Ghost Pirate Gambit, page 15
She breaks the hug before it’s too late, ready to make her excuses and leave, when Ruby’s voice cuts through her attention.
“Alex?” Ruby’s standing at the ramp to the Figment. She whirls, scanning the small ledge. “Alex, where are you?”
Lasadi turns as well, but there’s nowhere to hide in this little area.
Alex is gone.
CHAPTER 19
RAJ
Alex is gone, vanished without a trace — Ruby calls his name and it echoes down the canyon like the stone Jay threw. Like Alex’s scream surely would have if he’d fallen. Raj spins, trying to spot where the kid could have gone in the small ledge.
“Alex!” Ruby calls again, the knife’s edge of panic sharpening her brother’s name.
“Here!” comes the echoing response. “Relax!”
Ruby’s been peering fearfully over the edge of the ledge into darkness, but Alex’s voice comes from above. In the twilight Raj catches a glimmer of motion: Alex has scaled the canyon wall to reach the crashed plane tangled in vines. He waves from the pilot’s seat.
Ruby breathes a scathing curse. “Some warning, only, if you’re going to scamper off!” She’s trying to do miffed, but Raj catches the haunted look in her eyes before she turns away.
“What did you find up there?” Raj calls.
“Not much. If there was a name on the plane, it’s been rusted off. But they weren’t transporting cargo, there’s no personal luggage or anything inside.”
“No body?”
“Nope. But it’s definitely not going to fly, it’s in a million pieces. Come on up, it’s not a hard climb.”
In the light, maybe it would be a cinch. But this twilight gloom is a different story. Raj glances at Jay. “We’ve got headlamps?”
It’s quick work for Raj to scale the boulders with a headlamp, following Qacha as she nimbly picks her way up the wall. None of the other offworlders are interested in trying, and Raj doesn’t blame them. He grew up rock climbing in this same gravity, but it’s unfamiliar territory and he’s been living at lower gravities for a few years now. Not to mention his paranoia about potential creepy-crawlies lurking in the jungle. Qacha doesn’t seem to be worried as she reaches for handholds, and Alex didn’t get stung by anything nasty, so Raj tries to push the thought out of his mind.
Whereas the ledge had smelled clean and cool from the bare stone and the water flowing by below, more of the rich decay of the jungle reaches him the farther up he climbs. Along with the sharp bite of rust and mildew — but not the reek of death one would expect to find at a crash site.
The plane is a small two-seater, one wing broken off and teetering above them on the cliff’s edge, the body of the plane broken in half.
“The comms are fried,” Alex says from inside the plane. He’s still sitting in the pilot’s seat, jabbing a finger at the controls. Raj joins Qacha crouched outside; she’s intelligently hesitant to go in. “But there’s still plenty of fuel in the cell. You think whoever crashed here got out on foot?”
“Maybe,” Qacha says, but it doesn’t sound like she believes it’s possible. “But in that case I doubt we’d ever find them. There’s not much in between here and White Rock, and you saw it while we were flying over.”
“Maybe they followed the river.”
“It has to have been Theo,” Qacha says. “Who else would have come out here? The plane’s not rusted enough to have been here longer than a year.”
Alex shifts and the seat adjustment catch fails, sliding the seat back on rails. Alex lurches backwards with a cry of surprise, and one of the vines holding the plane in place snaps. The ship drops a meter before other vines catch, coming to a precipitous stop with a shriek of metal on stone. Raj throws up his arms as clumps of soil and debris pepper them from above. Some animal chatters nearby, irritated at having its sleep disturbed.
“Time to get out of here,” Raj says. He holds out a hand to help Alex crawl through the missing windshield, then stops, tilting his head as his headlamp sweeps over something unexpected at Alex’s feet. “Wait. What’s that?”
Alex shines his own light down to find a battered journal wedged under the seat. He shifts to grab it and the plane jolts again. Raj catches his arm and carefully helps him climb out of the plane.
“Careful, kid,” Raj says. “If I don’t bring you down with me, your sister’s going to kill me.”
