16,000 feet below the surface
8:28 a.m.
Connell rolled to his back, clutched his knee. Such pain. Something wrong in there.
Chest heaving, lungs burning, every muscle giving up the fight.
No screeches.
A new sound, unmistakable — the sound of a waterfall.
His eyes opened: pain forgotten, a rush of horror — flashing rocktopi filled the hall, just five feet away.
Oh God gonna die I hope there’s a heaven I might see Cori should have lived a better life so I could have gone to heaven and be with her …
“Get up, slowly.” Sanji’s voice. Quiet, calm, the kind of voice you use if someone trips and lands near a poisonous snake.
Connell stared. The rocktopi … they had stopped at the end of the hall, a mass of forming and shrinking tentacles, platinum knives, pulsing purples and coursing blacks.
Hands, helping him stand. Veronica.
Connell didn’t understand. “They’re not attacking. Why?”
“Not sure,” she said. “Maybe coming in here is taboo for their religion.”
Randy and Sanji, struggling to rouse O’Doyle. Angus, helping Lybrand to her feet. Everyone slowly backing away from the rocktopi.
It didn’t make any sense. He should be dead. They should all be dead.
“Religion? What are you talking about?”
Angus answered. “Holy ground. And these motherfuckers build one hell of a church.”
He tilted his head behind him.
Connell stopped, looked — and felt the bottom drop out of his world.
Gigantic. So big he couldn’t process it, half-buried in the cavern floor.
The Dense Mass.
He’d seen the map. He’d known the dimensions of this cavern: four miles long, a half mile wide. He’d known those dimensions, been prepared for them. Nothing, however, could prepare him for the vastness that spread before his eyes.
Monstrous.
Colossal.
Really, really fucking big.
Up above, in the ceiling, a string of artificial suns like the one in the kidney-shaped cavern. They cast a bluish tint down onto the metallic behemoth below.
A fountain pen with the cap on.
A cartridge with bullets on both ends.
The mystery of the caves, the creatures, the silverbugs, everything. The rocktopi’s “Garden of Eden” wasn’t a myth, wasn’t the creation of some primitive religion.
As unbelievable as it was, the evidence towered in front of him, real and undeniable and massive beyond comprehension. Blue-white light gleamed off an all-too-familiar color.
The rocktopi were aliens after all.
Their Garden of Eden?
The ship that had brought them to Earth thousands of years ago.
A ship made of solid platinum.
8:30 a.m.
Still holding Connell, helping him stay on his feet, Veronica Reeves stared at the ship. So did everyone else.
Everyone except Lybrand.
“We need to move,” the woman said. “Those creatures might change their mind and come in after us.”
Veronica glanced to the hallway entrance she’d just left. Such a crazy, panicked run to get here, she hadn’t looked at anything — and now she couldn’t help but look.
The rocktopi packed into the round hallway entrance. They shimmered with colors they hadn’t displayed before. Blues, greens, coursing grays and blacks.
The cavern walls around that entrance: dense with carvings, intricate shapes, curved columns, stonework of the highest caliber spreading left and right as far as the eye could see, and up as well, rising with the wall until it curved far overhead.
Spectacular, but broken. Cracked in a thousand places. Chips and chunks had fallen away, some as big as cars or buses, to crash and crumble on the floor beneath.
And the floor itself. Big, sprawling tiles of bright, colorful patterns. Enamel, maybe, or some other material. She didn’t know. Miles and miles of what must have once been flat and perfect, but like the walls, thousands of cracks ran through them, making the floor uneven like a sprawling concrete parking lot after a severe earthquake. Craters, some small, some the size of swimming pools, filled with and surrounded by jagged boulders, smaller rocks and gravel — ejecta from parts of the ceiling dropping down from over a thousand feet above.
Breathtaking. The scale, the scope the grandeur. An ancient ruin that dwarfed Angkor and Tikal, Teotihuacán and Pompeii, Vijayanagar and Persepolis.
“Hey, dumb-asses!” Lybrand again, yelling this time. “In case everyone forgot, the extra-fucking-terrestrials that want to butcher us are standing right over there.”
Veronica came back to the moment, saw that the others had also been staring at the impossible scene: the ruined ship, the walls, the endless floor.
Extraterrestrials. Yes, no question about it anymore — creatures from another planet. A partial answer to the larger puzzle, an answer that created far more questions.
“Lybrand is right,” Sanji said. “We need to move.”
Everyone looked to Connell. He was sitting on a knee-high rock, head hung, legs spread out, the very picture of exhaustion. Spots of orange on his shoulder — red blood from torn stitches soaking through the KoolSuit’s yellow microtubule material.
He realized everyone was staring at him, waiting. He shrugged.
“I’m not up to this anymore,” he said. “I hurt. So bad. Randy, can you take over for a bit? Lead us west, to that river?”
Veronica was surprised by that. Surprised and annoyed.
“What am I, chopped liver?” she said. “Why him? He leads because he’s a man?”
Connell shook his head. “No, because Sanji has to help carry O’Doyle. And you …”
His voice trailed off.
“And me what?”
“Because you’re a selfish bitch,” Lybrand said. “You could have helped us, but you care only about yourself.” She tilted her head toward Angus. “You’re as bad as him.”
Veronica looked at Angus, expecting him to be just as angry as she was, but he wasn’t paying attention. He stared at the ship. Doe-eyed. Mouth open. Like a little kid staring at the biggest Christmas tree he’d ever seen.
Randy nodded. “Sure, I can lead us. For now.”
There was a strength to the eyes behind those glasses, strength that hadn’t been there before. Lybrand was right — Veronica knew she’d run right by them, so scared she hadn’t even thought of stopping to help. With Connell and O’Doyle hurt, maybe the once-mousy scientist was the best choice after all. From zero to hero. All it took, apparently, was some bloodthirsty aliens.
“Everyone up,” Randy said. “I know we have injuries, but we have to move. It’s fifteen minutes to the river. If we’re out of sight of the rocktopi, we’ll stop there for a bit.”
Sanji and Lybrand again helped O’Doyle. The brief rest had let him catch his breath, somewhat. Connell limped so badly that Randy came back, slid under Connell’s shoulder, helped him along. Angus could have done it, maybe, but he was still oblivious to anything save for the ship’s hull passing by on their right.
As they walked, the waterfall’s roar grew louder. Despite the vastness of this ancient place, no one talked. What was there to say, really? Should they ask questions to which no one had answers?
Veronica gawked at the massive ship, at the cavern wall towering up on their left, at the floor. Once upon a time this must have been a grand place, the equal of anything the world had produced. Now it was a crumbling ruin, as ravaged by time as any of the ancient cities she’d seen in her youth.
A clink under her foot. She stopped, picked up a chunk of gleaming platinum, twisted and warped, almost like metal-colored melted wax.
Angus pointed to the wreck.
“Look at that hole,” he said. “Internal explosion, probably.”
A gaping void in the central shaft. Big, maybe a hundred meters across, but it was hard to gauge the scale. The hull seemed to have sagged in, a sheet of wax dripping from a flame held below it.
“Must have been a serious blast,” Randy said. “Could that have been what made it come down from space?”
Veronica held up what she’d found. “I don’t think so. Whatever it was must have happened after it was already down here. A big enough bang to splash molten metal all the way to where we’re standing.”
She noticed the others looking down, around. There were splashes of the metal all over the place.
Angus laughed. “I’d drop that if I were you. Platinum melts at seventeen hundred degrees Celsius, and this alloy probably a lot higher than that.”
Veronica shrugged. “So?”
“So an explosion that can rain molten platinum across hundreds of meters could have been nuclear. You know, there’s the whole radiation thing. But do what you want.”
She tossed it away, wondering if it had felt warm in her hand.
