by RJ Corgan
Carter glanced at the sky. “As long as it doesn’t erupt before my plane departs, I’ll be happy.” Catching her sour expression, he added, “And after everyone is safely out, of course.”
Shona’s mismatched eyes remained fixed on the slate gray clouds that cast long shadows across the land.
“Are these things waterproof?” Carter asked, examining the gravitometer.
“It’s not the rain I’m worried about,” Shona muttered, but did not elaborate further.
Returning to the truck, Shona opened a locker attached to the flatbed to get another battery for the gravitometer. Carter spied something nestled within the jumper cables. “Can I have that?”
“I suppose.” Shona handed him the small piece of equipment. “I don’t think Emilio will have any more use for it.” A notification lit up the screen on her wrist. She glanced at Carter, her face somber. “We better pick up the others and return to the Outpost.”
She added in a whisper so faint that Carter almost missed it, “While we still can.”
KEA’S PROGRESS was much slower than she had expected. Her initial burst of energy, driven by anger, had quickly faded. Ling insisted on making sure Kea took multiple breaks and kept hydrated. The others, unhindered, climbed farther ahead, but Ling never left her side, for which Kea was oddly grateful. As a bonus, no one else had yet succumbed to her illness, which made her feel marginally better.
After Josine’s stretcher began its slow ascent to the top of the rockfall, Kea almost regretted not asking for a ride. However, she felt that had encumbered the expedition enough already. Even though each step was torture, the pain was also somehow satisfying, as if serving penance.
Thankfully, after a few more minutes, Ling called for a rest and insisted that Kea eat something. From their vantage point, they could see Josine’s stretcher being decoupled above and Daniela’s being lifted into place below.
Kea unwrapped a peanut butter protein bar, surprised at her own appetite.
Maybe the worst is finally over.
She wanted to cry with relief, but found that she didn’t even have the energy for tears.
“He appears quite enamored,” Ling noted as Dominic fretted over Josine’s stretcher. “How long have they been together?”
“I think that depends on which one you ask,” Kea smirked. “For Dominic, forever. For Josine, about a year.”
“Fascinating.”
“I wish you’d sound less like a Vulcan. A psychology degree doesn’t put you above the rest of us, you know. Who are you dating these days, anyway? Aside from your husband.”
Ling stiffened momentarily then forcibly relaxed, as if aware she was being baited. “I am content to be with Deshi while I pursue my career goals.”
“Gotcha.” Kea chugged a small bottle of water. “I wonder what your therapist would say about that.”
“I do not require a therapist.”
“Of course not,” Kea sighed. She surveyed the mountain of rocks ahead of them. “Let’s keep on then, shall we? I’d hate to keep you from your introspection ...”
A series of cries sparked across the radio. Kea twisted round to see an avalanche of rocks spiral downhill toward her. Ling grabbed Kea by the arm, pulling her under the shelter of a boulder as cobbles and dirt rained down around them.
A clanging sound made Kea look up. There was a cry as the metal frame of Daniela’s stretcher crashed savagely against the edge of a boulder. Kea leapt up as if to help, but Ling grabbed her firmly by the waist and held her down until the clatter of rocks and debris ceased.
Only once the cloud had settled did Ling release her grip. The members of the team who had been directly below the tumult slowly emerged from their hiding places, while the rest above remained frozen.
“Everyone okay?” Ling called over the radio.
One by one, they all checked in. The only injured party was Luis who had taken a rock to the shoulder, but one of the paramedics was already tending to his wound.
“Perhaps your team was very good at their job,” Ling said quietly, “but something seems to have rattled them.”
“That was an accident,” Kea replied sharply. “Just like Emilio and the others – they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“This whole expedition has been nothing but a series of accidents,” Ling observed. “And having seen the proximity suits, it does strike me that from behind, it is impossible to tell anyone apart.”
Having no suitable reply to that disturbing remark, Kea focused on finding a new path through the boulders.
