by Jeff Long
Li was the last in line. “Tell me what it was like,” he said.
Bill gave a grin with what was left of his teeth.
Farther ahead, Morris, the geologist with the kidney stone, grunted as he walked. The team had run out of pain medication ages ago. The colony would have drugs and a doctor. Their suffering was nearly at an end.
But two days later, when they reached the outskirts of the well-lit colony, Li realized their suffering had only just begun. Bill was right. They should have kept going deeper out there.
There was no challenge, no warning. A gunshot snapped through the tunnel. Brooks, their botanist, dropped in a heap.
“Don’t shoot,” Watts yelled into the blinding light. “We’re friends. Don’t shoot.”
A man’s voice said, “They talk?”
Li and the others were quiet as mice. Quieter. Almost as quiet as Weber.
Another man shouted from the light, “Lay down. Right now. Noses into the floor. Kiss it. Anyone moves and we open up on the whole shitload of you.”
After a minute, Li heard boot steps. There were seventeen of them. They had been eating beef, he could smell the grease in their pores. Deodorant. Skoal’s chewing tobacco. Quartz dust in the cleats of their boots. Gold miners.
“This one’s dead. You got him through the eye.”
Brooks had been the one pressing hardest to go home. Two years of surviving in the tubes, just inches away from the ride home…he’d almost made it.
Watts started talking fast, part plea, part blame. “We’re team two with NASA. The space agency. Only inner space. Scientists. Unarmed. What have you done? Don’t shoot. Isn’t this the Sitka Station? We left here twenty-three months ago. Is Graham still in charge here? I want to see the person in command. Right now.”
“Enough of that,” a big man said. “Calm yourself down.”
“He has a family. You just shot him. Calm myself? Six thousand miles. We were here. We made it back. What have you done?”
Li could smell the inside of Brooks’s head. The blood traced past his fingers along a runnel in the floor.
“Let’s see some identification, mister.”
“Here, in my pouch, take it, damn you.”
After consulting one another, the men let them stand. But they kept the rifle muzzles trained at their faces, fingers on the triggers.
“Talk some more,” one demanded.
“Talk?” Watts snapped. “You’ve killed a man. A good man. Are you crazy? Lower those damn weapons.”
“He speaks English,” one of the men slowly observed.
It hit Li. The sentries thought they were hadals. Even up this close.
“They’re human?”
“What the hell happened to you boys?”
“Take them in,” a big man said.
What remained of team two entered the colony in a line, tentatively, barefoot and blinded. Li’s head throbbed. The acid light burned his eyes.
Blurred shapes bracketed the path. Voices fenced them in. Li heard them clearly.
“Who are they? What are they?”
“Team two, NASA, that lost bunch. Feds.”
“But they died out there.”
“Not a word in two years.”
“What happened to them?” Over and over, that question. “How could this happen?”
“Mommy, that one’s crying.”
Tears were running from Li’s eyes, flushing the smog and blaze of light. And the sickness in his heart.
“He’s coming home,” said the mother. “He’s just glad to be back.”
That wasn’t it, though, far from it. Li tasted the salt. He had made a mistake. Bill.
“Simms shot one. Hell, look at them. Horns and near naked. How were we supposed to know? Shoot first, ask later.”
The air gagged Li. It reeked of diesel fuel and engine grease and electricity and cement dust. Leftover food lay rotting in their homes. Even their sewage was ripe with waste. Overfed, their bodies had cast off the abundance.
He felt panic. What have you done? He didn’t belong here. This was a terrible mistake. But it was too late to run. They had him hemmed in from behind.
The shapes clarified. The crowd took on substance, lots of it. Subsisting on protein bars and whatever they could catch, his sticklike comrades had become the norm. These settlers shocked him with their immense shoulders and chests and padded stomachs. Even the thin ones seemed plump. Like cattle. He shut out the thought.
He should have known better. He had known better. And yet he was here.
No one offered water, or rest, or even a hey or a nod. No one spoke to them, only about them, as if they were wild animals sliding through. Li could feel their fear. It went beyond that. Revulsion. It was hard not to take it personally, but he tried. They were defending themselves. It was that simple.
Driven by poverty, greed, desperation, or dreams, these people had descended from all that was familiar to find what they were missing in their lives. They had carried light into the darkness, full of blind faith, believing their rewards lay just around the next bend. Now this little NASA parade of monstrosities had appeared from deeper yet, and it threatened them. It terrified them. They had thought they could muck around in the basement of the earth and not be changed, at least not like this. They had thought they could have deliverance without transformation.
“They must have done something wrong.”
“Went too deep, that’s what. It happens. Those boys went to the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Li’s misshapen companions were silent, because now they had their answer. The loathing would only get worse as they neared the surface. They could no longer pretend the Interior had not left its mark on them. Their wives would flinch. Their children would have nightmares about the creature in their house.
As he walked between the gawking settlers, Li withdrew deep into himself. He pictured Bill wandering like a monk into the core of darkness, padding through the tunnels, roaming through the hollow cities. He imagined Bill slowly starving or falling through a shaft or losing his mind among the empty temples and fortresses, and thought, What glories will I never see?
