by Andrew Lane
He glanced over his shoulder. The landscape behind them dropped away, of course, but it was creased and rumpled by millions of years of geological activity. The place where they had left the van was already hidden by several folds in the terrain and various upthrusts of rock. The main feature that he could see was a wide plain off to the west, with the far-off crimson glitter of late-afternoon sunlight on a river bisecting it.
Tara was about six metres behind him, and Rhino three metres behind her, making sure she wasn’t being gradually left behind. Despite the massive rucksack on her back, Tara was holding her tablet computer in both hands and staring intently at the screen.
‘What’s the story?’ Gecko called.
‘All I can see is the ground rushing past,’ she called back. Her face was flushed, and her forehead was glossy with perspiration. ‘I can’t even tell if Natalie’s still on ARLENE’s back.’
‘Can you recognize the terrain it’s running over?’ Rhino shouted.
‘I keep thinking I see a bush or a tree that looks familiar, but they’re gone too fast for me to be sure.’
Rhino glanced back over his shoulder, then ahead to the approaching dark slash in the rocks. ‘I hope to God that she makes it before we get in there. I’m not sure that ARLENE can manage the rough terrain inside the defile, and I don’t fancy hanging around waiting for her. The Nemor expedition will be moving fast to try and catch up with us.’
Calum’s voice suddenly echoed in their headphones: ‘Hey, I think I can see you! On ARLENE’s camera!’
The three of them glanced down the hill. For a moment there was nothing to see, but then a section of bush pushed apart to reveal the metallic skeleton of ARLENE. The robot stepped through delicately, carefully, then started to move faster up the hill towards them.
For a moment it looked to Gecko as if the robot had nothing on its back. He was convinced that Natalie had fallen off somewhere along the robot’s route. But as ARLENE climbed closer and started to slow down again something moved behind its neck, and Gecko suddenly realized that Natalie had been lying flat. She suddenly sat up, and Tara cheered.
Natalie didn’t look in the mood for cheering. Her hair was tangled, her face white and strained, and her skin covered in cuts and bruises.
‘I need a hairbrush,’ she said as ARLENE stopped by Rhino’s side.
‘You look like you’ve been through hell and come out the other side,’ Tara said as she extended a hand to help Natalie climb down.
‘I have. That’s why I need a hairbrush.’
Rhino walked forward and took Natalie by the shoulders. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘Did they hurt you?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘But I really need a hairbrush.’
Rhino smiled, and hugged her. ‘You’re quite a star, Natalie,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of you.’
She seemed to collapse against him. ‘Am I really safe?’
‘Yes.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘Can we go home now?’
He hesitated. ‘We still have to find the Almasti.’
‘Damn it, I was hoping you might have done that by now.’ She looked up into his face. ‘You know about the Nemor Incorporated expedition?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Calum said you mentioned it when ARLENE rescued you. It’s definitely them, then?’
‘It’s definitely them. A man named Roxton is in charge. Craig Roxton.’
Rhino’s face seemed to Gecko to tighten slightly, as if he had heard the name before, under circumstances that he didn’t particularly enjoy remembering. ‘They’ll have set out after you,’ he said. ‘And I’m afraid ARLENE leaves some very obvious tracks.’ Rhino gestured to the slope ahead of them, and the black crack of the defile. ‘At least they won’t be able to go past this point except on foot. I’m not even sure ARLENE can get more than a metre or so inside. We’re all on the same level now.’
‘Yes, but they have guns.’
‘We don’t need guns,’ Calum said in their ears, suddenly reminding them that he was there with them at least in spirit if not in person. ‘We’re not going to be shooting anything.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ Rhino muttered; then, more loudly, he added, ‘Right, let’s get a move on. Time is ticking past, and it’ll be dark soon. We need to find somewhere to camp, and it’s too exposed here. I want to find somewhere more secure – a cave, or something similar. Let’s go.’
Back in London, Calum kept one eye on the screens showing the headband camera images while he searched on the internet for any details on the name that Natalie had mentioned – Craig Roxton. There appeared to be several Craig Roxtons around the world, including a seller of religious iconography in Texas and a competitive eater in Hawaii, but none of them fitted the profile of a man who might be leading an expedition of trained fighters for a company like Nemor Incorporated.
He switched from basic text search to image search and was presented with a whole screen full of images related to ‘Craig Roxton’. Most of them were not relevant, including several showing a row of men at a long table stuffing food into their mouths, but there was one that made Calum lean forward. It showed a thin man with blond hair and washed-out blue eyes. He was wearing military fatigues, and holding a gun. His head was turned to one side and his mouth was open as if he was shouting an order. The background behind him looked like a jungle: vivid green leaves wet with moisture.
Calum stared at the image for a long moment. It was untitled, and when he checked the link it led back to a newspaper archive, just one of a string of photographs that had been used to illustrate an article about mercenary soldiers – fighters who worked for pay rather than belief or honour. If this was the same Craig Roxton Natalie had come up against, then he could be a dangerous man.
Calum turned his attention back to the screens showing the headband images. They were black. For a moment he assumed that the sun had gone down and the team had entered the shadows of the defile, but then he realized that the image intensifier software should have compensated for that. He should have been seeing something, even if it was just shades of green.