LING AND Kea were the last to reach the apex of the rockfall. The team had used the opportunity to give everyone a break and to re-evaluate the condition of the wounded before facing the next series of challenges: the vertical climbs as well as the Tyrolean traverse. Once on Beta level, they hoped for a vertical rescue by helicopter – if the weather, and Masaya’s temper, permitted. Otherwise, the stretchers would be secured individually to the pod and extracted to Alpha.
The effort required to negotiate the last few hundred feet had sapped any remaining pride out of Kea. She let Ling practically drag her over the last of the boulders. When Simon greeted her with another drink full of electrolytes, she greedily suckled from the straw, watching the rest of the team intently.
No doubt those who had been trapped on Delta found it a huge relief to be away from the fires below. While some able-bodied members, like Francisco and Blanca, could have gotten this far without the aid of the rescue team, there was nowhere to go from here without the new line. Backlit by Masaya’s antic red glare, the moving shadows of the rescuers made it difficult to see much of the activity above the rockfall. Kea could see Ling inspecting the headwall, presumably searching for any clues that might have initiated it.
Kea wanted to inspect the site for herself, but the ache in her head had grown into a roar. She slumped against a pile of rocks, feeling their sharp edges prickle through the fabric of her jacket. At least the new pain distracted from her migraine.
“I’m a useless turd.”
The voice came from behind Kea. She shifted in surprise, cringing as the rocks cut deeper. Squinting through the gaps, Kea could see Josine’s stretcher tucked round the bend in the path, her face level with her own. Josine’s skin was pale, the dark stubble of her buzz cut smeared with sweat and ash. Her mask was off, no doubt taking advantage of the brief period of clear air they were all enjoying.
“I’m guessing by the tone of your voice that the painkillers are wearing off,” Kea said, wishing she had some.
“I can’t feel my collarbone, thank god.” Josine averted her eyes. “But the embarrassment of being carted around like a lame horse is excruciating.”
“I know the feeling.” Kea sighed, although in her heart she knew that Josine had suffered more than all of them. The woman never complained; she had kept her head down and what needed to be done.
I wish I could be like you and keep pressing on, no room for doubts.
“Where’s Mack?” Josine’s question threw Kea for a moment. Thoughts of Mack elbowed their way back into her already overcrowded mind.
“You know, the last night has been so insane that I’d forgotten about him,” Kea confessed. “He … they wouldn’t let Mack come down.” She swallowed down her emotions, wincing at the physical pain of the action. “He’s safe.”
“Glad someone is.” Josine blew out a sigh. “Emilio promised to take us all surfing at Manzillo when this was over. I knew it was too good to be true.”
“If we get out of this, I’ll take you all to any resort you want.”
“Kea, the resort at Manzillo costs five hundred dollars a night.”
“We’ll call it team building,” Kea shrugged. “I still have the company credit card. For now, anyway.”
After a long moment, Josine asked, “What went wrong?”
Kea couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“What went wrong?” Josine repeated firmly.<
br />
Ling’s inspection of the rocks was drawing her closer to them. Kea shifted to see Josine more clearly through the cracks in the rocks. She shook her head gently and raised her voice to make sure she could be clearly heard over the rumble of the volcano. “For me? Let’s see, years ago in the Arctic, an experimental drone crashed. I found two pieces of it, one of which was stolen from me.”
“Is this relevant?”
“Everything is connected,” Kea said sagely. “Two companies, Corvis and T3, were searching for the crashed drone. They’re still looking for the last piece.”
Josine blinked. “You hid it down here?”
“That would be telling.” Kea tapped her nose. “All of this happened before I even moved to Nicaragua. I had a whole plan worked out to deal with it, then everything got pandemicked … Pandemicky?” Kea shook her head.