“Also I’m a valuable member of the crew,” says Alex, with a note of wounded pride. In the darkness Raj can’t tell if he’s actually insulted, or pretending.
“I’m way more scared of your sister than I am worried about how we’re going to get past an alarm system,” Raj says.
“An alarm system,” Alex says, shaking his head. He leaps nimbly past Raj and starts the climb back down. “You’d have died on Auburn Station fifteen times if I hadn’t been there. I am a master of my craft.”
Qacha laughs and follows him, stopping to shine her light for Raj on the trickier places. The plane above seems to have settled again, and whatever animal was chattering at them has calmed down. Still, Raj doesn’t relax until his feet hit the solid stone of the ledge and he’s out from under the potential fall of Theo Usoro’s plane.
The others have finished setting up camp, settling around a portable fire ring with rations. Ruby, sitting cross-legged on the far side of the ring between Qacha and Lasadi, gives Alex a frayed look he ignores. Raj takes the rations packet Jay hands him and finds a perch on one of the crates someone dragged out.
“It was Theo Usoro’s plane, all right.” Alex holds up the journal he’s been skimming through. “And he definitely thought there were aliens here.”
Ruby laughs. “Like, ‘Dear Diary, today I got captured by aliens’?”
“No, but he wrote he was coming here to bring the alien artifacts back and prove he was right about them.” He glances at Anton. “I thought you said he found an Alliance test plane.”
“That’s what he told me,” Anton says. He seems genuinely surprised by the strange turn Theodor Usoro’s second journal has taken.
“Get this,” Alex says. “He writes, ‘I left them originally out of a profound sense of wonder for the creatures. I couldn’t disturb that which should be revered, and turn it into a thing for the people of Moie to gawk at. Another spot for them to put on their tourist maps and trample with their guided tours.’”
Alex drifts off, tracing his finger down the page before flipping to the next one.
“What is it?” Raj asks.
“He actually goes off for a while about what an asshole the owner of Moie Dreams Adventure Company is.” Alex flips another page. “And now he’s burning on the mayor. Okay. Here’s good stuff again. ‘But everyone who mocked me will soon learn I was telling the truth. Something not of Earth landed on Indira, though it’s impossible to tell if it was before or after humans came as refugees on our own ark. Tomorrow I will follow the River of Blood to their temple and clear my name.’”
Alex flips a page. “And then there are a lot of details about what he had for breakfast.”
He sets the journal in Lasadi’s outstretched hand; everyone sits in silence a minute as she pages through it. It’s eerily peaceful, with insects chirping in the night, the trickle of water below. Some beast snarls in the distance; another snuffs through the underbrush along the opposite rim of the canyon.
“Why does he call it the river of blood?” Ruby finally asks.
Qacha shrugs. “Like how the Icaba River is muddy with red silt? It might be something like that. Maybe the soil is very oxidized here.”
Lasadi’s paging through the book. “He doesn’t say anything more about that,” she says. “But he definitely had a way with words. ‘The mayor crows at me like a white-tailed baboon, head full of his own wind.’”
“Theo was like that,” Anton says. “Some of the letters he wrote me were quite colorful.”
“Well, I can’t wait to see what’s down there,” Alex says.
Ruby gives him a look. “Aliens at the end of the River of Blood isn’t exactly what I signed up for.”
Lasadi laughs. “Should be a piece of cake after getting possessed by ghosts on a haunted space station,” Lasadi says to Ruby. She tilts her head back, braid slipping off her shoulder and falling down her back. “The stars are amazing here.”
It’s the most relaxed she’s been in Anton’s presence; whatever passed between them after she landed the Figment must have put her mind at ease. Raj saw her face in the moment after she and Anton hugged; she’d seemed profoundly at peace. Maybe Raj has had Anton pegged wrong this whole time.
Or maybe he’s an even better con artist than Raj thought.
