The officers' accommodation had turned into a circus. Half a dozen commanders stood in the corridor outside Rachel's quarters, barking orders at a dozen members of the security forces standing behind them. The floor outside Rachel's door had been quickly covered with a protective coating and overlaid by a temporary raised walkway that looked like an ornamental garden feature. Rachel would have laughed at its appearance if it hadn't been for the fresh memories of Morrang's horrible death. Technicians in lab coats gathered around the miniature bridge, arguing with each other and occasionally glancing underneath the bridge to see if anything was happening.
'It has to be molecular,' one of them was saying, but others shook their heads. They spoke of heat welds, acid pumps and other things that meant nothing to Rachel. Security forces paced back and forth in the corridor, talking into their comms units. They glanced around, looking alert and restless. More than one of them looked in Rachel's direction with concern in their eyes. Rachel tried her best to ignore them all.
Alice was the first friendly face to step across the strange raised walkway. She entered Rachel's living room, ignoring several technicians that tried to block her path. Rachel watched from her bunk room and waved for Alice to join her.
Alice smiled and sat beside her, wrapping one arm around her shoulders to offer a friendly hug. 'I'm so sorry,' she said. 'I was busy working on the pattern matchers. I had no idea what was happening. I came as soon as I heard but I was probably the last to know.'
'You couldn't have known,' Rachel said.
'Are you okay? It must have been awful. That poor man. Who was he?'
'I'm okay,' Rachel said. 'His name was Morrang. He was one of the new troopers. He was on his way to see you.'
'Me?'
'He said he was coming to help with the pattern matchers.'
'Oh, no. I called the operations room but they said that nobody was available. I didn't know they were sending someone. I guess they must have found someone after all.' Alice shook her head. 'If I hadn't called for help, maybe he would still be alive.'
'It's not your fault,' Rachel said. 'It could have been anyone that stepped into that thing. It could have been me.'
Alice squeezed Rachel's shoulders with a haunted look on her face. Maybe she was just beginning to understand the implications of Rachel's words. By calling for assistance with the pattern matchers, Alice had undoubtedly cost Morrang his life, but if she hadn't called for help, maybe Rachel would be dead in his place. The trap had obviously been intended for her.
Harris stepped into the bunk room, leaning his hand against the frame. He nodded in Rachel's direction, searching her eyes with his own. 'How's our new commander?' he said.
Rachel offered an embarrassed smile. She felt as though it was all her fault, though she couldn't think why.
'General Markov will be here in a minute,' Harris said.
Rachel forced herself to take a deep breath as she straightened her jacket. She couldn't get the images of Morrang's death out of her mind. Every time she closed her eyes, the trooper's terrified eyes stared back at her. She couldn't forget how his swirling body had sunk into a rippling black pool of sludge. She didn't want to remember such things anymore.
The cacophony of voices in the hallway fell silent.
Harris turned to face the living room. 'He's here,' he said in a low voice, backing out of the way as the general approached.
Markov stepped through the door and locked eyes with Rachel as she sat on her bunk. He gestured to someone behind him and walked into the centre of the room, his barrel chest bulging beneath his tight-fitting jacket. His neck seemed even thicker than before. Rachel held her breath as his steely grey eyes pinned her like a bug.
Commander Jim Parker arrived behind Markov. He stared at the floor with his shock white hair standing up in spikes. He gave no indication that he knew anybody else was there.
'Did you see it?' Harris said.
Markov raised an eyebrow. 'There isn't much to see.'
'Not now, there isn't.'
Markov frowned. 'Shouldn't there be some damage or marks or something?'
Rachel rose from her bunk and wrapped her arms around her waist. She felt suddenly colder than she had before. 'It's gone now,' she said.
Markov looked at her with a puzzled expression. 'Tell us what happened.'
'I was trying to explain it to Alice, but I couldn't find the words. I felt something. It didn't feel right. The display on my wall console was inactive, but I hadn't turned it off. When I turned it back on, I saw a man crouching outside my door. I could only see his elbow and one of his boots. I didn't see his face. He was wearing a commander's uniform.'
'I thought you said you only saw his elbow and boots,' Markov said. 'How could you tell it was a commander, or even a man for that matter?'
Rachel stared at the opposite wall, remembering. 'It was later. After I stuck my head out of the door. I saw him turning at the end of the corridor. I couldn't see his head clearly because the wall was in the way, but I saw his collar and his arm. The cut of the jacket is different on a commander's uniform. He was taller than any of the female commanders, and his shoulders were wide too. There might have been a bulge on the back of his head, but I'm not sure. He was too far away by then. It might just have been his hair sticking out.'
