Vigilant

SIREN-LIZARDS

Oh-God was still alive, but only thanks to machines — while Mother and I were in the grove, his diaphragm had futzed out, slack as a sack of potatoes. But the heart-lung was ready and Oh-God barely lost a breath. He was packaged up now, inside a clear plastic shell that would protect him till the emergency team arrived from Pistolet. Once our smuggler friend was in their hands, he could be kept alive mechanically for as long as it took to find a cure.

If a cure existed. And if Pteromic B didn’t flare so wildfire rampant that our medical system crashed in flames.

Demoth would be all right as long as the disease stayed Freeps-only. The world-soul told me we had 3,219 Freeps currently on planet — more than I expected, but our hospitals could manage the load. Barely. On the other hand, if Pteromic B hopped home to Ooloms, or even to Homo saps… hey, kids, the Circus is coming back to town.

Meanwhile, Oh-God was the most advanced case on Demoth. Other members of the Freep trade team tested positive for the microbe, but hadn’t showed symptoms yet. They’d all been bunged into hospital, of course, but Oh-God was going to be the star attraction for medical researchers. Total slackdown. He’d have the best specialists in the world looking after him, searching for a way to fight the disease before the full outbreak struck. He’d be poked and prodded and proctoscoped, but at least they’d keep him alive.

As for Tic, Festina and me… did we have to call the feddies? Tell them what Oh-God said about Iranu and Mummichog? Report that the dipshits had attacked again, firing illegal bazookas and what-all? Damned right we did. Yes, we might have felt a twingey temptation to hot dog, to jaunt around solo like dashing VR adventurers: but the stakes were too high to Indulge our vanity.

"I’ll call it in," Tic said. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall of Voostor’s medic room. His pouchy old face went distant: in communion with Mom-Xe.

"What’s he doing?" Voostor asked.

"Talking to the world-soul," I replied. "Which will then talk to a slew of other people. Sorry, but you’re going to have hordes of company coming."

Mother sighed. "Does this mean I have to clean?"

"Don’t be silly," Voostor said. "We’re always ready for guests. And if this guest is really my fearsome stepdaughter Faye…" He gave a smile intended to show he didn’t believe half of what my mother must have told him. "The least we can do is offer you breakfast. All of you. Come on."

Festina frowned. "Someone should stay with Oh-God."

"I’ve dealt with the plague before," Mother said. "And I know how to work these machines. You get something to eat… before other people arrive and things get hectic."

Smooth way for Ma to avoid breakfast with her darling daughter. But I told myself it wasn’t spite or anger — just embarrassment over her confession. ("He glowed.") She wanted some time to herself after sharing that little intimacy… not because she was mad at me but just feeling a titch shy.

Voostor took me by the arm (Oolom-style, hands delicately wrapped round my elbow to keep himself from bouncing too high) and led us through the parlor again, then under an archway of raspfeather fronds onto a covered patio with a view of the ocean. The sun was five fingers above the horizon now, shining onto a bamboo table with three places already set: one with Oolom fruit soup, two with Homo sap cheese fritters.

"You have company," Tic observed.

"One of our favorite guests," Voostor said. "A biologist who visits often to study the rain forest." He went to a grass-and-lath door leading off the far side of the patio and knocked lightly on the red-bamboo frame. "Breakfast time. How are you feeling this morning, Maya?"

Festina was closest to the door. Without a hair’s hesitation, she drove her heel into one of the wood door slats, a full-strength side-kick that snapped the slat in two. The force of the kick didn’t stop there; the door flew backward, slamming against the wall of the next room with an impact that shivered the grass-thatch roof. Shouting a kiai, Festina leapt through the doorway, fists in a tight guard position.

Tic went straight through after her. Ditto me, as soon as I’d snatched up a heavy clay porridge bowl for throwing.

All three of us came to a halt in the middle of a small bedroom. Spring mattress on the floor, sheets rumpled. Wide-open window, looking out on the orchid grove.

"Shit!" Festina growled. "Missed her."

"She must have seen Mother and me walking out back," I said. "Took to her heels as soon as we were out of sight."

"Would she recognize you?" Tic asked.

"My picture was on every broadcast when Chappalar died," I told him. "She must have thought we were coming for her."

