Suddenly, the picture on the wall started vibrating. Then it was still again. Had it responded to the notes? She kept silent for a moment, until the entire rock wall seemed to shift.
She ran back to where the others were gathered. “Did you feel that?” she asked.
“Yes!”
“We felt it!”
“Did you do that?”
“No,” Balewa said. “I didn’t.”
“Where is it coming from?”
“Quiet!”
The rumbling started again, the tea sloshing over the rims of the silver teacups. Durel had the presence of mind to throw sand on the coals. They felt a stronger shake now. The walls of the chamber seemed to shift and chips of rock began falling from the ceiling. The very ground beneath their feet was swaying. Abir tripped and fell on her side. One of the other women banged her head on a wall painfully.
“They’ve found us!” Durel hissed. “I told you that they would find us!”
“Use your voices to protect yourselves!” Balewa shouted. “Nothing can get through the Songstones.”
But the violent shaking of the chamber made it too difficult for them to concentrate, and Durel had never found much success with the stones anyway. Two of the women tried to sing and became frightened by the quaking ground. Balewa focused her mind as the walls were bending around her.
The sounds are right here in our throats, she thought. The music will keep us safe. Can’t they understand that?
A chunk of stone cracked from the ceiling right over Durel, who threw her arms above her head to protect herself.
“Watch out!” Abir shouted.
Balewa shifted her voice outward to move the aura around Durel. The rock slid harmlessly off the aura onto the ground beside them. After another violent shake, the rumbling subsided.
“I don’t think anyone is coming inside,” Abir observed.
“Then what is happening?”
“I don’t know. We should go outside to see.”
“That’s exactly what they would want us to do. Expose ourselves.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’m going to look,” Balewa announced. “I don’t want to wait for them to find us first. This is our home now, and they have no right to enter it without our permission.”
She emerged cautiously into the night with her Songstone held aloft to fight off any intruders. But she didn’t see anyone nearby. Above her, the stars traced a band of light along the Milky Way, and the air felt cooler than within the cave. She traced a long stream of smoke across the sky to a distant flame. They weren’t digging here at all, as Durel had feared. They had sent some kind of airplane framed with spearpoints into the dome of the sky, a new destructive force that had belched fire and smoke.
These people are much more powerful than we believed, Balewa thought. They would be able to do more than dig into our home if they ever found us. They could destroy us completely.
Soon the giant vessel shrank to a small circle of light in the night.
Balewa realized she would have to prepare the women much better to protect them against such forces. If the Jarumi arrived with that much strength, there wouldn’t be a moment to spare. Every note, every rhythm, every melody, would have to blend perfectly together in a harmonious defense. They needed much more practice. A rigorous training regimen. We’ve been too casual about our use of the Songstones, she thought, wasting our time bickering among ourselves every night and longing for our children. It’s time for us to sing without fear, to truly share our voices. She descended back into the chamber to tell them what she’d discovered.
CHAPTER 21
The Masquerade fired its ram’s-horn thrusters after its second orbit around Earth, sending the craft flaming through the atmosphere. On its descent the ship began a series of slow turns, using friction to lower its velocity for the landing. The blazing heat assaulted its underbelly, but the grooves in its crocodile-like bio-skin deflected the energy outward. The ship spread its hundred-meter-wide white egret wings to glide through the clouds toward the airstrip. As it neared the runway, the spacecraft ejected folds upon folds of parachutes adorned with brilliant green and white polymer beads like an enormous egungun dancer. The Masquerade touched down on the runway as the fire suppression trucks raced out to meet it. Both the Masquerade and the Indian rockets had returned to the base exactly as they had been designed and would now be refurbished and refueled for the crewed mission.
Amid the celebrations, Bracket observed the successful landing from the operations room, feeling triumphant but distracted. He dialed Wale through the Wodaabe identity that Ini had installed on his G-fone. In the image, his eyes widened and they were highlighted with eye shadow. His jaw stretched longer, with his teeth shining brilliant white as he spoke. It was as if he had become a more slender, effeminate version of himself, except that the identity also made his voice deeper.
“Why are you dressed like a woman?” Wale asked, frowning.
“I’m not a woman—it’s my secure identity.”
“You’re wearing makeup.” He avoided looking at the camera directly whenever Bracket spoke, as if he might be contaminated by his androgyny. “You told me on the plane that you’ve seen the Nok at two different locations,” Wale summarized. “Can you take me to where your worker disappeared?”
“Yes. But if the creature—”
“The Nok.”
“If the Nok are still there, we’ll need security. It’s not safe to go at night.”
“Clarence is all the security we need,” Wale insisted confidently.
“You’re right,” Bracket agreed. “But I doubt he’s ever seen anything like this. Let’s go at six. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“What about Dr. Chandresekhan?”
“She’s working a double shift right now.”
They picked Bracket up in the golf cart at Naijapool just after dawn. In the back of the cart, the scientist had brought a shovel, a broom, and his usual box of latex gloves. He was wearing a khaki-colored pith helmet like a British explorer. The open-air cart felt dangerously exposed to attack as they drove along in the soft morning light, people watching the motley trio curiously on their way to the mess hall for breakfast.