“Let’s move,” Randy said. “I think I can almost see the waterfall.”
As Veronica walked, the mist thinned, seemed to recede in front of her as if she was walking into a fog.
Finally, she saw the waterfall.
She stopped. So did the others.
Once upon a time, this spot must have been beyond spectacular. From two hundred feet up, water poured down, flowing over the remains of the biggest rocktopi that had ever been.
“Holy shit,” Lybrand said. “Hey, Angus — that one must have liked himself even more than you do.”
Carved from the mountain itself, maybe. At least two hundred feet tall. The rounded body and strange extrusions of that species. Smooth reaches of stone that ended in jagged chunks: tentacles that had long since snapped free to crash down and smash the beautiful floor below. Only two extrusions remained unbroken, reaching out and out and out; like huge, curved construction cranes stretching across the wide streets of some surreal city. Rushing water coursed over the sculpture. Millenia of erosion had carved at the stone, grinding it down. Some colors remained — bright patterns here and there in spots and chunks — but most of the exterior had been worn away by chunks of ceiling, the water, or perhaps just time itself.
The waterfall crashed down into a wide pool filled with fallen rock. One broken tentacle stuck up from the rippling surface at a shallow angle, a few streaks of green and gold still spotted with chips of black.
The river didn’t stop at the pool. It raged out into a winding chasm that cut through the cavern floor. Smoothly curved stone rose up from the edges of the roiling surface, terraced layers showing the ancient river’s previous paths. Here and there she saw chunks of broken, flat rock topped with thick platinum — perhaps it had once been an engineered riverbed, like the concrete spillways of Los Angeles. Whatever design this place once had, it was long gone, the victim of erosion, falling rock and lack of repair.
When had the rocktopi left this place to crumble under its own weight? Was it already empty when Christ was born? Even older than that? When Ahmose united Egypt? When Sargon of Akkad carved out the world’s first empire?
The hungry river wasn’t satisfied with the stone rocktopi and the cavern floor. Oh, no, there seemed to be no end to that monster’s appetite. The river raged into a hull crack that spanned nearly a hundred meters. Over thousands of years, the silt-filled water had acted like a slow and steady buzz saw, each change of the river’s course taking a chunk out of the dead ship. Clanks and plinks constantly filled the air: the sound of current-powered gravel smashing into metal.
At some point, the undercut area had collapsed. The ship’s hull arced high up on either side of the hundred-meter break. At the top, the two reaching sides almost touched, forming a mist-filled, shadowy canyon.
Like a cross section on some architect’s drawing, the river’s erosion exposed the ravaged hull’s interior. Circular hallways with gleaming rings on the ceiling. Circular room after circular room. Wherever she saw undamaged walls, there were no edges — only curves.
Randy pointed to a flat spot at the edge of the waterfall’s pool.
“Put O’Doyle there. We all need a rest.”
Veronica left Connell, ran to the spot, got down on hands and knees. She swept aside gravel, broken bits of colored masonry, a few fist-sized rocks, clearing a space for him to lie down. It didn’t make up for her earlier selfishness, but at least it was something.
Lybrand and Sanji set O’Doyle down, then collapsed on either side of him. Veronica wondered how much longer they could keep carrying the man. Hopefully, a short rest would let O’Doyle support some of his own weight.
Connell limped over to the trio and sat. He pointed to the near side of the waterfall.
“Angus, there’s those alcoves.”
Veronica saw them. Three on either side of the ancient rocktopi statue, set far enough back that the water hadn’t eroded them. Half domes set into the wall. Protected from falling rock as well. Whatever was inside, perhaps it had been protected from the ravages of age.
Randy raised his hands to get everyone’s attention.
“Seems like the river goes all the way through,” he said. “But we don’t know for sure. We don’t want to get caught inside and not be able to get out. So while you rest, I’m going to walk along the shoreline, see what I can see.”
Angus raised his hand. “I’ll go with you.”
Randy looked at him for a second, doubtful. “Really?”
“You know it, buddy,” Angus said. “I won’t let you go alone.”
“Okay,” Randy said, and he smiled. “Cool. Thank you.”
Angus nodded once, the pursed-lip no problem nod of a bro. Maybe he’d changed, too. Probably not. At least someone was going with Randy, because Veronica sure as fuck wasn’t about to do it.
Randy turned to Connell. “I know you wanted to keep two walkie-talkies working, but Angus and I should have one if we go into that ship so the silverbugs can’t make the rocktopi follow us if there are rocktopi inside. And we should leave O’Doyle without one, because he can’t even run. I want Angus to modify Lybrand’s walkie-talkie.”
Connell nodded tiredly.
“As long as we still have one to contact the surface, if we get close but can’t get out, I guess so. Do it.”
Lybrand tossed her walkie-talkie to Angus. He knelt and got to work on it. It took him only a few minutes to crack open the case, make whatever adjustment he made, then put the thing back together again. Angus tossed it back to Lybrand, who set it next to O’Doyle.
Randy looked at his wrist display.
“It’s eight forty-eight in the morning,” he said. “Our wounded need some rest if we’re going to make it. Twenty minutes is all we can spare. Angus and I will be back at eight minutes after nine, sharp. Then, we head out. Angus, let’s go.”
The two men jogged toward the sprawling ship.
Veronica watched them go for a moment, then looked toward the alcoves. She could see inside a little. She focused. A carving, like the others, but this one was round. No, a half sphere.
A planet.
8:50 a.m.
Kayla didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She had never been this still in all her life. Not when men with guns had been coming to kill her. Not when her father had been stumbling down the hall, trying to figure out which daughter’s room he would enter next. She stood in a tunnel branch that was no more than a fissure, so thin she barely fit.
Steyr in hand, she watched the silvery four-legged spider walk past her up the Linus Highway.
Smooth strides of long metal legs, so thin they didn’t look strong enough to support the round body. She knew state-of-the-art technology. She knew what her country was capable of building, knew what other countries were capable of building.
No one could make a machine that moved so smoothly.
When it was ten feet past, she eased out of the fissure just enough to aim. She fired. The bullet slammed into the round body, denting the metal and knocking the spider to the far wall.
It took a staggering, wobbly step. Kayla fired again. This bullet punched a neat little hole in the shell.
The machine stopped walking. The round body dropped to the silt, legs twitching spasmodically.
Kayla fired one more round.
The thing stopped moving.
She carefully lifted it by one thin leg. Heavy, far heavier than it looked.
“You wanted evidence, André?”
It was evidence — but was it enough evidence?
Kayla stashed the dented robot in the fissure. She’d retrieve it on her way out.
She checked the map — only about forty-five minutes to the Dense Mass. No other spiders in sight. None of those squishy killers, either.
Kayla slid a fresh magazine into the Steyr, then continued down the Linus Highway.
8:52 a.m.
Above him, a sprawling arc of platinum that mostly blocked out the artificial suns high above. A few feet below him, a river that had gouged a hole in an alien ship.
Randy Wright stood on a thin ledge of platinum that stuck out over the rushing water. The ledge connected to a narrow, flat, highly polished area that must have once been the river bottom before the unforgiving water cut deeper.
As dangerous as things were, as many obstacles as they had yet to cover, this was so thrilling. People needed help — he was helping them. People needed a leader — he was leading them.
Him. Leading. Dirty Fucking Randy.
“How’s it look?” Angus asked from behind him.
“Pretty good, actually,” Randy said. “Current is swift here, but doesn’t look dangerous. As long as people can stay afloat, they’re fine.”
Back where the raging torrent entered the ship, there were dangerous spots: rapids made from chunks of rock and shards of metal sticking up from the surface. Fifty meters in, however, the river took a bend to the right, out of sight, bleeding away some of that current. And the water leveled out, bleeding off even more.
