She held on, clutching the rifle tight against her chest with her numb hands as the winds gained in intensity and strength, wiping at her with icy fingers.
“Stay down!” she ordered her men.
In the hole she could see Vasquez and Dr. Downer duck back inside.
The winds whipped around her, forcing her to snap her helmet’s visor down into position to protect her eyes. She watched as the three tornadoes joined into one large swirling black wind rising a good ten stories into the air.
Then, as quickly as they grew, the winds seemed to form together into a black stream, sucked over the barrier of debris in the direction of the power source.
And again there was no wind.
Just calm, very cold air.
And a very quiet dead city.
What the hell had just happened?
Where there should have been three alien bodies there was nothing.
Her mind balked at what it had just seen. They had been too easy to kill, yet had they killed them?
And how close had they come to being frozen by these creatures? Her fingers were still numb.
“The other four are still coming,” Waters said over the commlink.
“Hold on, people,” she said. “Only fire when we’ve got a couple of them in the open.”
“I can see two of them from here, Sergeant,” Hawk said. He was in a position behind some debris on the corner, looking south. She couldn’t see down that street from her position. “And it’s getting damn cold again.”
“Copy that,” Cort reported, his voice weak-sounding through the commlink.
Cort was in a similar position just around the corner to the south from her. But he would be closer to the alien creatures and thus more exposed to the cold. Much longer and he wouldn’t be able to fire. She didn’t want to be losing men to the cold, that was for sure.
“Got one from the north,” Harden said. “Damn cold.”
“Copy Harden,” Raynor said.
“Waters, location of the fourth one?”
“Stopped inside the building where the first two came out,” Waters said. “Looks like it’s staying there for the moment.”
Again she could see her breath in front of her. It had to be even colder closer to those things.
“Take out the ones you can see, people,” she ordered. “Make it clean.”
The burst of gunfire again filled the canyon between the buildings with a roaring sound that was quickly cut off. The echo drifted down the streets and then died away.
“Two down to the south,” Hawk said.
“One down to the north,” Harden said.
“Hang on, men,” she said as again the wind started to swirl strongly on both sides of the intersection. “Protect your equipment. Stay out of the black sand.”
To the north she could see a large tornado climbing into the air between the buildings, the black sand swirling in it.
Then it moved out over the intersection above her, joining with the two from the south, again whipping at her uniform and helmet.
Once more she felt as if the wind, with its cold intensity, wanted to yank the rifle right out of her hands. She held on tight as the black winds spun together, climbing higher and higher until finally they had completely joined into one large, black swirling mass.
Then, just as the first three had done, the wind and sand flashed off over the debris barrier in the street in the direction of the power source.
The silence that again filled the intersection was charged. The air was crisp and cold.
But much warmer than it had been just moments before. And getting warmer by the second.
“The last one has moved off,” Waters said. “Clear.”
“Report,” she ordered. “Casualties?”
One by one her men reported in. No injuries. Just cold hands and fingers.
“Vasquez, bring out the civilians.”
She moved over to the spot where the creature she had shot had fallen. There wasn’t any sign of it at all.
She studied the ground around the spot. The street had been completely scoured of any trace by the wind. It was as if the creatures never even existed. Yet those nonexistent creatures had almost killed them by sucking all the heat from their bodies. A pretty powerful weapon.
She turned around to face the angry face of Dr. Downer.
“All right, Sergeant,” he said, his voice amazingly calm considering the look on his face, “I’m assuming there are a few more things about this island we weren’t told. Such as those creatures.”
She shook her head, again glancing down at the place where the black-robed being had fallen. “Didn’t know a thing about them. And I have no idea what the hell just happened to them, either.”
“Nothing?” Downer asked.
“Not a damn thing,” she said.
“What do we call them?” Bogle asked, moving up beside Dr. Downer.
Malone only shrugged. It wasn’t her business to name alien creatures. Her job was to defend the Union and these scientists against them.
“Sand would be as good a name as any,” Downer said. “At least from what we just saw.”
“That, Doctor, is you and your colleagues’ department,” Malone said, turning to rejoin the rest of her men. “My job is just to kill them if they threaten us.”
And she had a sneaking hunch that over the next few hours, she was going to be doing a lot of that.
11
Time: 1:03 P . M . Pacific Time
11 hours, 32 minutes after Arrival
Stephanie could barely grasp what Hank and Sergeant Malone had explained to her and the others who hadn’t seen what happened in the fight. These creatures, when shot, dissolved into a pile of black sand and blew away. It wasn’t logical, it didn’t make sense how it could happen or even that it had happened. Nothing in her medical training could explain that such a physical event was even possible.
Yet it seemed, from the witnesses, that it was. But even with that, she couldn’t believe it. She was about to ask Malone another question when Edaro pointed to the molecular sensor he’d being using to study the earthquake before the attack. “Would you look at this!”
“What?” Bogle asked, moving over to stand above Edaro. “We going to have another earthquake?”
