by Ryk E. Spoor
“I don’t think you could pull that off with explosives.”
Achernar shook his head. “I know something about demolitions, and I don’t think you could even come close to that. The nearby concussion would shatter the stone at the base and the whole thing would have collapsed before we got here. I’d really like to get a good look at the top of that, but I’m afraid it’ll fall down if anyone tries to climb it.” He pulled a small satellite phone from his pack. “Sif, this is Thor.”
A pause. Then a contralto voice answered, “Sif here. Go ahead, Thor.”
“Did you pack Hugin and Munin?”
“We did. You want them deployed upon landing?”
“Yes. What’s your ETA?”
“Seven minutes to land, ten to unload, ten to your current position.”
“Acknowledged. Thor out.”
“What was all that about?” I asked, as he put away the phone.
“My other teammates will be arriving in about half an hour. With a couple of UAVs—Unmanned Air Vehicles—which will give us a chance to get a good look up on top of that column. Until then, let’s just look around—carefully.”
I was sweating, but the open area allowed a reasonable breeze, so walking the perimeter of the crater wasn’t that bad. I honestly didn’t expect to find anything; if a bomb or something like it had gone off, I couldn’t imagine that any pieces would be left; aside from bomb fragments, I had no idea what I could be looking for.
“Syl?”
She gave a start. “Oh! Sorry, Jason.” She was following me, but her gaze was clearly not exactly here.
“Getting anything?”
“It was . . . magical. That’s all I can say, so far anyway. The traces of magic are so intense I can’t make out anything else; even my . . . talent feels fuzzed. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever felt before.”
“No sign of anything . . . well, anything that did this?”
“I haven’t got any sense of . . .” she paused, frowning. She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to . . . extend herself somehow, without actually moving in a way I could describe. When she opened her eyes, she looked confused.
“What?”
Syl glanced around quickly, eyes scanning the area, focusing on one particular location about two hundred yards away. “Something was watching. I think. But it’s gone now.”
I drew my pistol and moved forward carefully. It took several minutes to work our way to that area.
At first, it didn’t look any different than the other parts of the crater rim: fallen trees, flattened brush and blasted dirt. Then I looked closer.
In the thin layer of dirt I saw footprints. Shoeprints, actually. I knelt down and stuck the little yellow marker flags Achernar had given us into the dirt just off to the side of each print, then studied the actual pattern.
“Looks like . . . whoever it was . . . came up out of the crater,” I said finally, not without some reluctance. There seemed to be some scuffmarks right at the edge, and maybe even some smears and smudges on the glassy surface of the crater itself. “Then he or she sat down on this tree trunk.” The footprints bent towards the trunk, which showed slight smudges in the coating of dust that covered it. New footprints faced out from the tree and seemed to overlap those that had approached the tree. I knelt again, looking carefully at the prints. “Looks like sneakers or maybe running shoes. Size . . . six or seven in men’s, maybe.”
“So someone a little small if they were a man, but normal-sized for a woman.”
“Right.” I looked back across the crater. “Damn. Camera’s over there. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d find anything. C’mon, let’s go get it and tell Achernar what we found.”
She glanced at me. “You have that ‘I know something they don’t’ look on your face, Jasie. What is it?”
I grinned faintly, but the situation was too serious for me to find it amusing. “Strange mystical events intruding on our world makes me think of a certain incident . . .”
“Oh. Oh. And . . . ?”
“Near as I can tell from Verne’s sketchy guesses, we’re standing right on top of one of the sites of the Seven Towers.”
“But why in the world would one of them . . . explode or whatever now?” Syl muttered as we made our way back around the crater.
“Not a clue. Maybe Verne will have one, when we get back. But we’d better not say anything more; don’t want to drag them into that mess.”
Syl nodded. Project Pantheon might think they knew what was hiding behind the façade of normality in our world, but we knew that there was another, much more dangerous layer, and the last thing we needed was government agents poking into the history of Atlantaea.
Getting back was a little quicker. Finally, I caught sight of Achernar about fifty yards away, a pretty woman of about his own height talking to him while two men—one a tall black man, the other large, solid, with short bright-red hair and the pale complexion to go with it—unpacked a couple of crates nearby.
All four of them instantly stopped and glanced in our direction, seemingly aware of everything going on around them. Definitely from the Super-Spy Academy of Paranoia, I thought.
“You found something,” Achernar said as we got closer.
“How’d you guess?”
“Aside from your expression? You’re back much faster than I expected.”
I supposed that made sense. “Found footprints. Coming out of the crater.”
His eyebrows climbed skyward. “Really. You marked them?”
“Flag for each print and for a couple points of interest. Came back for the camera.”
“Very good. We’ll go check it out. Let me just introduce you to the rest of the team.” He turned first to the black-haired woman, who I could now see was, at least partially, Japanese and maybe Chinese, too. Something about the way Achernar looked at her gave me the feeling that he thought of her as more than just a colleague. “Bambi Inochi, Jason Wood.”
I tried not to grin at the name, but she caught it. “Blame my parents’ love of Disney,” she said as she shook my hand. I recognized her voice as the one that had answered to the codename “Sif” earlier. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Wood.”
