Icarus

by Roger Levy

Genres: Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Mankind has reached deep space. Separated from earth and each other by unimaginable reaches of space, forced to adapt to various diverse planetary environments the colonies have become isolated and inward looking, forgetting their pasts, losing touch with their humanity. Until a mysterious ship found locked in the deep rock by a mining team on a planet whose surface is drenched in lethal radiation sparks off a deadly conspiracy that threatens man wherever he is. After his grim dystopias set on a failing earth Roger Levy has spread his wings to give us a broad and exciting SF novel of exotic locales and mindblowing ideas without losing any of his trademark psychological acuity and elegant style.

Release date: October 17, 2013

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 432

Sample

HAVEN

‘Here we are,’ Quill said, for something to say. Scheck glanced across at him and raised his eyebrows. The two men from Fact didn’t react much. The taller factotem – Quill thought he’d said his name was Java – let a sour fizz of air through his lips.

‘Here we are indeed,’ the other one, Rheo, said cheerily. He rubbed his hands together and then clapped them hard. The noise was effortlessly swallowed by the geometrically puckered walls of the monitoring chamber. A few of the destruct team looked briefly away from their screens, one of them blinking as if unpleasantly woken.

‘You ever get claustrophobic in here?’ Scheck clapped a hand down hard on the shoulder of one of the team. The man didn’t even look up at him, his eyes never leaving the arc of screens with their ticking lines and soothing gel colours. Scheck looked around the chamber and eyed Rheo and Java. ‘You?’

Rheo didn’t respond at all, but Java grinned widely. ‘Don’t fret it. We’re screened for all that. We’re neck-deep in tests. Just like you two.’

‘Just like us, huh?’ Scheck glanced at Quill, who gave him back a quick frown, but Scheck ignored it, going on to Java, ‘You trust the screenings? Really?’ He ran his eyes from Java’s head to his boots, and said, ‘And you’re a bit tall, aren’t you? Anyone mention that to you? They screened you for this, maybe, but did they measure you for the coredors?’

‘Not just the coredors,’ Java said, and then stopped at a sharp look from his partner.

‘Leave him be, Scheck,’ Tanner said uncomfortably. ‘Let’s go down.’

Quill flexed his fists and closed his eyes, wishing himself in rock now. He thought how typical it was of Tanner to try and smooth Scheck’s abrasiveness. Tanner, the between-man, their hinge. He wondered what Fact was doing, sending men to survey Survey. But no one on Haven questioned Fact. To ask was to imply distrust.

One of the destruct team glanced fractionally at Tanner, then twitched a finger and one of the puckered walls gently slid up, as if floating, and came to rest at head height.

‘Don’t make any unnecessary movements, will you?’ Scheck said, moving towards the revealed darkness. They went through the far door, leaving the monitoring chamber in single file, Scheck first, as he always liked to be, then Quill and Tanner, and finally Java and Rheo. The door closed at their rear, and dim amber lighting came up around them.

The bolt chamber was circular and huge, with a single small opening in the far wall. The ceiling, though, barely cleared their scalps.

‘Hear it?’ Scheck said, and stopped, making everyone else halt. ‘You two still not claustrophobic?’ He brushed his hand across the ceiling, his elbows not extending beyond a box angle. Java was stooped already and looking awkward. Scheck whispered, ‘Wait . . . there. Hear that?’

The hiss was hardly perceptible. Quill always wondered whether he was imagining it.

‘That’s the bolt readying.’ Scheck stamped a boot on the solid metal plate of the floor. ‘You’re standing on the head of the bolt. Look up. See that? That gleam? That shine’s the bolt’s action. Every time, soon as we pass—’ He clapped his hands, the sound pounding like thunder, holding them still, fists in their ears. ‘Wham!’

Hearing the factotems grunt in the eventual hollowed silence, Quill remembered the first time he’d stood in the metal slot and been told what Scheck now was telling the men from Fact.

