Faisal gasped. He saw it at the same time she did.
The boot and leg of a yellow environment suit, protruding through the morass of swirling fog. Whether the human contents were still within she couldn’t see. More scraps of thick yellow material lay beyond the leg, forming a rough line toward the very center of the dome’s floor.
“This mission,” Samantha said, “just went off the ‘what the fuck’ chart.”
“What are you seeing?” Grillo asked, his voice laced with static now.
Sam rattled off the important details quickly: bits of a suit, torn to pieces. Some weird dome around a crater, the swirling mists. “My tactical instincts are telling me to get the hell out of here,” she concluded. “But I’m guessing you feel otherwise.”
“I do.”
She grunted, annoyance brewing within. Skyler would have argued with her. He would have left room for argument, and no matter what harebrained scheme he’d cooked up, if Sam said “scuttle,” he’d almost always do just that. Grillo’s manner somehow made her feel guilty when she disagreed, and his commitment to the mission bordered on dangerous.
She wondered what would happen if she told him to get fucked, and went back. Would he throw her back in jail? Threaten Kelly?
Would these two tagalongs even let her retreat? For the first time she saw them as escorts rather than helpers. Maybe they’d turn their guns on her, force her to proceed.
Best not to test it, she decided. The previous group Grillo had sent in was not combat trained, or so he’d implied. So far she hadn’t seen anything here she couldn’t handle.
“Fine,” she replied to Grillo, and then looked at her two companions. “Let’s keep moving.”
She stepped slowly toward the center of the crater, giving a wide berth around the severed pant leg. A dinner-plate-sized pool of blood surrounded the open end of the garment fragment. She decided not to check if a leg remained inside; the answer seemed obvious.
Breathing became a chore. The air stifling, like a sauna run amok. Sam watched as the improvised torch in her hand burned out, and she set it aside. David would want to get his rifle back together, but the stock would need to cool first.
She decided to save her flare for now and crept farther ahead, aware of her two companions following behind. They still held their flares aloft, more to light the strange alien cathedral than for any other reason.
Near the center of the impact crater, the ground ended at a jagged edge of earth and concrete. It was a circular opening to some kind of pit, descending down into blackness so choked with fog that the fiery light from the two flares could not illuminate much beyond the lip.
A twisted bundle of the glassy branches, thick as a tree trunk, rose up from the middle of the hole, stretching high above them before disappearing into the cloud. The fog wafted off this column in thick tendrils, rising swiftly toward whatever was above.
Sam looked at Faisal and jerked her head toward the hole. He took the hint and tossed his flare in. The beacon fell into the cloud, like an upside-down view of a firework launched into smoky skies. The light became a faint glowing orb and came to rest ten or fifteen meters below. The shape of the reddish glow resembled a crescent moon, and Samantha realized the flare was partially obscured by some giant boulder or object resting on the floor of the depression.
That’s what made the crater, she realized. And sprouted these vines.
“I don’t think they dropped a farm platform here,” she said for Grillo’s benefit.
“Explain,” he said.
“We found a pit, in the center of the crater. There’s something at the bottom, big as one of your trucks, and round. Roundish.”
A brief silence followed. David took advantage of the pause to put his rifle back together and wipe moisture from his helmet’s curved plastic mask.
“Could be some piece of machinery that survived reentry. A reactor, even.”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s what these goddamn branches are sprouting from.”
Faisal sucked in a breath. She glanced around, looking for what spooked him, but saw nothing. When she turned to him, he was staring at her with disgust. The expression vanished the instant their eyes met.
“Something wrong, Faisal?”
He looked down his nose at her and shook his head.
Grillo’s voice brought her back to the moment. “Can you climb down and get a closer look?”
Sam knew that no answer other than “Sure” would fly. She sent Faisal back to the truck to get a rope. When he left earshot, she turned her headset off and looked at David. “Why’s he so uptight all the sudden?”
David regarded her. “You should watch your tongue.”
