The gouting torso landed on the horrified Tech One. The arms flailed and then found purchase on the floor, one on the deck and one on the Tech One’s stomach, and for a moment that would stalk the technician’s dreams the truncated Weapons Officer tried to hoist himself up and walk on his hands, the dragging lengths of himself wetly mopping the deck. Then he fell back against the Tech One, who felt himself grow warm below the waist as he blinked up at aluminum struts and a diagnostic drone that had come to investigate. The two men lay like cuddling lovers studying the shapes of clouds.
The Tech One screamed. He pushed the body off him and heard it sigh and bubble as it sloughed aside. He stood. Warm soft lumps slid off him to plop softly onto the deck. He blinked at the open ball turret, hatch askew where it had struck the hydraulic rig frame. Blinking at the half body lying face-down in a metallic-smelling mush. At the patch of red glimpsed through the little hatchway where the severed legs and groin lay crumpled in the tiny metal ball.
The Tech One’s body did a little galvanic dance and then he vomited copiously.
“Medtech,” he said weakly. He touched his collarbone. “Medtech,” he repeated. “Medtech needed in the aircraft.”
The diagnostic biobot crept back and picked its way around the mess like a crime witness who didn’t want to get involved. The Tech One heard it clattering toward the rear of the aircraft. He thought he might be sick again but he forced it down.
If the medtech got here fast enough the Weaponry Officer might be saved. But then the Tech One realized that the sources of the organs the man would need had just been blown to sludge by a volley of .50-caliber slugs unleashed by the Weaponry Officer himself.
The Tech One set his hands on his bloodsoaked knees and heaved again.
*
The Twenty-Seventh Supreme Commander General of Services and Forces of the Redoubt watched the three medtechs roll silently across the cavernous staging area, their nimble manipulators already at work on the Engineer Threes slung in their hanging bays. The Supreme was in a cold fury. He knew that the debacle he had just witnessed firsthand had been the sole fault of the idiot Weaponry Officer One, who had lost control of an unfamiliar system. But despite where the responsibility clearly lay, the Supreme was certain that his prisoner had played a role. There had been too many accidents in the round-the-clock repair and modification of the warplane. Too many biobots put out of commission or inexplicably reconfigured. Too many convenient delays. Missing or damaged parts. Personnel injuries. Miscommunications.
He knew that, in time, his people could repair the aircraft to combat status without assistance. But the captive seemed to have a complete model of the entire vessel in his mind. Every nut, strut, gauge, feed, and gear of the clever and stupefyingly complex Gothic clockworks that was the Flying Fortress. This lucky scrap thrown at them from the past, a bone offered up by the same incalculable power that had ruined their world. Many of his people were already whispering that the warplane’s arrival was an act of providence, proof that resumption was at hand. As if some coughed-up tool were the reward for all the destruction, the centuries of hardship and cruel necessity, the attenuating generations lived without knowing whether their descendants would ever leave this box to reseed some bettered earth.
The Supreme would say nothing to counter this absurdity, though, because it was useful. It kept the remnant population bolstered as they toiled toward their common goal.
But destined or not, the warplane was a tool. A lever, accidentally dropped between the cracks of worlds, found by those most suited to take full advantage of its ability to move the world.
And the fulcrum?
The fulcrum stood beside him, arms folded as he regarded the quiet bustle, the organized response to unexpected mayhem.
Three Engineer Threes and a source clone shot to mere protein. Deliberate?
The Supreme looked back at his prisoner and felt his cold fury rise. The insolent slouch, the feigned indifference. The organ tanks will be there for you as well when I no longer need you.
Two repair drones dropped from the opened bomb bay doors, each carrying a bloody section of the Weaponry Officer One.
The man watched the biobots clatter off on multijointed legs in the direction of Medical Engineering and the organ tanks. He adjusted his dirty cap and shook his head. “Well, that’s unfortunate,” he said as he lit up a cigarette. “I musta tole that boy a hundred times to set that brake.” He turned his head to spit a fleck of tobacco on the Redoubt floor.
twenty-six
The sun that had set over the top of the high cliff when they were in the fissure had come into view again as they progressed along the crater floor, shining merciless and unwavering in an indigo sky bereft of cloud, in air too thin to distort. A few hard stars shone through.
Even though Farley had passed through the crater’s eastern perimeter not a week ago, the scale of the thing assailed him. It was the size of a large city, so big that it was hard to see it as a crater at all from within the bowl, so wide that the two-mile-high rim wall was a thin line at the horizon. Frozen lava ripples were ranges of low smooth hills, like folds in thick batter. Clusters of solidified air bubbles were the size of city blocks, some thin enough to have collapsed or broken open like bombed stadiums. The rubble of some final battle between warring deities.
And at the center of the crater five miles away, the flattened cone that rose above the well looked like an anthill at the bottom of a shallow bowl. Faint green light glowed from deep within the mound like something awful rotting in a bog. It looked ruinous and infected. The commander’s eggheads had said it was a kind of friction caused by the fraying edges of reality itself, a byproduct of the cataclysmic energy produced by whatever was still functioning in the well. They thought it might be what the Typhon guarded. Some archaic remnant of the world before.
