The Plague Forge [ARC] (29 page)

Skyler grinned, happy that she’d reached the same conclusion he had. He saw no reason to debate the outcome of her suggestion now, deciding instead to wait and see if she made the next logical jump on her own.

Ana threw a handful of sand down the hall. Two more sections of floor proved missing, on opposite sides from each other, leaving only a narrow section in the middle upon which to walk. Skyler didn’t like being forced down the center of the hall like that, but there was no other way. He went first, crossed without incident, and waited until Ana did the same. On a whim, while he waited he turned on the light affixed to his rifle and aimed it down into the pit. The void stretched farther than his beam could illuminate, and Skyler felt a chill course through him. How deep did this place go?

The next handful came from his pocket. Skyler released it a bit at a time now, as if he were sowing seeds. Coated such, the floor crunched beneath his boots, but not so loud their stealth would be spoiled by it. He hoped not, anyway.

Below he could see the hallway’s end. The floor there was different. Much smaller hexagonal tiles, each glowing with a brightness that ebbed and flowed in synch with the warm breeze. Skyler slowed their pace to a crawl as the next junction came into view. Only it wasn’t a junction this time.

Revealing itself with each step like a curtain being raised, a vast room began to appear. The floor first, which resembled a crime scene. Bodies lay everywhere. Dried blood scarred the glowing floor. Pools beneath some bodies, long trails where a few of the dead had been dragged from one place to another. Splatters and arcs of spray, all dry, marked almost every available centimeter, as if the space had been painted on by a child given red finger paint and a blank canvas. On top of all this the artist had thrown hundreds of shell casings. The little brass cylinders gleamed like gems.

The corpses were legion. Two dozen, Skyler guessed, his mind reeling from the carnage of the scene. Many wore the same lab garb as the woman one floor up. Others showed signs of paramilitary gear—black fatigues, high-end rifles. Despite the horror of the view, Skyler took in these details with a practiced scavenger’s eye. One soldier had a pair of grenades on his belt. Another carried a rifle-sized revolver, probably loaded with tear-gas canisters or smoke grenades.

Skyler paused one step from the room proper and let the whole place sink in. He heard Ana’s crunching footsteps grow slower as she approached, then a gasp escaped her lips. She began to whisper rapidly, sounding like a frightened, superstitious child.
“Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.…”

“Knock it off,” Skyler rasped at her. Too harshly, from the way her eyes flared at him. “I need you to stay focused.”

After a few seconds she relented and began to study the room like a warrior.

Skyler’s suspicion of a symmetrical layout to the structure seemed accurate. Four tunnels converged here, entering from the middle of each side of the square room. The bodies lay in a rough circle around a dais in the center, which hung suspended over a hexagonal hole that dropped out of sight below. A small walkway—it had to be a walkway—extended from the room’s floor out to the dais. The body of a dead miner draped across the narrow bridge, arms dangling over one side and legs over the other.
A miner?
Skyler had seen nothing but soldiers and medical personnel until this body.

Maybe he got here first.

The dais held a structure that reminded Skyler of a gazebo. Intricate supports rose from the base, alive with traces of yellow light that writhed within. Each pillar was different from the other, some thin and straight, others bulbous and curved. They all angled inward near the top, joining together in a sort of conduit that continued up toward the high dome-shaped ceiling. There the thick twisted cord branched out into a hundred smaller cables that weaved and snaked their way up into the top of the space, forming a cone-shaped area around a gaping hole in the center of the roof. Sections of the ceiling were peeled downward, as if the thing below had made an abrupt and violent entrance.

“It’s a shell ship,” Ana whispered.

He glanced at her, saw her gaze lay on the gazebo-like structure. He looked at it again and saw the truth in her words. The gazebo was actually two halves of a shell ship, the pillars between the two more like stretched material that still clung from one side to the other despite the craft having been pulled in two.

“It landed exactly in the center?” she asked.

“Pretty good aim,” Skyler agreed.

Across the rest of the dome were hexagonal holes of varying size. Lit from the floor below, the whole thing made Skyler think of honeycomb. It was as if he stood inside a beehive, and the idea unsettled him further.

