“We all need to start collecting samples of things we find.”
“Good idea,” Hank said, reaching down and picking up what looked like a small piece of wall material. He studied the grayness of it for a moment, wondering why it wasn’t transparent when not part of the wall, then he slipped it into his backpack.
“One-way transparent walls,” Stephanie said, “strong enough to hold up a skyscraper. Amazing.”
Hank couldn’t have agreed more.
Then he noticed something else. There was debris scattered in piles around the gigantic, block-square room. Not much, but some. It looked like old floor covering and maybe pieces of ruined furniture. Some of it had piled up against one transparent wall, looking as if it should simply fall out. They were going to be able to get quite a few specimens from this place.
“One more floor,” Malone said, not pausing, but continuing to move surely up the ramp.
As they climbed Hank couldn’t get over his astonishment at the transparent walls and the view beyond. The building next door was just as solid-looking from high up as it was from below. But he wondered if those walls were as transparent as the ones he was looking through. More than likely they were.
When they reached the eighth floor, it was exactly the same as the one below it. Transparent walls, lots of debris. The only difference he could see right off was that there was no ramp leading upward, just a flat ceiling overhead. Maybe the ramp was just broken. That would be logical, considering what the city had been through.
But it was also logical that its builders would have another way of reaching the top floors besides climbing ramps. After just eight floors, Hank was breathing hard. He didn’t even want to think about climbing another forty-two floors just to get to the first sky bridge. And there had to be another hundred floors above that in this building alone.
But there was no other way up. He could see every meter of the huge room and beyond that to all the buildings around them.
He forced himself not to stare out through the walls for a second and to look around instead. This level contained more debris than the others they’d seen. Piles of broken furniture and what looked like equipment were scattered everywhere.
Hank wanted to search through them, but first he had to check out the amazing walls. He wound his way to one edge of the giant room alongside Stephanie. Eight stories below, the street stretched in several directions. It seemed as if the floor ended abruptly and that he could have just jumped out into space if he wanted to. But if he looked closely, he could see the surface of the wall. It was like the most highly cleaned piece of glass he had ever seen. Yet he knew it had to be extremely thick. And it had to be very strong to form the walls of a skyscraper like this one.
At the same moment both he and Stephanie reached slowly out and touched the wall. It was cold and smooth to his touch. And very solid. Hank licked one finger and tried to smudge the wall, but left no mark at all.
“Not sure I could get used to this,” Stephanie said.
“Murder on someone with a fear of heights,” Hank said.
Stephanie pointed up at the roof. “I meant the feeling that the roof is going to come crashing down on us at any time.”
“Thanks,” Hank said, smiling ruefully. “I didn’t really want to think about that possibility.”
She laughed, and they eased as close as they dared to the thick, transparent wall and looked down.
What seemed like directly below him, but was actually up one block, was the debris barricade filling the street. And he could see all the way down the street beyond the barricade toward the power source.
“Sergeant,” Hank called, “I think you might want to take a look at this.”
He moved over to the corner of the building for a better look at the barricade below.
Malone came up alongside him and looked where he pointed.
Farther down the street, on the other side of the building that they thought was the location of the power source was another debris barricade blocking the street. He and Malone had been right. Someone, or some people, or some aliens, had gone to a vast amount of trouble to build a blockade around the central area of the city.
“Why would anyone do that?” Stephanie asked.
Neither he nor Sergeant Malone had an answer for her.
They weren’t going to find the answer to that question from up there. Somehow they had to get inside the blockade.
“Okay,” Bogle said, moving over and joining them. “How do we get any higher?”
Hank looked at Stephanie, and she just shrugged. “I assume the ramp from above just isn’t working,” Hank said. “We’ll have to go back down and try another building.”
“I don’t think so,” Lee said.
Hank turned to face him. Lee was smiling, and beside him Stanton had a bit more color in his face and was looking a little more confident again. Maybe he’d finally managed to surmount his fear. Hank hoped so, for all their sakes.
“Explain,” Malone said.
“This is a high-rise,” Lee said, continuing to smile. “Granted, a very advanced one with amazing walls and engineering, but still a high-rise building. There has to be an entire core area we’re not seeing. Air circulation, supply elevators, heating or cooling, water, and so on. If there are elevators or another way up, we would find it in that core or cores.”
Hank agreed completely with Dr. Lee, but as he turned slowly and looked around the monster room, he just couldn’t imagine where such a core might be located. He could see into space on all four sides of this building. It felt as if the floor above was floating five meters in the air above them. Everything else on the entire floor was visible.
There was simply no place to put elevators, stairs, and so on.
“So, where would it be?” Malone asked, also staring back at the vast space of the room and the open air beyond.
Lee shrugged. “It has to be here somewhere, I’d bet on it. Maybe inside these transparent walls.”
“This is just plain crazy,” Stanton said.
Everyone ignored him.