"What’s going on?" Mother demanded, storming in through the patio doorway. "What’s all this noise?"

"Your visitor," Tic said. "Maya Cuttack, correct?"

"Yes. So?"

"You really don’t listen to the news," I muttered. My mother stood on the far side of the patio, her face flushed: clearly thinking I’d gone bad-girl again, smashing the house to tinder. I told her, "Maya Cuttack is the most wanted woman on Demoth."

"She’s a dear friend," Mother replied, fierce as frost. "What’s she wanted for?"

"Questioning," Tic said. "Possibly murder."

Festina was at the window. "She climbed out this way; I can see her tracks in the dew. Heading inland."

"What is there in that direction?" Tic asked Voostor.

"Nothing. Our fields. The rain forest."

"I’ll bet there are mines," I said. "Ma told me there’ve been Freeps poking around back there."

"There is a sort of alien mine in the jungle," Voostor admitted.

"Which explains why Maya’s a frequent visitor," Festina said. "Her and Iranu."

"Do you think she has more androids here?" I asked.

"Maybe androids, maybe worse," Tic answered. "Why are we standing around when she’s getting away?"

"You want to go after her ourselves?"

"We have to," Tic said. "The nearest police are at least half an hour off. If she’s headed for the mine, she could activate robots, destroy evidence—"

"Maya?" my mother interrupted. "Impossible!"

"Time’s wasting," Tic replied, bouncing up to the window sill. "Voostor, show me the mine. Faye, you call Protection Central, then follow on foot."

Without waiting for an answer, he bent his knees and vaulted into the sky, spreading his gliders to catch whatever thermals might be rising in the tropical dawn. Voostor gave my mother a weak glance, helpless apology, then jumped out the window himself. As he flapped into the sky, that "Sorry, my dear," look on his face switched fast to a grin, caught up in Tic’s excitement.

"Well," Mother said, "what a charming guest you’ve been, Faye. Perhaps you’d enjoy setting fire to the house before you start hunting down my friend like a dog."

"You’ve got it all wrong, Ma." I speed-linked to Protection Central: Maya’s here. Send cops. Back in a beat came the ETA — Pistolet police would take at least thirty-seven minutes to reach Mummichog.

By that time I knew it would all be over, one way or another.

I squinched up my thoughts, fierce concentration. Peacock, can you reach out to help the police get here faster?

No response.

"Come on," Festina shouted. "We have to go!"

"One more second." Peacock, I thought again, Xe, Father, whoever you are, can you get us to the mine before Maya?

A swirl of light appeared outside the window. Festina leapt into it without asking questions.

"What is that?" my mother cried.

"Dads," I said. "Or whatever you were sleeping with the last few months of his life." I leaned in to give her a quick kiss on the cheek; I thought she might flinch, but she didn’t. Maybe too shocked to react. "When this is all over," I told her, "I’ll call and explain."

Then I sprinted forward, bounced off Maya’s mattress, and sailed out through the window like a diver from a springboard. The Peacock caught me in its mouth long before I touched the ground.

The Peacock dumped me on a game trail deep in the rain forest. As usual, the tube disappeared instantly, back… back… well, I’d shot the chute often enough by now that I wasn’t quite so queer-head dizzy as I’d been the first time I’d gone through. I had the presence of mind to look around fast, hoping I might catch sight of where the Peacock went. For just a second, I thought it was coming toward me: straight at my face, tangly-jambly lights plunging right at my eyes; but then the Peacock was gone, vanished, and I felt no different than I ever had.

I got to my feet. Dusted myself off. Thought about that phrase, "no different than I ever had" and wondered just how long the Peacock had been guarding my botjolo butt.

In the bad old days, sometimes I’d been Christly lucky to miss getting killed. And considering my habitually tin-sober state, would I have noticed a few more flickery lights?

Hmm.

Festina stood a few steps away, staring up at the trees with a gloomy expression.

"What’s wrong?" I asked.

"This place looks too much like my home."

"That’s bad?"

"My home was a damned dangerous place." She glanced at me. "Do you know anything about jungles?"

"No."

"Never mind — you’ll be all right if you remember one simple principle."

"Which is?"

"Everything here wants you dead."

It sounded like a joke.

