“Goggles,” he growled. “Bandannas.”
He tied a bandanna around his mouth and nose first, then fumbled for his goggles. A new sound began to grow, like a thousand rusty-hinged doors opening in sequence. The solar panels, caught up in the rush of wind and sand, were being spun away from the sunset. Skyler urged Ana to move to the south side of the tiny pushcart they’d hidden behind, and followed her, hunching over her as he had when the snow had fallen from the dome in Ireland.
The sound of it hit them first. In full force the noise bordered on deafening. The line of solar cells along the ridge flipped from west to south in almost perfect unison as the cloud of grit and sand rushed over them. Skyler felt his clothing tug in the rush. The cart offered meager protection, but there was nothing else, and anyway it was too late. He felt dry particles whip into his ears, his hair, and down his open shirt. All Skyler could do was press himself farther toward the ground, poor Ana below him screaming not from pain but surprise at the sheer ferocity of the maelstrom.
As quickly as it had begun, the storm weakened. Not entirely. No, Skyler still felt the rush of wind in his hair, against his clothing. Sand still spattered against his exposed forehead. But it weakened enough that he thought they could move. Perhaps find better cover, if not actually proceed with their mission.
He chanced opening his eyes and found that the air glowed.
A dim, pervasive yellow light enveloped the area around him. His stomach lurched from the fear that someone, or something, had found them. But as his eyes adjusted he realized what had happened. Mounted under each solar panel was an LED. They must, he thought, come on automatically when the sun sets, probably so the miners could keep working. And work they could have, for the light was bright and everywhere, save for within the pit mines themselves, which now stood out for their darkness rather than the bright spots they’d been under the furnace of the sun. It was like the world had reversed itself.
The lights in turn illuminated the fine sand that filled the air, creating glowing yellow orbs around each pole that held a solar panel aloft. To Skyler’s eye it was all bizarrely romantic.
He helped pull Ana to her feet as he rose. “Come on.”
“Shouldn’t we go back?” Her voice sounded distant under the constant buffeting of wind.
“We can use this to our advantage. Come on, it’s not that bad.”
The row of poles along the narrow earthen bridge acted as perfect guideposts, and the deep pit mine to their right tempered the gale, sucking the wind down into its depths and then pushing it back up the steep side beside where they walked. Halfway across, Skyler found he didn’t even need to hold the poles, so he increased his pace without complaint from Ana.
The landscape became a maze of such bridges, all lined with those glowing yellow orbs that constantly swirled and shifted. Visibility ranged from fifty meters down to just a few, and twice Skyler had to stop when he couldn’t see the ground at his feet. The skin on the side of his face felt caked with sand, dry as flour.
As their goal drew closer, Skyler noted more and more evidence of what had occurred here. Scenes of confusion, chaos, and violence marked the landscape. Half-buried bodies of laborers, soldiers, and scientists. A crashed flyer, no pilot inside. Just two dried-out corpses in the back, a man and a woman in business suits. “Fly us out to see the object,” Skyler could hear them saying.
One body wore a familiar outfit. A blue jumpsuit, like the kind Tania and so many other Orbitals favored. The corpse, a woman by the fine blond hair, lay faceup. Mummified as she was, Skyler thought he saw a smile there. He grimaced and moved on.
More and more, the bodies he passed were subhuman. He’d seen enough over the years to know that they’d been in that state for some time. Hair grown long and wild. Thick shaggy beards on the men. Yellow, uneven fingernails and toenails caked with dirt. These had come here well after the event, as if drawn by some latent migratory instinct.
A few wore the clothes they’d been infected in, like the one named Ammon. Skyler even saw one woman in a formal gown. He doubted there were any weddings or fancy dinners happening within a hundred kilometers of this nightmarish place when the disease hit, so she must have come from a long way. A broken high-heel shoe still clung to one filthy foot.
Most were naked, or at most wearing a few tattered remnants. While the soldiers and scientists were well on their way to being buried under the wind-driven sands, the subhumans spanned a range from there to just a light coat of the yellow powder. Their skin hadn’t dried to the point of leather yet. Fresh corpses. Recent arrivals.
