The source of the light he’d seen. It wasn’t sunlight, but some kind of underground junction. The vehicle he’d seen was parked in the center, and several Scipios moved between it and a platform it had pulled up next to. Skyler slowed, pressed himself to the wall once again. He had little shadow left to work with. That they had not spotted him, or heard him, was some incredible luck. He looked around, frantically seeking a door, a vent, anything he could tuck himself into before they glanced this way. But there was nothing.
Skyler stood there, ready to fight, ready to run. Expecting to be seen at any second. And then they were gone. The Scipios all went into a hallway just off the platform, pushing a few long narrow pieces of cargo that floated as the vehicle did. As the aura shards had in Belém, he thought, filing that, unsure what it meant, if it meant anything at all.
He ran ahead, crossing to the same side as the platform, intending to dive to the base of it if anyone came back out despite knowing that would make near as no difference. No one came out. He hopped up onto the platform and waited. Steal the vehicle? It looked too small for him inside. He stood a half-meter taller than any Scipio he’d seen, after all. But even allowing for that, the vehicle looked cramped.
The platform itself, then. He scanned it hopelessly. There was nothing. Nothing! Nowhere to hide. Just a big flat slab that abutted the parked vehicle, and the iris-style door the four Scipios had entered with their cargo. He glanced at the wall around the door. It went up about three meters, ending at the ceiling where a row of wan lights had been embedded along the length, providing all the illumination for the area.
There came a hiss. Footsteps. The Scipios were coming out. Skyler remained utterly still. He stood only centimeters away, his back pressed so hard into the wall he could feel his suit adjusting for the pressure against his supplies at the small of his back. The Scipios were oblivious, though. Chattering, walking in their odd gait, as they returned to the vehicle. Not a single one of them even glanced in his direction.
He rushed inside, ducking into the iris door before it could hiss closed. A second after he passed through it did just that, leaving him utterly alone in a narrow, low corridor.
Outside the group of Scipios was chattering to one another. His visor rapidly scrolled through the translations, the shattered glass able to display only the first few words of each sentence. Something about how they’d found two this time, and that was very good. The parting words were “Hunt well!”
Parting, he decided, because the engines on that vehicle were starting to roar again. Skyler crept deeper into the hall. He stopped at a junction just a few meters inside, pressed himself to the wall, then made a quick glance around the corner in both directions. Rooms, to either side, behind iris doors. Next to the one on the left were the two items they’d removed from the vehicle and brought in. They hovered like aura shards, one on either side of the door. Curious, he moved to one. There was a small display on the top, and a little clear section. A growing unease filled him as he approached. Part of his mind already deciding what these items were, the rest unwilling to accept it. Yet as he reached the object, he could no longer deny it. The proof was right in front of him, behind the glass.
Coffins.
Behind the glass of each lay the expressionless face of a Creator. One, Skyler realized to his horror, he recognized. That vertical scar. The one he’d sat with in that small dusty chamber while the aircraft searched for him. The one who’d told him how to get here.
Anger grew within him. He heard movement behind and turned, one arm raised and ready to fire, content to vaporize the two dock workers or whatever they were out of a sheer and sudden desire for revenge. His other hand rested on the coffin. He felt something, and held fire. A thud. And something else. Warmth.
Skyler glanced down. The face behind the glass had not moved at all, save for that third central eye, high on the forehead. It was open now. Staring at Skyler. Fear coursed through his veins, a terror like he’d not known since childhood. He started to step back, involuntarily. Another thud from within the coffin. Weak. A hand, Skyler thought, tapping against the inside.
Wait, some part of his brain said. This was no coffin. Skyler looked at the thing with fresh eyes. A medical device, maybe. A stretcher. Or something purely to restrain a prisoner. His fear abated.
He’d forgotten about the two Scipios. Skyler whirled just in time to see them disappear through the iris door in the opposite direction. They hadn’t seen him. Hadn’t even bothered to look. And that said a lot.
They weren’t on alert despite everything. If these two encapsulated Creators were indeed prisoners, then their hosts were utterly unconcerned about the chances of them escaping or being rescued. Moreover, they’d yet to discover the carnage just a few hundred meters back down the access tunnel. That might change, Skyler realized, if the departing vehicle went back the way it had come. They would find the destroyed barricade and the smears that had been their comrades. Of course they might drive the other way, deeper into the city, but he couldn’t count on that. No, any second now an alarm would be raised, and they’d be back on his scent. Skyler turned back to the strange life-support capsule. He looked helplessly for some way to open it, but there were no buttons or switches. No obvious latch. He placed a hand on the window and mouthed, Be strong. The gesture felt lame, inadequate in the extreme, but he couldn’t simply walk away.
Weighed down by guilt, Skyler went to the iris door the two medical pods were waiting in front of. Its segments swept out of the way and he stepped inside.
Another hall, this one sloping upward before reaching a sharp corner. Sterile white walls free of any markings. The floor was dark like graphite, with little grooved channels running its length. Some kind of rail for small robotic transport, maybe. Skyler rushed ahead to the corner and found another section of similar length and incline, another sharp bend. He moved to it and found the pattern repeated, like a spiral staircase. A dozen turns later, winded, Skyler reached the end of the hall and another iris door.
