Earthcore, p.48
Earthcore, page 48
Those footprints, so enticing. But following them, that wasn’t the smart choice.
Kayla stowed the Marco/Polo device. She drew the Steyr.
She continued down the Linus Highway.
8:24 a.m.
The noise: loud, echoing off the stone carvings and flat floor. It reminded Randy of a phrase he’d heard in college — give a thousand monkeys a thousand computer keyboards and an infinite amount of time, and they’ll produce the works of Shakespeare. Something like that.
He didn’t care about monkeys. Or Shakespeare. He didn’t care about keyboards, either — just the sounds they made.
The clacks. The clicks.
So loud it was almost deafening. How many silverbugs would it take to make that much racket?
He’d find out in just a few more feet, when he reached the next intersection — because it sounded like the noise was coming from there, from the hallway on the right.
Angus, tugging on his arm.
“Dude, fuck this. We’ll find another way.”
Randy pulled his arm free. He didn’t even want that bastard touching him.
“No, we’re almost there. Straight is the shortest way. And the scrambler’s working. Isn’t it?”
Angus pulled out the walkie-talkie. Nodded.
If the scrambler was working, did they have anything to fear?
Randy moved closer. If Angus didn’t want to come, he could stay behind.
How had he been friends with that man for so long? Followed him around. Made excuses for him. Randy had wanted a friend, a real friend, so bad that he’d ignored what his eyes showed him, what his ears told him.
Not anymore.
A silverbug stumbled out of the hallway that led right, half crawling, half rolling. Randy’s headlamp beam played off the burnished shell.
He watched it for a moment. There could be danger here. He had to know if it was safe for O’Doyle and the others. He took a big breath, then stepped forward and peeked around the corner.
His headlamp beam showed something that didn’t make sense. The walls, they were moving. The ceiling, too. The floor looked like a shimmering wave of metallic snow.
Silverbugs. Everywhere. Packed in so tight he couldn’t see the stone beneath them.
Angus came up, also peeked around the corner.
“Holy shit,” he said. “What are they doing?”
Randy shook his head. “Maybe they were doing something specific before the scrambler hit them. Something coordinated.”
The hallway dead-ended about fifty feet in, shimmered with a thick coat of the robots. Was this an alcove? Or maybe a hall that hadn’t been finished yet?
A silverbug dropped from the ceiling, dangled by one long leg, then fell, crashing into others. Its round body rolled down. It started to crawl, or tried to, sliding over the silverbugs below it.
“Let’s go,” Angus said.
No. Not yet. Randy wanted — needed — to know what they were doing. There was one way to find out.
“Shut off the scrambler.”
Angus stood, appealed. “Are you fucking insane? I’m not shutting the goddamn thing off, not for a second. What the fuck is wrong with you, Randy? You better pull your head out of your ass, pronto, Kemosabe, or—”
Randy turned, grabbed Angus by the throat and squeezed lightly.
Angus froze, stared, wide eyes blinking.
“Things aren’t like they used to be,” Randy said. “From now on, I tell you what to do, and you do it. Understand?”
Angus tried to shake his head, but Randy squeezed tighter. Tears filled Angus’s eyes. He was afraid. Afraid of Randy. It was … exciting. It felt good. Angus had treated him like shit for so long. Randy had eaten that shit with a spoon and begged for seconds.
Not anymore.
He reached to Angus’s belt, pulled out the walkie-talkie. He let go of the smaller man’s neck. Angus took a step away, rubbing at his throat.
A wash of guilt — that was no way to treat someone, not even Angus. Randy had been bullied enough times in his life to know there was no excuse to do it to someone else. He would make it up to Angus. Later. There were good people down here — Randy needed to do whatever it took to make sure they were safe.
He pinched the volume knob between forefinger and thumb. He turned it past zero, felt the click as it shut off.
A thousand monkeys stopped typing. Dead silence. The silverbugs didn’t move.
Randy looked at the walkie-talkie, made sure he’d actually turned it off. He had.
