Dry enough to still hold evidence of an aura tower’s passage, at least.
Despite being small, the aura tower still left a wide, smooth trail in the muddy path. Though the towers seemed to float above the ground when they moved, the “cushion” field they created still smoothed out the rougher parts of the ground beneath. A clean series of footprints trailed in the wake, spaced at a walking pace. Skyler concluded that the missing team must have been calm and in control when they left. The accepted practice for moving with an aura tower was to keep one person on each side of it, ready to nudge it should the thing start to drift. Once in motion the towers would keep moving, and thus they were prone to stray if not kept under constant watch. But they could just as easily become tangled or stalled if they collided with anything of significant bulk or height, thus the need for spotters ahead and behind the alien objects.
Beyond the four guides, anyone else in a party tended to stay out in front, ready to warn the others if a course correction might be needed.
In a low voice, Skyler spoke into his radio. “I’m at the point where they left the perimeter. Looks like they went into the rainforest here. Going to follow.”
A few seconds passed before Karl replied. “You made good time. Any sign of the alleged choir?”
“Negative,” Skyler said. “But I did pass a simply lovely string quartet.”
“Keep in touch, you prick,” Karl replied, chuckling.
Skyler clung to the edge of the path, where a carpet of fallen leaves served to keep his boots from sinking into the hungry organic mulch beneath. Flush tree limbs made a cathedral ceiling above him, thick with flowers and birds and strangler vines. Emerald-tinged light filtered down in tiny patches, and the air smelled of fresh rain mixed with old decay.
The path had once been a narrow road. Chunks of blacktop poked through in places where the relentless rain had eroded everything to the hardpan and beyond. Mother Nature had already won this war, and Skyler thought even the hint of a path here would disappear in another five years, giving way to ferns, roots, and strangler vines.
Ahead, as the road crested at a low rise, Skyler saw a break in the canopy and a wisp of rising smoke. The acrid smell of flame hit him an instant later.
A memory tugged at him of his descent on that first climber down to Belém. There’d been smoke northeast of the Elevator base, debris from the climber destroyed in orbit earlier that same day. But that had been months ago, and rain had fallen almost daily since. Surely those flames had long since been banished.
Campfire then?
He readied his new weapon, a compact machine gun scavenged a week earlier from the basement of a Belém police station. Skyler left the path and worked his way parallel to it through the forest. Years of wet dead leaves softened his footfalls. Even just a few meters off the road the forest became dark as night. Almost no vegetation grew this low to the rainforest floor, with so little sunlight available, but vines hanging from the branches above still forced him to take a winding path. It took every ounce of self-control to keep his machete sheathed against his leg instead of slicing back and forth across the tangle all around him. Such a sound carried, even in rain this heavy.
At the crest of the rise he paused to study the scene before him.
The path made its way through a ruined village, long succumbed to the unchecked forest growth. Vines as thick as Skyler’s arm snaked their way through every opening. Tall grass sprouted in damp clumps from the fractured soil.
A body lay just inside the perimeter of the small town, facedown in a puddle of brown water. Skyler dropped to a crouch and brought up the rifle scope to his eye, clicking off the holographic target in order to clear the view.
Other than the body, the village looked empty. He could not see the far side through the misty rain, however. Near the corpse, white smoke rose from the wall of a tiny wooden shack. Flames licked out from an object lodged there, too small to discern at this distance.
He let a moment pass before creeping down the rise. A backpack lay discarded just off the path, ten meters from the body. Stepping over it, Skyler raised his gun again and crept forward.
It was a woman. A colonist, from the clothing. He could see the rash on her neck clear enough, but walked to her anyway and used his boot to nudge her onto her back.
Facedown in the dirt, that’s no way to go. Skyler kept walking.
The meager fire came from a flare. It struggled to burn the moldy, rotten wood of the structure. Someone had fired the thing straight into the building, either in self-defense or a botched attempt to launch it into the sky above. The glowing fuel within the yellow shell sizzled under the falling water.
Two more bodies lay near the center of town. One still held the ankle of the other in a viselike grip, and both had the rash. SUBS affected people differently, and a propensity for either fight or flight often manifested first. In Skyler’s experience, the fighters survived more often—assuming their brain wasn’t crushed by the infection.
“That’s three,” he muttered to himself, glancing left and right. “Where are the rest of you?”
He found the aura tower on the far side of town, resting against a low building of rotten wooden walls. Some planks had snapped where the tower’s hard edge collided, and only vines now held the flimsy single-room structure together.
The stillness of the tower’s idle state gave Skyler a chill. He wondered if the thing would move an inch, or look any different, should a billion years pass. In the wan light he could just make out the strange, overlapping geometric patterns that laced the surface of the alien object.
He stepped around a Land Rover parked near the small home. Weeds and wild grasses burst through every seam in the rusted body panels. A power coupling was still attached to the recharge port on the rear flank, though the cord had all but disintegrated.
Someone—something—nearby coughed.