A waft of warm air pushed against him, rising and falling like the breath of a slumbering beast. The gentle wind came up from the massive hole in the floor, carrying a fine black particulate. As the dusty plume rose through the room toward the dome it accelerated, sucked into the myriad of gaps.

He began to walk—slow, careful steps over the corpses that dotted the floor—toward one of the fallen soldiers. He motioned Ana to follow and then instructed her with a hand signal to cover him while he looted the body. He ditched his machine gun for the much more advanced model carried by the dead man, after checking the clip to make sure it still carried bullets. It did,.45 caliber even, and there were two more magazines in his black vest. Skyler pocketed those, too. The gun had a holographic sight that still functioned. It was a risk, he knew, to switch to a weapon he’d never fired before in the middle of an op, but this didn’t have a scratch or scuff anywhere on it.

He hefted the gun to a get a feel for the balance, then pointed toward another dead soldier. “Get that rotary gun,” he said to Ana. She did, and gladly, slinging her own weapon in favor of the much more fiendish device. She strained under the weight of it at first, but adjusted quickly enough. Then she set it down on the floor and detached a bandolier from the man’s torso. A dozen canisters were held in black nylon sheaths along half of it.

She studied the ammunition. “It’s all in Chinese,” she said.

“Trial and error then, I guess,” he said.

Ana grinned at that. She checked the weapon itself and found it to be fully loaded. Whatever had happened in here, the dead solider hadn’t fired a single round. “Whatever will be, will be,” she said with a shrug, and gave the gun a little upward jerk. The front half clicked back into place.

“Right,” Skyler said. “Cover me?” At her nod he crept up to the narrow bridge that extended out two meters over the deep pit in the center of the room. The bottom hid in darkness, far below, exactly like the silos below Nightcliff and Belém. Odd that those were both below space elevators, but this place had no such feature.
Perhaps the Builders sank pits like this for some purpose unrelated to the facility above,
he thought. Heat dissipation or something. He wondered, belatedly, if such a pit existed below the site in Ireland, too. There’d been no evidence of such a thing, but they hadn’t really stuck around to find out, either.

Faced with the abyss, the slim bit of floor that led out to the dais suddenly seemed dangerously narrow. Skyler tested it with his toes, pressing lightly, then progressively harder until his entire foot rested on the surface. He gritted his teeth and shifted his weight outward, over that foot. “You bastards couldn’t put a handrail on this, for fuck’s sake?” he muttered. He took a full step now, over the thin body of the miner that lay draped across the narrow surface.

The bridge held. More than that, it felt solid, like it had been carved out of the same slab of material as the room. The thought gave Skyler a sudden pause.

“What’s wrong?” Ana whispered. She stood at least seven meters away, but her voice carried well here.

“Just,” he paused. “Thinking.” The bridge’s width almost perfectly matched that of his shoulders. The hallways they’d walked through to get here, while tall, were certainly comfortable for a human to traverse. The objects they’d already recovered from Ireland and Belém, though bulky and quite heavy, were still within the limits of a human being to carry.

Are they so similar to us? Do they know our physiology, our capabilities and limits? Or did we somehow tell them?

He recalled again the news Tania had dropped on him: Neil knew. What exactly he knew, or how, seemed a detail he’d taken to his grave. But he’d known something, and perhaps, perhaps, he’d told the Builders something as well. An exchange? A goddamn conversation?

“We should hurry,” Ana said.

Her voice brought him back to the moment. Skyler balanced himself one last time, then traversed the bridge in two quick steps. He glanced over his shoulder at the strip, then at Ana. He smiled at her. In response she made a shooing motion with her hand. “Okay, okay,” he said.

In the center of the dais, which was actually the bottom half of a shell ship, lay another of the objects. This one radiated yellow light from the fine grooves along its surface. It was oval in shape with a wavy portion along one length, matching exactly the slot he’d seen aboard the massive Builder ship that hung in orbit above.