He typed instructions into his keyboard, cautiously at first and then more frantically, checking the information that was coming from the headbands. They were all online, but they weren’t showing anything. Only the ARLENE camera was transmitting an image, and when Calum ordered ARLENE to turn round and scan the area, there was nobody around. The slope was empty.
‘Rhino? Tara? Gecko? Is anyone there?’
Nothing at all.
Calum felt a cold chill run through his body. His heart beat twice, three times, quickly. Somewhere out in the wilds of Georgia, while he was distracted, something had gone drastically wrong, and there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing at all.
A hand pushed Tara from behind. It shoved her further down the narrow rocky defile. She turned round to say something snappy, but the sight of the face behind her made her bite her lip. It wasn’t human, but it wasn’t bestial – quite. It was somewhere disconcertingly in-between.
It was the face of an Almast.
She was finding it difficult to breathe. Partly it was because of the smell – a rank, farm-like odour that hung around the Almasti so thickly that it was almost visible, like fog – but mostly it was because it was all true! Somewhere nearby there was an entire community of Almasti! Calum would be ecstatic!
If he ever got to find out.
The Almasti had been waiting for them, crouched behind outcrops of leafy bushes and stone. They must have been watching Rhino, Natalie, Gecko and Tara from some vantage point higher up the slope, and arranged an ambush. The four of them had been taken prisoner just after they had left ARLENE behind on the slopes and entered the rocky defile. It had all been over in a flash. They had been grabbed by sinewy, hairy hands and hustled along the floor of the defile before they knew what was happening. Worse, their rucksacks, their headbands and their mobile phones had been torn off them and thrown
away, which meant that Calum would have no way of knowing what had happened to them. They were on their own.
Rhino had tried to fight back, of course, but his struggles had been quickly suppressed. Their captors hadn’t hit him or hurt him, but they had piled on top of him in what had looked bizarrely like a rugby ruck, and held him down until he stopped struggling. The creatures who had taken them prisoner may have been smaller than all of them apart from Tara, but they were strong. Those thin, hairy limbs hid a lot of muscle.
Physically they were oddly like teenage boys – long limbs, stooped bodies, eyes hidden beneath long fringes of hair – but their skin was strangely baggy, hanging loose beneath their arms and under their chins, and it was all lined and wrinkled, as if the Almasti race had mysteriously shrunk from some larger size. Their teeth were big and slab-like, rather than pointed, which was kind of reassuring as it indicated that they were largely vegetarian, but Tara still had a horrible feeling that the four of them were being led along the defile to some kind of communal cooking area where they would be thrown into a large metal pot and boiled alive.
Like the one Natalie had seen back in the village, the Almasti were all wearing clothes: crudely fashioned trousers and sleeveless jerkins that looked as if they had been sewn together from stolen bits of canvas sack. Oddly, they each had a leather thong round their neck with a turquoise stone hanging from it. Decoration, or badges of rank? She wasn’t sure, but it meant these creatures weren’t just beasts. They had artistic urges. They created jewellery.
Tara caught her breath again. She kept finding herself treating the situation as if it was matter-of-fact, coolly and logically analysing what was going on, and then realizing with a gasp and a skipped heartbeat that it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. They had been taken captive by a group of half-human, half-ape creatures that were unknown to science! Missing links between humans and their evolutionary past! How incredible was that?
Incredible, yes. Incredible, and incredibly dangerous.
Rhino’s mind was racing.
This was a hunting party. He knew that for three reasons. Firstly, most of them were carrying weapons: axes made out of sharpened flints tied to the tops of sticks, knives fashioned from longer sections of flint with dried grass wrapped round the lower third as a handle, and spears constructed from long, straight branches tipped with sharpened stone, or just sharpened to a point and charred by fire to make them hard. Secondly, they moved like a hunting party – cautious, quiet and deferential to the one in charge, the one at the front with a scarred face who was guiding them using hand signals. And, thirdly, they’d already taken a captive before they had attacked Rhino and the rest of the Challenger expedition.
The other captive was another Almast. It was almost indistinguishable from the main group, apart from the fact that it didn’t have any weapons and they were pushing it along roughly in front of them. Oh, and every now and then it glanced back at Natalie as if it recognized her, although she hadn’t noticed the glances yet. This must be the Almast who had attacked Levan in the village. It seemed to be a runaway, a renegade from the rest of the Almasti, who had been recaptured and was now being taken back to the tribe in disgrace. Maybe its scavenging of the Ruspiri food supplies hadn’t been approved by its brethren. So what faced it up ahead? Rhino wondered. Some kind of primitive justice?
More importantly, what faced Rhino and his companions up ahead? Was it the same kind of primitive justice, or was it just a swift execution?
CHAPTER
eighteen
The defile sloped upward, with regular twists to the left and right. Gecko imagined that from above it looked like a crack in a concrete wall. It was wide enough that the party could walk two or three abreast, and its rocky sides towered high above them. Gecko could see enough handholds that he knew he could use to climb up there, if he had to, but what would be the point? Rhino, Natalie and Tara would still be prisoners. Gecko could maybe retrieve the headbands, get in touch with Calum, and get back to the van, but what then? He was hardly in a position to rescue the other three. Not by himself.
