Edge of the Wire, page 13
“Doesn’t feel good, does it?” Noyes offered gamely. “And just think, humans used to have to live with such uncertainties all the time! Maybe it makes you respect your ancestors a little more, eh?”
“I don’t know if I should respect them or feel bad for them,” Waverly said, shaking his head.
“What I think,” Rowe said, “is that the best thing for us to do right now is eliminate as many un-knowns as possible. And there are some very direct ways of accomplishing that.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Waverly asked, rising to his feet.
“We go and find Cortez . . .”
“And not let her hit you in the head this time?”
“Exactly,” Rowe said. “But one question more . . . Do we keep the crew drilling for the black box in the meantime?”
“That is a puzzler,” said Waverly. “Hey Encarta, what would you do?”
“Eh,” Noyes said. “I don’t see a countdown clock anywhere. What’s with the race against time? You could catch up with Cortez and then open the black box. Bring her back and have her watch you open it.”
“That’s one opinion,” said Waverly.
“Yes, it certainly is,” said Rowe. “And I think we should do the opposite. No offense, Noyes.”
“None taken,” said the floating officiant.
Waverly added: “I’m with Rowe as well. Two against one. Sorry, Encarta.”
Rowe and Waverly informed their remaining squadmates that the drill job could resume.
Then they headed off across the empty planet in the direction of the cave.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I’M JUST NOW THINKING OF SOMETHING,” ROWE SAID AS THEY WALKED. “How fast do you think you could take off your enviro-suit? You know, if you had to?”
“Pretty fast,” Waverly said. “Faster than you, I bet.”
“Yeah,” Rowe said thoughtfully. “So if something happens out here that doesn’t seem quite real. Like if I turn into a monster and look like I’m about to attack you. Or if Noyes suddenly starts saying you should kill me . . . Do me a favor and get down to your flight suit before you do it, yeah? Make sure I’m still a monster when the enviro-suit’s off, then shoot me in the face. If Cortez is being straight, I don’t want us to fall victim to something projected through the Goo.”
“Agreed,” said Waverly with a grin. “When I kick your monster ass, it’ll be Greco Roman style, with full nudity if you want.”
“Great . . .” said Rowe.
The windstorms stirred the silt as the men walked. The lightning above stayed bright and steady.
“Do you suppose this place has seasons?” Waverly asked. “Maybe the lightning has fall colors, and then turns greener in the spring.”
“Do you really want an answer?” Noyes asked. “Because I could give you one.”
“Do you think I want an answer?’’ Waverly growled at the hologram.
Noyes folded his hands and returned to a forward-facing position, looking out across the blasted plain.
At junctures, they passed tall clumps of rocks where Cortez could theoretically have been hiding, yet neither man concerned himself with that possibility. They saw nobody waiting in ambush. The scanners in the enviro-suits detected no sign of movement or life.
Soon, the cave came into view. It was in the side of a rocky cliff where the land rose up into a cratered hill. They did not see the Marie Curie’s captain anywhere. The mouth of the cave was dark.
“Hell of a place,” Waverly said as they approached.
“She must have thought it was her best option,” Rowe said. “If the Marie Curie is haunted somehow—poisoned, infected—then wanting to go totally off the grid like this makes sense. But it also makes sense if she’s crazy.”
They drew within twenty yards and still saw no movement.
Waverly cupped his hands, and looked to Rowe for the go-ahead. Rowe gave a shrug and a nod.
“Martha Cortez!” Waverly called. “Want to come out and talk to us? I’m even more fun than my man Rowe who you met. I’m handsomer too! Much . . . Handsomer . . .”
Waverly allowed himself a quiet laugh. His words echoed across the lonely planet. No response came back.
“Fuck it; let’s go inside,” Waverly said.
“All right,” said Rowe.
The men activated their helmets as a defensive measure. Rowe had seen no weapons—either on Cortez’s person, or among her supplies in the cave—but this was not a situation in which he wanted to take chances.
