Hunters Run Page 0,15

the boulders he'd chosen for shelter stringing the powder-primed fuse cord, hunkered down behind the rocks, and lit the fuse with the last ember.

There was the expected blast; but while the sound should have been a single report echoing against the mountains and then fading, it grew louder and longer instead. The hillside shifted greasily under him, like a giant shrugging in uneasy sleep, and he heard the expresstrain rumble of sliding rock. He could tell from the sound alone that something had gone very wrong.

A great cloud of dust enveloped him, white as fog and tasting like plaster and stone. A landslide. Somehow Ramon's little coring charge had set off a landslide. Coughing, he cursed himself, thinking back to what he'd seen. How could he have missed a rock face that unstable? It was the kind of mistake that killed prospectors. If he had chosen shelter a little nearer than he had, he could have been crushed to death. Or worse, crippled and buried here where no man would ever find him - trapped until the redjackets came and stripped the flesh off his bones.

The angry, thundering roar quieted, faded. Ramon rose from behind the boulders, waving his hand before his face as if stirring the air would somehow put more oxygen in it or lessen the thick coating of stone dust that was no doubt forming in his nose and lungs. He walked slowly forward, his footing uncertain on the newly made scree. The stones smelled curiously hot.

A metal wall stood where the fa?ade of stone had fallen away; half a mountain high and something between twenty and twentyfive meters wide.

It was, of course, impossible. It had to be some bizarre natural formation. He stepped forward, and his own reflection - pale as the ghost of a ghost - moved toward him. When he reached out, his blurred twin reached out as well, pausing when he paused. He stopped the motion before hand and ghostly hand could touch, noticing the stunned and bewildered expression on the face of his reflection in the metal, one no doubt matched by the expression on his own face. Then, gingerly, he touched the wall.

The metal was cool against his fingertips. The blast had not even scarred it. And though his mind rebelled at the thought, it was clearly unnatural. It was a made thing. Made by somebody and hidden by somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn't imagine by whom.

It took another moment for the full implication to register. Something was buried here under the hill, something big, perhaps a building of some sort, a bunker. Perhaps the whole mountain was hollow.

This was the big one, just the way he'd told Manuel it would be. But the find wasn't ore; it was this massive artifact. It couldn't be a human artifact, the human colony here wasn't old enough to have left ruins behind. It had to be alien. Maybe it was millions of years old. Scientists and archaeologists would go insane over this find; perhaps even the Enye would be interested in it. If he couldn't parlay this discovery into an immense fortune, he wasn't anywhere near as smart as he thought he was... .

He flattened his palm against the metal, matching hands with his reflection. The cool metal vibrated under his hand, and, even as he waited, a deeper vibration went through the wall - boom, boom - low and rhythmic, like the beating of some great hidden heart, like the heart of the mountain itself, vast and stony and old.

A warning bell began to sound in the back of Ramon's mind, and he looked uneasily around him. Another man might not have reacted to this strange discovery with suspicion, but Ramon's people had been persecuted for hundreds of years, and he himself well remembered living on the grudging sufferance of the mejicanos, never knowing when they would find some pretext to wipe out his village.

Whatever this wall was, whatever reason it had for existing here in the twice-forsaken ass-end of a half-known planet, it was no dead ruin - something was at work beneath this mountain. If this was hidden, it was because someone didn't want it to be found. And might not be happy that it had been. Someone unimaginably powerful, to judge from the scale of this artifact - and probably dangerous.

Suddenly, the sunlight seemed cold on his shoulders. Again, he looked nervously around him, feeling much too exposed on the bare mountain slope.