They tried hard, urging the horses forward in a fast walk. But after another forty minutes, the green glow didn’t appear any larger and dawn spread a brilliant sheen of monochrome light across the desert. As shadows thrown from them and the horses stretched out across the ochre sand, they stared at the horizon directly ahead. A small conical hill rose out of the barren terrain, its shallow slopes a curious slate grey, turning to a lighter ash shading as the sunlight slithered down it.
‘That’s not a ship,’ Kysandra blurted.
‘Doesn’t look like one,’ Nigel agreed. ‘But it’s definitely metallic. That has to be the spectrum Skylady’s sensors detected. This is what we’re here for.’
Even as he was talking, Kysandra was studying the ground around them. The shreds of fabric were everywhere. Hundreds – thousands – of tattered streamers lying without order, from the size of a handkerchief up to sheets that would have covered the bed back in the Rasheeda Hotel; lacing the sand between them was a multitude of thin filaments, some stretched out flat, others tangled in knots. There were also little chunks of tarnished metal – clips and bolts which the filaments were attached to. The ubiquitous rings.
‘How far to the metal hill?’ Kysandra asked.
‘Difficult to measure,’ Fergus said.
Even as she zoomed in again, Kysandra could see the desert stirring. The air swelling and flowing as the sun began its tremendous bombardment.
‘Let’s press on,’ Nigel said. ‘We might get there before we have to make camp.’
Kysandra thought that unlikely, but said nothing. The little convoy rolled along, with puffs of dust swirling up whenever a hoof or a wheel ran over a patch of cloth, causing it to disintegrate instantly. At the beginning, they were dismounting every couple of minutes to remove filaments that had tangled round the legs of the horses. After that, whoever took point used teekay to clear the strands away.
Now, the track they left behind was like a path of destruction, a trail anyone could follow. When Kysandra scanned round, she couldn’t see any other furrow through the delicate scraps of cloth.
‘Nobody else has been here,’ she decided.
‘Not for a long time,’ Nigel agreed.
The hill was definitely larger when they stopped two hours later. Her zoom function still wasn’t much use through the wavering heat, although she was convinced the sides of the hill were exceptionally knobbly. She was also intrigued by the uniformity of colour. The cone shape was nearly perfectly symmetrical, too, though it was odd, with a wide base, as if it had sagged at some time since its formation.
‘Why would you cover a hill in metal?’ she asked as they put the tents up.
‘There is no reason for that,’ Nigel said. ‘But then, I don’t think it is a hill, either.’
‘What then?’
‘Some kind of ship. Nothing else it can be.’
‘Is that what the colony ships looked like?’
‘No. At least, not any human one I know of.’
That made her shudder.
Despite a hard night in the saddle, Kysandra could only doze through the long day. She was bursting for them all to get back on the horses and ride to the hill. Solve the mystery! Though some deeper, more cautious, part of her mind was urging her to turn round and gallop for Croixtown, sail cleanly down the river and be safe.
‘Do you want to go home?’
Kysandra snapped fully awake, staring belligerently at Nigel, who was lying on his mattress next to her. She tightened her shell immediately, annoyed that she’d been spilling her drowsy thoughts. Irritated with him, too, for studying them. ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘This is a mystery that even you don’t understand. I want to find the answer. I want to know what’s out there.’
Nigel grinned. ‘That’s my girl.’
They watered the horses and packed up the tents. This time the pace was less frantic than it had been that morning. They’d been travelling for ninety minutes, with the sun dropping close to the mountain peaks, when they found the first body. It was sprawled on a crude cart, made from what looked like a circular door of some kind with a glass porthole in the middle. Solid-looking hinge mechanisms had a melted appearance. Wheels were circles of crudely cut metal that were twisted and cracked, stuck on axles that were lashed to the hatch with filament. A couple of tarnished boxes lay nearby.
Kysandra didn’t want to look, but couldn’t resist. The wizened body was strange, its skin grey and taut, as hard as stone; wisps of straw-like hair swirled round the skull. Remnants of clothes seemed to be fused with the skin. There was only one boot, on the left foot; the right foot was bare, twisted at an odd angle.
