The Plague Forge [ARC] (27 page)

“A very wise precaution,” Tania acknowledged. She looked at the water with more concern now. Before it had only registered with her as a pure liquid, an erosive fixture in this ancient place made dark only by the underground location. Now the obsidian black, rippling surface seemed alive. The entity the room been missing. An enemy to focus on.

“I’ll go first,” Pablo said. “Tania, only come out as far as you need to.”

His tone left no room for debate. Vanessa moved to stand beside a large boulder that had rolled to a stop at the lip of the river. She walked behind it and dug in her boots, positioned so the rope had to wrap around it. Satisfied, she nodded at them to proceed.

Pablo took each step with almost maddening care. Probing, testing. A little weight, then more, then a shift in stance to place himself exactly halfway between this step and the last. More probing, and then the final movement. Tania tried to focus on his foot placement, to spot for him and remember where he’d stepped so she could follow exactly, but the shell ship kept pulling her attention to it. The more she stared at that steady green glow, the more she thought it had a pulse to it.

“Whoa!”

Pablo stumbled, breaking her semi-trance with his voice and sudden movement. Instinctively she gripped the rope tighter, braced herself for the worst. Suddenly she imagined him going in the water, pulling her with him. This made her realize with horror that she wouldn’t drown. No, her fate would be something even worse. The suit would keep her alive for hours as she drifted down the underground river until the water pinned her against a wall in some deep, dark place, until her air ran out and she suffocated. Tania slammed her eyes shut and forced that vision away. She thought of the avocado grove on Space-Ag 12, the sound of the artificial breeze rustling the branches, and Neil. Her pulse dwindled.

The man in front of her laughed, nervously. It had only been a loose rock, she saw. The gray object rolled into the black water and vanished. Pablo paused for a moment, gathering his courage again before trying another position. Tania waited, found herself focusing on the green glow again.

Finally Pablo reached the crashed vessel. He placed his hand on it for support without any apparent concern that the contact might cause something to happen. Tania wanted to shout to him, tell him not to jostle the thing, not to wake it, but his hand was already resting on the scarred surface and nothing happened as a result.

She let out her breath. He was five meters away, just a dozen steps or so. Tania moved toward him and felt the rope tug against her waist. She looked back and realized that the maximum length between herself and Vanessa had been reached. “This is as far as I can go,” she said. “Can you move up?”

“I’d rather not,” Vanessa replied.

“It’s okay,” Pablo said. “There’s enough slack. I can make it. Stay put and be ready to go back.”

And just like that, he stepped into the opening on the side of the alien ship and out of Tania’s view. All she could see was the long blurred shadow he cast on the ceiling and walls of the cavern as he blocked out some of the green-hued light coming from within.

The rope that linked her to Pablo started to pull taut. Just when she began to think it might not be long enough, he called out.

“It’s here. I’m going to pick it up … right … now.”

The emerald-green glow vanished, plunging the cave into darkness. Tania gripped the rope in a fist so tight she felt her nails dig into her palm. Something pushed against her. A force, like a concussion wave from a nearby explosion. She almost fell. The display inside her helmet flickered once, then vanished. The static sound of the river coming through her suit’s speaker vanished with it, as did the ever-present background noise of her …

 … of her air processor. Gone.

A wave of anxiety swept over her. She slipped again, and in her rush to grab hold of the rope she let her gun drop. The splash of it in the water sounded far away, muted. Her heart pounded. Despite the lack of sound coming in she could hear her own terrified breaths, amplified in the confines of her helmet. She could smell her own fear, hear her own movements, but from the outside world … nothing. No scents. No light at all. Sounds were barely perceptible. Even her sense of touch was only what sensation came in through the protective suit.

All sensation from the outside world, gone.

She screamed for help, the noise of it deafening and yet, she thought, possibly inaudible to Pablo or Vanessa. Tania did the only thing she could think of and crouched down, suddenly feeling like she was on some tightrope over a deep, deep gorge.

