They crossed through a coastal village of two or three hundred homes. Cemeteries overlooked the water, the exposed dirt dark red in the moonlight. After another mile the houses stopped and the road ran right beside the ocean. The dog continued to shadow them from thirty feet behind.
A high-pitched hum pierced the night. Tristan hunched down and looked to the skies, hunting for a glimpse of engines. The noise mounted. At once it burst over them, deafeningly high-pitched, lowering swiftly as it dopplered away. The light of its engine was well hidden, but she spotted the black triangle of the jet against the night sky. It zoomed out to sea and began to bank back around.
Tristan's mind slammed into several questions at once—was it on patrol? Had it seen them? How?—then produced the answer, as if she'd swept the pieces of a broken teacup into a pile and reassembled it with a tap of a wand. She tore open her pack, grabbed a sealed baggie of dried fish, and tore it open, scattering the meat across the grass by the shoulder. She left a little in the bag so it had enough weight for her to throw it at the dog. As soon as it lowered its head to sniff, she grabbed Alden by the strap of his pack and pulled him off the road toward the beach.
The jet completed its circle and hummed back toward land, far slower than on its initial approach. Behind them, the dog glanced up, then resumed licking the fish from the asphalt. Tristan sprinted across patchy, sandy grass, eyes darting for any signs of buildings where they might take cover. The nearest was at least a tenth of a mile up the coast. There was a trail through the rocks fronting the beach and she followed it toward the building, running with everything she had.
Faint shadows leapt ahead of her. Behind, a swath of light slashed from the jet, illuminating the dog. It trotted away, glancing behind it. The beam moved past the dog, sweeping both sides of the road, then reversed course and made steady progress east toward them, the jet bumbling along at no more than forty miles per hour.
Even so, it would catch them long before they reached the buildings.
A hundred yards ahead, a dim shape sat in the sand above the tide. Tristan's side hurt but she picked up speed. The searchlight neared, swinging back and forth from the edge of the waves to the grass on the other side of the road.
Tristan skidded to a halt in front of a beached aluminum rowboat, sand flying from her shoes. "Help me tip it."
Alden gave her a crazed look but grabbed the side and lifted. Rainwater had collected in the bottom and it was twice as heavy as it ought to be. Tristan got her shoulder under the side and fought to straighten her legs. Water tipped from the edge. Tristan slid her hands to the middle of the upturned boat and shoved. It teetered on its side, hanging there, then Alden ran forward, pushing it past its balance point. He staggered away. The boat flipped with a hollow thunk. Tristan lifted its edge and Alden rolled beneath it. He propped it up with his back and she got in beside him.
Their breath echoed tightly against the metal walls. Tristan laid her cheek against the sand. The searchlight was just two hundred feet down the road and glaring closer by the second. She pulled away from the edge and shut her eyes. The ship droned past.
Alden put his eye to the crack between the boat and the ground. "It's coming back around."
"Hold tight and we'll be fine."
She put her eye to her side of the boat, trying to see where the dog had gone, but she couldn't see past the grass on the fringe of the road. The jet's engines rose. A false sunrise glowed from the field. The searchlight brightened and moved past. The jet made a third sweep, then the skirl of its engines faded, leaving them with the wash of the tide and the sound of their breath.
Tristan waited another twenty minutes before lifting the side of the rowboat and wriggling out into the fresh air. There was no sign of the plane or the dog. She beckoned Alden outside and knocked the sand from her elbows and legs.
"That wasn't a coincidence," she said. "They caught it, injected it. Put a chip in its collar. It must have a video feed, software to recognize humans—something like that."
"How could they train it to come after us?"
"I don't think you have to train a yellow lab to love people." She took a long drink of water. "How fucked up is it when you can't even trust a dog?"
"Good way to find people who don't want to be found." Alden shuddered. "I don't get how they can be so dumb about some things and so smart about others."
"They probably feel the same way about us." She hiked up her pack. "Ready to go?"
