“Well, this city is vast now, but it didn’t start out that way. Why wasn’t a wall or barrier erected around it before it spread to these dimensions?”
Ami hastened to answer for Gale, maybe in the hopes of preventing his reddening head from exploding. “Remember, at first they didn’t recognize this as Paxton, so they had no idea to what extent it was going to continue growing. The efforts in the beginning were focused on reprogramming the smart matter, trying to isolate the virus responsible, things of that nature. Shutting the process down remotely instead of containing it physically.”
“Exactly,” said Cali, in defense of his team.
“Thanks for bringing your friend, Rick,” Gale seethed.
“I think his questions are perfectly valid, Dom.”
David Bright moved up alongside Stake and whispered, “I told you, remember? I’m convinced now they don’t want to stop this thing from reaching full size! It’s their baby and they’re growing it to adulthood at my expense, all innocent while I shoulder the blame.”
“I still think that idea is a bit extreme.”
“Do you? Did you think the Blue War was extreme? Or should we call it the Sinon Gas War? These bastards want to build here, colonize, make the Jin Haa nation part of the Earth Colonies and suck the Ha Jiin in along with them.”
“By making both nations hate them?”
“By making them feel powerless, by crushing them under their treads. Except for isolated terrorist acts by extremists, and no matter how much all of this scares and upsets these people, look how resigned they are about it already! They should all of them be uniting against us...all of them! Instead, they’re broken and beaten by this one big monster – no need for an invading army! The Earth Colonies will grow like this city is growing, grow into a whole new dimension. This isn’t a city; it’s a living and spreading disease. And they’re just the same thing themselves.”
Stake thought that Bright had reached the limits of reason, desperate with frustration. Or maybe he just didn’t like contemplating the businessman’s theories.
“Down here,” Cali said, pointing toward an open doorway gaping blackly in the subway station’s wall. The pair of armored special ops soldiers ducked through it first, their postures crouched and assault engines leveled for action.
Another flight of steps downward. The group descended, arrived at a landing, tramped down a second flight of stairs. Then a second landing, and a third flight. Treading carefully in the bobbing light from the rear soldiers’ torches, Stake asked Cali, “Where is this headed? The lower level subway tunnels?”
“No – like I said, the bedrock around here won’t let Bluetown work its way down far enough to complete that. This is a system of utility tunnels. I’ve been down here already with the CF team assigned to protect us. They cut the doors open for us along the way to give us access. Get ready, now – it gets wet from here.”
The last steps were lost in black water that slurped around the legs of the first men to reach the bottom. Watching them wade ahead of him, their lights glaring off the rolling surface, Stake saw that they were immersed to their upper thighs. Ami ventured in timidly ahead of him, holding up those behind her. “Ohh,” she fretted, “if it goes up to my pee-pee I’m going to die.” Due to her petite size, the water did indeed rise to her groin, causing her to moan in despair. Sloshing ahead, she almost lost her balance and toppled in. Stake thrashed after her fast and caught her arm, proceeded beside her without letting go. If Gale looked back and didn’t like it, let him support her himself.
Ami cupped her free hand over her lower face and Stake did the same, but that didn’t keep their eyes from burning. No one had to ask if this were really water or another fluid instead; the acidic sting in their nostrils defined it as a trapped pocket of the runoff generated by the smart matter’s growth process.
They advanced through an arched utility tunnel, which opened into off-branching passageways along its length. They turned into one of these branches at Cali’s instruction.
From behind her hand, close beside him, Ami asked Stake in a subdued voice, “How is your investigation coming along?”
“So-so. It would be easier if people were more helpful. So you’re interested in my results?”
“Of course I am!”
“Would you like to see Brian reunited with his loved ones?”
“Well, it’s not like he’s someone’s kidnapped child, Jeremy. These loved ones you refer to lost an adult person, with a personality and memories that can’t be reshaped. This child has the same appearance, and of course he’ll develop some of the same personality traits, but in the end he’s another person. So I don’t see finding his family as being the priority, here. I’m more interested in finding out how the smart matter could interact with his cells to regenerate him.”
“You don’t seem concerned about identifying him, then. But are you at least concerned about his welfare?”
“You know I am! I want to see him have a long and healthy life, wherever he ends up. Maybe Captain Henderson there and his wife can adopt him, seeing as how he named him, huh?”
“I saw how sweet you are with him.”
“We’re sweet with each other. He’s starting to talk. He calls me ‘Mee,’ because he can’t say Ami.”
“That’s why I find it hard to believe you’re so indifferent about finding his blood relations. I think that’s more your boyfriend talking.”
“Believe what you want. And I told you when I first met you about the efforts we’ve made to cross-check Brian’s DNA against all the Blue War combatants on file.”
“I’d like to see him again.”
“Why?”
“If I see him, something useful might occur to me.”
She pouted. “Well then you’d better behave, and I’ll think about it.”