‘Look at your feet. What you’re standing on is the last line of safety for the monitoring team back in that room. The bolt weighs fifty thousand kigs, and it’s timed from the door closing on us. Rams up home into this slot—’ Scheck thumped the ceiling again, ‘—in a fingerclick. Hell of a bang. They say it’s so quick you actually hear it as your boots kick through your brain.’

‘Yeah?’ Rheo said.

Quill thought, oddly, that Rheo’s so-what wasn’t just make-up, that Rheo actually wasn’t impressed. But maybe Quill had been overimpressed by Scheck all those years back, his first time through the door.

Scheck hadn’t noticed Rheo’s attitude, so perhaps Quill was just oversensitive. They had no imagination in Fact, anyway. It was trained out of them, everyone knew.

‘That’s right,’ Scheck said. ‘Bolthead’s got a fifty em span. That door’s fifty em away.’ He turned on the balls of his feet, then pointed up and ahead at the far end of the slot, dimly lit by fluorescents. ‘Oh, and they’re running an exercise today, did anyone tell you?’ Scheck tapped the glass on his chrono and grinned. ‘Ready, now? You’ve got eight seconds.’

He half-crouched and started to run across the chamber, Quill keeping up with him easily, Tanner hard behind him. Quill could hear Java and Rheo stumbling and head-bumping as they came, not used to a low run. Making ground, Quill was thinking, Why do this, Scheck?

When they were past the metal and onto rock, filing one by one into the shoulderwide coredor beyond the bolt chamber, Scheck kept going, running and running, Quill and Tanner smoothly with him. Only when one of the factotems tripped face down behind them, swearing, did Scheck slow and stop, and hug his knees to laugh.

‘Did I say eight seconds? My mistake. I meant thirty.’

Whatever anyone might have said was drowned by the deafening sound of the bolt. Rheo and Java cradled their heads as the slug of air drove past them. Scheck and Tanner and Quill had already dropped flat to let it pass. As the bolt locked down, the wind roared down from uptop through the long, baffled runoff at the bolt’s heel, and then it kept coming, seething and groaning at their ears.

No one said anything else as they walked in the wind down the tiny coredor with its calculated undulations, its baffles and curves, to the final descent shaft.

‘We go down one at a time,’ Tanner told Rheo and Java, apologetically. Quill wasn’t sure if he was excusing Scheck or this indignity. ‘This isn’t just a drop-shaft. It’s part of the escape valve. If Scheck and Quill blow magma or anything during the survey, the idea is, it finds its way up here and sidetracks, takes an easy route uptop.’ He pointed to the shaft’s roof. ‘It’s weakened up there, packed with loose rubble. It might do enough to divert the flow. This is the first line. There’s another one a kil back, and then there’s the runoff at the bolt. And then of course there’s the destruct team.’

Scheck stepped into the shaft, twisting awkwardly to face the rest of them. His arms were above his head, wrists crossed. He looked at the factotems and said, ‘What I was saying about claustrophobia? It wasn’t about back there, and it isn’t about this, either,’ and dropped away, leaving the small echo of a laugh in the shaft. It took a minute for the line to stop humming and two more for the platform to return. Rheo shouldered past Quill with difficulty and went next, and then Java.

‘Why does he do it?’ asked Tanner, as the platform came up. ‘Scheck.’

‘Ask him,’ Quill said. ‘Why’s Fact here? They tell you?’

‘Monitoring procedures. Routine.’ And then Tanner gave a shrug, and Quill had a feeling about the gesture, rather like Rheo’s so-what, standing on the bolt.

Tanner went down next, hunching quickly into the shaft and dropping away.

Going down, watching the rock slide past, smoothed, uncoloured, turned to grey glass by speed and the shivering of his eyeballs, Quill thought, Something isn’t right here.

At the bottom of the shaft, he began to elbow his way through the crawl tube to the go station. The air was thin in the tube, and stank of sweat and oil. Even Quill sometimes felt claustrophobic in the crawl tube, as his lungs opened to pull in every last scrap of oxygen. He imagined his chest swelling so much that it would jam him in the tube as it fought for breath.