‘Mummified beautifully,’ Nigel said to Fergus as she approached. The two of them were examining the body enthusiastically, poking modules into it. ‘That’s kind of inevitable, given the location.’
‘Is it . . . ?’ Kysandra took a breath, calming herself. ‘Is it human?’
Nigel turned to frown at her. ‘Of course.’
‘I mean: is it a Faller?’
‘Oh. Hard to tell. There’s not much left to do a biochemical analysis on. And, in any case, I still need to get my hands on a Faller to find out exactly what their biochemistry is.’
Kysandra shuddered. Who else but Nigel could casually say: I still need to get my hands on a Faller? She gave the metal hill a pensive glance. It was closer now, just over eight kilometres away. They’d determined its size, too: u-shadows working it out as five hundred metres wide at the base, and two hundred and sixty three metres high at the precarious-looking apex.
Nigel and Fergus turned the body over. Its arm broke off with a dull crack. Kysandra flinched and clamped her jaw together. Come on, you can do this. Don’t be weak, not now.
‘Female,’ Fergus proclaimed. He ran a scanner over the skull with its empty eye sockets. Heavily creased lips ringed a wide-open mouth, making Kysandra think the woman had died screaming – a last action steadfastly preserved by the desert environment.
‘Picking up traces. She had biononics. Commonwealth citizen, then.’ He gave Kysandra a reassuring grin. ‘Human.’
Russell opened one of the boxes. The lid crumbled out of his fingers. ‘Nothing much in here. Metal bottles and some dust.’
‘Food and water,’ Fergus said. ‘Too bad she didn’t make it very far.’
Nigel knelt beside the rickety cart, his eyes closed as he reviewed data from the modules he’d placed on the body. ‘Crud. She’s been out here for three thousand years. Whatever happened here, happened when the colony ships arrived.’ He stood up and faced the hill, squinting against the dying sunlight. ‘What the hell is that thing?’
Fergus ran his hand over the hatch/cart, tracing the broken hinges. ‘This is from some kind of space vehicle. A shuttle? Exopod, maybe?’
Kysandra saw it, actually saw the shock flare on Nigel’s face. She’d never seen that before. It was hard to believe he could be shocked. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his shell weakened enough to let out a corresponding pulse of dismay. He stood up slowly and pulled his goggles down to stare at the hill. ‘Oh crap,’ he said quietly. ‘The profile. Look at the profile. It’s segmented. That isn’t some geological rock spike, it’s a pile.’
Fergus made no attempt to hide his flinch. ‘It can’t be. That size? There’d be . . .’
‘If it’s solid,’ Nigel said. ‘Well over a million of them. Which means the fabric is all parachutes – not tents. It fits, dammit! Where the hell did a million exopods come from? The Commonwealth never manufactured that many.’
‘What?’ Kysandra shouted. ‘What are you two talking about?’ The way they were sharing thoughts, how weirdly unified they were, frightened her. Because they so clearly knew something was wrong. Very, very wrong. ‘Tell me!’
‘Jymoar was mistaken,’ Nigel said sombrely. ‘It’s not ten thousand bodies out here. There’s going to be more, a lot more. You need to be ready for that.’
They found the next body ten minutes later. Female agai
n. It was on a cart almost the same as the first: identical hatch, but with different improvised wheels. There was no sign of them; they’d flaked away to dust down the millennia.
Over the following kilometre they encountered another eight of the carts with bodies. Those were just the ones lying along their path. Retina zoom showed them similar carts scattered across the desert.
‘All female,’ Fergus announced as he examined the sixth. ‘And they all have the same severe damage to their right ankle. The fracture patterns match perfectly, which is absurdly odd.’
There were few carts after that. Now the desert sand was littered with the same identical female body. She’d crawled along through the sand and pointed stones with her ruined ankle, always hauling along a box or bag. And how desperate would you have to be to do that? Often, the woman had died with her arms outstretched, as if reaching for something. Many were curled up. In defeat?
