Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  Hale studied his board of comm readouts. It was a sophisticated system, mounted to swing out from a slim cabinet. He punched several commands in and watched the shifting patterns. Claire could not understand what they meant.

  “Lost it!” Hale called across to her over the engine’s roar.

  “What?”

  “Data link from the cave. It showed normal radioactivity, then—zip—nothing.”

  “Maybe a mistake? Unplugged it for a minute?”

  Hale scowled. “Maybe.” He donned a neck mike and called the Watson.

  She looked out at the dark coastline sweeping by. No lights showed in the landscape to the north. There were few villages in this area, and none wasted electricity on all-night lighting. She should be able to see Nauplia when they turned north; the angle would be right and they were high enough. She studied the two armed men. They sat impassively, cradling their weapons, only their eyes darting and excited.

  They banked, heading north toward the site. They were coming in directly, west of the tomb, to reconn the valley. The first ’copter followed now.

  She looked far to the west, where Nauplia’s pearly glow silhouetted a crumpled line of hills. Then, directly below, an orange spark burned. She saw it only momentarily through the support struts and undercarriage, so bright it left a retinal image after the turn was finished and her viewing angle blocked. A campfire? Something from the turbine engines? She felt she should report it, and turned to Hale to shout, but he was intently working at his control board.

  “No question, it’s off the air,” he said. “Watson confirms.”

  “Then shouldn’t we—”

  “We’re already committed. Anybody down there, they’ve heard us.”

  They passed over the tomb site, she could tell the outline of the hill, but it was impossible to distinguish the tomb itself. They descended for a careful inspection of the area.

  “But what use is this if we can’t get the readings from the cave? We’ll never know when—”

  Over the turbine’s whine they heard something like pebbles rattling on the roof. A popping sound.

  “Can’t call it off now,” Hale said tersely. “That’s small arms fire.”

  The sounds came through the open window. She realized abstractly that someone was shooting at her.

  They wrenched to the right. A heavy thumping came from ahead and above and she realized it must be some big weapon of their own firing. Everything took an agonizingly long time. Absurdly, she thought of the assault scene in an old movie, Apocalypse Now, and wished she could ride up front where she could see what was going on. She could make out withered trees skimming by in the faint light. They were running down the little valley where she had spent months digging. From the side came flashes of light. She blinked, and saw retinal afterimages.

  Things were happening so quickly she did not have time to get scared. More trees rushed by and then a familiar slope rose to the right.

  Hale called, “We’re clear, but the others, they can’t turn so fast. They’re taking light machine-gun fire from the camp.” As he spoke they veered to the right, banking away and across the valley, toward the sea. The deck vibrated under her feet.

  Hale listened intently to his earphones, eyes distant. Then he said reassuringly to Claire, “Small arms stuff won’t do much against us. These babies, they’re armored. Double-hulled, got that new fiber stuff in between. Not much danger unless—” He fell silent, listening.

  Claire twisted to look down the valley and at last saw the first ’copter a half mile behind them. It was moving slowly, swinging the white crate below it like a swollen egg.

  Quick flashes from the camp. She was surprised at how loud the clattering, popping noises were. There had to be at least a half dozen people firing now because there was never a silent moment. Some came from over on the hill, at the tomb. There were spikes of light from the ’copter, too, lancing down at the camp. They were returning fire.

  Suddenly a loud rrrrppp came from the camp. The distant ’copter wobbled visibly, lost altitude, slid off to the left.

  “Sunabitch! They took heavy machine-gun fire,” Hale called. “Engine’s hit.”

  They turned abruptly, making a circle, heading back the way they had come. She lost sight of the others.

  Hale called loudly into his mike, “I don’t care, open up on that camp. Suppress that fire!”

  The thumping began above. Claire realized that the thumps were rapid bursts so fast she could barely distinguish them as a string of shots.

  Hale called, “Try to get over the hills, out of range.”

  He listened. Claire caught an irregular, grinding noise from behind them. It lifted, turned into a whine.

  “They’re going in,” Hale said quietly.

  As he said the last word a white flash came through the window. A crump and then a shattering explosion. The white flare dimmed but still lit the cabin with a ghostly light, freezing for an instant the stark, shocked faces.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  John squirmed upward, flashlight thrust ahead, shoulders scraping rock. Exhaled bubbles clouded his vision. The cylinder on his back clanged against the constricting walls.

  He didn’t remember it being this tight. Could the rock have shifted? No, that was stupid. Before, he had been swimming down, toward the light, not thinking about how narrow the passage was. And he had not carried an air tank.

  The sides seemed impossibly close, malevolently red, clasping at him.

  He twisted around a knob of rock and in that movement nearly lost it all. His mask scraped against stone. Water blurred his vision and then rushed into his nose. He jerked his head, banging it against rock. Sudden fear and panic filled him. Salt stung his eyes. He forgot that his nose didn’t matter, that he was breathing through his mouth. He sucked in and his nostrils filled.

  He yanked at the mask, automatically stroked upward for the surface, and slammed painfully into the rock. There was no surface, only rock all around, no way up to air. This was a long tube that led to a tomb, it was all a tomb, a place for the dead.

