“Naw!” the big miner laughed. “No danger. Just a little space walk is all.”
An hour later, Tash found herself walking on the surface of the asteroid. She was wearing a bulky spacesuit and a clear round fishbowl of a helmet. On her back she carried an oxygen tank and a small computer-the brains of the suit. The computer maintained a constant temperature inside the suit and pumped oxygen into her helmet.
Tash’s heart pounded against her ribs. She craned her neck forward and touched her nose to the plastiform faceplate of her helmet. Only a thin sheet of plastiform protected her from the icy cold vacuum of space. Only a few layers of protective fabric kept her from instant death.
“Look up, Tash,” Zak said. She heard his voice through the comlink speaker in her helmet.
Tash looked up and immediately felt dizzy. The asteroid field was just as frightening as before. In fact, it was scarier. Rocks the size of mountains hurtled over their heads. She felt just like one of the space rocks herself-spinning around, hurtling alone through the dark vacuum.
“There’s no ‘up’ in space, laser brain,” she told Zak irritably. “And there’s no down, either. That’s because there isn’t any gravity.”
Tash stamped her feet slowly. Her thick boots kicked up a cloud of dust that hung over the ground. The boots were specially designed for use on asteroids with zero gravity. The usual gravity boots-the kind used in spaceships-were equipped with magnetic soles so that they would stick to the metal of the ship. But since the ground on an asteroid was nonmagnetic, the miners used boots equipped with mini-tractor beams instead of magnets. The tractor beams pulled her feet toward the ground. On the planet Ithor, she would hardly be able to lift these boots. But in the weightlessness of space, they all had to wear special gravboots to keep from floating right off the asteroid.
They were marching along the asteroid’s surface, with Hodge in the lead. Fandomar followed Hodge in a spacesuit specially designed to fit Ithorians’ bodies. Then came Zak and Tash. Hoole brought up the rear.
Hodge led them to the edge of a giant pit. Unlike the rough surface of the asteroid, the sides of the pit were very smooth, as if something had been sliding in and out of it for years.
“A slug hole,” Tash guessed.
“Right,” Hodge’s voice crackled over the comlink. “But the slug’s long gone.”
“How do we get down there?” Zak asked, peering down into the rocky tunnel.
“Like this,” the miner said.
He jumped into the hole.
Without gravity, he might have hung in empty space forever. But his gray-boots pulled him downward, and slowly he began to descend into the slug tunnel. Fandomar followed a moment later.
Zak and Tash looked at Hoole, who gave the slightest nod.
They all jumped.
Tash fell in super slow motion. She had plenty of time for her eyes to adjust to the dark tunnel, and she watched the bottom slowly rise up to meet her. The tunnel wasn’t very deep. It dropped straight down for a few dozen meters, then curved sharply to one side and leveled off. She landed at the curve with an easy bounce.
Hodge had lit a bright glowrod and motioned for them to follow him.
The cavern was huge. The slug that had filled the hole must have been a hundred meters thick.
Tash slid her hand along the wall as they continued their hike. It was as smooth as glass. She could hardly believe that any creature lived in deep space. It was amazing that the slugs didn’t need air to breathe or sunlight for warmth.
Deep in thought, Tash didn’t notice that the walls were closing in. The tunnel was tapering off. She didn’t notice that the others had stopped moving until she bumped into something hard and gray standing in front of her. She looked up…
… into the face of an lthorian, standing there without a spacesuit, its two mouths twisted into a look of absolute terror.
CHAPTER 4
Tash let out a warning shout right into her comlink microphone. Everyone around her jumped as the sound of her voice blasted into their helmets.
Zak put his gloved hands on the sides of his helmet as if he were trying to plug his ears. “Tash! Turn down the volume. It’s only a-“
A statue. She could see that now. It was a statue of an Ithorian. It was holding both hands up in a warning gesture. In the light of Hodge’s glowrod, the statue’s face looked both angry and frightened.
“Curious,” Hoole muttered. He was talking to himself, but they could all hear him as clearly as they’d heard Tash shout. The Shi’ido stepped past the statue. The tunnel ended just a few meters beyond. Set in the very end of the tunnel was a thick durasteel door.
Hodge pointed up to a hole in the tunnel ceiling. A shaft had been dug down from the surface of the asteroid. The chief miner explained, “We were digging down from the surface, looking for minerals. Our laser drill broke through into this empty space. We knew it had to be a worm tunnel, so we found the tunnel opening and used it to get down here. We found this.”