“We kill it,” Pablo said.
His tone left no room for debate. Tania wanted to suggest they try to walk past it, but she knew the danger was too great. Once it noticed them, if it had the strength left it would try to attack. “It’ll make a lot of noise, shooting it.”
“No point in wasting a bullet,” Pablo said. Then, “You might want to back up.” He stood and slipped his rifle over his shoulder. Face hard with grim determination, he stepped out from the corner and closed the gap between himself and the creature in three quick steps.
Tania couldn’t bring herself to look away. She watched Pablo step in behind the creature. In one swift motion he gripped it by the right shoulder, reached around its head with his left hand, and at once pushed and twisted. The body counterclockwise, the head clockwise. There was a sharp crack, then the subhuman went limp. Pablo held on, keeping it upright, as if the thing weighed no more than a backpack of clothing. He eased the lifeless body to the ground and laid it on its side, facedown.
Tania swallowed hard, willing away the lump that had formed in her throat. Try as she might, she simply couldn’t let herself see the beings as anything other than human. When she caught a glimpse of Pablo’s face, what she saw surprised her. Grief, anger. He felt the same way she did; he’d just somehow figured out a way to bottle it. It was there, though, in his narrowed eyes, the thin line of his lips.
Pablo came back to them, pulled the rifle back down from his shoulder, and looked at each of them in turn. “Not much farther now.”
“How do you know?” Tania asked.
“That thing was trying to get to the end, too. It was drawn here, and it knew it was close or it would have lain down and died already.”
His voice held a certainty that left no room for argument. “I hope you’re right,” Tania said.
They looked at her.
“If they are drawn into this maze, few must have made it to the end. Perhaps none have and we won’t find any like those transformed by the ship near Belem.”
They both continued to stare at her, as if waiting for the punch line.
“A girl can hope,” Tania offered.
Pablo grunted. “Only one way to find out.”
Chapter Thirteen
Southern Chad
30.MAR.2285
Skyler placed his finger on the switch that controlled Russell’s external speaker, and held it there. “You’re going to want to stay very quiet,” he said in an even voice. “Understood?”
Russell nodded once. He looked pale, and not from fear of the surroundings. No, Skyler suspected the man was growing hungry and probably really did need to relieve himself. He carried himself differently than before. Slumped forward, shoulders turned in, head tilted down.
“We’re going to move you,” Skyler said before flipping the speaker on. “There’s a village, a few hundred meters. Can you walk it?”
Blackfield thought about it for a second, then nodded. A single shift of his head, as if it was all the energy he had. He seemed a shadow of the man who’d once confronted Skyler on the landing pad in Nightcliff, but then again he’d been a prisoner aboard Melville Station for weeks leading up to this. Besides, Skyler reminded himself, he’d lost everything before that.
Skyler flipped the switch. “Once we secure the aura towers, we’ll move you in range so you can eat something and take care of any personal business.”
“Let’s hurry, then,” he said. “Enough talk.”
“Fine with me.”
Ana took care of guiding Russell so that Skyler could carry the gear. He filled two duffel bags with what seemed like an obscene amount of weaponry and ammunition. Two assault rifles with several extra clips. A sniper rifle, as Ana had suggested. And a mortar tube with two explosive rounds. Skyler had almost forgotten about that last device. They’d found it a long time ago but never had a situation in which to use it. Placing it in the bag now, the beginnings of a plan began to form in his mind.
Outside, Ana guided Russell by the elbow. He moved like a kid walking to school on the day of a test. His feet scuffed the dirt; his head remained down. But he cooperated, and that was all Skyler cared about.
The weight of the duffel bags had Skyler’s shoulders burning by the time they reached the village. He dropped them in a room adjacent to the one where Ana took Russell. Rubbing his neck, Skyler left the arsenal on the floor and went to help her secure the man.
His assistance wasn’t needed. When Skyler entered the meeting room, Ana had already attached the cuffs to Russell’s wrists and looped them over a metal bar in the closet. Blackfield sat on the floor, back against the wall, eyes closed.
