She stopped just inches from the cliff edge. Caswell followed her, more slowly, his heart racing. “That was close,” he managed, pulling off his goggles.
“I was holding back,” she said.
“Not the race. Christ, you almost flew right over the edge, Melni.”
She turned to look, and seemed to see the crater edge for the first time. Propping the thumper on its stand, she walked to the drop-off and stood, mouth agape, at the view below.
Caswell came up beside. “Shit,” he whispered.
The great wound had leveled forest, cleaved away hillsides and floodplains, and demolished a small village on the visible perimeter far to his left. A river—he could almost see its original winding path from before the event—entered one side, pooled into a great semicircular lake in the basin, then drained out of a dozen low points along the eroded edges. Despite plenty of trees and plants growing in the massive basin, the shape and scale of the impact zone was still apparent, even after two centuries.
“One of the titan craters,” she said. “Fifteen miles across. There are only a half-dozen of this scale.”
“Unbelievable.”
She pointed off to the right. “If I am not mistaken, our destination is up that river valley about fifty miles. We are close.”
“How long until Valix’s summit, exactly?”
“Tomorrow evening. Fifteen hours from now.”
He converted that in his head. Thirty Earth-hours to get to Alice. And two days after that, reversion would come. Everything since the Venturi, forgotten. He’d have to isolate himself by then. Lose himself somewhere in this vast wasteland. What would he tell Melni? He resolved to worry about it later. “Will we make it?”
She summoned her mental map of the area. “It is five hundred miles from there to Fineva. It will be a near thing, especially if we spend a lot of time searching for our evidence.”
“No time to waste, then.”
The playful mood of the forest race evaporated in the face of the brush with death and the press of time. Melni took the lead, picking a path along the jagged crater rim. After a few miles a collapsed portion of the steep wall provided entry. She bounded down the recently formed hillside and into the crater proper, the drumbeat rhythm of her cycle just meters ahead of his, the two machines both at the limit of their capability.
After fording two streams at their shallowest points, and another half hour of brutal riding out the other side of the crater, Melni found the cleft that led into the valley Caswell had identified on the map. A swift and narrow river gurgled down the center of the ravine. Melni followed its rock-strewn bank. Soon she began to weave, and almost fell. Her bike rolled to a sudden stop.
“What’s the matter?” Caswell asked, pulling up beside her.
“I am exhausted.”
He let her rest, sitting on a rock a few meters away where he could see most of the sky and the entire span of the crater they’d just crossed. A birdlike creature wheeled overhead, four brightly colored wings glinting in the morning light.
“Hear anything?” she asked him.
Caswell shook his head. “All quiet.”
“We should go then, before they return.”
“Rest awhile.”
She considered this for several seconds, then began to shake her head, slowly, then with more conviction. “There is no time. I will be okay if you lead. Navigating requires more focus than I can muster.”
“All right then,” he replied.
Caswell mounted up and, while Melni fiddled with her goggles, he rubbed his temples and mentally gave a series of commands. A familiar warm tingle began to spread across his scalp from the back of his neck as a chemical mixture crept through his brain. It used the last of his reserves, but he could see no alternative. Saving it for some shoot-out with Alice Vale’s bodyguards would not matter if he arrived too late. Better to make sure he arrived in time, and trust his natural skill as a killer to do the rest. He only knew that part of himself from what had transpired the last few weeks, but what he’d learned gave him confidence. Just get me there, he urged his implant, and I’ll figure something out. It’s what I do.
So he rode, like some maniac teenage motocross champion. He weaved between narrow gaps in the hairy bushes Melni called “loma plants,” darted around boulders like a fox in flight, and used the bumps in the ground to jump over dangerous eroded pits. Melni fell into some kind of trancelike zone, mimicking his path subconsciously. She fell behind now and then, but overall she held her own and their pace improved significantly.
A few hours later, a patch of color ahead caught his eye. Caswell began to slow.