He nodded. She continued east, walking beside the shoulder in case they needed to reach cover. It was strange to walk on as if nothing had happened. The brain's greatest miracle was its ability to move on. She supposed anyone who hadn't been capable of that had been weeded from the gene pool long, long ago.
The highway turned away from the coast and began to climb into the foothills. Houses sat beside the road, loosely spaced. Trees filled the folds in the land but most of the ground remained open. The road made a sudden hairpin around a deep draw that led down to the sea. Within half a mile, the woods thickened to engulf the road. The houses grew sparser. The moisture in the air became so heavy Tristan imagined she could fill a cup simply by waving it around.
The road turned, following the side of another rift in the land. At the bend, the short stone bridge that had once crossed the gap lay in ruins. A post stood beside it, topped by a skull. The hand-painted wooden sign nailed to the post bore two words: "STAY OUT."
II:
ADRIFT
12
The map of the islands blazed from the console. Ness shook his head. "How in the world would I know?"
Sebastian twirled his pincers. "But which?"
"Tell him to throw a dart."
"Throwadart Island is which?"
"Try Manila," he signed, spelling it out, as they had no word for it. "Or how about we float around until something shows on radar?"
"Not elegant," Sebastian said. "But when are you?"
His tone was harder to read than a message forum, so Ness decided to chalk it up as a non-judgmental assessment of facts. The sub swung about and whirred up to speed. Ness headed to the upper level to let Sprite know they were underway, that they'd be at the Philippines within twelve hours, and that no one had any idea how long it would take to find their ultimate destination.
"Sounds like I can finally get some sleep," Sprite said, and left to do just that.
Fine by Ness. He was in dire need of some time alone to decompress. He dug out his laptop, which Sebastian had patched into the ship's power supply, and fooled around with the Civ 2-style game he'd been plinking away at in the last two-three years since he'd brushed up his coding skills. The project had begun life when he couldn't find a functional computer with a copy of the game installed, but it soon became clear to him how much he had to learn about writing software. He had little doubt it would take far less time to scavenge a real copy of the game than to rebuild an approximation from scratch.
But they were on the move so much he didn't have a lot of time to go poking around old homes and Best Buys that wouldn't be likely to carry a twenty-year-old game anyway. On top of that, Civ 2, while being nearly perfect, wasn't quite. He wanted to go more in-depth with the cities, allow them each to develop their own unique flavor. Make the units more customizable. Over the years, he'd produced a few playable versions, but kept going back to add more depth, more detail. The project sprawled and sprawled. He enjoyed the work, though, the act of seeing his virtual world come together brick by brick. Whenever he completed a new segment and booted it up for a test spin, he got a special deep-down joy from seeing it play out exactly as he'd envisioned—and liked it even more when something unexpected emerged from his carefully drawn rules.
He had been at it a good hour and a half when someone skittered up behind him. He turned, expecting Sebastian, but saw Number Three instead.
"COME," it gestured, the motion broad and slow.
"What's up?"
"COME"
He sighed, aware the
alien wouldn't hear it, and followed Three to the wasp nest of the Collective. The others watched unblinking from their nooks in the round walls.
"NESS," Three said. "PRAISE"
He shifted his feet. "Thanks for alerting us to the boat?"
"NO PRAISE NESS"
"I appreciate that you are willing to travel to the Philippines," he signed, glad, for once, that tone was so hard to discern from gestures. Were they really asking him to thank them for doing the job they'd assigned to themselves—monitoring and quashing unacceptable Swimmer activities?
"NO," Three twirled its pincers in frustration. "PRAISE YOU"
"Me? What'd I do?"
"FOLLOW WAY"
"Don't we all?"
Three sent its pincers through another loop, then turned to the others in the walls and gestured back and forth. To Ness, it signed, "AT FIRST WE DOUBT. SEBASTIAN INSIST: NESS' FEET FIND PATH. WE INDULGE BECAUSE SEBASTIAN GUTBROTHER"
"Yeah, he's pretty cool, all right."