"I mean it," Festina insisted. "Everything wants you dead. Even the things that won’t directly kill you still want you dead. You’re a waste of good nutrients; they want you recycled back into the ecosystem."

She reached to her belt holster and drew her stun-pistol… the first time I’d seen her do that in days. She hadn’t bothered with her gun in the face of androids, reporters, or dipshits, but now she wanted a weapon handy.

Okay. Chalk me up as intimidated.

"Keep to the trail," she said. "Don’t touch anything, don’t step on anything, don’t brush against anything. Understand?"

"Yes. Everything here wants me dead."

Which was too bad. To someone who’d grown up with Great St. Caspian’s half-throttled flora and fauna, the rain forest was a heady gush of abundance. Take the insect life, for instance. In Bonaventure, bloodflies were puny things, traveling in fast-moving swarms that dodged and weaved like drunken dockworkers. Here in Mummichog, I was buzzed by a single fly near as big as my thumb — no need for safety in numbers, this guy could take care of himself. Slow and bullish, able to withstand a head-on swat: the supertanker of bloodflies, with a monstrous hemoglobin-carrying capacity. Thank God this beastie had one thing in common with his baby brothers up north; evolution had only taught him to suck on native Demoth lifeforms, not humans. Perhaps he gave me a sniff as he flew by… but I didn’t smell like his natural prey, so he continued bumbling past.

One insect down, billions to go.

Ants the size of a baby’s foot… moths bigger than my hand… beetles so huge you could use their carapaces as bread plates… not that these were genuine terrestrial insects, of course. Eight legs, no antennae, oddly hinged mandibles; but the names humans hung on most Demoth wildlife were Earth names because those were the names we had. These creatures scuttled like beetles; they had chitinous shells like beetles; they filled the same ecological niches as beetles; they might as well be called beetles, even if they were giant alien groundthumpers.

"Stop gawking," Festina ordered. "We have to find Cuttack."

"I asked the Peacock to take us to the mine," I told her. "It must be close by."

"Says you," she muttered. "Your pet Peacock might have dumped us a thousand klicks from Mummichog because the place was too damned dangerous."

"You’re just jealous you don’t have an invisible friend."

I looked at the ground again; the dirt held a string of clear bootprints, made when the soil was muddy and preserved when everything dried. The tracks couldn’t be Voostor’s — too deep for a lightweight Oolom. If my mother never came back here, this had to be Maya’s trail. I asked, "Is this the sort of jungle where it rains every afternoon?"

"How should I know?" Festina said. "This is your planet."

"Yes, but you’re the jungle queen."

She stuck out her tongue at me. I didn’t know admirals did that.

"Let’s go this way," I said, pointing back up the trail: the direction the boots had come from. If rain fell here every afternoon, the tracks must have been made late yesterday — Maya heading back to the house after knocking off work. Follow them backward and we’d find where Maya spent her day.

The bootprints kept to the game trail for a few dozen paces, then veered off on a narrower track. Still easy to follow — Maya hadn’t tried to disguise her path. We wove our way over dirt leached light as sand, while bloodflies buzzed round our ears and wondered if they should bite us just for jollies. Past creeping vines and epiphytes floating on balloon sacs… crimson-strip fungi laid out like bacon on dead tree trunks… even a snake-belly or two… till we nearly walked past an overgrown hole in the forest floor.

If not for the bootprints, we would have missed the mine. Part of the entrance had been cleared with a machete, then covered again with prickly-leaved branches from nearby shrubs. Festina was still wearing her good-for-the-tundra gloves ("And I’ll wear them till we get someplace that I call warm!") so she had no trouble pulling branches away from the hole, never mind the bristles and pricks.

Leaving a tunnel that led downward.

Just inside the tunnel sat a plastic box holding five torch-wands.

"Convenient," Festina said, picking one up.

"Easier to stash a box here," I replied, "than bringing them up from the house all the time. Besides, Maya was pretending to be a biologist. Mother or Voostor might have wondered why she needed torch-wands to poke about beamy bright jungle."

"Mmm." Festina looked into the hole. "Down now? Or wait for Maya and ambush her?"

I looked at the hole myself, then shook my head. "It’d be nice to know what’s in there, but Maya’s more important. Stop her before she does something we’ll regret."

