Spinneret

Chapter 17

It seemed like forever before the flyer swooped in out of the west to settle down among the low hills, but Hafner knew it had actually been less than half an hour since his call. His four-man team had made good use of the time, though, uncovering enough of the double doors to get an idea as to how big they really were. In the silence that followed the flyer's landing, Hafner could hear the sound of approaching cars, and he wondered uneasily just how big a crowd Meredith was bringing. He debated heading out to the flyer to ask, decided not to waste the effort. Meredith and that pain Perez had emerged from the flyer; any questions could wait until they reached the doors.

As it turned out, everyone arrived at the same time: the two from the flyer plus six cars bursting at the seams with soldiers. "What's all this for?" Hafner demanded as the troops piled out and began taking up positions around the hill. Organizing things, Hafner saw, was Major Barner from Crosse.

"Security," Meredith said briefly, striding past the geologist and stopping in front of the doors.

Hafner joined him, trying to ignore the racket behind them. Moments like this should be celebrated with champagne, not machine gun emplacements. "We've been trying to enlarge the hole so that the doors will have room to open," he told the colonel. "You can see from that hinge over there that they swing outward."

"Um." Meredith ran his fingertips a few centimeters along the door. "Feels awfully smooth for something that's been buried this long."

"The Spinners seem to have built things to last," Perez commented, coming up behind them.

"Yeah." The colonel turned away and looked around. "Well, let's get them clear.

Sergeant! Digging team, on the double!"

The caravan had come well equipped with shovels, and within two minutes a double handful of soldiers were making the din fly. It was relatively fast work, the crumbly ground offering little resistance; but had the doors been as tall as their five-meter combined width would have suggested, it would still have taken a good part of the day to uncover them. As it was, the doors proved to be just under four meters high, and the process took only an hour.

"Now what?" Perez asked when Meredith had taken as many pictures of the exposed doors as he seemed to feel was necessary.

The colonel deferred to Hafner. "Doctor? Can you suggest a way to get them open?"

"Well … " Hafner stepped to the hairline crack separating the twin panels and carefully prodded a raised design that spanned the doors at eye level. "This is the obvious candidate for lock or doorknob. The problem is … it doesn't seem to want to move in any direction."

Meredith joined him and tried it himself. "Mm. You think we've been deliberately locked out?"

"Hard to tell." Hafner stepped a few paces back and peered at the edges of the hill.

"This particular mound looks like a simple case of particle accumulation—dust and sand collecting first on the lee side of an obstacle and slowly growing to cover the entire thing."

"You're saying the entrance wasn't deliberately concealed?" Perez asked.

"I don't think it was, no."

"Then chances are it's not deliberately locked, either," Perez concluded. "What do we try first: sledgehammer or dynamite?"

"Perhaps you'd prefer a small nuclear device," Hafner snapped. "It's faster and gives a much more satisfying boom."

"I wasn't suggesting we break down the doors," Perez replied mildly. "Obviously, anything that's lasted this many years isn't going to be bothered by a couple of blasting caps. I was thinking more of seeing if we could dislodge any sand that may have gotten into the latch mechanism."

"Oh." Hafner felt like an idiot.

"May be worth a try," Meredith grunted, squinting at the raised design. "Looks like a small crack between this thing and the doors that dust could've gone through."

"Let's try something a bit less drastic than dynamite first, though," Hafner said as the colonel started to signal one of the soldiers.

"Such as?"

"Hydrofluoric acid. We can squirt it into the crack or dribble it in from above. It should take care of any dust, and shouldn't affect the actual mechanism."

He regarded it as a small personal triumph when Meredith agreed.

And with a crunch like a steamroller on gravel, the doors slowly swung open.

"Get down!" Meredith snapped. Hafner, backing rapidly out of range of the huge panels, was yanked down into a crouch by a nearby soldier. Behind the doors was a dark tunnel that seemed to angle downward. Nothing moved back there, at least not that Hafner could see from his angle, and for a moment he considered standing up and telling Meredith there was no danger. But the soldier still had a solid grip on his arm, and with a mental sigh he resigned himself to waiting.