"HE JUDGES RIGHT. YOU FIND WAY. YOU HONOR US"
For a moment, he was motionless, at a loss for words. "Thank you."
"THANK YOU," Three replied, and then the rest of the Collective did as well.
Ness returned upstairs with an odd mix of confusion and gratitude. As Three had said, the Collective had left his schooling—really, his entire presence—up to Sebastian. He hadn't been aware they cared one way or another as to what he did, so long as it didn't involve blowing holes in the side of the sub. He was well aware the Collective's ongoing mission wasn't about saving innocent humans. It was about stopping their former gutbrothers the Swimmers from doing even more dumb shit in service of their warped interpretation of the Way.
Then again, Ness possessed the exact same set of motivations. So maybe that was why he came away from the brief "talk" feeling as honored as they claimed to feel by him.
He slept, ate, fiddled with his game, thought of ways besides sensors and radar they might track down the Swimmers operating out of the islands. Nothing that brilliant came to mind. Before he knew it, Sebastian popped his head into Ness' room to announce they had arrived, in the sense that they had reached the northern edge of the massive archipelago the alien traders appeared to be operating out of. It was mid-afternoon and the Collective refused to surface, but they had extended a camera above the surface and Ness headed down to the control room for a look.
On the video display, mounds of green rose from the blue. But the islands weren't just green, they were green, like green apple Jolly Ranchers or God's first attempt at grass before deciding he'd gone too gaudy. Emeralds on a sapphire sea, if Ness wanted to sound like a total jerk. The water surrounding the palm-stuffed isles wasn't your normal blue, either. In the shallows, it became an electric light blue-green beyond his ability to describe. The damn place was so gorgeous it was pornographic.
According to the displays, they were currently heading past a handful of small islands on their way to the big, stretched-out northern one that appeared to be the biggest of the chain.
"What say we stake this out right here?" Ness gestured, pointing to a spot on the ocean southwest from the tip of the big island.
Sebastian stared at him. "What is stake out?"
"Lie in wait. At that spot, any air traffic to or from China will practically have to pass right over our heads."
"Better than to search for the minnow in the school."
"Huh?"
"The one of seven thousand."
"That's my thinking," Ness said. "Unless we want to try to translate the writing on the crate and see if it says where it's manufactured. But that's going to involve trampling around in public. And no guarantee they're operating from the same town the crates are from."
"Yes yes, long-talker. We stake out."
They separated to pass this along to the other member(s) of their respective species. As minutes became hours and day became night, Ness decided to suggest that, come morning, he and Sprite be dropped off near a city to try to find a Spanish-English or Spanish-Chinese dictionary.
He didn't get the chance. Right as he was about to roll into his bunk for the night, Sebastian burst into his room, sending his heart leaping.
"We saw the blip," Sebastian said. "But now there is no more blip."
"Flying low again? You know where it went?"
"Yes but changing course. Go up. Go up and use your hears."
Ness ran up the ramp and into the night. The air was as warm as a blanket. Stars shined behind patchy clouds. The jet's engine whined from the darkness.
"South," he signed down to Sebastian. "By southwest."
As soon as Sebastian relayed this to Five, the sub hove to and cranked its engines to the max. The jet's pitch was low, but despite its modest speed, they lost ground on it fast. Ness let Sebastian know as soon as he could no longer hear it. The sub eased back, continuing another five miles before coming to a stop. The waves slapped its sides. Not fifteen minutes later, he heard engines mounting in the distance.
"South-southwest again," he told Sebastian. "Wherever it's operating from, it's got to be close."
The sub lurched toward the heightening drone. Ness spied the jet, a black smudge against the sky. It zipped overhead and faded away. The sub soon stopped again, waiting. Hours later, the sky behind the island to their east turned pink. Ness headed inside to grab some sleep.