  Stop breathing. Don’t draw more in through the nose. Stop. Use your head.

  The thought made him go rigid, but he followed the old lesson, waiting for the panic to die. Tombs, death, being buried in stone forever. No, forget that. Take it by steps.

  His blurred vision told him nothing. He counted to five and then began an old drill.

  Lean backwards. Press the top of the mask against your forehead. Tilt the bottom outward. Breathe in, taking all you want, through the mouth. It felt wonderful. Then let it go out, through the nose.

  He emptied his lungs forcefully, wheezing out the last bit. Vision cleared, though fresh contact with air made his eyes sting more.

  Bubbles rose and he sank, heavier. He cracked the demand valve, welcoming the filling rush. Incredibly, his mask was clear. He felt a thrill of accomplishment. You could die in a moment, every diver knew that, and he had passed through that without losing control. He wasn’t so bad after all.

  The glass pane had a rim of fog at the top. The hell with that. He wasn’t going to go through the clearing drill for a minor problem. He wasn’t going to do anything except get the hell out of here. Have a look, then turn tail. And at this stage, wedged in, it was easier to go forward than to negotiate a turn.

  He wriggled past the rock knob and let himself drift slowly upward. He had let himself breathe as he liked, but now it was time to get back to the regular, shallow pulling on the demand valve, holding the half lungful of air as long as felt comfortable, scavenging every molecule of oxygen from it before letting the bubbles trickle out.

  The red beam stabbed into consuming, impenetrable dark. The water here was dirty. The beam picked up a haze of suspended particles.

  A turn to the left. Yes, he remembered that. The walls yawned, letting him through easily. Up ahead lay the pebbly beach. He probed the beam around, searching.

  Then, out of the gloom, he saw s
omeone. The diver was swimming away from him, feet covered in the black warming material divers wore inside their fins, like socks. He had been trained to keep formation while in a group, so the sight of someone ahead automatically made him assume the man was about some task. Silt in the water absorbed the beam, and he could see only the legs. John approached, wondering why one of the men was still working in the water, when suddenly he noticed that the legs were not moving.

  He was still concentrating on breathing and that slowed his reactions to outside events. He was even with the man’s feet before the truth dawned on him. Now he could see white hands trailing listlessly. Equipment was missing from the diving belt.

  He drew alongside. There was no comm gear on the back of the wet suit. Most important, the cylinder was missing. No mask. Arms and legs bent, as though relaxed. And in the chest, a large gaping hole, trickling black filaments into the water.

  The hair waved slowly, like seaweed. The body was turned half away and John stared at it for a long moment before he recognized the profile.

  It was Arditti.

  He bobbed gently, eyes swollen and staring straight forward. John touched the body and it spun, bringing Arditti’s gaze directly at him, mouth pursed as though the dead man was going to ask a question.

  As John watched the black strands seep out from Arditti’s chest and billow away, he realized what made the fine haze in the water. He clamped down on the pad in his mouth, a sour nausea washing over him.

  Arditti’s quizzical expression bulged and the mouth opened. A bubble oozed forth. It rose like a question, Why?, and vanished up the slope, into the mist.

  Yes, why. Someone had shot Arditti after he got most of his diving gear off. He could not have been far away, because he fell back into the water. Or was thrown…

  That explained the flare. Someone had lit it as a signal to John, or to light the cavern, give them targets to shoot at.

  Whatever the case, it was out of his league. He had no weapon, nothing. Time to get outside, warn the transport team. Let them figure out what to do. Probably it meant the whole mission was scrubbed. The Greeks must be in the cavern, which meant they were surely above, at the camp site—

  Claire. The helicopters had already taken off. They would swoop by the camp, listening for the comm signal that wasn’t coming, because the gear in the cave was dead.

  So they would hang around up there, open to fire from the ground. With Claire riding inside.

  He had to get word out. He jackknifed in the narrow space, bumping against Arditti. The red beam cut through a suspended miasma of clotted blood.

  He stroked down, working his flippers. The passage seemed wider than when he came up. The turn came and despite his haste he carefully negotiated it, not risking again the jarred mask and sudden rush of water. It would be miserably hard to evacuate the mask in this position, head down.

  The fog of blood thinned as he left it behind. He was nearly clear of the rock walls when suddenly a blue glare burst in upon him. It was ahead, on the sea bottom.

  The source moved slowly from left to right, brilliant spokes of light racing from it to fade in the water. For an instant he thought it was the transport team, lighting an underwater flare to find their way, or look for him, but then he saw that there was nothing near the point of light, no figure holding the flare aloft, and he knew what the spitting, roiling fury was.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  The white flare faded. “Their fuel caught,” Hale said hollowly. “They’re burning.”

  Claire felt a tightening wave of terror. They completed their turn and she saw a yellow pyre forking up into darkness.

  George.

  “Signal’s gone,” Hale said tensely. “Maybe some of ’em got out, though. Let’s go see.”

  They rose above the long, slumped hill, momentarily taking them beyond the spattering rifle fire. Claire saw that the first ’copter had gone down about three hundred yards west of the tomb site, near the base of the hill. It burned fiercely, sending up acrid plumes of smoke.

