by John Shirley
“What would be the point? We could just drive around it, onto the plain.”
“Yeah. Seems like. But what’s on the other side of it? Maybe some kinda ambush.” He backed the truck up a few car lengths and put the truck in idle. “Listen,” he whispered, getting out of the truck, “stand just outside the truck, Marla—and talk to me as if I’m right in front of you and we can’t decide what to do. Do it kind of loud. Like we’re about to turn back or something.”
“What?”
“Just do it.” He walked softly toward the wall.
She shrugged, got out of the truck, took a deep breath, and, almost yelling, said, “Well dammit man what are we gonna do, are we gonna stay here or what? Are we going around it? Are we going back? I mean, what the hell? I mean shit, why don’t we make up our goddamn minds? What? What? What kind of way is that to talk to me?”
As she bellowed this, Vance was climbing the wall, easing up between the glass shards, picking out his footing with great care. He looked over his shoulder and silently mouthed, “Keep it up! More!”
She went on, “I mean, Jeezis, can we get off the dime and get movin’ here, man? You know, this is just like you. I do and do and do for you and you sit there behind the wheel yawning and scratching your nuts …”
Then he was at the top of the barrier, peering carefully through a space between two rocks down at the other side. He shook his head, then climbed quickly down.
“And another thing … !”
“Forget it!” he told her, hurrying over. “Nobody over there.”
“So who was I yelling for?”
“Somebody who might’ve been there. To cover for me as I took a look.”
“I know, but—who put this barrier up? What’s it for?”
“My guess is, somebody was setting up something here and they got killed before they could finish it.”
“You sure? Maybe we should go back a ways, then head out on the plain, take a long circle around it, Vance. It’s just too …”
He looked at her with narrowed eyes, seeming irritated. He’d made his decision and she was second-guessing him. “That’d take too much time, and it’d expose us too much. We’re going around the barrier right here and we’re moving on the way we were going. We’re already taking the long goddamn way to the crash site …”
If there is an alien crash site, she thought. The whole thing could be a boondoggle.
They got in the truck and he started around the barrier, heading out onto the glass plain. The wheels skidded a little on the slick surface, but driving carefully he was able to make good progress, passing the barrier. They had gone a truck’s length past it, turned toward the edge of the glass plain again—when cracks appeared in the glassy surface, all around them, making crick-crick noises as they opened. The cracks spread out from the truck in every direction, like thin ice breaking under a weight.
“Oh shit!” Vance burst out, flooring the accelerator. The wheels spun in place—and then the truck fell, straight down, through the shattering thin glass surface.
A second later the truck’s wheels struck the surface below with a jarring thud that cracked Marla’s teeth together, whiplashed her neck; a flailing grab at the dashboard saved her from cracking her forehead on it.
Engine dead, the truck sat on all four wheels in a thin cloud of dust. Light angled sharply down from above; to either side were rough columns of stone. As the dust cleared Marla could see the chisel marks—the stone had been hollowed out here.
“Get your gun ready!” Vance barked, turning to get the combat rifle from the back window shelf. “It was a tunnel rat trap! I fell for it like a green dumbshit!”
“What?” Still dazed, she fumbled for her pistol. “What are tunnel rats? You mean actual rats or …”
“People!” He opened the truck door. “They went degenerate in the tunnels! They eat human flesh!”
Vance was already climbing onto the truck cab roof and immediately firing at the dark tunnel mouths revealed by the settling dust. Hooded faces drew back into the shadow at his burst of gunfire.
Faces? Not exactly. More like goggling glass eye sockets, rubbery snouts in place of noses …
Instinctively, she pushed the passenger side door open, stepped out behind it, fired her pistol through the open window, blasting blindly into the darkness.
Muzzle flashes lit up the figures in the tunnel as they returned fire with pistols and shotguns. She saw they were indeed human in shape, though gas masks made their faces look snouted and rodentlike.
Bullets cracked against the armored door of the truck—there were flashes overhead as rounds impacted on Vance’s shield. She had no shield herself.
