The Exodus Towers (20 page)

Then she took apart the Zippo while David kept a close vigil on the hundreds of needle-tipped branches around them. Sam dumped the lighter fluid onto the shirt, but only a few
drops came out. “Shit,” she muttered. “Grillo, anything flammable in your vehicles? Liquor, a butane stove, anything?”

“We’re checking,” he said.

Sam quickly reassembled the lighter, before all the fumes vanished. She rolled the wheel and this time it produced a flame on the first try. Brow furrowed in concentration, she held it to the makeshift torch and watched with grim satisfaction as the torn, bloodied cloth took flame.

“We found some road flares,” Grillo said in her ear. “Would that work?”

“Worth a shot,” she said. “Faisal! You still there?”

“I’m here.” His voice sounded faint, and in a different place than before.

She told him to run back to the barricade and get the flares from Grillo. While he did that, Sam had David stand in the center of their cavity while she walked around him, waving the torch at the closest branches. They receded more violently from the bigger flame, making a sound like two shards of glass rubbing together when they moved. Gradually she managed to increase their space to something the size of a small car. A few new branches tried to snake their way in, so she kept at it until the bright red glow of a signal flare could be seen in the haze.

“I see your torch,” Faisal said.

“Meet you halfway. Be careful, they grow back in behind you pretty quick.”

A minute later the three were reunited. Faisal handed an extra flare to both her and David, and Sam saw he had one extra stuffed into his front pants pocket. She inspected hers and saw text on the side indicating it would last for one hour.

“All right, Grillo,” Sam said. “Your mystery fog is coming from some kind of bizarro plant. Or … reef. A strange fucking alien tree. I don’t know what the hell it is, but if you want my opinion, it’s not ours. Are we done here?”

“Faisal described it to me,” Grillo said. “I think it’s worth exploring the crash site. The traitors dropped a farm platform here, and if there was something related to the Builders aboard, that would be very interesting to know. Especially if it has now been … unleashed.”

She grimaced. “The flares only last an hour.”

“Then you’d better get started,” Grillo replied.

Sam bit back a snide response and looked at her two companions. “You’re both wearing environment suits in a forest of knives. You can bug out if you want; I’ll handle this.”

In unison they shook their heads, and Sam understood. They had orders.

“Follow me, then,” she said for the second time.

With fire, traversing the nightmare forest became easy. Sam went first, swiping her makeshift torch in slow, wide arcs. The branches shrank away with their glassy crackling sound.

She glanced over her shoulder every few steps. The two soldiers waved their flares about as if they were trying to flag down an aircraft. Sparks dripped from the bright red fires, and thick smoke billowed off until it merged with the foggy soup around them.

Every ten steps or so Samantha dropped to a knee, listened for a moment, and then selected a few pieces of the rubble that littered the ground. She arranged these in an arrow pointing in the direction in which they walked.

After a few hundred meters of this, she began to see signs of the explosion that resulted when the farm platform came down. Blackened debris littered the ground, skittering away when kicked by their boots as they walked. The asphalt road, as worn as any in Darwin, had a web of cracks laced across it. In places entire chunks were gone, revealing the hardpan beneath.

The sky grew dark above them as they went. Sometimes the fog above Sam’s head would dissipate enough to see more than a few meters up. The lattice of crystalline branches extended far above their heads here, half as tall as the office buildings she knew loomed around them, hidden by the cloud and the darkness.

Then, as suddenly as it had enveloped them, the branches ended, and the cloud thinned dramatically, turning from a static, oppressive soup to a patchy, swirling, silent maelstrom. Lit by her torch and the men’s reddish flares, the wafts of fog looked like otherworldly ghosts.

Samantha called a halt and took a knee again.

She realized they’d come to the edge of a giant dome within the glassy lattice. Twenty meters high at least, and the same across, she thought, perfect in its shape. Distances were hard to ascertain as wafts of the thick fog still drifted through the area. These puffs rose from the center of the space, as if hot air pushed them from below. If she had a religious bone in her body, she might have said they looked like souls ascending.