“Thanks, Ms. Inochi. This is my wife, Sylvia Stake.”
Achernar then quickly introduced us to Derek Fairchild (the tall black man) and Donovan Grant (the red-haired man). “You finish getting the UAVs set up,” he said, grabbing the camera case. “I’ll want a flyover of that . . . column as soon as possible. I’m going to accompany Mr. Wood to—”
His and Sylvie’s heads snapped around, and I turned just in time to see a flash of light. When it died down, dust was drifting in a thick cloud near the edge of the crater.
Just about where we’d found the tracks.
Achernar’s gun was already out, but Ms. Inochi was moving—cutting across part of the glassy crater at a high sprint, somehow not slipping on the steep, slick slope. The other two stayed back with the equipment.
I thought I was in pretty good shape overall, and I’ve certainly learned how to run fast when the occasion demanded, but Achernar was outdistancing both me and Syl, and by the time he was halfway around the edge, Bambi Inochi was already standing at the point where the flash had occurred. But I was already close enough to be sure.
The entire area had been wiped clean as a blackboard with an eraser. There wasn’t a trace of the footprints . . . or of the flags. Achernar looked at me. “You’re sure this was the place? Exactly the place?”
“I’m afraid so. The prints came from down there,” I pointed, noting that even the surface was now pristine, “to up about here. They walked to here, and whoever it was sat down on this log, which now is missing its bark for about three feet on either side of where the person sat, and then continued on.”
Achernar frowned. “And both Sylvia and I sensed . . . something, just as this happened. Someone’s here, or was here just minutes ago.”
“Syl said she felt someone watching before.�
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“Whoever it was must have realized you found clues there, and when you went back for the camera, did . . . whatever that was . . . to erase the evidence.” He looked to his companion. “Bambi? You got anything?”
The black-haired spy walked lightly across the ground, jumped onto one of the fallen trees and followed that for a while, surveying everything around her. Finally, she came back. “Sorry, James. Not a thing. The evidence says someone had to have been here . . . but I’m not seeing a trace. Whoever it is . . . they’re good.”
“And might still be watching us. Dammit.”
I looked around a little warily. To instantly strip something like eight feet of bark from a big tree and wipe everything else clean over forty feet in one shot . . . that would take a hell of a lot of power and control. Verne could probably do it; he’d shown some impressive telekinetic abilities. But this was someone and something else, and the thought they might be waiting there, watching . . .
But there was another side to this. “You know, he or she could have done a lot worse.”
Achernar glanced at me, then his eyebrows came down slightly. “I suppose they could have, yes. Whatever did this would probably be easily capable of injuring or killing us. They made sure that no one was nearby before doing . . . whatever this was.” He looked around slowly. “Not inherently hostile, then. Sylvia, what was it you sensed?”
She gave an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Mr. Achernar. Most of my senses are overwhelmed by the power still lingering. I just suddenly sensed something was going to happen. What about you?”
“Just for a split second . . . it was a feeling of concentration, of something pent up and released in the same moment.” He gazed off into the distance. “Nothing else, really. I’ve taught myself the best I can, but I just don’t have much of the Talent. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel blinded here; I’m almost blind to begin with.”
Derek Fairchild waved from the other side. “Hey, James, Hugin’s ready. What’s the plan?”
“Send her up and criss-cross that little standing garden in the middle of the crater,” Achernar said, giving a shrug and heading back in that direction. “How close can you get?”
Fairchild and Grant both studied the pedestallike column through binoculars for a few minutes as we made our way over. “No lower than about ten feet,” Derek said finally. “That one bush must be close on seven feet high, and I don’t want to cut it close; one snag and Hugin will go straight down to the crater floor, and that’s all she wrote.”
“Okay. Try to make it as slow as possible.”
Donovan Grant nodded. “Just at stall speed when we go over.”
I had to admit it was neat to watch. Remote-piloted aircraft weren’t new, but a semi-autonomous and instrumented drone like these UAVs was a refinement I hadn’t seen. Assembled, Hugin had an eight-foot wingspan and a four-foot body; I could see a camera projecting downward below the nose with some other mounts that looked like sensors out on the wings. Derek checked the unit, activated it, and simply threw it out into the crater like a giant paper airplane.
Hugin’s engine purred to life and the little drone came up and steadied. Donovan was guiding it, and after a few moments it climbed back up and glided low over the mysterious green spot.
Images flowed by on the screen, but when we froze the image stream they were slightly blurred—something that obscured crucial details. After several overflights, Achernar cursed mildly. “Bring Hugin in. We’re not getting anything this way. It’s just too small a target and we can’t move slow enough.”
Bambi had been staring at the column all this time. “I think I could get on top of it and take a look.”
Achernar looked at her narrowly. “There is no way in hell even you are getting up that thing without falling or, more likely, hitting it somewhere so it does come down on top of you.”
“I’m not talking about getting there from below.”
I suddenly understood what she was getting at. “You landed your courier jet on VTOL mode, like a Harrier,” I said. “So if you flew it that way—”
“With you hanging underneath, in the jetwash? To keep from messing up any evidence, I’d have to be at least a hundred feet up, probably twice that. That’s hellish maneuvering to get someone safely on a three-foot-wide target!”