At some point in the distant past, this part of the ship had collapsed. Torn hull all around, twisted hallways, warped rooms. The material that had fallen to the bottom was long gone, steadily carried away by the river’s constant erosion.
This would work. This would carry them through. They were going to get out alive.
Watching his feet, Randy slowly turned.
Angus was right there, smiling, closer than Randy had thought — almost blocking the ledge.
“You think they can make it,” he said.
Randy wished the man wasn’t standing so close. The ledge was so thin there was no way around him.
“Yeah, I do.”
“That only took us five minutes to figure out,” Angus said. “Come on, let’s check out some of this ship before we head back.” He pointed behind him, to his right. “We can get in through that hallway, looks like.”
A bent tube stuck out slightly, the once round shape contorted into a tight oval angling down. Randy could see through that oval to the area beyond — a round hallway. It looked straight. Angus was right: that would lead into the undamaged areas of the ship. They could spend a few minutes and …
No. As much as Randy wanted to see this place, this wasn’t the time for that.
“We can’t,” he said. “We have to get back. If we go in there and get hurt, we—”
“What are we, seven years old?” Angus laughed, spoke in that tone he’d always used when he wanted to do something risky, when he wanted to make Randy feel like a chicken. “We’re not going to get hurt, for fuck’s sake. We’ll never get a chance like this again. We have to grab it.”
Of course Angus wanted to explore. That’s what he did. The chance to see something no one else had seen. Not just that, the technology that might still exist inside the ship, things that could fuel Angus’s imagination for inventions. He hadn’t wanted to come for friendship or support, he’d wanted to come for himself.
Randy should have known.
He shook his head. “No exploring. There’s the rocktopi, and the silverbugs, and this wreck is thousands of years old. There could be all kinds of dangerous things in there, stuff we haven’t seen yet.”
Angus still hadn’t moved, still blocked the way off the ledge. He seemed so eager, so excited.
“Danger this, danger that, blah-blah-blah,” he said. “This is an alien ship. After we get out of here, this place will be locked up tighter than a nun’s cooter. The security here will make Area 51 look like Grand Central Station. You’ll never get a chance like this ever again. Come on, man, all I’m asking for is ten lousy minutes.”
Randy licked his lips. The river burbled on below him, the sound of the waterfall echoed in from outside.
Angus was right.
But what if this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ended up costing someone else’s life?
“We’re going back,” he said. “We just can’t risk it.”
The smile drained from Angus’s face. The helpful friend was gone: the arrogant ass had returned.
“You used to be a cool guy,” he said, sneering. “You turned into a loser. You want to waste this chance? Fine. Be a loser.”
Angus turned, scooted off the ledge to polished metal that lined the river’s path. He ran for the twisted tube.
“Angus, don’t!”
Randy chased after him, but it was too late. An agile and an experienced caver, Angus easily slid into the tube and was gone. Randy stopped at the tube, shouted in.
“Get your ass back here!”
“Ten minutes,” Angus called back, his voice already fading away. “Come on, man, don’t leave me by myself. What if I get hurt?”
That cutting laugh of his, echoing off metal.
Randy’s gloved hands clenched, unclenched. He couldn’t leave the man. And he couldn’t deny it — every last bit of him wanted to see more, wanted to see the inside of the ship that had brought the rocktopi.
Ten lousy minutes. That was all.
“Hold up,” he called into the tube, then crawled through.
8:57 a.m.
“Get out, Connell.” Something liquid and gurgling masked her smooth voice. She sounded weak, fractured. “You have to get out.”
He shook his head.
“No, I need to stay with you.”
Her broken hands reached up, grabbed his shoulders. He could smell her blood. She shook him, shook him.
“You’ll die here. They’re going to cut you open.”
A glow behind her. He knew what it was, but he couldn’t know, he’d never seen anything like it before.
A tentacle rose up, shimmering with coursing patterns of red and yellow. The end of it wrapped tightly around the center ring of a double-crescent knife …
Connell woke, pushed himself up on one elbow. Heart kicking, he looked around, expecting to see her, Cori, coming for him.
She wasn’t there, of course. She never was.
He groaned as the exhaustion reclaimed his body. The waterfall’s roar. Sanji, sleeping. O’Doyle, also asleep, his head in Lybrand’s lap.
She was looking right at Connell.
“You dream a lot,” she said. “Nightmares.”
He nodded. “I do. You?”
She glanced off. “Yeah. All the damn time. Hate ’em.”
Was there anyone that liked nightmares? Maybe. Crazy how a nightmare about Cori could actually scare him when the waking world provided all-too-real terrors.
Connell looked at his wrist display: just ten minutes since Randy and Angus had left? He’d been asleep for, what, five minutes?
He looked around again.
“Hey, where’s Veronica?”
Lybrand jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
“She went to check out those alcoves.”
A new layer of fatigue. How could someone that smart be so stupid?
“Can you go get her? We need to stay together.”
Lybrand shook her head.
“I don’t give a shit about Blondie. I’m staying with Patrick.”
Connell couldn’t blame Lybrand for that. He pushed himself up, put some weight on the knee. Not as bad as before, but also stiffer. Maybe the trick was to keep moving, as long as “moving” didn’t involve sprinting at top speed or carrying O’Doyle’s weight. Something grinding away in there, though. Not a good thing.
He limped to Sanji, shook the man’s shoulder.
“Wake up. Randy will be back here in ten minutes, and your dumb-ass daughter went off on her own.”
Sanji blinked a few times, then the words hit home and he was on his feet in seconds. When this had started, he seemed like a jovial guy, the very picture of fat and happy. Now his eyes were sunken, the skin below them darker, the wrinkles more pronounced. He seemed like a person who had never known real danger. Now that he’d experienced it, some of the light had gone out of his world.
“I’ll get her,” he said. “Which way?”
“I’ll go with you. Got to keep this knee loose. Lybrand, you okay here?”
She shrugged. “Does it matter if I’m not? Either way, you’re still going after that bitch.”
“Hey,” Sanji said. “That’s my daughter you’re talking about.”
Lybrand glared at him like she wanted to bury a knife in his throat, then that expression softened.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Whatever. Just hurry back. Don’t make us wait to leave.”
Connell and Sanji walked across a floor that once must have been spectacular. Still was, really, even with the damage. The giant stone rocktopi on their right, splashing water sparkling from the blue-white light above.
“Your daughter always this bullheaded?”
“She is,” Sanji said. “But I am worried about her. Not just her physical safety. I think this is getting to her mentally.”
“It’s getting to all of us.”
Sanji shook his head. “Yes, but look at the decision she just made, to go off on her own. She’s not thinking straight. Will you help me keep an eye on her? Please?”
A father, worried for his child. An emotion Connell could empathize with, imagine, but could never really know. Cori’s accident had stolen that bit of his life, just as it had stolen her.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”
They reached the alcove, a semicircle some fifteen feet high, set into the cavern’s carved walls. Inside, a round room with a curved ceiling, the apex some twenty feet high. Like the Picture Cavern, detailed carvings completely covered the walls.
Sanji strode toward Veronica.
“Ronni, what’s wrong with you? You can’t go off on your own!”
She spoke without turning around.
“They were running away.”
Her voice sounded distant, tired … maybe a bit disturbed. It stopped Sanji in his tracks.
“Running away from what?” he asked.
Veronica pointed to a carving just to the right of the alcove’s entrance. Connell came closer.
The carving showed a long, narrow, evil-looking shape, bristling with many sharp protuberances and jagged spines. It made Connell think of paper wasps, with their thin bodies and dangerous demeanor.
Sanji reached out, let his gloved finger play along the shape.
“Looks almost biological,” he said. “Another alien of some kind?”