Those two years trapped in Nicaragua with her new friends had been such a bizarre period in her life. It certainly deserved a new word, but none managed to capture the warped reality of putting the world on hold. “I was just getting everything together again during the last few months, hoping to end it once and for all, and then Amirah, who used to work for Corvis, suddenly moved this expedition up on the schedule. It was almost as if she knew.”
“What’s this got to do with us?”
“I’m simply pointing out that you can have the best laid plans, but you can’t foresee everything,” Kea whispered, her eyes once more drawn to Ling. “Sometimes I feel like a bad luck charm.”
“She said to the woman with the broken collar bone.”
“Touché.”
“Cariño, it is time to go.” Through the rocks, Kea saw Dominic kneeling beside Josine, a hand on her leg.
As Josine flinched in response, Kea warned Dominic, “You better see if Simon can get her more pain meds. I wouldn’t mind some as well!”
A cacophony of conversation suddenly erupted across their comms as they were reconnected to the Outpost systems.
Good old Carlos must have reconnected the repeater.
A ping from her wrist made her glance down at her comms unit. A message from Carter popped up on her display. She studied the screen grab, noting the rope around Emilio’s waist.
So, he was secured, Kea thought. Unless someone cut the rope. Or, of course, unless the rockfall obliterated it. Looking into the depths of the crater, she considered that it was the most likely option.
The thought of Carter made her unconsciously slip her hand into her pocket, seeking the stress toy she always carried with her. Her pocket was empty.
As the others prepared to move out, Kea turned to stare once more into Masaya’s heart.
“I’m leaving now,” she whispered to the ghoulish goddess she had imagined in her norovirus-infested dreams.
There must have been a delay in the buffer because all the systems erupted at once, causing people to shout in panic. A series of pings flitted across everyone’s comms, as if pixies were dancing from wrist to wrist.
Sharvil’s must have muted the rest of the microphones, for his voice blotted out the rest of the chatter. “Just for your situational awareness, all hell is breaking out up here.”
Chapter 14
AS THE Wi-Fi settled around them, the team fell silent, absorbed in their phones, reading of the protests that Emilio’s death had ignited – or rather, that Maria’s tweet about his death had ignited. Fingers frantically tapped as e-mails and texts were sent to worried relatives and loved ones. The lull in verbal conversation was gradually polluted with murmurs from videos that showed unrest spreading from Managua to Bluefields Bay and, of course, onto the streets of Masaya itself.
For once, Kea was grateful she was no longer in charge. The sounds of Ling and Carlos shouting over everyone on the comms attempting to instill calm was like listening to a couple of quarrelling parents.
Browsing through her phone, she found another e-mail from Carter, this one with a link to a video file. She tried to open it, but the file must have been huge, as it got hung up in the network. Too many people around her were taxing the buffer. A text, however, might go through. She tapped her watch and sent him a quick note.
Carter’s reply appeared onscreen immediately. “You’re alive!”
“Barely,” Kea whispered into her talk-to-text. “Aside from managing to spark nationwide protests and a possible coup, what have you been up to?”
“Now, that’s not exactly a thing that’s true ...”
“If it is a thing that’s even partially true, you’d better think about getting out of the country.
“I think that’s more on Maria than me,” Carter answered. “The whole implying murder thing, I lay squarely on your doorstep.”
“I only asked if Emilio was tied in correctly.”
“Oh, come on, it’s not like we just met. If you had a puppy, you’d name it Foul Play so you could yell out its name in the streets.”
Kea fell quiet and gently scooted her bum around on the boulder to find a more comfortable position.
“Silence is not exactly a denial,” Carter continued. “Did someone try to kill him?”
Kea sucked thoughtfully on her lower lip. If Ling had direct access to private comms, there was reason to suspect she was monitoring this as well. “Ling seems to think that Emilio may not have been the intended target.”
“Do you agree?”
“If we follow her logic, and the rockfall was intended to kill someone else, and Emilio got in the way ...” Kea chose her words carefully. “If so, then it is quite possible they may strike again. I imagine that’s what she would be thinking, anyway.”
