Nevertheless, those were magic words, even to Dale. He wouldn’t mind having control over this vessel at all. He had just about concluded that for the rest of his life he was going to have to give up the dream that he would ever have a clear idea what he was doing, or why. It was as if he had left motivation or reason behind on Earth.
And he no longer had his Hulk medallion for protection.
Some time later, Dash stopped and began clawing at what looked to Dale like another pile of rubble. “What now?” Valya said. She had been so silent during the hike that Dale had thought to stop and search for her...she had always been following, but slowly and painfully.
“I think it’s another habitat,” Zack said.
With five creatures and eleven hands (Dale saw that Dash was still protecting its number three arm and hand), this cave mouth was cleared quickly.
They were able to pass through without difficulty, though Dale noticed that the air was stale, burned, almost dead. He had to take several breaths to assure himself that he was still taking in oxygen.
Dash seemed to be laboring.
“Well, good news,” Makali said. “We won’t have to paddle across this one.”
She was correct. This habitat was a giant void...a huge space lit only by scattered, yellowed glowworms that showed a barren, lifeless, blasted landscape.
RACHEL
Run.
Rachel Stewart’s entire existence, her fourteen years of life, all her dreams, hopes, fantasies, accomplishments, disappointments, everything she owned, all that she had heard and seen, all reduced to one concept.
Run!
She was fast. Rather, playing soccer, with rest and food, she was faster than most girls her age. Was she faster than this Long Legs?
Or, as one of her father’s oft-repeated jokes suggested, was she faster than one of the other potential victims? Faster than Cowboy?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t do anything about it, anyway—
But run!
Yvonne was the closest thing to a local guide. She had led them downstairs and out of the Museum of Lost Aliens and across “town,” toward the far side of the habitat. Rachel had wondered why she was going so fast. Even Cowboy seemed unwilling to keep up with Yvonne. The dog kept stopping every few meters and sitting down.
“What was that thing?” Pav had said, walking as quickly as he could while still looking over his shoulder. Rachel wanted to grab him and scream, Run!
“‘Long Legs,’” Yvonne had said. “But the name...whenever I think it, it makes me feel scared and sick.”
“We already suspected it might not be friendly,” Zhao had said.
“What would it want with us?” Pav said. “I didn’t think aliens ate humans.”
“No,” Yvonne said, “but it might want something we carry or have. Water. Energy. Matter.”
“Well, it’s dead, isn’t it?” Rachel had said. “Can’t we slow down?”
Yvonne looked at her with pity. “Oh, girl, that thing isn’t dead. It’s probably put itself back together already.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Zhao said. “It just fell off a three-story building!”
“It’s...it’s partly machine. It can...reassemble itself.”
“So you’re not taking us someplace safe,” Rachel had said. “You’re just—”
“—Getting you the hell away from the Long Legs.”
At that moment, they heard an anguished howl from Cowboy. “What is it?” Pav had said.
Looking around, Rachel could see no obvious threat...but, surrounded as they were by buildings, she couldn’t actually see very far.
“Up,” Zhao said, pointing.
The Long Legs—its upper torso still incompletely assembled—had apparently just leaped to the top of a building not fifty meters behind them.
“Run!” Yvonne said.
They entered a panting, side-aching world of twists, sudden veers down what appeared to be dead-end alleys that turned out to have narrow passages, sprints across open plazas, and near-dunkings in pools of colored goo.
It took only minutes before Zhao said, “We can’t keep running like this. We have to kill that thing.”
“With our bare hands?” Pav said.
“No,” Zhao said. “We need a weapon. A gun.”
Rachel didn’t believe a gun would be useful against the Long Legs.
“No!” Yvonne said. She stopped; they all did, even the dog. Yvonne looked frantic, confused. “I meant, no, we don’t use bare hands or guns. That thing is...it’s an electrical field that holds it together, puts it back together. Overload it and we kill it.” Yvonne closed her eyes, like a contestant on a game show trying, trying to remember some simple fact. “There are...God, the word...duplicators?”