“What the fuck did I say?”
David narrowed his eyes. “I’m not as devout as them, so I can tell you. ‘Goddamn’ is like a punch in the gut. Show some respect. It doesn’t cost you anything.”
Samantha thought back to the little prayer circle she’d witnessed just before they climbed down the barricade. Them? Grillo is a fucking Jacobite?
She thought up and promptly swallowed a half-dozen snide, disrespectful replies, and waited. In the silence she pondered the revelation. Grillo certainly did have a minister’s demeanor, but his reputation as a ruthless slumlord didn’t mesh. She thought it possible he was just pandering to the sect to earn their support, and anyway it didn’t really matter if he’d thrown in with the weirdos or not. Her situation had nothing to do with it.
Faisal returned ten uncomfortable minutes later with a bundle of nylon rope. The two men helped Samantha tie it around her waist, across her shoulders, and then through loops on her pants and vest.
In no time she found herself leaning backward over the vertical pit, holding the rope with two hands, her toes resting on the edge of the precipice. She leaned farther to put her full weight on the line, watching David and Faisal as they grunted with effort to hold her in place.
“Lower me down,” she told them. “One step at a time, yeah?”
The heat became unbearable. Sam could do nothing on the descent except focus on her footing and breathing. The walls of the pit were a cross section of hard-packed earth, layers of foundational concrete reinforced with iron rebar, and the odd bit of pipe or wiring conduit. None of this showed the charred, blackened evidence of a major explosion like the crater above.
Near the bottom she cleared the fog, and the floor of the pit came clearly into view. Sam unslung her rifle and flipped on its barrel-mounted LED, bathing the place in crisp white light.
“Stop!” she called out immediately. The rope tugged her in a rough snap, her progress halting.
The floor of the pit shimmered and rippled. Black water, how deep she couldn’t guess. This is a sinkhole, she thought. The object had impacted above, and in the violence of that, runoff water had begun to pool down here, eventually causing the ground above to collapse. The water moved in one direction, implying a drainage path that kept the hole from filling to the top.
“Sam? Report,” Grillo said, almost unintelligible with the static.
She ignored him.
In the center of the circular pit, partially submerged, lay an oblong shape that reminded her of pictures of the Builders’ shell that capped the space elevator, only much smaller in scale. The surface of it was so black it seemed to drink in the light when her beam swept across it. Flickering light from the partially submerged flare cast the walls of the pit behind it in a dance of bright red and deep shadow. Backlit so, the object took on a demonic quality that brought goose bumps to her arms despite the stifling heat.
From the object’s “tail” came the bundle of glassy, segmented branches. The tangle of alien limbs stretched up in a straight line into the fog above. Unlike the black alien object from which they came, the branches seemed to glow in the light from her gun, their pale blue coloring almost jewel-like without the fog surrounding them.
“You okay down there?” David called out.
“Yeah,” she whispered. Then louder, “Yes. Lower me a meter or so. There’s water.”
After a series of short drops and barked commands, David and Faisal managed to lower her slowly into the balmy water, warm as a bath. Her feet touched broken, uneven ground when the depth had submerged her to mid-thigh. “I’m down,” she called up.
Sam crept slowly around the perimeter of the pit, her gun trained on the alien mass that loomed just a few meters away. The heat, she realized, had a pulse to it, rising and falling a few degrees every second or two. The air smelled of tar and burned charcoal.
After three steps the “drain” through which the water escaped came into view: a wide concrete pipe, cracked in half by the collapse of the ground above it. The dark water rushed into it in sloshing gulps as the wake from her passage pushed waves into its wide maw.
Lapping against the pipe’s opening, a body listed gently in the water. Clad in the trademark yellow of an environment suit, the limp form bobbed with each ripple.
Samantha saw parallel cuts in the legs and back of the suit, as if claws had raked it. The sight filled her with sudden fear. She pressed herself against the wall and swept the beam of her rifle’s light across the entire space, looking for any sign of what had caused such damage.
