The Other Tree (28 page)

Emir drew his gun almost before registering the looming shape before him, but Docker was already firing. Two steady shots as he ran towards the hulking form of the
Verhkoyanskiy
tiger. It was crouched before a doorway in the wall, one paw on the dry steps.

It roared in pained fury at the first bullet, launching away down the trail in a charge of muscle. By the second bullet, all that remained was a cloud of dust and a spatter of blood trailing across the sand. A low rumble shook the canyon, and the opening in the rock started to grind shut.

“Everyone through!” called Docker as Bale leapt through the doorway. “Emir!”

Emir raced towards the shrinking gap as Roman slipped through and down the stairs. Docker stood just inside the sliding rock face as Emir pounded the last few steps towards the fast-closing entrance. His foot hit the ground and the mechanics of it faded into a single-minded movement. He made a running leap towards the gap, launching forward into the darkness. He felt the closing walls scrape his shoulders before he landed solidly on the cool, dusty stairs.

Ragged breathing filled the darkness before a halogen lamp flared into light.

“I think we have some catching up to do,” said Docker dryly.

* * *

The motorcade snaked across the countryside with barely a noise beyond the soft rustle of grit on unsealed roads. It was an extremely modest procession by SinaCorp standards—two motorcycle scouts, three assault Jeeps, and an armoured four-wheel drive. All were equipped with patented silencer technology, and watching the vehicles churn over the road without a noise gave the disconcerting impression that both your eardrums had irreparably burst.

Spindly fruit trees dotted dried-up fields, and the occasional almond orchard billowed green against the unrelenting desert glare. Marrick looked thoughtfully through the deeply tinted vehicle window, ghostly traces of microchip lacework visible on the end pieces of her sunglasses.

“Nine years ago, Massari was a wasteland,” said Marrick.

Hoyle looked up from his electronic pad. He declined to comment that Massari still looked like a wasteland, just with more factories and mansions on the rugged skyline.

“Insufficient irrigation, struggling agriculture, unemployment,” said Marrick, the reflection of half-finished houses skimming past on her sunglasses. “SinaCorp came and provided training to the rural women. We funded a medical centre to create a healthy workforce, a school to prepare the next generation, and child care to free up an entire demographic of employees.”

And of course, the factories
, thought Hoyle.

Smelters, manufacturing, construction, and recycling. He had the impression there was a telecommunications call centre somewhere here too. Hoyle had overseen the shipment of conversation booklets on sixty-two national sports and the local weather in one hundred and forty-three cities.

“Give people wealth, and industry will grow,” continued Marrick. “Supply and demand, the engine of human improvement. People don’t need charity. People need industry.”

To a significant extent, Hoyle agreed. There was something magnificent about a full-blown economy, buying and selling and seething in cycles of push and pull, like a living organism on the verge of tearing itself apart. It was one of the reasons Hoyle had originally gone into engineering. It had always fascinated him how animals didn’t just explode at the sheer mess of forces pulling in all directions—blood pulsing through arteries, peristalsis squeezing along endless intestines, muscles contracting, swinging bones attached to slender tendons, and a heart that pounded hard enough to drive it all. And somehow, instead of spattering across the walls or collapsing into throbbing goop, it all held together. Somehow.

It did, on occasion, go wrong.organs failed, immune systems over-reacted, cells went rogue, and in rare instances, animals exploded. Hoyle had witnessed this once, and aside from only wearing dark suits these days, he was certain it had not affected him psychologically in any serious way. The same thing happened to economies—they overheated, or were under-stimulated, or bad decisions were made in subprime mortgage markets. You had to know when to change gears.

Hoyle swished a finger across the slick silver pad.

“We’ll reach the Perison Base in twenty-four minutes,” said Hoyle.

Marrick watched a man by the side of the road, fitting an MP3 player to his donkey.

“They say you can’t fix the world in one lifetime, but it depends on how long that lifetime is,” said Marrick, her gaze seeming to stretch beyond the desert. “Is Scarab ready to go?”

“Primed and loaded. Shall I tell the extraction team to stand by?”

There was a pause, and Hoyle couldn’t tell whether Marrick was deep in contemplation or reading the GPS data on her sunglasses.