“Plates?” Rachel said.
“Yes! That duplicating process requires huge amounts of power, so the plates are like...nodes. We need to find a plate.” When the others stared at her, waiting for more, she said. “To electrocute the son of a bitch.”
“And the on switch,” Zhao said. “Don’t forget the on switch.”
Yvonne led them quickly through one last cluster of squat, ugly structures. Cowboy kept racing ahead, and Rachel felt compelled to call him back.
“Why don’t you let him run?” Pav said. “He’s a Revenant. He may know more than we do.” Rachel was ashamed that she hadn’t thought of that. She kept treating Cowboy like, well, an ordinary dog, even though she suspected that, in his canine fashion, he could be channeling the Architects.
“City limits,” Zhao said. He was right; they were out of the mass of buildings and alleys now...hard up against the looming, curving wall of the habitat.
The smooth quasi-concrete ground surface gave way to raw, packed-down earth. There were even patches of greenery and some trees...everything looking old.
This wasn’t a walkway. Every few meters lay a cluster of pipes or other impediments.
“Which way?” Rachel said.
Yvonne had stopped and, eyes closed, arms outstretched, was turning in a slow circle.
“Great,” Pav said, “now she’s an antenna...”
This struck Rachel as both funny and true.
Yvonne stopped her turn with her arm pointed toward the south end of the habitat. “Somewhere along there,” she said.
“Question,” Rachel said, finding it difficult to talk with the endless exertion. “How do we get the Long Legs on the plate?”
“Bait,” Zhao said. “One of us has to be on the plate, I think. To make the Long Legs attack.”
“Zhao, I volunteer you,” Pav said. He was working his way under, then over, the pipes.
“I’ll do it,” Rachel said. It wasn’t nobility or the desire to sacrifice herself. One of them needed to be bait. She was smaller and quicker than the others. And it would spare her the agony of watching—
Then the Long Legs emerged from an alley—it was now between them and the plate.
Cowboy ran toward the Long Legs, barking furiously. Rachel was amused to note that the Long Legs treated the dog as a threat...backing away and moving to one side.
But they were still unable to reach the plate.
“Sorry, Rach, I don’t think we’re going to be able to use you as bait,” Pav said.
“Yvonne,” Zhao said. “What are you doing?”
The Revenant astronaut had her hands up against the nearest wall, running them slowly, as if searching for a minute crack in the surface.
“Time is our enemy, Yvonne,” Zhao said, his voice growing more agitated.
“I’m looking for the controls, all right?” she said. “The voices are telling me, controls are everywhere...just got to—” She smiled. “Got ’em.”
Rachel couldn’t see anything different. “It’s just a wall.”
Yvonne used her right index finger to draw a big rectangle on the wall...it was like dragging an image on a Slate screen.
But then half a dozen different colored boxes appeared ins
ide the larger box Yvonne had sketched. Each one was marked with symbols.
Rachel could see the Long Legs approaching now, as if moving in for the kill. What would it feel like, she wondered? Would she be ripped into pieces? Or would her death be even creepier...being absorbed somehow? Sucked dry?
Closer and closer...
“Got it!” Yvonne shouted.
“What?”
“Just...everybody hold on! Seriously, I mean.”
Rachel looked at Pav. She could hear the scraping, skittering sound of the Long Legs approaching. What? “Grab the pipe,” Pav said. They all did.
With her arm hooked around an alien tube, Yvonne brushed her hand across the panel.
Rachel immediately felt her vision distorting, whether due to her eyeball changing shape, or the habitat itself, she couldn’t say.
It was as if a gravity wave passed through them, simultaneously stretching the buildings, walls, and ground around them, squashing them...and dragging them toward the Long Legs and the plate.
But Rachel and the others held fast.
The Long Legs was slammed into the wall behind it, not hard enough to damage it...just to pin it.