At go, Scheck was already in their coffin, system-checking, and Tanner was sitting wired in his slot. Lensed as he was, it was impossible to tell whether he was staring at the monitors or they were staring at him. Quill wondered what it was like for him once the coffin had slid away, left here alone between it and destruct.

At least Quill and Scheck had each other. There was no one else in the support room with Tanner. He was absolutely alone. Once Scheck and Quill’s coffin was in rock, there was no one even close to Tanner. No one down the crawl tube, no one in the drop-shaft, no one at all this side of the bolt that shut off the destruct station that was the true, safe border of Haven. Uptop, where the winds and storms raged, was a border beyond exploration. On Haven, there was only down.

Quill usually tried not to think of the destruct team, whose sole purpose, nearly a kilometre above and over two kilometres east of the go station where Tanner sat, was to make a decision in less than two seconds to collapse the intervening shafts and coredors and gorge them irretrievably with rock.

The go station was already beyond the edge of the known, and it was Quill and Scheck’s dive point. This was where Quill came alive, and Scheck too.

Though today there were also the men from Fact.

‘Where are they?’ Quill asked Tanner.

‘They said they wanted to look at the other coffins,’ Tanner said. ‘Checking the new one in the dock.’

‘They get to see it before we do, huh?’ Quill glanced at the door through to the hangar where the backup coffins were kept. No one from Survey had seen the new one yet, which was crazy, as only Survey would be using it. It had been over a year in construction, everything broken down small enough to bring here for assembly and dock-testing by Factsupervised engineers.

‘They locked the door behind them,’ Tanner said absently, without looking away from his screens. ‘Scheck already tried.’

Quill spread his shoulders and made the last full stretches of his arms and legs that he’d be able to do for three weeks, then he inched into the coffin and sat at his console to start his own system checks, and forgot about the factotems.

‘You clear in there, Quill?’

‘Yeah, Tanner. Set.’

‘Scheck? You clear?’ Tanner waited. ‘Scheck? You hear me?’

Quill looked across at Scheck, who was running his comms frequency tests. He wasn’t too involved in it all to answer Tanner, Quill knew; he just wasn’t going to. Tanner knew that, which was why he kept it up.

‘I said, you clear?’

‘We’re clear,’ Quill said, at the fourth time.

‘I asked you already. I’m asking him.’

‘Scheck,’ Quill said. ‘You want to go or not?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay, Tanner? He just said he’s clear. You heard him.’

‘He wasn’t talking to me.’

Quill gave up. He ducked his head below the forward bulkhead and crawled into the overhead of the small cylinder and then pulled in his elbows to roll into his bunk, pulling up his knees to accommodate himself. Not that he was tall, but any height was too tall in a coffin. He could hear muttering – Tanner still not appeased – and then a sigh and a few unintelligible words from Scheck.

Then Scheck’s feet appeared as he swung himself round and rolled into his own bunk across the tiny aisle from Quill, his head to Quill’s feet.

‘We’re go,’ Scheck said. Then, ‘Quill?’

‘Yes?’

‘Wasn’t it my turn, feet to stern, this trip?’

‘No. Anyway, the pan doesn’t stink as bad as your feet. You haven’t got it so terrible.’

‘Is that right?’ Scheck pulled up his knees until they touched the curve of the roof, and wriggled his cotton-sleeved feet at Quill.

‘Yes. Oath’s sake, Scheck, take them away.’

‘In which case let’s swap and you can have the pan as a freshener for my feet. Perfect solution.’

‘You know what, Scheck?’

‘What?’

Quill contorted his head until he got a foreshortened view of Scheck’s face, Scheck looking back at him the same way and grinning. ‘I wouldn’t be partnering anyone else.’

‘Nor me. Set?’

‘Set.’

‘Then say goodbye to the world.’