Something moved unseen below the surface, brushing the outside of Stake’s knee. He might have dismissed it as his imagination, had Bright not cried out, “Fuck! What was that?” He spun around with a frightened splash. The KeeZee whipped in the same direction with his shotgun ready. In a flash of reflected torchlight, Stake spotted an albino animal that swished across the surface away from Bright before quickly submerging from view. A wide, segmented body about a foot long, outlined in a rippling fringe of many legs. Stake had only glimpsed it, but he knew these creatures from his four years on-and-off in the blue jungles. An amphibious trilobite-like arthropod with a fanged head that was not unlike the fleshless and eyeless skull of a ferret. Suddenly he was worried about the proximity of his own “pee-pee” to the inky pool.
“Keep moving, keep moving,” Gale commanded.
Several more of the animals broke the surface around them and nudged their legs, but no one was bitten. Stake was afraid one of the soldiers or Bright’s man might be spooked and fire into the liquid, blasting the kneecaps off one of their neighbors. Ahead, though, he could see a new flight of steps rising from the obsidian pool, and was grateful for it.
There was a doorway to the right of their exit, and as Stake came up on it the light from the soldiers in the rear of their party washed the inside of yet another tributary of this utility network. Stake glanced into the offshoot, and froze like a wary animal. At the end of the narrow corridor, where it formed a T with a crosswise tunnel, Stake saw a thin figure standing on crooked hind legs. It was emaciated, a corpse-like blue in the stark flood of light, its ribs picked out in black stripes of shadow. A dog-like muzzle had been tearing threads of meat from the broken back of one of those trilobite creatures, which the figure held in its forepaws. It had obviously heard their approach and frozen, too, waiting for them to pass. But its eyes met Stake’s, and flashed back at him redly just like the eyes of Sinanese humans.
Before Stake could warn the others, the dog-like animal dropped to all fours and plunged off into the crosswise tunnel with barely a sound, carrying its prize in its jaws. The soldiers’ lights had already slipped out of the tunnel, but the animal had a natural faint
bioluminescence and Stake saw it as a ghost before it was gone.
“Oh my God,” Ami said. She’d seen the thing, too.
“What’s wrong, ma’am?” asked one of the soldiers behind her.
“I saw a snipe.”
“Me, too,” Stake said.
For decades now, there had been packs of snipes in Punktown, though no one had known where they came from originally or how they got there, only that they were not an indigenous life form. Finally, during the Blue War it had been learned that Sinan was their world of origin, though how they had ended up on Oasis before Earth colonists had first teleported to Sinan remained a mystery. Stake thought of the rift he had seen in a corner of Wonky Science, in Punktown, and recalled speculation that the weird canine snipes knew ways of navigating such rifts, perhaps even opening them.
“There’s never just one snipe,” Colonel Gale said, looking back at them. “Come on; let’s get where we need to be, fast.”
SIXTEEN: TROJAN HORSE
Up three flights of steps, through a door that had been cut open during Cali’s earlier expedition, and the party entered a building that in its original form Stake figured was a power station, though the duplicate’s gutted appearance made it hard for him to tell. They worked their way through the building, out its front door, and found themselves standing on a street in Subtown. As he took it in, Stake felt it was even eerier than Bluetown above them. At least Bluetown had an open sky. With its solid ceiling and the blackness that only their torches illuminated in jerky sweeps and flashes, it was like a city that had been swallowed under the earth in some ancient cataclysm.
As Cali had noted, the subterranean sector dubbed Subtown was not as far-reaching as Punktown proper, above it, but still encompassed a large area. Its duplicate presented the same smallish, flat-roofed tenement buildings, interspersed with manufacturing plants and office blocks built on a modest scale so as to be contained by the ceiling. The ceiling, though, was missing the complex system of pipes and conduits that the original was thick with, and of course the lamps that lent a semblance of sunlight during the day but subdued themselves at night.
They walked onward, grateful for the dry ground beneath their feet. “Two-hundred munits for these shoes,” David Bright grumbled. Stake was too busy resenting the squish of his socks in his own shoes to sympathize with him.
“We didn’t know this was going on right below our trailers,” Cali was saying. His eye tendrils swam avidly, seeing into the darkness almost as well as the helmets of the two special operatives. “Not until we saw the steam of new growth sneaking up here and there. So we scanned below us, and that’s when we saw how the earth was being tunneled out down there.”
“How did the Jin Haa find out?” Bright asked.
“That’s what I want you to see,” Cali said.
Stake’s wrist comp was receiving a call, and he lifted his arm to peer at the tiny glowing screen. There, he saw the face of Thi Gonh. He did not interface his mind with the device, but he could still tell that her bruises had lessened even more since the last time he had seen her.
“Thi.”
“I want see you, Ga Noh.”
“I’m kind of busy. And I thought the last time was the last time, now that you’ve let your husband out of jail and all.”
“I want see you,” she said again, simply.
“I’m in Bluetown at the moment.”
“I meet you there.”
“You can’t. I’m in the middle of something. I can’t call you back to let you know when I’m finished, in case your charming spouse sees you talking to me, so you’ll just have to try me again in a couple of hours.”
“Okay. I call again, in couple hours.”
She looked so serious. Still upset at him from their argument? In any case, it made him serious, too, when he signed off, “All right, then. Talk to you later.”