Kysandra cried quietly to herself for a couple of kilometres as the sun went down. The night obscured all the bodies lying away from their direct route, but the horses were having to weave about constantly to avoid stepping on the desiccated carcasses.
So she rode on in silence, her tears all dried up. She was completely numb, her feelings banished to somewhere deep in her mind. This much death was impossible to grasp. Instead she ignored it, and focused only on following Nigel’s horse as it picked its way across this pitiless land of corpses. In front of her, the metal hill grew steadily closer. She imagined this was what it must be like for a soul arriving at Uracus itself. Eternal anguish was unavoidable. You could watch it coming, and there was nothing you could do to stop it. Nothing.
With the nebulas shimmering sweetly in the clear air above, they halted the horses five hundred metres from the base of the hill. The bodies were lying so close together now that the animals would be unable to avoid walking on them.
‘Wait here,’ Nigel said kindly.
‘I’m staying with you,’ she replied firmly.
So she and Nigel and Fergus walked the remaining distance to the hill, treading round the bodies where they could. As they grew closer, they couldn’t avoid stepping on the limbs any more, they were packed so close together. She felt them crunch and crumble beneath her boots. The baked three-thousand-year-old bodies were tragically brittle, shattering at the slightest touch.
Soon they were trying to dodge venerable, deteriorating pieces of equipment as well as corpses. The ground was jamming up with survival equipment cases, their contents of bottles and tools and cracked powercells and wisps of clothing and tarnished axes and ragged photovoltaic sheets spilling out, amalgamating to form a rigid hardware stratum for the bodies to sprawl across.
They stopped before they reached the base, where the bodies were piled up on top of each other, producing an embankment five or six times her own height. Here the majority had clearly fallen to their death from the tricky slopes of the hill above, to be mummified in contorted positions, legs and arms snapped and bent in grotesque angles, necks and spines broken. Every awful lonely death perfectly preserved by the desert.
Kysandra lifted her gaze above the gruesome mound of desiccated skin and bone that was melding together, up to the metallic structure of the hill itself. It was a stack made up from spheres about three metres in diameter, though it was difficult to distinguish them. This close to the base, the weight of the spheres above had crushed and squeezed the lower layers out of shape. But like the female body they’d brought to this world, they were all the same, all with a single bulging oval window at the front, a circular hatch that hung open, and inert clusters of disturbing tentacles that Kysandra’s implanted memories identified as electromuscle. Her ex-sight probed into a few of the artefacts, finding a maze of wires and pipes, the heat-wrecked hardware of complex systems.
‘What are these things?’ she asked.
‘They’re exopods,’ Nigel told her. ‘Larger spaceships carry them to perform maintenance work outside. In an emergency, they can aerobrake into an atmosphere, and land.’
‘So they all landed here together?’ Kysandra asked, desperate to understand. If she understood, she knew she wouldn’t be so afraid. ‘Why did they all bring the same woman? Is she . . . ?’ Her memory implants held the concept, one she’d never bothered to consider, it was so . . . so, Commonwealth. ‘A clone? Did she clone herself?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nigel said as his shoulders sagged in defeat. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’
6
They made camp half a kilometre from the hill of exopods. Fergus and Russell cleared an area of the dissolving bodies as best they could, creating an unpleasant cloud of gritty dust in the process. Once that was done, Kysandra actually welcomed the distraction that came from setting up the awning and the tents. It was familiar, something useful she could abandon herself to.
She’d just started to give her horse some water when Nigel and Fergus both looked up in unison. That fast nervy reaction made her worry, but then everyone was edgy. Her u-shadow was telling her one of Nigel’s sensor modules was sending out an alert, supporting a stream of fresh data. Displays appeared in her exovision, but even with the u-shadow tabulating them neatly they were incomprehensible.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked.
‘Localized quantum field fluctuation,’ Nigel answered. ‘Spike’s over. They’ve reverted.’
