The Plague Forge [ARC] (3 page)

More jostling followed as the APC barreled over fallen trees and rain-carved grooves.

Explosions continued to go off in rhythm with their departure. Skyler had no idea if the bombs would kill, or even harm, a single subhuman, but the hope was that it would keep them from following. At least until the APC reached the road.

“Low on ammo!” Pablo shouted down from his perch on the turret.

“Conserve it until we’re back on the path,” Skyler said.

“Almost there,” Vanessa said over her shoulder. Then, “The towers are moving.”

“Just as we hoped,” Skyler said. “Get ahead of them if you can, and let Karl know to be ready.” He got to his knees on the floor of the compartment and studied the object he’d stolen from the cave. In shape it almost reminded him of a giant wedge of cheese, square on two sides and triangular on the others. Two points of the triangle were sharp, but the third, the “tip,” Skyler decided, looked as if it had been cleaved off. He wondered at the reason for that, but knowing the object would fit into a specific place inside the Builder ship seemed to answer the question: It would only fit in one position, like a puzzle piece. Or a key.

Skyler lifted it into a hard case, then closed and latched it.

Explosions trailed behind them, every two seconds.

“The armored one is following,” Pablo said. “The rest stayed inside the mist.”

Skyler glanced at Ana. “How far behind us is it?”

“Ten meters,” Pablo said. “I can’t get a good shot.”

Ana read Skyler’s face and knew his plan almost before he did. She moved to the rear and grasped the door’s handle.

Skyler lifted the seat of one bench, revealing a compartment within. He pulled another assault rifle and thumbed it to explosive rounds.

“Do it,” he said to Ana.

She yanked the handle and pushed the door open.

Skyler stared down a “road” of flattened trees and crumpled foliage. To his left and right, enormous aura towers lumbered along in the same direction the APC headed, knocking over everything in their path as they made their way back to the space elevator.

Off center, but on the path, a black-armored subhuman sprinted toward him. The creature moved with inhuman speed, augmented no doubt by the strange material that coated its entire body.

One of Ana’s bombs went off a few meters to its left, and the creature stumbled but hardly broke stride.

Skyler aimed, a pointless endeavor in the bouncing, jostling vehicle. He pulled the trigger anyway and held it down. The rifle chattered, followed a split second later by a myriad of small flashes around the feet of the creature. Some of the shots went high and exploded into the trees at the side of the carved road. Splinters of wood filled the air behind the subhuman like confetti.

Finally Skyler got the weapon under control and swung it back toward his target. A round exploded off a clump of dirt just beside the creature, and it dodged left.

A fatal mistake.

Just as it stepped one of Ana’s bombs went off, right beneath it. The subhuman cartwheeled into the air, limbs flopping with sickening lifelessness. It landed in a splash of mud, unmoving.

Ana hooted in victory and rattled off a string of words in Spanish that needed no translation.

Skyler kept the gun trained on the body until it faded from view. Two more of Ana’s bombs went off before they passed the point where she’d started to drop them on the way in.

Vanessa weaved the vehicle around a few more aura towers, and then they were clear. The towers were all behind them, making their slow journey back to camp. Skyler guessed it would take them half an hour to reach the base of the Belém Elevator. By contrast, the towers released when he’d picked up the object in Ireland were still weeks away.

He left the rear door open and set his weapon on the side bench. “Vanessa, let Karl know we’re en route, and to get everyone ready on those barricades.”

“Already done,” she said. “He said the cord shook a few minutes ago, like before.”

The second object we’ve picked up, but the
third
time that’s happened.
He didn’t like what that implied.

The camp had drilled four times in the last two days for the possible return of the aura towers. Portions of the barricade around the camp had been placed on wheeled pallets, and the expected path to the center of camp had been cleared of structures, tents, and vehicles. No one wanted a repeat of the mess their departure had created.

Skyler leaned under the roof turret, squinting as he looked up. “Pablo, you all right up there?”

“Uh huh.”

“You can come down if you want.”

“I’ll stay. Just in case.”

“Suit yourself.”

A moment later Vanessa turned them hard left and gunned the motors. Teeth-rattling bumps turned into a gentle sway as the vehicle transitioned into the potholed road.