‘Goodbye world.’

Quill took a last glance at Tanner through the open hatch. As it closed, he saw Tanner turn his head sharply and make some gesture, but not towards the coffin. There was an unfathomable expression on his face as he turned.

The coffin hatch closed, bolted and sealed itself. Quill belched along with Scheck as the coffin air engaged. Then the motors kicked in, and the dampers with them.

And now, muffled silence and a disorientating, apparent stillness. Quill felt his nausea come on and waited for it to pass.

‘Okay if I sit?’

‘Fine by me,’ Quill said. Scheck was usually desperate to get going, and then instantly restless in the coffin. Quill knew he’d never fully understand his partner, but he supposed he didn’t understand himself too deeply either.

Scheck had inched himself up the tube and swung the seatbar out from beneath the bunk, and now he was sitting hunched over the tiny screen console beside Quill’s head.

‘Call me when,’ Quill said, and slipped his shades on and went into headspace. He made himself a complex dream in which the coffin was not inching through rock, grinding forward, funnelling and packing vitrified grit into its wake, but was floating almost motionless in a clear pool under a clear sky. The coffin was one of the canoes you’d rent by the hour to paddle along the high-roofed stretches of the jade river, over in Red where he’d lived as a child. The stars were zeolites. A silver moon was in holo above, swollen but not yet full, and there was the sound of birds.

And then a bell, a gentle echoing bell far away in the distance, so faint that when he first heard it he realised he’d been conscious of it for some time already. He came out of the headspace and rolled sideways.

‘We’re just about there,’ Scheck told him. He angled the screen for Quill to see. ‘First station point.’

Quill revolved his shoulders and rubbed feeling into the whitening tips of his fingers. Raynaud’s syndrome. His peripheral circulation was getting worse. It was a side-effect of spending too much time wired. Maybe the coffin as well, the vibration of its movement in spite of the damping. And maybe the low-frequency interstation comms. And genes, and all the rest of it. He flexed his fingers and turned his hands over.

‘You okay?’

The coffin stopped moving. Quill sensed it more than he physically felt it. The deceleration from a few centimetres a second to dead still was not great, but Quill was tuned to it.

‘Fine,’ Quill said. ‘You want me to take the probe out yet?’

‘There’s never a time like now.’ Scheck reached forward into the delivery channel and took out the probe, holding it in the palm of his hand as though it might break if he shook it. It was better than diamond-hard, a coffin in miniature except that it was stuffed full of comms and sensors and could grind through rock at ten times the speed of its parent. Scheck patted it, and Quill felt the touch almost physically on his own skin, even though he wasn’t wired yet. It was an odd, tender gesture from Scheck that made him more inscrutable than ever.

Scheck replaced the probe in its delivery tube and locked it away. It hummed and set off, embedding itself automatically forward of the tube and depositing a tiny wake of smoking powder in the rocklock cavity. Tanner waited for it to cool, then opened the lock and scooped some of the dust into his hand. He and Quill looked at it. It was a ritual between them, examining the first spoor at the first station.

This was fine, grey, flecked with brown. Scheck spread it over his palm with a finger. Neither of them said anything.

The console chirped. Scheck poured the dust delicately into a bag and sealed it, then hit the comms. ‘Yes?’

‘Scheck? You there?’

‘No, Tanner. I’m here.’

‘Don’t be funny, Scheck. You hear me clear?’

‘Sadly, I do.’

‘Yes or no, Scheck, that’s all I need.’

‘I know what you need, Tanner.’

‘Start your arcs. Let me speak to Quill. I—’

‘Quill’s getting wired. What is this, a social call? You want to ask him back for a visky?’

Scheck looked at Quill, grinning. ‘Tanner’s gone. I think you insulted him.’

‘You should stop needling him. Every time, Scheck, soon as we go, you start on him.’ Quill wondered whether Tanner had sounded odd, more tense than usual, but he didn’t say anything to Scheck.

