The Plague Forge [ARC] (28 page)

Focus!
she screamed at herself. Tania strode up to Pablo and pulled his head close again. “My suit’s off, I told you. No map!”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then shut his eyes in frustration. When he opened them, a bit of calm had returned to those eyes. “Try to remember,” he said patiently. He couldn’t cup his hands to channel his voice into her helmet, so he’d simply pressed his cheek against the glass. It worked well enough.

“I …” Tania paused. She simply couldn’t picture it. She hadn’t been paying attention, not beyond referring to the glowing line whenever necessary. She’d been relying on the computer to handle the task, and that, she supposed, was exactly what the Builder’s …

The thought hit her like a thunderclap. Puzzle pieces, slipping into place as if finally viewed from just the right angle.

Can we retrieve this without electronic aid?

Could we fetch the object in Ireland under the accelerated pressure of time?

In Belém, could we overcome the augmented warriors. Could we fight and win?

She didn’t know what Samantha had faced in Darwin, but it had sounded bad. And she couldn’t fathom to guess what Skyler would find in Africa. It would be tough, no doubt, and doubly so with the presence of Blackfield.

Maybe we’re just inmates,
she thought.
Earth our prison, and all this just a test of our mental facilities.

“Well?!” Pablo shouted into her helmet. There was no malice in his tone. No, the opposite was true. He’d no doubt mistaken her suddenly contemplative gaze and assumed she was recalling the map in her mind.

“It’s gone, Pablo. It’s gone.”

She half-expected him to swear, to fly into a rage. There was no basis for that; he’d been nothing but patient before. A kind, quiet man.

Sure enough, he just closed his eyes and nodded. Disappointment, frustration, yes, but also understanding. He looked like her own father had when she’d failed her first test in school. “You’ll have to try harder next time,” her father had simply said. She’d felt like a child then and she certainly felt the same way now, only here there was no “next time.”

Tania Sharma took a deep breath and forced all this from her mind. She was a scientist; she needed to think that way. The map was gone and so it was irrelevant. A data source that couldn’t be used. What else did she have? Tania glanced at the cave itself, first looking for anything she could remember. It was useless, though. The tunnels all blurred together.

Something on the ground caught her eye. She moved past Pablo and knelt down. There, in the space between two clumps of rock on the floor, was a partial footprint. A hint of boot tread, actually. Tania pointed at it. The man nodded, slowly at first and then a bit faster. He said something, and though she couldn’t hear it she thought he was chastising himself for not having thought of the same thing. Tania gave his arm a little squeeze and smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, but the corner of his mouth twitched and Tania thought that was good enough.

“Let’s go,” he mouthed.

Chapter Seventeen

Southern Chad

31.MAR.2285

Skyler pressed himself against the wall and waited for Ana to move in behind him.

He trained his rifle in rapid sharp movements on the likely places enemies would be. Alcoves on either side of the room, the corners to either side of the entryway, that dark Y-shaped passage that exited out the back with one path leading up and the other leading down.

When no subhumans presented themselves as fodder for his firearm, Skyler took in the details of the alien place. The walls were constructed of the same material as the towers, or so their appearance said. The now-familiar black surface that had no shine to it, interlaced with geometric grooves. The patterns were bigger here, though, and not as intricate, nor were they glowing from within.

The walls were not vertical, but instead slanted inward slightly. Whether on purpose or not, the effect left Skyler feeling like the place was about to collapse in on him.

The floor had a slight undulation to it, further upsetting his equilibrium. Individual hexagonal sections perhaps three meters across were themselves flat, but they were not all on the same plane. The slight variance made the floor look vaguely as if a gentle wave had run underneath and then frozen in place. The sections differed from the walls in a material sense, too. Black, of course, but textured, reminding Skyler of the spray-on coating that lined the cargo bed of many trucks.

The ceiling consisted of much smaller hexagonal tiles, black as night. All of the yellow light within the space came from a narrow, glowing band that marked the gap between floor and wall, illuminating everything from below.