“He asleep?” Skyler asked.
Ana shook her head and led Skyler from the room. “I think he’s sick or something.”
“SUBS?”
She shook her head. “The suit shows green. But maybe he caught something in Belem. It’s not like SUBS is the only ailment around, and there’s so many insects there.”
Skyler glanced at Russell with new interest. He crossed to him and gave his shoulder a gentle shove. “Hey. You awake?”
Russell mumbled something inaudible and turned away, slumping against the back wall of the closet.
“Exhausted is my guess,” Skyler said.
Ana wrinkled her nose. “Maybe. Suppose he doesn’t survive to Darwin?”
Skyler shrugged, leading her from the room to where he’d left their weapons. “I don’t much care. He might not even be able to help us if he does make it, and I’d rather not be towing him around with us when we arrive.”
“How can you say that? He’s a human being. He’s in our care—”
Skyler placed a hand on her cheek and forced her to look into his eyes. “Would you say that if he was Gabriel?”
Her mouth clicked shut. A few seconds later she shook her head.
“See him as Gabriel,” Skyler added, “and you’ll see him as I do. At the first hint he can’t help us accomplish our goal, his life is over. I don’t have the patience for anything else.”
The words tumbled out with more vitriol than he’d intended. She searched his face for something, found it, and said, “All right. All right.”
He gave her a quick half smile and turned his focus to what waited for them outside.
They found the first corpse just a hundred meters outside the village.
“A scientist,” Skyler noted. “Or a doctor.”
The half-buried body was clad in a long white coat, and looked as if it had fallen shortly after infection, as most did. A black patch on the breast pocket of the garment had Chinese lettering.
Thirty meters farther toward the circle of aura towers they passed an abandoned troop carrier, the doors still open. Nearby lay a cluster of bodies. Soldiers, save one who looked like a civilian. A miner, perhaps. There’d been a struggle, evidenced by the way the bodies had fallen. The civilian had rushed them, Skyler thought, and been shot. Yet still the soldiers had all died. A picture of what had happened here began to crystallize in Skyler’s mind.
“I think Nachu was right,” he said.
Ana looked up from the grisly, if faded, scene. “In what way?”
“The disease started here.” He glanced back toward where the scientist lay. “They came to investigate that giant building, or ship. Whatever it is. I’m guessing they tried to keep it secret. Then the infections began, spreading faster than news of the virus.”
“Why keep it secret?”
Skyler shrugged. “A giant alien vessel thing in the middle of your vast mining operation? They would have had soldiers, technicians, all that here already. But they would have also had businesspeople. People who’d seen how Platz capitalized on the Darwin Elevator. Is it so hard to imagine they’d want to keep it to themselves?”
Ana looked at the scene with the new perspective, and visibly shuddered.
“They probably cut communications first,” Skyler said. “Maybe even rounded up the miners and forced them into the barracks.”
“Those bunks we saw, all full.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Ana let out a long sigh. “Sometimes I think we deserve what happened. Our species, I mean.”
“Maybe.” He thought back to what Tania had told him about Neil and what he’d known. He’d pondered it many times since then, imagined what would have happened if Neil had given the world some kind of warning. Would things have been any better? Or would the panic that spread like a bow shock in front of the disease just started earlier? Perhaps Neil, armed with whatever knowledge he actually possessed, had done the right thing. Despite that possibility, Skyler knew the man’s reputation and found it hard to believe that he hadn’t kept the knowledge to himself for personal gain. He looked at Ana. “Greed played a factor, along with all our other legion of faults, but the way this disease spread … I don’t think any improvement in us would have made much difference. It’s not like anyone knew Darwin was safe at that point, and even if that realization had come out earlier, the city would have been worse off if more people had made it there. You didn’t see it in those early days, Ana. I did.”
“What was it like?”
