by Gary Gibson
“I seek knowledge,” Kendrick replied laconically.
The demonic eyes grew wide and round, before sliding from one side to the other, as if checking whether anyone was eavesdropping. “Are you prepared to pay the price, mortal?”
“Yes,” said Kendrick, in a resigned tone. They’d redesigned the front end, and although it looked slicker it was taking almost twice as long for him to get where he wanted to be than he remembered from previous visits.
Still, it could have been worse. The kind of information he was after wasn’t something you could get out of any public newsfeeds. For this kind of thing, you needed hackers. “I’m looking specifically for information on the Maze. I need a schematic of the whole thing, downloadable to this eepsheet.”
The face wiggled its eyebrows. Somewhere out there, maybe in Kazakhstan – which was functionally an anarchist state – was a real live computer geek with a micro-lens mapping the movements of his face to this devil animation. Probably not even speaking English, since some top-end translation software was virtually undetectable. “Such schematics are available publicly,” the devil pointed out.
“Not the ones I’m looking for. Check the records for the World Court proceedings, charges of genocide, accused President Wilber and General Anton Sieracki, 2090. I don’t have the exact date of the investigation to hand, but there was a question of missing schematics concerning to the Maze, how it was built, who contracted it.”
Of course, Kendrick had found his way to such schematics before during his lengthy researches into Draeger’s background. They weren’t legally admissible as evidence since they came only from highly illegal sources.
Which, of course, didn’t mean they couldn’t be found, so long as you knew who to ask and were willing to pay the price. The fact that the schematics had disappeared from every official database, server and Washington office where investigators might have reasonably expected to find them, along with untold terabytes of information and incriminating data, had done nothing except convince Kendrick that someone had set out to deliberately destroy evidence of a direct, explicit connection between Draeger and the Maze.
“Mm-hmm,” said the face after a short pause. “Veerry interesting. You accessed this information once before, yes? 12 March 2093.”
“Yes, but I don’t have access to it any more. I deleted it.”
“Very wise. Also, I note your current position near the border of the former United States, moving approximately south-east. Flying in the direction of Venezuela, perhaps?”
Shit. “Please don’t spread that around,” Kendrick said earnestly. He hadn’t expected this.
“Of course not. Well, not unless someone pays us to know where you are right now.” The face grinned evilly. “Here are your schematics.”
The face was replaced by a new animation of a taloned hand shaking a dented tin can. Kendrick pointed Buddy’s wand at the eepsheet and watched as a substantial amount of money transferred itself to the hacker’s account.
A look of alarm spread across Buddy’s face. “Christ, Kendrick, that’s a lot of money. I’m not rich—”
“If you’re right about the Archimedes, you won’t need the money much longer, will you?”
Buddy blushed red. “Yeah, true.”
“Look, once we’re in LA I can arrange a fund transfer from my account if you like—”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Kendrick looked back down at the eepsheet. The taloned hand had gone and had been replaced by a list of files. Most of them were useless, the same publicly available schematics he’d seen before. But he persisted, delving deeper, finally finding what he wanted: rooms and corridors that didn’t exist in other schematics, laid out in a three-dimensional array that he could study from any angle. He zoomed the POV outwards until he saw tunnels stretching far, far beyond the main body of the complex, their dimensions delineated in crude planes of primary colours.
“Look at this,” he said, holding up the eepsheet.
Buddy squinted at it. “You blew all my money on this?”
“Yeah, and for a good reason. There are tunnels leading several kilometres away from the Maze. They’re well hidden. Los Muertos might know about them, but then again they might not.”
Buddy let out a long, descending sigh. “You’re going to get me killed, I absolutely know it, and for some reason I’m still going to follow you in there.”
Kendrick grinned. “We’ll be fine.”
