Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “I just run off in the darkness?” she asked.

  “I’m going with you.”

  Another burst rocked the helicopter. The clatter of the shooting was making it hard to hear. “We got the backup chopper coming in, it’ll find you, pick you up. We’ll have these guys finished off by then.”

  Claire stared at him. In the midst of all this, he was still sure they could bring it off.

  Hale smiled. “It’s better than taking incoming fire, believe me.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Carmody’s orders, see?” Hale asked sharply. “Look, lady, I got things to do.”

  She nodded mutely. The gun above rattled off a burst. She noticed that the other men had come back to the helicopter and were crouched around the fuselage. She climbed down after Hale and inched along to the shelter of the undercarriage. A high whine came down from the clouds and then a low, hollow roaring.

  “Here’s Navy,” Hale called. He grinned. “Get set, hey? I’ll go with you, these guys’ll give covering fire. We’ll go up the hill, along that li’l ravine, see? Where it’s dark.”

  “All right.”

  The whine climbed and she realized the jets must be diving. Suddenly she saw one come down out of a low cloud several miles away, a black mote against the gray cloud bank. It swept down swiftly, like a bird in a flat glide. She lost sight of it as it passed behind the helicopter and then a yellow sun burst beyond, sheets raking the ground. Rumbling, a burned-golden ball rose in the night. It transfixed her, blinded her.

  “Hey! C’mon.” Hale grabbed her arm. She stumbled after him, in shock.

  They went straight up the hillside, scrambling in the loose stones, running hard at first and then grabbing at bushes to pull themselves up. All the time she wanted to look back at the yellow sheets of flame but she did not dare; the footing was difficult even in boots and she had to struggle to keep up with Hale. Their shadows stretched ahead, distorted arms swinging in huge arcs. He led the way into a narrow ravine, running lightly despite being bent over in a crouch. Then the light faded into orange. The napalm was giving out.

  She couldn’t hear any of the popping noises now, no rifle fire. Panting, she followed Hale’s murky form ahead. A pebble-rolled under her boot and she fell hard, rolling, scraping her face. The dry, clean smell of Greece swarmed in her nostrils, and then she smelled something else, like lighter fluid. Napalm fumes, she guessed, struggling upward.

  The ravine sloped steeply, narrowing into a rough gully. She glanced back and saw men in the guttered remains of the first ’copter. They were trying to get the cables free already. Beyond, the camp was aflame. Brush crackled and a pall of smoke hung over a growing orange circle.

  “Okay, right here,” Hale called. He had stopped in a hollow just below the brow of the hill. They were perhaps three hundred yards from the helicopter, she guessed. Only fitful flames lit the valley.

  She was amazed to find, as she climbed the rest of the way up, that he was scarcely breathing hard. They scrambled over a rock ledge and looked down at the shoreline.

  A dim blue glow spread like a fan from the base of the steep cliff, illuminating the choppy water from below. The inky sea lapped at its edges but could not smother the deep luminescence. Like a living thing down there, she thought. Like an ancient god.

  She surveyed the horizon. Where was the Watson? Miles away, she thought, and running with no lights.

  “I guess you were right,” Hale whispered.

  “And John’s down there.”

  “Huh?”

  “Has communication resumed with the men in the cave?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Then something…has…” She couldn’t finish. The ghostly radiance glided eerily, as if seeking a way into the cliffside.

  Then it struck her. The luminescence was moving far too slowly.

  The calculations were wrong somehow. The singularity had returned early. Instead of barreling back at high speed, then slamming into the cliffs below, the thing was crawling over the ocean floor.

  How long had it been here? Did it return along its previous tunnel?

  Everything they had assumed might be wrong.

  Hale was talking into his headset rig, reporting to Carmody. He broke off and gestured to her. “You just stay put right here. Navy’s taken out those bastards, so pretty soon we’ll have the crate hooked up. Fifteen minutes, max, I figure. Then I’ll send a man for you, or the backup chopper will be here. Carmody says you’re not to go back where you could get hit.”