“Stop here,” Bracket said, when they drew near the tracking station. Together, they dismounted, and he pointed at the area where Abdul Haruna had disappeared.
“You believe that he was taken into the ground at this spot.”
“Yes. He left behind a lot of blood.”
“Curious,” Wale said, furrowing his brow. He poked at the ground with the butt of his cane.
Clarence scrutinized the area. “You didn’t see anyone take him, Mr. Bracket?”
“No one saw anything. He disappeared out of sight.”
“I can see several old tracks here, but the prints have been obscured by the sand.”
“Those could be from my crew,” Bracket guessed. “They helped me chase him down after he grabbed the artifact.”
Wale rubbed his chin. “Strange that you found the artifact out by the pool too. You would think that it would have been deposited closer to this area, if we’re in the right place. Is that the tracking station over there?”
“Yes.”
Wale hobbled over to the door to peer inside. “So this is it! Fifty years of space history right here in Kano! How appropriate that the Nok might have been sitting underneath it all along. Let’s have a look.”
He moved to open the door with his good hand, but Clarence stopped him.
“Get out of my way, Clarence! We’re talking about decades of history. This station once tracked John Glenn around the Earth. This was Africa’s chance to join the space age—wasted, of course.”
“Let me check it out first, boss.”
“There’s nothing in there,” Bracket objected. “I went inside when we found the first artifact.”
“People who aren’t trained in archaeology often overlook things of value,” Wale insisted.
“How long ago would you say that was?”
“A year ago at least.”
Dust had silted the countertops. The shelving and drawers had already been stripped clean, save for some old folding chairs and rusted file cabinets. Bracket could see from a dirty line that ringed the walls that there must have been a flood at some point. Indeed, in the corner of the room silt had piled up. Wale walked over to the Bendix machine.
“This is marvelous,” he said. “Kano was on the old minitrack network, which used Yagi antennae, not the parabolic dishes that are standard today.”
The machine had a label that read ANTENNA SUBSYSTEM MONITOR. There were red plastic indicator lights for the reflector, elevation, alidade, and pedestal. There were also a number of buttons for brakes, lubrication, and hydrostatic bearing. At the top of the panel was a button that said SYSTEM POWER. Wale pressed it before Bracket could stop him. The indicator lights powered on.
“Oh.” Wale took a step back.
The machine sputtered for a moment before powering off again.
“Still works after all this time?” Bracket said.
Wale switched it off again. “I didn’t expect that. A station like this would have had generators to keep it operational, either two hundred fifty or five hundred thousand watts. One would run the core electronics and the other would keep the station cool. I’m sure Bendix would have removed them when they pulled out. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless they didn’t have time for some reason.”
“Someone else would have taken them,” Bracket observed. “People don’t waste things like that around here.”
“The tanks may have been buried.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Every tracking station was different, depending on the local needs and environment. This land was filled with nomadic herders before NASA arrived, simple people. It could have been too much of a shock to have all of the equipment jutting everywhere.”
“Do you have any idea why they shut this station down?” Bracket asked.
“No one knows. The Zanzibar tracking station was taken offline after a coup d’état, but nothing like that ever happened here. There were rumors that the Kano tracking equipment showed some anomalies, strange data that didn’t make sense. I’ve never been able to confirm that. It’s been classified for fifty years.”
“I’ve had computers short-circuit on me,” Bracket said. “My colleagues have also been reporting inaccurate readings on their instruments.”
“Might be a connection,” Wale said neutrally.
Bracket didn’t know what he’d been expecting—a staircase, maybe? a hatch leading down into the abyss?—but they didn’t find any entrance. They couldn’t find any proof of the Nok. If the civilization was as ancient as Wale implied, there was no reason for them to remain undiscovered for so long. Still, he found it alarming that NASA had left quickly without warning or explanation. Had they discovered something too?
“How do you know all this, Wale?”
Wale frowned as if troubled by the question. “When I was a boy, I had hoped to work here one day. Every boy in Nigeria did.”
They found nothing else of value in the station and stepped outside again, where the sun was already blaring down on the dry ground. Wale set off behind the station and scampered up a small hillock, Clarence running along to keep up with him.
“These mounds,” Wale said. “Were they part of your construction site?”
“No, we’re far away from the dig,” Bracket said, making his way toward them.
“How about the antenna array?”
“No.”
“These could be earthworks. Look—they stretch for hundreds of meters. Go fetch the shovel, Clarence. Let’s conduct an exploratory excavation.”
Turning around, Bracket saw that Wale was right, the mounds went on for a long distance. But there was nothing particularly remarkable about them. They weren’t unusually large and did not have any special features, looking like embankments you might find near the side of any road. He felt an unpleasant dissonance in his blood, a dry pucker in his gums, as if some dark vortex coalesced at the very spot he was standing on.
The thought crept up on him slowly as Clarence returned carrying the shovel.