'You didn't see his face?' Markov said.
'No. He was too far away by the time I opened the door.'
'Damn. It's going to be difficult to track him down with a description like that. Don't you even know if he was an implant?'
'Sorry,' Rachel said. 'I'm not sure.'
'What's their profile?' Harris said.
Rachel looked at Harris, remembering. 'It was a man, a commander. He was tall with short black hair. Medium build, I think. He moved quickly and silently.'
'You realise what you are saying?' Markov said. 'This is your first day back on duty, and you just accused a third of your colleagues of being traitors.'
'That's not what I want,' Rachel said. 'I didn't want any of this.'
'We can rule out Vanmarek,' Harris said with a twinkle in his eye. 'She said tall.'
Rachel hugged herself tighter. There was a coldness in her bones that wouldn't go away. 'I don't want to accuse anyone,' she said.
Markov glanced around the room as though looking for clues. He folded his arms in front of his barrel chest, and cords of muscle flexed across his thick muscular neck. 'Did anyone else see what happened?'
'No,' Rachel said. 'Me and Morrang were the only ones here.'
'I checked the visual logs,' Alice said, 'but they didn't help much.'
Markov frowned. 'If you saw the visual logs, you must have seen who did this?'
Alice shook her head. 'The visual logs were damaged. The useful parts have been deleted. There's no record of who came to the door or what happened to Morrang.'
'How is that possible?' Markov said. 'Was it a fault?'
'No,' Harris said. 'Whoever did this had someone else working with them, someone who had access to the visual logs so they could cover their tracks.'
'Perfect,' Markov said. 'Now we're looking for two traitors, and we have no way of identifying either of them. Get a list of everyone who has write access to the visual logs.'
'Yes, General,' Parker said. He stood to one side of the group, his pink eyes angled up towards the corner of the ceiling.
Markov put his hands on his hips and curled his lips. 'In fact, put a block on anyone tampering with the visual logs at all. From now on, I don't want anyone deleting them for any reason. Can you make that happen?'
'I'll see what I can do,' Parker said. 'It should be possible.'
Rachel stared at him. She had heard that his eyes were extremely sensitive to light due to a lack of pigment, but he seemed to be coping fine with the bright lights in her bunk room. She wondered whether retinal implants were compensating on his behalf.
Something sparkled near the cuff of Parker's shirt. He was wearing gold cufflinks. Rachel stiffened. The man who planted the nanopatch had worn cufflinks too. She remembered how his large hands had worked in a way that she hadn't understood. There had been a symbol carved into the surface of those cufflinks. Rachel tried to remember what it had been. She stared at Parker's cufflinks, trying to see if they were the same.
'Commander Parker,' she said, careful to modulate her tone so it sounded like a casual question rather than an accusation. 'What symbol is that on your cufflinks?'
Parker's face twitched down one side. He didn't look at her. 'CC,' he said.
'What does it stand for?'
'Central Command. These cufflinks are standard issue to all male commanders.'
Rachel felt foolish for asking. Had her attacker's cufflinks born the symbol CC also? She didn't think so. Maybe Parker had ruled himself out of her investigation, but what if he had several pairs of cufflinks? What if he had changed them before returning with Markov? Rachel's mind raced in circles. There were too many possibilities.
Markov narrowed his eyes. 'Is something wrong, Henson?'
Rachel shook her head. 'No, General. I was just thinking. It's nothing.'
'What about that comms message you put out, scaring half the crew to death?' Markov clicked his jaw, regarding her like an admonishing father. 'What was that phrase you used?'
Rachel didn't want to talk about it.
'Fless nanopatch,' Parker said without looking at either of them. His cheek twitched repeatedly and his tongue flicked across his upper lip like a snake.
Rachel shuddered. What was he doing?
'Where did you get a phrase like that?' Markov said.
Rachel looked at Markov and then towards Alice, who nodded for her to explain.
'It was a black pool on the floor,' she said. 'I was trying to describe it.'
'And that was the first phrase that sprang to mind?'
Rachel rubbed a hand across the back of her neck. She didn't know what to say. She had opened a comms link, meaning to say something about black pools on the floor, but when she had started to speak, the words had just tumbled out. 'I don't know why I said it.'
'What is a fless nanopatch?' Markov said.
Rachel looked down at her feet. 'I don't know,' she said. 'The words just sprang into my head. I must have heard the phrase somewhere before.'
Markov pressed his lips into a thin line. 'Parker, can you shed any light on this?'