“They’re recalibrating,” Angus whispered.
The noise hammered back all at once, someone hitting the power on a TV that already had the volume maxed out. The machines burst into action.
“Turn it back on,” Angus said quietly. “Now.”
Randy started to, then stopped. The silverbugs didn’t seem to notice him. No wedge-shaped heads pointed his way.
A few seconds more …
The living sheet of platinum writhed with activity, machines moving so fast he couldn’t focus on a single one for more than a second. A new sound joined the familiar clicking — the rapid-fire popping, chipping sound of breaking rock.
So much movement, a swimming pool full of ants.
On his left, a cluster of them pressing their wedge-shaped heads to the wall, to one of the carved tiles. The wedges moved so fast they blurred, smashing into the rock, kicking up a cloud of stone chips.
Down on the floor, silverbugs scurried over one another. Their wedge-shaped heads did something different, they pecked at the loose stone, and every time they did the loose stone was no longer there.
“The machines built this place,” Angus said. “The tunnels, maybe the caverns … all of it.”
A silverbug stopped chipping. It rotated — the wedge pointed toward Randy. Then another silverbug turned. And another.
The scrambler was ripped from his hands.
Angus turned it on, cranked the volume knob all the way up.
“I’ll just hold on to this,” he said, and jammed it back into his belt. “Randy, I used to think you were smart, but you know what? You’re a fucking retard.”
“That’s not a cool thing to call someone.”
“Now is the time to be politically correct? Double-fucking-retard. Like that better?”
The silverbugs, drunk again. The one that had first looked at Randy slipped from the wall. Two split feet reached out, grabbed the legs of others to try to stay up, but all three fell to the floor, exposing the tile they’d been carving.
Randy stared at it in disbelief. Not a carving of rocktopi or tribesmen or deer or anything else. Modern people, wearing mining helmets.
Seven of them.
“Oh my God,” Angus said. He pointed. “Randy, those carvings …”
They were stylized, but their likenesses unmistakable: little Angus, tall Connell, muscular O’Doyle, Veronica’s ponytail, Lybrand’s bulk.
And there, on the very end: Randy’s wraparound plastic glasses.
The carvings were like a sentence, reading left to right. He looked at the next panel: blank. The two after that, blank as well. The sequence wasn’t finished, but that didn’t matter. Veronica had explained that the tiles were like a sentence. Randy had seen similar sequences up in the Picture Cavern — knew how that sentence was supposed to end.
Over the noise of a thousand monkeys typing, another sound … a woman, yelling.
Randy and Angus turned, saw Lybrand helping O’Doyle hop down the hallway. Not that far behind them, Connell, Veronica and Sanji.
“Run,” Lybrand shouted. “The rocktopi are coming again!”
Chapter Thirty-One
15,967 feet below the surface
8:26 a.m.
“Light … up ahead,” Bertha said, each word a heavy breath out, each pause a gasping breath in. “It’s … gotta be … Dense Mass Cavern. Keep going.”
She carried most of Patrick’s weight, a burden that made each step punishing, from her heels to her knees to her back, through legs that begged her to stop, to a stomach that threatened to spew if she didn’t.
Eyes scrunched tight, he shook his head.
“I can’t,” he said. “Just leave me.”
“The fuck I will. Come on.”
Bertha took another step. Almost dragging him now.
From behind her, she heard the hiss of leaves on pavement and the sound of heavy footsteps — both coming closer.
If she could just get him to the Dense Mass Cavern. Then what? She only had a knife, and she was sucking air so bad she didn’t know if she could even wield that. Maybe find a place to hide. Something. Anything. She would not give up.
Veronica raced by at a full sprint. Rage blossomed, made Bertha want to drop O’Doyle, pull her knife and cut the bitch. Bertha had looked back a few times, seen Veronica dawdling, fucking around with carvings or paintings. Maybe she’d dropped out of scrambler range. Maybe she was the reason Patrick was about to die.
His leg gave out: he slid to his left, started to fall, taking her down with him — Sanji was there, catching them both, kept them upright.