At the entrance to the cave they also activated their suit lights, casting the beams forward. There was equipment piled within the cave, and the silt on the cave floor seemed recently disturbed. Rowe noted what might have been fresh footprints leading away.
They called for her again, and again got no response.
Their scanners picked up nothing.
Examining the space more thoroughly this time, Rowe found that Cortez had indeed tried to make a home of the place. There was an improvised bed and a chemical toilet, and even a little kitchenette to aid in the preparation of food.
Waverly said: “Of the places I’d like to build my hermitage . . . well, let’s say this option doesn’t figure into the top ten.”
“Yeah,” said Rowe cautiously. “I don’t believe she’s living this way for fun. It’s . . . Whatever the situation here actually is, I think Cortez must believe her own story.”
Waverly nodded vigorously to show he concurred with the diagnosis.
The men spent less than five minutes picking through the supplies in the cave. Then Waverly said: “Could you find your way back to that hilltop from here?”
“I think so,” said Rowe.
“I don’t have any other ideas,” Waverly told him.
“Neither do I,” said Rowe. “Noyes, do you see anything else important here? Something we failed to remark on?”
“No,” Noyes told them. “She was here recently. But I don’t see anything that tells us where she is now.”
“Thanks for nothing, Encarta. Shall we head for the hill?”
“Let’s go,” Rowe said.
They exited the cave and walked until the mesa came into view. (Again, Rowe was stunned by his ability to remember the way on his own.) From a distance, there was no sign of Cortez on the horizon.
As they neared the base of the towering mesa, Noyes suddenly shouted: “Stop! Don’t take another step!!!”
The men halted their advance. Waverly raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“There is some sort of . . . trap . . . I think . . . embedded in the ground at the foothill ahead,” Noyes told them. “I believe it’s a tripwire mechanism rigged between two rocks. I can make strong guesses as to how it might have been constructed with ground-clearing explosive material salvaged from the Marie Curie.”
“You can guess all that?” Rowe said.
Noyes nodded.
“The lack of anything else on this planet actually makes that sort of guessing much easier,” Noyes told them. “You can avoid the danger if you step around the tripwire. Take that side-path up the hillside. I’ll have your suit project a safe route with waypoints.”
A dotted line appeared on the ground. Rowe and Waverly followed it carefully.
“This is crazy,” whispered Rowe, advancing now with great caution along the edge of the hill. “I thought she wanted my help. Now she wants to kill me.”
Waverly said: “If she really believes that everyone has to be killed—and everything that can carry Goo should be destroyed—then she is acting logically, I suppose. It’s a really fucked up kind of logic, but still . . . You’ve shown you can’t be recruited, so she might as well blow you to bits along with the others.”
“We have to assume this might not be her only trap,” Rowe said. “Noyes, be sure to keep an eye out for more of those, eh?”
“What do you think I’m doing, boy-o?” the hologram replied in a tone indicating great concentration.
Both men readied the railgun functions in their enviro-suits, as a man might point a gun built into his shirtsleeve. In this way, they carefully advanced up the side of the hill, making sure to step only on Noyes’s projected pathmarks. There was no sign of Cortez, and they heard nothing beyond the crunching glass underfoot.
At the top of the plateau, Noyes whispered: “Ascend this last part very slowly.”
The men did.
The circle of stones gradually came into view, but Cortez was nowhere to be seen.
“Anything?” Rowe asked.
“Put me down for a tentative no, boy-o,” Noyes decreed. “Very tentative. It appears safe as far as the scanners in your suit can tell.”
Waverly lowered the arm that held the railgun and approached the circle of stones doubtfully.
“She sat in that, and it made Goo spontaneously appear in the air,” Rowe said as Waverly toed one of the rocks.
“You’re shitting me,” Waverly said.
“Goo as my witness, it happened,” Rowe replied.
He gazed out across the horizon for anything Cortez-looking in the vast gray landscape beyond.
