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CHAPTER ELEVEN

The river that Alpha was submerged in flowed largely south to north, coming out of the mountains and presumably winding its way to the ocean a hundred kilometers to the west. My original plan had been to strap ourselves into a couple of the Barracuda maneuvering packs, swim upstream underwater for a kilometer or so, then head to shore. We’d find a place to bury the packs and suits and approach the city from the south. Part of the logic was that if we had to leave in a hurry it would be easier and less detectable to let the current carry us back downriver to Alpha than having to travel upstream from the other direction.

But in the light of day, as we floated beside Shark Tooth Rock, I realized that wasn’t going to work. Both sides of the riverbank, in both directions, were crowded with the reeds I’d seen the previous evening, and while they shouldn’t be much trouble to get through, our point of exit from the river would be obvious to anyone with half a brain and decent eyesight. There might be better crossing points upriver, but I hated to count on that. Even if there were, a quick exit from the city would then require us to travel a hefty distance on foot before we could get back to our gear and into the water. Plus there was still the fact that neither of us had ever used a Barracuda before. Civilian gear like our vac suits were generally intuitive and simple to operate. Military versions generally weren’t.

Which left a single and obvious option.

“We could go straight across to the dock,” Selene suggested as I paddled around the rock. “That would get us past most of the reeds, and it looks like there’s enough room to store our suits underneath it.”

“I know,” I said, peering across the river at the eastern bank, the one on the far side from the city. Not only was the bank lined with reeds, but just a little ways inland was the edge of a fairly substantial forest. If we swam over there, punched through the reeds however we had to, hiked upriver, then swam back across to the city side…

“If we stay between the reeds and the forest, we’ll be in view of the city the whole way,” Selene pointed out, correctly interpreting my musings. “If we go into the forest, we’ll be hidden but will have to deal with whatever dangers might be in there.”

“Plus we’d have the same problem of coming ashore once we crossed back to the western bank,” I conceded, turning back toward the city. “So. The dock, you say?”

“I don’t see any better entry points.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Problem is that the natives probably use that dock on a regular basis.” I frowned as another thought belatedly struck me. “Selene, why are those reeds even still there? Why weren’t they knocked flat by the mini tsunami when Alpha hit the water?”

“Because it didn’t hit the water here,” Selene said, her pupils showing puzzlement that I had to ask. “It hit the mountains way to the south, rolled down into the river, then traveled underwater until it hit this rock and stopped.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, squinting upstream. There was nothing in view that indicated something like that had happened. “How do you know?”

“I can smell the crushed and scorched vegetation in that direction,” she said. “And as I think back, I can interpret some of Alpha’s shifting scents as corresponding to the changes from orbit, atmosphere, landing, then underwater travel.”

“So Tera’s calculations were bang on target.”

“Except landing us a few kilometers too far south.”

“Coming from two thousand kilometers up with a whole planet to aim at, that counts as bang on target,” I said. “Well, there’s no guarantee that going downstream wouldn’t give us the same shoreline reed issues, plus I don’t fancy a long exit jog if things go sideways. Let’s head for the dock and hope for the best.”

“All right.” She ducked her head under the water.

“Just keep an eye out for those ferret things,” I warned as I submerged alongside her. “I don’t know if they’re pets, symbionts, or parasites, but I’m not willing to assume friendliness on their part.”

“We shouldn’t assume friendliness on anyone’s part,” Selene said.

I frowned as I pushed off the rock and headed for the dock. There it was again. Just like when she’d asked her armadillo question last night, there’d been something in her voice that went past just normal caution or even random speculation. “You know something about these people that I don’t?”

She didn’t answer. I let her have her moment, focusing my full attention on my swimming. I’d noted yesterday that the vac suits had a tendency to float, and had added some ballast to both our outfits before leaving Alpha today. But even with neutral buoyancy this was harder than I’d expected.

For one thing, the last time I’d done anything like this I’d had swim fins that let my legs do most of the work of propelling me through the water. The vac suit’s boots were pretty much useless in that department.

Worse, my helmet and faceplate were designed to give me a clear view of the world when I was standing or sitting upright. Here, stretched out prone with my face pointed downward, I had a terrific view of the water beneath me but only a hint of what was directly ahead. Given that my hands were busy stroking their way through the water, I could only hope that my restricted vision would warn me of obstructions before I slammed helmet-first into them.