“Are we here already?” she asked, sliding up next to him.
“No,” he said, “and yet…yes.”
She followed his gaze down a steep hill. Ten meters away a signpost protruded from the ground, partially obscured by tall, pale weeds. Old and rusted, tilting slightly in the soft dirt where it had been placed, the sign nevertheless had obviously been placed here recently. In the last ten years, he thought.
The sign warned of mines, if he understood it correctly. Best to be sure. “What’s it mean?”
Melni swallowed to clear her throat. “Toe-bombs,” she said. “A good thing you spotted this. I would have missed it.”
“Toe-bombs?” He could guess, but he wanted to hear it from her.
“Disk-shaped explosives buried just below the topsoil. They will explode if enough weight is detected by a sensor plate on top.” As she spoke she made a round shape with her fingers, about the size of a dinner plate.
“Mm. We call them land mines,” Caswell said. “Or, we did. They’ve been outlawed for a hundred years on Earth.”
“They are illegal here, too. For almost half a century. One of the few things both North and South agreed on. None have been placed since, so far as I know. And while many old fields still exist, I have never heard of one so far from either frontier.”
“That sign doesn’t look fifty years old. More like ten.”
“I thought the same thing.”
He knelt and shoved his fist into the soil, scooping out a handful and letting it fall through his fingers. Soft dirt. Easy to conceal a land mine just a few inches below the surface. “Well,” he said, “one thing’s for sure. We’re in the right place.”
“How do you know?”
Caswell nodded at the sign. “Someone doesn’t want people snooping around.” He crouched there, studying the landscape, for some time. “I say we leave the bikes—thumpers—here. Follow the river on foot until we reach that boathouse we saw in your picture.”
“Too slow,” Melni said. “Plus we would have to walk all the way back here to retrieve them, the opposite direction of Fineva. It would set us back hours.”
He bit back his gut response, ready to defend his instincts against her calculated logic. She had it right. Caswell swallowed his pride. “Ideas, then?”
“Keep the thumpers,” she offered. “Ride along the game trails. Look, there.” She pointed off to their left, in a gully that paralleled the river. Even from here, fresh prints could be seen in the soft dirt. “Anything placed along such paths would have been set off by wild bhar already. They are heavy enough to trigger such devices. I see no sign of prior explosions.”
“The trail might not lead where we’re going,” Caswell pointed out.
Melni shook her head. “Bhar eat the shoreflowers that bloom along the fringe in second month. They will follow the river.”
“What are these bhar? Dangerous?” The word, similar to boar, conjured an unpleasant image of large feral pigs with nasty tusks.
“They are big, yes. The size of our thumpers, but harmless. They lumber around on six stubby legs, their great long snouts sweeping back and forth plucking flowers in vast quantities.”
Caswell glanced up and down the trail, and saw no flowers. But he did see stems he’d mistaken for weeds. He pictured the animals, walking in a line, then WHAM! The leader vanishing in a cloud
of smoke and chunks of meat and bone. Despite the wisdom in her plan, that vision gave him pause. “It’s risky.”
“So is fleeing Riverswidth on the eve of war. Or riding below airships that bomb anything that moves.”
He grinned at her. “Do you ever deviate from one of your plans, once formed?”
Her smile matched his. “Plans can be useful. You should try making one sometime.”
“I think I’ll leave that part to you,” he said, laughing.
—
The landscape began to feel familiar. Features gleaned from studying the photographs Melni had stolen. Certain twists in the river, and the shape of hills that sloped up gently to either side.
Half a kilometer from the boathouse Caswell skidded to a stop when the bhar trail abruptly ended. In front of him, almost concealed by the tall, bone-colored grass, were horizontal strips of razor wire. Not exactly like the kind he knew from Earth, but close enough. The sharp metal vines of the fencing ran out into the river and descended into sediment-clouded depths.