“There is also the other obvious problem.”
“What’s that?”
“The intended victim might realize that they had been the target of the rockfall.” Read by the dead tones of the computer’s voice, Carter’s words sounded ominous. “They might strike before waiting to be attacked again.”
“Interesting,” Kea replied. Ling stood a dozen feet away, studying her own screen on her wrist. “Well, I’m sure it will occur to Ling. Eventually.”
“I think this is the part in the conversation where I should point out that I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“Sorry.” Kea had never shared this embarrassing bit of her past with Carter. “She’s a psychologist who is running the expedition now. She’s also my ex. Sort of.”
“Noted. Also, I don’t care, I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be. I’ve just spent the last night vomiting up my insides, so on the plus side, I’ve lost about ten pounds. Another benefit of being patient zero is that no one wants to be within a hundred feet of me. It is an introvert’s dream. Also, I wasn’t on Delta, so I’m neither the intended victim nor the killer – if there even is one. This could all be an accident.” Her eyes turned to Ling, then added quickly, “By the way, how’d the survey go?”
“Shona seems to think the magma in the chamber is migrating rapidly. The faster you get out, the better.”
“No argument from me.”
“Her husband was quite grumpy. Apparently, a cave-in of one of the lava tubes cut off access to one of his precious piles of guano.”
Kea groaned. The shit kept piling up. Literally.
“We’re almost back in town,” Carter said, signing off. “Send me a note when you make it out alive and make sure to watch the video I sent you!”
AS THE Wi-Fi connected to her tablet, Ling felt as if she had been injected with a shot of adrenaline. Being cut off for so long had been frustrating, not to mention an impediment to her research. Scanning the messages as they popped up on her tablet, she coded them quickly by priority. News alerts, highlighting the protests, scrolled across the bottom of her screen and messenger notifications vied for her attention. Her main focus, however, was on the unsent e-mails she had drafted during her time off-network.
The first was a query to Sharvil, requesting a full inventory of all items brought down into Masaya to
date. She added in bold, ‘This is my third request for this information.’ She highlighted the sentence in yellow, then pressed ‘Send.’ She assumed his reluctance to provide the information was simply a passive aggressive gesture in response to her taking over the project, but he was quickly growing tiresome.
The second was a note to her husband, Deshi, informing him that she had not yet gained any insight on the missing ‘package’ that he was interested in. She had inspected Delta level multiple times, but the damage from the rockfall was so severe, looking for any trace of an explosive charge was like looking for a minnow in an ocean. She doubted that even if she could get experts down here that they would find anything. However, she did recommend a further query for the team to re-examine the seismic data, just to be safe. An explosive charge would have left a distinct seismic fingerprint. She concluded with her suspicions regarding the team, primarily that something was definitely off, and likely linked to the origins of the rockfall and Emilio’s death. She was unwilling at this point to commit to a specific cause until she had more information, but she indicated that she strongly suspected foul play.
Which led to her third e-mail, a request to the tech division. While she had privileged access to radio and intercom messages, she requested broadening the sweep to include all communication, including personal e-mails and any encrypted messaging apps. Just in case.
Ling’s finger hovered over the ‘Send’ button of the final e-mail. She had drafted it after Kea hurled, ‘it was my fault for falling in love with you,’ in her face. Ling still couldn’t quite work out why the remark had left an impression. She had no doubt that Kea, having fallen too hard and too fast, still resented how their relationship had ended, but something in Kea’s words didn’t quite ring true. Ling had initially ascribed the comment to Kea’s illness. Upon reflection, however, Kea’s outburst, coupled with her anger at Mack not being part of the descent team, required further research. She had drafted the query to Freedom Unlimited’s social engineering division, requesting a summary of Kea’s recent interpersonal communications and dating life. They’d already had several team members in the Outpost monitoring social dynamics at the site for several months, so the dossier should already be compiled.