“Who put these rocks here?” asked Waverly. “I mean, why place them like this?”
“Said she found it this way,” Rowe said, his eyes still tracing the horizon.
Waverly stuck his foot into the dust within the stone circle, smiling as it gave way. Then he squatted on his haunches, and eventually sat, dangling his legs down into the thin, fine dust as if it were water in a swimming pool.
Very slowly, an indistinct glow began to hover above the circle.
“Would you look at—” Waverly began.
“Boy-o!” Noyes said urgently.
“I see it too,” replied Rowe.
Waverly looked over to the spot where Rowe and Noyes had apparently—somehow—more important things to view than spontaneously appearing incandescence.
“What’re you two on about?” he asked.
Waverly rose to his feet, and the light above him dimmed.
“In the distance there is a human form, just visible,” Rowe said. “I’m zooming in.”
Enviro-suit functionality did not feature extensive magnification, but the suit still did a little better than squinting. He wasn’t able to make out a face, but the ESA flight suit was unmistakable.
“That’s her, no question,” Rowe affirmed.
“Yes,” Noyes said. “That is Martha Cortez, captain of the Marie Curie.”
Waverly stood next to Rowe and gazed at the figure in the distance.
“Is she climbing up the side of a boulder?” he asked, training the limited magnification of his own suit. “Why’s she doing it like that? She’s like a crab or something. Scrabbling. That’s positively undignified.”
“I’m glad you find her funny,” said Rowe. “Keep in mind she already hit me on the head and tried to kill us with a bomb.”
“I didn’t say she’s not also an asshole,” Waverly replied.
They watched as Cortez continued to awkwardly scale the distant boulder.
“I don’t think she’s seen us,” Rowe said. “We’re exposed up here, but she’s too focused on her task to look back. Maybe we can catch up while she’s distracted.”
“But wait,” said Waverly, casting a glance back at the circle of stones. “Do you want to show me this magic Goo-circle first? Rowe?”
But Rowe was already heading down the hill.
Sensing that the die had been cast, Waverly saw no option but to follow his friend.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ROWE DASHED ACROSS TENDUS-13 AS THE ENDLESS LIGHTNING PLAYED wildly above. As always, the enviro-suit intuitively aided him—its mechanical joints adding spring to every step until he ran at twice the rate of a normal man.
“Noyes,” Rowe said between breaths, “let me know if you see her look back at us. I can’t see so well when I’m running.”
“Aye aye,” Noyes replied.
Rowe sprinted forward until the form of Cortez climbing the boulder came into clear view.
She had made considerable progress and was now pulling herself up to the boulder’s very top—a place broad and flat enough that she would be able to stand. Rowe considered his next move. Cortez still appeared unarmed. It would be nothing to hit her with the railgun at this distance, but Rowe wanted to capture her alive; there were still too many questions. Rowe understood that his enviro-suit could be made to amplify a jump or leap, though he rarely used that function. He guessed that if he got the angle right, he could reach the top of her boulder in a series of bounds and tackle her. (He knew this would probably also cause serious injury to Cortez, but with the back of his own head still smarting, he was past the point of caring about that. Alive was enough.)
He drew within fifty yards of the boulder. Then thirty-five. Then twenty.
And then he saw something that made his blood run cold.
Cortez was now standing on the top of the boulder, but she had not stopped climbing.
Rowe slowed to a slow shuffle as he tried to make sense of it.
Cortez made all the movements of a person climbing a ladder—but lo!—she began to ascend into the space above the boulder, as if by a series of rungs. And there was nothing there. She climbed nothing.
“Noyes, are you seeing this?” Rowe whispered. He reduced his gait even further.
“Yes; thinking about it now,” the hologram said. “Many explanations. Just need a little more data to—”
Noyes stopped mid-sentence, calculating further, as Cortez—now approximately ten feet above the boulder—began to disappear.
It was as if she were climbing into nonexistence, thought Rowe. First her head disappeared, then her torso and legs. And quite quickly, she was entirely gone.
