Something Coming Through, page 34
part #1 of Something Coming Series
That was what he’d told Nevers before they’d set out, but even he didn’t really believe it now. Truth was, he’d never really believed it.
Nevers shook a couple of tablets into his palm and dry-swallowed them.
Vic said, ‘Is your arm giving you trouble?’
‘It’s fine. Why don’t you let me carry that kitbag for a while? We can’t have far to go now.’
‘I can manage. Well, maybe I need a hand to get to my feet…’
They went on. Nevers was keyed up, getting ahead of Vic and waiting impatiently for him to catch up. Vic plodded on, remembering how light he’d felt when he’d first arrived. He had long ago grown accustomed to Mangala’s gravity, but Nevers had an eager bounce in his step. It made Vic uneasy.
They passed through another regiment of stacked stones, some in close clusters, others spaced in long lines. Vic’s feeling that he was being stalked returned; when a shadow appeared in the haze, off to the left, a bolt of panic snapped through him and he stupidly unslung his rifle. He stood his ground as the shape grew larger and more distinct: a low-slung biochine the size of a large dog stumping along on three pairs of legs, a stiff spiky tail stuck out behind. It was mostly yellow, blotched with triangles of deep orange and rust.
Vic tracked it with his rifle as it went past and vanished into the haze.
‘An actual alien beast,’ Nevers said. The bastard sounded delighted.
‘They’re mostly harmless,’ Vic said, although he wasn’t sure what kind of biochine it was. Nothing he’d seen before, but he was a long way from home…
He slung his rifle on his shoulder and they walked on. Hazy glimpses of more biochines moving through the murk. Disturbed by the oncoming storm perhaps, except they seemed to be headed into it, moving in the same direction as Vic and Nevers, towards the smudge of skyglow. Once, a swarm of rat-sized things chittered past on long angular legs, scrambling over rocks, gone before Vic had properly registered their presence.
And then Nevers suddenly stopped and crouched down. Vic plodded up to him, discovered the abrupt edge of a low cliff that curved away on either side as if some giant had taken a bite from the land. Another impact crater, maybe.
The cliffs were footed in fans of fallen rocks. Beyond, level ground stretched into the haze beneath silky ribbons of frozen light. Vic scanned the scene with his field glasses. The dim shapes of a couple of flat-topped mounds. A biochine as big as a car trundling towards them. The rocky margin of the river, and there, yes, a cluster of tents. Vanishing as a scud of dust blew past, reappearing. Orange and blue in the sere landscape.
A flicker of movement off to his left: three bright red spiny footballs rolled over the edge and fell to the rocks below.
‘Something is drawing those things here,’ Nevers said.
‘I see tents, but I can’t see any people. Then again, I can hardly see anything in this shit.’
‘If we aren’t going to move closer, perhaps my friend can find out something.’
‘We’ll try something else first,’ Vic said, and unbuckled the kitbag and drew out an aluminium case and snapped it open.
The quadcopter nested in black foam padding was the shape of a flying saucer and the size of a dinner plate, with four fans caged beneath it and a pair of stereoscopic cameras in a fixed housing. Vic unpacked the joystick control and tablet display and switched on the little machine. It rose up, hovering at eye level and transmitting an image of himself and Nevers to the tablet in his lap.
‘I need you to spot for me,’ Vic said, and handed Nevers his pair of binoculars. ‘Guide me in towards those tents, out at about eleven o’clock. Tell me if I get too low to the ground or too close to some rock.’
He rubbed his hands together, took a breath, and sent the little quadcopter out above the edge of the cliff. An updraught caught it and knocked it sideways; it tilted and spun before its autogyro routine kicked in and stabilised it.
‘Try not to fly it into the ground,’ Nevers said.
‘Just point me at those tents,’ Vic said. ‘I’ll do the rest.’
He flew high at first, yo-yoing in the gusty wind, views of the ground pitching and spinning on the screen, half the time showing only sky. It was a lot harder than he remembered, back when he’d used drones to stake out drug corners. Beside him, Nevers gave terse instructions, and at last the orange and blue blooms of the tents appeared on the tablet’s screen.