That’s another thing Zac would’ve done, she figured—first thing he would’ve given her his shield. The one they’d scrounged for her from the dead bandits had run out of power.
She fired again, emptying her clip, then looked up to see Vance firing his rifle at the wall of dirt and rock to his left. Why was he doing that? Trying to cause a cave-in?
In a way, that’s just what he was doing, she realized—the soft, already undermined rock crumbled under the impact of his bullets, and a rough ramp of stone and dirt tumbled on his side of the truck.
“Come on, girl!” he yelled, leaping up onto the tumble of rocks.
“Help me up!” she yelled, as the tunnel rats came at her. She tried climbing up onto the truck cab, got onto her knees on it as Vance kept climbing, ahead of her, up toward the daylight just about two and a half meters above. Bullets splashed into his shield, making it flicker. Two tunnel rats clambered up onto the heap of rocks and grabbed at his legs. He smashed one in the goggles with the butt of his gun, cracking the glass and driving in the shards so the tunnel rat screamed, blinded; Vance shoved a pistol into the other one’s mouth, pulled the trigger, blowing through the back of the tunnel rat’s head.
Marla got to her feet, started to follow Vance—and then clutching hands grabbed her ankles and jerked her off her feet.
The wind knocked out of her, gasping for air, she clawed at the rooftop, tried to call out to Vance. The clutching hands were pulling her back, off the truck. Claws dug into her legs and dragged her painfully, inexorably, back down … to the floor of the tunnel. One of them clawed her gun from her hand …
She looked up past the truck to see Vance, silhouetted against the sky, standing on the rim of the break in the glassy surface of the plain—he fired a burst down at a tunnel rat near her, shot the top of its head off. She tried to stand—but saw that four other tunnel rats were holding her down, their visages completely enigmatic in the gas masks.
“You will be with us, we will share you, in many ways,” hissed one of them.
“Vance!” she screamed, as terror licked up in her like flame in dry kindling.
She caught a glimpse of him looking cautiously down into the pit. He fired at a tunnel rat, then jumped back from return fire. Bullets strafed past him.
Who sells these horrid creatures guns? But she knew. People like Grunj would sell guns to tunnel rats—people like Grunj and Dimmle, and probably Vance …
Another burst of gunfire from Vance. He was shouting at her. She couldn’t make it out. She caught only one word—sorry.
The tunnel rats dragged her, struggling, away from the truck, into shadow and then deeper darkness. In the last scrap of light, up above, she could make out Vance, crouching to peer down at her from up on surface of the plain. He cupped his mouth and shouted, and this time she heard, “Sorry, girl! Too many of ’em! You were a good—”
That’s all Marla heard—a wiry arm crooked around her head, muffling the rest as she was dragged backward.
Tunnel rats hissed and muttered as they clutched at her. A necrotic stench closed around Marla, making her gag—the stench choking her exactly as the darkness of the tunnels closed around her and clawed fingers began tugging at her clothing.
Crannigan, Roland, Cal, Rans Veritas, and the mercenaries were camped in the thickenin
g dusk; in the crater at the center of the glassy, cracked plain. The floor of the crater, about sixty meters across, was coated with dust. It was just the height of a man from the floor of the crater up to the glassy surface. They stood around a small campfire between their tents, the men talking over security. They were using a chemical fire here, poured from a can, no other fuel to burn.
“What are Guardians?” Cal asked, when the conversation lulled. He’d heard the mercs in the sandtracker talking.
Rans Veritas turned to glare at him, and didn’t answer at first. His face twitched. He looked around fearfully, then looked squint-eyed back at Cal. “You got all the information you need to have, boy. Ought to keep your flapper zipped.”
“The Guardians, Cal,” Roland said musingly, leaning back against a sandtracker, “are alien entities. Eridian based. Maybe artificial, maybe not. They guarded the area around the Vault—another alien site. Guardians are dangerous as hell. There’s more’n one kind of ’em too.”
