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.”
Skyler grinned, happy that she’d reached the same conclusion he had. He saw no reason to debate the outcome of her suggestion now, deciding instead to wait and see if she made the next logical jump on her own.
Ana threw a handful of sand down the hall. Two more sections of floor proved missing, on opposite sides from each other, leaving only a narrow section in the middle upon which to walk. Skyler didn’t like being forced down the center of the hall like that, but there was no other way. He went first, crossed without incident, and waited until Ana did the same. On a whim, while he waited he turned on the light affixed to his rifle and aimed it down into the pit. The void stretched farther than his beam could illuminate, and Skyler felt a chill course through him. How deep did this place go?
The next handful came from his pocket. Skyler released it a bit at a time now, as if he were sowing seeds. Coated such, the floor crunched beneath his boots, but not so loud their stealth would be spoiled by it. He hoped not, anyway.
Below he could see the hallway’s end. The floor there was different. Much smaller hexagonal tiles, each glowing with a brightness that ebbed and flowed in synch with the warm breeze. Skyler slowed their pace to a crawl as the next junction came into view. Only it wasn’t a junction this time.
Revealing itself with each step like a curtain being raised, a vast room began to appear. The floor first, which resembled a crime scene. Bodies lay everywhere. Dried blood scarred the glowing floor. Pools beneath some bodies, long trails where a few of the dead had been dragged from one place to another. Splatters and arcs of spray, all dry, marked almost every available centimeter, as if the space had been painted on by a child given red finger paint and a blank canvas. On top of all this the artist had thrown hundreds of shell casings. The little brass cylinders gleamed like gems.
The corpses were legion. Two dozen, Skyler guessed, his mind reeling from the carnage of the scene. Many wore the same lab garb as the woman one floor up. Others showed signs of paramilitary gear—black fatigues, high-end rifles. Despite the horror of the view, Skyler took in these details with a practiced scavenger’s eye. One soldier had a pair of grenades on his belt. Another carried a rifle-sized revolver, probably loaded with tear-gas canisters or smoke grenades.
Skyler paused one step from the room proper and let the whole place sink in. He heard Ana’s crunching footsteps grow slower as she approached, then a gasp escaped her lips. She began to whisper rapidly, sounding like a frightened, superstitious child. “Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.…”
“Knock it off,” Skyler rasped at her. Too harshly, from the way her eyes flared at him. “I need you to stay focused.”
After a few seconds she relented and began to study the room like a warrior.
Skyler’s suspicion of a symmetrical layout to the structure seemed accurate. Four tunnels converged here, entering from the middle of each side of the square room. The bodies lay in a rough circle around a dais in the center, which hung suspended over a hexagonal hole that dropped out of sight below. A small walkway—it had to be a walkway—extended from the room’s floor out to the dais. The body of a dead miner draped across the narrow bridge, arms dangling over one side and legs over the other. A miner? Skyler had seen nothing but soldiers and medical personnel until this body.
Maybe he got here first.
The dais held a structure that reminded Skyler of a gazebo. Intricate supports rose from the base, alive with traces of yellow light that writhed within. Each pillar was different from the other, some thin and straight, others bulbous and curved. They all angled inward near the top, joining together in a sort of conduit that continued up toward the high dome-shaped ceiling. There the thick twisted cord branched out into a hundred smaller cables that weaved and snaked their way up into the top of the space, forming a cone-shaped area around a gaping hole in the center of the roof. Sections of the ceiling were peeled downward, as if the thing below had made an abrupt and violent entrance.
“It’s a shell ship,” Ana whispered.
He glanced at her, saw her gaze lay on the gazebo-like structure. He looked at it again and saw the truth in her words. The gazebo was actually two halves of a shell ship, the pillars between the two more like stretched material that still clung from one side to the other despite the craft having been pulled in two.
“It landed exactly in the center?” she asked.
“Pretty good aim,” Skyler agreed.
Across the rest of the dome were hexagonal holes of varying size. Lit from the floor below, the whole thing made Skyler think of honeycomb. It was as if he stood inside a beehive, and the idea unsettled him further.
A waft of warm air pushed against him, rising and falling like the breath of a slumbering beast. The gentle wind came up from the massive hole in the floor, carrying a fine black particulate. As the dusty plume rose through the room toward the dome it accelerated, sucked into the myriad of gaps.