Melni watched as he dismounted and produced a pair of cutters from the tool pack each thumper had been supplied with. Old, rusty things, but when he pressed the handles together there came a satisfying snap and one of the sharpened strips of metal fell away with a twang that reverberated off in both directions—out into the water, and up the steep wall of the canyon that they had entered half an hour earlier.
He cut the remaining bands and, with a sand-coated scarf wrapped around his fist, pushed the fragments out of their way. Then he stowed the tool and stood beside his bike, ready to push it. He glanced at Melni and tried to give her a confident expression.
She met his gaze with a single raised eyebrow.
“If I’m right,” he said, “she’ll have this place well guarded.”
“We have not seen anyone.”
“Not by people. This place is her greatest secret, if it’s what we think it is. Mines, razor wire…that’s only the beginning, I fear. Stay well behind me just in case.”
He could see the small war behind her eyes, that innate desire to lead she harbored being fought back by a grudging acknowledgment that his implant gave them too large an advantage here. She relented, swung down off her bike, and began to push.
They walked in the late-afternoon sunlight. The cheerful conversation of songbirds gave way to the sighs and scratches of insects. Caswell listened, transfixed by the similarities and the differences equally.
Not far from the interwoven helixes of razor wire he came upon the narrow dirt lane glimpsed in the aerial scout’s photo. Weeds had obscured most of it, but there was no mistaking the wide bulbous puff of the greencloud tree and, in its shade, the two graves. Caswell glanced in each direction. To his right he saw the cottage, hidden in the cleft at the end of the ravine. No smoke curled from the chimney now. A good sign, he decided. If Alice had lived here, there wouldn’t be many clues left behind if someone else had moved in since.
Vegetation had all but consumed the little cottage. A small shade tree sprouted from the roof, its roots worming their way through layers of ancient mud-brick tiles and into the dark depths of two tall, glassless windows. Orange spiderwebs clung to the undersides of the eaves. An old wooden bucket lay discarded on the stone steps that led around to the back of the tiny hovel.
Caswell glanced right. The road, somewhat maintained in the photograph, was nothing more than a trail of saplings doing battle with choking weeds. Only their small size compared to the adult growth around them marked the path.
“No one has been here in years,” Melni said, echoing his thoughts.
Caswell wasn’t so sure. Something about the perfectness of it all nagged at him. As if this “nothing to see here” effect was elaborately staged. He said, “Or we’re meant to think that. Let’s have a closer look.”
He moved to the two graves and went to one knee. Knelt so, the meter-tall weeds concealed him completely. Melni came closer and knelt beside him.
Crude gravestones—crosses made from sticks and twine—poked from the far end. Near the middle of the piled dirt, dry flowers lay in bundles lashed not with twine but clear tape. The flowers, though brittle and long dead, still held faded blues and yellows of their original coloration.
“These were placed here in the last year, maybe two, if I’m not mistaken,” Caswell said.
Melni pointed at the strips of adhesive. “That tape is a Valix invention. Something of a North-wide phenomenon five years ago. Why are these mounds marked with the letter T?”
He stood and brushed dirt from his hands. “Our best evidence. That’s a religious symbol from Earth. She was here all right.”
“Did she travel here with others? Perhaps—”
“No, she came alone.”
“You are so sure?”
“Yes,” he said, more tersely than he’d intended. Caswell went back to the trail. He studied the cottage for a long time. It was far too dilapidated and exposed to harbor much in the way of evidence. He glanced the other way, toward the boathouse. In the photo that structure had a key difference compared to the cottage: a new roof. Caswell went that way and Melni fell in behind him once again.
He weaved a careful trail through what she’d called bonegrass. The knuckled segments tapped against his body and then sprang away before settling back in to mar Melni’s passage a few seconds later, like probing skeletal fingers.
A subtle change in the soundscape made him stop.