Ami had peeked over his shoulder, eavesdropping. “Pretty,” she said, though she didn’t seem to make the connection between the face on the screen and the face Stake had imitated that time in his quarters while she’d been showering. “Old girlfriend?”
“Old enemy,” he mumbled.
They turned off one street into another. At its corner, a building had been half crushed by a partial collapse of the ceiling. Stake was grateful for the support columns spaced throughout the streets, as unequal as they might be to their originals. Ahead, though, there had been an even more dramatic caving in of the ceiling, blocking off the street, but Cali kept leading them toward the wreckage. Stake understood why. A bluish haze hung in the air, churning slowly in their invading lights, and its scent was subtle but familiar. It was the gas produced by the decomposition of the Sinanese dead. The gas the Earth Colonies had named sinon.
Cali stopped to plant one foot on a block of masonry. It was not blue, but actual stone. Others in considerable numbers were mixed into a small mountain range of rubble and hard-packed reddish earth. Stake noticed something else: smears of a pasty yellow solution here and there on the heaped stone blocks and the shattered blue smart matter. Cali bent and dipped his finger in it, twisted around to hold it high for the others to see. Before he could explain it, Henderson spoke up.
“It’s the stuff the Sinanese paint on their dead, to preserve them.”
“There was a tomb up there.” Cali pointed above their heads, and the beacons of the soldiers lifted to a yawning black hole in the ceiling, where it had given away. The thin mist of sinon gas emanated from up there. It was like staring into a void to another plane of existence – or some bleak afterlife. “Sandwiched somewhere between the basements of the buildings above, and the roof of the Subtown level. Pretty close to the roof, I’d say. Sometimes the burial tombs are fortified with stone, and sometimes they’re just tunneled in the earth. This one was lined in stone, which made it heavier, and probably caused it to drop through the ceiling.”
“The central tombs are supported with stone,” said Stake.” Or the more important ones.” He knew this well. He’d been down in many of them. Killed soldiers who had taken to using the tunnels as shelter. The tunnels were like those of an ant colony, with different levels, sometimes close to the surface and sometimes quite deep. A channel so narrow it was impossible to stand in might run for a mile before it linked up to another section where the dead were stored in their niches in the walls. Sometimes the labyrinths seemed endless, and if a soldier lost or damaged his wrist scanner and contact was broken with those who might track his position, he could easily lose his way within them. Could join the population of the dead.
“The bodies dropped down, too.” Ami noted, regarding a smudge of the bright yellow mineral. “But I don’t see any of them now.”
“Come on,” said Cali. He broke off toward a building not too distant.
Before Stake followed, he looked around the base of the moraine, saw how smaller heaps of dirt had been dragged off to the sides. Stones had been piled in small cairns. He said to Ami, “Someone’s been digging through this.”
A rustling sound behind them caused Stake and several of the soldiers to turn around. The lights reached across the street, dimly picking out several shaggy forms lingering in the mouth of an alley. Had they been closer, the road kill stench of the carrion trees’ fruit might have given them away earlier. Seeing the nomadic plants lurking there made Stake wonder if these were the very same trees he had seen wandering into the city before, having arduously worked their way down into the lower levels. Like scavengers, they had been drawn to the taint of the dead. But why were they hanging back now? Was it their party the plants were timid about, or something else?
“Jesus,” Ami whispered, as if afraid to startle the trees into advancing on them. “Do you think they’ve been pulling the bodies out of the rubble?”
“No,” Stake said. He nudged Ami to continue following the others toward the building Cali had indicated. “It was something more sentient.”
The tenement building had once had energy fields for window
s, but the front door had been cut open to allow freer access. When the last of the crew had caught up, Cali said, “We found it this way. It wasn’t the CF guys who burned through this.”
“Wait,” Gale told him. He motioned for the two special operatives to look the place up and down. Stake knew their helmets permitted them to see right through the building’s walls. The ops reported that there was no one hidden inside. As soon as the reconnaissance party entered, though, they saw that the building was not really uninhabited after all.
Corpses in all states of preservation were lined up in rows on the floor with their heads touching the walls. The soldiers’ sweeping lights made the shadows of their gnarled limbs move across the blue walls like the grasping arms of phantoms. Light moved in and out of skull sockets, flashed across teeth laid bare in grimaces and silent shrieks. Some of the yellow-slathered mummies were fairly well preserved, while the oldest were little more than skeletons held together by the crusted mineral solution.
The collapse of the tomb had inflicted more damage than time had, in many cases. A skull crushed here, a rib cage laid open there. Limbs horribly twisted, or torn away altogether. The next room held an even more dramatic display of the indignities suffered by the dead. It was a collection of limbs, torsos, heads, like the parts of an army of Halloween mannequins waiting to be assembled. And a third room of the tenement held another category of cadavers.
Looking down at these remains, one might have thought all of them had had their faces destroyed in the tomb’s collapse into the street below. But Stake knew better, especially because this collection of bodies was dressed in blue silk robes that had fared better over the years than their flesh had. Little three-cornered hats were affixed to their scalps with pins.
“Clerics,” Ami said, observing the yawning pits where these men’s faces should have been, but which in life had been purposely consumed by a cancer brought about by the incense they smoked.
Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 19