Vic painstakingly edged the drone towards them.
‘No sign of anyone at home,’ he said, after a couple of minutes spent trawling about.
‘You might want to head to the left,’ Nevers said. ‘I thought I saw some activity around one of those mounds.’
Vic kicked the drone higher and spun it around, saw what Nevers meant.
Things were stalking and crawling and humping around the perimeter of the mound as if on patrol. Things were standing here and there like sentries – Vic was reminded of a documentary he’d seen about meerkats, although these dark spiky sentries were in no way cute. He saw a shallow trench and guided the quadcopter towards it, saw a small opening in the side of the mound.
‘Looks like someone has been busy,’ he said.
‘Perhaps the bad guys are trapped inside,’ Nevers said. ‘Can you get the drone any closer?’
‘I don’t want to get too low, in case one of those biochines takes a swipe at it,’ Vic said.
And someone else said, ‘You can stop wanking around with that toy, lads. Time to get real.’
Vic rolled over and sat up. Three men stood there. Two were aiming rifles at him and Nevers. The third was Cal McBride.
49. Downriver
Mangala | 28–29 July
‘No need to thank me for dealing with the man who killed your friend,’ the tall man with the ponytail, Danny Drury, told Chloe. ‘Billy had it coming. He had an attitude. Thought that because he’d been in the Paras he knew better than his boss. If you don’t make the same mistake, we’ll get along fine. Okay?’
Chloe stupidly nodded. She was the numb centre of a ringing calm.
‘Okay,’ Drury said, and spoke into a walkie-talkie, telling someone that he had secured the woman but that the man, Harris, was dead. ‘Billy bought it too.’
The voice crackling out of the walkie-talkie said something about not finding McBride.
‘Come on back,’ Drury said. ‘There’s some tidying-up to do.’
He handed Chloe goggles and a mask. After she’d fitted them over her eyes and mouth he fastened her wrists with a cable tie and with an oddly delicate courtesy helped her climb onto the bench seat of his speedboat.
‘As long as you don’t give me a reason to shoot you, we’ll get along fine,’ he said.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Chloe said.
‘I think you know where.’
A Range Rover roared up; four men tumbled out. While they carried the bodies of Billy and Henry away, Drury spoke with the driver, a bearded man with a piratical eyepatch. The men came back and two climbed into the Range Rover; it executed a three-point turn and sped away.
Drury went off through the stand of lightning trees. One of the men who’d stayed behind inspected Chloe with a cold direct stare; the other pulled down his face mask and lit a cigarette and said something that made them both laugh. They wore red quilted jackets and desert camo pants, were armed with small sub-machine guns with blunt barrels, slung carelessly over their shoulders. Chloe looked away. That jolt of alarm when a crew of big noisy young men came barrelling up onto the top deck of the night bus: it was nothing to what she felt now. Shock had numbed her to the bone and one of her shoes had filled with water when she had climbed into the boat. A fine spray of Henry’s blood dotted her hands.
There was a flash of blue light beyond the trees; Drury came back at a run. He told one of the men to give him his sub-machine gun and a spare clip, and walked over to the other boats, two aluminium-hulled skiffs with big outboard engines. Gunfire hammered holes low in the hull of the nearest, the hard percussion echoing out across the river, and Drury pulled out the empty clip and jammed in the spare and shot up the second skiff. He tossed the sub-machine gun back to its owner and the three men crowded into the speedboat.
As they swerved out into the brown flood, heading downriver, Chloe turned to watch the funeral pyres of the burning RVs as they dwindled and faded into the murk. Thinking of Henry, trying to formulate a prayer or a promise. He had children somewhere, she thought, and remembered the empty coffin at her mother’s funeral and vowed that she’d make sure that he went home. If she survived this she’d make sure he went home.
The speedboat slammed down the middle of the wide cold river, following its lazy loops through stony land hazed by dust. It was way past midnight. Chloe hunched in a corner of the bench seat she shared with Drury, remembering the trip down the Thames from Freedom Tower after the Jackaroo avatar had been assassinated. An age ago. Another world.
