Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  Broben made the wall and dove down beside the three crewmen already there. All of them staring out at Arshall looking like a man-shaped hole in the dimlit canyon floor.

  “Did Sten get in?” Broben asked.

  Nobody knew. They watched the red lines track the barely visible figures of the demo team pinned down near the western cliff wall. The transport pulled up and the sides popped open and troops spilled out. They heard the faint ascending whines of the nerve rifles as the firefight commenced.

  “They’ll have to open the door to let it back in,” said Boney.

  Broben nodded. “That’s our Hail Mary pass if Sten doesn’t come through.”

  The ground around them brightened. Broben looked up, expecting a flare or spotlight, but there was just the flat horizon of dully glowing wall, bright-red spiderwebs cutting the avenue of night sky overhead.

  Shorty tapped him on the shoulder and pointed, and he saw a man-sized oval in the wall at ground level fifty feet away. Bright light from inside. An armed silhouette appeared.

  Broben drew his pistol. The figure lowered its weapon and beckoned with the other hand.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Broben. “He made it.”

  The crewmen turned and crawled like sappers toward the oval entrance. Broben hung back and let the others go by him. He glanced at the distant firefight. That demo team didn’t stand a chance.

  He took one last look at Arshall on the canyon floor. Then he followed his crew into the Redoubt wall.

  twenty-nine

  The Typhon was parked head-first on an enormous slab centered on a groove that ran into a recessed bay the size of a warehouse, angular wings folded tight against its long body. Bugs crawled all over it like crabs feasting on a beached whale. A faint rumble sounded from it, a sound more felt than heard, the purr of a hundred-foot cat. But even without the deep vibration Farley would have known that this was not a dead creature being picked over. Perhaps the Typhon was not alive in any way that Farley understood, but though it swarmed with bugs and did not move he also knew it was not dead. Sleeping seemed as good a word as any.

  The line of bugs carrying Messerschmitt parts from the crevice behind Farley flowed past the Typhon and out of sight. A sparser line of bugs returned from that direction. Some of these continued back to the crevice opening. Others veered off to join their fellow drones crawling on the Typhon. Whines and faint metallic keening carried across the dilapidated distance. Bright white flashed in tiny spots along the Typhon, and a flickering bluish glow from somewhere deep within the bay gave the space the appearance of some Dantean factory.

  The bay in which the Typhon was parked was only one in a row of bays receding into the distance. Many were damaged—filled with rubble, roof collapsed. Most looked empty. More distant ones looked as if they held the flensed skeletons of other typhons.

  Large and terrifying as the Typhon was, the thing was dwarfed by the sheer scale of its surroundings. This was the largest man-made space Farley had ever seen. The tunnel walls were slightly curved, as if some inconceivably large and powerful bore had dug them and melted the walls to a smooth gloss. A large groove that ran the length of the tunnel bisected large circular designs outside each repair bay. Another groove ran from each design to the bay itself.

  The facility had to extend for miles, and for all Farley knew it descended for miles as well. He saw several open-framed, two-seater vehicles, and wheeled equipment sleds—from little upright carts the size of refrigerator dollies to slabs that looked as if they could have hauled a small house. In the bays were massive platform lifts and huge articulated cranes. Some of these still held components. Others had fallen with their burdens. The vast space was lit the same sickly green as the faint glow that emanated from the well in the middle of the crater. The air was musty and smelled of dirt, oil, faint copper. Time.

  Farley and Wennda stared at the stream of bugs marching past the lethal body of the Typhon. Wennda was scraped-up by the fall and from being dragged, but she seemed otherwise uninjured. Farley put an arm on her shoulder and she put a hand on his.

  “Do you think we can get back up the crevice?” she whispered.

  “You kidding? I’ll race you.”

  He helped her up, and they turned to see Yone still staring at the Typhon as he stood beside the line of bugs crawling from the crevice opening. One side of his face had been scraped raw in the fall, and the top of his jumpsuit was spotted with blood. As Farley and Wennda walked toward him, Farley could feel the Typhon behind him, like knowing that a sniper had you in his sights.