“Okay, look,” Lee said. “The builders of this city were masters at certain things, one of which was making materials appear completely transparent from one side while solid from the other. Why wouldn’t they be able to move light around an area like a maintenance core just as effectively?”
“Like a magician’s trick?” Hank asked, instantly understanding where Lee was coming from. “So it couldn’t be seen.”
“Exactly,” Lee said.
“So we fan out around this room until we bump our noses on something,” Bogle said. “Shouldn’t take that long.”
Malone instantly took charge. “Everyone move to the right wall. Hawk, Cort, Raynor, help us. Waters, stay on post at the top of the ramp and keep an eye on that motion sensor. The rest of you hold positions.”
Hank figured she had positioned the others floors below as guards.
They all did as she ordered and lined up along the right wall. But even with ten of them, they were still a good four meters apart along the transparent wall when they started walking slowly toward the opposite wall.
Hank was the second one from the left of their stretched-out, ten-person search line. Stephanie was closer to the edge.
It wasn’t until they had worked their way almost back to where the ramp went down that they found anything. He was only a step away from the invisible wall when he saw it. If he’d been moving any faster, it would have hurt.
“Got it,” he said, reaching forward and touching the hard surface he was having trouble seeing even as he was touching it.
To his left, Stephanie said, “Here too,” as she reached out and touched the invisible wall extending out into the middle of the big space.
“Over here, too,” Bogle said.
Directly across from Hank, on the other side of the circle that was the ramp down to the floor below, Bogle and Lee were both running their hands along an invisible wall.
“That
looks really strange, doesn’t it?” Stephanie said from beside Hank.
Hank laughed. It did look strange, as if the two of them were doing a pantomime act.
“Two cores,” Lee said. “Makes sense. Any building this size would need two cores to deliver everything to the floors. And they’re positioned to supply the entire space efficiently. These people did just about everything right.”
“Except survive,” Stephanie said only loud enough for Hank to hear.
“Got that right,” Hank said, just as softly.
They watched as Lee moved around the ramp opening, staring at the floor until he finally said, “Got it.” His smile was even bigger than normal.
Hank couldn’t believe they had missed it again. Lines on the floor. Of course. With the transparent walls distracting him when he came up, it hadn’t occurred to him even to look.
Lee turned and walked directly away from the ramp circle until suddenly a door slid open in the middle of what looked like thin air. It was as if the view of the buildings beyond just sort of slid back, showing a white-walled space.
“I’m starting to really like whoever built this place,” Bogle said, staring through the open door, then peering around behind it at the seemingly empty space and the buildings beyond.
“Talk about a hidden room,” Lee said. “Wow.”
Hank was having trouble believing what he was seeing, also. His eyes told him there was no room there, yet when he looked through the open door hanging in the middle of the room, there was a room there.
A solid, white-walled, fairly large room.
“Elevator through here, I’ll bet,” Stanton said, smiling at Malone.
For a brief moment she actually shook her head in amazement, then went right back to work.
“I’d prefer stairs,” she said.
She went quickly over to where Stanton was standing and looked inside the door without actually going through it. Hank noticed that she kept her rifle ready.
Then she stepped through with one foot and pressed her back against the door. She glanced at Waters at the top of the ramp. “Anything moving around us?”
“Nothing.”
She nodded. “Hawk, go right. Cort, go left. Doors on both corners. Need lights.”
Hank moved over so he could see inside the door as Privates Hawk and Cort went in, guns ready. The space was a twenty-by-twenty room with plain white walls. Hank could see clear pull handles in both corners. You could not see through the walls from inside the room, even though from the outside it looked as if there wasn’t anything there at all.
Private Hawk moved over and quickly pulled on one recessed handle, stepping back and lowering his gun as he did.
The doors opened outward to show a curving staircase, moving up into the dark toward the center of the room.
Cort did the same in the other corner. Same exact result. Another staircase, only this one moving down, circling under the other one.
“I’ll bet the elevators are across the room,” Bogle said.
“We’ll take the stairs,” Malone said.
“Afraid you were going to say that,” Stanton said.
“Let’s go, people. Same groups, same spacing,” Malone said. “Don’t open the outer doors to the floors unless you have to. Cort, take this position and don’t let this door close until everyone is inside.”
“One request,” Hank said. “Stop at twenty floors to rest and to explore that level. I want to see what one of the higher levels was used for.”
“So would I,” Bogle said.
Malone nodded. “Twenty floors. Go.”
Two of her men disappeared up the stairs, moving silently but quickly.
Malone waited, letting Private Hawk take the lead as they started the long climb to the fiftieth floor and the sky bridge.
13
Time: 2:22 P . M . Pacific Time
12 hours, 51 minutes after Arrival
Hank was panting and sweating by the time they reached the twenty-eighth floor of the alien tower. Private Hawk had his back against the door, holding it open into the large space beyond, and light flooded the stairwell. After twenty flights in the dark staircase, with only their flashlights for illumination, the sudden brightness made him squint.