Drury and the two men up front said little to each other and completely ignored Chloe. Which was fine by her. Drury was a rival of McBride’s, but he was no friend of hers. He had kidnapped Fahad. He had shot the man who had shot Henry. Shot him to see how the ray gun worked, what it did. Shot him because he could. And she was absolutely certain that if she and Fahad couldn’t give him what he wanted he’d kill them. He’d probably kill them anyway. So she had to stay alert. Be ready to take any chance she could.
She fell asleep, woke as the boat nosed towards a gravel beach. The men cranked up a camping stove and boiled a pot of coffee. Drury handed her an aluminium mug and she held it between her bound hands and sipped while he fired up a chunky tactical radio with a whip aerial and a telephone handset. Telling the person at the other end that he couldn’t hear one fucking word in three. Saying, ‘He did what? Inside?’ Looking at Chloe and slinging the radio’s strap over his shoulder and walking off down the beach, talking at length out of earshot, coming back and telling her, ‘Things are moving along nicely.’
She needed to pee. Another humiliation. Drury opened a folding knife and asked her if she was going to be good, shrugged when she didn’t answer and cut the cable ties at her wrists.
‘Run a hundred kilometres in any direction, there’s nothing but river and rocks,’ he said.
One of the men gave her a roll of toilet paper; she squatted behind a clump of grey wirewool, pretending that her captors weren’t in earshot.
Drury insisted on tying her wrists when she came back. She was given a sleeping bag and lay amongst the others on the hard cold ground, trying not to see Henry dropping down after he’d been shot, nothing like the way it was in films, trying not to see the bubble of blood rising between his lips. She woke to the same dull light and the same cold wind. Her captors fried up bacon and eggs; she ate a leathery fried egg between two slices of spongy sliced white bread and washed it down with tea. The men pissed into the river; she went behind the clump of wirewool again.
Drury didn’t bother to retie Chloe’s wrists, this time. She followed him into the speedboat and they set off again. After a couple of hours they passed through a shoal of sandbanks. The largest were crested with what she supposed was vegetation. Shocks of blood-red filaments; stiff tangles of jointed, semi-translucent tubes; heaps of blue-green bubbles quivering in the cold wind; low stacks of stiff plates that glistened like wet leather. Monocultures of different plants from different biological clades passing by like exhibits in a botanical garden or special effects in a movie.
The goggles fastened over her eyes slightly distanced her from the world. Cold wind blew into her face. Dust scratched at the rim of her mask, settled in her hair and the creases of her clothes. She jammed her hands between her knees for warmth.
Things like bundles of knotted rope slid from a sandbank and lashed away into deeper water. More special effects. Then the speedboat cut past the last of the sandbanks and there was only the river again.
Lunch was a cheese and tomato sandwich and a bottle of water.
They were running close to the bank of the river now. Passing cliffs of banded sandstone, fluted and rounded into fantastic shapes by erosion. An arch stepped out into the flow of the river like a bridge; the speedboat steered around the far side and the river bent and there were fleets of small islands again, with blunt prows upstream and long tails of gravel downstream. Several were crowned with skinny towers clad in what looked like pitted porcelain. The wind keened and fluted around them as they spun by.
Chloe asked Drury if they were Elder Culture ruins; Drury said he had no idea.
‘My expert in this alien shit told me they could be ruins or they could be nests. The kind wasps or termites make.’
A couple of hours later, Drury took out his radio and fiddled with it, talked briefly to someone, then leaned forward and told the two men in front that everything was good.
The dust haze thickened, blew aside to reveal a cliff or bluff of red rock bulging over the river, sloping down run-outs of rubble, and a rocky shore. There was something funny about the sky, a pearly gleam or shine like the reflected glow of spotlights.
The speedboat throttled back and turned, puttering into a sleeve of water pinched between tilted shelves of rock. The motor cut. The speedboat drifted past a small motor cruiser, grounded on a steep fan of pebbles.
The men stirred around Chloe. One of them helped her climb over the side of the speedboat and she followed them, splashing through icy ankle-deep water to the shore. Drury took her arm and steered her up a slope, pebbles rolling and turning underfoot, to its crest.