  “Come on,” Farley told Yone. “Let’s take our chances back in the crevice.”

  “I quite agree.”

  The opening was just wide enough for one yard-wide bug, if it turned sideways to get through. The thought of going belly-to-belly with the bastards to get back into the crevice made Farley’s skin crawl, but he’d take rubbing bellies with the bugs over the Typhon any day.

  He watched the bugs crawl out of the crevice opening. “Stay close behind me,” he told Wennda and Yone, and headed for the entrance.

  All the bugs stopped moving. The one that had just emerged from the opening stayed in front of it and raised its forelegs. Farley pulled up short and Wennda and Yone bumped into him.

  “It doesn’t look good,” said Wennda.

  “I’ll go left,” said Farley. “If our friend there moves with me, you two run in.”

  “All right,” Wennda said after a moment.

  “Okay.” Farley displayed his opened hands to the bug and sidled to the left. Several of the eye lenses shifted to follow him. The rest stayed trained on Wennda and Yone. The bug did not move.

  Farley lowered his hands and sighed. He stepped back and so did Wennda. The bugs resumed their steady stream.

  Wennda nodded at the Typhon. “That’s the only other direction,” she said.

  “Then there’s no use crying about it. Let’s go.”

  “We are just going to walk by that thing?” Yone asked.

  “Well, I think we should tiptoe, but yeah,” said Farley.

  *

  Don’t think of it as mice sneaking by a sleeping cat, Farley told himself as they walked single file in the metal groove beside the line of scavenger drones that crawled past the Typhon. Think of it as ants crawling in front of a lion. Lions don’t care about ants. Ants aren’t on the menu.

  The groove was five feet wide and at least that deep. Wennda walked in front, Farley at the rear. Farley wanted Wennda close, but Yone’s injured leg meant that someone had to keep an eye on him in case he faltered.

  Ahead and to the right lay the Typhon. Farley tried not to stare at the thing but it was impossible. They were trying to sneak past something longer and wider than the Morgana that had almost knocked the bomber out of the sky.

  The sky was full of these bastards once. That’s what Yone said. Battalions of living machines that darkened the skies. That fought without fear or hesitation. Without mercy. All you’ve got to do is walk by one of them without being seen. Nothing to it, Captain Midnight. Stay in line, keep moving, keep quiet, and maybe one day you can live to hold hands with a pretty girl back where you belong.

  He almost made it.

  *

  Farley alternated between keeping an eye on Yone and Wennda and straining to take in as much detail as he could of what he had somehow come to think of as his nemesis. He saw that the Typhon’s tail section was asymmetrical but aerodynamic, flaring into a kind of fluke that acted as a horizontal stabilizer, like the tail of a dolphin. The skin was dark and mottled and patched in many places. The bugs that swarmed it seemed to be repairing it. Arclights flashed from the tips of forelegs delicately spotwelding damaged sections. Other bugs opened the pliable skin to perform electrical repairs or surgery, or both. One bug swept a foreleg along an intake vent or a gill slit, then crawled inside.

  Throughout it all Farley felt a sense of breathing, of extensive systems working to keep a very old and complicated thing
functioning. It felt like standing next to a vast pressure cooker whose needle was well into the red. Farley’s jaw ached from clenching his teeth.

  He watched a bug run from the bay with a piece of equipment like a relay runner. He looked back at the hangar and did a doubletake.

  The Fata Morgana floated in front of the Typhon.

  Farley understood right away that he was seeing some kind of solid-looking projection, like the tabletop images in the Dome. But it was full-sized and it looked absolutely real. The bomber’s right rear elevator was damaged. Flak and bullet punctures riddled the hull. The Morgana flew low in the northern fissure toward the pale rectangle of the Redoubt in the distance, a disorienting vista receding past the far end of the hangar bay.

  From the foreground a bright orange streak shot toward the bomber and narrowly missed as she banked right. The top turret rotated and began shooting back. The image jolted as the rounds hit home.

  The image froze.

  The Typhon’s enormous head cocked right.

  The image enlarged. Farley could see Wen through the turret bubble as he fired on the Typhon.