Edaro ignored the question and scanned back through the last twenty minutes of the instrument recordings. “Here’s the earthquake.” He pointed to a large spike on what looked to Stephanie to be a straight-line graph. “There was a molecular disturbance in everything on the island.”
“You told us this before,” Bogle said.
Edaro held up his hand for them to wait as he moved the screen graph along to a different spot. He pointed to two other smaller spikes. “Here and here are when the aliens were killed.”
“You’re saying,” Stephanie said, “that the aliens phased out of this space, just as the island did when it left wherever it was and jumped itself here?”
“That’s exactly what I think happened,” he said.
“Are they dead?” Malone asked. She’d been standing to one side, listening intently.
Dr. Edaro glanced up at her and shook his head. “If I were to make a wild guess, I would say no. Your shots caused them to phase, and their parts, the black sand that you described, were drawn to the energy source.”
“Where they were re-formed?” Hank asked, shaking his head. “I don’t think I can believe that much.”
Stephanie couldn’t either. Her mind still boggled at the idea of an alien body dissolving into sand and creating enough energy to cause the winds Malone described.
Edaro only shrugged. “I’m just making a wild guess, but from what the sergeant tells us and what my instruments show, it wouldn’t surprise me that with the energy source, they just might. This entire island basically dissolves and re-forms on a molecular level every time it moves.”
“Centered around that energy source we’re picking up?” Malone asked.
Edaro shrugged, his go
lf ball back in his left hand. “Again, your guess is as good as mine on that one. But something has to be powering this, or maybe attracting the energy of the Maw in some alien fashion. To make these shifts takes a lot of energy. That energy has to be coming from somewhere; otherwise, this city wouldn’t continue moving around in space like it does.”
“And the most likely suspect is the energy source we’re reading,” Hank said. “Right?”
“Possibly,” Edaro said, flipping the ball into the air and catching it. “It’s the only one we have so far, I assume.” He glanced at Sergeant Malone.
“It is,” she said.
“Well,” Edaro said, “if you need an energy source and you only have one on hand, it seems logical to look at that one first.”
Stephanie took a step back and tried to get a deep breath of the stale and cold air. By now, she had managed to grasp, or at least accept the idea of an island simply appearing off the Oregon coast. The Maelstrom had vast power that often followed no natural law of physics.
But these were alien beings they were talking about. Beings who’d have had to evolve, have had some form of continuing the species in some material fashion, alien or humanoid. And that was what she was having problems understanding.
Or maybe she was making wrong assumptions. As Stanton kept reminding them, applying human assumptions to alien phenomena could very well be wrong. Dead wrong.
She turned to Hank and Chop Edaro. “Is it possible that the dissolving and possible re-forming of these creatures wasn’t a natural part of their evolution?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Edaro said. “But I would say that’s more than likely. Just as shifting to different parts of the Maelstrom wasn’t the natural state for this city when it was built.”
“Or being in the Maelstrom isn’t a natural state for Earth,” Lee said, shaking his head.
“Exactly,” Edaro said.
“So these Sand creatures may have become the way they are because of the shifts,” Hank said. “That would make sense.”
“And if we’re here when the island shifts,” Stanton said, joining the group, “do we become like them?”
Stephanie felt like slapping him for saying that. None of them had any real answers. They were using human logic to take one small step at a time, but everyone knew it was like shooting in the dark. And at the moment they didn’t need the negative Stanton reminding them of every possible thing that might go wrong.
She glanced at Hank, who was glaring at Stanton. Hank obviously felt the same way about Stanton.
Edaro broke the silence. “Anything is possible. The answers, I would guess, if there are any, are at that energy source.”
“You can’t be thinking about continuing, after this,” Stanton said, glancing around at Sergeant Malone.
“We will move out shortly,” Malone said.
Stephanie watched as Stanton’s face grew even whiter than it already was. He took a deep breath as though trying to collect himself, but said no more.
Stephanie understood exactly how he felt, but there was no turning back now. She stared up at the towering buildings overhead, the sky bridges, the slivers of sky and light on the buildings far above. This must have been a great city in its time. What terrible accident or quirk of Maelstrom fate far in the past had started it on this jumping road? She doubted anyone would ever know.
“Okay, people,” Sergeant Malone said, “let’s get moving, see if we can find a way around this debris blockade.”
At that moment, Stephanie was staring at a sky bridge and an idea hit her. Instead of looking for a way to go in through the debris, why couldn’t they just go up over that sky bridge and down? Just as the original residents might have done.
“Hang on, Sergeant,” Hank said, speaking ahead of Stephanie by a half a second. “What about going through where the Sand did?”
Malone shook her head. “Too dangerous. Too tight. Could be booby-trapped And if we get another shaker in that debris, we’d never get out.”
Stephanie agreed with that and it made her like her own idea even more. “How about we go over?”
“What?” Bogle asked.
