Hellhole (27 page)

The pond appeared utterly placid, but viscous, like a pearlescent tar pit; an oily sheen swirled and reflected indistinct shapes like clouds, but when Vincent looked up, the greenish-yellow sky was clear except for a distant smoke plume from a volcanic eruption.

A loud
plop
startled him, and he jerked backward from the pool’s crumbling dirt edge to see Fernando throw a second stone, which left barely a ripple. The liquid folded over the sinking rock and returned to its eerie quiescence. Grinning, the other man gave his assessment. “I’d say that’s no ordinary water.”

“Maybe we discovered some kind of oil,” Vincent suggested. “A clear petroleum seep.” He would have to take samples for the prospector office.

“You think the General would pay us a reward for this?” Fernando leaned over and squinted at his blurry reflection. “It’s quite a discovery.”

“It’s our
job
. We’re supposed to find things.”

Fernando made a raspberry sound. “There should be a difference between finding
interesting
things and just more of the same old boring landscape.”

Vincent sighed. “Take it up with General Adolphus when we get back to Michella Town. I’m going to check out the other pools.”

Leaving his friend, he circled the first of the strange ponds and moved to the second, which was slightly larger. Seeing no runoff channel that would have filled it, he concluded that the liquid must bubble up from some underground source. Unlike other streams and lakes they’d encountered, this liquid was devoid of algae, lichens, or indigenous weeds. At the third pool, the crater lip eased down to a shore of gravel and sand. Vincent squatted on his heels. The water looked somehow
slick
.

At the far end of the first pond, Fernando picked up a large chunk of obsidian and hefted it over his head. Grinning, he walked to the edge and called out, “Hey Vincent, watch this!”

Vincent was not as interested in his friend’s antics as he was in the liquid. It swirled gently with unseen currents, despite the calm air. No seismic rumbles shook the ground. Yet the water moved . . .

He heard a loud yelp, followed by a much bigger splash than he’d expected. Lurching to his feet, he saw that the edge of the pool had crumbled beneath Fernando’s feet, causing him to fall into the pool. With a groan, Vincent ran around the edge of the pond towards Fernando.

Though the pool wasn’t large, the other man thrashed and cried out with very real panic, choking. He clawed at the crumbly shore, finally got his elbows onto solid ground, and tried to haul himself out of the slick water.

To Vincent’s shock, the gelatinous liquid
crawled
over Fernando, clinging, trying to pull him back into the pool. Fernando screamed again.

Before Vincent could reach him, his friend managed to scramble onto the dry ground and collapse in the dirt. The thick water oozed off him and trickled down his body, off his feet, and back into the pool, leaving him completely dry.

Vincent arrived, panting, dropped to his knees, shook the other man’s shoulders. “Fernando!”

The man coughed, squeezing his eyelids shut, then with a sharp gasp he flung his eyes open and sat up on the ground. Vincent was amazed to see Fernando’s eyes were covered with a turbulent opalescence; apparently he was blind.

Fernando reached out, waving one hand in the air. “Vincent! Vincent, are you there?”

“I’m here – what can I do? How can I help you?”

Fernando’s voice had a breathy sense of wonder, tinged with madness. “The things I’m seeing! This planet, the natives . . . all the history and memories! So amazing . . .”

He collapsed onto the dirt and began convulsing.

I
n the impact basin where the Children of Amadin had gone, the hilly landscape was studded with rough, pitted boulders from a hardened lava floe. Devon and Antonia’s Trakmaster descended the steep walls of the outer-crater boundary, toiling down loose slopes toward the wide basin of the central-impact scar. Simmering lava continued to blister the landscape, hefting smoke into the sky.

The locater ping from the three overland vehicles grew stronger. “That’s an odd spot to establish a settlement,” Devon said. “I don’t see any ready water supply, native vegetation, or natural shelter.”

“Not much of a promised land,” Antonia agreed.

The Trakmaster rumbled across the crater floor, and ahead they finally spotted the three big vehicles and the camp the religious group had set up – the
ruins
of a camp, Antonia realized with a sinking feeling. The prefabricated shelters were battered hideously, the tents had collapsed. The abandoned Trakmasters looked as if they had been pounded by a meteor storm. She saw colorful scraps of polymer walls and tarpaulins, now covered in soot.