“What a relief,” Stephanie said, as they went through the door and out into the open area.
Hank felt exactly the same way. It was a relief just to stop climbing stairs.
It was cold, with a slight wind swirling through the enormous room. Hank glanced around and could see that the wall and part of the floor below had collapsed in one corner. The outer walls were still transparent like the seventh and eighth floors, but there were more remnants of what might have been furnishings, varied equipment, and patterns of spaces laid out across the vast area.
He and Stephanie moved out into the room and stopped. Hank took a few deep breaths of the wonderfully cooling air, working to get his lungs full again. He had spent far too many years working in labs and not exercising. Climbing twenty stories of stairs spaced just a little too far apart was a killer. And they still had a distance to go, let alone get back down in the other building. He had a feeling that by the time this was all over, his knees would ache for a week.
On the way up he and Stephanie had talked a little about what the size of the stair spacing, the height of the ceilings, and other such details might indicate about the look and shape of this city’s original inhabitants. They decided they didn’t yet have enough information to make any logical assumptions.
Slowly the other scientists came out of the stairwell, seeming to appear from a door in the middle of empty space. Hank didn’t know if he’d ever get used to seeing that. Or to being in a building with invisible walls.
Sergeant Malone stood to one side, watching as they all came up. She and her men were in such good shape that it looked like they hadn’t even broken a sweat under their armor after ascending the twenty flights of stairs. And they were all carrying what looked like heavy equipment.
Stephanie reached down and tried to pick up a piece of debris, but it broke apart in her hand. “How old is this city?” she asked, brushing the dust off her hands on her pants.
“Old,” Edaro said between pants for breath. “But not as old as I feel at the moment. I haven’t had this much exercise since the last time I tried to walk thirty-six holes in one day.”
“It’s a wonder this entire city isn’t just one big pile of dust,” Hank said, staring at the broken, crumbled bits of the item Stephanie had tried to pick up. He tried to lift what might have been a piece of furniture, but it too disintegrated in his hands, sending a small cloud of dust swirling into the air. He managed to save a small piece for his pack.
“It’s not a pile of rubble,” Edaro said, “only because of the incredible engineering of whoever built it.”
“We’ve got movement, Sergeant!” Waters called out from a position near the door.
Hank felt his stomach twist. Aliens from the ship or Sand, he thought. And of course, base hadn’t been able to warn them because their communications were cut off when they were inside the building.
“Where?” Sergeant Malone asked, voice calm and all business.
“On the street level,” Waters said, pointing at the hole in the wall. “Two blocks off and moving this way from the north. Outside the debris barriers.”
Sergeant Malone moved over toward the hole in the wall.
Hank glanced at the other scientists. “Stay here.” Then he followed Malone, staying behind her and out of the way.
Malone strode toward the hole in the wall and floor with no attempt to stay hidden. When she got within a few steps of the opening, she stopped. Then she tried to contact base.
“Any luck?” Hank asked after a moment.
She shook her head as he moved up beside her. “Links with the orbital stations are still blocked by the buildings. And we’re not high enough for our link to the base to clear the surrounding buildings.”
Hank di
dn’t much like the idea that they were out of contact with the rest of the Union and its forces, but at the moment they couldn’t do much about it. He looked down through the hole in the wall. The cold air was blowing in at a pretty good pace, whipping at his skin and jacket. In the distance between the buildings, he could see slivers of the blue waters of the Pacific. For some reason the sight of it was reassuring after the last hours in the midst of the alien city.
As he watched, two Union fighters streaked past over the water. That also made him feel better. He might be feeling that they were alone here, but they were far from it.
Below them, the streets looked like narrow canyons and were much farther down than he’d expected from twenty-eight stories. He had a sense that they were climbing more than normal-length flights of stairs. But with the wider-spaced stairs, it was hard to tell. From where they stood it looked more like forty normal human stories in the air. And the sky bridge that was their goal wasn’t that far above them. Maybe six or seven alien stories was all.
“Pharons,” Malone said matter-of-factly.
“What?” It took Hank a moment to see them. Then he did. They were moving slowly, spread out, coming up the street from the north. Their armor glittered brightly, even in the shadows of the street.
“A dozen warriors, at least,” Malone said. “The one in the center looks like a high priest. See that big headdress?”
“High priest?” Hank echoed.
Malone nodded. “That’s what our people have named them. I guess because of the fancy headdress and that they seem in command of the troops in battle. From what I saw in the briefing tape, they’re the really nasty ones. The others are just soldiers.”
“Do they know we’re here?” Hank asked.
“Let’s hope not. Harden, Marva, with me,” Malone said into her commlink. “The rest of you I want up the stairs. Six floors to the sky bridge. Stay together and wait there until I say otherwise. Hawk, at two stories up, break off and shoot some recon views from there, then continue on up.”
“Copy that,” Hawk said, and fairly dived through the open door.
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