“Help me with this,” Skyler said to Ana. He tugged at the heavy armor on his chest and Ana stepped across the cabin to assist. Together they lifted the bulky plated mass over his head and dumped it on the floor with a deep, dull thud.

“That’s better,” he said, and leaned his head back against the wall. The rush and chaos of battle behind them, Skyler’s thoughts turned almost immediately back to Tania. The sacrifice she’d made so that he would have enough air to survive. The sight of her drawing that last tiny breath before her oxygen ran out.

He felt the sting of tears and willed them away. A familiar hollowness slithered into his gut, something he’d foolishly hoped would fade with the distraction of a mission.

Ana, uncanny in her ability to sense the shifts in his mood, took a seat next to him on the bench, folding her legs up beneath her and resting her head on his shoulder.

He took her hand in his, and together they watched the infinite blur of forest go by.

At Camp Exodus, Karl waved them in. He stood in the middle of a widening gap in the colony’s wall, a bullhorn in one hand and a radio in the other. Colonists scurried about, pushing portions of the wall aside. Farther inside camp, more people worked to reposition the temporary structures that surrounded the base of the space elevator. A few forklifts assisted the effort, tracks coated brown with mud.

Rain pounded the entire area. It had been relentless for the last week, turning the unpaved areas of camp into muddy ponds and the rest into slippery patches if one wasn’t careful.

Vanessa pulled to a stop next to Karl and they exchanged a few words. She coaxed the vehicle forward and turned hard left, moving them toward the river, well out of the path of the incoming towers.

Skyler could see almost nothing but a rain-lashed windshield; still, he knew the camp’s layout like the back of his hand and could guess how far they’d driven. “That’s good enough, Vanessa. Park here; we’ll help them prep.”

She obliged, rolled to a stop, and killed the current to the motors.

“Damn this rain,” Skyler said once he set food outside. The thick drops of water fell in an almost artificially steady pace. He left his body armor in the back of the APC, and offered Ana a hand down to the ground. She jumped instead, wincing slightly on the landing and probably hoping Skyler hadn’t noticed. He pretended not to and pulled his bushman’s hat from the pocket on his pants where he kept it. The downpour soaked the treated leather before he could get it on his head. “This is miserable.”

Ana pulled her own hat on, a black baseball-style cap unadorned with any logo. She still wore her shorts and tee, but at least she’d pulled a combat vest on over the thin top. She flashed him a thumbs-up.

“Pablo, Vanessa, guard the … thing,” he called out, and they set out.

They met Karl at the edge of camp. He stood on a scaffold that had been bolted to part of the wall there, allowing a kind of lookout. A metal ladder provided access, and Skyler climbed up. Ana, he noted, stayed behind. The lingering pain in her back must be flaring up again, but he knew better than to suggest she find somewhere to lie down.

Karl held a set of binoculars to his eyes. He lowered them as he made room for Skyler. “Can’t see shit in this rain. Are half coming?”

“Just like Ireland.”

“Okay.” He turned and raised his bullhorn. “Control team, into positions!”

A portion of the camp had been cleared in a pie-slice section expanding out from the Elevator base, in the direction of the crashed ship out in the rainforest, plus a healthy buffer around the entirety of the disk that marked the cord’s actual connection point.

“Think it’s enough?” Skyler asked.

“Only one way to find out.” Karl waved as a group of colonists emerged from the shelter of a camper some distance away. They rushed forward and swarmed into the cleared space.

Skyler noted that the rest of the colonists had also sprung into action at the command Karl had shouted, retreating far to the opposite side of camp by the university complex.

The “control team” fanned out and spaced themselves evenly in a line, halfway between Aura’s Edge and the base of the Elevator.

Karl spun around and scanned the forest again. The path originally carved when the towers had left was still detectable if one knew where to look, but a remarkable amount of foliage had already regrown along the route.

Skyler heard the towers before Karl saw them. The crack of young trees being folded in half, the crunch of rock being pushed aside. Muted under the heavy rain, but there, and growing louder.

“I see them,” Karl said.

Visibility in the rain was two hundred meters at best, one hundred at worst. What Skyler expected to see was tall, black towers pushing through the wall of rainforest that ran right up to the edge of Belém’s slums. Instead he saw the foliage begin to whip and sway, as if a strong wind had suddenly rose.