Approaching cautiously, Devon shone the vehicle’s front lights into the smoky pall. When he ground to a halt at the edge of the empty camp, they both stared. The area was still, silent, holding its breath.

“I don’t see anyone,” Antonia said.

Devon drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly before saying, “We may be too late.” He opened the Trakmaster’s hatch and motioned for her to join him. “But I’m not going back to my mother without answers. Come with me to help keep watch. And be careful. If you see anything unusual, let me know right away. Don’t investigate it yourself.”

“Then we’d better stick together.”

Together, they wandered through the eerie ruined camp, finding tools, shredded clothes, battered bins, broken pieces of camp equipment. “These people came here a month ago,” Antonia said, “but this place looks like it’s been abandoned for centuries.”

Devon pressed his lips together, studying details, running possibilities through his mind. “One good storm could account for this . . . but it doesn’t look like it was caused by a storm. It’s something else.”

He crunched along and overturned a small, pitted metal box with his toe. “Sometimes these fanatical groups do strange things. A couple of years ago a guru and his cult stripped themselves naked and stood out in the middle of a growler, claiming they wanted to feel the energy of God. They felt it all right. The only survivor lasted a week in the hospital with severe burns over eighty per cent of his body. The others were just skeletons covered by slabs of cooked flesh.”

The group’s three off-road vehicles sat near one another in various stages of disrepair; the lead Trakmaster slumped on collapsed treads. Jumbled piles of pocked lava boulders formed dikes nearby.

Standing next to the nearest vehicle, Devon ran his fingers over the dimpled surface. Some of the impacts had cut entirely through the hull, leaving ragged holes. The sealant strips around the windows and door hatch were gone, and the cab’s windows had fallen in. He opened the hatch to discover that the interior had been stripped as well. The upholstery on the passenger seats was nothing more than a few frayed remnants. “Something sure tore this up.”

Behind the base of one of the seats, Antonia found a fragment of bone.

Devon’s well-toned face grew grim and his eyes narrowed when she showed him. He held the ivory fragment between his fingers, while scanning the interior of the Trakmaster. “Even a high-velocity abrasive storm can’t blow hard enough to scour flesh from bones
inside
a vehicle.”

Antonia felt sick to her stomach and her tension heightened. She had spent years looking over her shoulder for supposed government assassins, and then she’d been fearful of Jako pursuing her. This danger seemed much less personal, but even more deadly.

“Let’s take a quick look around the camp and inside the other two Trakmasters. There’s got to be some kind of clue.” His voice cracked, and he made a show of clearing his throat. “Stay close to me, and alert. Very alert.”

The remnants of the prefab shelters contained only scraps of light blue cloth and a few more bone fragments. Antonia picked up a pipe from one of the larger tent supports. “Devon, this looks like it’s been
chewed
.”

Inside the lead Trakmaster, they discovered an unusual object composed of strange curves; its oily, obsidian-like surface was studded with reflective crystalline patches. The object gave off an eerie
flowing
sensation, an exotic sense of alienness. Devon picked it up, acting studiously detached in an obvious effort to hide his nervousness from her. “The General collects alien artifacts that pop up now and then, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” He frowned at the relic.

Antonia felt skittish, looking around at the distant scarlet glow of fresh lava. Her eyes stung from the sulfurous vapors in the air. “We should take that and go back home. We’re not forensic archaeologists, and I doubt we can figure out exactly what happened here.”

“You’re right. The General will have to send a larger team if he wants to get to the bottom of this.” His voice sounded tight, though he clearly didn’t want to alarm her. “And it
is
my job to keep you safe. I promised.”

Antonia normally would have insisted that she could keep herself safe, but Devon knew a lot more about the real dangers of Hellhole. “All right,” she said. “Let’s document this, then get out of here.”

After taking a series of images of the ruined camp and marking its location, they picked their way through the rubble back toward their Trakmaster, carrying the unusual alien artifact with them. They moved at a quick pace.

