The Seeds of Time (58 page)

“Not
the same as you!”

“What did you say?” Ashe’s voice.

“Nothing.”

“Quiet then,” he whispered. “Is this the cavern?”

The walls were gone. The torchlight fled into the darkness, surrounding them with an ineffectual nimbus, serving only to expose them to anyone hiding here. At this point they should go forward thirty or forty paces, then directly left to the cave wall, skirting the chasm without a bottom. If memory served. Ashe took her hand as she moved ahead. Held on tight, he did, as though he could pull her back from the abyss. As though he could sense the loosening of her belly as she pictured the fall of the FTL circuit into the bowels of Niang and her own long plunge over the edge. They shuffled forward. Here, the air stilled and the torch flames quieted, leaving only the huff of Clio’s breathing. Each step was a decision. Her resolve flickered with the smoking torch as she pushed forward, nearly blind now. Nearby the chittering of Teeg’s rats joined the sputtering of the torch.

“This way,” Clio whispered. She turned to the left. Not far now would be the cave wall, with its nook cradling the crystal-lit treasure. They trudged for a few paces, still seeing nothing. Clio stopped, pulling on Ashe’s hand, listening to the warning of her body.

“Douse the light.”

Ashe knelt down, extinguishing the remains of the flame.

Eyeless, they watched. She crouched down next to him.
Far to the right, a dull pulse of light appeared. She waited until Ashe saw it too.

“You see?” he whispered.

“But it’s in the wrong place.”

With his insistence, she moved forward some paces, then dropped to her hands and knees, touching the ground before putting weight down. Something skittered across the back of her lower legs and in the next instant her right hand dropped into sheer space and her stomach spasmed. A frigid draft of air ballooned up from below. She heard herself cry out between clenched teeth, and Ashe was yanking her arm, pulling her backward, and she lay on the hard ground, side by side with the great chasm, the Hell Crack, her arm dangling over. She jerked it back. Next to her she heard the cocking of a gun. A light struck up and Corporal Lewis’ face floated into view.

“Well looky here. It’s Clio Finn,” he said.

Then Ashe’s voice. “Is that you, Lewis?”

“Who else is with you?” Lewis hissed.

“Clio.”

“Who else?”

“Nobody,” Ashe answered. “We’re alone. God, we’ve been lost in this maze.” Their agreed-upon alibi.

Clio tried to get up. Right hand floundering into nothingness. “Get me the hell away from this,” she said. “Help me.” The cave floor tilted, trying to roll her into its throat.

Ashe’s hand pulled her along the ground. She huddled against him.

Someone else moved into the light. A woman.

“You’re alive, then.” It was Imanishi.

“Barely,” Ashe said. “We ran into Harper Teeg. He captured us during the firelight. Son of a bitch had plans for Clio after he got rid of me. Do you know how to get out of here?”

“Yes.” A voice just out of the light.

Clio knew that voice.

Jackson Tandy stepped forward. His hand glowed halfway to his elbow. As he loomed closer, Clio saw the glowing pink coals of his hand. The glowing embers of his
prize. Push him now, she thought. Push him over the edge of the chasm. One chance to do it right.

She could push him now.

He knelt down next to Clio. “Are you hurt?”

“Get me away from this goddamn crevasse.”

Tandy pulled her toward him, away from Ashe and the crevasse. She had him in her hands, clutched his arm.

“Sounds like the old Clio,” Tandy said. “He didn’t hurt you, then.”

Clio scrambled away from the looming crack.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She pulled back from his hands. “He slapped me around a little. Crazy. He was crazy.”

“Did he tell you about this?” Tandy held up the circuit board. The board and his hand pulsed with the same luminescence.

“No. What is it?”

“Didn’t brag about this little item, eh?”

“He bragged about how we were going to be happy ever after in this stinking hole. So what is it?”

He advanced on Ashe. Imanishi shone the flashlight in Ashe’s face. “I give you credit,” Tandy said, “for keeping Clio safe. He could have killed her.”

“I guess so. How many survived the ambush?”

“Three, so I thought. Now, looks like five. Lewis and Imanishi and I escaped and managed to press on to the ship. We found it. Also found someone else still alive … Harper Teeg.”