He didn't notice the faint sound of a motor until it cut off into silence, leaving the doors standing parallel to each other like extensions of the tunnel's walls. From somewhere behind him a car-mounted searchlight probed the gloom, reflecting briefly off dull metal as it danced around.

"All right, everyone; at ease," Meredith called. The hand on his arm loosened, and Hafner stood up, turning to face the colonel. Only then did he see the double semicircle of soldiers behind him, their weapons only now shifting away from the tunnel mouth as they rose from prone and kneeling firing positions. My Lord! he thought, his hands starting to tremble. What if the Spinners had left something behind to greet visitors? They would've cut it in half!

"So. Even their doors still work," Meredith commented as he came to Hafner's side. "Smells sort of strange."

Skin crawling with the thought of the guns at his back, Hafner took a step nearer the tunnel and sniffed. "Probably just very stale air," he said. "I've opened caves on Earth that were a lot worse. We can do an analysis, though, if you'd like."

"Please." Meredith stepped to one of the doors and began studying the inside surface. Easing his way past the soldiers, Hafner went to get his air-test kit.

The smell was already dissipating by the time he was set up to begin, and a fast check showed that the air composition was indeed basically Astran normal. "Some trace things that look like metal oxides and a slightly higher concentration of radon gas are the only anomalies I get," he told Meredith. "There could be alien bacteria, I suppose; we don't have the equipment to test for organic contaminants."

"Given the rest of Astra, I don't think that's a real danger," Meredith countered dryly. "All right. Let's go see what all the Spinners left us." He gestured toward Major Barrier and started back toward the cars.

"Just a moment, Colonel," Hafner stopped him. No telling how Meredith would take this, but Hafner's conscience demanded he bring it up. "How many of these soldiers were you planning to take in?"

Meredith cocked an eyebrow. "Three squads—that's thirty men. Don't worry; I'm sure they can handle anything we run up against."

"Exactly my point. They'll handle things, whether those things actually need handling or not."

The colonel frowned. "What?"

"I doubt very seriously if there's anything dangerous in there, provided we keep our hands off any equipment," Hafner said. "I'm more worried about someone shooting up something irreplaceable because it reflected a flashlight beam back at him."

"Come on, Doctor—my men aren't that trigger happy—"

"Furthermore, I think this is the right moment to set a precedent here." Hafner waved at the tunnel. "If we want the other races around us to treat the Spinneret as a peaceful manufacturing device, we've got to make it a civilian matter right from the start. You put soldiers inside here and everyone's going to jump to the wrong conclusion."

"You're oversimplifying," Meredith said, with obviously strained patience, "not to mention anthropomorphizing. At least two of the species out there don't seem to even make a distinction between military and civilians."

"Then let's do it for ourselves," Hafner insisted. "We make that distinction, and so do all the people back on Earth. In the UN, for instance."

Meredith gazed at him for a long moment, and Hafner wished he had some clue as to what the other was thinking. Certainly the geologist's personal leverage and influence were very near zero, a fact Meredith obviously knew as well as he did.

His only chance was that the colonel might somehow glimpse the various political consequences involved here—consequences Hafner himself only dimly understood—and make his decision appropriately.

And apparently he did. "All right," Meredith said at last, his eyes flicking back toward the troops. "The military presence will be limited to Major Barner and myself. I trust you won't mind if I have a defensive perimeter set up out here?"

The last was definitely sarcasm, but Hafner didn't care. "No, that'll be fine."

"Thank you." Quickly, the colonel issued orders: he, Barner, Perez, Hafner, and Hafner's assistant, Nichols, would go inside for a fast look around. All would be equipped with emergency packs; Meredith and Bamer would be armed as well with stunners and dual-clip pistols. There was some discussion as to whether or not to take a car inside, but the vehicle's ability to carry extra equipment eventually tipped the balance against the traditional military dislike for bunching up. In addition, Bamer would wear a medium-range radio headset.