ARTIFACTS
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Underground Economy: “Deep Dollars” Both Boom and Bane
Fueled by a surge in raw exports, the Subterranean economy grew an astounding 282.1 percent last year. Meanwhile tax revenues, corporate profits, and earnings sent home by workers in the Subterrain, have sent federal and private spending on the surface into overdrive.
Fueled by “deep dollars,” the U.S. has seen a boom in spending in all sectors, from health and education to information technology, transportation, and the military. Analysts predict the recent record deficit will be wiped out in the next two months. Unemployment rates have tumbled. Wall Street broke 15,000 last week.
And yet President Wayne Burr has called for a range of economic sanctions to be imposed upon the entire Subterrain. “Plain and simple, we are getting bought off by rogue states,” Burr said. “While we spend the riches sent up from below, Subterranean regimes are building armies, stockpiling weapons, and trafficking in humans and drugs. The international order is disintegrating before our eyes, undermined by warlords and modern-day conquistadores using petroleum and precious metals to bribe the surface nations. Unless we reject their temptations and take control, we will find ourselves hostage to our own appetites.”
Of particular concern, says Burr, is the recent spate of coups in sub-Atlantic regions, the assassination of UN peacekeepers in sub-Africa, and China’s continuing violation of immigration limits throughout the Pacific commons. Numerous terrorist organizations are known to have bases under the surface.
But one man’s terrorist is another’s revolutionary, at least according to several Subterranean politicians. On a recent swing through the Subterrain, this reporter found uniform consent among colonists that surface fears are overblown.
“If anything, it is we who are being held hostage
to the needs and demands of surface nations,” said Tommy Hardin, the disgraced ex–House representative from Texas, and now a governor within the Pacific Confederacy. “We are subject to taxation without representation. Surface tariffs cripple our factory goods. Food, medicine, and other critical supplies are sold to us for outrageous profits. UN troops are garrisoned in our settlements at our expense, where they act above our laws.”
President Olmec of the Correo Pacifico Sector has set off alarms with his pledge to seize control of all drilling and mining operations in his region. “There must be just compensation for our labor and resources,” he says. “No more pillaging by the sunshine pirates.”
4
BENEATH THE MUSICIANS SEAMOUNTS,
NORTH OF HAWAII: 5,635 FATHOMS
You saw the most amazing things through a sniper scope.
At the moment, Ian Beckwith, Navy SEAL, was admiring a strange, leathery hummingbird licking the inside of a cave “flower” made of gypsum crystals. Hovering a few inches to the left of his target, at a range of 938 yards, it pulsed in his night optics. Unless he was wildly mistaken, this was a species never before seen. Later he would add the bird to his sniper log.
Every sniper kept a sniper log. The front page had handy algorithms for reckoning distances, plus human physiology factoids, like how long a head was, or how many inches it was from your neck to your navel. The rest of the book was for recording kills. This is where Beckwith kept his life list. Encrypted.
A life list was the birder’s version of a sniper log. It listed every new species one saw. Beckwith’s life list also served as a sort of memoir. Peregrines reminded him of a certain city where he’d stalked and shot a terrorist. Parrots summoned to mind a drug cartel he helped root out, one shot at a time. A whippoorwill once sang to him while he smoke-checked—shot dead—the leader of a Communist coup. In a sense, they became the souls of his kills.
To say the least, watching birds wasn’t part of his job. He had to be careful. A gunnery sergeant once came close to finding him out. Luckily Beckwith was jotting down his sighting of a great tit flicker, and the gunny decided that if anything could be excused, it was most definitely that.
They trained you in sniper school to focus your mind the way you focused your scope. Dial it in. No distractions. Watch. Wait. Make the kill. Pack up. Get away.
But Beckwith couldn’t help himself. After a time, the targets reduced to mathematical calculations. Whereas every time he uncapped his scope, a whole new world lay waiting.
“Wind?” said Beckwith.
“One minute right,” said his spotter.
A military sniper rifle is considered a crew-served weapon. It takes only one finger to pull the trigger. But your spotter provides you with an extra pair of eyes, and a second brain, and backup if the enemy starts to close in.
“Elevation?”
The spotter told him the numbers. Beckwith adjusted the knobs. The hummingbird flickered like a little tongue of fire inside that crystal flower. So beautiful!
Until sniper school, Beckwith had never paid the slightest attention to birds. He’d never been a hunter, a student of birds, or even much of an outdoors person. Sniper school had changed all that. Now he hunted men for a living. He lived outdoors mostly. And he was an avid birder.
The first time it happened he was on an exercise like this one, but up on the surface. He was wearing a ghillie suit, one of those monstrously hot and fetid lumps of garbage and grass they sometimes used for camouflage. He had been dressed as a cow pasture that early morning, and was lying next to a pile of flyblown shit, glassing the far-off weeds for a target, not exactly hating his life, but not exactly loving it either.
He had joined the marines ten years ago, when the deeps were first revealed and Haddie seemed to be lurking in every shadow. Like so many other young recruits, he had heeded the call of the president to “join up and take the fight to hell and back.” But by the time he finished basic, the fight was over. Haddie had been exterminated. Mission accomplished, the president announced. Beckwith had never even seen a live hadal, much less shot at one.