High above the crater well the constant vortex churned, a tornado sensed not through any feature of its own but through the reality it displaced. A tear between two worlds, the violation that had brought them here. And their only hope of going back.
Europe, Farley thought as he ran. We’re still in Europe.
*
Farley called another break at an outcropping a hundred yards from the knifecut wedge of black that would lead them off this soul-grinding crater floor and into the massive fissure that led to the Redoubt. Between here and the fissure entrance were small rocks, pebbles, a large boulder shaped like a sausage, and a narrow slope of rockfall at the cutaway where crater rim became cliff wall. This time the men collapsed where they halted, breathing hard and sipping water and shaking their heads. Boney took off a boot and tended to his foot. Broben just laid down in an X.
Farley posted Martin at rear guard again with Wennda’s binoculars. If north on the crater face was noon, they had been near eight o’clock when the belly gunner had finally spotted the team sent after them as it emerged from the southern fissure onto the crater floor, though he couldn’t say for sure how many there were. Five or six. Weapons fire had not yet been exchanged, but Farley knew it was only a matter of time. This break would be just long enough for everyone to catch their breath and tighten up their gear and move out again before their pursuers gained too much ground.
Wennda sat beside Farley and sipped from a tube in the collar of her smartsuit. She was breathing hard but not winded. “When we head back out you should remind your men to keep something between them and the team chasing us,” she told Farley. “They forget that their body heat is visible if they aren’t wearing armor. Staying in the dark isn’t enough.”
Farley nodded. “Hell, I keep forgetting it, too.” He took a few deep breaths and slowed his breathing.
“So.” Her smile was slanted. “What’s our plan once we get to the Redoubt?”
“I was kind of hoping you could provide some info in that department.”
“Sten and Arshall have a copy of the report from the team member who made it back yesterday. When we were there before, I was go
ing to find out what I could from Yone.” She nodded at the small man sitting on the ground a dozen yards away. “He’s from there, after all.”
Farley nodded and got to his feet. “I better talk to him,” he said. “We have to move out in a minute.”
“I’ll come with you.”
He helped her up and they headed toward Yone, who was fanning himself with the flaps of his partly unzipped coverall. Farley remembered Grobe telling Yone I was right about you. Who could blame the poor guy for wanting to come back with them? He would always be an outcast among strangers here.
Wennda stopped walking just as Farley heard it: Faint whistling high above that quickly grew louder.
“Mortar!” Farley yelled. “Take cover! Everybody move!”
He and Wennda were already running toward the big sausage-shaped rock. Halfway there an explosion shook the ground behind them like a drumhead. Farley felt heat on his back and was pushed forward. Beside him Wennda stumbled and rolled and came up running. They stayed low and ran like apes to the cover of the long rock while fragments of canyon floor pattered down around them.
Crouched behind the long rock Farley glanced at Wennda as he drew his sidearm. She already had her nerve gun ready and was leaning up against the rock’s smooth curve. Farley risked a quick look at the crater floor and was relieved to see none of their party lying out in the open. Broben waved to him from where he lay prone behind a low flat rock fifty feet away. Martin lay beside Broben, peering south with Wennda’s binoculars. Garrett and Everett were partway up the rockfall by the fissure entrance, already setting up the Browning.
A thin red thread of light appeared from the south and swung toward Broben. The Browning spoke up, chump chump chump. Tracer rounds streaked toward the origin of the red light. The beam swung wildly, then disappeared.
Farley glanced at the darker fissure opening. It was an uncomfortably long hundred yards away, with little cover. He cursed himself for not calling the break after they had entered the fissure and posting a rear guard.
“It’s gonna be a firefight if we don’t get out of here soon,” he told Wennda.
“If we can draw the mortar fire toward a heat source, we can run for the fissure,” she said. “We could try—”
The rock she was leaning against bent in with a faint clunk. She jumped back and brought her rifle up. Farley dropped low and backed away from the rock and looked at its long, cylindrical shape in the canyon twilight.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “It’s an Me-109.”
“It’s a what?”
“Me-109.” He looked at her, astonished. “A German fighter plane.”
*
The shape had not been readily apparent because the fuselage lay on its side and the front third looked partly embedded in the ground. Either the crater floor was soft here, or the Messerschmitt had broken through to some hollow space, maybe the top of one of those hardened air bubbles, when it impacted. The fuselage was crumpled and burned, the canopy had torn away, and both wings had broken off and were nowhere in sight. As if the plane had angled down into the crater floor and then tumbled when it hit.
There was no body in the shattered cockpit. The pilot had probably been thrown out when the fighter tumbled across the crater floor. Or he had bailed, but what would the poor bastard have done after that? His body was probably out there somewhere, dead of wounds or dehydration. Whatever the case, the Messerschmitt had augered down onto the crater floor. Maybe the pilot hadn’t been able to power back up or deadstick in. Or maybe he had dueled the Typhon and lost.
“Someone’s coming,” Wennda said. She nodded toward the western cliff.
Farley peered past the crumpled fuselage to see someone jogging toward them across the open crater floor. Martin? No, Martin was still beside Broben.