Skyler jumped at the hacking noise, which carried through the static of rainfall like glass shattering in a silent room. The sound came from within the damaged hovel, still five meters away behind the hulking form of the aura tower.
Without a second thought he clicked his holo-sight back on and brought his newfound gun to a ready position. Stepping sideways, he moved in a slow arc around the crumbling shack.
“Someone there?” he called.
Another cough came in response, muffled this time.
“You can come out, I won’t hurt you.”
In a span of five seconds, the rain dwindled to a sprinkle, and then stopped completely. Only residual runoff could be heard, clacking against the forest floor from the lush canopy that ringed the village.
Still moving sideways, Skyler continued his curved path until he’d come around to the back of the building. There were gaps, once filled by a door and window, now rimmed with pale yellow vines, like maggots clogging a wound. The room within remained shrouded in total darkness.
Skyler paused long enough to click on the flashlight slung below the barrel of his weapon. The strong LED beam had limited impact outdoors, but it was enough to cast the interior in pale white.
Having already announced himself, Skyler strode to the window frame with little concern for the plodding, crunching sounds his boots made.
Two meters from the opening the creature leapt out at him.
He fired on pure instinct, the bullet leaving a coin-sized red splotch in the center of the being’s forehead. Only after it slumped to the ground did he allow himself to exhale. He quelled the urge to put another round in its back, and swept the room with his light instead.
Another body slumped against the wall. A man, his throat torn out in a bloody mess that made Skyler’s stomach clench. No rash marked the poor bastard’s neck, which meant he’d managed to stick close enough to the aura tower to survive, for a time. Too bad his comrades hadn’t.
Five of the six accounted for, Skyler backed away from the building and walked a wide circle around the edge of town. Made up of perhaps fifty small
structures, the tiny village turned out to be otherwise devoid of life. He crisscrossed from building to building and found nothing larger than a two-meter-long snake, which he happily left alone.
Satisfied there was no immediate danger, he returned to the aura tower and sat near it. A full hour passed in quiet solitude. He ate some dried mango, a staple of the fledgling Belém colony, and a Preservall-packaged granola bar, something he’d pocketed earlier in the day. It tasted like almonds and honey, not bad if he ignored the chemical aftertaste the preservative gave. Two long draws from his canteen washed down the midmorning meal, and he took his time refilling the stainless steel bottle with rainwater dripping from a plate-sized leaf, allowing the carbon filter in the canteen’s lid ample opportunity to purify the cool liquid.
The sixth member of the doomed group never materialized. Skyler had no trouble imagining the man or woman lying dead in the tangled undergrowth, vibrant rash proudly worn on their once-human neck. Or maybe they were a survivor, doomed to a life as a subhuman, and even now were stumbling through the rainforest in search of a meal or shelter like any other primal creature.
Whatever their fate, he doubted they would ever be found. Certainly they posed no danger to him anymore.
He lifted his radio and spoke. “Karl, Skyler. I’ve got bad news.”
When Karl responded, Skyler painted the scene for him. He knew the stoic man well enough not to sugarcoat any of it.
“The Mercy Road team brought back a bunch of stretchers,” Karl said, sounding numb. “We’ll send a team back out there tomorrow to recover the bodies and their gear.”
“Suits me,” Skyler said.
“Can you bring the tower in?”
“Sure,” he said. “See you soon. Over.”
Ten minutes later, as he packed his gear in the shadow of the aura tower, Skyler heard singing.
Not singing, he decided.
No, this was a chorus of primal humming. He knew the sound well enough: subhumans, and a lot of them. The sound was distant still, coming from the northeast, by his estimation.
He listened for a full minute. The voices were just on the edge of his hearing, fading in and out. There was, he realized with dread, an unmistakable rhythm to their hum.
“Perfect,” he said to himself. “Every time I figure you bastards out, you change again.”
Kneeling in the mud, Skyler set to work disconnecting the flashlight attached to the barrel of his gun. He slipped it into his backpack and pulled out a plastic green case. Willing himself to remain calm, he thumbed the latches and opened the hard-shell box, revealing a grenade launcher within.
He’d yet to fire it. The weapon had been recovered the same day he found the gun itself, in the munitions locker of a Belém police precinct. Normally he would test any equipment before taking it into a dangerous situation, but with only five rounds of ammunition, he’d erred on the side of conservation. The flashlight would do him little good in the outdoors, though, so he took the risk and slid the launcher module into position until it snapped into place.
Skyler slipped his backpack on again and pulled the shoulder straps as tight as they would go. Satisfied it wouldn’t jostle about, he focused on the sound and began to walk toward it.
Melville Station
27.APR.2283
“REMOVE YOUR CLOTHING,” Zane Platz said, “and lie facedown on the floor. Please.”
Tania held her breath and watched, uncomfortable with the order but unable to deny the wisdom of it.
The new arrivals glanced at one another. Their surprise and discomfort at the order came through the video feed with surprising clarity, by way of nothing more than their body language. Some of them must have recognized Zane’s voice, too, which only added to their confusion.