She stopped, gripped by freezing déjà vu.
There it was, unambiguous, absolute. The original of Michel Charpentier’s 3D model; the landscape of Fahad’s pictures. A bare bleak flatland, red stone and sand. A cluster of flat-topped mounds. Low cliffs ribboning away into the tawny haze towards the ghostly outline of rounded hills. All this sitting under a kind of dome or cap woven from faintly flickering light the colour of the inside of an oyster shell.
Drury was pointing towards one of the mounds. ‘Your little friend says there’s something in there.’
‘Fahad is here? I thought he was with you.’
‘That’s what I wanted McBride to think. No, I sent your little friend on ahead a couple of days ago. He says that he’s found something. And you’re going to tell me if he’s right.’
Drury dismissed the two men and led Chloe across a stretch of stony ground. Flat black stones like gravemarkers were embedded here and there, half-buried by sand and dust. Elder Culture stuff. Chloe didn’t like to look at them too closely. They had a faint but distinct aura, like radioactive openings into some other, utterly hostile dimension.
Several tents were pitched behind a half-buried shelf of ordinary sandstone, shivering in the rip of the wind. Drury unzipped a flap in the largest and Chloe followed him into a blue space with three sleeping compartments down one side. A man in a canvas director’s chair looked up from the tablet in his lap; a big, shaven-headed man in a red quilted jacket, squatting on his heels near a space heater, stood up.
Drury and his two men pulled down their masks and stripped off their goggles; Chloe followed their example. They made a crowd under the slanting membrane of the tent’s roof. The air was warm and stale. There was a strong sharp tingling odour, like the taste of a battery on her tongue.
‘I thought there were two of them,’ the man with the tablet said.
He wore a baseball cap pulled low, blue jeans, a black leather jacket. Amusement flickered in his sharp gaze.
‘Her boyfriend had an accident,’ Drury said. ‘What’s cooking, Tommy? Give me some good news.’
‘We extended an exploratory tunnel into that mound the kid fell in love with. Found a void he got very excited about. It seems pretty much intact, but empty. No activity, as far as I can tell.’
‘As far as you can tell. What about the kid?’
‘He’s out there now. You can’t keep him away. Luke is looking after him; Riley and Logan are patrolling the perimeter; Niles and Patrice are making the tunnel safe. We had a roof fall. The mudstone is as friable as old cat shit.’
‘And you’re doing what? Apart from sitting on your arse in this cosy tent.’
‘Keeping an eye on the general situation,’ Tommy said. ‘The magnetic anomalies are stable, but something’s definitely coming online. You saw the light effects. Plus this fucking dust is getting thicker.’
‘The edge of the storm?’
‘That’s still maybe fifty or sixty kilometres away,’ Tommy said. ‘Call this a local intensification of pre-existing conditions.’
‘There have been more critters checking in,’ the shaven-headed man said. He had a tattoo of two praying hands on his neck, Believe written across them in cursive script. ‘We took down a bunch this morning. Like turkeys in a shooting gallery.’
‘Something’s bringing them here,’ Tommy said. ‘The lights, maybe.’
‘Some actual hard facts would be good,’ Drury said.
‘About this weird shit? I’m just a humble archaeologist. I don’t do weird shit.’
‘Everything you dig up on this planet is weird shit.’ Drury held out his hand; Tommy gave him the tablet. Drury flicked through images, now and then showing one to Tommy and asking him what it was or what it meant. None of Tommy’s answers seemed to satisfy him; at last Drury held the tablet towards Chloe. ‘See this?’
Some kind of map: different shades of greens, white contour lines. After a moment, she realised that the contours were the mounds.
‘Magnetic anomalies,’ Drury said. ‘Remnants of some kind of machinery under the mounds. Spaceships, maybe, if this really is a space port. If the kid really is telling the truth.’
‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you?’ Tommy said to Chloe. ‘The kid’s familiar. Ugly Chicken.’
‘It’s real,’ Chloe said.
‘I don’t doubt that, given what’s been going on here. What does it look like?’
‘Like your worst nightmare. I hope you get to see it soon.’