  “Great.”

  “Come back a way, you’re too easy to see up here.”

  They slid down and walked into the gully. Fifty yards down it. Hale held up a hand. “This’s okay. Stay put.”

  He started back down, cradling his weapon, studying the way. He was about halfway down when a quick brrrrrpp sliced through the night and Hale fell face forward. The body rolled and then tumbled head over heels before it disappeared in some bushes.

  Claire shrank back into the shadows. The awful sound had come from her left, to the west. She peered at the bush where Hale lay but nothing moved. Perhaps he was working his way downhill, crawling. The men at the helicopter had heard, she could see them dispersing. They started shooting. Sharp spatting reports came from the undergrowth near the smoldering ruins. There was no answer from the darkness.

  She crouched, trying to get control of her thoughts. Hale wounded, possibly dead. The team below, expecting an attack. Probably some were still trying to free the cables, and the rest were keeping up covering fire. She listened to a steady peppering of shots. Yes.

  What should she do? Stay here, certainly. If things calmed down, and no one came for her, she could work her way over the ridgeline, down to the sea.

  From the left, a faint snap.

  She peered over a clump of brush. From this angle she could make out areas the men below could not, and she thought she caught a shadowy movement. It was so hard to tell in the pervading gloom, but there, yes, another dark patch changed slightly.

  Crack. This time closer.

  She got the impression of steady movement along the face of the hill. Two figures, perhaps three. Not firing, only maneuvering, coming this way.

  Of course. Hale had brought her up this gully because it gave shelter. Anyone descending would seek the same concealed approach when they were going down.

  They would come this way, and find her. And Hale, if he was still alive.

  What was intended as a safe haven for her was now a trap. She had to act. They were coming. They would probably pass through here. She had to move. Yet all her instincts were to hide, go to ground. And she could not shake the feeling of incongruity, that she shouldn’t be in something like this, that the world had suddenly spun away into madness.

  Coldly, she told herself that this was a time to think and act and let nothing else get in the way. That was the way a man would be, just do what had to be done and leave the rest for later. Analytical. Careful. Mind focused on each problem as it came up. And, she thought wryly, try not to tremble.

  She scrambled up the gully, looking for a break in the scrub brush. Another snapping sound came to her across the chilly air, closer this time.

  She found a passage, a narrow lane between two tall stands of brush and knobby trees. Gratefully she inched up the steep side of the gully, holding to tufts of grass, avoiding outcroppings of loose dirt that might crumble, sending rattling pebbles down. She was panting so strongly it seemed the sound itself might give her away.

  She got on hands and knees and crawled into the lane. The enclosing shadows seemed welcoming after the exposed gully. Twigs raked her face but she kept steadily on, following the twists, working her way uphill and away from the gully. Sharp stones cut her hands. The brittle tang of the brush covered the lingering sharp napalm stink.

  Once she had started it was automatic to keep on. Her knees rubbed raw, nettles ripped at her face, but she kept the stinging pain suppressed, devoting all her a
ttention to listening.

  The staccato shots from below, had stopped. A soft wind brought a mumble of conversation, perhaps the men discussing the cables. Above that, of course, the helicopter kept up its dogged ratcheting. Nothing more.

  She stopped and quickly bobbed up to see. The camp was still aflame, oily smoke engulfing the fires. She was amazed to see how far she had crawled—at least two hundred yards. She could barely make out the murky outline of the helicopter.

  And at any moment, she knew, the singularity might rip to the surface, burning and irradiating them all. Or worse, a nuclear explosion.

  It was attracted by the cube, by its twin trapped in the carefully sculpted magnetic fields in the crate. If what John and Sergio and the others said was right, the strange glow would not remain down there in the sea. Inevitably, their forces would draw the twin “twists” together.