“I might,” Selene said reluctantly. “Do you remember me telling you there are stories of Kadolians being recruited as assassins?”

Like I would somehow have forgotten a bombshell like that. “Yes, of course,” I said. “Were these armadillos involved in that?”

“The stories are…unclear,” Selene said. “Some say that armored creatures were the ones who sent the assassins on their missions. Others say those creatures were the assassins’ targets.”

“Or it could be both,” I offered. “After all, the whole reason we’re here is our theory that there was a big dustup on Meima, and that one side of it sent half of the directory here. Depending on how deep and how nasty the fight was, it’s possible people on one side sent assassins to attack people on the other.”

“Those assassins being us,” Selene said quietly.

I winced at my mental image of what her pupils must look like right now. Selene was bad enough with just ordinary death. Death that her people might have been deliberately involved with would be far worse. “Or the stories might just be rumors started to implicate you and maybe alienate you from one side or the other,” I pointed out. “The only reason I brought it up was to ask if you thought the people here might themselves be Icari.”

“I thought the Icari disappeared ten thousand years ago.”

“All we know is that they stopped making buildings in the Spiral around that time,” I pointed out. “We don’t know if they all disappeared after that or are still hanging around in the shadows. Or if the main group is gone but a remnant got left behind.”

I made it another couple of meters before she spoke again. “I don’t know,” she said. “If these people are Icari, how did they work the portal controls?”

I scowled. That was one of the questions I’d wrestled with ever since the first time I’d taken a ride in one of the things.

I could understand why all the portal launch module displays were flush with the inner hull, essentially set into the module’s floor. Human designers probably would have mounted them on stands or consoles, but that was mostly because we liked looking at things that were waist-high or higher. But the Icari could easily have had different preferences, and standing over a display was an equally reasonable setup.

For me, the sticking point was that all the controls were down there, too, including the four-by-twenty array of squares where you punched in the portal’s destination address.

Did the Icari just crouch down to reach them? Did they lie flat on the deck to punch the keys? Both postures were workable, but they seemed starkly at odds with the sense of dignity inherent in towering over the displays.

A better guess was that there was something about Icari physiology that made such an arrangement both logical and practical. “I asked McKell about it once,” I said. “He told me the Icarus Group thought the Icari either had very long arms—like, you know, gorilla-long—or else had tentacles or elephantine trunks they could use to reach the controls.”

“The skeletons on Shiroyama Island and Meima didn’t have any such appendages.”

“I know,” I said. “Though I suppose any tentacles could have been non-bony and decayed along with the rest of the soft tissue. Anyway, that was McKell’s theory.”

Selene was silent another few strokes. “You’re thinking the local aliens here might fit the skeletons?”

“Not a clue,” I admitted. “They have all that armadillo armor and those extra-long fingers, but I suppose ten thousand years of decay and scavengers could account for those discrepancies with the skeleton record.”

“Especially since we don’t know what those body parts are made of,” she said. “Cartilage scales might disintegrate more quickly than bone, and what you thought were fingers might be short tentacles.”

I pursed my lips, thinking back to the brief look I’d had. Those appendages hadn’t appeared to be anything except fingers, but given my distance and the short observation window, what Selene was suggesting was certainly possible. “They’d have to telescope pretty far in order to reach the controls,” I said. “That much extension would leave them really thin at the end. But I suppose it doesn’t take that much effort to punch in a code.”

“It’s also not possible to know a being’s strength merely by looking at him,” Selene said. “Is that the dock?”

I paused in my swimming and arched my back to angle my faceplate as far forward as I could. Through the murky water I could just make out a set of pilings rising from the riverbed below to a shadowy overhang above. “Looks like it,” I said. “Stay back while I check it out.”

There were three sets of supports in all, holding up a dock that was about five meters long and three meters wide. The entire structure was made of stone: square stone blocks piled on top of each other for the pilings, a couple of wide flagstones sitting on top of them forming the dock itself. There was about a meter of air between the dock and the rippling water, plenty of room for our vac suits once we were out of them.

Which was going to be the tricky part. Here at the bank the water was only half a meter deep, which meant we could easily undress under the dock’s shelter and fasten the suits to the underside with the bungee cords we’d brought. But that would leave us wet from at least the knees down, rather defeating the whole purpose of heading into the city without the inhabitants knowing where we’d come from. In the end we had to set the bungees in place, climb up onto the dock and strip off the vac suits, then lean awkwardly over the edge to maneuver the bundles into place in their supports.