When he got up, the floor was vibrating. They were in motion. He found Sprite and Sebastian in the galley seated around a counter. The alien stared at one of its smaller pincers, which delicately held a sheaf of playing cards.
"What are you doing?" Ness said out loud.
"Playing hearts," Sprite said. "I tried to teach him to gamble, but Hold 'Em was way too hard to explain. Anyway, I didn't feel like playing for seaweed."
"Where are we going?" he signed to Sebastian. "I thought we were on stake out."
"Stake out is a waste out," the creature replied, scowling at its hand. "We marked old spot. Will search by day and wait by night."
Ness had to admit that made sense. He watched them play for a minute, then, deciding it was too early in his day to absorb such a sight, headed down to the control room. As always, Five monitored the screens and pads, motionless except the occasional flick of a tentacle or sense-pod in response to a change in the readouts. The aliens did need sleep and Ness wondered if Five was so obsessive about its work that it snoozed in the orange cup of his chair, waking whenever the pads pulsed an electric signal. The only alternative was that Ness was worse at telling them apart than he thought.
According to the monitors, they were cruising past a sizable bay bitten out of the western flank of the main northern island. Coral reefs surrounded the shores, their waters pale blue. A small island popped from the shallow sea a mile from the big island, the coast of which was spangled with houses and less densely vegetated than most of what he'd seen so far: former farms in the process of being swallowed back up by the jungle.
The coastline turned due south and the sub paralleled it from half a mile out. Ness wished the ship had a glass bottom. Had to be some amazing stuff passing below them, seahorses and turtles and crazy shit like those crabs that carried anemones around as marine stun guns.
The sub hooked around a peninsula into a much smaller bay than the one they'd passed earlier. Islets peppered the waters, some hardly big enough to stand on. They cruised along one of the larger islands, a low shield matted with jungle.
"Hang on." Ness tapped the screen. "See that?"
Five waved a tentacle. "WHAT SEE"
"Beats me. But I'll tell you what it's not: green."
Five eyed the screen, then made a series of smooth, intricate gestures. The sub slowed, turning to face the island head on. As they neared, the orange blob Ness had spotted clarified: the tip of one of the conical alien towers, all but hidden within the canopy of the jungle.
Five did some waggling. Sebastian rattled into the room a minute later, limbs waving in excitement. A new image
appeared on one of the screens, an abstract field of green enveloped by blue and sporting an arrangement of three orange dots. Five had sent out a single-use miniature scout drone, which they'd been trying to hold in reserve, but given the circumstances, Ness couldn't blame Five for expending one.
Sebastian leaned closer to the display, then whirled on Ness. "Fool!"
Ness' jaw dropped in affront. "What'd I do?"
"Not you. You are non-fool. It is they that are the fool. You see?" He jabbed his tentacle at one of the orange circles, then at the two others set in an orderly triangle. "You see? You see?"
"The towers? What about them?"
"Not towers. Arrangement of the towers. When you are to grow a building, you are to coax it, or to force it. Coaxing is the Way but it takes much longer. So they have forced it. When you force, it is to a standard. A..." He cast about for the sign. "Model."
"Meaning?"
Sebastian clicked his claws in high amusement. "They have not allowed the dirt to do as the dirt will. Now, their choice has betrayed them."
"Those bastards," Ness signed back. "Should we go pull down their pants?"
"You joke at our advantage. You see? They have used a standard. I know the standards."
He drew back, comprehending. "So you'll know your way around."
Sebastian nodded exaggeratedly. "I will know."
"What's the plan, then? Sneak up on one in bed, snatch it up, and interrogate it?"
"Swimmers will know we are not brothers and they will lie. Thus we will not ask them. We will ask their computers."
"You are one smart sea monster," Ness said. "Can you get inside?"
"This depends on the depth of their fool."
He considered pausing for a brief grammar lesson, but it wasn't the time. "How so?"
"Much as exist standards for buildings and the arrangement of buildings, there exist standards for doors. If they use a standard standard, I can open it."
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