One slab sagged, then the whole construct collapsed on itself. Barnes thrust his shovel in high, then lowered it and dragged out several feet of rock and dirt with the back edge.
Hogg looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow in approval. They’d both dug enough holes to appreciate how much strength Barnes’s action had required. Dasi leaned forward and cleaned much of the remainder.
“Unit, I’m through,” Sentino called over the intercom. “Holy God, it’s a real cavern in here! It opens up just a couple yards in and it’s huge!”
“I’m next,” Sun said, stripping off his belt and flexing his shoulders. He grinned apologetically at Daniel. “Get some command authority in there.”
Anger and a direct need for him had brought the gunner’s mate back from a funk that seemed even more unreal now that it was past. Sun simply wasn’t a man you could imagine that happening to.
“Right,” said Daniel. “Take a shovel with you. I don’t know how far I trust this tunnel now that we’ve widened it—”
He moved aside. Barnes and Dasi stepped back together with their shovel heads locked, making a final sweep of the debris.
“—and I want us to be able to grub it out from both sides if there’s a cave-in.”
Sun put his knife in his teeth and took the shovel from Barnes. He thrust it ahead of him as he followed Sentino.
“Barnes,” Daniel said, nodding to the man. Anything Barnes’s shoulders cleared would probably pass Hogg’s belly, so it was a good test. “Miquelon, Jeshonyk, Dasi, Hogg, and me. Hogg, you take your impeller.”
Nobody protested at the order of entry, not that a protest was going to change anything. There was a risk to splitting his small force, but Daniel was unwilling to let one or two of his personnel scout a burrow system that held scores or possibly hundreds of the creatures who’d dug it. A team of eight with an impeller could support itself.
“Vesey, you and your section will watch our gear and the entrance from outside,” Daniel continued. Barnes had grunted his way into the tunnel and Miquelon was ready to follow; she held her equipment belt ahead of her rather than dropping it on the ground as the others had. “You’ll have a shovel and the other impeller. Don’t get frozen on the hole. There have to be other entrances, and we don’t need whoever’s inside—”
He’d meant to say “whatever,” not “whoever.”
“—to swarm around us from behind, all right? Over.”
Vesey and Matahurd stood in sight at the corner of a bush whose tasseled crown fluttered occasionally like a stand of ultramarine flags. The midshipman trotted forward to take the weapon and shovel, speaking briskly. Daniel couldn’t hear the words, so she was addressing the members of her section alone over the intercom.
Daniel nodded mentally, though his head didn’t really move. She had the makings of a good officer.
“I don’t expect you’ll have any trouble,” Daniel said as he gave Vesey the impeller. “But if I were sure of that, I wouldn’t leave a guard to begin with.”
Hogg, wheezing like a rooting sow, thrust himself into the burrow. Daniel waited a comfortable five seconds and followed. It was tight, but never so constricting that he wondered if he was going to be caught. At the far end of a tunnel no longer than the six feet Sentino had estimated was—
Well, was a paradise of pastel light and plants which swooped toward the twenty-foot ceiling like constructions of cast plastic. The spacers wandered among them in amazement. The air was noticeably more humid than that in the ravine outside.
“Don’t get out of sight of one another!” Daniel said. Besides humidity, the air was perfumed. Gnatlike insects drifted through the mist of light, and—
“Where’s the light coming from?” Daniel called, lifting his visor out of the way. He didn’t need its enhancement nor protection from windblown grit. “Hogg, can you tell?”
“Sir, I think it’s just blocks of quartz built into the ceiling for light guides,” Jeshonyk said, pointing his arm as Daniel joined him under one of the bright patches. It was a good eight feet in diameter, made of quartz wedged into place with other bits of stone. The contruction was similar to that of the entranceway lining.