‘It keeps him awake,’ Scheck said. ‘Sitting back there at go, you can get crazy. What he does, it’s the end of the line. Like holding the rope in case we fall. It’s a sleep job unless he has to actually do it. He knows we won’t ever need him, but he has to dream it might happen, and if it does and he’s not sharp, he never gets to have the last word. He never gets to hear me say, “Thanks, Tanner, you saved my life,” and never has the chance to say back, “Well, the pleasure was all yours, Scheck.” That’s what keeps him awake for us.’

‘Are you sure about that? He could just cut us off one day, wander back to the world and tell them we didn’t make it. Maybe that’d be enough of a last word for him.’

‘No,’ Scheck said. ‘He’s too crazy for that.’

‘Crazier than you?’

‘Hell, yes. We hit fire or flood, and die, it’s been our mistake. If we spike something big enough to spit back—’ Scheck shrugged, momentarily serious. ‘He’s in our hands, Quill. And he tries to needle us! He has to be crazy. Would you put yourself in our hands?’

‘When I’m wired out there, you put yourself in mine, Scheck. What about that?’

‘Not the same.’

Quill thought again that he’d never understand Scheck. He laid himself back on the bunk and set the wires up, the laceface stiff until it had wormed its way into his nostrils, his ears and the corners of his eyes. He felt it spreading warmly through his body until he was lying steady in stagnant water the colour of the dust in Scheck’s hand in the coffin behind him.

‘What can you see?’ Scheck’s voice had a faint reverb.

‘Nothing yet. Give me a chance.’ He looked over his shoulder, an effortless one-eighty degrees with no crick in his neck, and saw the coffin sitting there like a finless fish, receding into the dark, vanes and ridges for scales, a mantle of pulverised and liquefying rock caught about it like a frozen eddy. ‘Okay, I’m starting my first circuit.’

This was Quill’s speciality. Quill was the face worker of the team. Scheck wouldn’t do it, but Quill wouldn’t do what Scheck did, the calculations and evaluations. Being wired to a probe was easy work, once you swallowed the edge of risk. It was like swimming, though not like swimming in any river Quill had ever plunged into. It was like being underwater but breathing, with no current, no surface or riverbed. Just a view in every direction for a few metres, a few centimetres, sometimes a millimetre or two, depending on the type of rock. For Quill, it was the most perfect form of freedom.

This was Haven, and Haven was an excavated world. It was tunnelled and refined. But farout and deepdown, beyond the endwall of the lastdug coredor, was forever the unknown. Without Survey, every strike of a pick, each strum of a drillhead, held the potential for world-ending catastrophe. And Survey itself held that potential to a perfect degree.

There was provisional stability, and that was all. Beyond any depth of dependable, cavitatable rock lay unstable shelves of magnetic scree, or intrusions of permeable rock being progressively cavitated by pressurised gases, toxic and inert. Huge, reliable folds and sheets of dense and intrinsically stable rock were poised over porous rubble and voids that could crumble at a touch and collapse everything.

‘Good so far,’ Quill said. ‘Stay with me. I’m going straight. Good visibility. I can’t hear anything. No creaks.’

It was possible to carry out communication and structure-analysis through the rock to varying distances, depending on the type of rock, but actually to drill, to penetrate, risked weakening the periphery of a major problem. It had to be done, though. To extend the world, to build anything under Haven, you didn’t need to construct foundations, but you had to test them.

‘Quill?’

‘Nothing yet. Granite as far as I can see.’ It was in greens, subtly shaded, rippling away from him as he slowly swam through it. Beautiful and calm. He kept on moving at what felt like speed. ‘Temperature stable. Keep coming.’

‘Okay. I’m hard-mapping it two ems on your either arm. Go on three ems, then swing four dot two east-east-down and come back.’

‘I’m on it. It’s a beautiful day out here, Scheck.’

The deeper, further, outer excavation of Haven was slow, carried out delicately by pindrills and probes, the endless work of Survey.