Clio turned her face away from Imanishi’s flashlight.
Holy God. Teeg
.

“Jesus,” Ashe said.

“Even better than Jesus,” Tandy said. “He told us where to find this.” He held up the small, chitinous plate. “Told us to look in this cave. That’s why the Nians left the ship lying there. No point in destroying it. The essential piece was missing, you see. Harper Teeg stashed it away here.”

Lewis snorted. “Didn’t mean null to him. But he hid it
like a goddamn trophy.” He murmured, low: “We persuaded him to tell us what he knew.”

“Now what?” Imanishi asked.

“Now we get out of here,” Tandy said.

Clio’s mind was still on Teeg. “Where’s Teeg now?”

“He’s dead,” Lewis said. “Spilled his story, and died. Like he was just waiting for us. Waiting to tell somebody.”

“He also raved about you and Ashe,” Tandy said. “We thought you were dead, that maybe Teeg had killed you.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Imanishi said.

“We’ll go out the back door,” Tandy said.

A pause before Clio asked, “Back door?”

“Yes. Closer proximity to camp than the other.”

“How do you know there
is
a back door?”

“Lewis went back to reconnoiter. Whole cave system is riddled with entrances. We can take our pick.” Tandy turned to Ashe. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Then take the flashlight, in the lead.” Tandy gestured into the deep of the cave.

“Your army grunt might do better. He’s been over the ground before.”

“No, I think you’ll do.”

Imanishi handed over the flashlight.

“Watch your step,” Lewis said. “Can’t afford to lose the flashlight.”

Clio’s eyes had adjusted to the twilight brown thrown by the broad-beam flashlight. The chasm was just to the left. She could push him now. Her arms crackled with tension. Push him now.

The group moved off, following Ashe. In the rear of the line, Tandy fell in step with Clio, clapped her on the shoulder. “Luck starting to turn, Clio,” he said. “Luck starting to turn.”

She was on the inside, next to the crack. A pebble bounced off her shoe and took flight into the spacey depths.

“Yessir,” she said, her heart plunging with the stone. “Luck starting to turn.”

•   •   •

They slogged through the web of undergrowth, forearms in front of their faces to fend off the slapping tendrils and branches. Dusk was coming on. So while they could still see their way, and despite the crashing noise of their passing, Tandy urged them onward to camp. The enemy could hear them if they lurked nearby. Tandy was betting that they weren’t.

And, as Clio knew, Tandy was right. While the colonel fled with his prize, Ashe’s forces were massed in front of the Great Cave, several kilometers back toward the river.

They bored on through the hovering mat of the jungle until they popped out, suddenly, into a clearing where the last shreds of day hung from the canopy. Fantastic shadows and highlights shaped the jungle floor with tricks of light, but enough daylight remained to show the scatter of bodies across the field. The dead lay where they fell, Nian, army, and Biotime sharing the same repose. As Clio picked her way into the scene, she saw a man lying draped in dried blood where Niang ants swarmed like a coat of fur, and next to him, a soldier reclining simply as though too tired to go on.

Then, farther, lay Richardson, right arm still in its sleeve but lying akimbo across his ankles, and there Pequot, on his back and staring in ugly surprise at the tropical sky. Clio and the others moved through the clearing in slow motion, Tandy and Lewis watching the trees, and she, Ashe, and Imanishi watching the dead. Here lay a Nian woman, whom Ashe looked at with eyes giving nothing away though her long hair lay in a striking image of frazzled and burned filaments so delicate that they collapsed into dust as the ants tried to use them for a bridge to her face.

“Keep moving,” Tandy said, “there’s nothing to be done here.”

It was no place to stop for water and rest, with its stench of open bodies, but Clio’s legs begged for surcease. And the decent thing to do was check for survivors. Even in this carnage someone might yet hang on.

“Nothing to be done here,” Tandy repeated as Clio
knelt beside an army private, body intact, peacefully dead. Tandy waited while she stood up.

“Someone may still be alive here, sir,” she said.

“They’re all dead. Nothing even you can do for anybody here, Clio.”