Then the towers came.

Like an advancing army of siege engines from medieval times, the dark obelisks powered their way through the tree line. Skyler’s heart leapt when those at the vanguard suddenly dropped as if falling into a pit, until he realized they were just crossing the steeply banked water channel that marked the border where city and rainforest met. The towers rose again a half second later as they reached the other side, a fine mist of water rising from where their bases touched the swollen waterway.

Still more came through, in a wider spread than Skyler would have guessed. One, a shorter tower whose tip sat well below the tree line, broke through close to where they stood, outside the cleared wall section. Karl saw it the same instant Skyler did.

“Hell,” he said, “too close.”

“Get to the ladder!” Skyler bellowed. He was closest and went first, taking the rungs two at a time and jumping the last three. His boots landed in the mud below with a splash, and he stumbled trying to make room for Karl. He braced his fall with one hand and whirled in time to see his friend slip on the scaffold top, still two steps from the ladder. The man landed hard on the wooden slats, one arm folded awkwardly underneath his torso. His binoculars tumbled over the edge and into the mud below. Wincing, Karl started to stand again and move for the ladder.

Then the wall wrenched and broke apart.

The scaffold heaved and tilted. Skyler had time to see Karl tumble off it and fall to the mud, before he, Skyler, had to move or be crushed himself.

Sheets of aluminum siding and chain-link fence crumbled as the tower pushed through. The scaffold walkway finally tipped and fell, slamming into the murk below with a tremendous sound and sending up a wall of milky brown water. Somewhere, underneath the broken remains of the wall and the ankle deep mud, was Karl.

Once the tower passed by, Skyler leapt forward. He hoisted a segment of fence away and tossed it aside. Someone else appeared next to him and lent a hand. Then two more people, shouting Karl’s name and tossing chunks of debris aside.

A hand grasped Skyler’s and he yanked without a second thought. “Help,” he grunted. The others around him converged, and then Karl came free of the mud. He was covered in the stuff, screaming and coughing in agony as his leg and foot came out from under a section of the collapsed walkway. The foot splayed out at an unnatural angle. “Careful of the leg,” Skyler said to the three people helping.

They moved the injured a few meters away and laid him on a patch of paved ground. Karl whimpered when they set him down, then spat, groaned. He swiped mud from his face and Skyler could see the intense pain on the man’s face.

“I’ve got him,” a nearby man said. “I’m a medic. Go help the others.”

In the confusion Skyler had forgotten all about the rest of the towers. He glanced toward the center of camp in time to see the first of them reach the line of colonists who’d volunteered to try to stop them, an act of selfless bravery Skyler greatly admired. The men and women held their ground despite having just witnessed Karl’s fall. The first of them, a stocky woman with short curly hair, held out their hands to an approaching tower, dug in her feet, and pushed.

The tower slowed, and stopped.

Skyler let out a sigh of relief, and turned back to help his fallen friend.

“Arm’s broken,” Karl said with a medicated slur. “The leg, too.”

“Yeah,” Skyler replied, kneeling down next to the cot in the infirmary tent. “I saw the way it was bent. Not pretty. Are you all right?”

“High as a kite.”

Skyler grinned. “Thought we’d lost you when you went under the mud.”

“How I had the presence of mind to hold my breath, much less keep it in, I have no idea.” His eyes lost their focus for a few seconds, then he seemed to come back and see Skyler again. “I remember the snap in my leg, and then, then, waking up here.”

The injured limbs were engulfed in thick spray-on casts, both propped to minimize swelling.

“How’s it look out there?” Karl asked.

“You took the only wounds, you clumsy bastard.”

Karl’s laugh slid into an anguished grunt.

“Sorry,” Skyler went on. “Twenty-two towers back, all safely back in the yard. And one alien key, or puzzle piece, or whatever, ready to make the climb up.”

“Who’s taking it up?”

“I am.”

“Good.”

Skyler looked at the man’s leg again, recalled the way his foot had been pointed the wrong way. He shivered despite the humid afternoon.
As if the slight infection of SUBS weren’t already enough for Karl to deal with …