Myell went to Nam’s side. He lowered the commander and helped him out of his winter gear. He gave him water from his own bottle. Gayle went off to investigate the interiors of the two other Spheres. Flies buzzed in the heated air, and Myell swatted to keep them away.
“We have to go back,” Nam said, eyes still closed.
Myell said, “There were forty or fifty glyphs on that token. We’d never survive a loop all the way around.”
“Can you get us back?”
“How?” Myell asked.
“Talk to your snake friend.”
“It’s not my friend.” Myell hadn’t seen the Rainbow Serpent or accompanying shaman since he and Jodenny returned to Warramala. “I wouldn’t even know how.”
“You can’t improvise?”
Myell scowled. He was keeping an eye on the interior of the Mother, waiting to see if the Bunyips—really, what a name—followed.
“Why were they there?” he asked, thinking aloud. “Camped out. For a while, judging by the snow on the dead one. Two adults and a kid.”
“Stuck,” Nam said. “Trapped when the system shut down. You’re still the only one who can call a token. Which means the rest of our team is trapped back in the snow until we get back to them.”
Forty or more stations to get back, and no Blue-Q to ease the way. Myell swatted at more flies. The horizon to the west was hazy and gray, and a shift of the wind brought him a hot, bitter smell.
“That’s smoke,” he said, standing.
“Muck fire, maybe,” Nam said.
“No GNATs to tell for sure.”
“Not much of anything,” Nam said. “Inventory?”
“Winter gear, some emergency hand warmers, three flashlights, three bottles of water, three radios, and whatever’s stashed in your and Dr. Gayle’s pockets. Your mazer fell before we were transported.”
Nam opened his eyes reluctantly. “Unarmed, no equipment, no food. Not exactly the rescue mission I’d planned.”
The flies were feasting on Myell’s neck. He swatted and squashed some, and gazed out at the dried-up marshland.
Nam said, “Evidence of intelligent aliens was found at several different stations on loops out of Kiwi and Warramala. Fire pits, crude shelters, animal carcasses that showed evidence of tools. There were three confirmed sightings of creatures that walked upright and wore feather cloaks. One exchange of hostile fire. Two of our own were killed. Then a team working on Kookaburra captured a token and tried to ship it back to the research facilities on Fortune. They thought the risk was small, and it was important to get a handle on this technology if we were going to be facing hostile species. You know this part.”
“The Yangtze blew up when it tried to enter the Alcheringa,” Myell said.
“The disassembled token activated. Someone—something—was trying to come through.”
“Jodenny didn’t see anything,” Myell said, but even as the words came out of his mouth he knew they were wrong. Jodenny’s memories had been tampered with. Blocked. Sam Osherman had said that Team Space had done it, though others had denied it.
“She did see something, didn’t she?” Myell asked. “She saw one of them. That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Team Space thought it prudent to block that information.”
“Tamper with her brain, you mean. Osherman saw it too, didn’t he? Son of a bitch.”
Nam put a hand out to the Sphere and pushed himself upright. “Saadi, Collins, the others—they didn’t know much more than to be prepared. And so we all are.”
Gayle returned with a disgruntled air. “I can’t trigger any tokens. You’ll have to try, Chief. Unless it interferes with your personal idea of what this mission is about.”
Nam said, “Dr. Gayle. There’s only the three of us, and he’s the only one who can make the Spheres work. I think a little civility is in order.”
Gayle’s mouth formed an unhappy little line. “Fine. Chief Myell, will you please try to save our asses by triggering a token?”
Nam rested outside while Myell went to try. The first Child responded almost as soon as he entered it. The token came bearing sixty glyphs. Gayle recognized number thirty as a remote spot on Kiwi.
“Too far,” she said. “Even if we got there safely, it’s a thousand-kilometer hike to civilization. Then it would take us months to ride the Alcheringa back to Fortune.”
They checked on Nam, whose eyes were closed again. His skin was clammy under Myell’s touch and his pulse a little fast. In the second Child, the arriving token had only two glyphs on it.
