Free Red Sun Bleeding by Stephen Hunt

deep underground. Zeno was waiting for her, standing by a rack similar to the one they had left behind, a selection of gravity chutes.
    Her legs trembled on contact with the hard rock floor. Fear or relief, she wasn’t sure which. Lana counted four chutes on the wall rack. Zeno had wisely attached his to his equipment belt, leaving nothing about his exit to chance. Lana did the same and looked around. A landing chamber the same size as the one above, a single passage leading out.
    ‘Are those chutes spares, do you think? Or do we have company down here?’ asked Lana.
    ‘Nobody else walking or talking that I can hear,’ said Zeno. ‘Let’s hope they’re in case of equipment failure.’
    ‘If the missing driver is down here, it would explain why nobody’s found her in the jungle yet.’
    ‘Hell of a lot effort to water-knife a shaft this deep just to dig a cell,’ said Zeno. ‘Kick her out beyond the base or the mine’s fence and she would be lunch for the local mega-fauna soon enough.’
    Lana grimaced. Her hopes of finding Calder tied up down here had almost vanished too. Pity, it would have been good to have her prejudices against the professor confirmed. ‘If this is a working mine, I’m a carrier commander.’
    They took the single exit, a tunnel little bigger than a corridor on Lana’s ship, bare walls and simple electric lighting. It stretched out for a minute or two’s walk, before terminating in a rough rock wall, bare except for a single instrument panel. Zeno inspected the panel. ‘I think this is a power interface.’
    ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ said Lana. ‘All this way down here, only to lead us to a dead end? The money they’ve spent getting this far? Why plan opening a second bigger shaft down here? This is like the dictionary definition of “money pit”. Is there a concealed entrance?’
    Zeno opened his mouth but said nothing – at least, nothing within Lana’s range of hearing. He was ultrasounding their surroundings. ‘Solid rock all around us for hundreds of feet. No openings or concealed doors.’ He turned his attention back to the panel. ‘So, what does this do?’
    ‘As long as it isn’t drown us in sand or start the walls moving towards us, I’ll be happy.’
    ‘Sure isn’t an intercom to above ground,’ said Zeno. ‘There’s no wireless connection available.’ His little finger broke open and a cable snaked out, interfacing with a port at the bottom of the metal. As soon as the connection was made a screen in its centre started rapidly scrolling with moving numbers, blinking green against black. ‘I think this is a lock.’
    What to? ‘Can you break it?’
    ‘Not as such. But give me a second and I can trick its memory into playing back the last code entered. From the time stamp it would have been a couple of hours ago. You might want to get ready to tear back to the shaft, you know, in case a large granite sphere starts rolling down the corridor.’
    ‘I was joking about drowning in sand.’
    ‘Let’s hope whoever installed this panel feels the same,’ said Zeno. ‘Three, two, one…’
    Lana leap back as the wall started to shimmer. It disappeared, revealing a long horizontal tunnel stretching ahead. This tunnel was different, though. Its walls seemed to be made of a shiny black substance, slightly wet, and the ceiling was glowing green as though the rock had just been nuked. ‘Hey, I thought you said that wall was solid rock, not a hologram?’
    ‘It was solid rock,’ said Zeno. ‘Jeez. Abracadabra… now you see it, now you don’t.
    Lana ran her hand where the wall had been. ‘It had to be a hologram!’
    ‘I don’t think so,’ said Zeno. ‘The operations I sensed within the panel were too complex for that. I think they were activating a smart matter sequence.’
    ‘Programmable matter?’ laughed Lana. ‘That’s science fiction. Doesn’t exist.’
    ‘Not quite,’ said Zeno. ‘There’s one species that’s believed to have made