“Here goes,” Yvonne said. With difficulty, as if she were being pulled toward the plate herself, she touched the panel that activated the duplicator.
The Long Legs twitched, then froze as a massive electric jolt surged through it. Then it began to smoke and melt, matter dripping down the creature’s sides as it began to shrink. Rachel wanted to look away but couldn’t. She wanted this thing gone; if this was how it had to happen, too bad.
In less than a minute, the Long Legs was gone. Yvonne shut off the power.
“How did you do that?” Zhao said.
Yvonne seemed surprised. “I guess I accessed the gravity controls.”
“The what?” Pav said.
“The whole NEO is, ah, filled with clumps of super-dense matter. There’s a...a system of magnets that moves them around, which is why we have Earth-like gravity even though we should be bouncing like balloons.” She blinked, confused. “I can’t believe I know all that, somehow. It makes my head hurt and my stomach ache.”
Zhao turned to Pav and Rachel. “The cat’s-eyes, you called them. They can be controlled.”
“Great,” Pav said. He had knelt to hold on to Cowboy. The dog seemed eager to sniff the remains of the Long Legs, and Pav was holding him back.
Zhao was taking a moment to be an engineer again. “Gravity. Nanotech plasm. 3-D printing. Morpho-genetic mapping and retrieval. I’d love to see the main computer and power station for these things.”
“Soon,” Yvonne said, tapping her temple. She looked tired, but satisfied somehow. “We’re on our way to some answers, I think.”
Rachel was still distracted by the awful, gagging smell of the electrocuted Long Legs. It was like burned plastic times ten.
As for the Long Legs itself...there was sizzling black matter spattered all over the plate.
“Is it dead?” she said.
“For the moment,” Yvonne said. “You can never really kill these things.” Incredibly, as Rachel looked on, several puddles of former Long Legs goo began to shape themselves into squares, as if forming up for battle. “Oh my God, Yvonne, look.”
“That’s what I mean,” Yvonne said. “We’ve got to go.”
She made several additional passes at the control panel, which then, magically, closed itself down and vanished, leaving the wall as blank as it had been when Rachel first saw it.
There was a portal not far from them, large and, to Rachel’s mind, industrial; it was worn and stained from the passage of God knew how many tons of goo or other fluids. There was a spillway of sorts, and channels leading from that to pools in the “city.”
It also smelled bad, exactly like a sewer. Rachel’s overwhelming impression of Keanu, at least the parts she had seen since leaving the human habitat, was of nasty odors. “Are you sure we should go through here?” she said to Yvonne.
“My voices are telling me it’s not the best route, but it is the most direct.”
“Are we going to have to walk much farther?” Pav said.
“I’ll show you.” She led them through the portal, striding purposefully now, like a woman with a mission. For a moment, Yvonne reminded Rachel of Megan going shopping. Her mother often said she did not possess the woman’s shopping gene, the one that apparently allowed you to visit any store for infinite amounts of time, lingering and looking. Megan Stewart walked into a store with a list and walked out with an item soon after.
Rachel, too. She wanted to walk in and out of this store.
They wound up in a tunnel much like the one they had walked through earlier...old, still used, lit by some faint glowing element in the walls themselves.
“Now what?” Zhao said. “We’re close to collapse. I don’t think we have another multikilometer hike in us.”
“Wait,” Yvonne said. Rachel could hear a faint rumbling from down the tunnel. She immediately thought, Not another cat’s-eye!
“Ah, everybody stand back....” That was all the suggestion they needed. Rachel grabbed Cowboy and joined Pav and Zhao and Yvonne against the tunnel wall.
With a notable gust of wind—air being pushed through the tunnel—and a throbbing roar, a module slid in front of them and stopped.
The “car” was open on the side facing them—the interior was featureless and appeared to be designed to transfer goods as well as passengers.
As for the passengers—the car would have easily held a creature as wide as an elephant or as tall as a giraffe. Rachel found what might have been a restraint strap positioned above eye level. But when she touched it, the material crumbled.