"Agreed." Festina checked the batteries on her pistol.

"Before you start shooting," I said, "remember she still might be innocent. Maya could have had her little dance with Chappalar, then headed down here the same night. Sounds like no one in Mummichog listens to the news, so she never heard tell of the murders. Doesn’t know her sweetie’s dead, doesn’t know the cops want to question her…"

Festina just looked at me.

"Right," I said. "Stun the bitch’s tits off and apologize later."

We made the ambush simple: Festina down the tunnel, waiting with pistol in hand. I borrowed her gloves and covered back the hole with branches, so Maya wouldn’t know she’d had visitors. Then I moved off a ways, hunkering down behind a fallen log till our target arrived.

(Not touching the log. I’d heard about insects who made nests in such places, and got swarming mad if you gave their homes a knock.)

So we waited. For Maya to scuttle down the path, racing toward the mine and whatever she’d stashed below. Festina would stun her the second Maya started clearing branches from the hole, and that would be that. In due time, flocks of people would arrive from Pistolet: the med team for Oh-God, police for Maya, plus a rabble-pack of robot experts, archaeologists, forensics specialists and who-all else might get sent to investigate Maya’s home away from home.

With luck, they’d let Tic and me look over their shoulders for a while… till more senior proctors arrived to shove us aside again.

In the distance, I heard shouting. Tic and Voostor yelling. At Maya? Why? If they’d caught up with her after she bolted from the house, they wouldn’t holler; Tic would sweep silently out of the sky and deck her with a sock to the jaw. I’d never seen him fight, but he was a master proctor. Zenned-out too. That put him in the same league as those little old gents in tic-chips, the kind who look beatific as soap till they whonk you with a heelkick to the head. If Tic could reach Maya, he could take her down.

So why all the whooping and bellowing?

Suddenly, Tic’s voice got joined by shrill animal howling: a noise I recognized from VR sims of jungle life. The danger call of siren-lizards. They were only the size of squirrels, teeny pseudo-reptiles who clambered through the canopy eating fruit and seedpods… but they had eyes keen as hawks’, and a resonating collar around their throats that made their shrieks trumpet-loud. Naturalists called them "the Klaxons of the rain forest" — little noise-boxes that screamed blue murder if something scared them.

They were scared now: dozens of them, high and off to my right. Then another troop of lizards took up the cry, this one a fair bit closer. Were they just echoing the shrieks of the first bunch — an instinct to squeal when they heard other sirens howling? Or had they actually seen something, something coming my way?

More sirens took up the wail. Closer. I couldn’t hear anything else over the racket. What was up there? What?

Something they could see from the treetops. Something flying. A skimmer?

Christ, of course Maya had a skimmer. We’d known from the start she didn’t leave Bonaventure by transport sleeve. She had her own vehicle, and now she was bugging out in it.

World-soul, I thought, track it, track it! But even before I finished the mental shout, my mind filled with the world-soul’s response: ground radar couldn’t get a fix.

Lord weeping Jesus, did everyone on this planet have stealth equipment?

Something ripped through the canopy of leaves straight overhead, I had a quick glimpse of a skimmer’s underbelly, its bay doors open; then something big and black and blimp-shaped started to fall, crashing down through the trees.

"You’re kidding," I said in disbelief. A bomb? She had a bomb in the skimmer? And she was dropping it on me. No, not me, she didn’t know I was here; she was bombing the mine entrance, to close it off, seal it up.

Which would still blow me to smithereens.

"Festina!" I shouted. "Incoming bomb! Head down the mine, deep as you can go."

The blimp-shaped cylinder continued to fall — jerkily, slowly, catching on tree limbs, stopping for a moment before its weight broke the branch or it rolled off sideways, then falling a few more meters till it hit the next snag.

How much bouncing could it stand before it blew up?

I tore my gaze from the blundering bomb, and of course the Peacock was rippling in front of me, tail snaking far out of the jungle. "No," I snapped. "Down the mine! I want to go down the mine."

Festina was there. If I went in too, the Peacock and I could save her. If I let the Peacock chute me out of the forest, it might not volunteer to bring me back.

Festina would be trapped in the dark. Like my father.

