Prodigal (5 page)

“No joy, Commander?” Pitch asked.

“We’ll never narrow it down banging away like this,” Nathan replied, motioning for the others to join him. They huddled close together, while Nathan changed his scanner configuration.

“Our only shot is to go passive, broadening our range with a combined sweep. Between the three of us, we should be able to cross-section the entire cavern. That should at least get us going in the right direction.”

Pitch and Kellean nodded, switching their own scanners to passive mode. The group then turned around and formed a reverse circle, standing at each other’s backs so their sensors would overlap. Gradually, the excited pings melted away into an oppressive stillness. Minutes passed before another reading started to take shape—an amorphous form, crawling across the walls like some viscous liquid.

“Any idea what that is?” Pitch whispered.

Kellean stepped backward, pressing her back into the circle. “It looks
alive
.”

“I don’t know about that,” Nathan said, watching his scanner as the surges peeled off into one of the tunnels. “But I do believe we found our point of origin.”

He pointed toward a small ledge, about a three-meter rise over their heads. Past that was another opening, just barely visible from where they stood.

“Come on,” Nathan said.

Pitch went up first, getting a boost from Nathan. Kellean followed, scrambling up the rock face by herself, with a practiced ease that made her climb look effortless. She then reached down to lend Nathan a hand, while he looked back up at her in surprise.

“I’m a Colorado girl,” she said with a shrug, and pulled him up.

The opening was wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side, while Pitch brought up the rear and kept an eye on their backs. Given the history of this place, Nathan couldn’t blame him for being paranoid. The cave
reeked
of malevolence, a dry charge sparking to life the moment they entered.

“Kellean,” he said, forcing himself to think of something else, “was there any record of the colonists ever making it up this far?”

“No, sir,” she replied. “None of the survivors ever mentioned it, but it’s unlikely the civilians would have known anything about military expeditions. SEF kept things pretty tight—no logs, no documentation—so nobody knows entirely what happened.”

“Makes sense,” Pitch said from behind. “Goddamned butchers didn’t want anybody to find out what they did to all those people.”

“And they would’ve gotten away with it,” Kellean reminded him, “if the rescue ships hadn’t arrived ahead of schedule. They must’ve dug this place out as a fallback position. Makes you wonder if they ever had a chance to use it.”

Nathan didn’t need to wonder. He knew the stories—the crimes exposed in lurid detail at the trials of those few soldiers who had made it off Mars in one piece. The Collective had made a show of them for all the world to see. Testimony had gone on for weeks, colonists recounting how the SEF had declared martial law after the Mons outbreak—and the atrocities they committed to slow the spread of the disease. Anybody who fought that hard to survive would have used
every
contingency. Or they would have died trying.

Maybe it was both.

Nathan instantly froze, eyes darting behind the plastic faceplate of his helmet, trying to make sense out of randomized darkness. Somewhere out there, patterns assembled in his peripheral vision—solid, familiar shapes that dissolved when he looked at them directly.

The others reacted to his sudden halt, crouching into ready positions. Nathan held one hand up, a gesture for them to stand by. He then switched his scanner back to active mode, sending out a single ping that bounded down the remaining length of the tunnel. Shielding distorted the return into dead-channel static—but within that blizzard of digital snow, Nathan picked out a recognizable outline.

A head. A torso.

Arms and legs.

A body.

“Move,” he ordered.

The location was only steps away, though the tunnel seemed to extend itself in advance of their march. The entire time, Nathan used his eyes to confirm what the scanner plainly showed. It was impossible to pick out details in the swaying helmet lights, but that did nothing to dispel his certainty. In the confined space, he felt it closing around him like dark matter.

Flesh and bone. Somebody here.

Nathan slowed as the beeps sounding off in his helmet reached a fever pitch, finally stopping when he could hear nothing else. He turned his head from side to side, following the sweep of his scanner as he searched through the gloom for physical evidence of what the device told him. But the proof would not reveal itself—not until he accidentally bumped against it and felt something yield to his touch.

“I’ve got something!” he yelled.

The thing was slumped against the wall, disguised in a mimicry of color and shadow. It only materialized when Nathan kicked it, the resulting deformation bending light and allowing shapes to spring out of nothingness—the same shapes he had seen on the scanner.

“Camochrome,” he pronounced.

Nathan knelt down and felt along the outline of a human form that shimmered in and out of view. He worked his way over the chest plates, eventually finding the smooth, rounded shape of a helmet. Gripping it with both hands, he gave it a hard pull and plucked it off.

A desiccated face stared back.

With no organisms to feed on it, the corpse was remarkably well preserved. Milky eyes, still wide open in amazement, topped pallid cheeks crisscrossed by blue capillary trails. Below that, the jaw stood rigid and open, a desiccated tongue poking from the back of the throat. The close-cropped hair and rank insignia made the dead man easily identifiable—as did the pulse rifle lying at his side.

“I think we found one of your missing soldiers, Kellean,” Pitch said.