Kendrick half-slept as Buddy simultaneously piloted the craft and fired out messages via the helicopter’s ancient gridnode. Kendrick woke when the constant drone of the rotor blades above his head changed subtly. He looked down with sleepy eyes and saw a crossroads: two intersecting highways cut through an infinity of scrubby desert. As he looked more closely, he saw a truck kicking up sand and dust as it approached the intersection. Buddy piloted the ’copter down, landing it close to where the two roads met.
Caroline was awake now. They helped her out and she swayed a little as she tried to stand, choking on the thick dust kicked up by the rotor blades still turning slowly above their heads. The truck had pulled up a few metres away from them. A tall man with shaggy blond hair and a neatly trimmed beard climbed out. Kendrick ransacked his memories, trying to remember where he’d seen him before.
Samuel Veliz, he remembered, the memory rushing back. Veliz had arrived in Ward Seventeen only just before the liberation and so had never made it down to the killing levels. Although Kendrick had never spoken directly with the man before, he remembered that Veliz had given evidence against Maze guards during the subsequent trials.
“Is that the lady?” Veliz strode forward. Caroline peered at him awkwardly, as though she wasn’t sure what was going on. Kendrick kept an arm around her shoulders, more to support her than anything else.
“Kendrick, I’m sorry,” she murmured. Kendrick shook his head, as if to say It doesn’t matter. Together, he and Veliz helped her into the rear of the truck where a cot had been arranged for her.
“Where are you taking her?” Kendrick asked Veliz.
“Frisco. Then offshore to . . .” Veliz glanced over at Buddy, who nodded that it was okay. “Offshore to the launch ship. They’ve got facilities there that don’t necessarily involve UN nanoware restrictions. Long as you don’t tell nobody,” he added, grinning slyly.
“I won’t,” Kendrick promised sincerely.
Veliz looked at him curiously. “So how come you two guys ain’t heading there right now?”
Buddy stepped forward. “We’ve got some things to take care of first. When you see Sabak, tell him I’ll be there a little later than expected.”
“Okay, but there isn’t much time left,” Veliz warned. “When we go, we go.”
“I know that,” Buddy replied, casting a significant glance in Kendrick’s direction. “We’ll head for LA first, if there’s time. But not just yet.”
Over the next several hours they stopped twice again, dropping into small, private airstrips for refuelling as they continued south. The landscape changed beneath them, becoming rougher, wilder, before all visible signs of civilization disappeared beneath a verdant jungle canopy. At one point they saw a ruined highway passing through the jungle from horizon to horizon, cutting the green world into two halves.
With its camouflage on, the helicopter appeared from below as just a pale blue outline that would darken as the day moved on to dusk. From only a few dozen metres away, you could barely hear the sound of the rotors. Although it looked ready for a scrapyard, hidden under its scarred and dented interior lurked some pretty state-of-the-art technology. In fact, it had been optimized for smuggling. Of course, good-quality thermal-imaging equipment could penetrate its disguise in a second, but some kind of concealment was better than nothing.
Finally, when it seemed their journey would last for ever, Buddy skilfully guided the ’copter down through a narrow gap in the canopy, somehow managing to drop the craft onto a patch of even ground. While Kendri
ck watched his knuckles turn white with terror, Buddy appeared calm throughout this operation, the only noticeable tension in the lines around his mouth.
They stepped out into an inferno of heat even worse than the one that Kendrick had experienced during his trip to Cambodia. Animal noises echoed through the tropical forest and hot mist rose in occasional wisps from the tree trunks whose vast gnarled roots dug hungrily into rich black soil. A bird with brightly coloured feathers flashed shrieking through the air above them, heading for the treetops high above. The very air tasted honeyed and thick.
Kendrick felt a fresh chill of fear down his spine. This was Los Muertos territory, and they could have been tracked even before they’d landed.
“That’s possible,” Buddy admitted when Kendrick voiced his worries. “But it’s a chance we’re going to have to take. Remember the last time we were here, with that kid Louie? Keep in mind that we’re right in the middle of tens of thousands of square miles of jungle territory. Los Muertos can’t cover more than a fraction of that.”