I could feel reluctance spilling from the Peacock like a physical force; but its tail flicked, swept, and jammed itself through the shrubbery covering the tunnel entrance. Before it changed its mind, I threw myself into its mouth.

Vomited into blackness. I scraped my arm as I landed on the unseen stone floor, but it only did minor damage — this tunnel had a thicker carpet of dirt, fungus and animal crap than the one in Great St. Caspian. The jungle had more wildlife than the tundra… more dung and droppings for me to splash into.

Joy.

Then light flamed viciously far to my right, followed by a distant roar and rumble. That would be the bomb, blowing the bejeezus out of the mine entrance. Collapsing who knows how much dirt and stone to close the tunnel. Probably setting fire to the forest too, giving the siren-lizards something to really howl about.

The ground beneath me shook for ten seconds, trembling as more and more debris fell into the tunnel mouth. Not just dirt but trees toppled by the blast. I could imagine their leaves burning, while birds squawked and lizards shrieked and insects tore away from the flames…

But I couldn’t hear any of it. Not with a massive plug of jungle floor sealing off the mine. I couldn’t even hear the shaking; I could only feel it through the stone under my body.

After a few seconds, the quaking stopped. Then a heavy silence set in, as if I’d gone deaf. No — I could hear my own breathing. But no-one else’s.

"Festina?" I called. She must have had time enough to run for safety. To bolt down the tunnel, out of the blast radius, beyond the cave-in.

Unless she hadn’t heard my warning. Or she tried to run the other way, out into the open rather than be trapped underground.

Out into the explosion.

"Festina-girl!" I called again. "Are you there?"

A torch-wand sprang on in the darkness. "Okay," Festina growled, her uniform smeared with dirt, "when I said the jungle was dangerous, I meant snakes. I meant jaguars. I meant army ants, and piranha, and bushes with sharp spiky thorns. I did not mean goddamned motherfucking high-explosive bombs."

Pause.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Yeah sure." She brushed mud off her shirtsleeve. "I’m an Explorer. I’ve lived through real explosions."

I could have called the Peacock to get us out. If it had managed to thread its way through the Rustico mine cave-in, it could do the same here. But I wasn’t leaving yet. Not till I saw what Maya had found down here… something she wanted to keep secret so badly, she had a bomb ready in case she needed to obliterate it.

World-soul, I thought, are you receiving?

Immediate acknowledgment.

Good. I was worried we were too far underground for link-seed radio transmission. Tell Master Tic that Festina and I are safe. Pass it on to my family too. We can get out of this tunnel anytime, but first we’re going to see what’s down here.

Acknowledgment. And underneath the bland mechanical okey-dokey, a twitch of something else. Something with a squirt of adrenaline. Fear? Or was it excitement?

Festina had been watching me. "So?" she asked.

"So we’re here," I said. "And if we tube out now, it may take a long time for anyone else to dig down here. I think we should see what Maya wanted to hide."

"There might be androids," Festina muttered.

"We’ll tell them we’re allergic, same as last time."

"That trick only works if we see the robots first."

"Come on," I said. "Aren’t you curious what’s down here?"

"Of course I am," she snapped, "and damn it, I shouldn’t be. Explorers are supposed to purge out every grain of curiosity they find lurking in their souls."

"So what? You aren’t an Explorer anymore."

Her eyes squinched down with anger. "Faye… till the day I die, I will always be an Explorer."

"No. That part’s over now. You’re someone else." She started to interrupt, but I plowed on. "No. No. You’ve got to stop telling yourself you’re that old person, because you aren’t anymore. You don’t have to dig that hole deeper; you can just walk away."

She glared at me for another few seconds with those blazing green eyes; then she dropped her gaze to the dirty floor. "I could say the same to you," she murmured.

"You wouldn’t be the first," I told her. "Blessed near everyone in my family rags on me about it. High time I got to rag on someone myself." I reached out, took her by the shoulders, stared her straight in the eye. "Festina Ramos: you aren’t an Explorer anymore. That’s behind you. It’s still part of you, of course it is, but you’ve got other parts now. Here-and-now parts. And telling yourself, I’m still a disposable nothing, is a witless way of behaving, especially when you have important things to do. Live in the real, dear one. Got it?"

The edges of her mouth twitched up. "Does talk like this really work on you?"