“Heat,” she muttered. The tension of their situation, and the long walk, had masked it, but she now felt the oppressive heat of the place.

David and Faisal knelt behind her, taking in the dome in silence from behind the curved plastic masks of their environment suits. Their breaths fogged the clear material in rapid puffs that vanished a heartbeat later as processors pulled moisture from the sealed outfits. Faisal drew his towel-wrapped arm across his mask to wipe away a fine pattern of droplets. The towel looked soaked.

She glanced at each of their chests, noted the green light of containment on each, and turned back to the view.

The ground beneath the dome sloped downward. A crater, she realized, and they were perched on the lip. She followed the broken ground to the center and sucked in her breath.

Faisal gasped. He saw it at the same time she did.

The boot and leg of a yellow environment suit, protruding through the morass of swirling fog. Whether the human contents were still within she couldn’t see. More scraps of thick yellow material lay beyond the leg, forming a rough line toward the very center of the dome’s floor.

“This mission,” Samantha said, “just went off the ‘what the fuck’ chart.”

“What are you seeing?” Grillo asked, his voice laced with static now.

Sam rattled off the important details quickly: bits of a suit, torn to pieces. Some weird dome around a crater, the swirling mists. “My tactical instincts are telling me to get the hell out of here,” she concluded. “But I’m guessing you feel otherwise.”

“I do.”

She grunted, annoyance brewing within. Skyler would have argued with her. He would have left
room
for argument, and no matter what harebrained scheme he’d cooked up, if Sam said “scuttle,” he’d almost always do just that. Grillo’s manner somehow made her feel guilty when she disagreed, and his commitment to the mission bordered on dangerous.

She wondered what would happen if she told him to get fucked, and went back. Would he throw her back in jail? Threaten Kelly?

Would these two tagalongs even let her retreat? For the first time she saw them as escorts rather than helpers. Maybe they’d turn their guns on her, force her to proceed.

Best not to test it, she decided. The previous group Grillo had sent in was not combat trained, or so he’d implied. So far she hadn’t seen anything here she couldn’t handle.

“Fine,” she replied to Grillo, and then looked at her two companions. “Let’s keep moving.”

She stepped slowly toward the center of the crater, giving a wide berth around the severed pant leg. A dinner-plate-sized pool of blood surrounded the open end of the garment fragment. She decided not to check if a leg remained inside; the answer seemed obvious.

Breathing became a chore. The air stifling, like a sauna run amok. Sam watched as the improvised torch in her hand burned out, and she set it aside. David would want to get his rifle back together, but the stock would need to cool first.

She decided to save her flare for now and crept farther ahead, aware of her two companions following behind. They still held their flares aloft, more to light the strange alien cathedral than for any other reason.

Near the center of the impact crater, the ground ended at a jagged edge of earth and concrete. It was a circular opening to some kind of pit, descending down into blackness so choked with fog that the fiery light from the two flares could not illuminate much beyond the lip.

A twisted bundle of the glassy branches, thick as a tree trunk, rose up from the middle of the hole, stretching high above them before disappearing into the cloud. The fog
wafted off this column in thick tendrils, rising swiftly toward whatever was above.

Sam looked at Faisal and jerked her head toward the hole. He took the hint and tossed his flare in. The beacon fell into the cloud, like an upside-down view of a firework launched into smoky skies. The light became a faint glowing orb and came to rest ten or fifteen meters below. The shape of the reddish glow resembled a crescent moon, and Samantha realized the flare was partially obscured by some giant boulder or object resting on the floor of the depression.

That’s what made the crater
, she realized.
And sprouted these vines
.

“I don’t think they dropped a farm platform here,” she said for Grillo’s benefit.

“Explain,” he said.

“We found a pit, in the center of the crater. There’s something at the bottom, big as one of your trucks, and round. Round
ish
.”

A brief silence followed. David took advantage of the pause to put his rifle back together and wipe moisture from his helmet’s curved plastic mask.