And that was where Scheck and Quill came in. They were first-outers. They were there to redefine the boundaries of Haven. They explored not just the areas where coredors were to be extended, but beyond and beneath, to ensure – as far as was possible under Haven – that the extensions would remain stable. And they were there to search for water and to map rivers, to decide at what point it was safe to tap them.

‘This is your fifth run, Quill. You want to stop and eat? You’ve been out for three hours.’

‘I’ll keep going. One more run.’

The subgeones, the coffins that carried them, were self-sealing in their wakes, to minimise the possibility of flowback. So were the probes. In theory, as soon as Quill probed close to anything suspicious, he’d border-flag it and withdraw, re-approach it from a different direction, let Scheck map the entire fault, and on his computation recommend total or local area avoidance.

But Quill could also spring the whole thing, weaken a thin rock envelope and let go a firespit. The probes were tiny, but a corefire spit could snap along a probe track with only the faintest of temperature rises in warning before the coffin fried. And then magma would open the crack further, backtracking it along the weakness of the coffin’s wake, and sensors at the go station would bypass Tanner and give the destruct team their few moments of consideration to throw the bolt and cross their fingers that Survey’s engineers had designed the runoffs well enough.

‘Okay, Scheck. We’re over the edge and in hard lava. One kil down and we’re still above the lake floor. Should we go deeper?’

‘Not yet. We’ll check the lake’s solidstate and stable at this depth all the way across, like planned. Then we’ll drop a few ems and swing back, see if we can find the floor. Keep going for now. Temperature’s still fine. Looks like it self-plugged from deep, the whole lake got isolated, cooled and set. Crise, Quill, they’ve given us a sleep exercise. We’re supposed to be first choice. You think they don’t trust us any more?’

Quill didn’t answer. An hour passed. Then he said, ‘I’ve got something here, Scheck.’

‘Hold it a moment. We’re starting to lose Tanner’s signal. I’m just seeding a link . . . Done. We’re in comms again.’ Scheck chuckled. ‘He’s not talking to me. What is it, Quill?’

Quill didn’t reply.

‘Quill? Quill?’

‘Half an em ahead. I don’t think it’s anything. Stay back, though.’

‘What is it? I’m getting nothing on my readers here.’

‘Some kind of metal, not an ore I recognise, an odd shade. I’m sure it’s not on the charts. And silicon. And . . . Oath! It’s greyed out. I’ve got impenetrability ahead.’

‘Stop there. Come back, Quill. We’ll go round.’

‘No. Wait. I don’t understand this. It’s clear to either side, and temperature’s stable. It’s an isolate of some sort. I’m going on, at dead slow.’

‘Quill—’

‘Wait. I’m within two milliems and I still can’t see into it or go through it. It’s not magma, can’t be. I’m going to withdraw and use the heatlance.’

‘Quill, I—’

And suddenly, when the lance was within half a milliem of the impenetrability, the grey area became a brilliant red and the probe slid straight into it. And then, just as he’d penetrated it, the swirl of colour fluctuated crazily, as if it were not exactly melting, but somehow changing. It almost seemed to retract from the probe. He’d stopped dead but the colours kept shifting, red to scarlet to crimson.

‘Scheck, something weird’s happening here. I’ve hit some sort of odd concretion. It feels like its molecular structure’s shifting in reaction to the lance. Heat-sensitivity at extreme temperature.’

‘Some new element, maybe, pushed up from the core with the flow. Maybe this lake’s not so dull after all.’

Quill could almost hear him grin.

‘Be a pat on our backs. Go round it. All the way, full-frame grid, and I’ll model it,’ Scheck said. ‘Better do this right. Then dock the probe and we’ll look at it.’

It took Quill two more hours. Then he slept a few hours and had something to eat while Scheck worked the screen.

