Machines of Eden (3 page)

Captain Mochizuki was in
his chair, head bleeding, speaking rapidly into his headset mic.
His voice was high, on the edge of breaking, face damp with
perspiration. Lights flashed red everywhere on the instrument
panel. The sky-bot’s cables were dancing this way and that,
overcharged and vibrating.

“
What’s going on?”
John yelled.

Mochizuki ignored him. “ –
say again we have lost our starboard engine and are losing
altitude. Please advise on nearest airfield for emergency
landing.”

There was no reply.
Mochizuki slammed his fist against a console. “Mayday, mayday, this
is PAC-M-flight 339, our starboard engine is gone and we are going
down. Engaged by hostile fire, coordinates – ”

John
stared.
Hostile fire?
The war is over.

No
, came the familiar voice of Sergeant Wiley, in his
head.
It’s never over.

John
grabbed Mochizuki’s shoulder. “What hit us?”

“
SAM. Came out of nowhere,
not a word of warning from Lucky or the onboard
systems.”

John
shot a look at the little sky-bot. A thin tendril of white
smoke was drifting from a seal on the side of the cylinder. A small
motor-driven hatch on top was opening and closing several times a
second.

“
Your bot’s
flipped!”

Mochizuki shook his head,
concentrating on hitting several switches and keeping his hands on
the stick. “Lucky’s been with me for years, he’s solid.”

“
I’m telling you,
y
our bot has flipped!”
John
reached over and yanked the
sky-bot’s cables from the console in front of it. There was a
shower of sparks and the smell of melted electronics, and the bot
did an emergency shutdown that ended in a high-pitched
whine.

“
Hey!” Mochizuki screamed
in protest. “You killed my sky-bot!”

“
Can you
manually
set her down on
the water?” said
John
.

“
I used to be able to.”
Mochizuki’s knuckles were white on the controls. “Be a lot harder
without Lucky.”

John
watched the ocean come up to meet them, moon glinting like
silver on a thousand little waves.

First, pain.

Thick pain, hammering just
behind his eyes. He debated opening them, decided he would, and
then squeezed them shut again with a groan.

John was lying
on a beach of brilliant
white sand that stretched away in either direction to the
horizon. The glare of the brief glimpse doubled the throbbing
behind his eyes.

How did I get here? And
what day is it?

A moment later, though, he
opened his eyes again, this time in a miserly squint. It was
beautiful. Before him lapped the turquoise water of a lagoon from
paradise, as deep and blue as any pic or holo he’d ever seen. A
dreamlike sense of lassitude crept over him. If this
was
a dream
than
it was a nice
dream, and he’d had few enough of those to appreciate this one. He
would wake up soon enough, probably back in Recovery, so it made
sense to enjoy it.

But behind the throbbing
pain behind his eyes and the surreal beach was a nagging thought
that shouldered its way into full consciousness. The sun was too
hot for this to be a dream, the sound of the surf too wet, the sand
too gritty in his teeth. This was real.

That thought made his eyes
open a second time, and stay open.

He squinted against the
glare, doubly bright off sand and water. His
back was
damp, and he rolled to one
side and saw that the depression
he
’d been lying in was soaking wet.
He licked his lips and tasted salt, not the metallic saline of
blood, but the brine of the wide blue expanse in front of him. He
sat up and rolled his head on his shoulders. There was no
appreciable increase in pain. That was good. He gave both arms and
both legs a shake. Other than a deep ache and incredible stiffness,
he was intact.

His physical
discomfort
reinforced the reality of his
situation.
He reached down to his ankles,
stretching his back and hamstrings.
That
felt better.
The surf around him was
pleasantly cool,
easing the hot glare of
the sun,
and a warm breeze made him want
to slide back down into unconsciousness. Instead, he opened his
eyes a little.

It suddenly occurred
to
John
that if
he sat on a beach facing the open sea, there must be a landmass
behind him, and he pivoted. A wall of dense tropical green met his
gaze. A few coconut palms with slim gray trunks served as an
advance guard ahead of the main jungle, looming out over the sand,
but for the most part the foliage followed a set boundary down the
beach in either direction.

He was aware of an almost
total silence. The ocean lapped quietly at the sand. Far out he
could see the white crests of real waves, but they lost all power
long before they reached the beach. There were no cries of gulls or
other seabirds, and behind him the jungle was devoid of the usual
faunal cacophony
common to the
tropics
. That was enough to make him truly
uneasy.

Real. But not as it should
be.

He stood up with gritted
teeth and hung there for a minute or two, letting his body reorient
and fighting back a sudden swirl of nausea. H
is face
felt puffy
with
sunburn and
realized that he was intensely thirsty. He wondered how long he had
lain there.

He walked toward the
nearest coconut palm. It jutted out at a low angle, almost
horizontal for several meters, before rising sharply
to a head with broad leaves that cast a
substantial shadow on the sand below
.
Scattered beneath were dried brown fronds and old coconut
husks
that
made a
dry rustling under his feet. He sat on the long trunk in the shade
and tried to think.

He was on a beach. The
information his senses were giving him and his pain all seemed to
indicate that this was real. He had experienced some incredibly
persuasive dreams before, especially in Recovery when the meds were
wearing off, but this wasn’t like that. This felt real. He dug his
fingers into the rutted trunk.