‘Oh right.’ His casual, confident answer was obscurely reassuring after days of uncertainty. Of course, what it actually meant was another thing altogether. Her physics memory implant wasn’t terribly helpful, something about quantum fields underpinning spacetime, and some reference codes for further memory implants. ‘Does that happen much?’
‘Never. Not in the outside universe, anyway. In the Void – who knows?’
That was when the sound began – a distant clattering and banging. It made Kysandra jump. The desert had been devoid of sound since the moment they started trekking across it. Sound was alien here. Shocking.
They all stopped what they were doing, staring round, trying to pinpoint the noise. Kysandra realized it was coming from the exopods, and well up the hill if she was any judge. The clattering went on for a few moments more, then stopped.
‘What caused that?’ Madeline asked anxiously. ‘It’s the monster, isn’t it?’
‘No monster,’ Nigel said. ‘I’d say an exopod shifted about. It certainly sounded like that.’
‘Has another one landed?’ Kysandra asked. She studied the top of the hill, her infra-red scan trying to find an exopod that was a different temperature to all the others. They all remained stubbornly identical.
‘No such thing as coincidence,’ Nigel said. ‘Whatever instigated the quantum fluctuation knocked the exopods about.’
‘The monster,’ Madeline said in dread. ‘It’s coming for us.’
‘Now listen, all of you,’ Nigel said forcefully. ‘There is no monster. These corpses, everything we’ve seen here, it’s all three thousand years old. Whatever happened, happened back then. Today, here, now, you are perfectly safe.’
Whatever the sound was, it didn’t come again. They carried on putting the tents up. Kysandra kept using her ex-sense and infrared vision to scan around, making sure nothing was creeping out of the darkness. Just in case.
Once the tent was up, she went inside and took her robes off, slipping into the baggy white shirt. Nigel came in and unwrapped his turban, but left the rest of his sand-encrusted robe on.
‘What now?’ she asked, sitting on the mattress, hugging her knees.
‘We wait until daylight. Even with all the senses I’m enriched with – nice irony, that – I do need to have a clear field of vision to assess things properly.’
‘And when it’s light?’
‘Fergus and I will start a decent, detailed investigation of the exopods. There are well over a million of them piled up out there, stuffed full of solid state components. Sheer probability is that some processors and memory blocks can be salvaged, es
pecially those that haven’t been crushed. And I saw a lot of array tablets jumbled up with the bodies. There have to be some files somewhere I can retrieve and download into my storage lacuna.’
She managed a weak smile. ‘I’m so scared,’ she confessed, on the verge of tears again. ‘Something killed that woman. All of her.’
‘That’s the bigger puzzle,’ he said. ‘Why so many? Nobody has over a million clones. It’s insanity. Whatever happened to her, it wasn’t as simple as a monster.’
‘Is it going to get us?’ she asked, hating how pathetic she sounded.
‘No.’ And he actually grinned, squatting down beside her. ‘I really meant it when I said we’re perfectly safe. This is probably the time to tell you. You see, the people on Querencia found out something else about the Void. Something utterly amazing.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a kind of time travel possible in here.’
It was no good; her mind had gone blank, unable to process what she’d just heard him say. ‘Time travel?’
‘Yes. You know, when you travel into the past.’
‘You can time travel in the Void?’
‘Yes. If you know how, and if your mind is strong enough. I tried it once, the day I landed. I can just do it; it takes a hellish amount of concentration, and I could only manage to perceive a couple of hours. But I went back in time. My first couple of encounters with Ma’s boys at the Hevlin Hotel didn’t go too well. But the third time, I knew what didn’t work, like trying to reason with them, so I just started straight in with domination. And . . . here we are. So you see, if anything does start to go catastrophically wrong, we travel back in time and avoid the danger.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re just saying that to try and make me feel safe. Nice try, though.’
‘Listen, outside in the real universe, time is a one-way flow. We learned how to manipulate that flow in a wormhole, slow it down so we can take a relative jump forward if we want, but it is impossible to go back. Always. But here, the Void is different. Remember I told you it is made up of many layers?’
The Abyss Beyond Dreams Page 47