Every few seconds, a warm breeze would push against him from within, then turn and pull inward again. It was impossible not to think the building breathed.

Movement to the right caught his attention. He’d been so transfixed on the architecture around him that he’d half forgotten about the mission, the danger. Ana had slipped inside and was in position directly across from him, crouched down on one knee and sweeping the alien room with her rifle as he had. He caught her eye and pointed at himself, then pointed forward. She nodded.

Skyler moved along the wall, rolling his feet to keep them silent. He checked the alcove across from him first, saw it to be a meter deep and empty, then he stepped out from the wall and spun around to look into the alcove next to him. Empty as well. He took a position in it and motioned for Ana to move up.

Once she’d taken the alcove across the room, he stepped out again and continued to the back wall. Outside he heard a sudden eruption of chatter among the subhumans who’d swarmed on their diversion, reminding him of the dingo packs that roamed the canyons south of Darwin. Sometimes in the night he could hear them fall upon some unsuspecting animal, even from as far away as the airport hangar.

He waited for a second, aiming toward the entrance and expecting the pack to return, but as quickly as it had arisen the sound died out. Skyler shared a nervous glance with Ana and continued to the back of the room.

A wide gap in the rear wall served as the only exit. The hallway split in a Y just a few meters in, one section diving downward at a steep slope and the other going up at an identical angle.

He paused as another unnerving waft of warm air pushed against him, stronger here in the narrow mouth of the hallway. The “breath” carried a faint chemical odor he couldn’t identify. As he waited for Ana he heard sounds, too. Barely audible, baffled by the layout of the building, no doubt, but there. Movement, chatter, and the underlying drone of some kind of machine.

Ana came to the wall on the hall’s opposite side and glanced at him.

“Up or down?” he whispered.

“Down,” she said, sounding only half sure of her quick answer.

As good a choice as any,
he thought, and moved into the narrow space. Narrow compared to the room outside, but still spacious by human standards, he felt. Three meters across, wide enough for one of those hexagonal floor sections. The tunnel, like the room that fronted it, had the same undulating floor and sloped walls lit from below. The ceiling remained a narrow band of black, at least five meters above the floor. Skyler wondered for a moment what this might say about the Builders themselves. Were they twice our height? Perhaps walking on four crablike legs that spread out below them to support a heavy torso? He almost laughed at himself, for the thought conjured an image in his mind right out of some sensory shooting game.

Focus, focus
. He mentally banished the visual. Let Tania and the other scientists theorize.

“Careful!” Ana hissed.

Skyler froze. In the gap where two hexagonal tiles met was a chute that went straight down into inky darkness. The toe of his boot dangled over the space, and his next step would have taken him in. Slowly he stepped backward and knelt. From a meter away, with his focus on the hallway as a whole, the floor looked entirely solid. But if he stared at the section while standing right next to it the gap became obvious. The illusory effect was nearly perfect. He swallowed, studying the rest of the slanted tunnel before him, to no avail. It was impossible to tell one section from another until standing right over it. He wondered how many subhumans had slipped into the pit, and if the bottom was full of their broken bodies. The hazard made one thing clear: He’d have to slow down drastically or risk falling in.

And yet any minute now the subhumans outside would likely give up on the diversion outside and return to guarding the doors, assuming that was what they’d been doing in the first place. It certainly seemed to be the case.

Skyler sat down, set his gun on the floor, and started to untie his boots.

Ana glared at him from across the hall. She kept her voice a whisper. “What are you doing?”

Better to show her, he decided. He pulled one boot off and tipped it over, placing his other hand beneath it. Yellow sand spilled out into a neat pile on his palm. More than he’d hoped for, in fact. He stood, centered himself in the hallway, and tossed the handful of sand like a bowler in a cricket match.

The particles flew out in a cone before him and made their own whisper as they hit the floor. Thanks to the slope of the hallway, the sand rolled and bounced many meters ahead, coating the hexagonal tiles and the gaps between, except in two other places where darkness remained.