“Have them prepare the Wasp,” said Marrick. “Xian-Fei to pilot. I don’t want any screw-ups.”

Reflexively, Hoyle’s fingers started tapping across his pad, while his brain was occupied preventing his mouth from stating the obvious.

Certainly, the Wasp was an assault craft like no other. Barely out of beta testing, it had three-hundred-and-sixty degree manoeuvrability at six-hundred kilometres an hour, with stationary hover stability within seven millimetres at an altitude of over a kilometre. It was armoured to withstand concussive forces exceeding a direct missile strike, and it could function submerged to depths of over eight hundred metres. Xian-Fei could fly the Wasp through a hurricane, through a war zone, through a forest full of butterflies without so much as a scratch or a bug smear. Unfortunately, Xian-Fei was one of the most humourless people Hoyle had ever met, having been given away to a martial arts temple at six months, and capable of pulling out your Adam’s apple with her pinkie by age three. That, however, was not the problem.

The Wasp could only carry a single passenger, aside from the pilot.

“And the extraction team?” asked Hoyle.

“Take a closer look at the map, Hoyle,” said Marrick. “I don’t think we’ll be needing them.”

14

The stairs had spiralled downwards into a narrow tunnel, with smooth, straight walls of ochre clay. The flat, sanded ceiling extended about a metre overhead, and the floor was even grey schist, sloping visibly downwards. The air was cool and dry, with a strange, stale odour, like an untouched bedroom in a long-deserted house.

Chris and Luke had run as fast as they dared, half-expecting Bunsen to follow them inside. As they’d hurried along the corridor, they had heard muffled bangs coming from somewhere far behind them, but then it had fallen into a disconcerting silence. Without the reassuring noises of leaves, insects, or distant traffic, it was like being sealed in a tomb. Chris fell into a steady march, pacing herself for what could be a long walk, but acutely aware of how dangerous it would be if SinaCorp were to catch up.

There was no going back now. Travelling from continent to continent, wandering through museums and scouring books—that had been the easy part. Everything came down to what happened next, these last, crucial hours when it would all come together, or all would be lost.

Luke’s flashlight flickered and failed.

“Wait up,” said Luke.

Chris swept her beam of light slowly over the walls while Luke wound up his flashlight.

“Why can’t you use ethanol cells like everyone else?” asked Chris.

“Ask me again when your battery dies, and I’m still going. I thought you’d be into sustainability.”

“Not when I have to stop every ten minutes while being pursued by armed mercenaries in a secret underground corridor with limited air.”

Luke clicked his flashlight back on, and a greenish beam lit the floor.

“Is it just me or is it getting steeper?” said Luke.

The floor was, in fact, sloping more steeply downwards—not impractically so, but enough to make you hope very much that you wouldn’t be coming back the same way. Chris had a brief nightmarish vision of the ground turning into a near-vertical slide, sending them plummeting into the volcanic depths of the earth.

As the path took them deeper underground, the air took on a slight chill. The ground was becoming a little rougher, as though the builders had decided to go for a more natural finish. The walls were less evenly planed, with bumps and hollows where the clay had been casually layered on. Chris noticed she had to breathe much deeper, and more frequently, to get enough air.

“We should have brought a canary,” panted Luke.

“I did,” grinned Chris, slapping Luke on the shoulder.

However, it wasn’t long before Chris and Luke had to break out their breathing equipment, strapping small clear masks over their noses and mouths, connecting the hoses to compact tanks of oxygen. They had been unable to afford anything more sophisticated, and as it was Chris wasn’t sure how they were going to get home. Things like that just seemed to sort themselves out once all the excitement was over. However, she had the niggling feeling she’d been ignoring things which were actually more important than she’d realised.

She had been so focused on getting to the Tree of Life that she had pushed everything else from her mind. She hadn’t allowed herself to be distracted by thoughts of the future, or the needs of others, or her own feelings. She had avoided thinking about anything beyond getting to that moment when she held the fruit in her hand. Somehow, once the smooth, solid flesh lay heavy in her palm, everything else would fall into place.

As the air grew steadily thinner, the shadows seemed to take on a physical weight, pressing in on their weakly waving beams of light. Chris alternated between three breaths of tank oxygen and two breaths of ambient air, ignoring Luke’s mutterings about brain damage.