Skyler swallowed down the growing lump in his throat. This, he thought, was an evil place.
When the yellow glow of the aura towers finally cut through the swirling sands, Skyler turned back to Ana and pulled her close enough that he could whisper. He tugged the bandanna covering his mouth away and cupped one hand over her ear.
“Visibility sucks,” he said. “Might work to our advantage.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” If she was scared, she hid it well.
Skyler pointed toward the nearest tower. “I’ll move up first. Stay just close enough to keep me in sight; keep your gun ready but don’t fire unless there’s no other choice.”
She nodded, pulled down the bandanna that covered her mouth, and kissed him. Her dry lips tasted like the sand. “Be careful.”
“You, too.”
Skyler turned away from her and crept forward toward the row of alien pillars in front of him. They were spaced about twenty meters apart. The one in front of him was one of the taller versions, its tip mostly obscured by the maelstrom of sand. The two to either side were just vague columns of shifting golden pulses.
Near the lip of the mine he began to hear the sounds of activity below. The pit itself looked like a giant inverted pyramid, though he had to mentally fill in the picture of it from what he’d seen during their initial flyby. The sandstorm prevented him from seeing even a quarter of the way to the other side. But he could see all the way down. The artificial crater was largely sheltered from the windblown sands above, and what did make it down into those depths was pushed right back up again by the warm air that vented from the strange alien structure in the basin.
Again the ground shook. A low rumble Skyler felt in his gut, building to one he felt in his teeth. At the crescendo the sound of it released in a booming sha-coom sound. In that instant, the hundreds of sunken cavities on the topside of the building spewed material into the air. The oily black smoke reminded Skyler of the footage he’d seen as a child illustrating the pollutants factories used to release into the atmosphere. The inky puffs quickly merged and rose. Near the top of the pit mine the winds of the sandstorm caught the rising cloud and pulled it into long, arching tendrils. Vortices of black and tan that snaked up into the sky with dizzying speed before melting together.
Skyler had lain down at some point, he couldn’t exactly remember when, on the edge of the pit next to a tower that rippled with glowing yellow patterns. Ana lay next to him, a look of terror and amazement on her face that mirrored how he felt. “What is it doing?” she asked.
He shook his head, though in his gut he knew. The kid in Belem, the scavenger, had been exactly right. SUBS had started here, only that wasn’t all. It was being perpetuated here. This place, this … forge, was pumping the manufactured virus into the atmosphere, letting the swift Saharan winds propel the material into the upper atmosphere, where it could fall like volcanic ash across the planet.
And directly overhead, the massive Builder vessel had parked itself. Fifth in a series of six events, if Neil Platz had accurate information.
One more to go.
A crazy thought entered his mind. Like the virus being thrust upon the world from the building below, the thought spread through him like a cloud and wouldn’t go away. Somehow, someway, he had to destroy this place. Even if it took months of hauling explosives in, he had to blow it up. If there was even a chance it would end the disease, he had to try.
Do I? Would it matter?
He suddenly doubted blowing up the structure would make any difference. The virus replicated just fine on its own. This place probably still functioned because that’s what it had been programmed to do.
At that moment the storm subsided. He heard it subside before he saw it. The howl of wind became a rush, then a whisper. Then sand began to fall from the sky like snow. Thick at first, but even that abated with astonishing speed. Within ten seconds Skyler could see the entire pit as clear as day. The LED lights under the solar panel field were their characteristic white now, forming a gleaming band between the yellow ground and the blood-red remnant of sunset.
Skyler didn’t know how long the calm would last. “Now or never,” he said to Ana.
There was no hint of confidence or bravery in her face until she looked directly at him. When their eyes met, she seemed to drink his courage in. Courage he hardly felt himself.
With the air clear, Skyler was able to assess the pit in an instant. The mine itself had a square footprint, and dove down like an inverted pyramid. The structure below, unmistakably Builder in origin, filled the bottom, masking the true depth of the pit. If it descended to its pyramid point, Skyler judged it would be a kilometer, and the alien structure rested just below the halfway mark.
