by RJ Corgan
Kea poked her head out from under her hood so she could see the screen of the GPS unit. The readings flickered in spastic twitches, the digits unreadable.
Just like mine did when I measured the stream channels that day.
“I think you’re right.” She pointed a kilometer down the glacier toward where her team had been chasing apples. “Let’s head down that way. Spread out, let me know if you see anything unusual.”
They started walking down the glacier, keeping twenty meters apart. The rain increased, changing from a light spatter to a full-on downpour, rapidly decreasing visibility and making each step treacherous.
Kea tried to imagine the scene as Bruce had seen it on that day when it had been sunny and warm: with the bright blue sky above and the crystalline expanse of the glacier glittering underfoot.
Where would I go if I were Bruce? What was he thinking? Did he want to be as far away from the group as possible? Did he want to take a picture, to find a cliff to jump off, or just a quiet place to pee?
In the end, she realized she would never know. She settled for simply walking, letting gravity guide her down the most obvious, and safest path, down the ice.
Perhaps, she reflected, Bruce had done the same.
***
As they moved across the ice, the sound of water became louder, finally building into a roar. It took Kea a moment to realize that the rain was still only a drizzle. The noise was coming from up ahead, drawing her closer. Somehow, Kea wasn’t surprised when she found herself standing near the northern ledge of the vast moulin she had found the day Bruce died. Water poured off the ice ledge to cascade down into the maw of a gaping dark hole, its center obscured by mist. She carefully skirted the edge of the abyss and peered into the darkness, listening to the sound of the falling water. If she had seen a bloody mark the last time she was here, it was gone now.
Wait, was that a scuff mark by her feet, she wondered, and another there?
She shook her head. She was no tracker. This landscape was so dynamic, its surface could change on a daily basis. If there had been any activity, she doubted if there was any way she could detect it.
She spied the black, insect-like stick still wedged in the ice. Using the walking staff to brace herself, she was able to reach down into the moulin and pull the object toward her. Examining it in her hand, it was not organic, nor igneous in origin. Definitely manufactured.
“You think it happened here?” Tony joined her by the moulin.
“It certainly could have,” Kea tucked the object into a sample back in her pocket, out of sight. She shifted a couple of paces away from him, just to be safe. She tried to recall the location of the moulin on the aerial photographs in relation to the lake. “There are several moulins in this area and numerous crevasses, but maybe…”
She imagined Bruce standing here, looking over the outwash plain, the shimmering hint of the ocean beyond. To the west, cliffs loomed above the edge of the glacier while to the south lay the hidden valleys and canyons of the wildlands, obscured beneath a cloak of fog and rain. Along the snout of the glacier, the lakes shimmered like pools of dark obsidian, reflecting the darkness of the clouds above. What had he been doing out here?
“I’ve no idea...” she answered herself aloud. She stared down at the wildlands, regretting that they hadn’t come via that way. It would have saved a great deal of time. For all their wandering across the ice, they hadn’t, as far as she could tell, discovered anything. Certainly, no sign of Romulus.
“I can’t see anything.” Tony walked carefully away from the edge of the moulin. “There’s almost no point in this weather.”
Kea was certain that he would follow that shortly with ‘Let’s go home,’ a refrain he’d been chanting for the last twenty minutes. She knelt, examining the canyons of the wildlands below. The sinuous twists and turns of the streams that down-cut into the ice created an almost impenetrable maze, but her eye was caught by a flash of color. Her flow meter.
Bruce would have been able to see me.
“Maybe Bruce wasn’t headed back to the drill, but was headed toward us,” Kea breathed. “Toward me.” She turned and looked westward, where the glacier sloped away from view, its surface stuttered by elongated crevasses. She headed along the edge of the wildlands, with Tony and Jon following close behind.
As they moved westward, the swooping arcs of ice grew steeper, the crevasses wider, extending up to two meters in width and at least thirty long. The chaotic topography forced them to walk up and down their irregular lengths until they could cross. The rain fell in gray curtains so thick, that if a crevasse hadn’t opened up before her and made her pause, she would never have seen what she didn’t know she was looking for.