  The shadowy figures were moving. She sensed them melting in and out of the rumpled terrain, still angling this way, apparently trying to encircle the helicopter. There were only a few. But if one of them came upon her…

  She turned, thinking to make her way back over the ridgeline—and was surprised to find the rising scarp of the pathway only thirty feet away. Above it loomed the entrance to the tomb.

  The fires from the camp were smothered now in smoky clouds. She could not see the helicopter but she could acutely sense the men on the hillside, still maneuvering.

  She worked her way up to the pathway, crawling over broken ground. The entrance of the tomb reared above her, almost a welcoming, familiar sight. She swung her cramped legs over a boulder and crouched on level ground. No unusual sound, only the rustle of the wind, the helicopter engine idling, and the distant crackling of the fires. She duckwalked around a final outcropping and into the shelter of the limestone entrance. It was so dim she made her way along by touching the limestone wall with her right hand. She panted, still in shock, anxious to get to shelter. The wall ended and she felt her way to the great rectangular door. Her fingers found the corner. She stepped through, pressing against the comforting massive stones, and only then thought that she had not found the iron gate, and the wooden door must be swung open, on the opposite side. She would not need her key. The tomb was open.

  A beam of white light shone in her face. She gasped.

  “So it is you,” a voice said. The voice of Colonel Alexandros Kontos.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  John stared for a long moment at the tiny, virulent blue spark. It rolled on the sea floor, perhaps forty yards away. Yellow tendrils forked from it like lightning, ending in cloudy bursts of violet. A blue aura lit rocks and crevices, casting an eerie radiance on the brown track it left in its wake.

  Bubbles popped into existence all around it, sparkling with blue light, then wobbled and cascaded upward like flights of silvery birds.

  The twin singularity. It had come back already, traveled over a thousand miles, arrived hours too early.

  But how did it get into the sea? It should have come back into the cavern. Its tunnel led there.

  As he watched it veered sharply. It struck a rock and yellow sparks shot out, blooming like sulphurous flowers. The rock split in two.

  No sound. Ghostly, silently, it rolled and cut, vaporizing seaweed into brown smoke. Ivory bubbles burst across the sea bed, steam trails of high energy particles. The singularity was taking in water and adding some to its mass, ejecting the rest as live steam.

  Water stirred in his ear. Seaweed unfurled with slow green majesty before a fresh current. Pushed by it, the singularity abruptly lumbered toward him, spitting forked lightning of purple and gold.

  John jackknifed, turning. Move. The water stopped most of the radiation, even the gammas, but he was still getting a dose of a respectable level. He had to find shielding.

  There was no escape out this way. Not when it was moving. It could catch up to him and fry him in an instant.

  He wriggled around and worked his way back over the same course, faster this time. All he wanted was out, away. The transport would come and if he could reach it—

  No, it wouldn’t. The team could see the singularity as they approached. They’d turn tail and go back to the Watson.

  Leaving him here, with somebody up above who had already killed Arditti and maybe the others.

  He stopped at the narrow turn and clicked off his flashlight. Save the batteries. Also, someone above might be able to see it.

  Hang in the dark and think. He couldn’t go back, he couldn’t go forward. And he couldn’t stay here, not for long—his gauge showed only twenty minutes of air left.

  He shouldn’t let the air dwindle down to nothing. If he did, he would have only one way out of the cavern—up, through the tomb. Unless he wanted to swim back through the throat in the dark, with his flashlight, hoping the singularity was not out there.

  He gritted his teeth. Be a mathematical physicist, young man. See the world, have adventures, meet interesting singularities. See your equations come alive.

  They had all drastically miscalculated the time when the damned thing would arrive back at the site. Some mathematician he was. What else had they gotten wrong?

  Still, in an odd way it was satisfying to see the spitting, virulent twin singularity, to know that their deductions from a rarefied field theory had the heft and tang of reality. He smiled. His imaginary dragon in a mathematical garden bore claws that truly slashed, snorted with a breath of real fire. He might not get out of this stupid trap, but he had seen the truth, his basic calculations were right. That was something.