Rans’s face was twitching. “They don’t apply here! That’s a whole different set of aliens. There won’t be any Guardians. What we’re going to see has nothing to do with the Vault! I’m telling you, I had a couple artifacts, had ’em tested and they’re not Eridian.” He pointed at Crannigan’s Eridian rifle. “See the shape of that alien gun there, the material it’s made of? Everything, even the power source, is Eridian. Eridian guns are made for something that has hands not so different from us. But this ship, out there—it’s nothing like that. Maybe these critters were enemies of the Eridians. I dunno. But they’re different—and that means, no Guardians at the crash site!”
“No Guardians,” Roland pointed out, “doesn’t mean no guards. That ship could be protected by something else. That suit from Atlas claimed it wasn’t safe to approach the crash area from the air. Which means it’s got some kind of protection.”
“How dangerous is it to go at from the ground, Rans?” Cal asked. “You were there, so—”
Roland winked at Cal. “Good question, kid.”
“I’ve briefed Crannigan about that,” Rans snarled, glaring at Cal. “I don’t need to answer questions for this pain-in-the-ass boy.”
“Then answer it for me,” Roland said icily, looking steadily at Rans.
Rans looked at Roland, licked his lips nervously.
“You may as well, Rans,” Crannigan said, stroking the Eridian rifle thoughtfully.
Rans shrugged, then said, “You can get pretty close to the ship, approaching on the ground. There’s a debris field where you can pick up a few things. That’s as close as I got. You can see the main fuselage of the ET ship from there, see, down under the volcano shell. But … if you try to move in real close, things get ugly. There’s a thing that flies around and grabs things … changes ’em sometimes, makes ’em its servants. Now, a force of men like we got here—I figure they can shoot their way in, get some good stuff, more proof of what’s there …”
“In short,” Roland said, “you chickened out and ran, and you don’t really have a goddamn clue what’s down there. You didn’t get that close.”
“So what?” Rans said sulkily. “I can take you there, that’s the main thing.”
“Atlas already knows where it is.”
“I can show you how to get close pretty safely, I can tell you about a lot of stuff—but I’m not telling you anything else in advance.” His hooded eyes flicked at them suspiciously. “I know what could happen if you bunch figured you don’t need me no more …”
With that he turned and limped toward a tent.
Looking up at the crater rim, Cal could see the upper edge of the moon rising. “Going to be dark soon. You figure it’s safe down in this crater, Roland?”
“Safer’n some places, anyhow,” Roland said. “This impact crater’s pretty close to the volcano. We’ll head out there fresh tomorrow …”
Cal’s heart lifted at the prospect. His dad could be there—alive.
The moon was rising. The stars appeared over the plain of cracked glass. Shotgun in his hand, Zac kept scanning the horizon, hoping to see skags before they saw him. No real cover here. If he did see predators, best to flatten down, hope they overlook him. He could kill one or two skags with the shotgun, but if they came in a pack, he was done for.
Zac stopped, catching sight of a faint, dancing light off to the east. A campfire, he figured, a half kilometer away. He lifted the small telescope to his eyes—in the scope he could just make out an outrunner parked on the edge of a crater. Sweeping left, he saw the silhouettes of squat, big-wheeled vehicles, probably sandtrackers. Chances were, that was the mercenary camp. They had vehicles, protection—they could stop for the night. That was a luxury he didn’t have.
They had other luxuries too. They’d have water. Food. But …
There was no chance of any kind of friendly reception there. They’d probably interrogate him, and then kill him. And even if they weren’t completely hostile, they wouldn’t know where his wife and son were.
Better to steer way clear of them.
Zac angled away from the distant firelight, heading a bit out of his way to give a wide berth to the merc encampment.
He trudged on, glancing at the sky for rakks, scanning the horizon for skags, or the birdcage shape of a drifter; he licked his cracked lips, trying not to think about water.
