Pelquin's Comet (34 page)

Before starting forward into the tunnel itself they launched the two remaining drones, Leesa confirming she had control.

In no time at all they reached the first Xter body. There was no mistaking this for a human spacesuit. Everything about it was wrong; not just the configuration of limbs and the elongated body but the styling, the shape of the helmet,
everything
. It all screamed ‘other’ more forcefully than anything Drake had previously seen, despite his experience with Elder artefacts. Perhaps it was because this suit represented a living, thriving alien culture, whereas the cache chambers were mere echoes of a civilisation long gone, no matter how impressive those echoes might be.

They took things cautiously, with the two drones acting as scouts, bobbing around like wingless dragonflies a short distance in front of the buggy. They had to stop to move the next two Xter corpses out of the way, Nate and Bren jumping down to do the honours, though not without difficulty to judge by Bren’s, “Stars, these things weigh at ton!”

To Drake’s relief, nobody suggested taking all or part of the Xter suits as bounty or salvage.

They passed through the first two defences without incident, thanks to the unwitting sacrifice of the Xters.

Next up was the collapsed section of tunnel, which was somehow smaller and less dramatic than it had appeared on the drone’s cam. They all got down and were forced to move another Xter corpse but the rubble itself proved no real obstacle for the buggy under Anna’s deft guidance. A short distance beyond lay the shattered wreckage of the original drone, and their first fully active defence. Drake could almost sense the guardian entity watching them and willing them to fail.

Progress slowed to a crawl as they approached the spot, the two drones pulling back to either side of the vehicle.

Nate and Bren were in motion before the buggy came to a halt, jumping down and hurrying to the rear, where the boxlike oblong tank had been fastened. They each grabbed one of two nozzles, holstered on either side of the tank, and walked back to the buggy’s front. Flexible hoses unravelled, linking them to the buggy like umbilical cords.

Anna was busy, staring intently at the screen in front of her while her fingers danced over unseen keys. Two pencil thin beams of bright red light stabbed out from the buggy’s front, one to either side, indicating opposing sections of the tunnel wall.

“That’s where we need to hit,” she said.

“Well, here goes nothing.” Bren planted her feet and trained the nozzle on the highlighted patch of wall.

Nate was a fraction ahead of her, but soon both were spraying a continuous stream of frothy, gungy foam. They started at ground level and worked their way upward. Anna continued to shine her indicators, raising them as required, but the light was soon lost in the foam. Not that either Bren or Nate needed much guidance once they’d started.

It looked as if they were spraying the walls with thick, bubbling scum, while the smell – which came through strongly despite the slap masks – was an unholy alliance between brick dust and detergent.

Little more than a minute after they’d started, Bren and Nate completed their work. The foam hardened in seconds, leaving the tunnel bracketed by two thick, lumpy and uneven columns.

“All right, Leesa,” Pelquin said. “Send one of the probes through and let’s see what happens.”

Everyone was quiet as the right hand drone eased forward. It reached the space between the two grotesque pillars, hovering there… and nothing happened.

Anna let out a held breath with an exaggerated “phew!”

Just to make sure, Leesa moved the drone backwards and forwards and had it bob up and down above its mangled predecessor. Still no reaction.

“Looks as if the foam
has
done the trick,” Bren said.

“Maybe,” Nate said. “Unless the guardian is playing clever and holding back on the trap until we all wander through it.”

“Thanks for that cheerful thought.”

“Only one way to find out,” Pelquin said.

He was out of the buggy in an instant and walking forward.

“Pel, no!” Bren cried out, but it was too late to stop him. They’d halted just short of the trap and a few long strides brought Pelquin level with where the drone continued to hover.

There he stood. Arms stretched wide. Drake could visualise the metal spears bursting free of their bonds in a shower of hardened foam shards to skewer the captain in half a dozen places; but, even when the man turned sideways to face the wall, arms still spread as if in willing sacrifice, there was no response.

“Looks good to me,” Pelquin said, dropping his arms and walking back to them. He was grinning from ear to ear. Bren looked furious, as if now that the trap had failed to kill him she just might.