Melni almost ran into him. “What is it—”
His upheld hand silenced her. He rubbed his temple, and willed augmentation to his hearing. The dregs of his chemical reserves obliged, but only just. Caswell craned his neck and tilted his head from side to side. What was it? What had changed? Insects, like cicadas but with a wholly alien rhythm and tone, filled his ears. Beneath came the regular sloshing of the river. There had been something else. A brief, minute addition, like the hiss of a snake. Or like an air engine, settling down to a stop? Whatever it was, it was gone now.
Beside him, Melni glanced around, her brow furrowed. She hadn’t heard it, or perhaps whatever had made the sound was normal to her ear, like the rush of a field mouse through grass that he would ignore back home.
Twenty seconds passed without further anomalies. Caswell lowered his hand. “Nothing, I guess,” he said. “My imagination. Let’s go.”
The cleft between the hills weaved around for another thirty meters. With each step the sound of the river grew until finally the brown water came into view, sliding past from right to left. Roughly a hundred meters wide here. The path’s angle sloped suddenly down to the water’s edge where the boathouse waited.
While the cottage had appeared to be centuries old, the boathouse gave the exact opposite impression. Though ramshackle and filthy, it lacked the air of total abandoned disrepair. The roof sloped to either side at a shallow angle, finished in shingle tiles, even patched in places. The walls were of poorly painted wooden slats. None of it seemed to line up quite right, as if the right supplies had been slapped together by an incompetent builder. Compared to the small cottage it presumably serviced, this was quite large, a long, rectangular shape that started five meters out on the water and spanned another ten up onto the shoreline of the turgid river. The building’s uneven window frames were not empty, though they didn’t contain panes of glass, either. Instead, planks of wood had been sloppily nailed across the spans. The door itself had a length of heavy iron chain wrapped neatly around the handle and the foot latch at the base. Clasped around the links there rested a heavy combination padlock, alien and yet instantly recognizable.
The lock did not concern Caswell. His eyes were drawn instead to the signs peppered all around the building as well as on both windows and the door itself.
Each read:
QUARANTINE
DEADLY TOXINS PRESENT
Joint Gartien Assembly—Desolation Survey
Rust crept in from the edges of the brightly painted signs. One hung at a tilt
ed angle, a broken loop of wire dangling behind it.
More theater, Caswell suspected. He smirked.
“What is funny?” Melni asked, a tinge of fear in her voice.
“Everything. It all says, ‘Go away, it’s too dangerous and besides there’s nothing interesting here. Nope, nothing at all. Please leave.’ Someone’s trying too hard, I think.”
Her gaze swung back to the boathouse, and she studied it anew with this perspective. After a few seconds she nodded in agreement.
Caswell studied the broader scene: the sloped path, the reeds along the riverbank, and the clefts in the surrounding hills now tucked in long shadows. He glanced at Melni and said, “Stay low.”
Another nod.
He bent at the waist and moved at a light jog, avoiding anything on the path that might make a noise if stepped on. At the door to the boathouse he took one side. Melni understood and slid in opposite him, her back to the wall in a mirror of his posture. He glanced at the heavy lock and then the chain. He took in the windows and up to the underside of the eave that shaded them.
“Whoever built this place did a shitty job,” he whispered.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
He gestured to the lock and chain. “The wire cutters won’t get through this.”
“Agreed.” Melni nodded toward one of the boarded windows. “Easier to pry some of those planks away, I think.”
Caswell considered that, then grimaced. “Too loud. Let’s check around the back first. Maybe it’s open out toward the water. If we can get out of here without leaving a sign of our presence, I’d prefer it.”
“Agreed,” she said.
Melni took the lead. Around the side of the structure she found a long stick. She thrust the six-foot length of wood in, probing the depth a meter off the shore. The stick descended until her wrist touched the murky liquid. No chance of walking that. Without a word Caswell began to remove his boots and clothing. Melni watched him, a total lack of embarrassment as his clothes came off.
Zero World Page 27