“I think it’s a spaceship,” Veronica said. “I believe this was their enemy in some ancient war. Follow the sequence of tiles.”
The tile to the left of the wasp ship showed a familiar image: the same tapered cylinder that had been on the hallway tiles, the same shape as the real-life version sitting cracked and broken out in the cavern. Engraved lines had to be weapon fire of some kind, reaching out from the tapered hulls and into a pair of wasp ships, both of which were breaking up into pieces. The next square showed a planet surrounded by wasp ships. In the middle of the planet was a detailed rocktopi. The next square chilled Connell — the planet breaking into pieces from a wasp ship attack.
“Their planet was destroyed,” Veronica said. “Looks like the Garden of Eden out there was part of a navy but had no home to return to.”
Connell wondered what that must have felt like. A planet destroyed, a species suddenly without a home. The rocktopi stranded in their warships, left with nowhere to turn.
“That wasn’t the end of it,” Veronica said. “Look at this one.”
Her gloved fingers traced the curves and lines of another tile. Hundreds of the wasp ships, surrounding three of the rocktopi’s tapered, cylindrical forms.
Connell shook his head, feeling actual pity for the ancestors of creatures that had tried to kill him.
“They were being hunted,” he said.
Veronica nodded. “Looks like they were highly outnumbered. Maybe those three ships were all that remained. No reinforcements. They fled. They came here. Oh, for fuck’s sake … their Year Zero — it’s the year they landed. How could I not have figured that out?”
“That doesn’t matter now,” Sanji said. “Do these carvings show where they came from? Obviously, they can breathe our atmosphere and survive in our gravity, but how did they know Earth would be a suitable habitat?”
Connell looked around for carvings that might answer the question. He found none. Neither did Sanji or Veronica.
“We’ll never know,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t know ahead of time. Maybe they searched until they found a suitable planet. Could have taken centuries. Millennia, even. Hundreds of generations born on ship, living their lives, dying. A self-contained culture.”
Connell knew nothing about physics or space travel, other than what he’d learned from watching movies and TV. Had that ship out in the cavern been able to travel faster than the speed of light? It must have — the nearest star other than the Sun was some insane distance. More than twenty million miles, if he remembered right.
“Ronni, look at this.”
Sanji was off to the right, examining a series of large tiles, each about four feet square. At the bottom of the first tile, the definitive outline of the Wah Wahs. Above that outline, a large, rectangular chunk of the mountain range floated in the air, leaving a gaping hole beneath. A tapered cylinder shape was half in, half out of that hole.
“The rectangle,” Veronica said, her voice cold and flat. “It wasn’t a trench. They lifted the entire fucking mountain and set the ship inside. That rectangle is thirteen thousand years old. That’s how long these bastards have been down here.” She rubbed at her temples. “Thirteen thousand years ago. The Mesolithic Period. People hunted with sticks and stones. Flint spear points were our highest level of technology. There might have been less than a million people on the entire planet, and very few in North America. So why bury themselves? The rocktopi could have easily wiped out humanity and taken over Earth for themselves.”
“Perhaps the surface is too cold for them,” Sanji said. “They seem to thrive in these high temperatures. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a mild winter could kill them.”
That made sense, but Connell knew that wasn’t the reason. His eyes flicked across the sequences. The history of a species spelled out in carved stone. One image after another — the battle, the planet’s destruction, the overwhelming odds — connected in his mind, and the rocktopi story became perfectly clear.
“It’s not about temperature,” he said. “I mean, sure, they like it hot, and cold might kill them, but if they can engineer that huge ship out there they could have made buildings to keep them warm. They didn’t want to conquer, they wanted to survive. They’re down here because they are hiding. Hiding from that wasp-ship enemy that wants to wipe them out. That’s why they’re so deep. That’s why there’s no trace of them on the surface. That’s why they bury all remains of anything they attack — they don’t want any evidence, not even a shred, that they’re here. Because that way, even if the wasp ships find Earth, it’s possible they might not find the rocktopi.”
Sanji rubbed at his face.
“Then why are the ones we’ve fought so primitive? Their ancestors built starships. They must have built the silverbugs, too, designed that cavern with the food that has kept their descendants alive for thousands of years. So, why are their descendants seemingly no smarter than cavemen?”
Connell said nothing. He didn’t have answers.
Sanji checked his wrist display. “Five minutes until Randy returns. Quickly, let’s see if the next alcove has any answers.”
He and his daughter rushed out, went left. Connell wanted to tell them to stop, to go back to Lybrand and O’Doyle, but he wanted answers even more.
Just a few more minutes.
He ran after them.
9:01 a.m.
In here, the artificial sun’s light couldn’t reach. In the ship, his headlamp beam was the only illumination.
Angus ran from room to room, feeling shocked and giddy and amazed. He might as well have been a medieval farmer suddenly zapped forward in time and dropped onto the deck of an aircraft carrier — did he even understand the concepts of what he saw?
Another room, bigger than the last few. Round, with oval doors like all the others. Curved walls, shallow dome ceiling. The floor was flat, except at the edges of the room, where it curved up into the walls.
Randy entered the room.
“We have to go,” he said, but he said it without conviction. He turned in place, looking at everything, just as amazed as Angus was.
“Sure,” Angus said. “Just a few more minutes.”
A musty, archaic odor filled the air, the smell of abandoned industrial machines combined with buildings left mildewy by receding floodwaters. River mist drifted lightly inside the ship, collected on the curved walls and dripped down to collect in little stagnant pools. The dark alien vessel felt dungeon-like and dangerous, as if it might spring to life and swallow them up at any moment.
How many rooms had he looked at so far? Six? Seven? Too excited to keep count. All the rooms had been empty. No wood, no plastic, no materials of any kind other than platinum, really, save for some ceramics embedded in the walls. Whether those bits were art or control interfaces, Angus didn’t know.
And with each room he left, he wondered if the next one he entered might be a treasure trove packed with ancient yet advanced technology. It couldn’t just all be empty, could it? He wasn’t expecting a teleporter or anything, but was it too much to ask for a few gadgets and gizmos? Something he could spend years studying, taking apart, reverse engineering, then patenting?
He was already smarter than everyone he’d ever met. If anyone deserved to get a boost from a dead alien ship, it was him.
“This is so unreal,” Randy said. “Every room is like a squashed bubble. All curves. I haven’t seen one straight edge yet.”
He’d been pissed Angus had gone in, but that had lasted about thirty seconds. Randy might be a backstabber, but he was smart enough to appreciate just how un-fucking-believably awesome all of this was.
Angus shook his head in pure amazement. He’d done that in every room, would probably keep doing it.
“An entire ship made of platinum-iridium,” he said, sliding his hands across the curved wall. “All of it. To think, if not for that river eroding it, grinding bits of it to dust, and some of that water making its way to Sonny’s spring, this would have never been found.”
Randy knelt, rubbed his palms on the wet floor, held them in front of his headlamp beam.
“No corrosion, no decay of any kind,” he said. “Must be why they chose this alloy. It doesn’t break down unless acted upon by something, like the way the cave water erodes it. This hull will last forever, until the damn tectonic plate this mountain rests on slides back into the mantle.” He stood, wiped his hands on his thighs. “But I don’t see any wiring, any ducting. There’s no access panels. Everything is solid.”
Angus thought of the silverbug he’d dissected, torn apart on top of that rock.
“Platinum is a great conductor,” he said. “Signals could go through this entire hull — all three miles of it — with almost no degradation. It’s just like with the ALs. You don’t need wires when the shell itself is the wiring. I wonder if this was a warship? The alloy is strong, conducts well, can withstand intense heat. Imagine the kind of damage this beast could take and still keep kicking. Blowholes in it, signals still go through. No wires to sever. No wireless signals to jam. It’s …”
No edges. No lines.