Then, looming up ahead, purple in the evening, he saw the bluffs of stone encircling the plain. Why not follow the edges of the plain around to his goal? It would be farther—but safer. He might well be able to retreat into those rocks for cover. There could be overhangs, boulders, caves near them. There might also be water there.
He pictured a spring of water, crystal clear, enticing, trickling from a crevice in the bluffs. He imagined the stream falling glitteringly into a clear pool. He’d find it, he’d throw himself facedown and bathe his dust-stung eyes, and drink deep …
Zac moved toward the bluffs with redoubled energy. Feet hurting, he marched onward, stumbling sometimes in the cracks on the glassy surface. The edge of the plain seemed to get no closer. The night, however, got darker. The moon was no longer full and it was dipping close to the horizon, threatening to set; clouds had come to shutter the stars.
His legs began to ache and he coughed with dust. He felt as if he were growing heavier, as if gravity were increasing around him. He was wearing out. He wanted to lie down and rest. But he was afraid he’d go to sleep here—good chance he’d wake up with a skag or some other creature slavering over him. Keep going.
He looked down at the glassy surface of the plain, and watched his own feet trudging, on and on. It was hypnotic …
After a timeless time he stopped, staring … past his feet. He had come to a place where the ground under the glassy surface seemed to change color. No—the ground down there was absent, he realized. He was standing over a covered pit of some kind. The surface was scratched and dusty and discolored but it admitted a little wan moonlight. And down below, through the translucent glaze, he could just make out what looked like a chamber, carved in rock, with tunnels at either end. Was it an illusion? Maybe just some mineral pooled in the glaze of stone?
But then he saw something moving down there. Though distorted by the uneven surface like an image seen through a primitive window, the shape seemed human. Then it looked up. Were those two big, round, dark eyes, like the eyes of a giant rat? Was that a rat’s snout on a man’s head?
Zac stepped hastily back, hoping the thing hadn’t been able to see him.
He felt dizzy, deciding that fatigue and dehydration were getting to him. He must be seeing things.
Still, he circled around the dark place under the glassy surface, walking only where the glaze seemed supported by stone.
He saw no more of those dark places. And at long last, he thought he was making real progress. It looked like only another half klick to the edge of the plain.
But something else was up ahead. Was that a wall, jutting from the bluffs? Difficult to
tell in the darkness. But it looked like a wall, or barrier of big stones. Something glittered, spears of glass, in the barrier of rocks.
Maybe there was shelter there. Perhaps a spring …
Zac picked up his pace, gasping the last half kilometer, his throat rasping—and he almost tumbled headlong into a large hole broken in the plain, near the end of the jutting barrier. He swayed, and then got his balance, and stepped back from the hole. The break in the surface was clearly delineated in the moonlight. There was a pit down there, this time—and it was open. And something else down there caught the light. It was dark, difficult to make out exactly what it was. But … it looked like a truck, down in a pit. A flatbed truck.
Had someone been driving through a tunnel down there? Then he saw the tire tracks in the thin layer of dust spread intermittently over the glassy plain. They led up to the edge of the pit. They’d driven here—and crashed through, it looked like, maybe forced onto this spot by driving around the barrier. They’d been caught in a trap.
He remembered the ratlike face on a man’s body, and shuddered. Whoever’d been in that truck—one of those things had them. Hadn’t Berl once said something about “tunnel rats”? Seemed like he had, and with a tone of real disgust.
“Hello?” Zac called, not too loudly, in case there was someone lying low in the truck.
No reply. He shouldn’t be calling out, attracting attention to himself. He should get away from this spot, and quickly.
But what if there was water down there, in that truck?
No. No, it would be a trap for him too. He mustn’t venture any farther.
He backed away from the pit, and looked for its edges, made his way carefully around them, feeling the surface, with his feet, for springiness, testing for too much give where it might break under him.
He moved past the pit and found more solid footing. He reached the end of the barrier of rock, followed it back toward the bluffs. He hoped to see a silvery trickling in the moonlight. Nothing.
What had he expected? No reason there should be water in this spot, particularly.
