Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (42 page)

He waded ashore. The surf was still running past his knees when he caught the trace. He shook his head, for a moment not daring to believe it was real. Then he blinked his vision down to IR, and scanned first the beach and then the vegetation line.
There!
Just where the plants began to grow he caught a patch of heat. “Urban!” he screamed. “Alta!” The wave pulled back, leaving only sizzling wet sand under his feet. “Urban!”

The warm patch rose. It floated ghostly for a moment then responded with an answering whoop—“Yeah, Lot!”—and Urban came lunging down the beach.

Lot met him halfway in a furious embrace: “God, I thought you were lost! Dead.”

And Urban talking at the same time: “You crazy, fury? Swimming at night? No old piece of a broken ship is worth that risk! I almost stripped Ord apart again for letting you go.”

Then Alta was there, her arms around him, her lips against his cheek, her presence rolling silvery and bright across his sensory tears, an intoxicating, commanding tide. His eyes widened in surprise. He pulled away from her, suddenly terrified that he might slip under. She let him go with a gasp of her own. Maybe she felt it too.

He backed off a few steps, letting the clean night air run between them. Urban grinned, a hand on Lot’s shoulder. “Hey fury, did you ever think we’d last this long?”

U
RBAN HAD HELD ON TO HIS PACK AFTER THE TUMBLE
into the river. They huddled together at the top of the beach, sharing out the last of the fruit while Urban recounted their adventures. Somehow, he and Alta had managed to stay together in the water. They’d washed up on a shelf inside the gorge, and had taken shelter there under a rock overhang. “We didn’t dare move,” he explained. “We didn’t want to call the city’s guns down on us.”

The river had carried a lot of debris, among it a mound, torn free of its substrate and floating upside down in the swift current. It swept close to the shelf, and Alta had grabbed it.

Now she grinned at Lot, her cheeks warm with a faint flush of pride. “It was hot, even after soaking in the river. I guess it was still functioning, but it didn’t shoot any stink at us . . . maybe because it was upside down. There probably is no defensive mechanism on the bottom.”

They’d discovered they could peel away thin layers from the mound’s underside, gooey, discrete levels connected by tough, vertical white fibers. “Like nerves,” Urban said. “Anyway, it had been floating so high that Alta had this idea we could use it for a boat. So we hollowed it out, and what was left was still buoyant. We waited till dark, then got inside. The current brought us all the way down to the edge of the marsh.”

“Was the mound still hot?”

“Yeah. Real cozy.”

Lot frowned, unhappy with the image that suggested. But Urban didn’t notice. “So what did you find out from the ship’s core?” he asked.

Lot shifted, suddenly apprehensive. “A lot of history, mostly. She doesn’t know what happened to Jupiter.”

He lay back on the sand, not quite ready to talk about his suspicions, afraid of how Urban might react. Instead, he entertained them with the story of Ord’s snails. They laughed like drunks over the incident, pulling jokes out of it long after the humor should have been spent—not touching on anything more serious until finally Ord interrupted: “A call for you, Lot.”

Urban scowled at the robot. “What’s it talking about?”

“It’s got a link to the city.”

Urban’s eyes went wide. “Shit, fury! They’ll target us again.” He was already halfway to his feet. Alta had made a quick grab for the pack.

Lot held out a restraining hand. “It’s okay, really. They’re not going to use the guns anymore. I talked to your old man. He wasn’t in on that. He tried to stop them.”

Urban considered a moment. He didn’t seem fully convinced, but he did settle slowly back onto the sand. “Maybe you better catch us up.”

So Lot told them what he knew: that the riot had not been quelled, that the rebellious ados were all infected with a neural parasite, and that authority had lost control. “David said they were repairing the column; that they’d be down in a few hours.” He could feel Urban’s tension doubling, then doubling again, filling the space between them.

“This neural parasite, fury—it’s why the ados follow you?”

Lot answered cautiously: “Sooth. That’s why.” But still Urban’s tension rose another notch. Lot studied him closely, trying to discern the reason. With a start of surprise he realized how haggard Urban looked. His eyes were hollow, his cheekbones prominent. His mood tasted sharply bitter. Lot caught on. “It’s not in you, of course,” he said firmly.

“You know that?”

“I know it sure.”

Urban thought it over; then his teeth flashed in a quick grin. “Sooth. I never followed you. It was always the other way around.”