Angus walked back into the strange corridor. A tube, yes, but not a straight one. It twisted subtly, up a little, to the left a little. So … organic. Up above, curved metal bars blended seamlessly with the ceiling, a horizontal ladder running the length of the corridor. The long spine of some dead metal monster. He imagined the rocktopi swung from those, like a long-armed gibbon, one extrusion after another shooting out.
But even with those bars there were no seams. Everything was a curve. Nothing had an edge. Every room like a bubble …
“Holy shit, Randy. This entire ship, they cast it, somehow.”
Randy stepped to the door. “Calm down, you’re yelling.”
“They cast it! Somehow, I don’t know, they take millions of tons of molten metal, they form it, inject it with air and control the, I don’t know, the air shapes to make the rooms and the halls, then just let that shit cool and you have the entire ship.”
“Angus, did you change the frequency on the scrambler?”
“I mean this is fucking titties and beer, man! It’s …”
The flat, quiet tone of Randy’s question hit home. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Randy stood in the curved entryway. His wide eyes stared down the corridor, headlamp beam catching swirls of floating river mist.
He was scared.
“I didn’t change it,” Angus said. “Why?”
Randy slowly raised a hand, pointed in the same direction as his headlamp beam.
Angus turned. There, maybe twenty meters away, a silverbug hung from one of the curved ceiling bars. His and Randy’s headlamps blazed off a polished shell and off its perfect, unmarred legs. The shape was the same as they’d seen before.
But that gleam …
This one wasn’t burnished by hundreds of tiny scratches. No dents. No big scrapes.
It wasn’t old.
More important, it wasn’t milling about aimlessly. The wedge-shaped protrusion aimed at Angus, then Randy, then Angus, then Randy.
“I don’t get it,” Angus said. He heard the whine in his whispered words. “The scrambler doesn’t affect it?”
Randy slowly stepped into the hall.
“They must have made a new one. With a new frequency, to get around our scrambling.”
Angus felt like a fool. A terrified fool. Why had he gone searching through this ship? He should have stuck to the river, not gone into the darkness, screaming his head off like that. Had his yelling drawn the thing?
“We’re missing something,” he said. “The rocktopi are fucking primitives. They couldn’t have made a new silverbug.”
“If they didn’t, that leaves only two possibilities. Either something we haven’t seen yet made it, or the new AL was made by old ALs.”
Artificial life. He’d thought of them as a collective organism. Artificial, sure, but still operating like an ant colony. Except ants were limited by biology: they couldn’t engineer new kinds of themselves to deal with new threats. Artificial life — robots — didn’t have the same limitations.
The silverbug let go. Two headlamp beams tracked it as it dropped to the floor, long, thin legs reaching out first, touching down with metal-on-metal clicks. The round body slowly settled.
A sharp sound made Angus jump, a ringing, a scraping that echoed through the metal hall before quickly fading away.
From just under the wedge shape, a nasty-looking blade stuck out. Six inches of sharpness, curved forward like the horn of a charging rhino.
“We’re in trouble,” Randy said. “Now they’ve got soldiers to go along with the workers. The rocktopi aren’t building the silverbugs, Angus — they’re building themselves.”
The machine didn’t move. It was as still as the ship itself.
As still as death.
9:03 a.m.
Veronica stared at three carvings. Ten feet square, they were the largest she’d seen yet. Inset deeper than the others, and rough. It looked like the rocktopi had long ago chiseled out the tiles that had been there and carved new images in the space beneath them.
More of their story, more clues to the mystery … So why didn’t she feel excited?
Not just about these tiles, why didn’t she feel excited about any of it.
This was way more than some lost tribe. This was a game changer. This was beyond the first explosion of the atom bomb, beyond the Wright brothers, beyond Edward Jenner or Louis Pasteur, beyond Watson, Crick and Franklin. Beyond anything humanity had known.
As cliché as it sounded, nothing would ever be the same again.
And she was there. As it happened. Her earlier work had helped make this possible. She had every right to claim this as her discovery.
So, again, the question — why didn’t she feel excited?
A familiar hand on her shoulder, a squeeze she would know with or without these suits.
“Ronni, what is it?”
She turned. Those big, brown eyes. The same eyes that had looked upon her as a child, the man who had taken her in, made her his own.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just trying to figure these tiles out.”
He held her shoulders.
“You can’t lie to me. You know this.”
She let herself be distracted by Connell, who was walking along the wall, looking at the tiles.
Sanji gave her a little shake, just enough to make her look at him again.
His stare bore into her. She felt like she was in high school again, coming home three hours after curfew, trying to come up with a lie so she didn’t have to tell him she’d been drinking, that she’d had sex with a boy she barely knew.
“Dad it’s … it’s just that it’s extra-fucking-terrestrials, as Lybrand so eloquently put it. I missed it completely. I should have seen it.”
He sighed.
“How could you have seen it? They hid themselves well. And is that really something to worry about right now?”
It wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. They had to worry about staying alive, getting out.
He pulled her in, hugged her. He smelled like a man that hadn’t showered in days, but she didn’t care. He was her father. Wherever he was, it was home.
“I know I’m not much of a fan of the sports,” he said. “But their terminology is best right now. I love you, my daughter, but you need to get your head in the game.” He held her at arm’s length, pierced her with those brown eyes. “People are dead. We need to make sure we don’t lose anyone else. Focus on that, you understand?”
She did. Everything was so fucked-up, but he was right — she could worry about it later. As long as he was here with her, that was all that mattered.
“I understand.”
He forced a smile. “Good. Now show me what you’re looking at, we’re almost out of time.”
She gestured to the carvings.
“These seem like they were an afterthought. Something else was taken out, these were carved instead. We’ve seen graffiti, but not replacement.”
Three squares.
The first showed hundreds of rocktopi, a teeming mass of intertwined tentacles. If aliens had their own version of souls twisting and burning in hell, it would look like that. While the carving was rough, it was detailed. Half the rocktopi seemed more bloated than the ones she’d seen in the tunnels. About a quarter of the carved aliens were splitting, popping, the work so intricate she could easily imagine yellow fluid splashing in all directions. Another quarter were flat, deflated — the way the creatures looked after death.
“Disease of some kind,” Sanji said. “No question. A plague.” He pointed to the base of the carving. “Aren’t those marks Chaltélian numbers?”
He was right. Yet another obvious thing she’d missed. She quickly counted, working her way through their strange base-12 system.
“Looks like … five thousand, eight hundred, sixteen.”
“That’s the dead?” Connell asked. “They lost that many.”
Veronica realized there were two sets of numbers. One she recognized from her work in Argentina — the zero year, the beginning of their calendar.
“No, the number on the left is a measurement of time,” she said. “I think what happened in that carving happened in their year five thousand, eight hundred and sixteen.”
Connell huffed. “This makes my brain hurt. Fifty-eight hundred years after they landed? And that was like seven thousand years before now. Crazy.”
Sanji stepped closer. His gloved fingertip poked at a splitting rocktopi.
“The other number,” he said. “Maybe it’s a death toll.”
She counted.
“Looks like … twenty-four thousand … three hundred and five.”
Her father turned, looked at her. “Twenty-four thousand? How many did they start out with?”
Veronica remembered that number from the hallway images, the ones she had thought represented their Garden of Eden.
“Thirty-two thousand,” she said. “I think that was their original crew complement.”
Connell let out a long whistle. “That means they lost three-quarters of their population, all at once.”
Sanji turned to the carvings again. “Possibly. Five millennia after they landed, the population could have been much smaller or vastly larger. No way to know. But a massive number nonetheless. It could explain why they’re so primitive. Who knows how much of the leadership and knowledge died in the plague.”