“I thought Romulus was red...” Tony’s voice trailed off beside her.
Wedged into the lip of the crevasse, where the glacier ice pinched together, laid an oblong object less than two meters in length, its matt gray form was twisted like a giant piece of fusilli pasta. Its skin glistened in the rain, almost reptilian. The object’s narrow length and unusual form made it invisible against the dirt riddled surface of the glacier. A gash had been torn along its length, exposing innards of silver and black. The winds pulled at its fragile form, threatening to tear it away from the grip of the crevasse.
It almost looks alive, Kea thought as she clipped the walking staff into her frame pack to free her hands and pull out her GPS. Watching as its display flickered uncontrollably, she retrieved a paper map from inside her jacket and read off their approximate coordinates to Tony. As she watched, he used his phone to enter them into a text message addressed to Julie and Marcus and hit Send. The hourglass icon spun on the screen as it attempted - and failed - to connect to the network.
“Guessing that’s not a coincidence,” Tony observed, staring at the object. “What is it?”
She stepped closer, leaning down carefully. While the rain had started to ease, falling in intermittent gusts, the thing’s exoskeleton trembled with every breeze and raindrop, making it difficult to discern any markings, although she spied a tracery of fine circuitry running along its skin.
“Well, it’s not alien.” She examined the area where the surface ruptured, noting the way the skin seemed to bleed a viscous blue fluid. “At least, I don’t think so.” Leaning out carefully, she could almost reach it. “Jon, what do you think?”
Studying his face, she noted that he didn’t appear as confused as they did. If anything, he looked worried.
Not a coincidence indeed.
Jon stood silently beside them, as if deciding what he should say. She shifted another meter away from him, her shields up. She was surprised when he put a hand to his forehead and groaned.
“It’s not supposed to be here,” Jon answered finally. “This... this shouldn’t have happened.”
“Is that yours?” Tony pointed at the thing.
“No,” Jon shook his head. “We don’t make those. We don’t make anything.”
“That’s not an answer,” Kea snapped. “What is it?”
“Suborbital drone,” Jon answered. “Basically, an experimental communications relay. Sort of, except it’s not.”
“Could you be less specific?” Tony asked in exasperation.
“It’s more of a cuckoo...” Jon trailed off, unwilling to divulge anything more.
A cuckoo? Kea struggled to remember her biology classes. The cuckoo laid eggs in other birds’ nests. When the egg hatches, it tosses out the other eggs and chicks from the nest. Her mind leaped back to the tattoo on Max’s arm, the image of the ant on the blade of grass. A parasite controlling its brain. “A lancet,” she breathed. “It infects and controls the brain. But the brain of what? Other drones?”
Jon looked at her in surprise. “Yeah,” he nodded. “It infiltrates different communication systems of the Face-Google fleets up there.” He waved up at the sky. “We developed the software for the chip, but Corvis built the component. It allows the drone to pass as one of them, t
aking in and reading the data – or changing the data, depending on what the customer wants. It can even interfere with the commsats entirely, taking out a whole network, if you decide you want to take down the competition. Plus, if you’re trying to track it, it can jam or scramble any signals in the region.”
“Which is why our tools are all screwed up.” Tony tucked away his useless phone.
“The drone’s batteries are probably nearly dead by now,” Jon said sadly. “Looks like the solar collectors were damaged during the crash.”
Kea leaned back, steeling herself to run.
Was Jon telling them all of this because he was going to dispose of them?
Jon’s eyes were wide open, his hands trembling. He didn’t appear threatening. If anything, he seemed afraid. Still, at least he was talking for a change.
“If you didn’t build it,” she asked carefully, “what does T3 have to do with it? Why is it here?”
Jon shook his head. “I told you, I don’t know why it’s here. We just designed the navigation software. Corvis did the hardware, they never let us anywhere near the thing.”
“And Bruce? This was his project?” Kea asked.