“I’ve got you,” he said, grunting under their weight.
Bertha regained her balance. “I have his right, get on his left.”
Before Sanji could adjust, Kirkland slid under Patrick’s left arm.
“Sanji, go,” Kirkland said. “Catch up to your daughter.”
The Indian man hesitated, glanced at Patrick, then after his daughter. He nodded at Kirkland, ran down the hall.
The brief pause made her body think it was done, and when she started moving, that body rebelled. Her stomach heaved, sending bile down her chin, onto her webbing and KoolSuit. Her legs cramped.
She ignored both things.
One more step. One more step. One more step.
Up ahead, the hall ended in light.
“Almost there,” she grunted. She didn’t know if she was telling Patrick or her legs.
His weight lurched against her. She glanced left, saw Kirkland limping, favoring the knee — but he didn’t let go.
“O’Doyle, you fat fuck,” she said, forcing the words out through pain-clenched teeth and snarling lips. “Walk, goddammit, help us!”
Patrick said nothing. His head lolled, bounced with each step.
Passed out.
She and Kirkland were carrying all of his 250 pounds.
A rocktopi screech echoed through the hall, a drill bit driving through steel.
They were so close she smelled their billowing stench.
Memories of her childhood sprang up, unbidden, unneeded. A camping trip with her father. Him teaching her how to shoot. Hunting deer. Him explaining life feeds life, that in the end all creatures wind up as food. Her letting herself believe him, so that she could pull the trigger, kill an animal that had never threatened her.
Now she was the target.
This is what it feels like to be prey.
Kirkland yelped — that was the only word for it — and limped so badly he almost fell. Still, he refused to let go.
“Ten more steps,” he said. “We’re almost there!”
The rocktopi were right behind them, so close she waited for a blade to slash into her calves, her thighs.
Nine steps.
Eight.
The end of the hall, bright, blinding, bouncing.
Seven steps.
Six.
A crash to her right, the ring of metal, a knife skittering down the hall in front of her, rolling and bouncing like a quarter thrown across a table.
Five steps.
Four.
Kirkland, screaming, falling, skidding.
Three steps.
Bertha’s left arm around Patrick, her ear on his chest, her right arm thrown between his legs, the back of her head on his ribs, still reaching, grabbing Kirkland’s wrist, standing, all of Patrick’s weight on her shoulders.
Screeching. Hissing. Colored lights playing off the wall carvings.
They should be on her by now, they should be slicing, chopping.
Two steps.
Dragging Kirkland. Carrying Patrick.
Her body giving up.
One step.
Blinding light.
Falling.
Bertha Lybrand tucked into a ball. She waited for the cutting to begin.
Chapter Thirty-Two
16,000 feet below the surface
8:28 a.m.
Connell rolled to his back, clutched his knee. Such pain. Something wrong in there.
Chest heaving, lungs burning, every muscle giving up the fight.
No screeches.
A new sound, unmistakable — the sound of a waterfall.
His eyes opened: pain forgotten, a rush of horror — flashing rocktopi filled the hall, just five feet away.
Oh God gonna die I hope there’s a heaven I might see Cori should have lived a better life so I could have gone to heaven and be with her …
“Get up, slowly.” Sanji’s voice. Quiet, calm, the kind of voice you use if someone trips and lands near a poisonous snake.
Connell stared. The rocktopi … they had stopped at the end of the hall, a mass of forming and shrinking tentacles, platinum knives, pulsing purples and coursing blacks.
Hands, helping him stand. Veronica.
Connell didn’t understand. “They’re not attacking. Why?”
“Not sure,” she said. “Maybe coming in here is taboo for their religion.”
Randy and Sanji, struggling to rouse O’Doyle. Angus, helping Lybrand to her feet. Everyone slowly backing away from the rocktopi.
It didn’t make any sense. He should be dead. They should all be dead.
“Religion? What are you talking about?”
Angus answered. “Holy ground. And these motherfuckers build one hell of a church.”