Gayle said, “An express. I don’t recognize the destination. Could lead to more Spheres, could be a dead end.”
The air outside was growing thicker with the smoke from the muck fire. The sky had darkened and grit made Myell’s eyes sting. Gayle gazed at the Mother Sphere and said, “We’ll have to keep going on the loop. Hope that the next station holds more promise.”
“Not today, we won’t.” Myell bent low to Nam. “The commander’s too sick. We don’t have any Blue-Q or medical equipment to revive him if he gets worse.”
Nam proved he wasn’t asleep by saying, “Don’t be ridiculous. Fire’s coming.” The words were slurred, almost indistinct.
Alarmed, Gayle said, “I agree. We can’t stay here.”
“We’ll retreat until the fire’s out, then come back,” Myell said. “These Spheres aren’t going to burn down. I’m sure they’ve been through worse over the centuries.”
Nam swatted at Myell’s arm. “Go ahead without me.”
“That’s not even an option, sir. You’re going to have to walk.”
Nam cursed, Gayle argued, but Myell told them that they were wasting time. The fire was growing closer. Unless they planned to be incinerated in its path, they had to move now. Finally Nam let Myell help him up to his unsteady feet and Gayle shut up and they started east, skirting the marsh, fire and smoke chasing them.
The air was baking hot, Nam’s weight heavy against Myell as he tried to maneuver both of them across the unsteady ground. Gayle led the way in grim silence, keeping an eye out for snakes or crocodiles or other predators. Home on Baiame had been less desolate, but the wide open space with no sign of civilization was familiar to Myell, the sense that the world was endless and forever, horizon to horizon, with nothing between a man and the madness of the wide open. Black vultures flew east over their heads, eager to escape the inferno, but one bird took an interest in the human party and circled downward with increasingly loud cries.
Gayle said, “Kill it, won’t you?”
Myell asked, “With what?”
Nam, his breathing labored, only grunted.
The fires pushed them eastward. The hillside became more dense with gum and dried-out creek beds and scrub bushes. Myell was soaked with sweat, aching from exertion, but strangely enough his skin bothered him the most. He itched all over. Even his tongue itched, which was odd. Gayle was scratching her arms so often that welts had started to appear.
Myell asked, “That Blue-Q. It’s addictive, isn’t it? We’re in withdrawal.”
“It’s a small price to pay,” Gayle said.
“How bad will it get?”
Gayle shrugged.
They were hiking above the valley now. The landscape fell away, rugged and harsh but beautiful in its own strange way. Jodenny would like it for a day hike, as long as the day ended with a reliable flit to carry them back to modern civilization. Thinking of Jodenny comforted him a little, but he was already starting to fear he might never see her again. It would just be him and Gayle and Nam lost on this outback planet, doomed to wander forever and never find their way home.
“Done,” Nam finally said. He sagged so abruptly that Myell nearly lost hold of him. They were several kilometers east of the fires, which were now smudges on the horizon. It wasn’t an ideal spot to make camp, not with dry, loose ground sloping toward gullies, but Nam had reached the end of his endurance and even Gayle looked exhausted.
&nbs
p; They drank from their water supplies. “Better in you than in a bottle,” Nam muttered, but Myell rationed himself strictly. Gayle curled up on the ground, her head pillowed on her arms. She didn’t volunteer to go off and hunt down dinner for everyone. Myell considered the odds of stoning or catching a wild animal. He wished he’d thought to stuff his pockets with ration bars that morning.
Though he was bone-tired, someone needed to keep watch on the fire and for wild animals. It was late afternoon, the sun burning somewhere low in the smoky west. Gayle and Nam slept. Myell forced himself to walk a perimeter line, to throw rocks at an improvised target, do anything he could to stay awake. Darkness came, and soon afterward rain started dropping from the sky. The others woke immediately.
“Thank God for small miracles,” Gayle said as she played her flashlight over the ground and up into the sky.
Myell welcomed the wetness. He let it soak into his skin and onto his tongue. Nam, beside him, rolled onto his back and spread open his arms as a father would to a child. But then the water started pouring down. Lightning arced in a hot blue flash across the sky. Thunder rolled across the clouds a few seconds later, a long, low, rumbling explosion.