"Depends what you mean ‘work.’ " When my fine sweet Lynn took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and gave me a pep talk, calling me "dear one" and what-all, I sometimes got worked up right enough… though not with lofty thoughts about my personal potential. More like longing thoughts, wishing there was some way past all my years of playing the self-sufficient loner.

Same thing here. Eye to eye with Festina, just the two of us in the quiet black of the tunnel. Jungle-warm. Jungle-moist.

She eased herself away from me, holding eye contact a second more before she let her gaze slip shy to the floor.

"Okay," she said, "it probably won’t hurt to look around a bit. If we’re careful. Better than just standing here in the dark."

I looked at her a heartbeat longer, then turned away. Two seconds later, I felt her hand warm on my bare arm. "Faye…"

I turned back, my heart flying. But whatever she’d been going to say, ex-Explorer Lieutenant Admiral Ramos suddenly lost her nerve. Instead she just mumbled, "You carry the torch-wand," and pushed it toward me.

Passing the torch, for God’s sake. Handing me the decision.

What futtering cowards, the pair of us. I knew I should just swoop her up in my arms, then and there. Both of us wailed to see if I’d do it.

"Christ," I finally said, "we have work to do."

I shoved the torch-wand roughly back into her hands.

"Right," she said. Finally letting go of the breath she’d been holding. "Right. We’d better get moving." She gave me a side glance. "Keep ourselves busy." She looked away again. "See what there is to find."

For another second, she just stared at the torch in her hands. Then she lifted it high and started leading the way down.

A hundred meters on, we came to the first rockfall. Part of the ceiling had given way, dumping a load of stone and soil. The wreckage had been shoved off to the sides of the tunnel, leaving a clear trail down the middle.

I slopped long enough to nudge a chunk of debris with my foot. Any girl brought up in Sallysweet River develops a canny feel for stone. Fleck by fleck, this looked like granite… but overall its texture was too regular, with none of the wrinkles you find in honest-to-igneous rock. My gut said it was artificial — poured like concrete, then flash-hardened.

Strange, when you thought about it. If this was a mine, why line the walls with synthetic rock? Shouldn’t mines have rock of their own? Then again, the bedrock here must lie a lot deeper than in the Great St. Caspian shield… so this part of the tunnel might need to be shored up with extra support till it got down into solid stone.

Could be. But it sounded a lot like rationalization.

There were more rockfalls as we went along, some several meters long, some only a litter of stones. Each lime, a path had been cleared so we could pass through prance-easy: the work of Maya and Iranu, or more likely, their robots. Here and there, they’d propped support poles from floor to ceiling to shore up parts of the roof: places where the pseudo-granite showed thready black cracks of strain.

I’d never seen any such cracking in the abandoned mines around Sallysweet River. Then again, Great St. Caspian had bugger-all in the way of earthquakes. I didn’t know much about Mummichog specifically, but the whole Argentia continent had a reputation for being seismically active, so no surprise this particular mine suffered the occasional crumble.

At length we came to an area where the slant of the tunnel flattened to a wide room, much like the one up north where we found Kowkow Iranu. Rusty lumps sat scattered about the floor like dog turds — just left lying, though you’d think archaeologists would scrape up the stuff as valuable artifacts. At the very least, Maya should have chalked measurement lines on the floor. But no. Nary a sign she’d paid attention to this junk at all.

"Look there," Festina said in a low voice, pointing the torch-wand toward the far end of the room.

Another tunnel collapse — this one taking out part of the wall. Beyond was another room, dark, too far for the torch-light to reach. I couldn’t help noticing there was no visible door between that room and ours. If the wall hadn’t fallen in, there’d be no way through.

Queer thing, that.

I Festina walked toward the wall-breach. Debris had been cleared here too, leaving a gap you could walk through. Festina pulled up in front of it. "Stop," she yelled into the next room, "you’re making me allergic."

"You saw something?" I asked.

"No. But why take dumb chances?"

She poked the end of the torch-wand through the breach. A trio of androids stood on the other side, jelly guns raised.

Like lightning, Festina dropped the wand, dived sideways, jigged the moment she hit the floor, and rolled to her feet, weaving like a kickboxer in full defense mode: guard up, chin down, body loose. My own reaction wasn’t half so dramatic — I just jumped to the side, out of the line of fire from the hole.