Nathan stepped aside as the specialist came forward. She approached the body with trepidation, caught between professional curiosity and revulsion. “He was a lieutenant,” Kellean said. “Full grade—probably a squad commander.” Gingerly, she brushed her fingers against the dead man’s lips, tracing a white powder that had caked against his skin. “Looks like poison. Could have been self-inflicted.”

“So much for having a plan,” Pitch remarked.

“I’m not so sure,” Nathan interjected. He had ventured a few meters past the others, into what appeared to be a tangle of debris littering the cave floor. The lieutenant’s body, however, made those contours take on more ominous dimensions. Nathan nudged his foot against a few of them, exposing more camochrome—more bodies and body parts, silhouettes leaping out at him before retreating back into the dark. There was no telling how many.

“My God,” Kellean said, rising to her feet.

“
These
guys didn’t kill themselves,” Nathan told them. “Poor bastards were blown to pieces.”

Pitch carefully stepped around the remains as he walked toward Nathan. Along the way, he pointed his helmet light at several jagged holes carved out of the cave walls. “Definitely some heavy fire in here,” he said. “Must’ve been one hell of a fight.”

“Looks pretty one-sided to me,” Nathan said, examining the area around him. “I don’t see any other weapons.”

Pitch turned back toward the dead lieutenant. “Blast patterns indicate the shots originated from back there,” he speculated. “Our friend could have been the only one shooting.”

“Which means he killed his buddies, then killed himself.”

“I don’t get it,” Kellean said, a rising tension in her voice. “A squad leader wouldn’t turn on the rest of his men. The SEF code demanded absolute loyalty to the unit. There’s no way it could have gone down like that, sir.”

“Not unless he was ordered to do it.” Since they entered the caverns, Nathan had been filled with the uneasy notion that they were desecrating a tomb—and now he understood why. These men were like Egyptian slaves, executed after digging the Pharaohs’ graves to keep them from revealing the location of secret burial chambers. It was the only way to ensure total security—the only way to make sure that all those treasures followed kings into the afterlife.

“He was protecting something,” Nathan said, and tore away from the others.

He moved as fast as his bulky suit would allow, Pitch and Kellean struggling to catch up. He heard them calling out over the comm link, but dared not answer them lest he lose his resolve. Stumbling over more remains, he left a sepulchral ripple in his wake. Labored breaths echoed within the confines of his helmet, abruptly halting when Nathan finally came across a blind turn. There he stood, waiting for his crewmates—aware of their presence as he was aware of the scanner, which screamed at him in a nonstop deluge of readings.

But it was the
light
that penetrated his senses, to the exclusion of all else. Nathan had seen it from a distance, spilling out from around that corner, growing more intense as he drew closer.

“Do you see it?” he asked the others, hoping that it wasn’t real.

Kellean mouthed the words, but couldn’t speak.

“Can you
feel
that?” Nathan added, seeing from their expressions that they did. So much more than a surge of power, it was the same thing he had seen from orbit: energy
personified,
touching his every nerve ending with a static charge.

The three of them moved together toward it. As they rounded the turn, the pummeling sensation decreased—so quickly that Nathan believed that he had imagined it and merely shared his illusion with the others. That was when the tangible came into focus, and the tunnel opened up into a large inner chamber. The space was astonishing at first glance—even more so as Nathan took in its scale. At least thirty meters deep and twelve meters high, it was stacked floor to ceiling with a trove of equipment. Most of it was for light excavation, probably the stuff used to dig out this bunker; but there were also rows of computers, still active and functional after all these years, as well as a huge weapons cache. Explosives, pulse rifles, pistols, tactical missile launchers—all of them were scattered throughout the bunker, as if they had been assembled here in a hurry.

In total, the find was worth a fortune.

But that wasn’t what caught Nathan’s attention.

At the center of it all, placed with reverent care, were six silver tubes. Arranged in a horizontal spoke formation, each unit pointed in a different direction, meeting at the center. It was from there that the power originated, a low thrum that pulsed with the consistency of a slow heartbeat. A blue glow emanated from the head of each tube, filling the space with the ethereal light they had seen from outside.

“What are those?” Kellean asked.

Nathan already knew—but still, he had to see for himself. Walking toward the tubes, he stepped through a thick haze of frost particles that hovered above the floor. He hesitated for a moment as the others watched, then slowly moved toward the center, where tiny windows offered a view into each tube.

And within each one, a human face stared back at him.

Nathan checked the cryogenic readings, which told him exactly what he feared.

“They’re alive,” he said.

Lea Prism took measure of herself the way she always did—in fleeting glimpses, caught by accident, off some reflective surface that obscured her face in shadow. Tonight it was a window, her face flanked by pinpoint stars and glowing LEDs, the flood of virtual monitors elongating her features in a trick of the light. It was a mission ritual: a pause followed by a sideways glance, just to see how much the person staring back at her had changed since the last time.