“They can move mountains,” Connell said. “And we’re not talking some motivational poster in the break room, we’re talking about literally moving a mountain. If they can do that, surely they have supercomputers or something that can store all their knowledge, right?”
“You are thinking short-term,” Sanji said. “When the plague hit, they’d been down here for over five thousand years. How long can any computer last, even one from an incredibly advanced civilization? Surely all things break down eventually.”
Connell grunted in agreement. “As often as I have to replace equipment, I guess you’ve got a point.” He reached up, lightly slapped his palm against the second carving. “This is the wreck.”
It was, obviously. The detailed carving showed the ship exactly as it looked in the cavern, with one key exception — an explosive cloud in place of the gaping hole.
“Kaboom,” Connell said. “It’s been seven thousand years since our last accident, but that last one was a doozy.”
Veronica looked closer. More flat rocktopi. Thousands of them, very small because they were in scale with the ship.
Sanji pointed to the number marks at the bottom edge.
“Another cataclysm,” he said. “When did it happen, and how many dead?”
She counted. It came easier this time.
“Just over a century after the plague hit. Another six thousand dead.”
Had they been inside the ship when the explosion hit? Or perhaps in the cavern surrounding it? Could some of them have died from radiation after the fact?
Maybe it was all three things.
Connell moved to the last big tile, while her father rubbed his eyes through his thin mask.
“They could have been down to a few thousand survivors,” Sanji said. “And if the blast was radioactive, some of those who survived could have suffered damage to their genetic material. Think if that happened to a fixed population of humans. The gene pool might stagnate. We thought we found birth defects in the rocktopi — that fits the idea of a limited breeding pool.”
Her father spread his arms, turned in a slow circle, taking in the whole room.
“We’ve called the rocktopi primitives, even described them as cavemen. Everything we’ve seen points to a logical idea — they have devolved. Once a brilliant, spacefaring race, their homeworld destroyed, so they fled for their lives. They hid down here, possibly flourished for thousands of years until disease and tragedy gutted them, left them with a genetic pool so small inbreeding was inevitable. Imagine if that explosion also wiped out what tech they had left, or if they couldn’t come into their ship until the radiation died down. How long would that take? A century? Ten centuries? How many generations would it take before they lost their technological knowledge altogether?”
A horrible concept. It almost made her feel sorry for the creepy crawlies. To think that a sentient race — one far more advanced than humanity — could decline like that. It was scary.
“They went out with a whimper,” Veronica said. “Not a bang.”
“I think their bang is right here,” Connell said.
He pointed to the third carving. Like the second, it showed the shipwreck but at a smaller scale. A line extended down from its center. The line was five times as long as the ship. It ended in a clear representation of an explosion, one that seemed to be shattering pillars of some kind.
Sanji stepped closer. “What is that line?”
“Don’t know,” Connell said. “But I saw the same line on Angus’s tablet map, so it’s still there. That map said it goes down over four miles, but from the looks of this, it’s more like twenty miles. I feel like this is important, so—”
Veronica heard a buzzing sound.
Connell looked at his wrist.
“Shit, we’re supposed to be back.” He looked to the alcove exit, then back at the third carving. “We’ll go in a second, just see if you can help me figure this out real quick.”
9:06 a.m.
They had rushed through the ship, seeing what they could in the little time they had. Those minutes had seemed like seconds.
The minutes spent silently staring at the soldier silverbug, those passed like hours.
It remained on the corridor floor. Motionless. More abstract sculpture than working machine.
Randy hadn’t been trying to wait it out, he’d just been too terrified to move. That blade, the way it curved forward like a stubby scimitar. The flat gleamed. The edge showed two shining dots, each on a reflection of the two headlamp beams locked onto it.
He’d seen how fast they moved. Maybe fifteen feet away — it could close that distance in seconds.
“Randy,” Angus whispered, “we have to do something.”
Angus was right. They couldn’t just stand there. What if new silverbugs were forming lines out in the cavern, leading rocktopi against Connell and the others? The alien creatures acted like it was forbidden for them to come in, but could their little metallic masters convince them otherwise?
“You’re right,” he whispered back. “The longer we wait, the more the others are at risk. We have to get back to them.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Angus look away from the silverbug for the first time, glance at Randy, then back to the silverbug. Angus had to be afraid, too.
That meant Randy had to be brave enough for both of them.
“Okay, here’s what we do,” he whispered. “We back away slowly. Maybe it will stay where it is.”
“What if it doesn’t? What if it follows us, or attacks?”
That whine in Angus’s voice again. He had always been so full of himself. Not here. Not now.
“If it follows, we keep going,” Randy said. “Our chances are better with all of us together. If it rushes us—” he licked his dry lips, felt the icy swirl of fear prickle his guts “—we grab it. We can’t outrun it. It has four legs — you grab the ones on its right, I grab the ones on its left. We pull tight, like a tug-of-war. We go back the way we came and throw it into the river.”
A pause.
“Like a tug-of war,” Angus said.
“That’s right. We just pull tight. It can’t use the knife on us if we pull tight.”
A bigger pause. Angus’s breathing, rapid, ragged. Was he mustering his courage or hyperventilating?
“All right,” he said. “Fuck it, man — let’s do this.”
Randy nodded, making the headlamp beam bounce along the machine’s gleaming curves.
“On three, take a single step back,” he said. “One … two … three.”
Randy gently picked up his left foot, leaned back, stepped down.
The silverbug shot forward.
Randy raised his hands, had a moment to mutter “ohshitohshit” then his eyes locked on the machine’s legs. The thin straws of metal had always seemed like a blur, but in that instant he saw their every movement, reaching forward, grabbing, pushing back, metal claws slipping slightly on the wet metal floor. Not like it was moving in slow motion, but rather like he was processing what he saw faster than he’d ever done before.
The silverbug closed, gathered, leapt, knife point leading its charge. Randy sidestepped, reached out, fingers splayed like two fleshy nets. The knife point slid past, into the air where his body had just been. Thin legs hit his palms — his fingers clamped down fast, so fast, and he held the thin metal in a stone-tight grip.
Randy’s gaze flicked past the still-moving machine, to Angus …
... but Angus wasn’t there.
A flash-moment of not understanding, a moment where Randy’s thoughts ceased working but physics did not. The silverbug’s momentum whipped him around, twisted him to the right, off balance. The metal body clanged into the corridor wall just as Randy stumbled to the left, his body out too far for his feet to catch up. He landed hard on his side. His helmet bouncing up, then off.
A crack when it hit the floor.
His headlamp beam winked out.
Randy blinked, eyes trying to adjust to the almost total darkness.
A rapid-fire burst of click-click! Click-click-click!
He rolled to his back just as the silverbug sprang, its four thin arms outstretched like a pouncing spider. Hands shot up, grabbed the front arms, but the ball of platinum was moving too fast to stop. The knife point shot forward, punched through his mask, into his cheek. Fire lance through his face.
Metal hooks clawed into his arms, his hands, dug in deeper as the machine used the footholds to lurch its heavy body forward again.
Can’t see can’t see —
“Angus! Grab it!”
A flash of blinding light, a headlamp beam gleaming off the silverbug’s side.
A reflection — Randy’s own face, distorted by the curved metal shell — staring back at himself, Rec Specs askew, blood sheeting his cheek.
The light angled away … and it was gone.
The weight, pushing him down. Claws digging into his flesh. Another lurch: a stabbing pain deep in his neck. The metal — inside of him — felt hot against the back of his throat.
He struggled for a few more seconds, pushing with all his strength, then his strength gave out. His grip relaxed. Thin metal arms slid out of his hands.
The hot metal slid out of his neck, then stabbed home again.
Randy lay on his back. Something poked at him, over and over, but he didn’t feel the pain, just the pulling, the jerking, the jostling.
Coldness spread over him.