“That’s right. You got it.”

“A call for you, Lot,” Ord said again. So Lot reluctantly told it to go ahead.

It spoke in David’s voice. “Hey, Lot. Things are going a little slower than expected. We found only three cars on the lower tracks.”

Lot felt a chill across his back.

“We brought the cars up,” David went on. “City authority can’t stop us. They’ve retreated to a remote complex in the industrial core. We want to start loading. But Lot, one of the cars—”

“I know, David. We saw it on the way down.”

David didn’t speak for a moment. Then: “There’s at least a hundred and eighty bodies.”

“I know.”

“Do you . . . want me to send them down? Maybe they’ve got enough physical structure left that you could . . . reach them? Somehow?”

Lot caught a foreign thread of human emotion on the air. He turned slowly, to see the softly glowing blue figures of two phantoms on the beach. Urban swore in ugly whispers. Lot felt his hackles rise. “Yeah, David,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “Go ahead. Send them down.” The Old Silkens had been resurrected here . . . sort of. And a cargo of dead would at least keep the living at bay for a while longer. “Send them down first.”

He signaled Ord to cut the connection.

Urban had moved protectively between Alta and the dim blue apparitions. The phantoms were perhaps fifty yards away, two masculine figures standing just above the splash zone, both of them nude, their long, unkept hair framing stern faces. “They’ve followed us down the river,” Urban said.

“The same figures?” Lot asked.

“Sometimes a woman’s with them.”

Lot knew her.

Urban added: “They’re drawn to Alta.”

Lot looked at her. He remembered the blue woman crouching, staring hungrily at Alta as she slept. But there was no concern on Alta’s face. She wore a faint smile. In her eyes was a faraway look, like a real one who senses something pleasant over an atrial channel. She seemed limned in silver.

Alta had the neural parasite. She was part of the cult and the phantoms sensed it. Lot edged away from her, shaking his head to dispel the pressure of her presence against his sensory tears. “Listen, I’d really like to get a look at what’s left of that mound.”

“Yeah,” Urban said. “Let’s get out of here.” He touched Alta’s elbow. “Come on. You don’t want to go that way.” He pushed her gently; got her to turn around. But her eyes remained dreamy. Lot stayed well away as they waded back through the marsh: night creatures seeing heat in the darkness. He continued to sense the vague presence of strangers, somewhere in the still night air.

O
N A MUDDY BANK, WHERE THE RIVER SURGED
whenever there was rain in the highlands, Urban showed him the overturned mound. “See, it’s made of layers,” he said, peeling back a section of the gooey material a couple of inches thick. Long white filaments poked out of it. Urban pulled the layer off them as if he were pulling a bead free of multiple strings.

Alta helped him. She seemed to have forgotten about the phantoms, though she stood closer to Lot now than she had before. The clouds had begun to break, and some ring light shone through the wrack. Silver glinted everywhere on the edge of his vision.

“Look here,” Alta said, pointing to a tangled web of the filaments. The mass layered the hollowed-out interior of the mound and nested in the bottom. “It has to be some kind of nervous system.”

Neuronal architecture.

Urban handed him the stripped layer. It was heavier than Lot expected; dryer too. He squeezed it, and it yielded, soft/firm like a sleeping pad. Cautiously, he held it near his face, but it had no sense that he could perceive. He wondered again if it had anything to do with the phantoms.

He was getting ready to throw the stripped layer back into the hollowed-out mound when a hint of motion among the reeds drew his eye. He half-turned, expecting to see Ord, for Alta had sent it off to hunt snails. Instead, he recognized the diminutive figure of a warden hardly an arm’s reach away. Its body glowed faint red, like a fading emergency light. Urban saw it at the same time. His hand dropped to his waist. From his suit pocket he retrieved one of the capsules they’d captured from the warden that first day.

This new warden raised its hands. They dissolved, flowing down over its forearms like candles melting, while wisps of steam rose into the night air. “No armaments here,” it said, speaking in a multiplex voice that issued from hundreds of tiny mouths strung together in lines to suggest a human face.

Lot laid a hand on Urban’s arm. “It’s Sypaon.” He stepped toward her cautiously. She’d lowered her hands. Now the steaming limbs were re-forming. “We want to thank you,” Lot said. “You saved us there, on the ridge.”