Clio flipped him a look for his sarcasm, but moved on, as Corporal Lewis hung back behind her, waiting for her to obey Tandy’s orders, and they all plunged into the thicket on the other side of the clearing. Light was slipping fast from the jungle, and Tandy urged them faster, though their boots slipped on the ragged braid of the floor, and they staggered at times from exhaustion. The sweat of their bodies lay congealed on them as the jungle cooled.

Imanishi fell in beside her. “I heard a groan,” she said. “Somebody groaned, back there.”

Clio looked at her in stupefied silence.

“It could have been my imagination,” Imanishi said, defensive.

Clio caught up with Tandy. “Imanishi said she heard a groan, sir, back at the ambush. We may have a survivor.”

“We may
all
die, if we’re stuck in this maze at dark. We are all in very great danger still, Clio, do you understand that?”

Clio looked into his face, but the growing dusk threw a gauze over her sight. She could barely make out his eyes. He turned away, and she followed his back, stumbling on into the mounting dark.

After what seemed like hours they heard a sentry challenge them as they pushed free of the forest and emerged one by one into the clearing before base camp. A white-hot light swept over them from floodlights at the perimeter wire.

“Who’s there!” came the challenge.

“This is Colonel Tandy and Operation Zeal!”

“Proceed forward, sir!”

“Extinguish lights and lay down a cover fire; we may be followed!” Tandy cried, and amidst the staccato rifle fire, the four of them raced across the thirty meters toward the perimeter wire.

The moment Clio lunged into a sprint, Niang erupted
with all the noises of hell. The thudding of pulse rifles and tearing cracks of hundreds of rifle rounds combined with the shouts of the camp and screams of orders from officers as their ragtag group crossed the clearing. When they reached the perimeter of camp, Tandy hurled orders to lay out canisters and evacuate, while a dozen people jumped to obey. Ashe kneeled down to help Imanishi, who had collapsed just inside the wire, endurance broken now that she had crossed over. Voris and two guards rushed by, each holding a white, cylindrical canister, cradled like a baby. Clio stared hard, trying to figure out what they were for, here in the midst of a hell-bent retreat, but there was no time for wondering as Tandy hastily pulled Clio onward to the lander.

The translucent airbag serving for a quarantine airlock wrapped partway around the ladder to
Sun Spot
like a giant blister. Clio, Tandy, Imanishi, and Ashe removed their fatigues and boots, and stepped through the flexible hatchway, resealing it behind them, as the airlock shuddered, expelling air and refilling with a frigid, noxious mist. Flakes of grey, sublimated gas fluttered off Clio’s eyelashes as she scrambled up into the lander, eyes feeling like smooth ovals of ice. Once inside, they pulled on white paper togs. Clio managed to look at Ashe as a new volley of gunfire erupted outside. Ashe shook his head, bleakly, once. Not his people out there. Tandy was firing at shadows.

Clio strapped into the pilot’s seat, a chair she most definitely did not want to be in. The rest of the mission crew scrambled aboard along with Voris, looking sick to her stomach, black hair flecked with icy particles. Clio threw the prelaunch system switches. On a signal from Tandy,
Sun Spot
thundered to life.

“Main engine burn,” Meg Voris said. She flipped the main toggles to fire
Galactique
’s primary engines, sending a shudder through the hull and releasing a distant aft roar of ignition and firing, enough to push eleven million kg’s out of comfortable geosynchronous orbit. Ship balked, easing off orbit with immense reluctance.

“Bring her up smartly,” Hocking said, in the headphones.

Clio watched Voris take the ship to full thrust. Jesus, in a hurry they were. Barely time to strap in and secure landing bay before
Galactique
came around, pointing home. Or that general direction.

Clio adjusted the headphones on her ears, scratching her head, caked with mud and decontamination chemicals. No time to clean up. No time to rest, though Tandy had driven them three hours through the jungle, his eyes unnaturally bright, his energy inexhaustible. And no time to rest in camp, as they rushed for the lander, as the crew hurried to set out the canisters: canisters Clio now realized were poison gas with their clouds of golden vapor that spilled onto the verge, sliding into the jungle like a killer’s hands through his victim’s long hair. And everyone, enemy or mission straggler, was soon dead in that cold flaxen cloud.