Lord weeping Jesus, did everyone on this planet have stealth equipment?

Something ripped through the canopy of leaves straight overhead, I had a quick glimpse of a skimmer’s underbelly, its bay doors open; then something big and black and blimp-shaped started to fall, crashing down through the trees.

"You’re kidding," I said in disbelief. A bomb? She had a bomb in the skimmer? And she was dropping it on me. No, not me, she didn’t know I was here; she was bombing the mine entrance, to close it off, seal it up.

Which would still blow me to smithereens.

"Festina!" I shouted. "Incoming bomb! Head down the mine, deep as you can go."

The blimp-shaped cylinder continued to fall — jerkily, slowly, catching on tree limbs, stopping for a moment before its weight broke the branch or it rolled off sideways, then falling a few more meters till it hit the next snag.

How much bouncing could it stand before it blew up?

I tore my gaze from the blundering bomb, and of course the Peacock was rippling in front of me, tail snaking far out of the jungle. "No," I snapped. "Down the mine! I want to go down the mine."

Festina was there. If I went in too, the Peacock and I could save her. If I let the Peacock chute me out of the forest, it might not volunteer to bring me back.

Festina would be trapped in the dark. Like my father.

I could feel reluctance spilling from the Peacock like a physical force; but its tail flicked, swept, and jammed itself through the shrubbery covering the tunnel entrance. Before it changed its mind, I threw myself into its mouth.

Vomited into blackness. I scraped my arm as I landed on the unseen stone floor, but it only did minor damage — this tunnel had a thicker carpet of dirt, fungus and animal crap than the one in Great St. Caspian. The jungle had more wildlife than the tundra… more dung and droppings for me to splash into.

Joy.

Then light flamed viciously far to my right, followed by a distant roar and rumble. That would be the bomb, blowing the bejeezus out of the mine entrance. Collapsing who knows how much dirt and stone to close the tunnel. Probably setting fire to the forest too, giving the siren-lizards something to really howl about.

The ground beneath me shook for ten seconds, trembling as more and more debris fell into the tunnel mouth. Not just dirt but trees toppled by the blast. I could imagine their leaves burning, while birds squawked and lizards shrieked and insects tore away from the flames…

But I couldn’t hear any of it. Not with a massive plug of jungle floor sealing off the mine. I couldn’t even hear the shaking; I could only feel it through the stone under my body.

After a few seconds, the quaking stopped. Then a heavy silence set in, as if I’d gone deaf. No — I could hear my own breathing. But no-one else’s.

"Festina?" I called. She must have had time enough to run for safety. To bolt down the tunnel, out of the blast radius, beyond the cave-in.

Unless she hadn’t heard my warning. Or she tried to run the other way, out into the open rather than be trapped underground.

Out into the explosion.

"Festina-girl!" I called again. "Are you there?"

A torch-wand sprang on in the darkness. "Okay," Festina growled, her uniform smeared with dirt, "when I said the jungle was dangerous, I meant snakes. I meant jaguars. I meant army ants, and piranha, and bushes with sharp spiky thorns. I did not mean goddamned motherfucking high-explosive bombs."

Pause.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Yeah sure." She brushed mud off her shirtsleeve. "I’m an Explorer. I’ve lived through real explosions."

I could have called the Peacock to get us out. If it had managed to thread its way through the Rustico mine cave-in, it could do the same here. But I wasn’t leaving yet. Not till I saw what Maya had found down here… something she wanted to keep secret so badly, she had a bomb ready in case she needed to obliterate it.

World-soul, I thought, are you receiving?

Immediate acknowledgment.

Good. I was worried we were too far underground for link-seed radio transmission. Tell Master Tic that Festina and I are safe. Pass it on to my family too. We can get out of this tunnel anytime, but first we’re going to see what’s down here.

Acknowledgment. And underneath the bland mechanical okey-dokey, a twitch of something else. Something with a squirt of adrenaline. Fear? Or was it excitement?

Festina had been watching me. "So?" she asked.

"So we’re here," I said. "And if we tube out now, it may take a long time for anyone else to dig down here. I think we should see what Maya wanted to hide."

"There might be androids," Festina muttered.

"We’ll tell them we’re allergic, same as last time."

"That trick only works if we see the robots first."

"Come on," I said. "Aren’t you curious what’s down here?"

"Of course I am," she snapped, "and damn it, I shouldn’t be. Explorers are supposed to purge out every grain of curiosity they find lurking in their souls."

"So what? You aren’t an Explorer anymore."

Her eyes squinched down with anger. "Faye… till the day I die, I will always be an Explorer."

"No. That part’s over now. You’re someone else." She started to interrupt, but I plowed on. "No. No. You’ve got to stop telling yourself you’re that old person, because you aren’t anymore. You don’t have to dig that hole deeper; you can just walk away."

She glared at me for another few seconds with those blazing green eyes; then she dropped her gaze to the dirty floor. "I could say the same to you," she murmured.

"You wouldn’t be the first," I told her. "Blessed near everyone in my family rags on me about it. High time I got to rag on someone myself." I reached out, took her by the shoulders, stared her straight in the eye. "Festina Ramos: you aren’t an Explorer anymore. That’s behind you. It’s still part of you, of course it is, but you’ve got other parts now. Here-and-now parts. And telling yourself, I’m still a disposable nothing, is a witless way of behaving, especially when you have important things to do. Live in the real, dear one. Got it?"

The edges of her mouth twitched up. "Does talk like this really work on you?"

"Depends what you mean ‘work.’ " When my fine sweet Lynn took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and gave me a pep talk, calling me "dear one" and what-all, I sometimes got worked up right enough… though not with lofty thoughts about my personal potential. More like longing thoughts, wishing there was some way past all my years of playing the self-sufficient loner.

Same thing here. Eye to eye with Festina, just the two of us in the quiet black of the tunnel. Jungle-warm. Jungle-moist.

She eased herself away from me, holding eye contact a second more before she let her gaze slip shy to the floor.

"Okay," she said, "it probably won’t hurt to look around a bit. If we’re careful. Better than just standing here in the dark."

I looked at her a heartbeat longer, then turned away. Two seconds later, I felt her hand warm on my bare arm. "Faye…"

I turned back, my heart flying. But whatever she’d been going to say, ex-Explorer Lieutenant Admiral Ramos suddenly lost her nerve. Instead she just mumbled, "You carry the torch-wand," and pushed it toward me.

Passing the torch, for God’s sake. Handing me the decision.

What futtering cowards, the pair of us. I knew I should just swoop her up in my arms, then and there. Both of us wailed to see if I’d do it.

"Christ," I finally said, "we have work to do."

I shoved the torch-wand roughly back into her hands.

"Right," she said. Finally letting go of the breath she’d been holding. "Right. We’d better get moving." She gave me a side glance. "Keep ourselves busy." She looked away again. "See what there is to find."