"We'll stay in continuous contact as long as possible," Meredith told the captain being left in charge of the Crosse contingent. "Don't worry if we fade out, though, because these walls will probably cut off the signal long before we get to the end of the road. If we're not back in four hours contact Major Brown at Martello for instructions and assistance." Climbing into the front passenger seat, the colonel glanced at the others: Barner, Perez, and Hafner squeezed together in back; Nichols at the wheel. "Everyone set? Okay, Nichols; slow and easy."

The young geologist eased the car into the tunnel and started forward. Hafner discovered he'd been right; the floor did angle a couple of degrees downward. He was leaning forward, eyes searching at the limits of the car's headlights, when the tunnel abruptly blazed with light.

Nichols slammed on the brakes, and Hafner heard the double click of two pistol safeties. For a moment there was a tense silence; but as Hafner's eyes adjusted to the light he saw that the tunnel was still empty.

"Automatic," Barner muttered. "We hit the Spinner version of a welcome mat and they turned the lights on for us."

"Yeah." Meredith seemed to take a deep breath. "Well. Nothing seems to be threatening us at the moment. Let's keep going."

Nichols got the car moving again, and Meredith craned his neck to look at Hafner.

"Doctor, you quoted me a minimum time of a hundred thousand years once for how long the Spinneret has been operating. Does the length of time this entrance has been covered up correlate with that number?"

Hafner shrugged as best as he could, squeezed as he was between Perez and the right-hand door. "I really couldn't say for sure. We still know next to nothing about Astra's climatological patterns, let alone the erosion and compacting rates for many of the minerals here. I'd guess we're still talking in the tens to hundreds of thousands of years."

"Does it matter?" Perez put in. "It doesn't seem all that different to me whether a piece of equipment lasts a thousand years or a million."

"The difference—" Meredith broke off. "Never mind. Is that a door off to the left up there?"

It was indeed a door, one as tall as the outside entrance and nearly as wide.

"Looks like it slides open instead of swinging," Barner commented as they climbed out of the car.

Hafner nodded; he'd already noted the lack of visible hinges and the way the door was set back instead of being flush with the tunnel wall. "If you all want to stand back, I'll see if that plate in the center works the same as the one outside did."

This time there was no sand gumming up the mechanism, and it took only a moment for Hafner to discover the eye-level design needed to be pushed in instead of rotated. As the door slid smoothly into the wall a set of interior lights came on, revealing a vast, empty-looking room.

"Looks like a high-school gymnasium," Perez commented as the others joined Hafner. "Floor markings and everything."

"You'd never play basketball here, though," Hafner muttered, eying the four-meterhigh ceiling.

Nichols had taken a step into the room. "Boxes off in the corner, Dr. Hafner," he announced, pointing.

"Where?" Meredith asked, moving alongside. He still held his pistol loosely in his hand, Hafner noted with some uneasiness. " … Ah. Interesting." The colonel looked at the opposite side of the room, then back to the boxes. "Yes. See how they're not really arranged in rows? If the floor pattern's symmetric on both sides, it looks like they're set out along one of the French curves back there."

"Odd," Barner murmured. "Some sort of giant board game, you think?"

"Not necessarily," Meredith said. "It could just be their method of storing supplies."

"Seems like that would waste a lot of space," the major said.

"Even if you had them in rows you'd need room for ventilation and forklift maneuvering," Meredith pointed out. "And as for identification purposes, a row number plus pallet number is no simpler than a curve number plus distance along it. I understand in some parts of Japan they still use a similar system for addresses."

Hafner found himself staring at the elaborate floor pattern, trying to visualize a race that would rather think in curlicues than in straight lines. Do the Rooshrike do things that way? he wondered suddenly. Might be worth finding out.

"Should we open one of the crates up, see what's inside?" Nichols asked.

"Not now," Meredith said, turning back toward the car. "The follow-up teams can handle details like that."

They passed several more of the storeroom-type doors in the next two or three kilometers, Meredith vetoing any suggestion that they be examined for contents.

"It's obvious that what we've found is a freight entrance and storage area.

Interesting, but not nearly as important as the control room for the Spinneret machinery."