  They passed over the sea, blotting out the view. She glanced down and saw a glimmer of orange. It rippled, became diffuse, and then returned to an intense orange point. She closed her eyes, thinking it was a retinal afterimage, but saw nothing. When she looked again it seemed to have moved. A craft light, perhaps. The transport, bringing John back to the Watson? No, they were supposed to run without lights.

  Shoreline slipped under them. The pilot had circled, was bringing them around from the west, farthest from the camp.

  Loud pounding came from above again. She could see flashes from the camp but there seemed to be fewer of them. The gunner above must have hit the heavy machine gun, because she didn’t hear it anymore.

  Noise, confusion. Hale was suddenly shouting into his mike again. Men in the cabin gripped their weapons. The ’copter swooped down, coming in fast. A heavy rattling from the gun above.

  They landed hard. “Stay here!” Hale ordered her. As if she needed to be told.

  Hale slid the big steel doors open with a rattling bang. The men leaped out. They were facing up the hill, so the ’copter itself shielded against fire from the camp. A gust of heat swept across her face. Claire watched as they ran toward the burning wreckage, its skeleton revealed as black struts among the fire. A few crumpled forms sprawled near it. Hale reached the first one, turned it over, shook his head.

  One of them, she realized, must be George. And as the men pulled the charred lumps away from the flames she saw that no one had survived the crash.

  The sounds seemed to drop away, becoming unimportant. She thought of cocksure George only minutes ago, on the Watson, eager to take off on his big adventure. What had he thought when the shooting started? she wondered.

  Above the whump whump whump of the rotors she heard snapping rifle fire. They would have to get out of here now, forget—

  The cube. She leaped up and stood in the doorway, searching the firelit terrain. There, fifty yards away. The crating looked intact, a pearly block lying nearly in the valley, wrapped in cables.

  She shouted to Hale, but he didn’t hear. The men were still pulling the bodies clear. The fire was sputtering now, running out of fuel. Hale shouted something to them and then ran toward her, crouched over.

  “No chance,” he said, bounding up into the cabin. “They died on impact.”

  He slipped the comm headset on and spoke rapidly into it, describing the situation. Claire felt numb, disconnected. She tried to shake it off, but it was tempting to ignore the hammering from the gunner above, the crackling acrid pyre up on the hillside.

  Carmody and the National Security Council had been so sure. They had counted on the Turkish war to divert Kontos, on stealth, on speed and—not the least—on a theory. On calculations that, if she understood what she saw out there in the sea, were seriously wrong.

  Hubris. They disliked questions unless there were clear answers. They believed so much in their method that they conjured up certainty out of undeniable risk.

  “Hey!” Hale called to her. “Get away from that door.”

  She realized she was standing in it, looking dumbly out at the flickering scene. Hale finished talking and yanked off the headset.

  “Navy’s sending in two jets,” he said.

  “The crate,” she said. “We have to get it in the air again.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking. Look, soon’s that fire’s died down and the jets knock out that camp—they’re using napalm—we’ll get to it. I figure to pull the mooring block for those cables off the wreck, then hook it to our hoist rig.”

  “Can you do that quickly?”

  “Easy. Ten, maybe twenty minutes.”

  “Then you should know what I think I saw.” She told him.

  His eyes narrowed. “Maybe we can’t wait for those jets to suppress fire.”

  “Until they do, let’s stay away from the crate.”

  “Okay. We’re out of good rifle range, but there’s nothing
stopping them coming after us.”

  The heavy gun above rattled again. “Except that,” Claire said. “Do you think there are a lot of Greeks?” One of the arguments she had made to justify coming along had been her command of Greek. She realized that her glib debating point might now turn out to be valid, in a most unpleasant way.

  He spat carefully on the floor. “Could be.”

  “We’ve got to get that thing in the air.”

  “Yeah. Look, I’ll report what you said—”

  The headset halfway on, he stopped dead. A rrrrtttt came from the distance.

  “Damn! That heavy sucker again. They musta got it back in action.”

  Three slugs smacked into the body of the ’copter, each one like hammer blows on wood. Claire cringed. Another burst from above. Hale looked confused. She was glad to know matters were coming a bit too quickly for him as well.

  Two more slugs slammed into the body of the ’copter, this time bringing a clang from the tail.

  “Jesus, they can come right through the side,” Hale said wonderingly. “High caliber stuff. We’re just a big target.”

  “Then let’s get out,” she said.

  More slugs smacked into the ’copter, making it rock slightly. The men nearby set up a cracking din of return fire.

  Hale said something into his mike—it was covered by the noise—and nodded. “Right. We’ll do that.” He signed off.

  “Do what?”

  “Get up on the ridgeline, see if that thing’s out there.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Not me, it’s Carmody. We got to know what’s going on.”

  “Well—”

  “Another thing. Carmody wants you away from this ’copter. Brush fire’s dying down, Greek infantry might come up on us any minute. Carmody says I’m to get you away, safe, over the ridge line, before that singularity thing gets here. Check on what you saw. I’ll leave you there, hidden. Then we’ll get that crate strung right.”