His eyes were wide open, but he couldn’t see anything. Was that because there was no light? Or was it because he was bleeding out, and just like in the movies, everything was going black?
That question would be his last.
Randy Wright would never know the answer.
9:08 a.m.
A buzzing on her right wrist. The display read 9:08 a.m.
Bertha twisted, gently, so as not to disturb Patrick, who was asleep with his head in her lap. She looked back to the alcoves. Connell, Veronica and Sanji were still in one of them, apparently.
She looked toward the massive shipwreck.
No sign of Randy or Angus.
“Fuck all of you,” she said, her voice a growl. “If you dick around and Patrick dies because of it, I’ll hurt you like you can’t even imagine.”
O’Doyle twitched in his sleep. His scarred face wrinkled, winced.
He had nightmares, too, apparently.
Bertha watched him. Despite his KoolSuit, sweat beaded on his forehead beneath the formfitting mask. He didn’t have a fever, at least according to the display on his right wrist.
She would have liked to feel for herself, to take off her glove, peel back his mask and put her hand against his cheek. She couldn’t do that, though, not unless she wanted him to breathe in a surprise lungful of two-hundred-degree air.
The suits stayed on. The masks stayed on.
It was almost cruel to be this close to him, to hold him and yet not be able to actually touch his skin. She let him know she was there, though, her gloved hand gently stroking his hooded head.
Spots of dried blood dotted his thigh. She didn’t dare check that, either, for fear of ruining Angus’s KoolSuit repair job. In Patrick’s current state, Bertha doubted he could handle another blast of heat.
Bertha stroked his head. She watched his face. She watched it so intently she didn’t see a pair of spidery, metallic shapes emerge from the ship and crawl along the curved terraces of the river’s former paths.
9:09 a.m.
“Those pillars are in a chamber, I think,” Sanji said. “They look like they’re supporting a great weight.”
They did look like that. Sort of. But Connell didn’t think that made sense.
The line — thin and straight — reached down some twenty miles from the ship until it hit what appeared to be a miles-wide chamber with hundreds of tall pillars. An explosion was breaking those pillars. For what purpose? To collapse the entire mountain? No, that didn’t make sense, with seventeen miles of rock between the chamber and the mountain, it would hold up just fine.
Veronica pointed to the bottom of the square.
“Look at this series of smaller carvings. They seem to be related.”
The first tile showed a rectangular console, with buttons of different shapes. The second showed a sphere dropping into the long shaft. The third was almost the same as the big one above it — an explosion, shattering the pillars. The last frame in the series illustrated some kind of flood. Liquid filled the tunnel. Rocktopi appeared to be bursting into flames.
No, not liquid …
The truth hit Connell so hard he leaned away from the carvings, as if they might hurt him.
Veronica looked at him quizzically.
“What is it?” she asked. “What does it mean?”
“It was a doomsday device,” Connell said. “I think the sphere is a bomb. A big one. They would have lowered it down to that pillar chamber, detonated it, and magma would have rushed up the shaft, filling the entire tunnel complex, killing everything inside.”
She stared at the sequence. She shook her head.
“Those crazy motherfuckers. They’ll do anything to avoid losing.”
Sanji glanced from Veronica to Connell, then back again.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “How is burning up in molten rock going to help them defeat their enemy?”
Veronica reached up, tapped the carving of the wreck.
“I said avoid losing, not defeat. That’s a warship out there, which means the rocktopi culture was military in origin. Maybe it’s remained that way. Looks like the original crew would rather have their descendants die before admitting a final defeat. Death before dishonor or some bullshit like that.”
Connell tried to imagine the power of an explosion that could punch a hole deep enough to create a volcano.
“If we find any random buttons, let’s not go pressing them, okay?”
Sanji shook his head.
“There is no way such a device would work after all this time. I do not think—”
A shout cut him off, a shout from the cavern.
Lybrand, screaming for help.
9:09 a.m.
A kick to his shoulder, a woman’s shout. Panic in that voice.
An attack … the Colombians found us, coming to gut me and string me from a tree like they did to Matty …
Without moving a muscle, Patrick opened his eyes, instantly aware of every injury, every limitation. He expected to see dense greenery above him, or the black of a jungle night, but he saw neither.
Blue-white light. High above … was that stone?
He wasn’t in a jungle. Or a city. He wasn’t in the desert, either, but far beneath one.
And it wasn’t the Colombians who wanted him dead.
“Patrick, get your ass up, now!”
Bertha on his right. He rolled to his right, onto hands and knees, careful not to jar his leg. She stood there — on his left, now — knife extended in the direction of a beached leviathan that had once soared through the universe.
“I see them,” he said.
Two silverbugs, only yards away, creeping with the smooth, steady motion of cats closing in on prey. Impossibly bright, shiny platinum legs and mirrorlike body reflected the artificial light from above. On their curved bodies, he saw a warped reflection of the rocktopi waterfall behind him.
The machines looked new.
Ten-inch blades jutting out from a dark slot in their round body, curving up like a long kerambit. Bad news.
He moved his hands until each sat atop a loose rock the size of his fist. He pushed himself up, stood in a fighter’s stance, adrenaline rush already drowning out his pain.
They crept closer. Two meters now, split feet reaching out slowly, a moving crouch of potential energy. They looked so alive.
“Put your knife away,” he said. “It won’t hurt them and you need both hands when they attack.”
Bertha slowly slid the Ka-Bar into the sheath on her chest webbing, clicked it home.
Patrick reached out his left hand, pressed a rock against her thigh. She took it from him, shifted it from her left hand to her right palm, felt its weight before her fingers closed on it.
“Rocks,” she said. “Rocks against robots with knives. That’s just awesome.”
He started to tell her how he wanted to attack, but she was already moving, left foot reaching forward, right arm stiff and pointed straight at the silverbug, then windmilling up and backward. Her left foot planted as the fist-gripped rock passed her right thigh — a softball pitch, and a violent one. The rock shot out of her hand so fast he barely saw it, gonged as it smashed into the closest silverbug, sent it tumbling.
The other silverbug rushed at her, a gleaming crab-spider instantly moving at full speed.
Patrick hurled his rock, a hurried throw that didn’t have Bertha’s speed or accuracy — the stone cracked into the ancient tile floor inches shy of the target, bounced, sailed just over the metal shell.
He stepped toward it, reached, wasn’t fast enough.
The silverbug leapt, arms outstretched, split feet splayed wide.
Bertha crouched, snarled. Her hands popping up in a defensive posture.
She tried to grab the machine in midair.
The curved blade flashed.
Two fingers on her left hand fell to the ground as if they’d never really been attached at all.
The metal body slammed into her, sent her stumbling back.
Patrick took another step, kept reaching.
The world moved so slowly.
Split feet curled around her right arm. The blade flashed again, from left to right across her face.
Blood flew.
A third step. Patrick’s palms on either side of the round body. He lifted hard, stretched his hands up. Hooked feet dug into her flesh and suit, tried to hold on, slashed long, dragging lines in both as he ripped the machine off her.
He twisted and stepped in the same motion, taking it away from her, even as his eyes spotted a boulder. The kerambit pointed away from him. Patrick heard himself roaring, screaming. He brought the silverbug down with both hands, with all his strength, smashing it into unforgiving stone.
Metal dented. Rock shards flew.
Legs reversed. Sharp claws pierced his forearms.
He lifted high, arched, brought it down again.
Another dent. Rock chips.
Lift, arch, smash.
Lift, arch, smash.
Lift, arch, smash.
“O’Doyle, stop!”
Lift, arch, smash.
Lift, arch, smash.
“O’Doyle!”
Arms wrapping around from behind, encircling his chest.
“Stop, it’s dead!”