Perez spoke up. "Just out of curiosity, Colonel, what exactly do you propose to do if and when we learn how all this is done?"

Meredith turned halfway around to look at him. "For starters, I'd like to either shut down or drastically restrict the metal leecher—our attempts at agriculture are going to be limited to hydroponics if we can't do that. It might also answer some questions if we found out whether six-centimeter cables are all the Spinneret can produce, or whether we can make plates of the material as well. Why?—did you have some project of your own in mind?"

"I'm wondering about the basic science involved," Perez said. "Are you going to offer the gravity nullifier for sale, too, for instance?"

Nichols caught the key word before Hafner did. " 'Too'?" he put in before Meredith could answer. "What's going on? What are we selling?"

"We're putting Spinneret cable on the market," Meredith said—rather grudgingly, Hafner thought. "It's not a secret, exactly, but we weren't going to say anything to the rest of the colony until we'd settled with the Rooshrike on terms and prices."

"The Rooshrike?" Hafner frowned. "I thought the Ctencri handled all trade with Earth."

"They do," Meredith said. "That's one of the reasons we're going through the Rooshrike."

Hafner thought about that for a long moment, not liking any of the implications that came with it. Clearly, important things had been happening while he'd been occupied with digging up the Astran landscape; just as clearly, Meredith wasn't interested in giving out details. He wondered if Carmen knew what was going on. and made a mental note to get in touch with her as soon as possible.

"But as for the gravity nullifier and leecher," Meredith continued, "that technology is staying on Astra. Period. Unless you have objections?"

"None at all," Perez answered. "Though I would actually go further and say we shouldn't even study the equipment too closely. The minute you begin to store such knowledge you invite its theft, and we can't afford to lose Astra's secrets."

"I expect Drs. Hafner and Nichols would take a somewhat dim view of that philosophy," Meredith ventured. "Or would the scientists here be happy working with a machine that's running on black magic?"

Hafner's inner ear signaled a change in direction. "We've leveled out," he announced, glad of an opportunity to short-circuit the argument. "I think I see a cross corridor up there, too."

"You do," Meredith confirmed, craning his neck to see the car's odometer. "About six kilometers from the end … puts us something like one to two hundred meters underground. Hm. Odd that the Rooshrike metal detectors didn't pick up the place; they're supposed to have a half-kilometer range."

"Maybe it's all made of the same stuff as the cable," Barner suggested. "That doesn't register well on detectors, remember."

"Won't work," Hafner said. "Cable metal's fine for structure and power cables, but the electronics have to use normal metal."

"Why?" Perez asked.

"You need both normally conducting metals and semiconductors for any kind of electronics," Hafner told him. "Cable metal either conducts perfectly or terribly.

More likely the walls here shielded the electronics in some way."

They'd reached the cross corridor now, and on Meredith's orders Nichols brought the car to a stop. "Anything look interesting either direction?" the colonel asked, sending his own gaze back and forth.

"Looks like the hall just dead-ends at a single big door on this side," Barner reported.

Hafner leaned forward to look past Perez. Sure enough, it did … and suddenly he had an idea what they'd find behind that door. "Let's take a look," he suggested.

Meredith shot him an odd look over the front seat, but nodded. "If you think it's worth doing. Major, how's contact with the outside world holding up?"

"It's been fading steadily, but we've still got them."

"Warn them we'll be moving in and out of corridors from now on and likely only have erratic contact. All right, Nichols; drive us over there."

Hafner's hunch proved to be correct. Behind the door was another corridor, parallel to the entrance tunnel and with perhaps four times its cross-section.

Mounted up off the floor, disappearing away to infinity in both directions, was a huge solenoid.

"A particle accelerator?" Nichols whispered as they stood and stared at the monster coil.

"Who knows?" Hafner shrugged. "All we know for certain is that it knocks out repulser plasmas."

Meredith muttered something; apparently, he hadn't made the connection. "You mean some sort of resonance effect with this thing is what wrecked our flyers?"

"Or with one of the pieces of equipment you can see hooked into the solenoid in places," Hafner said. "Must be a tremendous field inside the coil if the stuff that leaks out is that strong."