“Could be some piece of machinery that survived reentry. A reactor, even.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s what these goddamn branches are sprouting from.”

Faisal sucked in a breath. She glanced around, looking for what spooked him, but saw nothing. When she turned to him, he was staring at her with disgust. The expression vanished the instant their eyes met.

“Something wrong, Faisal?”

He looked down his nose at her and shook his head.

Grillo’s voice brought her back to the moment. “Can you climb down and get a closer look?”

Sam knew that no answer other than “Sure” would fly. She sent Faisal back to the truck to get a rope. When he left earshot, she turned her headset off and looked at David. “Why’s he so uptight all the sudden?”

David regarded her. “You should watch your tongue.”

“What the fuck did I say?”

David narrowed his eyes. “I’m not as devout as them, so I can tell you. ‘Goddamn’ is like a punch in the gut. Show some respect. It doesn’t cost you anything.”

Samantha thought back to the little prayer circle she’d witnessed just before they climbed down the barricade.
Them? Grillo is a fucking Jacobite?

She thought up and promptly swallowed a half-dozen snide, disrespectful replies, and waited. In the silence she pondered the revelation. Grillo certainly did have a minister’s demeanor, but his reputation as a ruthless slumlord didn’t mesh. She thought it possible he was just pandering to the sect to earn their support, and anyway it didn’t really matter if he’d thrown in with the weirdos or not. Her situation had nothing to do with it.

Faisal returned ten uncomfortable minutes later with a bundle of nylon rope. The two men helped Samantha tie it around her waist, across her shoulders, and then through loops on her pants and vest.

In no time she found herself leaning backward over the vertical pit, holding the rope with two hands, her toes resting on the edge of the precipice. She leaned farther to put her full weight on the line, watching David and Faisal as they grunted with effort to hold her in place.

“Lower me down,” she told them. “One step at a time, yeah?”

The heat became unbearable. Sam could do nothing on the descent except focus on her footing and breathing. The walls of the pit were a cross section of hard-packed earth, layers of foundational concrete reinforced with iron rebar, and the odd bit of pipe or wiring conduit. None of this showed the charred, blackened evidence of a major explosion like the crater above.

Near the bottom she cleared the fog, and the floor of the pit came clearly into view. Sam unslung her rifle and flipped on its barrel-mounted LED, bathing the place in crisp white light.

“Stop!” she called out immediately. The rope tugged her in a rough snap, her progress halting.

The floor of the pit shimmered and rippled. Black water,
how deep she couldn’t guess.
This is a sinkhole
, she thought. The object had impacted above, and in the violence of that, runoff water had begun to pool down here, eventually causing the ground above to collapse. The water moved in one direction, implying a drainage path that kept the hole from filling to the top.

“Sam? Report,” Grillo said, almost unintelligible with the static.

She ignored him.

In the center of the circular pit, partially submerged, lay an oblong shape that reminded her of pictures of the Builders’ shell that capped the space elevator, only much smaller in scale. The surface of it was so black it seemed to drink in the light when her beam swept across it. Flickering light from the partially submerged flare cast the walls of the pit behind it in a dance of bright red and deep shadow. Backlit so, the object took on a demonic quality that brought goose bumps to her arms despite the stifling heat.

From the object’s “tail” came the bundle of glassy, segmented branches. The tangle of alien limbs stretched up in a straight line into the fog above. Unlike the black alien object from which they came, the branches seemed to glow in the light from her gun, their pale blue coloring almost jewel-like without the fog surrounding them.

“You okay down there?” David called out.

“Yeah,” she whispered. Then louder, “Yes. Lower me a meter or so. There’s water.”

After a series of short drops and barked commands, David and Faisal managed to lower her slowly into the balmy water, warm as a bath. Her feet touched broken, uneven ground when the depth had submerged her to mid-thigh. “I’m down,” she called up.

Sam crept slowly around the perimeter of the pit, her gun trained on the alien mass that loomed just a few meters away. The heat, she realized, had a pulse to it, rising and falling a few degrees every second or two. The air smelled of tar and burned charcoal.