Skyler slung his new rifle over one shoulder and stood over the artifact. A meter wide and roughly half as tall, it would require two hands to carry. That wouldn’t do, he decided. He couldn’t have Ana the only one ready to shoot, given the swarm of subs that waited for them above. He unzipped one of the pockets on his jacket and slipped out a folded backpack made of ballistic nylon. It would be a tight fit, he thought, but should do the job. He unzipped the bag and laid it on the ground next to the alien object. Then he braced his feet on either side, crouched, and placed his hands on either side of the oval. The material felt cool to the touch. He flexed his fingers. The thing lay perfectly flat on the platform floor. If it was much heavier than the objects from Ireland and Belém, he’d need a pry bar to lift it, and that was one thing he’d not thought to bring.

In Ireland, lifting the object had triggered the release of subhumans trapped within what could only be called time bubbles. Near Belém, a localized earthquake had almost shook the cave down upon his head. “Ana,” he said. He made sure to lock eyes with her. “Something will happen when I lift this.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m ready, I think. Just do it and let’s go.”

“Right then.” Skyler heaved. The object didn’t budge. He adjusted his hands and tried again, emitting a grunt that turned into something of a shout by the time he gave up and relaxed.

“Let me help,” Ana said. She stepped forward.

“No, no. Stay back, I mean it.”

He saw the flash of an argument in the way her eyes narrowed, but she pursed her lips into a thin line and took one step backward.

Skyler adjusted his hands again, this time placing both hands next to each other. He dug his fingers into the edge of the object until the tips turned white, then red.

Something popped and the artifact lifted from the floor so abruptly he almost fell. Ana let out a little yelp of surprise from behind him as Skyler shoved one hand under the object and moved his other hand around to grip the opposite edge. The bottom of it must have formed a suction bond with the tile below, because now that the oval had lifted it weighed very little—less than half what the one in Ireland had weighed, he guessed. Skyler slipped it into the bag easily, zipped it up, and turned around.

Ana shrugged at him, a grin playing at the corners of her mouth. He returned the shrug and pulled the backpack on, again surprised at the relatively light weight of the object.

Skyler took the narrow bridge in one quick, long stride. He turned to Ana again. “Let’s—”

She had a finger pressed to her lips, her eyes cast upward at the ceiling.

“What is it?”

After a second she shook her head. “I don’t know … something’s different. I’m not—” Then her eyes widened. “The breathing. It’s stopped.”

Chapter Eighteen

Darwin, Australia

31.MAR.2285

In the end Arkin had offered to pilot the hauler himself, rather than risking the involvement of one of his pilots in the whole endeavor. The short hop across the water, undertaken many times per day and largely automated, was one the plant manager had taken upon himself to learn over the years. “Don’t have the luxury of hiring young pilots out of the air force anymore,” he’d said. “The only good one to come up since the plague hit took off to join one of the scavenger crews, and that was a couple of years ago.”

He’d meant Angus, Sam realized. She’d said nothing, and neither had Skadz.

Twinkles of fading orange sunlight glinted off the water below. The flotilla of boats, barges, and improvised rafts that crowded Darwin’s aura-protected shore lifted and fell as a gentle surf pushed beneath them.

“It’s a bit sad, isn’t it?” Sam asked, not speaking to either man in particular.

Skadz looked at her with mild annoyance. He always hated starting an op without a real plan.

Prumble, though, seemed relaxed, even happy, feet propped up on the duffel bag that held his custom-made environment suit. “Hmm?” he asked.

“All these boats, stuck here,” Sam explained. “I mean, the life of a sailor is all about the freedom to travel at will, to enjoy the open water, you know? It’s bad enough to have to live your life trapped in one city, but to do so while living on a perfectly mobile vehicle … It’s depressing.”

Skadz rolled his eyes and went back to staring at the roof of the cabin. No doubt he was playing out scenarios in his mind, trying to win the chess game before it started.

“There she is,” Prumble said, his face suddenly pressed against the window. He was looking at the ocean below.

“What did they decide?” Sam asked.

“Take a look for yourself.” He leaned back in his seat so she could see past him. Below she saw the edge of the flotilla. Despite the fact that nearly half of the precious aura generated by the alien cord covered water, the ships that had made it to Darwin mostly clustered together along the shore for the simple reason that they had to get supplies just like any other dwelling. Fish and rainwater would only go so far. A few boats, though, anchored farther out. Some were abandoned, already listing steeply and soon to be relics for the ocean floor. Most were fishermen, scavengers in their own right trying to bring in a haul of protein for the hungry city.