In the United States, Mexican drug smugglers had ferried in cocaine through tunnels until the Flare, when it became more profitable for Americans to use the same tunnels to escape to Mexico and then press on to Central America.
“What if it’s a tunnel built by the Jarumi? Abdul could have used one to escape.”
“The vegetation is quite thick here, Mr. Bracket,” Clarence observed, thinking through Bracket’s suggestion. “Plants don’t grow quickly in the Sahel—that means the Jarumi would have needed to build any tunnels before the spaceport was constructed. They don’t plan so strategically. They specialize in skirmishes and targeted strikes.”
“There’s no sense in speculating,” Wale said. “Let’s dig.”
The bodyguard stripped off his suit coat and began shoveling out piles from the mound, but he unearthed only dirt and stones. Bracket relaxed as he realized that the mounds weren’t hollow after all.
“Clarence is right,” Wale insisted. “You can forget your theory about the Jarumi. If these mounds are older, we most likely wouldn’t find anything inside. There could still be something below them—over the centuries the earth would have been pushed up. We’ll have to come back with the ground-penetrating radar machine.”
“Alright, let’s get going.”
Bracket called Seeta on the ride back to Naijapool, where she was at the rocket platform examining the stability of a concrete escarpment. “Kwesi, are you wearing eyeliner?”
“Digital Security wants me to use this identity,” he said, and sighed.
“Looks like a silly woman,” Wale huffed.
“You look very fetching,” Seeta replied, laughing. She aimed her camera at the ground. “See that? It’s a microfissure. I’ve found six of them now. We’ll have to seal them. I told Josephine that we were short by a hundred thousand liters of water, but she didn’t listen. Thankfully, I deflected most of the energy down the shoot. Burned the bloody hell out of the brush on the other side.”
“We didn’t find anything at the tracking station,” Bracket said.
“These things take patience,” Wale chimed in. “You can’t unearth an ancient civilization in a day. I need you to help me use the GPR, young lady, so we can be more methodical next time.”
“Time,” Seeta said, “I don’t have. My job right now is to keep the astronauts from being fried like a sausage.”
Wale looked disappointed.
“Then our best lead for now continues to be the meteorite,” Bracket concluded.
“Maybe we can gather more information once we understand its structure,” Wale admitted. “Can you initiate a deeper acoustic scan, Doctor?”
“I just told you I don’t have the time.”
“Let me carry it forward once you begin. You both can attend to your duties, and I’ll monitor the experiment.”
Seeta thought over the proposition. “All right, I’ll come down to the pool. Meet me there in a half hour.”
When Seeta arrived, they searched for a quiet area and ended up settling on the dive equipment room, which was empty. Inside they were surrounded by racks of dive fins, masks, and wetsuits on hangers that had a sour smell. On the other wall, hidden behind a locked grate, were air tanks and oxygen lines.
“I need you to keep your people out of here,” Seeta ordered. “I have to calibrate my instruments.”
They stepped outside as Seeta began setting up her equipment.
“Quite a feisty young woman,” Wale said casually.
“Please don’t say that to her face.”
“Of course not. She’s quite well educated.”
“What is it with you and your PhDs?”
“Education is a mark of achievement. Pedigree and upbringing are as important as your current status because a wise man looks at things differently from an imbecile.”
“How about an imbecile with a PhD?”
“There are sadly too many.”
There was a high-pitched whinnying sound that grated at Bracket’s ears. Then the glass from the door of the equipment room splintered, the shards exploding outward. He fell to the ground, and Wale tripped over backward, his cane rattling on the concrete.
Bracket kicked the door open and found Seeta slumped over the artifact on the floor. “Seeta! Are you all right?”
“Ugh.”
He gently tried to raise her head. “Let me look at you.”
She slowly, painfully, allowed herself to be stretched out. He searched her torso for any kind of injury and then checked out her limbs. She hadn’t been harmed except for a nick on the back of her hand, which she must have picked up from the blast.
“Talk to me. Let me know you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” she said.
Now Bracket became aware of the sound of air hissing around him. One of the air lines had ruptured. He quickly twisted the valve shut, grateful that nothing worse had happened.
Wale poked his head in, saw that she was okay, and huffed: “The artifact?”
“Now is not the time, Wale.”
“Well, what happened to it?”
“It broke! Okay, it broke!” Seeta snapped.
“Christ,” Bracket said. Although he knew it could have been a lot worse—there were more than a dozen oxygen tanks in the room.
“And where were you, Clarence? I pay you to look after me, not to flee at any sign of danger.”
“I was pushed back by the explosion.”
“That was some distance.”
Seeta leaned against the wall of the hyperbaric chamber. “The tones, Kwesi. What I heard in there.”
“What tones?”
“I calibrated the instrument across several frequencies. The pottery was responding somehow, as if it was listening. I felt subtle vibrations as I played back the same tones. The rock inside was growing warm…the next thing I know the pottery exploded. It responded to sound in a way I’ve never encountered before. I wasn’t playing a strong amplitude, certainly not strong enough to break it.”
After the Flare Page 19