This one looked different, though. He stood before it, keeping his distance, unsure why. Skyler studied the lines where the segments curled together, traced their Fibonacci paths outward. It all looked fine. So why am I standing here?
The words registered then. Glowing letters in the corner of his vision, only visible when he focused on a small faded set of symbols just above the circular portal.
TRANSFER STORAGE
The translation seemed so simple, so innocuous, he’d only subconsciously registered its presence. And Eve’s language skill had already produced its share of bizarre conversions. Yet here, now, after what he’d seen below and what he’d come through to get here, some deep part of Skyler found grave concern in those two words.
Transfer storage. A place to stage items being transferred to orbit. This was it, the gateway, the first step toward leaving. Toward finding the others, and confronting Tim. They were up there, somewhere. Unless they’d already found a way to leave, or a worse fate. Yet he couldn’t make his foot take that step. He glanced down, actually stared at his own goddamn foot. Move, for fuck’s sake!
The sound of a footstep, but not his own. They were coming up the spiral ramp. A different part of his mind came forward. Skyler took the step without another thought. He was in the open, nowhere to hide here or anywhere behind him. The door was all he had. It hissed open as he reached it, and Skyler ducked under the low bulkhead.
He entered a vast warehouse. Scaffold shelves stretched away before him, marked at regular intervals by massive support pillars that had lines of light running up their entire height, fifty meters or more. Virus-dust swirled in the air, gray and fine, somewhere between ash and snow that just refused to fall.
Skyler ignored the scale. He paid no mind to the handful of Scipios milling about, some just at the edge of his vision, so vast was the room. What held his gaze was what the shelves housed. Those capsule stretchers. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. “So many,” he whispered.
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br /> The door hissed behind him, the sections clicking softly together as they met again in the center. The sound snapped him from his entranced state. He was in danger here. An intruder. A killer, in fact.
Skyler glanced right, saw nothing of use. To the left, along this wall, were a series of large cylindrical tanks. Ugly, grimy things, like everything the Scipios seemed to make. They’d been added haphazardly, not part of the building’s original design, he guessed. Because of this they stood about a half-meter out from the wall. Skyler ducked that way and squeezed into the shadowed gap. He pushed farther and farther into the darkness. Banged his knee on a pipe that he registered as hot, but he knew he could not back out now.
The door behind him hissed open.
Skyler was about five meters away. He tucked himself between two of the massive tanks and pressed himself against one, waiting. In his mind’s eye he saw Scipios all staring at one another, some pointing at his hiding place, others rushing off to call security, or drawing weapons and beginning to encircle him.
Something caught his eye. Strange indentations on the side of the tank, just visible in the weak light. He craned his neck upward, and realized it was sort of a staggered set of ladder rungs, indented into the surface rather than protruding out. The tank must be twenty meters tall, but in this gravity if he climbed it and slipped it wouldn’t be too bad. Would it? For the first time, he recalled the propulsion system his suit contained. He hadn’t tried it since the battle aboard the Chameleon. Had no idea if it still functioned.
It was a gamble, but one he had to take. Staying down here, without a line of sight on the enemies around him, was to put his fate entirely up to luck. Fuck luck, Sam had once said. Wise words, though he hadn’t told her that. Sam was hard enough to handle on her own. Sam with an inflated ego? No and thank you. The thought filled him with guilt. If I see you again, I’ll tell you just how brilliant I found that phrase, Sam. I never gave you enough credit for my own survival. I’m sorry for that.
Skyler climbed. He didn’t bother to look to his right through the occasional gaps in the pipework, to see if the workers were still going about their business, or standing slack-jawed, watching the alien scaling their storage tank.
He reached the top without incident, and hauled himself over and onto the roof. A maze of tubes snaked in every direction, connecting this tank with those adjacent. In several places, large bundles ran off toward the storage shelves that dominated the room. Skyler decided in the low gravity of this world they could probably take his weight. They were big enough, and metal. He climbed atop the nearest trunk and, on hands and knees, crawled across it. A harrowing five meters to the other side.
Halfway there he paused.
Movement below, glimpsed from the corner of his eye. He flattened himself, waiting for cries of alarm or bullets to ping and spark in the darkness around him. Nothing happened. He leaned out and looked down. Below, the Scipios were gathering around the two white pods brought up from the subterranean tunnel. Their chatter could only be born of excitement, he thought. They each leaned in, remarking on the contents. One reached out and did a strange little slapping motion against the glider-flap of one of the newcomers who’d shepherded the device up. It was, to his admittedly alien sense of body language, a pat on the back. Job well done.
Puzzled, Skyler glanced at the vast room full of similar lozenge-shaped pods. Why, he wondered, were they so excited about two more when they had a million or more here already?
And if this was transfer storage, why were so many just sitting here? A traffic jam? A backlog?