Rowe stopped. He stood staring up into the space where Cortez had been.
A moment later, Waverly caught up.
The Silkworms exchanged a silent, uneasy glance. Waverly had seen it too.
“Noyes?” Rowe said urgently. “Your best guess. Now.”
“I . . . Yes . . .” the hologram replied in harried tones.
“What’s the matter, Encarta?” Waverly said, panting. “They didn’t send along the disk covering invisible ladders.”
“I am still thinking, but there are options such as a previously unencountered cloaking mechanism or an optical illusion,” Noyes said.
“An optical illusion?” Waverly said. “That’s fuck all. She was on top of that big rock, and now she’s not. She climbed up nothing and disappeared.”
“Noyes, are we in any danger right now?” Rowe pressed. “Could this be another trap?”
“No,” the hologram said. “I would be telling you if I thought that.”
Rowe asked Waverly: “What do you think, man?”
“I think we’re letting her get away.”
The two men bounded the rest of the way to the boulder.
“Wait, I’m still searching for other possible . . .” Noyes began, but trailed off when he understood his objections would be bootless.
They easily scaled the boulder with the aid of their suits. They saw nothing above them but the lightning-filled sky. Rowe began feeling around the top of the boulder like a man trapped in a dark room. Waverly did the same. After only a moment, Rowe firmly and definitively wrapped the fingers of his suit around something that, as far as his eyes could tell, was not there.
The rungs of a ladder.
With a few tentative kicks, he found additional rungs by his feet.
“If you’d just be patient, gentlemen, I am processing several options surrounding the properties of certain surfaces and materials that can be used to bend light,” Noyes protested.
Ignoring this, Rowe said: “I’m going first.”
“I’m right behind you!” Waverly insisted.
Rowe began to climb the ladder he could not see.
Through the gloves of his suit, the rungs felt like familiar metal. As he ascended, the sky full of lightning and clouds seemed to fade. With each rung, the atmosphere above became blurrier and less distinct, and a new, overlaid image became apparent.
At the top of the ladder, the clouds faded entirely, and Rowe stepped off the ladder and onto a floor. The illumination on his enviro-suit kicked in. There was now a featureless white ceiling above. The nearest wall was curved with no joints. Rowe leaned his hand against it; it was hard like plastic; smooth and white. He was in a room of buttons, many of them flashed or glowed softly, and there was a circular hole in the floor through which the ladder extended. Corridors led out of the room, apparently to other places made of curving white walls and buttons. A moment later Waverly appeared behind Rowe at the top of the ladder.
“What in the world?” Waverly whispered.
They urgently looked around for any sign of Cortez. The crackling of lightning was muted now. The only new sound from within the room was a low mechanical hum.
“This is a spaceship,” Rowe said quietly.
Waverly looked all around, nodding.
“I sure can’t think of what else it could be.”
“Noyes, does this match the properties of any ESA vessel you know about?” Rowe asked.
“It does not,” Noyes replied softly. “The cloaking camouflage also—because I know you’ll be curious—is not something I can find a reference to. That kind of technology? The need to operate a large ship covertly? Well, it all died out back when there stopped being separate nation states, boy-o.”
“Hmm,” said Rowe, glancing doubtfully around the spacecraft. “And how do I know you’re not lying to me? How do you know you’re not lying to me? This could be an ESA ship you weren’t told about. There were holes in your memory when it came to some of the Marie Curie crewmembers, remember?”
“I guess anything could be anything, if you want to take that attitude,” Noyes said defensively.
The hologram’s words were not reassuring.
Waverly took several tentative steps down one of the hallways with the buttons and smooth walls. He gently ran the fingers of his suit across the buttons but did not depress them.
“You realize that if Encarta here isn’t lying, this is one for the history files,” Waverly said. “You and I are going to be famous. We’re Armstrong and Aldrin. We’re the first humans to step inside of a ship built by another life form.”