Yvonne noticed. “I don’t know how long it’s been since this has been used.”
“We’re in no position to argue,” Zhao said. “How do you make it go?”
XAVIER
“Where’s Zack Stewart?” Brent Bynum said. He was sitting on the floor of the Temple, the tipped-over Woggle-Bug terrarium in front of him...together with its smear of roiling, growing bugs. Weldon was with him; so was Harley Drake.
Gabriel Jones was asleep or unconscious a few meters away.
Xavier Toutant heard Bynum’s question as he hurried down from upstairs with food. Jaidev and his Bangalore guys were hard at work on...something. It had taken Xavier quite some time to get them to whip up some “fruit” juice and stew.
Xavier liked the fact that he had somehow become important to Jaidev and Nayar, and especially to Mr. Drake and Mr. Weldon. It reminded him of his first weeks at the restaurant, when Chef Charles realized that he wasn’t all thumbs and could be entrusted with independent tasks, and spent time talking to him during his cigarette breaks about cheap-ass Le Roi and the stupid customers. All that had ended when Xavier got busted, of course.
But so far, during his days on Keanu, he had felt that way again. As if he had a job, and that people trusted him to do it.
Even though he was hungry and tired, and more than a little worried about the Woggle-Bug deal, and about Chitran coming back and saying Camilla had been the one who killed her...and about Camilla, who seemed to have vanished...being sent to find Mr. Weldon had made Xavier almost unspeakably happy.
Right up to the moment when he found him with the one they called Bynum. Xavier had been surprised to find that being on the inside wasn’t fun all the time, and this was one of them. If he hadn’t already dealt with the monkey, or with Chitran, he would surely have run away in fright. But he remembered the man from the RV! Knew he had been gunned down by the Chinese fellow.
So now he had become another of these Revenants, struggling to cope with being alive again—what did they see during the time they were dead, he wondered?—while peeling off the coating they woke up wearing, like foil on a tamale.
He had left Bynum for a few moments to catch up with Weldon, whom he had just seen going a different direction.
And now he was back at
the Temple, fetching food and water for the latest Revenant. Who didn’t thank him or even acknowledge him as he placed the items in his hands. Well, maybe he was still in shock. Being dead would probably do that to a man.
“Zack’s gone,” Harley said.
Before Bynum could ask whether that meant absent or dead, Weldon said, “He and Williams, Makali, Valya, and Scott were checking out the vesicle port, then the Beehive. They never came back. It’s going on its second day.”
“And the Chinese guy with the gun,” Bynum said, obviously struggling with the memory. “Where is he?”
Xavier caught the warning look Weldon shot at Harley. Bynum’s voice was calm, if incredibly tired...but it didn’t hide the anger.
Which was quite understandable. Who wouldn’t be angry with the man who killed you?
“He’s also absent,” Harley said. “We sent him after Zack’s daughter and Taj’s kid when they ran off.”
It seemed to Xavier that Bynum was considering this—or that he had lapsed into unconsciousness. “You trust that guy?”
“It seemed like the right move,” Weldon said. “We’ve had a murder—”
“Besides yours,” Harley added.
Bynum stared at his food. Xavier imagined that it would require a mental adjustment to hear and accept phrases like your murder.
Weldon continued his update. “Some things are much better. We’ve made a lot of progress figuring out how to make the habitat sit up and beg.” He indicated the food in Bynum’s hands. “We can eat and drink for a while, we think. Nayar’s people are already doing some pretty advanced...manufacturing or processing. But that murder...it seems to be tied to Camilla, the Brazilian girl—”
Bynum sat straight up. “Where is she?”
Harley looked at Weldon. Both men seemed reluctant to share additional information with Bynum. Well, Xavier thought, he was a Revenant...like Camilla. Who knew what side any of them favored?
Finally Harley said, “We don’t know where she is.”
“I don’t see Jones anywhere....”
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