  He shrugged. Something, sure. But not nearly enough.

  Water sloshed in his ears. Time to decide.

  From behind him the burnt-orange glow ebbed, casting shadows. He hissed air in, taking a deep breath, hoping it would resolve his mind. The damned singularity might be leaving. That would be the break he needed. He didn’t want to go back into the cavern.

  He turned to study the weakening illumination. But no, it wasn’t weaker. The orange aura waxed as he watched, sliding into green. It must be approaching the foot of the cavern, drawn to the shoreline. Why?

  There wasn’t time to figure that out. He watched the glow getting stronger as he peered down, between his flippered feet. No choice. He had to go up.

  He wriggled and worked his way around the neck. The glow was getting stronger. He swam quickly away, pulling at the water, navigating by the light from behind.

  There were Arditti’s feet. John slipped past the body, avoiding looking at the face. The water was thick with the cloaking haze and he imagined he could taste it. His stomach churned.

  Now there was barely enough light to see. He tentatively drifted up and broke the surface. No light above. He let the demand valve drop from his mouth and groped for the side.

  Gravel ground under his flippers. He raised his mask and crawled up, trying not to make noise. Every ripple of the water sounded impossibly loud. He floundered up, pebbles sliding beneath his feet, the cylinder lurching to the side. He caught it just before it struck the stone lip where the water ended. Carefully he eased it off his shoulders and rolled it quietly onto the ledge, panting. He crawled farther up, into near total darkness. The ledge was thick with slime. He slipped and nearly ended up back in the luminous water. He crawled upward again. Then came some pebbles and he got the leverage to roll over and pull off his flippers.

  Still no movement anywhere. No sound. He had half expected to be met with a hail of fire.

  Where were the two others? His hands ran across wires in the dark and he grasped them. The cables for the antenna. They led forward.

  He got to his feet and stepped cautiously, careful on the slimy slope.

  Get to shelter. He followed a slightly darker set of shadows and found they were a line of boulders. He slipped behind them. The pool of water seemed magically lit from below, eerily like a fish pond in someone’s fancy backyard. He could see little by it. He waited. Silence. No, a creaking. Very f
aint, off to the right, but coming as if from above, too. There, again.

  He had to know the situation. Anyone who really wanted to kill him would’ve shot at the first sound.

  Unless they thought he was one of them, of course.

  One of the Greeks. Kontos. He’d somehow guessed the tomb was important.

  He fetched the flashlight up from its tether at his belt and pointed it upward. Best to get an all-round view, and it also wouldn’t pinpoint his location quite so strongly.

  He clicked it on. The gallery leaped into stark nearness, a red cavern. No response. He recognized the long slope of pebbles, the arched roof about ten feet above, the scattered rocks and sand.

  And there, two bodies. He knew them without even turning them over. They lay among the comm gear. Both had large red stains across their black wet suits. The gear was damaged, too, torn apart as if by an explosion.

  Neither was holding his weapon. Their submachine guns were neatly leaned against a boulder ten feet away.

  Still no movement. Maybe the attackers had gone away, back up. He snapped off the flashlight and worked his way around the rocks until he judged he was about fifteen feet from the bodies. He would have to come out into the open to fetch one of the guns. He duckwalked his way across, keeping low. Then he scrambled quickly forward, to another group of rocks that provided some shelter from above.

  He clicked the flashlight back on. Wet rock reflected the beam back. From here he could see the hole in the roof above. A rope hung forlornly there, and from the end of it, in a harness, swung a body.

  The person wore the same Greek army fatigues he had seen in Boston. The body swung slowly, making the rope creak. As it came around fully into his beam he recognized the face. It was Sergeant Petrakos.

  She was limp, hands hanging free. Below her lay a light machine gun and at her belt were spherical black hand grenades. One of those had probably gotten the two men, and then she had shot Arditti, who was farther back.