  On its massive metal slab the Typhon unfolded a wing. Something swelled on the underside near the creature’s body. It swiveled slightly. Ahead of the Typhon, the image receded until the whole bomber could be seen. Streaks fired from what was now a rod projecting from beneath the Typhon’s wing. Impact marks stitched along the top of the Morgana’s fuselage until they tore apart the turret bubble.

  The image froze.

  The Typhon turned its head and looked right at Joe Farley.

  Farley went cold all over. His breath caught. Everything went far away. Nothing existed but that enormous streamlined head. No light but the pale dead ovals of its eyes. It sees me, Farley thought. It sees me and I’m going to die. He willed himself to move. He could not move.

  Then he was falling backward and he hit the metal floor of the groove and saw stars and heard voices. Wennda? Yone?

  All at once it all let go. “It saw me,” Farley said. “We’ve got to go, we’ve got to move, it saw me.”

  Wennda put a hand on his arm. “It’s looking at its wing, Joe. I don’t think it saw us.”

  Farley blinked at her. “Its wing?” he said.

  “Look,” she said.

  He stared at her a few more seconds. She looked past him at Yone, and her expression was beseeching, and for some reason the idea that she was asking Yone for help because he’d gone flak happy snapped him out of it. He stood straight and looked out across the hard distance where the Typhon lay running simulation after simulation to teach itself how to destroy his bomber.

  The wing was still extended. The head was still turned back. The re-created Morgana flew ahead of it again. The shape beneath the Typhon’s wing was longer now, and bulbous, like some kind of engine.

  The aerodynamic head turned back to face the resurrected bomber. The vista dizzyingly revolved until the Morgana faced the Typhon head-on. The Flying Fortress frozen mid-bank. Two figures dimly visible through the cockpit windows. One of them Joe Farley.

  The scene zoomed backward. The frozen bomber retreated to a distant speck, a slanted line of wing. The image held a moment, and then the B-17 completed its mid-canyon turn and the walls streaked forward as the Typhon advanced. This time a full-out headlong charge. The bomber growing in the center of the lifelike vista. Small white flashes from the nose and belly as the guns began to fire. The top turret swiveling forward. Bomber and Typhon like jousters at some apocalyptic tournament. The Morgana banked again to swerve. A bolt of white-hot fire shot from the Typhon’s wing pod. The Flying Fortress soundlessly erupted into a brilliant ball of particles that quickly dissipated and left no hint that in the previous second it had been a huge machine with men inside.

  The image froze. The Typhon’s head cocked, then cocked the other way. The landscape vanished and the long head lowered to the slab.

  You figured me out, thought Farley. You son of a bitch. You figured me out.

  thirty

  With eight men in it the long and narrow room in which Broben found himself was stuffed like a rush-hour bus. Boney had to hunch to keep his head from hitting the low ceiling. The walls were white plastic panels. Light was indirect and glaring. The floor had a grated drain, and high up on one wall was a bank of shower heads. No furniture of any kind. The whole thing looked molded in one piece. Not exactly the vast aquarium-city vista Broben had been expecting.

  A muffled klaxon brayed like a distant angry goose.

  Sten touched a panel on the wall and the oval opening squeezed shut like a tightening muscle. Broben started to tell him about Arshall, but something in Sten’s look made him realize that he already knew. “Where are we?” Broben asked instead.

  “Clean room,” Sten said. “Decontam.”

  “Anybody see you?”

  Sten shook his head. “I don’t think so, but they could have cameras in here. I would.”

  “Well, we’re not gonna hang around to find out.” Broben nodded at the inner door. “What’s waiting for us in there?”

  Sten hesitated. “It’s easier to show you,” he said.

  Broben gestured impatiently and Sten turned to the inner door. Sten motioned Boney aside and Boney shuffled awkwardly out of the way. The men had to crowd even tighter against each another as Sten pulled the door wider.

  In the distance, framed perfectly in the doorway, was the Fata Morgana.

  “Oh, baby,” Garrett breathed.

  “Thurgood here we come,” said Shorty.

  “Are you kidding?” said Plavitz. “That ship couldn’t be more of a trap if it was made out of cheese.”