“There,” he said, “and there.” Skyler emptied his other boot and shoved the handful of sand into one of his pockets. While he relaced the long black shoestrings, Ana sat down and repeated his action. She thrust two handfuls of sand into her jacket and grinned at him when they were both ready to go again.

The tunnel evened out after twenty meters. By now the sounds of subhumans outside had vanished completely. Either they’d given up on the burning truck, or Skyler and Ana were simply too far inside now to hear them. Skyler hoped for the latter, or else getting out would be a bloodbath.

Where the hall flattened another junction loomed. Straight ahead an upward-sloping hallway mirrored the one they had just traversed. Skyler assumed it led up to one of the other corner entrances. A symmetrical layout made sense, though part of him wondered if that might just be a human peculiarity. To his right, another hall led down toward the center of the facility. The regular breaths of warm air were coming from that direction.

In the exact center of the T intersection lay a body. A woman, Skyler judged from the long hair.

She was clad in a white lab coat and black slacks. A gas mask covered her face, the plastic visor cracked and lacerated with claw marks. Her skin had dried into a leathery drape that covered the bones beneath. Her hands were outstretched in two claws, as if she’d been moving on all fours, which Skyler figured was exactly the case. A subhuman when she’d died, then.

Ana slipped along the wall toward the gap that led downward. She peered within and then turned back, giving Skyler a nod that said “clear.”

Instead of joining her he moved to the body, ignoring the questioning look Ana gave him. Skyler knelt and began to rummage through the pockets of the woman’s slacks. He found nothing, then rolled her onto her back. The corpse weighed almost nothing and felt like a loose bundle of kindling. Underneath the gas mask, her face was twisted in a snarl that, despite or perhaps because of the mummification, made his stomach flutter. Skyler forced himself to focus on the stained white coat. He fished through the two oversized pockets on the front and found what he’d hoped for: a terminal slate. As he stood he saw something else—an identification card around her neck. Skyler grabbed it and yanked, the fabric lanyard that held it in place disintegrating in the process.

Finally he stood and moved to the hallway entrance where Ana waited, eyebrows raised.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Hoping for a clue as to what happened here.”

Ana nodded, her face determined, yet impressively calm given where they stood.

Skyler flipped the ID card over in his hand first. It had a picture of a young Asian woman, Chinese he guessed by the characters that covered the rest of surface. The title across the top was in English, though:
CHINESE
CENTER
FOR
DISEASE
CONTROL
AND
PREVENTION
.

He’d expected the logo of a mining company, or perhaps some military organization. But this made sense, too. The raw minerals exposed in Africa as the Sahara expanded were exploited by every major nation, China chief among them. So either they’d sent a team here after the first reports of the SUBS virus came in, or perhaps they’d even had a team stationed nearby for all the other wonderful ailments Africa offered. Either way, they’d not only explored this facility but also had known to send a virologist in. Skyler felt a surge of anger with that realization. No such news had ever been released that he knew of. Certainly the presence of an alien facility where the disease started would have been all over the press and the HocNet. No, the Chinese and whoever else here knew about it had kept it quiet, no doubt wanting to own the alien object and whatever benefits it would reap, as Platz Industries had done in Darwin.

Skyler handed the card to Ana so she could read it for herself, and turned on the slate. It worked, but the operating system and text displayed were all in Chinese. He slipped it into his inner vest pocket for now, in case someone at Camp Exodus could read it, or perhaps figure out how to switch it to another language. He doubted it contained anything useful, but it couldn’t hurt to find out.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said.

“SUBS didn’t just start here,” Ana said, lost in thought. “The place is still churning it out.”

He nodded. “So it would seem.”

Her eyes darted back and forth. In Skyler’s experience that usually meant something mischievous would be said next, and she didn’t disappoint. “When this is all over, we should get your friend Tania to drop a space station on it.”