The buggy shot forward with all of them back on board. Anna had backed up a little before gunning the engines. No one wanted to be between those pillars any longer than they had to be. Drake felt a degree of sympathy for Anna, their pilot and driver, who would have to pass between the columns again and again, ferrying artefacts back to the ship.

Anna slowed down as soon as they were past the pillars. The cache chamber itself now lay only a short distance ahead. The buggy’s headlights offered tantalising glimpses of its crowded interior through the shattered inner door.

“Did the Xters do that?” Pelquin wondered, looking at the door.

“No, I don’t think they made it this far,” Nate said. “That looks to be pretty much how we left it. A shaped charge, very tightly focused.”

“What happened to the bodies of the men you lost getting this far?” Bren asked.

“No idea.”

And not a question Drake cared to dwell on. “If the traps were rebuilt, why not the door?” he wondered out loud.

“Too big a job?” Anna suggested.

Nate shook his head impatiently. “If the guardian can repair and rebuild a laser trap it can fix a door.”

“Which means this is almost certainly another trap,” Pelquin said. They had come to a halt again, just short of the door. “Leesa…”

She didn’t need telling. One of the drones was already drifting forward. Anna wasn’t the only one holding her breath as the probe moved with frustrating slowness through the broken door.

It paused, hovering in the doorway as if inviting trouble; but none came. After a couple of seconds it edged forward, entering the chamber itself. Just when Drake was tempted to start breathing normally again there came a blinding flash and a quick wash of heat.

“Anna?” Pelquin snapped.

“Hang on, I can’t see a thing right now.”

“A discharge of energy, and a big one at that,” Leesa’s voice said. “Looks to be an energy net positioned just the other side of the door. Give me a second… Right, I’ve got it. I’m sending you through a map of the points that need to be taken out to cripple the net.”

Drake, still blinking away the afterimage of the flash, craned his neck to look over Anna’s shoulder at the dashboard display. It showed an image of the doorway and the chamber walls just beyond with a tracery of orange points overlaid – seven or eight in all.

“Anna,” Pelquin said, “can you upload this to the gun?” He held out the energy weapon from the
Comet
’s arsenal.

“Yes, sure, wait a sec… Done.”

Pelquin stepped down from the buggy once more and moved to stand in front of them, holding the gun in both hands. This brought him to the edge of the shattered doorway, and Drake felt Bren tense beside him, though she kept quiet.

Pelquin held the gun at waist height, shooting from the hip like some macho marine, but Drake knew that he was doing so in order to match the targeting screen with the overlaid image sent across by Anna. He fired – a brief burst of white-bright energy – then repositioned and fired again, repeating the process another half dozen times. Finally, he lowered the gun and asked, “That’s all of them. How did I do?”

“Looks spot on to me,” Leesa confirmed.

“Good, because there’s not much juice left in this thing.”

That was the problem with energy weapons: they packed a heck of a punch but they were also thirsty little beggars.

“Leesa,” Pelquin continued, “if you’d do the honours…”

Their final probe moved forward, edging past the captain’s position and into the chamber. It did so unhindered and unharmed.

Bren was moving even as Anna let loose a whoop of triumph and before anyone else could react. She stepped quickly forward to put a restraining arm across Pelquin’s chest. “You stay there,” she said. “This time, let someone else be the hero.”

“Actually, I was going to suggest that you and Nate use up the rest of the foam, just to make sure that this ‘net’ doesn’t reknit itself while we’re inside the chamber.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

So they were all forced to wait impatiently for a few moments more – the cache chamber and its glittering contents a few tantalising steps away – while Bren and Nate repeated their performance with the hoses and the foam.

As soon as they’d finished, everyone climbed back aboard the buggy and the whole group of them entered the chamber together.

How’s that guardian entity doing?
Drake asked.

Still here, still angry, and still up to something,
Mudball replied.

But you can’t give me any idea what?

No, not yet. Watch this space.

Nate dropped off the left side of the cart, stretching up to slam a stickalamp against the uneven wall of the chamber, as high as he could reach. The sharp rap of contact brought the bulbous blister of illumination to life, while its malleable underside adapted to the rough surface of the wall and bonded. Bren was only a fraction behind him on the opposite side, jumping up with her left hand flat against the wall and stretching with her right, as if determined to get her lamp higher than Nate’s.