Eventually Scheck sat back and said, ‘Look at it. That shape. It’s not a concretion, Quill. Not a geode either. You know what? I think you’ve found a fossil. I think there’s only ever been three or four, all the time we’ve been here. This is a good find. But look. If I go to himag at the edges—’

Quill watched the screen as Scheck moved the image around. There were more than twenty tendrils extending from the central core of the thing into the encasing rock. Then he said, ‘I need some more sleep, Scheck. We’d better move on. Map it, if you like. They can send someone else after it if they want. Not our job.’

But when he woke up again, Scheck had the thing inside the coffin, sitting on the small foldout table in the tiny aisle.

‘Crise, Scheck. What did you do that for?’

‘It wasn’t easy. I had to sever most of its extremities with the lance to get it through the sample port.’

‘Well, jettison it. There’s no room.’

‘No. Look at the scan,’ Scheck said. ‘It’s interesting.’ He twisted the screen to show Quill.

On the screen, the sheathing rock was like frosted jelly. The fossil was outlined in red and whorled with pink and purple. ‘It’s totally soft, as far as I can make out. No exoskeleton. Or else it’s totally hard.’ He rotated the image. ‘No flattening, no compression. It looks—’ He stopped, not finding the word.

‘It looks comfortable,’ Quill said.

‘Yes. Except,’ he touched the screen. ‘Except where we cut through the tendrils. According to the sample, we didn’t. There’s a clear margin of rock around the whole thing. We’ve got the whole thing here.’

‘No,’ Quill said. ‘We haven’t got it all. Look at the tapering of the tendrils. Go in on that. See? They are cut off. Where the heatlance cut through the rock, the melt flowed to cover the site of the cut.’

Scheck looked from the screen to the rock to Quill. He didn’t need to say anything. He didn’t need to point out what was also apparent. That the tendril, tapering away from the body and approaching the cut, bulged minutely at the cut end. It had actively withdrawn from the cutting tool, and the meltrock had flowed into the void and set.

It wasn’t a fossil. It had just been alive.

On the table, the rock didn’t move. Scheck rotated the image again, reassessing it. ‘Look at the rock,’ he said, quietly. ‘Those faint lines around the body. That’s rippling. Like when you’re swimming. All around it, those broad ripples.’ He pulled the image in at one of the cut tendrils. ‘You’re right. Here, where you thought you’d severed the limbs, these tiny, tighter ripples.’

They looked at the lump of rock on the table, in the coffin with them. ‘I’ll jettison it. Like you said, Quill, no room in here, and not our job. And anyway, it’s dead now, that’s for sure.’

Scheck picked it up and tossed it cautiously in his hands, and then he voided it into the rock behind. As they started to move forward again, with the thing jettisoned into the superheated, vitrifying rock to their rear, for a moment Quill was sure the coffin shivered, as if shaken and then let go.

‘Well, that was a time waste,’ Scheck said, forcing a smile.

‘Yeah,’ Quill said. ‘Any more of those, we’ll go round. You told Tanner about it?’

‘Yes. No. That last link we dropped, it must have been faulty. Or one of them along the line. Seems to be transmitting, but I’m getting nothing back. It’ll clear.’

‘Crise! Aren’t they clustered?’

‘It happens. I’ve dropped some more, ultrawide frequency, lower wavelength. One of them’ll cut through to the next link.’

‘Or Tanner’s getting his slice of us. I told you to leave him be.’

‘It’s not Tanner. It’s a fault. And don’t worry.’

They mapped eight more days of cold lava and found no more fossils, and stopped talking about it. Tanner still wasn’t responding, but there was nothing to be done about that. Apart from the occasional boulder of foreign rock suspended in the lava, it was an increasingly tedious survey. By the ninth day, they had settled into a pattern of sleeping and mapping. The confines of the coffin didn’t matter to Quill any longer. When he was awake, he was in the probe, and otherwise, in the coffin, he was either too tired to notice Scheck, or asleep.

Some time during the tenth day, a sea of green all around him, Quill wanted to scratch his nose. He knew the urge was just a program fault, that he didn’t actually have a nose to s