Curious. He crawled the rest of the way across. The bundle bored straight into a channel that perfectly fit its size, disappearing into the complex scaffold of shelves. Too narrow by far for him to continue, so he stood up and climbed onto the shelving. He went sideways, to the corner, and then turned in and continued deeper into the vast space. He was twenty meters up, only darkness below. The pillars that supported all this were spaced at least forty meters apart, the lights embedded in them providing only minimal visibility. It was darkest between these, so he kept going until he reached the halfway mark and then started up. He’d go as high as he could, he decided. Maybe find a way onto the roof. He found he wanted that, to see the sky, to see that graceful line of a space elevator soaring higher than the mind could easily comprehend.
But first, the capsules. Skyler paused. He hooked his arm around one of the thin beams of the shelving stack, and craned his neck into the narrow space between. The capsule here was identical to all the others, placed feetfirst so that the little viewing window was on the outside, closest to him.
Dust coated the whole surface. Or dead virus, if there was even a difference here. He swept one hand across it and cleared the view. Dark inside, not like those below. And no status lights, either. Skyler leaned in farther and waited for his vision to adjust. It was almost pitch-black here. But not quite. There was enough light to see, after a minute or so, that this capsule was empty.
As was the next.
And the next.
Skyler climbed up and up, checking each capsule he passed, growing more and more confused. They were all empty. Every single one. Which explained, he supposed, the excitement of the Scipios far below.
At the top his hopes proved true. A large fan whirled slowly inside an indented section on the ceiling, pulling air upward, probably for filtering. Next to it was a hatch, an iris door embedded right into the surface. Skyler crawled across the tops of capsules and support beams to reach it. Each pod he passed he glanced down at, almost wanting to see a face now. He never did.
“So many, and all empty. What the hell does it mean?” he muttered, aware he was talking to himself and not really caring. Something about this place did not add up, did not match Eve’s description. He just couldn’t figure out what.
The hatch led to the roof. An inclined surface, marked in random places with the machinery he guessed was cooling, ventilation, and power. The building was, compared with those around it, quite low. Skyscrapers rose all around him. These were Creator built. Elegant, bright, with swirling patterns of windows here and angular, geometric patterns there. All had been marred, though. Protrusions grafted on, ugly and out of place. The work of Scipios, and not just the powdery virus cells, which coated everything like a light snow. Their own gear marred everything: pipes, vents, cabling, and all the rest. In many ways, it reminded him of Darwin, the way people had been forced to retrofit the city to support the population trapped there.
Nothing Eve had said implied the Scipios lived in a similar state, though. This was no prison for them, just a ready-made city that needed to be adjusted to support their culture and physiology. Indeed, the most common out-of-place addition to the structures around him were what he had to assume were perches. Little poles protruding from the corners of buildings at random heights. He let his eyes take it all in, and yes, there, in the middle distance, he saw several Scipios gliding between these perches. Poles and platforms, even little huts in some cases. All grafted right onto the sides of the original buildings.
He forced his gaze away. Cast his eyes skyward in search of some glimpse of the Elevator. But he saw nothing. Worrying, but he shunted that aside. It was here, somewhere, close. Blocked by these massive buildings. He would have to go around.
Skyler worked his way to the edge of the building, wondering when day would come, when he’d lose the natural cover of night and the deep shadows created by the erratic lighting across the city.
“Tim,” he said, deciding to risk the transmission. “Tim, you asshole, answer me.”
No response came. Not then, not ten minutes later when Skyler finally ambled to the edge of the roof and glanced down on the city below.
He heard them before he saw them. The noise of life. City life. Vehicles, like the one from the tunnel, trundling down the once-picturesque plazas and paths the Creators had favored. The batlike Scipios milling about in small groups, some shuffling to home or work or whateve
r they did here. Still others, gliding from perch to perch, building to building. Always a slightly downward path. How they got back up again he could only guess from the spiraling ramp he’d ascended himself.
There were many Scipios here, though the city had none of the vibrance or lived-in feel of Darwin. Still, it was night. Plenty more could be asleep in all these massive buildings, assuming they kept to such a day-night schedule. A guess, yet Skyler still decided he needed to be gone before the sun rose, if only to take advantage of the cover of darkness. Skyler racked his mind, trying to recall how long a day lasted on Carthage, but that detail remained steadfastly out of reach, if Eve had ever bothered to share it. His only option was to watch the sky for signs of an approaching sunrise.
He walked along the rooftop to the far end, to get a better look. Below, a wide plaza seemed to be the central place for Scipio nightlife to gather, at least in this part of the city. He found their movements and social patterns mildly fascinating, like watching a colony of ants for the first time, marveling at individual interactions as much as that of the whole population.
A gravity began to tug at that population. Something he couldn’t see, drawing their attention. They began to move toward a place directly below his position. Skyler backed away, fearful. They’d seen him, were ambling over, curious.
No, he realized. None of them were looking up. They were looking at the base of the building. Curious onlookers began to cluster, becoming a crowd. He didn’t know why, or what they wanted, or how to get them to leave. This must be how Russell Blackfield felt, he realized, when crowds would surround the gates of Nightcliff. Only he knew what they wanted. Food. A better life. They were angry, scared. These Scipios, on the plaza below, were neither. They seemed almost giddy with excitement.
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