Chapter 155: The Doorway
The first strike went into the northern rail at 0114.
Glitch hit it hard with his tail, once, then moved forty meters and hit it again, then crossed into the fractured stretch and struck a loose plate that carried almost nothing anywhere.
Jin watched the response come in and felt something in his chest settle.
Two hunters moved in the northern gallery. Then a third, much further out, from a zone that had no business reacting to a disturbance that size, which meant the rail had done its work and made one lizard sound like an incident.
Good. Now make it worse.
He kept the avatar inside the fractured floor for the next ninety seconds, striking things at irregular intervals, never twice from a position that could be read. Reports were going in from four points at once and none of them agreed on where the intruder was.
The commander answered from the junction. Jin felt the strikes arrive, heavy and precise, redistributing hunters across the northern half of the sector.
Then Glitch went for the spine.
Eight meters of connected stone bridged two old cuts, already cracked at the western end, which was why Jin had picked it. Glitch got under the crack, braced, and hit it with shoulder and tail together, then again, and on the fourth impact the spine dropped into the cut with a noise that filled the sector.
The change came through the avatar’s feet immediately. A transmission route that had carried clean strikes a moment earlier now ended at the new gap, its remaining vibration scattering through broken stone below.
The commander struck again from the junction. The strike went out, reached the gap, and stopped, and the northern galleries did not answer.
It went to relays, exactly as Jin had expected.
Two mantises drifted toward the break within twenty seconds and took positions on either side of the dead span, striking the floor between movements, trying to carry the rhythm across the gap by hand.
He did not kill them. Killing them would have taken time and would have told the commander precisely what he cared about.
He moved them instead.
Glitch put a heavy strike into a rail sixty meters east of the first relay, and the relay left its post to check it, because a relay that hears something moving nearby is a hunter first and a relay second. Then a spill of loose ore down a slope behind the second one, which pulled it eight meters off its spot and left it standing on fractured floor where its own repeats came out wrong.
Reports began arriving at the junction that did not agree with each other.
Jin could not read their content. Tremor Sense gave him timing, strength, and direction, and what he heard was three separate sources sending at once, at different rhythms, from positions the commander’s own corrections had never put them in.
The heavy strikes came faster after that. Twice, then a pause, then four in a row.
It’s asking the same question and getting different answers.
Then the rhythm moved.
Jin felt it leave the junction, and he took no satisfaction from it, because there was nothing foolish in the movement at all. The commander had been offered a choice between sitting on a door while half its colony went blind and restoring the network from a position it could actually reach, and it took the second option and took it fast.
The heavy pattern travelled east across connected stone toward the shelf junction near the northern cuts, and the fourth descending route stopped producing a six-second response.
"Go," Jin said, to a phone.
The signal shadow was the fractured gallery on the western approach, the same one where a motionless sentry had opened the avatar’s flank on run seven.
He went in at a careful walk.
Tremor Sense showed three hunters in the surrounding sectors, and all three were moving late, arriving at positions the commander had ordered forty seconds earlier and reaching them after the situation had changed. Delay made them clumsy as a group.
Individually they remained perfectly capable of killing him, and Jin reminded himself of that every fifteen meters.
He used the terrain the way he had learned to use it across repeated runs. A wedge of ore rolled down a slope on the eastern side and pulled one hunter into checking a noise. An old sorting frame, half-collapsed, gave off a long groaning shift when Glitch leaned on it, which took a second hunter twenty meters out of position.
The third he simply avoided, going wide and slow through the worst of the fractured floor where the avatar’s own movement came out as nothing.
Glitch passed within four meters of an empty niche, and Jin held his breath for no reason at all, because there was nothing in that one and Tremor Sense would not have told him if there had been.
Sixty meters from the descent, the commander’s rhythm changed direction.
Jin felt it turn. There was nothing hurried in it. It had reached the eastern junction, sent perhaps six strikes from there, gotten answers that made sense together, and worked out from those answers that the northern incident had never actually gone anywhere.
The heavy pattern started back toward the descent.
"Faster."
Glitch went faster. Two hunters converged on the sound and arrived at a position he had already left, because their corrections were still coming through eighty meters of shattered floor, and by the time the commander’s clean signal reached them the avatar was at the mouth of the fourth route.
Glitch went down it.
The lower passage did not feel like the quarry.
Everything above had been cut and blasted and hauled, all straight lines and steel and the leavings of an industry. Here the stone had never been worked. The passage ran down at a steep grade through a natural fault that the old mining had broken into and abandoned, and the walls were rough and wet and noticeably warm.
Mineral roots had gotten into everything.
That was the first strange thing. Something was growing through the rock, pale and thick and hard, running along the seams and splitting them wider, and where the roots crossed open air they carried a faint crystalline crust that reminded Jin of the seam at marker five and looked nothing like it.
The second strange thing was the evidence.
Scratches everywhere, thousands of them, far more than the upper galleries had ever shown. Shed armor plates in drifts against the walls, some of them small enough to fit in Jin’s hand. Broken shell that was too thin and too curved to be armor.
Eggshell.
And in the deeper reaches, movement: small, quick, low to the floor, plentiful. Glitch’s sense came back full of it, dozens of light bodies going about their business somewhere below.
It’s the nest. The whole thing. It’s been standing in front of its nest through every run.
Which was, on reflection, an extremely ordinary reason for an animal to stand in front of something.
The passage bent left. Glitch went flat against the wall and put his head around the corner, and the main chamber opened below.
Jin got a partial view, maybe a third of it. A vast natural void with a floor that dropped away in tiers, the far side lost in dark.
Growing out of a hummock of mineral-rich stone in the middle of the visible portion was a tree.
He looked at it for several seconds before he was willing to use the word.
It had a trunk, and the trunk had bark, and the bark was the colour of wet slate and looked like it would blunt a chisel. The roots did not sit in soil. They had grown into the crystalline seams in the rock and run along them for twenty meters in every direction, thickening the veins as they went, and the entire hummock had been split open by however long that had taken.
The branches were sparse and grey and nearly leafless.
On one of them, low, hanging out over the tier below, was a single fruit.
It was about the size of two fists, dark and matte and heavy enough that the branch bent under it. It did not look like food. Jin found that he could not stop looking at it.
The Engine noticed before he did.
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