“We can’t stay out here!” Gayle said.
“We have nowhere else to go!” Myell said.
More lightning slammed through the air above them. The shock of it made Myell’s heart jump. Automatically he pulled into himself, hoping to become as small a target as possible. Rain soaked down, hammering and pummeling. A punishment. He’d never been caught outside like this, never been lashed by the elements. Sound and light blistered through the air, diminishing his will and turning him to spineless flesh.
Nam pressed against him. They both huddled into the mud with their hands laced over their heads. Gayle yelled against the thunder, her words unintelligible. Railing against the unfairness of the universe, perhaps. Even with his eyes closed Myell could see the lightning bolts, hot against his eyelids. Electricity sizzled through the air and was followed by deafening booms that made his teeth ache. The urge to flee nearly made him scramble to his feet, but that would be suicidal. Stay away from storms, his mother had always told him. Stay low. Stay low …
He tried picturing the Rainbow Serpent, appealing to it for help. Mud and water pushed against his mouth and he choked, spat out. Jodenny would kill him if he drowned. The softening ground sucked at him, trying to swallow him whole. Quicksand? And still the thunder and lightning chased each other across the nighttime clouds, a terrible game of one upmanship that had him trembling so wildly that he feared pissing his own pants.
Nam tugged at his arm and yelled something, but Myell’s ears had dulled from trauma and he couldn’t make out the words.
“Easing up!” Nam shouted, and Myell risked a glance skyward. The rain was still torrential, but the storm itself had passed its peak of fury.
“I hate this!” Gayle said from nearby. “We should have kept going on the loop! Stupid goddamned chiefs—”
So she’d been cursing Myell all this time, not the universe. He found that funny. So funny that he began to laugh. The laughter made him slide a little in the mud. But his amusement ended when the ground below slipped away, carrying him like a river.
“Chief!” Nam screamed, and grabbed for him.
The grab missed. Myell slid away.
Rocks gouged into his hips and legs as the hillside collapsed. A slow, inexorable tide carried him down several feet, twisting and turning him. He covered his face, hoping mud wouldn’t bury him alive. But the ride didn’t last long before he thudded to a stop. He tilted his head back, rain still hitting hard, then lurched to his knees and feet in a pit of cold mud.
He found his flashlight and played it around. Walls of rock, a narrow channel, strange shapes. He thought at first they were ghosts. Eagles and crocodiles, and something like a whale, or a large shark. White and yellow outlines painted in ocher. Petroglyphs.
Exhausted, sodden, shaking with cold, Myell nevertheless thought the paintings were beautiful and strange, wondrous.
He glanced up, searching for Nam or Gayle, and saw light gathering in the sky. Boiling white light. How very strange. The light became burning lines and curves shaped like the snout of a crocodile, like a twisting long tail. More beautiful than any real creature, and more deadly.
The lines collapsed, the crocodile diminishing to a tiny point that exploded outward, downward, a directed explosion of heat and sound that blasted through Myell and turned the entire world white.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I know what I saw,” Nam said.
For the third time, Myell said, “It must have been a trick of the light, sir. Of the storm.”
Gayle, who was busy examining the petroglyphs on the cave walls around them, spared a glance over her shoulder. “No entry or exit wounds. Besides, if he had been hit by lightning, he’d probably be dead.”
Nam didn’t look persuaded. Myell rubbed the side of his head. His head felt full of static, but he wasn’t about to admit that. He’d woken up from a sound sleep feeling muzzy-headed and sore from tumbling along in a mudslide, but he had no obvious injuries or burns and no memory of being struck by lightning, as Nam claimed.
Gayle was right. If he’d truly been struck by a bolt of enormous electricity, he’d probably be dead. Or close to it.
Daylight spilled through the cave opening. Outside, a steady rain kept falling in the gulley. Thunder rolled in the distance and the water drummed against mud and into puddles. The cave wasn’t very deep but it was elevated, making it a dry and safe haven. Gayle was ecstatic over the paintings that covered the outside gully and rapturous over the ones inside the cave. Eagles, crocodiles, whales, and other animals stretched from floor to ceiling, yellow and red and white and sometimes blue, a cornucopia of artwork, a zoological spectrum caught in stone.