"Wonder what it's for," Barner said. "Any ideas?"

"Could be practically anything." Hafner shook his head. "This whole place is incredible. Why on Earth would anyone go to the trouble to build something like this?"

"Maybe it was their normal mining method," Perez suggested. "This is impressive, certainly, but so are off-shore oil rigs and the Exxon Tower."

"Then where's the rest of their civilization?" Nichols objected. "They should've left some other traces behind."

"After a hundred thousand years?"

"We find fossils older than that on Earth."

"Actually, the Spinners probably weren't native to this system," Meredith interjected. "Possibly not to this entire region of space. Let's get back to the car and move on."

"What's your evidence the Spinners were strangers here?" Perez asked when they were again driving down the main tunnel. "Lack of fossils hardly counts—nobody's really been looking for them."

"How about lack of other cable-material structures?" Meredith countered. "Not just here, but elsewhere in the system? Remember, the Rooshrike did a pretty complete survey of this place when they first ran across it. Besides, if they lived anywhere near here they ought to at least be hinted at in Rooshrike archaeology or legends."

"Maybe they are," Hafner said. "Stories of godlike creatures and all could be references to them."

"The computer doesn't think so. All the appropriate mythological figures are too similar to Rooshrike themselves to be aliens."

"But after several thousand retellings—"

"Hold it!" Barrier barked, cutting Hafner off and causing Nichols to stomp on the brakes. "On the right, down the corridor we just passed—looked like a hole in the rock."

Nichols backed the car up the necessary few meters and turned off to the right.

Hafner leaned forward, peering over Meredith's shoulder. Sure enough, where the metal walls and lights ended, the tunnel continued on. "You've got good eyes, Major," he commented.

"They're no better than yours," Bamer replied, a bit tartly. "I just use mine, that's all."

Hafner reddened and shut up.

The corridor ended in what had once been a T junction with another hallway; the rough tunnel Bamer had spotted led through the crossbar of the T, as if someone had planned to extend the corridor and never completed the job. "Sloppy work,"

Nichols commented, running his fingers over the rough stone within the hole.

"Must've had their funding cut."

"I don't think so," Meredith said. "Note that the whole wall's been left open to the rock here, as if they'd planned to drill into it."

Hafner stepped back and looked down the hallway. "You're right—looks like another hole down there, just past that vertical support bar."

Meredith produced a flashlight from his pack and aimed it into the tunnel. "Goes pretty deep … well, well. Looks like there's something metallic back there."

Shifting the light to his left hand, he ducked his head and stepped carefully into the passageway. "Everyone wait here and keep your eyes open. I'll be back in a minute."

It was more like five minutes before the colonel reappeared. "Well?" Perez demanded as Meredith put away his light.

"Hard to be sure, of course, with an alien design," Meredith said, "but the thing back there seems to be an automated digging machine."

"So they were extending this tunnel," Nichols said.

"Or else mining the rock for the nonmetallic elements the leecher doesn't get,"

Hafner suggested. "Maybe hauling the digger out would give us a clue."

"I wouldn't recommend that," Meredith said. "The thing's still active."

They all turned to face him. "It's what?" Hafner said, cocking an ear toward the tunnel.

"Oh, it's not actually running—there's a rock jammed between two of the track links. But there's something that looks like a display panel in the rear, and a halfdozen lights are still showing on it." Meredith brushed at the dust that had collected on his shoulders and headed back toward the car. "Come on; let's keep moving."

They returned to the main corridor and continued on inward, driving for the most part in silence. It shouldn't have been such a shock, Hafner told himself—they all knew, after all, that the main Spinneret machinery was still operational. Somehow, though, he'd always pictured the Spinneret as an essentially solid-state apparatus, barely surviving through the grace of multiple redundancies. For a small peripheral unit—and a tunneling machine, at that—to be in equally good shape was both awesome and just a little bit creepy.

The corridor made a thirty-degree angle to the left … and without warning, they were abruptly in a new world.

"Snafu on toast," Barner gasped, craning his neck to look up. "What the hell is this?"