Stuck with three more years of service, Beckwith had decided to improve himself. One thing had led to another until the morning he found himself sharing space with a pile of cow flop, peering through a sniper scope, and contemplating his lowly station in the universe. That was when, through his scope, he strayed upon two creatures dancing face-to-face. Time had stopped for Beckwith. Wings spread, the two whooping cranes—he looked them up on his next leave—went on dancing and flapping and bobbing their heads hypnotically. After that, out in the field, whether training or manhunting for real, Beckwith could not seem to escape the beauty waiting in his scope.
“I’m holding center chest,” he said to his spotter.
“Roger, on scope,” his spotter said.
“On target.” Beckwith exhaled half a breath and softly squeezed, taking up two of the three pounds of trigger pull. The hummingbird glowed.
“Fire when ready.”
Beckwith finished the squeeze. His bullet left a vapor trail of disturbed air, but with a difference. Here in the darkness, lit by the optics, the hole in the air was full of rainbow colors.
“Hit. Center chest,” said his spotter. “That’s one dead piece of paper, Becky.”
The paper target was an older version, left over from ten years ago, back when Haddie was a threat. The new targets had Chinese soldiers on them. The Chinese army used American soldiers on their targets. That was the point of these training exercises. Wars always loomed for the warrior. Eventually the paper would turn to flesh.
Beckwith lingered with his scope. The hummingbird was gone, though. “Shake a leg, Becky,” said his spotter. “We’re moving out.”
Beckwith reached for his drag bag, sheathed his rifle, and started walking.
One by one, other sniper teams met them along the trail. None was in uniform. Loosely speaking, they didn’t exist, not as marines and SEALS, not in the DMZ. It was just a matter of time before the niceties of international law wore out, though. Once the landgrabbing began at the international level, subterranean warfare was going to be the next big thing. Until that day, however, uniforms—and targets with Chinese soldiers on them—were forbidden down here.
Their cover—when they passed through the settlements and mining outposts—was a fictional NGO called Paramedics for Peace. Beckwith and his fellow snipers were supposed to act like barefoot doctors, never mind the rifle cases. People saw right through their disguise, but if it meant free medical care, they were happy to play along.
So it was in the town they now entered. Margaritaville was built into a cliff side. The citizens crawled from their burrows and caves like insects. Two navy corpsmen set up a medical clinic, and Beckwith got enlisted to help stitch some cuts.
Coming in, they had dispensed drugs, pulled teeth, and fixed a tree’s worth of broken limbs. Cave life could be brutal. Walls collapsed, machinery ate fingers and arms, animals bit you, pockets of gas migrated, underground rivers flash-flooded, and miners got sloppy with their explosives.
It was all pretty standard until two miners carried in a man on a section of aluminum ladder.
The man was a mapmaker. His name was Graham. He looked tough as wire, more like an old-fashioned mountain man than a cartographer, whatever they were supposed to look like. Like Peter O’Toole at the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, thought Beckwith. Not like this, slashed and mauled.
After getting raked by the talons of some animal, Graham said, he had crawled through the darkness for three weeks, to safety. The old mapmaker couldn’t quit grinning. “Boys, I’m the luckiest man in the planet,” he said. “I made it. I’m going home.”
Beckwith and the corpsmen went to work on the slash wounds on Graham’s chest and abdomen. A crowd of onlookers formed around them. Graham never quit talking despite his wounds. He was a contract worker for one of the big multinational land companies. He had gone out with a long-range surveying team.<
br />
“Where’s the rest of your crew?” someone said.
“In the belly of the beast. The black beast.”
“You left them?”
“There was nothing much to leave, believe me.”
“Where are they, Graham?”
“I’m not telling you, boys. That’s my gift to you. Because if I tell you, you’ll go, and if you go, you’ll die, too.”
“They’re dead?”
“They are. We trespassed on the beast, and it got us.”
“What beast is that, old man?”
Graham’s eyes shone with a damning gleam. The man was mad. Beckwith opened a stitching packet.
“By beasts, you mean animals?” said a lanky man. “Was it dogs?”
Beckwith had been briefed on the wild dogs. Left behind by miners or settlers who could take no more of the Hole, the pets went wild, packed up, and were prone to attack the unwary traveler.
But the mapmaker’s wounds didn’t look to Beckwith like a dog attack so much as a knife fight. That disturbed him. Tales surfaced now and then of remote outposts running out of food, and parties lost in the tunnels. It was a documented fact that a group of Japanese lepidopterists, trapped by a cave-in, had resorted to murder and cannibalism.
“Not dogs,” said Graham. “There was just the one of him, and he was only part animal. The rest of him was man, or something like it.”
“What are you talking about, Graham?”
“An ogre or a demon, I don’t know what exactly. Something that’s been living down there a long time, hidden away in the bowels of the earth. Leave him buried, boys.”
“Where is this demon of yours living?”
“I’m not saying.”
“Why is that, Graham?”
“No trespassing. Even here, we don’t belong. That’s the lesson, boys, don’t go any deeper. Just pack it up and walk away. That’s my plan.”