But the place was quiet. Dead. She slowly exhaled and spoke into her headset. “Found another of your lost crew,” she said. “Something cut him to shreds, I don’t know what. Can you hear me?”
A garbled response came, full of scratchy hisses and deep clicks.
“Piece of shit,” she growled. Grillo could get the highlights later. She continued on her path around the object, stopping long enough to inspect the body. She rolled it over in the water and cringed at the face inside the suit. The mask had been shattered, as had the face. Bruises covered the nose, one cheek, and an eye.
Something must have given this poor bastard a haymaker of epic proportions, she thought. That, or he fell in. She flipped the corpse back over and turned to the alien shape in the center of the pit.
Three more steps into her route, Sam froze. The flickering red flare lay only a few meters away from her now, and its dancing light illuminated a gaping hole in the side of the object. She trained her own beam on the opening. Not a hole, she saw, but an actual entrance, square in shape.
Inside the shell was a cube-shaped cavity, roughly two meters on a side. The walls were laced with thin grooves, drawn in sharp, straight lines and perfect ninety-degree corners.
Thin arms jutted out from the corners of the cavity, converging near the center around a cube-shaped object, perhaps a half meter tall and wide. A channel three or four centimeters deep ran down one side. Sam knew somehow that the thin black arms were not connected to the object, but rather were holding it in place.
The cube had the same angular patterns of lines etched into its otherwise smooth black surface. But these lines were different. As Samantha watched, pale blue light rippled along their lengths, the same color as the thorny branches above. To Sam the cube’s surface almost looked like a circuit board, or city streets viewed from high above.
“Sam?” David called down from above.
“Here,” she called back. “I’ve found something.”
Wading through the warm water, Samantha approached the cube, unable to take her eyes off the fine patterns of blue-white light that rippled beneath the lines etched into its surface.
She reached the opening on the side of the shell and climbed up onto it, warm water dripping from her legs and sloshing in her boots. The liquid should have pooled around her feet, but instead the Builders’ material drank it in. For a moment she marveled at this before turning her attention back to the cube suspended in the center of the chamber.
Flexing her fingers, Samantha reached out for it. The blue laser light pulsing along its surface shifted, growing brighter where her hands were about to touch, and darker elsewhere, as if sensing her presence. She paused only for a second, gave a small shrug, and gripped the cube by two sides.
A pulse of light exploded from the cube, blinding her. The object hummed under her hands as if she’d gripped a live electrical wire, and she couldn’t let go.
Above her came an avalanche of noise, like a thousand butcher’s knives being sharpened at once, so loud it hurt to hear. Somewhere beneath that noise she thought she heard a scream, silenced abruptly. Something splashed in the water at the bottom of the pit. Something large. Sam turned but all she saw was the afterglow of blue light.
Her hands remained clasped to the cube, vibrating. She yanked, hard, and the cube came free. It weighed as much as a concrete block, and she stumbled, falling backward out of the shell and into the warm water.
The cube landed on her stomach and forced the air from her lungs. A mouthful of gritty water flooded into her mouth and nose and she tried to spit it out, but she had no air to do so.
Somehow she found her footing, rolled over, and stood up. The raking, calamitous sound of glass sliding against glass continued above her. Sam coughed and retched the water from her lungs. When she opened her eyes, she could see again.
The cube lay in the water at her feet, still pulsing with blue light. She turned and looked up. Above her, the bundle of glassy limbs that stretched from the top of the shell were writhing. They’d taken on the color of fire, and burned as bright. The glow faded the farther up the trunk she looked. Above the pit, she could see the latticework of branches flailing about violently. The segments no longer had a pale blue color. Now they were blood-red. She thought it must be like standing in a whirlwind of barbed wire up there. “David! Faisal!” she shouted. No response came.
The violent movement of the branches dispersed the fog, and Sam could see that the alien structure stretched at least fifty meters above her head.