“See how they layer over each other? How the style evolves slightly?” Gayle pointed her flashlight at an example. “There’s centuries of work here. Generations of painters. It’s not the kind of discovery that will thrill the military, but I know people who would die to see this. If only I could show them…”
Myell reached for his recently refilled water bottle. He ignored the grumbling in his stomach. Nam, gazing out at the rainy day, said, “We better get going. Back to the Spheres.”
“Going?” Gayle asked, her voice shrill. “We can’t go anywhere.”
“We stay here, we’ll starve,” Nam said.
She turned back to the wall. “I’m not going anywhere until the weather clears. Go hunt something down and cook it.”
Myell raised an eyebrow. Nam said nothing. He seemed recovered, but his eyes were bloodshot and his hands shook as he drank from his water bottle. Myell had wanted to start a small fire, but they had no chemical sticks or kindling and Gayle forbade anything that might damage the paintings, such as smoke.
“I can go looking,” Myell offered. “Try to catch something.”
“Ever hunt down your own dinner before?”
“Used to catch lizards back on our farm.” Myell didn’t mention that he’d always released them afterward.
Nam said, “Right now I could eat a crocodile.”
The word crocodile struck deep inside Myell, spasming a muscle that was already sore and stretched. He sucked in a sharp breath.
“Chief?” Nam asked.
“Nothing.” The memory of a crocodile in the sky flashed through him, too quick to hold on to.
Nam examined his boots. “It’s natural to be a little confused after being hit by lightning.”
“I wasn’t hit by lightning,” Myell said.
Gayle said, in exasperation, “Shut up, the two of you. Don’t you have any idea how significant this find is? We’re millions of light-years from Earth and there are Aboriginal paintings on the wall. You two are just sitting there like logs.”
Nam said, carefully, “Maybe this is Earth.”
She shone her flashlight on his face. “Are you crazy?”<
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Myell gazed out at the rain. A spider was perched in the cave’s mouth, one leg flexing in the air.
“We haven’t seen any constellations,” Nam said, quite reasonably. “We know there aren’t any Spheres on Earth now, but we could be thousands of years in the past. Chief Myell here thinks the Wondjina Transportation System moves through time as well as space.”
Myell shrugged. “That was just speculation.”
“What speculation?” Gayle demanded. Her light shone into his eyes, and he waved it off.
“Those marsupial lions,” Myell said. “Saadi’s GNATs not getting a fix on the stars. I was thinking aloud.”
Gayle sighed rather dramatically. “Don’t think too hard. There’s no evidence we traverse anything but distance.”
“Then who painted these walls?” Nam asked. “Interstellar Aboriginals?”
She said, “I hope we find out.”
Nam studied his boots some more. Despite his Aboriginal heritage, he hadn’t shown any interest in the cave paintings. Myell, for his part, was still numb with surprise over the Bunyips. Aliens with guns. Jodenny, having seen one. Compared to that, petroglyphs weren’t much to get excited about. Unless …
“Are they recent?” Myell asked. “Are the painters still around?”
Gayle said, “I don’t know. My gib’s broken, and I don’t have any other way to test the paint.”
Myell’s belly rumbled with hunger. He imagined his stomach shrinking up, folding into itself, lines of white shrinking to a distant point—
“Chief?” Nam asked.
“I’m fine.” He pushed himself upright. “I’ll be right back.”
He stepped carefully out of the cave and into the rain, skirting a low outcrop of rock to the spot they were using as a latrine. He kept an eye out for crocodiles, Bunyips, and Aboriginals, but the landscape was desolate and empty. Water ran down his neck and under his uniform. He wondered if one of them would catch cold out here, if sickness or exposure would claim them before starvation did. He eyed a patch of dead shrubs and dug up some weedy-looking plants by the roots.
When he returned to the cave, Nam said, “Going to eat those?”
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