He tilted his head behind him.
Connell stopped, looked — and felt the bottom drop out of his world.
Gigantic. So big he couldn’t process it, half-buried in the cavern floor.
The Dense Mass.
He’d seen the map. He’d known the dimensions of this cavern: four miles long, a half mile wide. He’d known those dimensions, been prepared for them. Nothing, however, could prepare him for the vastness that spread before his eyes.
Monstrous.
Colossal.
Really, really fucking big.
Up above, in the ceiling, a string of artificial suns like the one in the kidney-shaped cavern. They cast a bluish tint down onto the metallic behemoth below.
A fountain pen with the cap on.
A cartridge with bullets on both ends.
The mystery of the caves, the creatures, the silverbugs, everything. The rocktopi’s “Garden of Eden” wasn’t a myth, wasn’t the creation of some primitive religion.
As unbelievable as it was, the evidence towered in front of him, real and undeniable and massive beyond comprehension. Blue-white light gleamed off an all-too-familiar color.
The rocktopi were aliens after all.
Their Garden of Eden?
The ship that had brought them to Earth thousands of years ago.
A ship made of solid platinum.
8:30 a.m.
Still holding Connell, helping him stay on his feet, Veronica Reeves stared at the ship. So did everyone else.
Everyone except Lybrand.
“We need to move,” the woman said. “Those creatures might change their mind and come in after us.”
Veronica glanced to the hallway entrance she’d just left. Such a crazy, panicked run to get here, she hadn’t looked at anything — and now she couldn’t help but look.
The rocktopi packed into the round hallway entrance. They shimmered with colors they hadn’t displayed before. Blues, greens, coursing grays and blacks.
The cavern walls around that entrance: dense with carvings, intricate shapes, curved columns, stonework of the highest caliber spreading left and right as far as the eye could see, and up as well, rising with the wall until it curved far overhead.
Spectacular, but broken. Cracked in a thousand places. Chips and chunks had fallen away, some as big as cars or buses, to crash and crumble on the floor beneath.
And the floor itself. Big, sprawling tiles of bright, colorful patterns. Enamel, maybe, or some other material. She didn’t know. Miles and miles of what must have once been flat and perfect, but like the walls, thousands of cracks ran through them, making the floor uneven like a sprawling concrete parking lot after a severe earthquake. Craters, some small, some the size of swimming pools, filled with and surrounded by jagged boulders, smaller rocks and gravel — ejecta from parts of the ceiling dropping down from over a thousand feet above.
Breathtaking. The scale, the scope the grandeur. An ancient ruin that dwarfed Angkor and Tikal, Teotihuacán and Pompeii, Vijayanagar and Persepolis.
“Hey, dumb-asses!” Lybrand again, yelling this time. “In case everyone forgot, the extra-fucking-terrestrials that want to butcher us are standing right over there.”
Veronica came back to the moment, saw that the others had also been staring at the impossible scene: the ruined ship, the walls, the endless floor.
Extraterrestrials. Yes, no question about it anymore — creatures from another planet. A partial answer to the larger puzzle, an answer that created far more questions.
“Lybrand is right,” Sanji said. “We need to move.”
Everyone looked to Connell. He was sitting on a knee-high rock, head hung, legs spread out, the very picture of exhaustion. Spots of orange on his shoulder — red blood from torn stitches soaking through the KoolSuit’s yellow microtubule material.
He realized everyone was staring at him, waiting. He shrugged.
“I’m not up to this anymore,” he said. “I hurt. So bad. Randy, can you take over for a bit? Lead us west, to that river?”
Veronica was surprised by that. Surprised and annoyed.
“What am I, chopped liver?” she said. “Why him? He leads because he’s a man?”
Connell shook his head. “No, because Sanji has to help carry O’Doyle. And you …”
His voice trailed off.
“And me what?”
“Because you’re a selfish bitch,” Lybrand said. “You could have helped us, but you care only about yourself.” She tilted her head toward Angus. “You’re as bad as him.”
