Satok landed the shuttle, loaded with barrels of Petraseal, at Savoy. His three assistant “shanachies” were still there, drinking and talking.
“Where’s Luka?” Reilly asked.
“Ran off,” Satok replied. “Don’t worry. I’ll get her back, and when I do, I’ll make her sorry she was ever born. The fraggin’ bitch stole the ore samples and put rocks in their place.”
“So you didn’t get to make a deal with the company?”
“Course I did! Guy named Fiske saw them first before Luka switched ‘em, but he wants to have genuine samples to show off.”
“It was hard enough getting together what we did without you letting it get snitched,” Reilly complained. He liked easier work than mining.
“Hold it! All we gotta prove is that there is genuine ore available. We’ll use the one here, and who’s to know if we don’t tell ‘em, huh? Fiske gave me some more Petraseal, so Reilly and I will mine the earlier veins while you two paint us a path back.”
“Shit! I hate doing that,” Soyuk grumbled. “Damn caves give me the creeps.”
“Stop bellyachin’,” Satok told him. “If we make this deal with the company, you’ll have enough money to go off-planet permanently.”
They climbed onto the Petraseal-laden shuttle and flew to the cave mouth, which was inconveniently distant from the village. In Satok’s absence, the location had grown even more inconvenient.
“Where the hell did these weeds come from?” he demanded, astounded by the sea of tangling vines choking the cave mouth and cloaking the cliff and mountain meadow where they usually landed.
Reilly shrugged. “I dunno. They weren’t here a coupla weeks back, but the season’s gone nuts. We can torch ‘em?”
“Not enough time. The fraggin’ cave would fill with smoke and we’d never get at the ore.”
“We could try the site back at my place,” Soyuk suggested.
“No, hell, we’ll hack ‘em back and splash ‘em with Petraseal as we go. We only need to get inside the cave.”
The stalks were amazingly tough and the stinging vines clung to the men with fierce tenacity, but they hacked and splashed until they reached the entrance of the cave.
“Just hack this crap away from the front here, and it’ll all be clear back where the Petraseal is, boys,” Satok directed.
The way was not as clear as he had hoped. They had to make several trips to lug the vats of Petraseal into the cave. Left on his own while the others pumped the Petraseal in, Satok wondered how the weeds had managed to penetrate right through the ceiling of the cave. Had the latest tremors shaken a hole in the roof? Roots and tendrils of vines drooped from the ceiling.
When Soyuk, Clancy, and Reilly returned, he sent the first two on ahead to paint where they could excavate, and told Reilly to start patching farther back in the cave. In order to listen for Fiske’s copter, Satok took the area nearest the entrancehe wanted to make sure the captain didn’t see too much of the operation.
He hacked and daubed and hacked and daubed. The interior of the cave, now insulated by the cover of vines, seemed hotter than it ever had before. The light grew dimmer and greener as he worked, almost as if he were working underwater.
He thought at one point he heard some scuffling, and the others seemed noisier than they had been for a while, hollering and swearing as they worked. Getting stung, no doubt, he thought with a grin, but that noise was soon masked by the steady chop and daub of his own work. The beat of his own heart, the rasp of his own breath, was all he heard.
In this new rhythmic silence, he worked and sweated, the faint drip of his perspiration landing on the cavern floor the only other sound he heard as he strained to listen for the engines of Fiske’s copter.
He didn’t notice when he first heard the slithering sound, a soft rustle followed by a dry whispering crackling noise, as if paper had fallenor leaves.
Then it came to him, just as he felt something slide across the toe of his boot and curl to brush his pant leg, that he had heard nothing from the others for some time. The thought crossed his mind just before the thorns bit into his leg as the vine tendril tightened.