Lift, toss the enemy away, turn fast, left elbow back, the feel of it hitting home, the grunt of another enemy, that enemy letting go, falling away. Reaching down, grabbing a shard of colored tile. The enemy hitting the ground, stepping forward for the kill …
Patrick stopped.
Not an enemy. Connell. On his side, his hands pressed to his mouth, blood on his yellow gloves.
Patrick turned again, toward the ship, eyes searching for the silverbugs. One a few feet away, round shell smashed like a wrecked car, three legs motionless, one twitching. The other one, a few feet farther away. Only one big dent, but lay still.
Bertha.
He spun, saw Connell lying there, saw Sanji and Veronica on top of Bertha.
Two fingers on the ground, still encased in KoolSuit yellow.
Blood, everywhere.
“Kirkland, get up and watch for more silverbugs!”
Patrick stepped over him, not knowing if he’d heard, not even caring.
He knelt next to Bertha, shoving Veronica and Sanji out of the way.
Bertha’s good right hand covered the mauled left, unable to stop the blood that spurted forth from the stumps. The sleeves of her tattered KoolSuit dangled from her forearms. Blood sheeted the right side of her face. She’d rolled on the ground while writhing in pain — bits of rock and sand stuck to her blood-drenched skin, as did a few flecks of colored masonry.
“I’m here,” he said. “Baby, I’m here.”
Bertha’s eyes alternately pinched shut and stared with wide-eyed disbelief at the two yellow fingers laying a few feet away.
He had to stop that bleeding. He pulled Bertha’s knife from its sheath.
“Sanji, backpack, now.”
It was at his feet before Veronica could stand.
Patrick slashed at it, cutting off two long strips of nylon fabric.
“Hold her good arm,” he said.
He expected Sanji to do it, but Kirkland was there, hooking her right arm, pulling it away, locking it up tight. Blood covered his mouth, dripped down the inside of his thin mask.
Bertha fought weakly, kept staring at the severed fingers.
“Those are mine,” she said. “Patrick, I need those.”
She was in shock.
He dropped the knife, pinched her forearm between his elbow and body, heard her cry out, ignored it. He fumbled with the strips he’d cut, but they were already bloody, too slick to manage.
Sanji snatched them. He looped one around the stump of her missing pinkie.
Bertha yelped, pulled the hand back — not far, but enough that the bloody strip fell away.
“Hold her still,” Sanji barked.
Patrick gripped Bertha’s wrist, suddenly at home because someone was giving an order and he didn’t have to think.
Sanji looped the strip again, then pulled it tight on the stub with a snap of his wrists.
Bertha threw her head back and screamed.
“Shut up,” Patrick said. “Bear down and shut up.”
Blood streaming down her cheek and slashed mask alike. Her lip curled, her eyes widened. She glared at him. With hate and pain at first, then just pain.
“Do it,” she said.
Sanji looped a strip around her ring finger, snapped it tight.
She threw her head back again and her eyes scrunched, but she clenched her teeth and grunted instead of screamed.
In that bloody moment, Patrick knew he couldn’t possibly love her more.
Bertha coughed. She stuck out her tongue, like she had something caught in her throat.
“Can’t … so hot.”
She gagged.
Her mask. The silverbug blade had partially sliced through her upper lip, must have broken the breather.
Veronica, shoving her away in, hands pulling at Bertha’s belt.
“Take it easy,” she said. “We have to get your spare mask on.”
“Her cut,” Patrick said. “We have to stitch her first, she—”
Veronica pulled the mask out of a pouch. So thin, little more than face-shaped plastic wrap.
“Her lungs are cooking,” she said. “Air first, the cut second.”
Sanji ripped off Bertha’s ruined mask, tossed it away like so much trash. Veronica pressed the new one to her face, used fingers and thumbs to smooth it tight.
Bertha struggled, gagged.
Patrick held her tight.
Another gag, a cough, then a deep, desperate heave in.
She twitched. She calmed.
She could breathe again.
9:11 a.m.
He sprinted down the riverbank, the water rushing past on his right. Out of the darkness of that horrible place, back in the blue-white light. The giant rocktopi statue, warped by eons of erosion. Below it, his people, huddled together by the waterfall pool. Near them, on the ground … more soldier bugs? The bugs weren’t moving. Had O’Doyle smashed them, somehow?
Angus felt an urgent need to be with Kirkland and the others. The shit was hitting the fan now — machines with knives, the rocktopi still somewhere out there … he needed the safety of the group.
He didn’t want to be alone.
The backpack lurched with each step, threatening to throw him off balance. He grabbed at the buckles, unfastened them, stumbled as the backpack fell away and then he was sprinting again.
Tug-of-war? What a fucking idiot.
Randy, dead. His friend. Murdered by that psycho machine.
Everything shimmered. Eyes, stinging. Angus pressed his fingertips through the thin mask, tried to wipe away the tears.
I could have saved him … I could have thrown that thing into the river … I let Randy die.
No, that was stupid, stupid, stupid — the soldier bug would have killed one of them. Should Angus have died so someone else could live? Fuck no. Survival of the fittest, of the smartest.
Lying there, terrified … that knife driving into his throat, slicing …
Lungs burning. Angus kept sprinting.
Everyone huddled together. There was O’Doyle’s big back, Sanji, Veronica … and Connell, blood all over his face. On the ground … Lybrand?
Veronica looked up, was the first to see him coming.
“Angus! Where’s Randy!”
Yes, two soldier bugs, gleaming in their newness, but broken, unmoving.
Angus pointed to one of the dead, gleaming silverbugs. “One of those got him. The scrambler doesn’t work on the new ones. Randy is dead.”
Veronica looked away.
Connell glared at him, eyes narrowed in disbelief.
Sanji shook his head, closed his eyes. “Dammit. We have to get out of here, or we’re all going to die.”
O’Doyle shouted over his shoulder.
“Angus, Lybrand’s suit is cut, fix it!”
His back was so big Angus almost couldn’t see her. Almost.
Blood, everywhere.
The sleeves of her KoolSuit.
Torn to shreds.
Yellow fluid leaking out on to the cracked floor.
If the rest of her suit was intact, she wouldn’t die right away. She would die, though. It would be slow. Agonizing. Better to kill her now. Less cruel that way.
“I can’t fix it,” he said. “We don’t have anything left to fix it with.”
O’Doyle reached to the ground, picked something up. He stood. He turned.
He held a knife.
His chin was near his chest. He glared out from beneath that ridge of bone he called a forehead. The red slash line and fresh stitches made him look like a monster, made Angus stop in his tracks, made his balls shrink.
“Find a way,” O’Doyle said. “Come up with something, fast, or she’ll be wearing your KoolSuit.”
The others snap-glanced at the scared man, all took small steps away from him. They looked shocked.
Back in the hotel room, that day all of this began, Angus had feared Patrick O’Doyle. Even in the lab, Angus had kept his distance, because there was something deep inside the man that just wasn’t right. Whatever camouflage O’Doyle used to hide his real self, he wasn’t bothering with it anymore.
He stood there, knife in hand.
He was finally being himself.
A killer.
Well, fuck this. Fuck ALL of this.
Angus ran for the river’s edge.
O’Doyle screaming his name.
A step down to a former path, then the edge that dropped away. Stepping, leaping, hands forward, splitting the water, a thud.
Dizzy. Sliding along.
He’d hit the bottom.
Up, have to breathe …
A thud in his back, the current throwing him right, spinning him.
Under again, hot water in his mouth …
He popped up, splashing, coughing. Facing upstream. Far off, he saw Patrick O’Doyle limping along the bank. To be that far away, Angus would have to be near the shipwreck.
Oh God …
He whipped around just as the water angled down, sped him on like a dipping roller coaster.
The ship canopy blocked out the light, and he was sucked into the rapids.