Hilldiggers

Rhodane looked at me, "What?"

"Nothing. 'Tigger' is just an expletive in my language." The pendant moved against my chest. I casually took hold of it, and looped the chain off over my head. As soon as Rhodane returned her attention to Shleera, I opened my fist and glanced down to see that the miniature tiger now held one paw over its eyes and seemed to be wincing.

"You were saying Fleet would destroy an entire city in retaliation?" I asked.

"They'll call it a military excision," Rhodane replied. "And it will all look very neat in the media, because all anyone will ever see is a hole in the ground."

"Or not even that," Shleera added, "if they use a gravtech weapon."

"So you're saying that Fleet may very soon be launching an orbital strike against the Brumallian city called Vertical Vie

The pendant squirmed in my fist. Rhodane gazed at me with a blank expression, but Shleera's look gave me the distinct impression she thought me rather thick.

"Yes, that's very likely," said Rhodane, before Shleera could comment.

I raised my fist, rubbing one eyebrow with my forefinger, opened my hand as I lowered it, then quickly closed it again. The tiger lay on its back in my palm, paws in the air and eyes crossed. In my own tongue—the language spoken on Spatterjay for a mille

"What was that?" asked Rhodane.

"I believe in a supreme being," I replied, "and I just prayed for intercession."

Tigger—in the Past

With his two halves joined together Tigger gazed down at the river, tracking further along its course to where it poured into the fifty-yard-wide mouth of the underground pipe. Seismic mapping had shown only two breaks in the pipe, where water seeped into the surrounding limestone and sought out its previous natural routes from the time before the Brumallians had diverted it to New Pavonis—a city named after one on Mars that lay in the shadow of Pavonis Mons. New Pavonis had been one of Brumal's largest underground cities, its population topping five million.

"Okay, graverobber," said Tigger to himself, "let's take a look."

Still remaining combined, because for this task he felt he would require all of himself, Tigger descended alongside the massive waterfall into misty depths, tracking his progress by radar once the light from above ground began to fail. Two hundred yards down, the pipe began to curve, the waterfall becoming a torrent that gradually filled the entire pipe as it narrowed. He submerged, initiating sonar and switching on his headlights. Here he came upon the first rupture; the pipe being sheared through and displaced to one side by half its width. Some water had flowed into crevices throughout the surrounding rock, gradually widening its escape route, but not enough to make a visible difference to the main torrent. Five hundred yards further on, the pipe began to widen again, to level out, and here the flow hit a series of generator stations and baffles. Emerging from the main flow of water again, he kept his lights on as he cruised along above the surface. Some Brumallians had escaped from here through exit tu

Some 300 yards beyond the last generating station, Tigger entered a wide slice through the rock, where only a few remnants of the pipe remained, the river now spreading out into a wide shallow flow that disappeared off into darkness on either side. Ahead, he eventually came upon a continuation of the pipe again, bone-dry and high up in a rock face. He entered this and cruised along to where the pipe terminated in a canal bed, now roofed with stone where there had been open space. Either side of him there had once been a glittering grotto of underground tower blocks, homes, factories, shops: all the panoply of human civilisation. After the attack it had all been compressed down to a layer about three feet thick in which the humans had become thoroughly melded with their civilisation. He passed a barge lying on the canal bed, disco

Tracking through the canal system the drone eventually reached a point where a crevice opened above him. Closer now to this feature he had often sca

Even at that range the blast wave knocked Tigger back a hundred feet. After a cautious pause he advanced again, ultrasound sca

Even though much of the section of city above—the ceiling of this section—had fallen, still some buildings had remained standing. Giant boulders and tons of rubble jammed the rest of the tubular city above. It was a shame the populace trapped here had not thought to drill downward rather than up, for then they might have escaped via the route Tigger had entered.

The dead were stacked in their tens of thousands along the course of a dried-up canal. At first the survivors had filled the ground in above the corpses, then—perhaps as water, energy and hope ran low—they ceased to cover them. Tigger observed the heavy drill they had been using to cut right through one wall to one of the big vent pipes—to their minds their nearest possibility of escape—and did not have to speculate on how they must have felt upon finding that the pipe itself had simply disappeared, closed up by the massive quakes caused here. He cruised along, studying the temporary accommodations the survivors had made for themselves, the equipment salvaged, the food supplies—soon emptied—the attempts at making water condensers and air scrubbers. And the little huddles of bones representing those who had survived long enough so as not to have anyone else to throw their corpses in the canal.

After a few hours of surveying this mass grave, and recording all of it, he eventually headed over to one particular building, whose upper floors had been crushed by the falling ceiling but whose bottom two levels remained intact. He entered the foyer through a space for wide doors that now lay some distance behind him, having been blown off by the compressive effect of so many levels above being crushed. After sca