Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [187]
Now when Orli looked at the lumps extending up the sheer wall, she saw them as convenient handholds, a stepladder that could carry her up to the inaccessible cracks and niches high in the rockface.
She scrambled up, stepping on the crystals and grabbing with her hands to move her body higher. She grinned to think she was reaching places the archaeological expeditions could never have mapped. Margaret and Louis Colicos—as well as Hud Steinman—were old people. They would not have tried anything so physically demanding or risky.
Halfway up, she paused to look down, then realized that was not a good idea. The canyon floor was a long, dizzying way below her. The rest of the sheer cliff rose above her, and the lumps of alum crystal now seemed tiny and unstable. If she let go, if she fainted, the fall would be a straight, swift plunge to certain death.
Swallowing hard, Orli decided to look up and forward and not bother to glance back down. She had her eye on a black vertical notch half-hidden in a fold in the cliff. It might once have been a large cave opening, but the intense heat of ancient blasts had folded the granite down so that it drooped over the doorway like a partial curtain.
By now she was tired of climbing. When she reached the right height, she saw what she was looking for and started to work her way over to it. One foot slipped on the slick, smooth surface of a tilted alum block, but she caught herself by grabbing a sharp edge of rehardened granite. Breathing hard, she squeezed her body into the dark cave.
Because many of the rooms in the Klikiss city were half-collapsed and dark, all the new colonists carried small handlights. Orli crawled until she reached what was obviously a spacious chamber, then fumbled in her pocket. Now that her sore hands were free, she switched on the illumination. Light flowed out, splashing on the cave walls.
Here the rock was rough-hewn pristine granite, not flash-softened like the outer cliffs, but the chamber was too perfectly symmetrical, too out of place high up in the middle of a granite cliff, to have been formed naturally. She imagined an army of workers—the insectoid Klikiss?—chopping out a spherical room five meters across. But why so high up in the cliff? She shone her light on the rough ceiling and the far walls, searching for tunnels or exits, but found only the strange, weblike Klikiss writing, hieroglyphics and equations that spiraled outward from a central point.
When she pointed the handlight toward the dusty floor, she gasped.
The last reports Margaret Colicos had transmitted contained images of a mummified Klikiss body found on Rheindic Co. Now, seeing the withered corpse on the floor, the girl instantly recognized the leathery cockroach shape of a Klikiss—this one no longer intact. Its body had been torn apart, its exoskeleton exploded from the inside, as if numerous swallowed land mines had detonated. Its limbs and wing coverings looked chewed, as if something had torn its way out from within the corpse. Some terrible parasite native to Corribus? A predator?
Inside the chamber, the shadows seemed darker, the temperature colder. She listened intently, but heard only the pounding of her pulse in her ears, her own ragged breathing, and the faint whistle of a breeze outside the cave opening.
Beside the alien’s body Orli found another wrecked form, this one larger and darker, as if coated with oily shadows. It had the same basic shape, but made out of metal and obsidian-colored ceramics—one of the Klikiss robots!
The beetlelike machine had also been torn apart, just like the Klikiss body. Its components were smashed and pummeled. Barely recognizable scraps lay strewn around the chamber floor, as if an army of rodents had toyed with a pile of treats. Pieces of near-indestructible exoskeleton were shattered, mangled, discarded like garbage.