Her panic faded enough to allow a single cold realization in:
The air processor has stopped
. Her suit was dead, all the electronics shut down, possibly fried beyond repair. It took a singular force of will to release one shaking hand from the rope and fumble at the control panel in the center of her chest. She tried to picture the layout of the buttons in her mind, and couldn’t. In her panic she began to punch them at random. Nothing happened. She began to pound her chest.

Calm. Get a hold of yourself
.

She hadn’t even realized she’d let go of the rope. Utterly blind, she patted the slick rocks around her for it. Nothing. She extended her hands and felt a subtle change as they entered the water. Coldness bit into her fingers and for a fleeting second she thought the liquid had entered her suit. But no, it was just the outside environment no longer being held at bay by heating elements built into the fabric of her outfit. She splashed around in the water, felt something round, and gripped. The rope. She pulled it from the river and only then realized it was still wrapped around her waist. The realization that she could have found it easily by starting there seemed to stem the growing fog of panic in her mind.

Both sides of the rope were slack. She began to haul in the portion that led to Pablo. Or had, at least. If the rope pulled in without him and the end, or Vanessa at the other—

She couldn’t allow herself to think that. Tania shouted again, at herself this time.
“Think!”

There were patterns before her eyes, like the bizarre shapes that appeared on the inside of her eyelids if she stole a glance at the sun. Her foot began to feel cold and she realized it had slipped into the water.

Tania pulled in Pablo’s side of the rope first, and to her horror it kept coming easily, just as she feared. Any second she expected to find the end, dangling loose. Then something—someone—bumped into her. She fell, a hand caught her. One strong hand, gripping her by the upper arm. Pablo or—

A demon’s face emerged from the darkness before her, at the edge of her perception. Faint, stark hints of cheekbone and jawline. Haunted eyes like two emerald stones. The scream she’d been on the verge of letting out died in her throat at the sight of those eyes. They were terrible and beautiful and …

Pablo’s
.

He was shouting at her. At first she recoiled, sure he’d been transformed somehow by the alien vessel. But no, she realized, he was simply lit from below. Faintly, yes, but that was all it was. She looked down and saw an object cradled in his other arm. Glowing green lines a hair’s width across covered the surface, emitting so little light, the ground at her feet was still nothing but inky blackness. The triangular object was perfect save for one missing tip, matching exactly with the receptacle she’d seen aboard the ship in orbit.

Pablo squeezed her arm and shook her. He was still shouting. Tania reached up and pulled his head to her visor, turning him so his ear pressed against the glass. “I can’t hear you! My suit has failed!” Tears welled in her eyes as she said the words.

The immune nodded and guided her by the arm. She had to move one slow step at a time, tapping around with the toe of her boot to find a solid place for her weight. Twice she slipped and almost went down, and each time Pablo’s grip—painfully tight—kept her from spilling into the water. Her proximity to spending the rest of her life in a weightless, frigid oblivion forced her to concentrate.

She felt a tugging at her waist and remembered that Vanessa wore the other end of the rope. Tania gripped it and gave it a tug in return. A second later she felt two quick tugs, which she returned. A signal that all’s well. It added to her confidence and she took the next few steps more assuredly. Just like that, her feet were on solid ground. Pablo guided her a few meters onto the pile of rubble that served as a shore and eased her to a sitting position.

To her surprise he plopped the alien artifact in her lap and then vanished into the darkness. Checking on Vanessa, she supposed. Tania ran one hand over the surface of the triangular mass, watching as the silhouette of her fingers obscured the laserlike green lines.

The rope at her waist tugged from Vanessa’s direction, and then the woman was next to her. She crouched next to Tania, probably thought she was in shock. Tania repeated the technique she’d used with Pablo and pulled Vanessa’s face down to her helmet, pressing her ear against the glass. “I’m okay! The suit is off line.”

Vanessa cupped her hands against the glass and shouted back. “Understood. We need to—”

Red light exploded into the cavern. Tania jerked back in surprise as a single, fiery point of light began to float before her in odd lurches. She could see smoke curling away from the red fire and sparks dripping down from it.