The procedure had the advantage of keeping us dry. It had the disadvantage of putting us right out there in the open, in front of God and everyone. If any of the locals happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time, we might as well not have bothered with the subterfuge. Still, if we kept low enough, the reeds should give us at least partial cover.

“Why is there still a path to those buildings?” Selene asked.

I frowned, following her eyes. Right along the riverbank, a single narrow line of reeds in from the shoreline, there was indeed a path. It led off upstream, toward our left, from the track that the fishermen I’d seen last night had been using. It was a little hard to see through the various stands of reeds, but it looked like it ran past all the decrepit buildings on that side of the water.

And Selene was right. With those structures long since abandoned, why hadn’t the reeds reclaimed that section of the bank?

Unless the houses weren’t abandoned?

“Good question,” I said. “Now that I think about it, what I assumed was the lead fisherman turning to talk to one of his companions might instead have been him starting to turn onto this path.”

“Which would suggest they weren’t fishermen.”

“Which would suggest it highly,” I agreed. “Any one in particular you’d like a look at?”

“That one,” she said, pointing to the debris pile third over from the dock area. It was the largest of the group and also in the best shape, with two walls and part of the roof still mostly intact.

“Okay,” I said, giving the area a quick survey. Reeds, bushes, decrepit buildings, no people. “Let’s go.”

We headed off along the path. “Anything interesting?” I asked.

“There are several strong scents,” she said. “Some locals were here in the past day or two. I don’t know whether they were inside or outside.”

“Not that there’s a lot of difference between those two,” I said, eyeing the generous gaps in walls and roof. “Any idea whether they stayed or were just passing through?”

“They were here awhile,” she said, sniffing a little harder. “A couple of hours, possibly more. I’ll be able to tell more once we’re inside.”

“Okay,” I said, an unpleasant tingle running up my back. Maybe the group I’d seen last night hadn’t been as quick to dismiss the glint from my faceplate as I’d hoped. If they’d decided to run surveillance along the riverbank, this building would have been a reasonable place to do it from. “Anything else?”

“There’s metal,” she said. “Not one I’ve smelled before.”

“Another Icari variant?”

“Possibly,” she said. “But it smells…cheaper, somehow.”

We arrived at the building, and I ducked through the drooping opening that had presumably once held a door.

“Do you think we should?” Selene asked, hesitating at the doorway.

“Not exactly breaking and entering when all the breaking’s already been done,” I pointed out. “Don’t worry, we’ll be quick.”

The building layout was about as simple as such things could get: a single square room with a dirt floor. Over in the corner between the two mostly intact walls someone had torn away the baseboards and dug into the floor beneath the rotting wood, exposing a foundation consisting of a line of stone blocks with some sort of black wire mesh facing on them. Beside the pile of dirt from the excavation were a pair of metal trowels, a wide-blade shovel, and three soft-bristle brushes.

“There’s your cheap Icari metal,” I said, pointing at the trowels. “Tools.”

“Yes,” Selene murmured, taking a couple of steps toward the site.

I frowned at her. There’d been something in her voice just then. “What is it?”

She didn’t answer, but just continued walking. She reached the excavation spot and knelt down. For a moment she paused, sniffing. Then, picking up one of the brushes, she started clearing away the dirt from the stones at the edge of the hole.

I walked over and stood beside her, feeling a stir of unpleasant anticipation. The last time she’d smelled something through a layer of dirt it had ended up being an alien skeleton. She hadn’t taken that particularly well, and she probably wouldn’t do any better if she found another one here. The dirt fell away under her brush, rolling down to the bottom of the hole. With her head bowed over her work I couldn’t see her pupils, but I could imagine a mix of intensity and dread. She gave the stone surface one final sweep—

I stiffened. Behind the dirt, woven into the black mesh, were two other threads. Not black, these two, but a shimmering, glistening silver. Even in the diffuse light coming through the sagging roof they seemed to glow like strands of living light.

I took a careful breath. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

She nodded and looked up. There was intensity and dread in her pupils, all right. But flowing across both of them was a sort of disbelieving awe. “It is,” she confirmed.

“It’s silver-silk.”

* * *

From the moment Selene smelled the presence of Iykams in the city I’d known this moment was coming. But despite that head knowledge I’d still clung desperately to the hope that I was wrong, that Sub-Director Nask and the Patth had found some other way to get to this world and its cluster of Icari portals.