He began to walk—slow, careful steps over the corpses that dotted the floor—toward one of the fallen soldiers. He motioned Ana to follow and then instructed her with a hand signal to cover him while he looted the body. He ditched his machine gun for the much more advanced model carried by the dead man, after checking the clip to make sure it still carried bullets. It did,.45 caliber even, and there were two more magazines in his black vest. Skyler pocketed those, too. The gun had a holographic sight that still functioned. It was a risk, he knew, to switch to a weapon he’d never fired before in the middle of an op, but this didn’t have a scratch or scuff anywhere on it.
He hefted the gun to a get a feel for the balance, then pointed toward another dead soldier. “Get that rotary gun,” he said to Ana. She did, and gladly, slinging her own weapon in favor of the much more fiendish device. She strained under the weight of it at first, but adjusted quickly enough. Then she set it down on the floor and detached a bandolier from the man’s torso. A dozen canisters were held in black nylon sheaths along half of it.
She studied the ammunition. “It’s all in Chinese,” she said.
“Trial and error then, I guess,” he said.
Ana grinned at that. She checked the weapon itself and found it to be fully loaded. Whatever had happened in here, the dead solider hadn’t fired a single round. “Whatever will be, will be,” she said with a shrug, and gave the gun a little upward jerk. The front half clicked back into place.
“Right,” Skyler said. “Cover me?” At her nod he crept up to the narrow bridge that extended out two meters over the deep pit in the center of the room. The bottom hid in darkness, far below, exactly like the silos below Nightcliff and Belem. Odd that those were both below space elevators, but this place had no such feature. Perhaps the Builders sank pits like this for some purpose unrelated to the facility above, he thought. Heat dissipation or something. He wondered, belatedly, if such a pit existed below the site in Ireland, too. There’d been no evidence of such a thing, but they hadn’t really stuck around to find out, either.
Faced with the abyss, the slim bit of floor that led out to the dais suddenly seemed dangerously narrow. Skyler tested it with his toes, pressing lightly, then progressively harder until his entire foot rested on the surface. He gritted his teeth and shifted his weight outward, over that foot. “You bastards couldn’t put a handrail on this, for fuck’s sake?” he muttered. He took a full step now, over the thin body of the miner that lay draped across the narrow surface.
The bridge held. More than that, it felt solid, like it had been carved out of the same slab of material as the room. The thought gave Skyler a sudden pause.
“What’s wrong?” Ana whispered. She stood at least seven meters away, but her voice carried well here.
“Just,” he paused. “Thinking.” The bridge’s width almost perfectly matched that of his shoulders. The hallways they’d walked through to get here, while tall, were certainly comfortable for a human to traverse. The objects they’d already recovered from Ireland and Belem, though bulky and quite heavy, were still within the limits of a human being to carry.
Are they so similar to us? Do they know our physiology, our capabilities and limits? Or did we somehow tell them?
He recalled again the news Tania had dropped on him: Neil knew. What exactly he knew, or how, seemed a detail he’d taken to his grave. But he’d known something, and perhaps, perhaps, he’d told the Builders something as well. An exchange? A goddamn conversation?
“We should hurry,” Ana said.
Her voice brought him back to the moment. Skyler balanced himself one last time, then traversed the bridge in two quick steps. He glanced over his shoulder at the strip, then at Ana. He smiled at her. In response she made a shooing motion with her hand. “Okay, okay,” he said.
In the center of the dais, which was actually the bottom half of a shell ship, lay another of the objects. This one radiated yellow light from the fine grooves along its surface. It was oval in shape with a wavy portion along one length, matching exactly the slot he’d seen aboard the massive Builder ship that hung in orbit above.
Skyler slung his new rifle over one shoulder and stood over the artifact. A meter wide and roughly half as tall, it would require two hands to carry. That wouldn’t do, he decided. He couldn’t have Ana the only one ready to shoot, given the swarm of subs that waited for them above. He unzipped one of the pockets on his jacket and slipped out a folded backpack made of ballistic nylon. It would be a tight fit, he thought, but should do the job. He unzipped the bag and laid it on the ground next to the alien object. Then he braced his feet on either side, crouched, and placed his hands on either side of the oval. The material felt cool to the touch. He flexed his fingers. The thing lay perfectly flat on the platform floor. If it was much heavier than the objects from Ireland and Belem, he’d need a pry bar to lift it, and that was one thing he’d not thought to bring.