Antonia turned as the strange silence of the dead camp began to throb with a resonant subsonic hum that grew to a furious buzzing. Shocked, the two of them tried to locate the source of the sound. Moraines of gray-black rock from the old pyroclastic flow formed barriers on all sides, sharp and fragile rock piles that would have been a nightmare to traverse on foot.

A cloud of black insects wafted up from the shadows in the rocks, swirling like smoke. “What are those?” Antonia cried.

The swarm curved in the air and darted toward them.

“Never seen them before – but I’m not taking any chances. Come on!” Devon grabbed her hand, and they raced toward the Trakmaster. All scientific curiosity evaporated as the first of the hard-shelled insects struck them. Latching onto Antonia’s arms and neck, the bugs began to slash with razor-sharp mandibles.

Although bugs landed on him as well, Devon swatted some of them off Antonia and pushed her ahead of him so she could reach the vehicle first. “Get inside!” The cab’s hatch was partly open, and she slid through the gap. Devon leaped inside after her as a handful of outlier insects swirled around them. Working together, she and Devon strained to seal the hatch, but a last spurt of ravenous bugs slipped in. From outside, Antonia heard a sound like shotgun pellets peppering the hull. Swarming beetles smashed themselves against the reinforced windshield and hammered the sides of the Trakmaster.

Dozens of the hungry insects buzzed about inside the cab, and Antonia dealt with several that bit into her arms and neck. She knocked them away and smashed them against hard surfaces with the side of her fist; another landed on Devon’s back, and she slapped it aside and crushed it on the dashboard.

“I’ll take care of these. Just get us moving – go!” A bug flew at her face, and she swatted it out of the air. Antonia couldn’t stop thinking of the other three battered vehicles, the scraps of shredded upholstery, the fragments of chewed bone.

The high-horsepower engine was already running, and Devon accelerated. The rugged tracks spat loose dirt and broken stones, grabbing for traction as the heavy vehicle lurched over bumpy terrain toward the steep crater wall. The native bugs continued to smack into the windshield with such force that they left tiny crazed divots.

Antonia heard more buzzing, watched two beetles crawl through the ventilation screens. “Devon, the air intakes!”

Without taking his eyes from the path ahead so he could keep them moving, he worked controls with his left hand. “There, sealed off the outside source.” Antonia wondered how long the block would last.

In the rear imager, she saw that they were pulling away from the cloud of bugs, but thousands might still be clinging to the outer hull, chewing and scuttling. So many had already splattered on the windshield it was hard to see the path ahead, but Devon raced along, nevertheless.

Antonia moved about the vehicle’s interior, methodically dispatching the straggler insects. When she was finished, panting and bleeding from numerous bites, Devon said, “Thanks. Not bad for a newbie. I hate to ask you this, but could you gather some specimens and put them in a container? Maybe someone in Helltown can ID them.”

Antonia scratched at the stinging bites on her arms. “I guess we know what happened to the Children of Amadin. I thought indigenous life forms couldn’t digest Terran proteins?”

“They didn’t have to
digest
us.” Devon looked down at his bleeding bites. “All they had to do was chew and keep chewing until there was nothing left.”

T
he Diadem was no help at all. Even when Keana promised to do whatever her mother wanted, Michella refused to lift a finger on Louis’s behalf. “The matter is closed.” The old woman brushed the conversation aside and moved on to important things.

But Keana would not be so immediately dismissed. “Louis doesn’t deserve this! Admit it, Mother. His only real crime was loving me!”

“What he has or hasn’t done is irrelevant. Thanks to your scandalous actions, the Crais family is mortally offended, and you’ve left me a stinking mess to deal with. No one feels sorry for a man who corrupted the daughter of the Diadem. And you, Keana, are an embarrassment to your family. You have a role to play, even if it’s just window dressing. Now be a dutiful princess and stop drawing unwanted attention to yourself.”

It was the wrong thing to say to her. “Then put me in prison, too. Exile me along with Louis. I doubt Bolton would even care!”

Michella looked impatient. “There are bigger issues at stake than you realize – noble families jockeying for power, the trading of favors, the machinations of strong lords against waning families – and you played right into their hands. We’re talking about the balance of power in the Crown Jewels, and all you can think about is silly romance?”