Waiting. The torch-wand rolled along the ground, shadows shifting in response… till the wand ran up against a chunk of stone, rocked back, lay still.

Nothing from the robots.

Slowly I let out my breath. "Good call with that ‘allergic’ thing," I told Festina.

She let her fists relax. "Yeah," she agreed, lifting her hand to her cheek. "A faceful of acid would ruin my complexion."

"Don’t obsess — there’s nothing wrong with your cheek that couldn’t be solved with a nice hard kiss." It felt good to say that out loud. I bent and picked up the light. "Now let’s see what’s next door."

The androids had shut down, just like the ones near Sallysweet River: standing there stock-still, frozen in the blink before firing. We slithered past them, avoiding the tiniest touch for fear they’d wake again.

Beyond the robots? More robots… only these weren’t humanlike. Their bodies were fat ellipsoids, the shape and color of watermelons but almost as tall as me. They had no separate head, but the top of their watermelon torso was ringed with pits and niches that I guessed were for sensing — eyes going all the way round, 360 degrees, plus holes that might be ears or nostrils or breathing orifices. They had thinnish legs, bony and tough like an ostrich’s. As for arms: three pairs each, spindly, insectish, covered with coarse hairs that might have been sensors or bristly protection.

How did I know they were robots? There were four of the beasties within reach of the light, and all had patches where the epidermis was peeled away — flayed sections of arm, flaps cut into the torso, an entire leg where the skin had tattered. Beneath the exterior were metal flexors, armatures, ball bearings, fiber optics… eerily similar to what I’d seen in Pump Station 3, when jelly acid bared the androids’ innards.

I took a step toward the closest watermelon. Festina grabbed my arm full strength and yanked me back. "Don’t touch. Their natural skin chemicals are poisonous to humans. Nerve toxins."

"You know the species?"

She nodded. "They’re Greenstriders."

"Never heard of them," I said.

"The fleet made contact with their people a couple times. Not a friendly species — arrogant landgrabbers, dangerously greedy. Worse than humans, believe it or not. A few years back, the League of Peoples rescinded their certification of sentience: grounded every Greenstrider space vessel till they learn to play nicely with others."

"So what are these doing here?" I asked.

"They must have arrived before the League clamped down. At one time, the Greenstriders set up colonies all over this arm of the galaxy; but their settlements had a habit of fizzling out… which is a polite way to say they degenerated into civil war. Striders have a rabid territorial streak that they seldom bother to control."

"Are they a robot species?"

Festina shook her head. "They’re organic. These must be the Greenstrider equivalent of androids — robots built in their own image. How old did you say these mines are?"

"Three thousand Earth years."

"Then they could have been dug by Greenstriders. The striders were definitely active in this neighborhood back then."

"How sophisticated were they technically?" I asked. "Compared to us."

"Who knows?" Festina replied. "The striders don’t share confidences. We have no idea how advanced they are now, let alone three millennia ago. But they were a spacefaring race even back then, so they may have had some interesting goodies."

"And that’s what Maya and Iranu were looking for."

"Probably."

So: hypothesize a sequence of events. Yasbad Iranu, Kowkow’s father, discovered this place thirtyish years ago, back before the plague. His first thought — scour the mine for alien tech… and do it on the hush so our government didn’t interfere with the game. Unfortunately for him, Iranu senior wasn’t careful enough, and the feddies caught him smuggling. Away he went, first to jail, then booted off planet as persona non grata. He never found a way to sneak back.

Forward two decades: Iranu junior gets friendly with Maya Cuttack on some archaeological dig in the Free Republic. Kowkow shares the secret of his father’s discovery. He and Maya head for Demoth to resume dear old dad’s work… not just here in Mummichog but at Sallysweet River and other sites round the planet. When the Freeps begin trade talks with Demoth, Iranu wangles a place as aide to the negotiating team, probably by milking his family connections. Next thing you know, the treaty contains a clause that opens Demoth archaeological sites to Freep exploitation.

Slick. I wondered if our feddies had ever suspected Iranu junior of following in his father’s footsteps. Probably… but junior was tied so close to the Freep government he’d have diplomatic immunity. Anyway, Maya must have done most of the fieldwork; Iranu just dropped by now and then to see how she was doing.