Kendrick eyed the helicopter, seeing the way its camouflage software reflected the vegetation around them like a constantly shifting funhouse mirror. He had no doubt that from further away the machine would blend in perfectly with its surroundings.
“Do Los Muertos have satellite capability? Could they track us that way?”
“I don’t think so – though I think they have people who hack into commercial GPS satellite feeds.”
Earlier, Buddy had copied the maps that Kendrick had downloaded into his own wand. Now he peered into its tiny screen, lost in thought.
“Okay,” he said, dropping the device back into his pocket. “Your secret entrance is maybe fifteen klicks east of here. We can get ourselves there in a couple of hours, and get out some time before dawn – with any luck. That’ll give us plenty of time to take a good look around while we’re down there.”
“Couldn’t we have landed closer?”
Buddy shook his head. “Terrain’s no good for landing any further east. And we can’t follow the highway, either: too good a chance of being spotted by road patrols.”
Kendrick shrugged. “So I guess we just walk?” His back already itched from the river of sweat pouring down it.
Buddy flipped open a storage hatch, pulling out some bundles and dropping them to the ground. Then he tossed one of a pair of water bottles over to Kendrick. Next he produced a machete.
Buddy slammed the hatch closed and began to pack some of the stuff he’d taken out into a backpack.
He looked up at Kendrick. “This is not going to be a picnic. It’s going to be a long, hard slog. Do you understand that?”
“I hear you. Remember, I’ve been in places like this with you before.”
“Even so, it’s easy to forget.” Buddy handed him the backpack. “We’ll take turns carrying this. You first.”
Kendrick slung the backpack over his shoulders. Although it looked large and bulky, it turned out to be surprisingly light. The heaviest items they had with them were the water bottles.
At first they made good progress, since the jungle had been relatively sparse where Buddy had dropped them down. They kept within a few hundred metres of the highway but far enough away so that anyone using it would be unlikely to spot them. This undeniably made the going a lot harder, but both men considered it far better than getting shot at.
After an hour or so Kendrick’s muscles began to ache badly. Though the ground was level, every step taken involved a negotiation of tree roots and tangled vines, to the accompaniment of the constant shrieks of outraged birds and monkeys. The sun glancing down through the high canopy revealed slippery mosses coating the rocks, and fallen branches seemed to reach out malevolently to trip them up. They trampled through wide-leaved plants that grew wherever sunlight reached the soil and enormous ferns batted at their faces as they passed.
But just as the pain in Kendrick’s sinews and joints threatened to become unbearable it faded away magically, becoming distant, easier to ignore. The augmentations had just kicked in, tweaking his nervous system to allow him to keep going far beyond his usual limits. He wished it had been that easy when he had suffered the seizures.
After a couple of hours the going got harder as the terrain began to rise. Buddy glanced down at his wand from time to time, checking the GPS and keeping them on course.
They had run into no one so far, which made Kendrick paranoid. He wondered if they had just been lucky, or if they were being tracked without their knowledge.
“Okay,” Buddy announced some indeterminate time later, halting with his back against the vast trunk of a banyan tree, his shirt stained black with sweat. “Okay, that’s good time. Only five kilometres to go, and we’re ahead of schedule. Maybe another couple of hours if we keep up this pace, and we’ll be there.” He nodded, as if attempting to convince himself. “Maybe we’ll make it.”
They rested a little while longer, Kendrick swilling water that tasted like the sweetest wine round his throat. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he could get drunk on it, if only he were to drink enough.
Having crested the hills, the two men were on ground that now sloped downwards again. Before too long they heard a sound like static crackling. It came at them across a stream that rushed over boulders before falling several metres to form a wide pool below a nearby cliff. Vines and roots trailed in the clear water below them and they stopped, briefly spellbound by the sudden beauty of the place.
They were getting near. Very near.