There were entrances, or what looked like entrances, at the corners. Shifting yellow light came from within, spilling out in bright pools onto the sloped sides of the open mine. Subhumans loitered at each. Some moved in and out as if carrying out tasks, though what they could be doing Skyler had no idea. Others just stood around. Some lay on the ground, unmoving. Dead, or sleeping.
A sloped ramp provided the only way in or out of the pit, just like the one they had landed in. It entered on the side opposite where Skyler and Ana lay and ran in a wide, flat path around the perimeter of the mine. Surprisingly wide, in fact, until Skyler realized the need to haul debris from the pit as it was dug. In evidence of this, on the side to his left about halfway down to the alien structure, a massive rock-hauler truck sat abandoned. Each of its massive tires was as big as a military APC, and the Magpie could have fit in the huge bin that made up the vehicle’s bed were it not already piled high with boulders and crumbled earth. The vehicle had been on its way out when it stopped years ago. The side facing inward on the pit was all charred, likely from the violence of the alien structure’s landing. Its driver had probably been cooked inside the cab, a mercy considering what followed. The huge tires, caked with sand, had almost melted away. They practically dripped over the precipice of the sloped road, causing the massive truck to list heavily toward the pit’s depths.
An idea formed. A crude plan. “Keep an eye out for a minute,” he said to Ana as he began to rummage through their gear.
“What are you going to do?”
He grinned at her. “What Jake would do.”
Ana raised one eyebrow, confused.
“Sorry,” he said. “Haven’t told you that story yet, I guess. You’re going to cause a diversion. I’m going to capitalize on it.”
When he removed the sniper rifle from the gear bag, Ana figured out the plan. She pulled her sunglasses and bandanna off and took the gun, a hint of mischief playing at the corners of her mouth. It took her a few seconds to screw on the bulky silencer. Then she settled into a sniper’s lie with practiced ease and pulled the lens cover from the scope. “Which one am I aiming for?”
“None of them, actually,” Skyler said, removing the mortar tube from the bag. “Go for that dump truck, somewhere that will make a lot of noise. Get their attention. The side of the bed should get a nice loud bang. It might even rattle around inside.”
She studied the decrepit vehicle through the rifle’s scope, then flexed her fingers. “One of the rear tires is still inflated. I could pop it.”
“Perfect.” He unfolded the mortar’s two stabilizing legs and locked them into place, turning the launch tube to face roughly in the same direction Ana sighted. Once in rough position, he thumbed wheels on each leg, fine-tuning the setup until the sight’s leveling bubble came to rest in the center.
“Tell me when.”
Skyler dialed in the primitive sighting system, adjusting the launch angle and hoping his estimates for elevation would be close enough. “Once you shoot, ditch the gun and be ready to move on foot.”
“Okay.”
“Fire when ready.”
She did. A dull thwick. Sand on the ground near her barrel hopped into the air as the round flew.
There was no pop of the tire. Instead Skyler heard a crack, like a boulder splitting in half. Exactly like a boulder splitting in half, in fact. Ana cursed. She’d missed, her round slamming into the compressed earth just below the rear tire. Rocks began to slide down the sloped side of the pit mine as she took aim again.
“Wait,” Skyler said.
The rock slide grew. With total fascination and more than a little horror, he watched the back of the vehicle dip suddenly. Then the giant machine groaned, an anguished sound louder than any exploded tire could have achieved. The groan of tortured metal grew as the vehicle began to list more and more toward the drop-off. Larger rocks began to tumble loose from beneath its tires. And then, in one violent instant, the whole section of access road collapsed.
The massive truck tilted and rolled into the depths, spilling the contents of its hauling bin in the process. Below, the subhumans closest to it began to spew agitated shouts, unaware of the catastrophe about to befall them.
Skyler all but forgot about the mortar. His hand rested on the trigger as his focus remained utterly transfixed on the tumbling morass of metal and rock that roiled down the side of the pit toward the alien building below. The subhumans there had lost the part of their minds that could evaluate a threat and know when to run. Skyler almost wanted to shout a warning to them. Get the fuck out of the way! his mind screamed. His mouth remained closed.
