Tropic of Creation Read Online Free PDF

with perspiration as the hexadron warmed to its task. It was a descent of 120 feet. Next to him was a tank of air, in case of trouble on the way down or back up. He didn’t expect trouble, but that’s just when it would probably happen. His father and brothers would have been at ease in such a place, deep in the bowels of a planet; but Eli had vowed he would never be a miner, and his parents chose the only other option: they sent him for a soldier. The draft would have snared him eventually anyway, and it was an honorable calling; until Eli showed an aptitude for an officer. Then he saw his father harden toward him, as though Eli’s rise in rank set his brothers lower by default. If enlisted was good enough for them, it was good enough for Eli. But now that three of them were dead, how could he ever compete with that?
    His ears were plugged with noise. Rocks ground beneath his feet as the hexadron lurched downward in small, shuddering jolts.
    It felt like going into combat. Times like this were what a professional soldier trained for, maybe lived for. Times when the mental world peeled away, leaving you in the center of the moment, doubts left behind along with every other piece of cognition. He thought of the many times he’d slammed a shuttle down into atmosphere, ready to debark and fight … the old combat high … distant memory now after missions of transport, supply, administration, and routine. He still had his rank, despite thecarnage that was not—at least officially—his fault in that last battle. Not the last battle of the war, by any means, but
his
last battle …
    With a final lurch, the craft stopped.
    Dead quiet crept in, replacing the roar of teeth against stone. His bones rang with harmonics, skin tingling. Pings of small rocks skittered off the hull. He fingered the hatch control. A sickening delay, then the scrape of the panel. Beyond, only black—and the piquant rush of oxygenated air.
    Eli powered up his lamp and crawled through. The beam flashed on walls to the side, and the floor, a short drop down from where he stood. The techs had nailed the calibration to within inches.
    He stepped out, leaving the hexadron mostly buried in the wall, all but the egress side.
    The beam of the lamp revealed a shelf cut into stone, stretching out beyond the cone of light, but far enough to convince him that this tunnel was a construct. Some ten feet high by eight feet wide, the place had the look and smell of decay.
    Standing now in the middle of the tunnel, he listened. Profound silence surrounded him. After a time, he heard faint sounds, buried sounds: hissing of air, dripping water, creaks of sediments giving way to gravity. Once—though it was surely imaginary—a remote shout. On another level, he registered only silence. It was as though his ears carried background noise, the reverberation of things heard before, erratic snips of sound lost in the maze of the cochlea.
    He set off in the direction of the most extensive tunnels as mapped by the survey team. There was no machinery, no litter of artifacts, no rails or tracks, yet the walls themselves, in their regularity, spoke of purpose and permanence. In places, water seepage traced rusty fingers from ceiling to floor.
    Pulling out his comm unit, he made his call to Roche on the surface. It was no surprise to him when it went unanswered. If radio didn’t work on the surface, no reason why it would come to life 120 feet below ground. But he
would
follow procedures. It would all be done according to procedure.
    Turning back, he secured his tether to the hexadron with a staple. When he glanced up from that task, he noted the walls again. Something odd about them, regular but pitted, gray with what might be a pinkish cast.
    The place had to be ahtran—who else could have built this? If true, it was a momentous discovery. Command would want to know about this, and soon. Because ahtra were never known to use worlds other than their great metal spheres, the