Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix Page B

to the Spinners themselves instead of us.”
    He didn’t say anything to that. She was right; he had got himself into this and should expect to bear the brunt of it, be it boredom, apprehension, or outright fear. Whatever was awaiting him, though, there was little he could do to avoid it now.

    1.1.8

    Hatzis watched in silence as the alien machine carried Alander to the top of Spindle Five. It was hard to obtain a direct view of him, since his eyes were the only things remotely resembling a camera in the climber. Now and again, Hatzis would jump to Samson’s viewpoint, but the image she received merely showed what he would look like if she were actually sitting there beside him, a reconstruction created from what little data was available. The Tipler had full access to every piece of information gathered by his body, but it couldn’t perform miracles, so at best the pictures from Samson’s viewpoint were alternately fuzzy and blocky. It made her wish they had planted nanotech surveillance devices on him.
    Nevertheless, it all added to the show, thought Hatzis. This way there was a sense of the ambiguous, of mystery, that anything could happen.
    The bug barely slowed as it neared the spindle, although its frantic legwork did gradually ease until it seemed to be drifting along under momentum alone. For a brief, worrying moment, it looked to Hatzis as though the bug was moving so fast that it was going to crash into the base of the imposing edifice toward which it was ascending; but at the last possible second, a section of red gold hull opened up and swallowed the climber whole.
    Hatzis’s worst fear was that Alander would be cut off the moment he entered the spindle, but these concerns were quickly laid to rest. The signal through his eyes was as strong as ever, revealing little more than the interior of the bug. Either it was dark outside, or the climber’s carapace had resumed its earlier opacity.
    There was one slight difference, though.
    “Can you hear that, Caryl?” he asked.
    The question seemed to Hatzis at first to be unnecessary, because he knew that whatever he heard, she would hear also. But she realized that he had no way of knowing whether or not his signal was still getting through.
    “We can hear it,” Samson answered for her.
    Hatzis paid closer attention to the auditory information coming through from his ears. Below the mingled sounds of breathing, heartbeat, and involuntary muscle activity, she could make out a faint sound. It was like a mechanical hum or perhaps a rushing of air. But she couldn’t be sure what it was. The signal was too distorted with him still sitting in the bug.
    “It sounds like a subway,” said Samson.
    The bug came to a halt and its mouth opened. Alander’s eyes saw little more than a white floor before him. The noise was slightly louder.
    The view danced as Alander eased out of the chair and exited the climber. His movements were cautious, nervous, and Hatzis couldn’t begrudge him that. She would have been the same in his position—not that she would have allowed herself to be in his position, of course.
    Outside, he took a moment to look around. The bug was squatting on the floor of a tube barely large enough to contain it. The walls were white and smooth, and from them emanated a faint glow. There was enough light to see that Alander was standing in a tubular corridor that stretched ahead of him with no end in sight.
    The rushing noise was also stronger, now that he was out of the bug, although there was still no obvious source.
    “I guess I just walk, then,” he said nervously, taking his first couple of apprehensive steps along the tunnel. “Any idea where the gravity comes from?”
    It was Sivio who answered, “Beats me. Hopefully, you’ll get the chance to ask someone soon.”
    He headed off away from the bug. The conSense version of Cleo Samson followed close by, barely visible in his peripheral vision. After a moment or so of walking down the unchanging