The substrate that held her face seemed to liquefy. The tiny mouths slid into meaningless patterns—for a moment only—before order returned and her face reemerged. “This language: it is difficult to re-master,” she said. “I’ve strung neural patterns together—”

Lot interrupted her. “How many wardens do you control?”

She seemed puzzled. “This one is all that’s necessary.”

But that snake thing had surely not disgorged her whole. She must have had another warden under her command. “You can access others?”

“As needed.”

“Can you stop the wardens that are repairing the elevator column?”

She frowned. “Translate for me. Why have you driven our people from the Well?”

Lot held himself very still, sensing that his position had grown suddenly more precarious. “I have not done that, Sypaon.”

“They’ve retreated,” she insisted. “They say you carry plague. They fight among themselves.”

He backed up half a step. His throat had gone dry. “It wasn’t me. Your people vanished from the Well long ago. I’m trying to understand it.”

“Is that why you were made?”

“It doesn’t matter why!”

This outburst startled her. She went still for several seconds. Perhaps she’d withdrawn from the warden, to run her own assessments in the vast body of the ring. But soon her face coalesced again in sharp detail. “The Well holds me hostage. I cannot penetrate this system.”

So. Was this the root of her interest in him? He knelt cautiously in front of her. “I can. Sometimes. Perhaps we can help each other.”

She seemed to consider this. “A tool may be useful for things other than its intended purpose—”

“Shit, Lot,” Urban interrupted softly. “They’re back.”

Lot turned. Some twenty yards away, three blue figures, two men and one woman, walked toward them across the surface of the water. He could see their reflections in the smooth mere as they strode silently forward. They made no disturbance in the surface tension.

Alta seemed mesmerized by them. She stared across the water, her expression vibrant with expectation. Silver glimmered in her eyes and across her face. Lot stepped close to her. “Do they talk to you?”

She glanced at him, a childlike smile of wonder on her face. “Not in words. But I’ve begun to feel them, like I feel Jupiter.”

He looked out across the water. The trio had stopped perhaps ten yards away. He could see their features clearly. Worse, he could feel their desire and it pulled at him. They knew him. He had no doubt of it now. Expectation seeped from their strengthening auras.

“Translate for me,” Sypaon said. “What system is this?”

Overhead, a cloud shifted and ring light turned the water silver. Or was it something else? Lot felt a gathering pressure on the air, as if an unseen crowd had suddenly risen from the ground around him, their bodies flush against him. He shook his head, backing away from the water, rubbing at his sensory tears as if he could rub their influence out of him.

Alta smiled. “They’re from the Communion, aren’t they?”

“The Communion?” Sypaon muttered. “Archival reference—”

“Sooth, it’s so.”

Urban’s hand fell roughly on his shoulder, spinning him halfway around, leaving him staggering on the slippery ground. “That’s bullshit, Lot! You know it. That’s not transcendence. It’s stinking marsh gas.”

Lot caught the sense of his anger and felt it resound inside him, amplifying in a knee-jerk reaction as if he were some kind of dumb machine. Alta caught his mood shift and melted back into the silvered reeds. But Urban was blind to it. Dark. Forever separate, a flaw in the silver net. Lot grabbed at the open neck of his suit, his fist closing around the supple fabric. “They would have killed you in the Hallowed Vasties,” he growled. “They destroyed everyone like you who couldn’t feel it, who couldn’t believe.”

The dark souls had been quickly isolated wherever the Communion grew. The tendrils of light that flowed through the growing network had closed like a garrote around the throats of those who could not conform to the pattern of the Vasties.

Crowds seemed to whisper around him, tugging at him with a silver tide. He felt himself slipping.

I’m not ready for this
. He grabbed for Urban with both hands now, trying to reach into that dark space, clinging to it like a drowning man clinging to a rock against the rising waters.

Silver flow of thought running in tides around a star.

“I can remember it,” Lot said. Urban’s eyes went wide. His hands closed defensively on Lot’s arms. His skin stank of fear. “It starts small, with a man like Jupiter. They made him for the purpose. He carries their seed in him. Call it the cult virus, though it’s more than that—and it’s older than the Hallowed Vasties. Some people sense it right away. Like Alta, they’re vulnerable; they’re drawn to him. Others get it when they’ve been with him awhile. He changes people, Urban. He parasitizes them. He makes a place for himself down inside them. His desires become their desires. They accrete around him. It begins.”