This
is
real.
But where does that leave me? And how did I come here?
He
was having
trouble
remember
ing
much at all about the last few
days.

Already the dreaminess was
leaving him. Getting out of the sun and into the shade had
something to do with it. His mind began to revive fully, and all
his latent energies sent out feelers to feed the information his
mind needed into the central cortex and up to the various lobes
where the information built sequence on sequence into cause,
effect, strategy, and action.

That was the way it was.
The mind was a computer, pure and simple, needing only water and
carbon and a few other little necessaries just as its plastic and
silicon imitations needed electricity.
He
knew computers. It helped to reduce the human mind into such
accessible terms. It enabled him to get a handle on things, to
control his situation, and to formulate plans of action.

He studied the beach. It
stretched far away before him, a white band with a green wall on
one hand and a rippling blue glass on the other. At the very edge
of his sight the beach bent away to the left and out of
sight
, kilometers
distant
. He turned and saw the same thing
in the other direction. There were no tracks or marks of any kind
on the sand, and no rocks jutted up from the beach or shallows. He
was overwhelmed with a sense of artificiality. He told himself it
was just a feeling, and he knew it was, but his mind retained the
impression of repetitive monotony, as though it were a holographic
that had run out of code and simply repeated itself
endlessly.

There was nothing to
salvage in sight. He had the clothes he was wearing, a drab
short-sleeved military shirt and cargo pants. An impulse born of
habit caused him to pat his inner thigh, and he was relieved to
feel the comforting profile of the slim mini-toolkit strapped
there. At least he had something to work with beside his bare
hands, although it would do him little good in the
jungle.

Things were coming back to
him now. Discharge, flight, Mochizuki. And then… the last part was
too chaotic in his memory to give him more than a vague picture of
night-time danger and the fear that had accompanied it.

Doesn’t matter right now.
Right now I have to get out of the sun and get some intel. I’m
here, like it or not. Wherever here is.

He re
ached down and selected a heavy
,
dead
palm frond, breaking off the blades
from the central stalk until he had a thick, tapered club. It was
flimsy, but for the moment it would do to help him bat aside the
underbrush of the forest in front.

Because
the forest
is where I
have to go.

The very distance of the
beach,
bare sand for kilometers
in either direction, decided
John
against following it.
He could see that there was nowhere to go that
way, and t
he sea was empty
behind
. T
hat left
only the emerald tangle before him. The wild profusion and variety
of the jungle growth was a sharp contrast from the monochromatic
smoothness of the sand and sea. This was a three-dimensional
environment that could be penetrated and occupied.

He started forward
into the trees
.
Instantly the heat and humidity engulfed him. Out of the direct
sunlight the heat lost direction and came from all sides at
once
, even radiating down from the foliage
overhead
. Sweat burst out across his face.
He breathed deep and inhaled the musky, earthy scents of mud, rot,
chlorophyll, papaya, and sheer life. An insect whined against his
cheek, and then there were hundreds and he staggered as he swiped
at them. His feet slipped on the sodden brown layers of
decomposition underneath. Vines and creepers slanted across his
field of vision, diagonals to the verticals of the trees. The light
was a deep green, filtered from above, only occasionally breaking
through the canopy in dappled stripes of gold.

He stopped fighting the
jungle and stood motionless, ignoring the buzzing insects, the
heat, the damp. He closed his eyes.

Think
.

There was no way to tell
where he was. It could be mainland, it could be an island, it could
be anywhere. If it was an island, the only way to tell would be to
follow the beach and see if it ended up at the beginning. If the
island was large, that could take days.

A better way would be to
find some high ground and observe from an elevation. But there was
no guarantee that there was any high ground, or that he could find
it. In this steaming tangle of trees, he might head in the wrong
direction and never see a hill.

Trees. I need a
tree.

He scanned the jungle. A
large tree trunk off to his right looked promising, and moving
closer he saw that it was actually two trees, massive warty things
that grew together in a writhing embrace. Enough creepers wrapped
around the trunks to provide easy hand and foot holds. He started
climbing.

The light became a brighter
green. The air grew fresher. He pushed upward through a cluster of
spade-shaped leaves that smelled of licorice, and broke into sun.
The canopy stretched away on all sides, but the trees he was
climbing continued upward at least two more meters. He kept
climbing until he found a fork to rest his knee in near the top,
and studied his position.

Seaward there was nothing
but turquoise waves, and the beach was still as empty as it had
looked from ground-level. He turned his attention to the
land.

Hills began rising from
the jungle perhaps a kilometer distant, thickly forested and
without any distinguishing feature beyond an abrupt crest. Past
them he could see
the jungle rise steadily
toward
what looked like cliffs, perhaps a
gorge. A gorge could mean water. He shaded his eyes. It was
impossible to tell at this distance what lay beyond the gorge, if
anything. Perhaps another beach. His perch was not tall enough to
reveal whether this was an island, but a view from the top of one
of the hills would.

John
started back down the tree, analyzing the information. He
still didn’t know where he was, but a view from the hills would
fill in some of the pieces. It was midday; plenty of time to get
there before evening.