“Our team built the nav systems and the infiltration-ware. This isn’t the first one to bite it.” Jon frowned. Leaning carefully over the crevasse, he stretched out an arm to the device, but it was still out of reach. “Bruce told us it went down in the North Atlantic, lost at sea...”
“Is that thing why you’re all here?” Tony asked angrily. “Why didn’t you just go get it yourselves? Why do you need to drag us into this?”
Jon stepped carefully as if herding a terrified cat, watching the strange form tremble in the stiff wind. “I swear, I didn’t know it was here. They said it was lost, irretrievable. Believe me, you don’t want to be near this thing.”
“Why? What’s inside?” Her stomach clenched at the thought of accidentally exposing her team, or herself, to radiation or whatever else the thing might be carrying.
“It’s not dangerous, in itself,” Jon replied cryptically. “It’s who might be after it.”
“For God’s sake!” Kea, afraid that she would start thumping someone, rammed her fists into her jacket’s pockets. “Can you just tell us-”
“Look out!” Tony cried.
The device leaped out of the crevasse and darted straight at Kea’s face. She yelped, swatting it away in terror. Frantic, she ripped it out of her hair. The torpedo-shaped projectile bounded away, skittering across the ice. It traveled about thirty meters before finally nose-diving into another crevasse. The rear portion of the drone poked up above the ice, its tremulous wings fluttering in the winds, as if ready to take flight again at any moment.
Calmer now that the drone was a safe distance away, Kea discovered that her hand was still tangled in her hair, her fingers stuck to a heavy, sticky mass. Using her free hand, she put the small stick into her pocket and gently teased the goo-encrusted object out of her tangled hair.
“I think I can reach it,” Tony called as he and Jon trotted after the drone.
“Wait,” she called after them, but her voice was lost in the wind. In her hand, she held a strange black globule, its glutinous surface matted with strands of her hair. She must have torn it out of the drone when it hit her. It was only a few centimeters long, but glistened with oil, or moisture. Repulsed, she resisted the urge to toss the thing onto the ice and mash it with her boot.
Corvis built this drone, she reasoned, Bruce came here for this, and someone wants it back very badly. Any part of it could be valuable.
Wrinkling her face in disgust, she tucked the thing into her jacket pocket in the bag with the black stick then joined the others at the side of another narrow crevasse.
“That,” Tony pointed across a series of dark fractures in the ice, “is going to be a pain.”
She was surprised at how tiny and frail the drone appeared. No wonder neither the drones nor the search team had spotted it. “How did you even expect to find it out here?”
“We didn’t,” Jon reminded her. “But maybe Bruce knew it was here.” He seemed to consider the idea for a moment before dismissing it. “Honestly, I don’t think he did. He can’t have had any clue. He would have said... but with Corvis showing up here, I think we all suspected something was going on.”
“But why not just get it yourselves?” Kea seethed. “Why did you have to involve us?”
“I told you, we didn’t,” Jon pleaded. “If we wanted it, we would have just landed it at our test site in Arizona. My guess is someone wanted to make it look like a crash, retrieve it, and sell to the highest bidder. They probably didn’t count on how difficult it would be to find it here, let alone get across the margin to look for it.” He kicked at the ice like an angry child, knocking chunks into the crevasse. “Corvis was working on a portable remote guidance system that could have helped them find it, but we only saw the schematics. We didn’t have one.”
Kea eyed the dark shadows that lurked within the crevasse. “I don’t want to die trying to reach that thing. Besides, Zoë will kill me if I don’t find Romulus but… hang on a sec...” Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the effort of processing so much new information, but her thoughts were sliding slowly like treacle through her head making it difficult to piece everything together. “What did this remote look like?”
“Small, black, about so long,” Jon said, measuring a few inches between his fingers. “Look, we can’t stay here. Trust me, we must leave. They’ll come for it.”
“Who’s they?” She felt the outline of the stick in her pocket. She must have launched the device when she clenched it. She gently squeezed it, then paused, worried the drone might leap into the air.