A flare. An emergency flare, held aloft by Pablo. He’d pulled it from the backpack he’d left on the shore before venturing across. So their flashlights had failed, too. Anything electronic, she guessed, due to some kind of electromagnetic pulse unleashed when the object was picked up.

The man came to them and handed a second flare, unlit, to Vanessa. Tania saw his lips move. Whatever he’d said, Vanessa nodded back and slipped the spare light source into a pocket. The two of them then launched into a rapid-fire conversation. An argument? No, she thought, just frantic planning.

Tania tugged at both their sleeves and pulled them close. “My air processor is off. I don’t know how long I can breathe this air. We have to get to the towers.” Her voice came out steady, even confident, belying how she felt.

Pablo nodded once. He said something to Vanessa, who responded with a lengthy sentence.

God,
Tania thought,
if the
Helios
was affected, too
 … The thought pushed her toward an emotional cliff of sheer panic. It took all her will to pull back from it. All that mattered was reaching the aura towers. She could camp there if necessary while Pablo and Vanessa found another aircraft in Denver.

All of the sudden the two immunes jumped to their feet, guns drawn, pointed somewhere behind Tania. The tunnel mouth, she knew. Tania rolled to her knees so she could see. She started to rise and felt Pablo’s hand on her back, pushing her low. A flash of light above her, along with a deep
whump
sound she felt more than heard. A gunshot. He was shooting. At what?

Vanessa fired, too. A rapid pulse of white light like camera flashes. In that burst of illumination Tania saw their target. A subhuman, running on all fours toward them.
Toward me,
she thought. Could that be right? When the gunfire ended the creature was in shadow, Pablo’s flare behind somewhere on the ground behind her. Pablo fired again. How he could still see the thing she couldn’t fathom, but in the burst of light from his gun she saw a bullet hole appear on the left side of the sub’s forehead. Tania moved to her right to let the light from the flare pass her, just in time to see the creature collapse into an unmoving heap just a few meters away. One of its hands—a dirty, scarred thing with jagged fingernails—was outstretched toward where she’d been.

No,
she thought.
Not where I’d been. Where the object had been.

Vanessa’s cupped hands were on the side of her visor again. “Where’s your gun?” Then her hands went away, replaced by an ear pressed against the glass.

“I dropped it when the lights went out, into the water.” Tania searched the woman’s face for a reaction to that and saw nothing. The immune whipped her focus back to the tunnel mouth. Her lips were moving. Talking to Pablo again. The lack of sound from the outside wasn’t quite as terrifying as the absolute blackness had been just minutes before, but it was close.

With no gun to carry about, the task of carrying the alien object fell to Tania. Pablo emptied nonessential gear from the bag he’d left onshore and gestured for her to place the triangular mass within. She did so, then zipped up the bag, pausing only for a second to soak in those green angular filaments of light.

She hoisted the bag on one shoulder and saw Pablo was already moving. She followed, up the sloped tunnel through which they’d entered, leaving the shell ship behind them, perhaps forever. Tania tried to imagine recreational cavers exploring this place a hundred years from now. What would they make of the empty ship? The skeletons they’d find? She tried to picture the confusion on their faces if they searched hard enough and found her gun at the bottom of that river. This place would have to be marked, perhaps even made off-limits if the world ever recovered enough to worry about such things.

Ahead, Pablo had reached the first junction in the tunnel. He whipped his red flare in one direction and then the other. Then he whirled on her, shoulders up and hands turned out in a silent question:
Which way?

Tania shrugged.
How the hell should I—

Oh, shit. The map.

Stupidly she tapped away at the controls on her suit again. Of course this changed nothing. Her HUD was blank. No clean little 3-D trail marking their path, no reassuring display of her remaining air. Nothing. The electronics were fried. The caps would need to be replaced. Firmware, reloaded. Even then it might not work, and anyway it didn’t matter. It was entirely possible there was no repair capability left on Earth, much less someone with the knowledge to do the work. Like most complex things that broke, it would be tossed, and the scavengers tasked with finding a replacement. Good luck, on a suit like this.