And how was she doing? With all their undercover digging, had Iranu and Cuttack turned up anything useful? Or were they just flouncing around in the dirt, without finding bugger-all?

Gingerly I stepped past the Greenstrider robots and lifted the torch-wand to light the rest of the room. It showed more robot watermelons on ostrich legs, and assorted machine boxes — computers maybe, or communication transceivers, food synthesizers, air conditioners. How can you ever tell? One box of wires looks much like another… and these had been rusting in a hot humid climate for three thousand years.

No, not that long — this room had been sealed hermetically for a long time, till an earthquake opened that breach in the wall. It explained why I recognized this stuff as machinery, unlike the moldering lumps in the outer room. It’d taken longer for microbes and humidity to get in. Even so, every exposed surface here was covered with corrosion; I doubted anything was still in working order.

Festina had her Bumbler out, running its scanner up and down a Greenstrider robot. "Interesting," she murmured.

"What?"

"See here?" She pointed to a flap of green skin folded back from the creature’s chest to reveal metal beneath. "The edges are clean," she said, "and the metal has practically no rust."

I held the torch-wand close so I could see for myself. She was right — the skin had been sliced away with a knife. Underneath, the robot’s innards had a passable gleam. "Probably the work of our bold archaeologists," I said, "cutting a hole to peek inside."

"But here…" Festina squatted and aimed her finger at the point where the robot’s left leg joined its torso. "This damage is much more ragged. And the metal’s been exposed to air a lot longer."

I crouched and looked. The scaly ostrich skin had been eaten away, eroded to shreds; and the armatures beneath were speckly brown with rust. "Sure," I agreed, "this damage is older. But what does that mean? The natural decay process had to start somewhere. This is just where the skin flaked off first."

"It doesn’t look like natural decay to me." Festina fiddled with the Bumbler controls; the image on the machine’s vidscreen ballooned through several powers of magnification. "See around the edges there? A rim of white plastic. There used to be a plastic sheath just under the skin, like a protective wrap around the metal flexors. Something chewed away most of the plastic, and bared what was underneath."

"Acid?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Then I’d expect to see melting, and there’s nothing like that. This looks more… eaten."

"Demoth has bacteria that can break down some types of plastic," I told her.

"But there’s still some plastic left," she replied, moving the Bumbler’s scanner up and down the robot’s leg. "Once a bacterial colony begins consuming a particular substance, why would they stop? No. To me, this looks like an entrance hole. Something ate through the skin, then consumed just enough of the plastic sheath to get into the robot’s guts."

"I assume you don’t mean pesky jungle insects?"

"Most likely a coordinated nano attack, specifically designed to disable this type of robot."

She grabbed the Bumbler’s scanner and gave a yank. The scanner pulled out of the Bumbler’s body, trailing behind a fiber-steel umbilical cord… like a thumb-sized glass eye on a flexible tether. Festina jammed the eye through the break in the robot’s skin. "Yes," she said, "the circuits are a real mess in there. Diced. Wire salad."

"So nanites bit their way in, then chewed up the robot’s guts? Why?"

"It was a weapon, Faye." She pulled the scanner out of the robot and stood up. "Like I said, Greenstrider colonies had a habit of disintegrating into civil war. Faction against faction. They’d start off targeting each other’s machinery, just like this — the League of Peoples doesn’t mind if you corrode the guts out of mindless robots. But how long before tactics accelerated into something uglier?"

I looked around the room: the unmoving robots, the rusting machines. Shut down by enemy nano? And what happened when the nanites destroyed other equipment… food synthesizers, say. Could Greenstriders eat our local flora and fauna? Or did the war against each other’s machinery send the colonists spiraling down to slow starvation?

Next question: how far would starving people go for revenge on their enemies? Bombs? Poison gas?

Germ warfare?

Maybe.

And when the war heated up, some Greenstriders would hide from their enemies. Huddle down in places like this, where they’d hope they were safe from nanites, armies, whatever their opponents might throw at them. Underground complexes in Mummichog, in Sallysweet River, all over Demoth.

We’d thought these were ancient mines; and some probably started out that way. But in the end… they’d become military bunkers.