Wait a minute.
“Did you say this thing may have been screwing up readings in the entire area for more than a month?” she asked.
Jon nodded.
She felt her stomach convulse in panic. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
“Look,” Tony leaned into her, and pointed along the crevasse toward the drone. “All we have to do is cross up there where it merges, then come down the other-”
Her head exploded with light as Tony’s head crashed into hers. She felt a tremendous weight slam into her chest that knocked her straight into the gaping crevasse. She reached out to Jon, her hands grabbing his jacket for support, realizing too late that they were both falling into the darkness below.
Chapter 17
Wrong way around! Wrong way around!
That way up! That way up!
Kea’s body sent a torrent of messages to her brain, overloading it.
Breathe! Breathe! Just breathe!
Calm. Stay calm.
In.
Out.
Warm water trickled along her temples, slithering across her skin and puddling in her ears. Her heartbeat thudded inside her head, making it impossible to think, to focus.
Upside down! Wrong way around! Upside down! Get right side up!
The impulse to panic was overwhelming. Her frame pack had saved her, digging into the opposing sides of the crevasse, its straps pinning her shoulder against an icy wall. Her glasses had been knocked off her face in the fall, leaving her dislocated from the world around her. Although nearly blind, she could hear the echo of the water falling into the emptiness below, eager to consume her.
Stop.
Focus.
What else?
Not alone…
Something had halted her fall. She could make out splotches of red polyester and a haze of pink. As her eyes began to adjust to the light, her cold fingers pressed against the wet slickness of a jacket. She traced the sleeve until she reached the collar. Gently, she pulled at it, slowly turning the face toward her.
The pink blur resolved itself into Tony’s head, his neck bent at an unnatural angle, his eyes wide. Empty. Lifeless.
Retching, she pushed herself away, swaying back underneath the trickle of warm water that dripped on her head
. She let out a long breath. Tony’s pack, wedged into the ice beneath them, had helped cushion her fall, but she may have killed him in the process.
Not now. Not now, don’t do this now. Crying. Stop crying. Stopstopstop.
The chattering of her teeth alerted her to the fact that her body was shivering uncontrollably.
How long have I been here?
She didn’t remember blacking out. She tilted her head up, shielding her eyes against the gray glare of the sky, and found herself looking up at Jon.
He was dangling above her, rivulets of his warm blood dripping onto her face. She jerked back, frantically wiping her face in horror. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming.
Was their attacker still up there, listening? Was there more than one?
Holding her breath, the fear of what waited for her above and the certain death below threatened to drive her insane. She focused the pain that burned in her shoulder, the strap of her pack still biting into her flesh.
Listen. Listen. Listen.
The rain. She could hear the patter of the falling rain as it trickled down the sides of the crevasse.
Nothing else.
She was alone.
Squinting up at Jon, Kea could discern a lurid red gash arcing across his forehead. The gray sky beyond him was just a vague smear. Near-sighted, she couldn’t clearly see anything unless it was less than a few feet away.
Like Jon’s face.
Shuddering, she closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing. She had no idea how much time had passed, but it was clear that if she stayed here much longer, she would die. If she went up and her attacker was still there, she would also likely die.
Decisions, decisions.
She listened and waited.
Rain continued to fall in a steady drizzle. Wind gusted through the crevasse every few minutes, as if the glacier below was exhaling. It was impossible to hear much of anything else.
Hopefully, if the attacker was still close by, they can’t hear anything either.
Very slowly, she pulled her knees into her chest and stretched them out again, placing her boots on either side of the crevasse that narrowed below her. Gingerly, she shifted her back against the ice, easing the pressure off her throbbing shoulder. Using her good arm, she released the strap and slid out of her frame pack. Pulling the small daypack free, she looped its strap around her neck, careful to avoid her injured shoulder. She unzipped the main flap of the frame pack and extracted items she thought might come in handy, including the emergency blanket and compass. The walking stick appeared undamaged, so she clipped it to her belt.