“And if anyone can do it, James Achernar, it’s you.”
I could see that Achernar was torn. He really wanted to get a good look at that little piece of untouched land, and probably wanted to do it well before anyone else got here. But he also didn’t want to risk her life. Finally, he turned to Syl. “What do you think?”
I was surprised for a moment, and so was she; but both of us realized why he was asking her, after a moment. “Well,” Syl said slowly, “I . . . don’t get a bad feeling about you trying it. But—no offense—you’re not very close to me and usually that sense of mine triggers when it’s something to do with me or very close friends.”
“I suppose so,” Achernar sighed. “All right, Bambi. But you be careful.”
“That’s your job, James,” she said with a smile. “I just have to get a good look at it.”
“Is it really worth the risk?” I asked, nervous about interrupting. “What do you think could possibly be up there that makes it worth the chance of screwing up?”
The four members of Project Pantheon looked at each other. “Maybe nothing,” Achernar said. “But maybe something, and we need anything we can find. Look at this again.” He gestured, taking in the immense smoking crater. “Something blasted this area with more concentrated power than the biggest nuke ever detonated, and yet—somehow—that little column was protected from it. Maybe this is a freak magical accident. Maybe it’s some kind of . . . natural but mystical phenomenon. Or maybe it’s something deliberate—a test of a technique. I can’t afford to not get that information. Understand?”
I nodded. “I felt it had to be asked, though.”
“It did, I think,” he agreed. “Thanks.”
About twenty-five minutes later, I heard the rumbling howl of Hermes’ engines, and it wasn’t five more minutes before the craft drifted slowly into view. Below the sleek black jet with its now down-turned engines, dangled a figure in black. “Jesus,” I muttered. Bambi Inochi looked like a tiny spider at the end of a thread, but if she fell off she wouldn’t just land and scuttle away; it was over a two-hundred-foot fall to the bottom.
Hermes floated towards the column, slowing ever more until it finally came to a halt over the strange column. Bambi twisted her body slowly, damping out swinging motions and compensating for the unavoidable slight rocking of Hermes as Achernar kept her poised, immobile over that impossible dot of green.
Gradually, Bambi lowered herself until it seemed she was just about touching the bush on one edge. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she was taking pictures.
Then Syl jumped, Hermes twitched, and there was a flash from below, right at the base of the column.
The column shuddered, then began to tilt with a low groaning, cracking sound. Hermes’ engines instantly roared louder, lifting upwards, as the two-hundred-foot anomaly sank and shattered in a new cloud of dust and debris.
Hermes swung around, slowed over our location and let Bambi drop off before going to land. “Well, that was exciting,” Bambi said.
“Get anything before it fell?”
“Pictures only,” she said. “And I have no idea if there’s anything to see here, but at least shutter speed should’ve prevented the blur.”
I sighed. “So we won’t know until the film’s developed.”
She grinned brightly. “This is a digital camera.”
“Really?” I’d seen the recent releases of digital cameras, but they were too expensive and the resolution wasn’t nearly on par with real film. “I don’t recognize the brand.”
“You wouldn’t,” Achernar said. “Custom design. You’ll probably see something like this on the market in . . . oh, seven years. Maybe.”
Bambi had gotten a cable out and was connecting it to the same portable computer that had been running the UAV. After a few minutes, she brought up a graphics program, showing a top-down view of green and brown—some bare earth in the center, short leafy plants hiding a few sticks, a tall bush and a shorter one. I was startled by the sharpness of the images; yes, real film would have gotten better detail, but the immediacy of this was amazing. Once this technology gets out there, I mused, I suspect film cameras are going to die a fast and final death.
“Darn,” she said after a bit. “Nothing.”
“No, there’s something,” I said. “Flick through the last three again.” The images clicked by, changing perspective slightly to parallel the change in Bambi’s position as she had swung above the enigmatic patch of land. “There.” I pointed to a faint blackish line.
Achernar and Bambi squinted, zooming in on the area—to end up with a more-pixelated image. “Well, okay, you’re the expert in interpreting data,” Achernar said after a moment. “There’s something there, but damned if I know what it is, and it’s gone now.”
“Probably. But maybe not. If we look for it right now.”
Bambi raised an eyebrow; Derek and Donovan had similarly skeptical expressions. I noted, with some satisfaction, that there wasn’t a trace of skepticism on Syl’s face. “I can’t look for something, Mr. Wood,” Bambi said slowly, “if I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s a thread. About seven inches long. Not quite sure about the material, but I’d lay a lot of money on it being a thread; it’s dead black in color, too.”
“You can get that out of this blur? Without analysis?” Derek looked unwillingly impressed.
I grinned. “The human brain’s darn good at analysis. And this is, as Mr. Achernar said, one of my specialties. Down there,” I pointed, “is roughly where the top part of that thing came down. If we go look right now, we might find it before the wind comes along and blows it away.”
James Achernar shrugged after a moment and gave a small Clint Eastwood-like grin. “What the hell. Not like it’ll hurt to try.”