“It’s Yone,” said Wennda.
“What the hell?” said Farley.
“He’s going to get killed.”
“He’s gonna get us killed.” Farley waved the approaching man away, but Yone kept coming. “Take cover!” Farley called. “They can see you!”
A knifecut line of red appeared from the south and immediately swept right. An inch-wide dot found Yone and bobbled on his torso as he ran toward them.
“Go back, god damn it!” Farley yelled.
The Browning fired briefly from the rockfall. Two tracer rounds sped in the direction the red light was coming from. The targeting laser stayed on Yone. Farley clearly heard a distant, hollow sound, like a palm slapping the mouth of a Coke bottle.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Mortar!” he yelled. “Get down!” Now Wennda was yelling for Yone to go back. Yone kept coming and Farley looked around. There was nowhere else to go.
Faint whistling now from high above.
Farley pulled Wennda down alongside the embedded fuselage and prayed the plane’s remains would shield them from the blast. He lay prone in the dirt with an arm across her and one hand absurdly clutching his crush hat. Not now not now not now.
The whistle grew. The round hit. The ground opened up and the world went dark and silent.
twenty-seven
Farley lay in darkness. His head throbbed and his ears rang. He heard faint steady pattering, like rain on dead leaves, punctuated by irregular thumps and metallic squeaks. He felt sick.
He lay quietly and took stock. Sharp pains along his arms and back. Left upper ribs bruised where the shoulder holster mashed against him. His right ankle throbbed. The back of his head felt hot, and he thought he probably had a good-sized goose egg growing there. He didn’t think anything was broken, though. Yippee.
He blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust. Faint light showed that he lay head-down on a steep slope amid rubble. More than that was difficult to make out because pulsing metallic afterimages trailed when he turned his head.
He eased himself up to his elbows and felt dizzy. He waited for it to clear, and when it did he was glad that he’d stopped moving.
A dozen feet upslope the buckled Messerschmitt fuselage lay on its side. It had fallen with them when the mortar round had blown a hole in the crater floor on top of what was clearly a narrow crack beneath the surface.
The ruined fuselage was covered with enormous bugs. Black, yard-wide hemispheres on six multijointed legs that picked their way along the foundered wreck or worked delicately at its burned metal skin, pulling out parts and taking apart the hull. They looked like ants swarming the corpse of some dead insect, an image reinforced by the line of creatures crawling to and from the aircraft. The slanting crevice was loud with taps and bangs and little shrieks of wrenching metal, and through it all a constant rustle of hundreds of dainty spider legs negotiating the fuselage and the rock-strewn passage.
The bugs were stripping the ME pretty fast. Sections of metal framework were already exposed. One bug had climbed to the top blade of the mangled propeller like some determined flagpole sitter. Another bug pulled off the cowling, and several others went to work on the now-exposed engine. The one with the cowling carried it away, even though the cowling was bigger than it was, and joined the line of bugs that crawled downslope like orderly looters.
On the other side of the bug line were Wennda and Yone. They sat upright against the crevice wall, a little downslope. In the dim light Farley couldn’t tell if they were injured, or even conscious. Wennda’s nerve gun lay by her feet. Two bugs stood in front of it.
Farley ignored the grinding pain in his upper ribs as he propped himself straighter. He eased his right hand to his holster and covered the strap with his palm as he pinched it open. The sound was just a tiny tik but it still made him wince. He slid the pistol free and held it against his chest. He thumbed the safety and squeezed the grip, then worked the slide.
All the bugs stopped moving. The carrier line, the bugs on the Messerschmitt, the two in front of Wennda and Yone.
Screw it. Farley raised the pistol. He brought his left hand to his right to steady his aim. The bug
nearest him in the carrier line dropped the access panel it was holding and scurried to him, the faint patter of its nimble legs like light gravel on a tin roof. Farley could not believe how fast it moved.
The thing halted in front of him, its left-front walking leg six inches from his knee. Farley held the pistol steady. The bug studied him. That was how it felt. Farley saw now that the half-dome carapace was set with paler ovals that glittered as they subtly shifted. Insect eyes, inspecting him. Or camera lenses. The forelegs were as long as the other four legs, but they were whiplike and supple, not segmented and angled. Other than the light tap of its footfalls it made no noise as it moved. Even this close up Farley could not have said if the thing were a creature or a machine.
He looked past it at Wennda. His eyes had adjusted enough to see that she was watching him now. Beside her Yone watched also. A dark patch glistened along one side of his face.
The other bugs had not moved.
Farley tightened his grip on the pistol and took a deep breath and tried to watch the bug in front of him in his peripheral vision as he aimed at the bug in front of Wennda. He saw a spark from his pistol, then felt a shock through his wrist and heard something clatter on the ground. He thought the gun had gone off. But there’d been no flash, no recoil.
Then he saw that he was holding half a service .45. The front half lay on the ground between himself and the bug, which held a supple foreleg poised to strike again. The tip of the tendril now ended in two thin and narrow blades or claws.
Farley held completely still. Past the transfixed line of bugs he saw Wennda staring wide-eyed. She gave a small shake of her head.
Fata Morgana Page 23