  “You want to go back to the Dome?” said Broben. “Feel free.” He stared hard at the bomber two hundred yards away. The bomb bay doors were open and the ball turret was pointing straight down into a divot scooped out of the floor beneath it. An arc of clean metal lay over the gouge that had been blown from the tail section. She was too far away to see what else might have been done to her, but from here it looked as if she were waiting for them on her hardstand. Nothing moved on or near her. Just looking at her lifted a weight from Broben’s heart.

  He pointed at the doorway and swept his arm to the left. “All right, everybody on this side, break left a hundred yards and then go for the bomber.” He lowered his arm. “Garrett, you’re up front with the Browning. I got the rear.”

  “Will do, cap—uh, lieutenant,” said Garrett.

  Broben’s only acknowledgement of the slip was a slight nod. He looked at the men to the right of the hatch. “This side, break right, same thing. Sten, do your chameleon trick and provide cover from the rear.”

  “The suit battery is pretty low,” Sten warned.

  “I’ll take what I can get.” Broben looked around the cramped little room. “We’re not attacking a fort, we’re stealing a bomber. Got it? Keep it quiet. But you see anything that even looks like it’s guarding our ride, you shoot it like a mad dog. I don’t care if it’s a blind nun with a tin cup; we’re getting on that bomber and going home. Got it?”

  “What do we do when we’re on board?” asked Garrett.

  “Firing positions. Shoot anything that moves that isn’t us.”

  *

  Garrett, Plavitz, Martin, and Francis bolted out the doorway and veered left. Broben had time to think, This must be how those poor saps in Airborne feel when it’s their turn to jump, and then he was out the door and running on a rough stone floor inside a space so vast he didn’t perceive it as inside at all. Full night had fallen in the fissure, and faint pale light like strong moonlight came from everywhere and nowhere. Ahead and to the left was a cluster of low structures. Behind them rose taller, lighted buildings with narrow roads between them. Here was the vast aquarium space he had expected.

  Near the huge main door were stacked rows of large rectangular containers the size of semi-trailers. Parked near these was a wedge-shaped troop transport. Ahead and to the right, the Fata M
organa faced the main door in the middle of a huge rectangular staging area.

  In the lead, Garrett cut right and made for the Morgana as ordered. Broben glanced at Everett leading the right-flank charge. Boney had fallen back and was limping so bad he looked like he was skipping. Broben looked for Sten in the rear but couldn’t see him, which was terrific.

  Where the hell were all these Redoubt bastards? Attackers outside, invaders inside, alarms going off like the end of the world, and not a soul in sight.

  Shut up. Run.

  The two flanking lines converged upon the bomber.

  Man, the ship looked like a million bucks. The tail damage had been beautifully repaired. Broben saw no trace of flak damage, no oil streaks, no burn marks, not even bulletholes. Who’d bother patching bulletholes in a bird that wasn’t flight-ready?

  Fifty feet from the bomber Garrett pulled up short and raised the .30-cal, with its remaining yard of ammo belt. Broben clearly heard him say, “What. The. Shit.”

  A spider the size of a St. Bernard dropped from the open bomb bay and scurried off in the direction of the nearest cluster of buildings.

  Garrett apparently realized that machine-gun fire would only invite attention, because he lowered the Browning. The creature wasn’t heading toward them, anyway.

  Then another giant spider crawled out of the Number Four engine cowling and crept onto the wing.

  Screw this, thought Broben. “Shoot it!” he yelled. “Shoot the goddamn thing!”

  “I’ll hit the bomber,” Garrett called back.

  “Then shoot the other one!” Broben raised his pistol.

  Behind Garrett, Plavitz said, “But it’s running away.” His tone was amazingly calm.

  “Who gives a shit, it’s big as a goddamn Buick, for christ sake! Shoot the son of a bitch!”

  “What in the hell is goin’ on out there?”

  Everyone stopped running.

  The voice had come from the bomber.

  Something dropped down from the bomb bay, and for a moment Broben thought it was another spider. But it straightened as it emerged from underneath the fuselage and walked beneath the wing on two legs.