Page 3 of River Dragon’s Song

She eased herself into the crack sideways, pushing the spare lamp ahead of her, and the rock scraped across the front of her coveralls. For a moment the passage pressed in on both sides and she couldn’t see anything but black stone a few centimeters from her faceplate. Then her shoulders slipped free and she was through, standing on a steep, uneven slope with the warm air pouring up around her.

The sound of water was louder here. She aimed her lamp down the slope and caught a glint of reflected light far, far below, a flicker that shifted and danced in a way no rock ever did.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, would you look at that.”

She started down cautiously, one step at a time, feeding out the line behind her. The floor of the passage was layered with loose grit that shifted under her boots, and she moved slowly, testing every foothold before she trusted her weight to it. The low gravity helped. On Earth she would already have been sliding. Here each step settled lightly, and she could catch herself on the wall with one hand whenever the grit started to slip.

The slope ended in a narrow ledge that ran along one side of a much larger space. She stopped at the edge and swept her lamp across the dark.

It was a cavern, far bigger than anything on the survey maps. Her light didn’t reach the far side. It didn’t reach the ceiling either, and that made her stomach tighten. Somewhere below the ledge, the sound of water was a steady rush now, echoing off stone she couldn’t see. The warm air rose past her in a gentle current, and the green scent was stronger. And along the wall beside her, where her lamp touched the rock, there was a faint, patchy glow.

She leaned closer. It was lichen, or something like it. A soft blue shimmer clinging to the damp stone, fading as her lamp swung over it and returning when the light moved on.

That was also impossible. Everybody knew Mars had never supported life. It was the first thing they taught in orientation, right after how to fit a breathing mask. The only lichen on the planet had been bred on Earth and painted onto the rocks by settlers. It didn’t grow forty meters underground in the dark, and it certainly didn’t glow.

Except it did, and she was looking at it.

She reached for the sample kit on her belt with hands that weren’t quite steady. She needed pictures. She needed readings. She needed Tanjiri, and she almost laughed at herself for thinking it, because Tanjiri was going to be absolutely unbearable when she heard about this.

“Ethan,” she said. “Ethan, you need to come back. You need to see this.”

Static hissed in her ear, and then a single broken word came through. “…Frankie?”

“I’m at the bottom of the side passage by marker fifteen. There’s a cavern. There’s water, Ethan, running water, and there’s something growing on the walls. Can you hear me?”

Nothing came back. She switched her lamp to its widest beam and lifted it high to take a picture of the cavern. That was when she noticed the lip of the ledge.

The stone at the edge wasn’t the same dark basalt as the rest of the passage. It was paler and softer, riddled with the same tiny holes she had seen around the failing anchors. In the moving light she could just make out a thin dark line running along the rock behind her boots. It was a crack.

Every instinct she had trained into herself for eight years went cold at once. She knew what that line meant. She had seen it in the foundations of habitat domes and the walls of mine shafts, and she had written it up in more reports than she could count. The moisture had been eating away at this ledge from below, softening the stone, hollowing it out until nothing was holding it up but habit.

And she was standing on it.

Very slowly, very carefully, she took one step backwards.

The crack widened with a soft, dry sound, like a gentle sigh. A fine stream of grit trickled away from under her heel and vanished into the dark.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. Nobody panics.”

She reached behind her for the safety line, and her fingers had just closed around it when the ledge gave way beneath her.

There was no time to think. One moment she was standing on stone, and the next there was nothing under her boots. The lamp flew out of her hand and tumbled away, a spinning point of light falling into the black. She heard herself cry out. The line snapped taut against her harness and jerked her sideways into the wall, hard enough to knock the air out of her lungs. For one wild, hopeful second she hung there, swinging helplessly against the damp stone.

Then, far above her, she heard the sharp crack of the anchor tearing free from the rotten rock. The rot had gone deeper than her hammer could find.

Frankie fell.

She fell slowly, the way everything fell on Mars, and that was almost the worst part. She had time to see the glow of the lichen streaking past her. She had time to hear the roar of the water rising up to meet her. She had time to think, very clearly, that Ethan was going to be furious with her for being right.

And then the darkness swallowed her.

CHAPTER TWO

The river was restless tonight. Korrak felt it before he heard it, a faint unevenness in the current that slid across his scales as he moved through the dark water. He was halfway along the great channel below the falls, drifting with the flow and letting his tail do the work. The water was usually smooth and steady there, but tonight there was a small hesitation in it, like a breath caught and released, and it made the fine scales along his spine prickle.

He surfaced beside the first of the old spillways and hung there in the water, listening.

The cavern was full of sound, if a male knew how to hear it. There was the deep, patient roar of the falls behind him and the softer rush of the channel as it narrowed between the stone banks. Somewhere to his left, water dripped from the ceiling into a shallow pool, each drop ringing a slightly different note. The glowing moss on the walls made no sound. But he could hear the faint crackle of the pale vines where they clung to the rock, quietly drinking the damp from the air. All of it was familiar. All of it was as it should be. And yet the river was restless.