Raj cranes his neck, following her gaze to the slash of black sky visible directly above them. Someone — he doesn’t note who — turns the fire ring down until it’s barely flickering, and as his eyes adjust, the sky is set with diamonds. A glow paints the horizon to the east, one of Indira’s moons cresting the low hills the ravine they’re camped in opens into.
“Corusca,” Jay says quietly, and heads turn to the glow. They eat the rest of their meal in silence, watching Corusca rise; Raj can’t help but remember watching it as a young man, knowing the moon was inhabited but never thinking about it seriously until he was sent there to quell an uprising. He wonders if Lasadi ever stood and stared up at Indira the way he stared up at her homeworld. She must have.
When he looks down, Lasadi is watching him. He smiles at her, but her own smile is a touch too slow to come. When it does, her eyes remain troubled.
“Let’s get some sleep,” Lasadi says, getting to her feet. “I want to be packed up before dawn so we can head in at first light.”
CHAPTER 20
RAJ
Qacha whistles low when she steps to the edge of the ledge. “So that’s why Theo called it the River of Blood.”
Raj steps up beside her. His eyes go wide.
The first rays of the sun have set the morning mist glowing, illuminating the canyon and giving them their first view of the river about twenty meters below. While the upper part of the canyon is granite like the ledge they’re standing on now, it transitions to dark jasper, knobby boulders worn smooth by centuries of water. The river fills the floor of the canyon, a few handspans of water flowing over a smooth stone base of blood-red jasper. Downstream, the jasper drops away in steps to form a shallow falls, water cascading white and lacy in stunning contrast to the red stone below.
“Incredible,” Raj says. The rest of the crew have joined him and Qacha, staring down into the River of Blood below.
Lasadi is the one who breaks the spell. “We need to get moving,” she says. “Raj, Qacha, Alex — you three apparently like scrambling around on rocks, so you’re in charge of getting us all to the bottom of the canyon. The rest of us will finish breaking camp.”
“On it,” says Raj. The view is gorgeous, but what’s even more gorgeous is that unlike the sheer limestone-and-jasper cliffs on the far side of the canyon, the wall below this ledge is broken up and cracked, massive boulders and seams in the rock that will make the journey down — and back up — much more manageable.
“This top section looks like the tricky part,” he says. “But if we rappel down to that boulder, the rest is a fairly easy climb.” He expects confirmation from Qacha, but she’s still staring at the river. “What is it?”
She glances between him and Alex, a line sketched between her brows. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Just a story my grandma used to tell me. A teaching tale, like if my brother and I were fighting over something and she wanted us to share?”
“What was the story?” asks Alex.
“About a village that went missing in this part of the Liluri Mountains. A century or so ago, someone found palladium and there was a rush in the area. A bunch of miners got really rich overnight, and the village of Tatzin sprouted out of nothing. But one day, a miner flew to Moie to get supplies, and when he flew back to Tatzin, it was gone.”
“Gone?” asks Alex.
“He couldn’t find it anywhere. He searched until he ran out of fuel, food. He finally found his way back to another town and said he’d found nothing where the village had been. My grandma always used to say the people of Tatzin fought because of their greed until all of them had been killed, and the mountains were upset with the greed of the people of Tatzin, and swallowed the village up. She’d say, ‘There’s a river in that part of the mountains that still flows red, it was stained so badly with their blood.’ And that’s why Temu and I should share whatever we were fighting over.”
She frowns back down at the river. “But once, my father told me a different version. In his, the mountain didn’t swallow the village. He says the people of Tatzin discovered an ancient cursed treasure, and they wanted to keep outsiders from discovering it and spreading the curse. So they hid the village themselves and now kill anyone who comes close. In his version, the blood that stains the river is from outsiders who come searching for them.”
Raj shakes off the chill at the back of his neck, telling himself it’s simply the cooler air drifting from the canyon below.
“Your dad was trying to scare you,” he says. “C’mon. Let’s get our line tied and test this route.”
