The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton Page B

dose of antibiotics from the armour’s
     emergency pack, and shunting a mild tranquillizer program into primary mode to calm his inflamed thoughts.
    While he waited for the drugs to start working he took a more measured assessment of the passage. The polyp had ruptured in
     several places, water and a syrupy fluid had spouted in, freezing over the walls in long streaks, turning the passage into
     a winterland grotto. They were boiling now, crusty surface temporarily turned back to a liquid by the retreating steam, frothing
     like bad beer. When he shone the suit’s lights into the rents he could see tubes running parallel to the passage; water ducts,
     nutrient arteries, sewage ducts—whatever, they were the habitat’s utilities. Edenist habitats were riddled with similar channels.
    He summoned up the inertial guidance display, and integrated the passage into the data construct of the shell section. If
     the curve was reasonably constant, one end would emerge from the section’s edge after thirty metres. He started to move up
     the other way, watching the conduits. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
    The passage branched, then branched again. One junction had five passages. Ice clogged a lot of the walls, bulging outward
     in smooth mounds. In several places it was virtually impassable. Once he had to use the thermal inducer again. The conduits
     were often buried under frosted waves. The destruction had been as great down here as it had everywhere else in the habitat.
     That should have warned him.
    The hemispherical chamber might have held the central storage system for the offices above; there was no way of telling now.
     The conduits which had led him loyally this far all snaked in through an open archway, then split at the apex three metres
     over his head, running down the curving walls like silver ribs. There had been a great deal of electronic equipment in here
     at one time: slate-grey columns, a metre or so high, with radiator fins running down the outside, the equivalent of human
     processor-module stacks. Some of them were visible, badly vacuum eroded now, their fragile complex innards mashed beyond salvation,
     battered ends sticking out of the rubble. Nearly half of the ceiling had collapsed, and the resulting pile of polyp slivers
     had agglutinated in an alarmingly concave wall, as though the avalanche had halted half-way through. If gravity was ever reapplied
     here, the whole lot would come crashing down. Whatever force had rampaged through the chamber when the habitat broke apart
     had left total devastation in its wake.
    Maybe it was deliberate, he mused, because it’s certainly very thorough. Maybe they didn’t want any records to survive?
    The manoeuvring pack rotated him, allowing him to perform a complete survey. Over by the archway, a tongue of that viscous
     brownish fluid had crept in, stealing along the wall until the temperature drop congealed it into a translucent solid. A regular
     outline was just visible below the gritty surface.
    He sailed over, trying to ignore the debilitating effect his maimed feet were having on the rest of his body. He had developed
     a splitting headache despite the tranquillizer program, and he’d caught his limbs trembling several times as he drifted along
     the passage. The neural nanonics had reported his core temperature dropping one degree. He suspected a form of mild shock
     was tightening its malicious grip. When he got back to the spaceplane he was going to have to use the medical nanonic packages
     to stabilize himself straight away. That brought a grin. When! He’d almost forgotten about Sam and Octal.
    He was right about the frozen liquid, though. Up close, with the suit lights on full, he could make out the definite shape
     of one of the grey electronics pillars. It was in there waiting for him; waiting patiently for over two and a half thousand
     years, since the time Jesus was nailed to the cross on a primitive, ignorant Earth, immaculately