Between twisting trunks they could see slivers of the distant horizon as the jungle dropped further towards a flat plain: a broad expanse of cleared land that looked as though it stretched on for ever. Kendrick squinted into the near distance, seeing a needle-thin road leading towards a huddle of breeze-block buildings. In an instant, his memory flashed back to that day when a transport plane had dropped out of the skies, spilling himself and countless others into a searing daylight that they would not experience again for several months.
Buddy consulted his wand. “Somewhere around here,” he said.
Kendrick looked around him. “I don’t see anything.” He stepped up beside Buddy, studying the wand’s readout over his shoulder. It definitely showed a clear match between their current location and the GPS read-out for the hidden entrance.
Kendrick felt his resolve waver. He’d brought them out here on the whim of a man who had been dead for years. It was insane, after all.
He stepped across to the cliff edge, peering down through the dense foliage. A shelf of rock, jutting out above the cascading water, cast deep shadows across the base of the cliff.
“Down there,” he said, stepping back.
Buddy stuck his head over the edge, peering down the sheer drop. “You think?”
“Only one way to be sure.”
They picked their way carefully around the cliff top until they came to a less sheer descent, clinging for support to roots and rocks as they went. There were probably easier ways to get down but neither of them wanted to waste another hour trying to find one.
It came close a couple of times, as Kendrick’s hand slipped on a slimy tree root and he tumbled before fetching up against another tree growing from the hillside.
This close to the Maze they would be extremely vulnerable if they were spotted. Defending themselves when trapped on a near-vertical gradient would be impossible. They moved patiently, quietly, carefully, picking their way over rocks and vines, making slow but steady progress.
Kendrick was the first to notice something strange. He was clambering over a scattering of loose boulders when he spotted a silvery glint in the nearby foliage, mistaking it at first for a spider’s web.
Then he looked much more closely. “Hey, Buddy. Check this out.”
They could discern the thread-like substance everywhere – a fine nacreous filigree, so thin and delicate that it was almost invisible, spreading across trees and rocks and bushes alike.
Buddy reached
out to touch a thread and jerked his hand away almost immediately.
“What’s up?” asked Kendrick.
Buddy looked afraid. “Touch it and see.”
Kendrick fingered the strand. For a moment he was somewhere deep and dark as a sense of unutterable loneliness washed over him. He quickly wiped his hands on his jacket, aware that they were shaking.
“Remember following that kid Louie halfway across Venezuela?” he muttered. “This is the same kind of thing we found then.” He suspected that the threads extended deep beneath their feet, all the way down into the Maze itself.
Buddy nodded. “Like I could forget.”
Kendrick stepped away. “We shouldn’t be surprised by this. This stuff is what keeps Los Muertos so close to the Maze.”
Buddy shrugged. “I know, but . . .”
Kendrick nodded in turn. Sometimes there just weren’t the words, but he was shocked by the fear that he detected in Buddy’s voice.
Buddy’s eyes widened and he pointed over Kendrick’s shoulder. “Hey, I think I see the entrance!” He picked his way between two vast tree trunks, sliding down a muddy slope until he reached the base of the cliff. Kendrick followed, grabbing at roots or anything else he could use to stop himself falling too fast. The air was filled with the sound of exotic and primal wildlife, and those silver filaments were everywhere: it was like being on another world.
The threads had even woven themselves into the rough surfaces of tree trunks and were also visible in patches of mud, or stretching between blades of grass. As the sun sank towards the western horizon they reflected its light in an unearthly glow, giving the surrounding forest an hallucinatory dimension.
Sure enough, at the base of the cliff, hidden behind bushes and moss-covered rocks, lay the mouth of a cave, its interior dark and mysterious. Kendrick gazed long into its lightless depths before kneeling and brushing his fingertips against some of the thin fibres that extended ahead.
It was like someone finding, while standing in the middle of a vast crowd, that they possessed a hidden talent for telepathy. A rapid series of impressions flew through Kendrick’s mind, faint enough for him to be uncertain whether or not they were the product of his own imagination.