“Am I starting to hallucinate, or are we getting bigger?” said Luke, checking the meter on his oxygen tank.

Halfway to empty.

Luke turned to look back the way they had come and was startled to see how steep the incline actually was. Sections of the path undulated like a fairground slippery dip, and anything further than about ten metres back was obscured by the sloping ceiling.

“The tunnel’s getting smaller,” said Chris.

She didn’t slow or look back. In the past hour, there had been several occasions when she thought she could hear something echoing faintly through the darkness behind them. Whether it was SinaCorp, the
Verhkoyanskiy
tiger, or something else lurking in the dark, she didn’t have time for it.

There was someone waiting for her, someone counting on her. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just get this done and go home.

Luke had noticed the passageway getting smaller with increasing apprehension. He had also noticed the corridor looking progressively less like a hallway you would find in someone’s house and increasingly like something you would find wending its way under a prison wall. Smooth clay surfaces had given way to coarse gritstone walls, roughly hewn from the surrounding rock. The rust-coloured ceiling stooped in ragged chunks, blending into the walls.

A thick layer of sand covered the uneven floor, and Chris and Luke had to stoop to continue down the tunnel, skidding on the grit as the ground sloped ever downward. Chris was breathing exclusively from the oxygen tank now—the atmospheric air seemed to suck the oxygen from her lungs.

Luke watched the needle on his oxygen tank dropping steadily lower, and the part of him that didn’t want to die screamed at him to turn back.

However, the other part of Luke, the part which had set him on this course, the part which largely shunned the world, would not be moved.
Show me
, it demanded.
Through death and devastation, through all you’ve endured and all you’ve seen, through all you’ve suffered and all you’ve anguished, burning into a hollow man through your semblance of a life—show me something real
.

This part didn’t so much shout down the other part as obliterate it like a moon-sized meteor hitting a stick insect.

It wasn’t long before Chris and Luke were forced into a painful, semi-crouching shuffle as the tunnel became progressively tighter, like a rocky windpipe slowly constricting. Sweat ran down Chris’s neck, and her pack kept knocking into the ceiling, sending showers of crumbly rock onto Luke.

“If this leads to a dead-end piled with skeletons, we’re going to have words,” said Luke.

He noticed that Chris hadn’t checked the levels on her oxygen tank, and he suspected she wasn’t going to. She would tease him about the Crusades, but she seemed oblivious to the same fervour and recklessness in her own actions. Luke suddenly became aware of a soft clumping noise coming from behind them, approaching quickly.

Chris and Luke both turned their flashlights back towards the passageway, the floor now indistinct from the walls. The irregular clumping sound was accompanied by a rattling hiss, and Chris’s hand was slippery with sweat as she gripped the aluminium barrel of her flashlight. She briefly regretted not having purchased the deluxe Iron Club flashlight, which had come with a complimentary machete in three fun colours.

Chris and Luke tensed as the noise grew closer, and something glinted in the shadows, jerking erratically. A dark object flew down the passageway, bouncing towards them in a shower of falling grit before rolling to rest at their feet.

Don’t let it be a grenade
, thought Luke.

Don’t let it be a severed head
, thought Chris.

A dull, dented object lay in the sand, neither ticking nor oozing blood. Chris nudged it with her foot, and when it didn’t explode or groan, she flipped it over with a plastic clack. It was some kind of helmet with a broken glass visor, exposed circuitry visible through the cracked, curving surface.

“They’re catching up,” said Chris.

With some manoeuvring reminiscent of a six-point turn or a European folk dance, Chris managed to turn around and shuffled faster down the tunnel.

“This would be a really awkward place for a showdown,” muttered Luke.

This statement became even truer when the tunnel, unsurprisingly, became even smaller. It was now little more than a crawlspace, and both Chris and Luke were forced onto their hands and knees, pushing their packs along the ground in front of them. They had argued briefly about who should go first, once it became clear they would have to proceed in single file. Chris had insisted that Luke lead, since he was the priest. Luke wasn’t sure exactly how this formed an argument, but Chris had been very insistent about wanting to bring up the rear, so she could kick SinaCorp in the face should the need arise.