“Another time,” Skyler said. “It’s not an easy story to tell, and this isn’t the best time. We have a rendezvous to make, remember? The important thing right now is that we find what we came for.”
She tried to hide a frown, and failed.
“On the flight to Darwin I’ll tell you the whole, sordid tale. Okay?”
Despite all the dangers that surrounded them, Ana moved up next to Skyler and rested her head against his shoulder. He felt her arm slip around his waist, as natural as if they were on a beach stroll. When she spoke, her voice was tender. “Okay.”
He tilted his head and inhaled the scent of her brown hair, somehow sweet despite the acrid odor of exposed minerals that clung to this place. “Good. Now, let’s focus, hmm?”
“Yes.” All signs of the frown had vanished.
Skyler took point again. The most direct path to Builder’s Crater, as he’d come to call the depression where the giant structure waited, required traversal of a narrow strip between two identical pit mines. The sides were steep, the bridge of land between no more than four meters wide at the top. Even this tiny bit of land had a row of solar panel installments running right down the center. Skyler tried to imagine a team of workers placing the equipment in such a perilous place, until it occurred to him that they’d probably been there before the pits.
The bridgelike strip of packed sand ran a hundred meters in a straight line toward their destination. Beyond, with most of a kilometer still to go, more pits of varying sizes waited, lined by the surreal rows of solar panels. The sun lay low in the sky now, and the panels, most of them anyway, were almost vertical now as they tried to drink in every last photon.
A pushcart lay in their path, just before that first long bridge, its handles and wheels half buried in accumulated sand. Skyler moved next to it and hunkered down.
Ana slipped in next to him, peering around the side opposite his. “Why are you stopping?”
“Notice anything different here?” he asked, jerking his head behind them and up.
She looked back for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders.
“There’s almost no sand on the solar panels now.”
Her gaze went to the objects and her brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“Good question. It’s not why I stopped, though. There’s not much cover on these ridges, and it’s almost dark. So let’s wait a bit. Maybe you should switch to the sniper rifle now.”
As Ana worked on changing her gear, Skyler continued to study the landscape around them. The longer he looked, it seemed, the more bodies he spotted. The more abandoned vehicles and equipment. The majority had Chinese lettering, but there were some in French and Russian, too.
Most, he noted, were pointed toward Builder’s Crater, lured in like ants to bait. They must have been racing to be the first to claim the alien object for their company or nation. Perhaps some were motivated for personal reasons. The first person to set foot inside a Builder …
A Builder what?
Skyler still couldn’t quite come to grips with the structure he’d seen from above. Was it a reactor? Or some kind of temple, purely without function?
Movement caught his eye. Above the horizon, stretching in a golden line from west to east, was a cloud. A cloud of sand.
“Ready,” Ana said.
“Change of plan,” he replied. “Look at that.”
Ana gasped when she glanced where he pointed. The coming sandstorm bore down on them from the vast Sahara like a tidal wave, and visibly grew larger and closer with each second.
“Forget the rifle,” Skyler said. “Visibility will be—”
The ground beneath them rumbled, cutting off his words. It started small, as if caused by the approaching sandstorm itself. But as the vibration grew Skyler knew it was something mechanical, something below the ground. The shaking grew with linear perfection, as if punctuating his theory. Sand began to shower down from above, shaken loose from the vast grid of solar panels. There’s one mystery solved, Skyler had time to think.
At that instant, the structure inside Builder’s Crater erupted.
A dark gray plume of gritty smoke shot upward from the pit like the initial belch from a long-dormant volcano. A single, enormous roiling ball of ejecta propelled high into the sky, stretching out as it went into one long smear. With its release the ground stopped shaking.
Skyler watched, mesmerized, as the dark cloud rocketed upward, slowed, and expanded. Then, as if pushed by some invisible hand, it started to stretch to the south. Propelled by the invisible bow shock of the sandstorm, he realized. He’d forgotten about that, and the wave of oncoming sand was almost upon them.