The wash of fresh illumination exposed the chamber and its contents; what had previously been no more than glimpsed in the buggy’s headlights now stood revealed in all its glory.

Anna gave a long ‘ooh’ of delight while Bren grinned from ear to ear, and even Pelquin glanced across at Nate and smiled. The big man looked insufferably pleased with himself.

“Well, was I right or was I right?” he asked.

“Not bad,” Pelquin allowed. “Not bad at all.”

“Gods, this is really something,” Bren murmured, as she came back to stand by the buggy. “I can’t believe I’m actually standing inside a cache chamber.”

The reverence in her voice brought home to Drake just how privileged he was. He’d been inside a dozen or more cache chambers in recent years and, while each was thrilling and wondrous in its own right, it was easy to become a little blasé about the whole thing and forget the sense of awe that stepping inside one of these places for the first time could invoke. The majority of humankind would never have the pleasure of doing so, not even once; and this was an impressive cache, perhaps the largest he’d seen in all his years with First Solar.

Bren had every right to be impressed.

Mounds of artefacts surrounded them, heaped on top of each other like some mad pirate’s haul. There was nothing neat and tidy about it; objects tilted, spilled over and leaned against one another, and they came in all shapes and sizes – from tiny trinkets that glittered and winked in the light cast by the stickalamps to solid-looking blocks. It was all overwhelming, too impressive to focus immediately on any single item. Drake knew from experience that some of these things would be no more than baubles – still intrinsically valuable because of their Elder origin but of little scientific value – while others would be gimmicky little novelties such as the ‘gonk’ Pelquin had given to Terry Reese. But hidden among them were likely to be a few true marvels – things that human science had never encountered before and, quite possibly, never even dreamed of. These were the real prize. Even one such item would be enough to turn a small fortune into a large one, and in a cache of this size there was every hope of uncovering several. If not, the trinkets alone would still amass a tidy sum, but everyone would be hoping for the rarer artefacts that might just qualify as ‘priceless’.

They had all climbed out of the buggy now, except for Anna.

“It’s going to take us all day to get this lot on board,” Bren said.

“Just think of the money totting up while we work,” Nate said.

“Then what are we standing around gawping for?” Pelquin asked. “First we need to get the powerlifter ready and then, Anna, turn this jalopy round and let’s get on with it, shall we?”

Nate and Bren took charge, unloading the powerlifter and sliding a number of light but deceptively strong pallet bases from the back of the buggy, where they had sat flush with the floor.

Anna proceeded to do as instructed, manoeuvring the vehicle back and forth a few times in the confined space until she brought it around to face the way they’d come.

Pelquin had already started clearing some of the smaller items to clear one of the larger, bulkier ones. Drake went to help him.

“Is there any way of telling, just by looking, which the really valuable pieces are?” the captain asked.

“No, not usually,” Drake told him. “You can sometimes tell by touch – some of them respond to organic contact…”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“…but even that’s not reliable. Often you don’t know what you’ve got until you bring it back home for analysis. And don’t worry; most of this stuff is bound to be dormant or inert.”

“Thanks again. ‘Most’… that’s very reassuring.”

Privately, Drake reckoned they had bigger things to worry about. Not that they were doing this entirely blind. Anna stayed in the buggy, her gaze glued to its screens, and there was also Leesa back on the
Comet
. Yet, for all their vigilance, Drake doubted whether the two women combined would be enough to cope with whatever was coming.

T
WENTY

Leesa continued to feel as if she was the only sober person at a party. She watched, from the limited viewpoint provided by the buggy’s camera, as the others efficiently loaded up first one pallet and then another with Elder artefacts, using stasis tethers to keep the teetering loads in place. Nate then stepped into the powerlifter and loaded the first full pallet onto the buggy’s flatbed – and presumably the second, though by this point her view was obscured by looming artefacts. She could still hear them, though: laughing, joking, clearly having a ball. She could always switch one of the minicams built into the stickalamps if she felt the need to see more. She chose not to.