Nick was grateful for Petra's ability to multitask so heavily. She was monitoring Kathy's health, learning Kthufu from the fuakalas, answering his questions, printing out a lot of equipment, and navigating carefully downhill. I'd have been dead a hundred times over without Petra. Alien girl on Market Street, you saved my ass, he thought, not for the first time.
He kept an eye on the materials scan. There were occasional small blips of concentrated element 23, but they were pretty deep underground, less than one unit each, and he didn't want to spend a major effort digging up just one. He tried to think up a strategy.
He told Petra not to go too much farther south, because that would add to the return travel time. Instead, they moved parallel to the former coastline. The shadows lengthened as the Death Star approached sunset.
It was hard to see what was outside; there were various shapes and blobs of color, but Nick had trouble figuring out what he was looking at. Finally, he brought Rockhunter to a halt at the edge of a cliff shadow. He wanted a direct look while there was still plenty of light to see by.
He cracked open the hatch, and the stench hit him like a physical punch. One hand to his nose, he coughed. Come on, man, don't be a wuss. It's just a stink. Taking a deep breath of the air inside, Nick opened the hatch wider and looked around.
One mysterious shape resolved itself as a skeleton of some kind of huge fish. Other shapes stayed indistinct. He looked at a mess of color that had resisted bleaching. Maybe that was a blob of seaweed? Hey, maybe it's rich in something. Nick checked the scan, and sure enough, there was a lot of element 53 in the blob. He took a minute to send one of the guys to scoop it up and process it.
His eyebrows went up when he saw how many units came out of one blob. I had to scour the whole valley back near Bare Hill to get that much, and I just got it here in seconds. Despite his hurry, Nick spent several more minutes gathering element 53 before moving on.
Hey, maybe element 23 is concentrated in some dead sea creature, just like element 53 was in whatever this used to be. A random idea flitted through his mind. I wonder if tuna does that with mercury, and that's why it's got so much?
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Loading up again, Nick got Rockhunter back into motion, scanning for element 23. Sometimes, he sent Rockhunter zooming at high speed. Other times, he slowed down for more detailed scans of anything that looked unusual.
He searched for nearly an hour before he got his first real hit—a cluster of spots with a couple of units each of the needed element. He parked Rockhunter in the middle of the cluster, and dropped out one of the guys to start processing. The lumps were a mix of pastel colors, heavy on the pink and purple. The little guy scooped up and absorbed a lump, scoring two units, and then trundled over to the next lump.
It disappeared.
Nick blinked. One moment it had been there, and the next, it was gone. It had fallen out of the network, too. “Petra, what just happened?”
“I don't understand, Nick.”
“Where is Monster...? Uh...” Nick had to spend a minute scrolling through Petra's monster population before finding the missing one. “Where is Monster 27, Petra?”
“I don't know, Nick.”
“Show me the last minute of data from Monster 27.” Petra displayed an incomprehensible mess. Nick squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and tried again. “Petra, did a camera see Monster 27?”
“Yes, Nick.”
“Show me the last ten seconds of video of Monster 27.”
Petra replayed the view from the nose of Rockhunter, as the little bot glided over the ground and settled down next to a purple lump. It inched forward, and vanished. “What the hell, Petra?”
“I don't understand, Nick.”
“Play that video again, but slower.” It took a couple of tries to get that across, but finally Petra got it. Nick watched the little bot glide over, land, move forward and vanish. “Again, slower.”
This time, Nick could see the moment where the little bot abruptly fell through what looked like solid ground at a surprisingly high speed. Did that fall, or was it pulled down somehow? More to the point, where did it go? He zoomed in on the spot with the live camera feed, and there didn't appear to be a hole in the ground. What the hell happened?
Nick replayed the video until it got blurry. Apparently, there was a limit to how well Petra could store video, at least if she wasn't told in advance what to record. In effect, Petra hadn't been paying enough attention and didn't notice whatever happened.
Even Petra's multitasking has limits, I guess.
Nick thought he heard a groaning sound for a moment, then it stopped. “What was that noise?”
“I don't know, Nick.”
Nick switched to an up-to-date material scan, hoping to pick up the little bot as a metal source. What he saw didn't make any sense for a moment. The groaning sound started up again, getting louder. At the same time, Nick realized that the scan was showing a huge air pocket just beneath the surface, directly under the spot where the bot had vanished. The pocket was big enough that it extended under Rockhunter, too.
“Oh, shit! Petra, back us—!”
With a loud crunch, the surface caved in, and Rockhunter plunged into the hole.