“Then you just unclip your harness at the bottom, and you can make your way down from there,” Raj says. He’s miming proper rappelling technique while the others watch with varying degrees of skepticism. “That first granite boulder has plenty of deep handholds, the smaller jasper ones below are a bit more slippery. It’s not steep, though. Go slow and you’ll be fine.”
Lasadi’s mouth is pressed in a flat line. Anton’s frowning at Raj with arms crossed. Jay’s scrubbing a hand over his jaw, Ruby’s chewing on her lower lip.
“It’s not as far down as it looks,” Raj says.
“Some of us didn’t grow up on Indira,” Ruby shoots back.
Raj isn’t sure that’s an advantage at the moment, especially given how long it’s been since he’s done much scrambling up and down rocks. He’s tested the route and now his arms ache from the effort. His muscles and frame may have been developed in this gravity, but in truth he’s been living in Durga’s Belt for the past three years and not pushing himself. When they’re back on the Nanshe he’ll have to join Jay in the gym.
“I’ll carry you, sis,” Alex says brightly; she swats at him.
“I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. I said I hope you all know how to tie some good knots, only. How do we keep our gear from getting wet?”
“Pretty sure we’re all getting wet,” Raj says. “But I think I saw a dry bag in the Figment that would work for any of your electronics. Give me a second. Alex, Qacha, start getting them down this cliff.”
By the time he returns from rummaging through the gear already packed away in the Figment of the North, everyone but Ruby and Alex has made it down to the bigger boulder below. Ruby quickly stashes her gear and slings the bag over her shoulder, then slips over the edge of the cliff with a muttered prayer and surprising grace. Raj follows after.
He, Qacha, and Alex help the others pick good lines and spot them through the tricky spots, and soon they’re at the bottom of the canyon.
Raj’s boots splash into the water, which comes up to midcalf. It’s cold now, but it’ll feel refreshing as the day heats up. The river fills the entire bottom of the canyon, the jasper beneath is a little slick, but the surface is relatively even and the going is easy.
As the sun rises, the blood river becomes even more dazzling. The sun’s rays catch in the water to sparkle like cut glass, drawing out the many shades of brick, rust, umber, garnet, wine in the stone beneath. The canyon walls narrow as they walk to a choke point where the water tumbles over boulders in an airy veil; they scramble up and over, stone slippery under the soles of boots.
“I needed a shower,” Raj says when he finally climbs to the top of the little waterfall, but no one answers — they’re all staring at the sight ahead.
The walls of the canyon sweep out after the choke point, coming back together about twenty meters away, forming a near-perfect circle of placid water. At the far end, the river disappears into a cleft in the cliff face. The cleft is about three times Raj’s height and three meters wide at the bottom, a dark gash breathing out cool air that seeps through Raj’s damp clothes.
The ravine’s end would be gorgeous on its own, but the truly stunning thing is the pair of tall columns framing the cave’s entrance: a pair of vaguely humanoid figures, obviously carved by human hand.
“The colonists of Tatzin?” Alex asks Qacha.
She shakes her head. “That’s a story.”
“If this is out here,” Ruby asks, “why doesn’t anyone know about it?”
“Theo knew,” points out Alex.
“The jungle hides many things,” Qacha says. “Besides, look at the carvings. They’re ancient. Whoever carved these is long gone.”
Lasadi clears her throat. “And we need to be long gone, too. Let’s move.”
The closer they get to the statues, the less they seem human. They stretch up grotesquely, the lines morphing as the angle of view changes, turning the humanoid figures into slender, monstrous giants. A pair of hollowed-out stones are set at their feet like bowls for an offering; Raj tries not to think about the fact that each bowl is big enough to hold a human body.
A meter-wide flat ledge juts out from the wall of the cave, Raj realizes with relief. He hadn’t been looking forward to fording the river in the dark. But before Lasadi can climb up onto it, Alex grabs her arm.
“Hold up, Cap,” he says quietly. Lasadi’s gaze follows Alex’s finger as he points, tracing one strangely taut vine to where it disappears into a canopy of other trailing vines. And there, in between the green foliage, are a series of points. Sharpened sticks, aimed downward.