Besides, he suspected that the Almasti would be able to scramble up the sides of the defile just as fast as he could. They had the look of free-runners – wiry and lean, but with obvious muscular development. He snatched a look at the hands of the Almast who was walking next to him. They were calloused, and covered with scratches and old scars – the hands of a climber. Or maybe a fighter.
The Almast glanced at him, noticing his interest. It frowned at him and jerked its head in the direction they were heading. The message was clear – keep walking, and don’t get distracted.
This was like a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake up.
Gecko’s mind churned with half-formed ideas of escape, but none of them led to a place where all four of them ended up safe. For the moment it seemed as if he had no choice apart from to go along with the rest of the party and hope for some better opportunity to come along later.
Ahead of them Gecko noticed that the defile abruptly narrowed so much that they were going to have to go through one at a time. The leader of the Almasti – an older creature with a scar running down the right side of his face – went first, and the three Almasti behind him sorted themselves out into a line. Was Gecko’s guard going to go ahead, or did he want Gecko to go first?
The Almast glanced sideways at Gecko. He was presumably wondering the same thing. It was difficult to tell, but he seemed young. His eyes were brown, and Gecko thought he could see humour and a sense of . . . maybe humanity in them. It wasn’t like looking into the eyes of a dog. It wasn’t even like looking into the eyes of a chimpanzee, or a gorilla. It was like looking into the eyes of someone at the next table in a coffee shop or sitting beside you on the bus.
This was incredible. His heart skipped a beat as he realized how amazing this moment was. Gecko was gazing into the eyes of a creature that nobody, apart from the four of them, and Calum, and a handful of people back in Ruspiri, knew existed. They were making history here!
Gecko smiled cautiously, and extended a hand towards the narrow point. The Almast’s lips seemed to twitch into what might have been a smile or could have been a snarl – it was difficult to tell – and it extended its hand in the same way.
No, Gecko corrected himself, he extended his hand. This was a person, not an animal.
Gecko nodded his head, and increased his speed slightly. He went through ahead of the Almast. As soon as he was through, he slowed down slightly, letting his guard catch up. The Almast stared at him, and nodded slightly in what looked like thanks.
Gecko began to smile, and then he noticed that the Almast’s arm was extended and he was holding a rough stone knife centimetres from Gecko’s back.
They might have been making history, but Gecko desperately didn’t want to become history.
Natalie trudged along with her head bowed, staring at her feet. She was trying not to think. In particular, she was trying not to think about the hideously unattractive welts and blisters that were forming on her feet as she walked, about the fact that the Bruno Magli hiking boots that she had forced her mother to buy her were getting scuffed and muddy, or about the way that one particular Almast up ahead, the one who was being pushed along by its companions, kept turning round to look at her. Could life get any more horrendous?
She supposed that this was some kind of momentous occasion. After all, they had found the Almasti – or, to be absolutely correct, the Almasti had found them. This was what Calum had wanted. This was what the whole expedition had been about. This could change the world. The trouble was, she couldn’t raise much enthusiasm. She was too tired, and too scared, and her feet hurt.
Maybe this was what it was like at any moment when history was made, she thought. Maybe all the observers spent their time standing around and complaining about the weather, or bitching about the fact that they had a headache.
Some kind of commotion was happening in front of her. She looked up, trying to work o
ut what it was. The defile which they had been trudging along for the past hour, and which had led them inexorably and tiringly upward, seemed to be opening out, just as it jinked to the left. The sun had gone down a while ago, and they had been walking by what little moonlight managed to filter from above, but Natalie’s dark-adapted eyes were suddenly overwhelmed by the sight of orange firelight flickering on the rocks. She felt her heart leap with a combination of relief and alarm. Relief, because it meant that they might have finally got to where they were going, and she could stop walking. Alarm, because she had a terrible feeling that the end of the walk might just be the end of them.
The Almast ahead of her turned left and vanished from sight. Within a few seconds Natalie was at the point where the defile abruptly turned.
And ended.
She was walking out into a natural arena of rock that seemed to be about the size of a baseball field. It was open to the sky, and the sight of the massed stars and the half-moon that were shining down from above made her catch her breath, but what really caught her attention was the dark spots that seemed to pepper the rising walls of the rocky bowl. They looked like . . . in fact, they were . . . caves. But not just caves – they were too regular, too rectangular. Natalie realized with a sudden sense of shock that they were doors and windows leading into caves. They must have been carved out over thousands upon thousands of years – an entire cave city, deep in the Caucasus Mountains, where the Almasti had lived their lives out of the sight of mankind for as long as mankind had existed. Or longer.
But it was almost entirely deserted. That realization struck Natalie just a few moments later. There were fires burning in a handful of the nearest caves, maybe twenty or so of them, but most of them were black and empty. Hundreds and hundreds of holes in the rock, staring down like empty eye sockets in hundreds and hundreds of skulls, and only a very few were actually occupied by anything alive or intelligent.