She pointed up. Everyone glanced up, then Malone looked back at Stephanie. “What did you have in mind?”
“The sky bridges,” Stephanie said. “We go up here, over the sky bridge, and then down. We bypass the debris blockade completely.”
Hank nodded, staring up at the bridges over them. “Just might work.”
“And it would give us a chance to explore a couple of these buildings along the way,” Bogle said.
Stephanie noticed that Malone was also nodding, probably calculating what might be the military and defense problems of being inside. Finally, the sergeant said, “Worth a try.”
She turned and strode back to the middle of the intersection, her boots making no noise on the hard surface. Then she stopped and stared upward again, clearly picking a path of bridges.
Stephanie and the others walked over to join her.
Malone glanced at Hank, then pointed upward. “We go up about fifty flights to that bridge there.”
“Yeah,” Hank said. “Take it over to the next building.”
“And then up another twenty flights or so to the next bridge,” Malone said. “Two more buildings on the bridges at that level and we should be just about over the location of the power source.”
“Sounds good,” Hank said.
“Sounds like a climb,” Bogle said, staring upward.
Of course it does, thought Stephanie. No one could imagine that climbing seventy flights would be fun. But so far nothing about this expedition had turned out to be fun. Nothing at all.
And she didn’t expect that to change any time soon.
12
Time: 1:35 P . M . Pacific Time
12 hours, 04 minutes after Arrival
The ground-floor chamber of the building was dark, damp, and covered with a thick layer of dust that seemed as light as air and swirled around Hank’s feet in eddies like water.
“Pick up your feet and walk lightly,” Malone ordered, “unless you want to choke on the dust.”
Malone had sent advance men ahead, but they were nowhere to be seen as Hank entered the big, dark room. The central ramp was down, and in the beams of everyone’s lights, he could see footprints heading up the ramp. Her men had obviously gone ahead, scouting.
Before entering the building, Malone had contacted base control and reported their plan, knowing that the video and audio uplinks to the orbital stations would be cut off while the group was inside the buildings. Hank didn’t much like the idea of being out of touch, but base control gave the go-ahead so he kept quiet.
“We’re going up spread out,” Malone said. “One floor between us. Two of my men with every two civilians. You hear shooting above or below you, or anything else, you scramble for the nearest wall and find what cover you can. Understand?”
Hank nodded right along with the others. He just hoped her plan would keep them all from getting killed at the same time in an emergency.
“Dr. Downer, Dr. Peters, you two are with me,” Malone said. “Waters, take point. Hawk, stay behind us. Let’s move. The rest wait for my signal to start up.”
The second floor was as dark and as empty as the first. But the dust had decreased to a thin layer. The ramps to the floor above seemed almost to meet at the ramp coming up from below. So at each floor they were only on a flat spot for about three steps, then they started back up again.
The ramps weren’t steep, but it took them two times around the wide circles to reach the next floor. By the time they passed the dark third floor, Hank was beginning to wonder if the aliens who’d built the place had thought of elevators. And that maybe he should stop and go looking for them.
Sergeant Malone started Bogle and Stanton and two of her men when Hank and Stephanie were halfway up the ramp to the third floor. And when they got halfway up the ramp to the fourth floor, she started Edaro and Lee
and two more men.
By the fifth empty and dark floor, Hank was beginning to wonder what exactly had happened to this city. Someone or something had obviously cleaned it out at some point in the past. They saw not a stick of furniture, no sign of any occupation. But had it been cleaned out before or after the shifting started?
The second, third, and fourth floors were all dark and smelled of mold and dampness. From the watermarks on the walls and the caked dust, these floors must have been flooded at times during the city’s hops around the Maelstrom. Maybe the water had simply flushed away every trace of life. Given enough years in enough water, that was possible.
Or maybe the furniture and bodies of the original residents were the dust that covered everything. Given enough years, that, too, was very possible.
“Understood,” Malone said in response to something said to her over the commlink as the five of them reached the fifth floor.
“Take a look at that,” Stephanie said, pointing upward.
Hank glanced up at the light coming down the opening from above. There must be a hole in the wall up there a few stories. A big hole to allow that much light.
“Seventh floor has windows,” Malone said matter-of-factly.
Then, after a short moment’s pause, she said, “So does the next floor above that. And no more ramps.”
“What?” Hank asked.
She held up her hand. “We’ll see when we get there.”
Five long minutes later they had climbed into the light of the seventh floor. It didn’t just have windows, it didn’t seem to have walls.
Not one wall or support beam in the entire city-block-sized room.
It was as if the massive floor above was just floating overhead.
Hank was shocked. What had looked like solid wall from the outside was perfectly transparent from the inside.
Frighteningly so.
The weight of the ceiling over their heads seemed to want to come crashing down at any moment.
“This is incomprehensible,” Stephanie said, staring around the massive room.
“One fantastic piece of engineering,” Hank said. “And I want samples of that transparent wall material before we leave this island.”
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