Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds Page A

trail” which helped other worms navigate through the tunnel system. The chemistry of that scent trail turned out to be very complex, with each worm capable of secreting not merely a unique signature but a variety of flavours. Conceivably, more complex message schemes were embedded in some of the other flavours: not just “follow me” but “follow me only if you are female”—the Diadem worms had at least three sexes— “and this is breeding season.” There were many other possibilities, which Setterholm seemed to have been attempting to decode and catalogue when the end had come.
    It was interesting . . . up to a point. But even if the worms followed a complex set of rules dependent on the scent trails they were picking up, and perhaps other environmental cues, it would still only be rigidly mechanistic behaviour.
    “Nevil, come here.”
    It was Galiana’s voice, but it had a tone he had barely heard before. It was one that made him run to where Felka and Galiana were waiting on the other side of the lab.
    They were facing an array of lockers occupying an entire wall. A small status panel was set into each locker, but only one locker—placed at chest height—showed any activity. Clavain looked back towards the door through which they had entered, but from there it was hidden by intervening lab equipment. They would not have seen this locker even if it had been illuminated before Galiana brought the room’s power back on.
    “It might have been on all along,” he said.
    “I know,” Galiana agreed.
    She reached a hand up to the panel, tapping the control keys with unnerving fluency. Machines to Galiana were like musical instruments to a prodigy. She could pick one up cold and play it like an old friend.
    The array of status lights changed configuration abruptly, then there was a bustle of activity somewhere behind the locker’s metal face—latches and servomotors clicking after decades of stasis.
    “Stand back,” Galiana said.
    A rime of frost shattered into a billion sugary pieces. The locker began to slide out of the wall, the unhurried motion giving them adequate time to digest what lay inside. Clavain felt Felka grip his hand, and then noticed that her other hand was curled tightly around Galiana’s wrist. For the first time, he began to wonder if it had really been such a good idea to allow the girl to join them.
    The locker was two metres in length and half that in width and height; just sufficient to contain a human body. It had probably been designed to hold animal specimens culled from Diadem’s oceans, but it was equally capable of functioning as a mortuary tray. That the man inside the locker was dead was beyond question, but there was no sign of injury. His composure—flat on his back, his blue-grey face serenely blank, his eyes closed and his hands clasped neatly just below his ribcage—suggested to Clavain a saint lying in grace. His beard was neatly pointed and his hair long, frozen into a solid sculptural mass. He was still wearing several heavy layers of thermal clothing.
    Clavain knelt closer and read the name-tag above the man’s heart.
    “Andrew Iverson. Ring a bell?”
    A moment passed while Galiana established a link to the rest of the Conjoiners, ferreting the name out of some database. “Yes. One of the missing. Seems he was a climatologist with an interest in terraforming techniques.”
    Clavain nodded shrewdly. “That figures, with all the microorganisms I’ve seen in this place. Well: the trillion dollar question—how do you think he got in there?”
    “I think he climbed in,” Galiana said, and nodded at something Clavain had missed, almost tucked away beneath the man’s shoulder. Clavain reached into the gap, his fingers brushing against the rock-hard fabric of Iverson’s outfit. A cannula vanished into the man’s forearm, where he had cut away a square of fabric. The cannula’s black feed-line reached back into the cabinet, vanishing into a socket at the