Tropic of Creation Read Free

this case, one was half the size of the other.
    “A natural system of tunnels isn’t proportional,” Eli said.
    Ben Juric looked at him, gracing him with a crumpled lip. Juric didn’t talk unless he had something to say, so Eli had learned to read his face.
Tell me something I don’t know
, the master sergeant managed to convey.
    From outside the tent, the noise of grinding gears erupted, as the techs put the craft through its paces, digging down a yard or two; digging back up. The engineers cracked the control system easily. The controls were simple; hardest were the calibrations for depth, and the techs were closing in on that.
    Techs had been swarming over the craft since the gradiometer reading had revealed the tunnels earlier thatmorning. The soundings crew were now some half mile up the wadi, still following the main tunnel, measuring the gravity-gradient changes that implied subsurface structures.
    “Ahtran tunnels, I say,” Marzano concluded. Maybe she hoped they
were
. He couldn’t blame her if she was eager to fight the war she’d been denied, eager to forget the past year’s truce with the enemy.
    At the mention of ahtra, one side of Sergeant Juric’s face hardened—the alpha side that still bore normal expression. Eli would have welcomed his assessment, but the sergeant was wary of him. There was no history between the two of them, no loyalty. Like the general’s daughter and granddaughter, Juric was merely hitching a ride on this quick run down through Keller Space.
    Only now the shuttle run had taken on a different complexion. They both wished he could radio for orders. Armistice or no, if you had a cache of arms down here, and God knew what ahtra surprises, you damn well got your orders from Command, especially if you’re just a stinking tub of a transport with a tarnished officer in charge, occupying a post a better man would have had if most of them weren’t dead or in regen baths. But radio was down, as Marzano had told them. If they hadn’t discovered her Mayday beacon in orbit, they would never have found her—even though they
had
been looking for her. The satellite wasn’t broadcasting—whatever electromagnetic interference disrupted the surface transmissions also extended well into the planet’s exosphere—but on retrieval the ship’s techs had decoded its message.
    Eli caught Sergeant Juric’s eye, just long enough to lock on. “We get the kinks worked on that digger, I’m sending someone down,” Eli said.
    Juric nodded. In the three months of their acquaintance, Eli had never seen Juric show surprise. If you werea veteran of battle, you
didn’t
show surprise, not at an officer’s order. If Eli had said,
Take a spoon, Sergeant, and dig your way down to that tunnel
, Juric would have nodded in just that same way.
    “Let me send one of my people, Captain,” Marzano said. It was her plea, maybe, for a chance to salvage something from Null. Maybe she looked at Eli and hoped to God she’d never fall so low. He didn’t think she would. Patrician Luce Marzano, of good family, of the right connections, looked a little different to Command than up-through-the-ranks Eli Dammond with top scores, no connections, and a worse crime, by some lights, than desertion.
    “We’ll see who goes. We’ll see if we
can
go.” He turned to Juric. “Sergeant, keep the tech teams working here. Give them some backup for a complete scan of the tunnels. See how far they extend.”
    “Yes, sir. And the ship?”
    Luce Marzano’s ship, the
Fury
, was still out there on the flats with Eli’s crew combing its systems for evidence—one way or the other. “Keep working,” he told Juric, and Marzano nodded, relieved no doubt that her situation wasn’t upstaged by a more interesting one. “Box up what you have and transfer it to the
Lucia”
The
Lucia
, a sweet name for his ship of command, which was little better than a bathtub with fusion drive. And it’d be a full tub once its complement of 157