Parker's expression didn't change. He hadn't moved any part of his body since he had entered the room, but his eyes flicked from side to side, focussing on nothing that Rachel could see.
'The fless are the ancestors of the clerics,' he said. 'I don't have access to any more specific information than that. My access privilege is not high enough.'
'I know that much,' Markov said. 'Do you know something about them, Rachel? Have you encountered the fless before?'
Rachel shook her head.
Markov raised his voice. 'Then why the bloody hell did you say it?'
'I'm sorry, General. I don't know. I don't know anything about the fless. I must have heard someone mention it before. The words just came to me. I don't remember why.'
'I can tell you one thing about the fless,' Markov said. 'You don't ever want to meet them. I spent four long years at Alma Station trying to clear them from the upper fless caves.'
Harris raised an eyebrow but made no comment.
'You've seen these things?' Alice said.
'No. There was a whole range of nasty things living in those caves, and they killed almost as many of us as we killed of them, but we didn't see any fless.'
'I don't understand,' Rachel said. 'Why are they called fless caves if there aren't any fless in them?'
Markov's eyes focussed on nothing as he explained. 'That's where the fless used to live. We didn't find them but we're pretty sure they haven't all gone. I don't know how anything could live in a place like that. It was a place of total darkness, caves of unshaped rock. The whole place stank of ammonia, and the air was thick with dangerous fungal spores.'
'Spores?' Harris said.
'The cave walls were covered in some kind of fungus. It released tiny spores into the air in great clouds. There was so much of the stuff that you couldn't help but breath it in, even if you used masks. If it got into your lungs, that was the end of you. A third of our losses at Alma Station were due to diseases caused by the spore.'
'Remind me never to go to Alma Station,' Harris said.
Markov nodded. 'You don't want to go there. There's a lot worse that I haven't told you about. If you ever find yourself in the misfortune to be near a fless cave, don't go inside under any circumstances. Stay the hell out of it.'
'I'll remember that,' Rachel said. 'It sounds like good advice.'
'So, what happened to the fless?' Harris said. 'You said the caves were empty.'
Markov frowned. 'I didn't say the caves were empty. I said we didn't find any fless. Just because we didn't see them doesn't mean they didn't see us. We only searched the upper caves to make sure that they were clear. We never went down to the deeper levels. There's no end of passages down there. It's too dangerous. The stusskats would never leave us alone.'
'What are stusskats?' Alice said.
'Horrible things. They live in the caves as well. They fly in the dark and they're very difficult to see. They have some intelligence about them, but they only use it to hunt as far as I can tell. They attacked us on a daily basis. Once one of those things gets hold of your neck, you're finished. That's why we started wearing metal collars.'
Rachel didn't want to think about such creatures. Her mind was already full of enough horrors. 'The caves are deep, aren't they?' she said.
Markov nodded. 'Deeper than you can imagine. We were there for four years. In that time, we were barely able to search half a kilometre below ground. There were so many caves, and there were so many connections between them. It was impossible to do a thorough and conclusive search. At their deepest, the caves descend several kilometres underground.'
Rachel rubbed her hands together, squeezing them between her knees. She didn't want to think about the things that lived in the dark so deep underground. She didn't want to think about the fless at all. She had never seen them, but she had an awful feeling that if she tried too hard to remember, she might find memories that weren't her own.
'A nanopatch,' Parker said, as though he wasn't aware of the conversation going on around him, 'is a term that was used several centuries ago. It relates to weapons used before and during the Iridium Wars.'
Rachel saw an image in her mind, a herd of Lion droids, charging across a plane in full armour. The ground turned to liquid beneath their feet, and the droids thrashed and struggled against the strange lake that had sprung up around them. They couldn't escape its pull. One by one they all disappeared into the rippling black stench beneath them. Rachel felt suddenly cold inside.
'Rachel?'
Rachel looked up. Everyone was starring at her with concern. 'What?' she said.
'I was asking what you know about nanopatches.'
She didn't know what to say. What could she tell them? She had seen a herd of Lion droids, war machines that hadn't walked the land for over seven hundred years, and she had seen them sinking into a nanopatch the size of a lake, in a place she didn't even recognise, from a time before any of them were born.
'I don't know anything,' she said in a quiet voice.
Markov looked as though he was losing his patience. 'If there's something you're not telling us, you'd better spit it out. It's not just your life in danger here. If this thing happens again, it could be any one of us disappearing into the floor. I for one prefer to be on top of the floor rather than inside it. I've spent enough time underground already.'
'I need time,' Rachel said. 'I need time to think about what happened.'
Markov didn't look impressed.