Tim suggested the strip-down tactic after the first batch of colonists came aboard, one month earlier. With them, the order had been to simply sit on their hands and wait to be searched. The process took far too long, she thought. More important, after studying the video they’d found a correlation between those who obeyed eagerly and those who were spies.
A request to remove one’s clothing, Tim suggested, would be even more telling. The idea surprised her coming from the young man. Or, man, rather. She’d learned over dinner recently that he was a year older than her, despite his boyish looks. It was the freckles, Tania decided, that seemed to radiate youthful innocence.
One of the forty individuals began to disrobe without hesitation.
Zane put one hand over the microphone. “Spy,” he said.
“Yup,” Tim replied from behind. “That one, too,” he added, pointing. “Too eager to comply. See?”
Tania grinned and shook her head at the same time, as if she’d lost a friendly bet. She wrote quick descriptions of the two on a pad of graph paper, marking their rough position within the larger group. By the time she looked back up, all of the candidates sent from Darwin were in the process of undressing. A few already lay naked on the deck of the curved room. Only then did she find she could exhale.
That first moment, when the fresh arrivals walked out of their capsule, terrified her. Up until that instant, all she could picture was a stream of well-armed Nightcliff guards rushing forth from the makeshift shuttle. Or worse, no one at all, but instead a bomb with a red ribbon tied around it. Russell Blackfield is toying with us, she thought. He needs the food, yes, but not enough to set aside his wounded ego. Sooner or later he will try something, something more ambitious than a handful of informants. At least this second shipment contained no overt surprises.
There was still the matter of interviewing the newcomers. They’d be photographed, too, the images sent up to Black Level and down to Camp Exodus so existing members could look for people they recognize, vouch for them. She promised herself she would apologize personally to all the legitimate colonists. Tim’s technique for rooting out spies might be effective, but she wanted to make sure the others realized they were leaving indignity like this behind.
Of course, she had more to apologize for. Leaving in the first place, taking the farms. The innocent scavengers and crews who’d died when the farm platform came down in Africa. These crimes weighed on her, as if she bore the corpse of her former self on her back.
“Are we ready?” Zane asked.
“Ready,” Tim said.
“I’d feel better if Skyler were here,” Tania said. “We’re not as good at judging people.”
“There’s too much to do down below.…”
“I know, I’m just …” Tania let the sentence die and handed Tim the graph paper. “Take the team in, and be careful.”
He took it and offered her a reassuring grin. Then he vanished through the door of the tiny security office.
A section of hallway one level over had been designated for “colonist processing,” if for no other reason than it had lockable doors at both ends, and an access tube up to the cargo bay. Tania felt strongly that no one should be in direct contact with an arriving group until they could ascertain that none carried concealed weapons. As with the first shipment a month ago, Russell appeared to be exercising some restraint once again, if the nude bodies on the monitor said anything.
“We’re at the door.” Tim’s voice, over the handheld.
Zane replied, “It’s still clear, son.”
On the screen, the door at the far end of the room opened, and Tim entered with the processing team, a group that consisted of seven other fighters trained by Kelly Adelaide months earlier. Most had either a military or law enforcement background.
The process went smoothly. The fresh colonists were escorted in groups to cabins that lined the hub hallway beyond. Each would be interviewed later, the spies or miscreants sent back at the earliest opportunity.
Soon only the two men marked as spies remained. Tim returned with four of his team in tow. The suspected Nightcliff agents’ bags and clothing were searched, and then Tim gave them a short speech. “Sorry, going to need to hold you two for a while.”
Slumped shoulders and heads hung low, the two men walked between an escort of guards toward their improvised cells. They weren’t stupid.
“I wonder how many more we’ll find,” Zane said, “in the interviews.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Tania replied, standing. She dreaded this but saw no other choice. So much work had yet to be done on the ground, not to mention the myriad of tasks being neglected on the farm platforms.
Before she reached the door of the security office, the comm activated and Karl’s face appeared.
“I’ll take it,” Zane said. “Hello, Karl.”
“Zane. Is Tania around?”
“Right here,” Tania said, stepping back into the room. “How about some good news?”
Karl grimaced.
Oh, hell, Tania thought.
“Just talked to Skyler. He found the reservoir team. Looks like they let their tower get away from them somehow. All are lost, I’m afraid.”
Tania slumped into her seat, her eyes never leaving Karl’s sad, exhausted face. “Go ahead without me, Zane,” she said flatly. Her focus went to Karl. “Tell me what happened.”
She closed her eyes as Karl recounted the story. Memories of Hawaii, of battle and the crumpled bodies that resulted, helped her picture what Skyler found out there. More than anything, she wished a role could be found for him here, in orbit, next to her.
His immunity still meant too much, though. Despite the aura towers, Skyler’s unique attribute and his ability to find things made him ideal for scouting and mapping the city. If anything he could help even more down below by training others to scavenge. They had two years, a bit less now, to get Camp Exodus running smoothly before the Builders’ schedule indicated another event would occur.
The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two Page 3