That hope was now shattered. The presence of silver-silk meant Alainn, and Alainn meant that Nask had been able to reactivate the portal he’d taken from that world. The Iykams had been a strong hint, but now the connection was confirmed.

And if Kinneman was still uncertain whether or not to charge me with treason, Selene and I had just made his case for him.

“Well,” I said, hearing the slight trembling in my voice. No use trying to sound casual. Not anymore. “I guess they got the portal working.”

“I guess they did,” Selene said, turning her face and her pupils away from me. She could follow the logic train, too, and knew as well as I did what this discovery meant for my future. Or more likely, my lack of one.

I took a deep breath. Fine, so I was doomed. But just because I was a walking dead man didn’t mean we should just go back to Alpha and sit around singing sad songs until EarthGuard Marines showed up and clapped me in irons. If nothing else, we owed it to McKell and Ixil to gather whatever information we could before they arrived.

“At least we know now why the Icari went to all the trouble to keep the portal to Alainn open,” I said. “Apparently, this stuff has other uses besides just decorating the rich.”

“So it would seem,” Selene said. “Strange that no one’s realized that after all these years.”

“Not really,” I said. “Not for humans. We have a long history of letting decorative stuff just lie around without bothering to figure out what else we could do with it. Gold, for instance. For centuries we just thought of it as something you could make thrones and scepters out of. It wasn’t until we started getting serious about technology that we figured out it was a good conductor, was soft enough to be hammered into thin coatings, was impressively noncorrosive, could reflect EM radiation, et cetera.”

“Though to be fair, as you said, there wouldn’t have been any reason to look at gold’s other properties until you began utilizing electricity and electronics.”

“True,” I said. “And that’s a good point. We know Icari technology is light-years beyond anything in the Spiral, so there really may be nothing else we can use silver-silk for right now.”

“Any thought as to what it’s being used for here?” Selene asked, gesturing at the glistening threads.

“Not a clue,” I admitted. “The way it intertwines with the black wires reminds me of an electrostatic defense grid. But without knowing anything about the other stuff I wouldn’t want to put any weight on that.”

“And we don’t know anything about whatever missing equipment it was attached to.”

“That, too,” I agreed, looking around the ruined building with new eyes. Strip off the rotting wood, extend the stone foundation up above ground level…“You know, if I were going to make a wild guess, I’d peg this place as some kind of guardhouse. A river in front of me, a city and a bunch of Icari portals at my back, a defense grid”—I pointed to the floor in the center of the building—“maybe a mobile missile cluster or a swivel-mounted laser cannon here in the middle.”

“Yes, that could make sense,” Selene said, her pupils thoughtful. “You noticed the dock used to be longer, didn’t you?”

I frowned at her. “It did? How do you know?”

“There are the footings for other pylons in the mud,” she said. “I saw them as we were swimming across. At least, I thought they were footings. You didn’t see them?”

“No, but I also wasn’t looking,” I said. “Interesting. So are we talking a longer dock or a full-fledged bridge?”

“I hadn’t thought about a bridge,” she said, the thoughtfulness deepening. “Where would it go? I didn’t see anything on that side of the river except reeds and forest.”

“Maybe there used to be another city over there,” I said. “If it collapsed faster than the one on this side and the forest reclaimed the land, there could be nothing to see. Or maybe there wasn’t a city, but they did a lot of mining and logging in the mountains.”

“Or—” She broke off. “Gregory, they’re coming,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Three of them. Maybe four.”

Reflexively, I dropped my hand to my holstered plasmic. “How close?”

She shook her head. “A hundred meters. Maybe less.”

I looked around the ruined building. Not a single scrap of cover in here, though the two mostly solid walls might let us do a duck-and-seek with our new playmates.

But keeping the walls between us and them would be tricky enough to pull off with one or two seekers. It would be nearly impossible with three or four of them, especially if they knew what they were doing. They were also already too close for us to make it back to the dock without being seen or to look for other cover.

Which left only one option.

“Okay,” I said, taking my hand off my weapon. “We came here to make contact with the locals. I guess the time has come.”

“So it would seem,” Selene said. There was tension in her pupils, but she could see the same lack of other options that I could. “Just remember they won’t speak English.”

“Hopefully, they speak empty hands and smiles,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. The history of the Spiral was replete with alien first-contact stories, some of them warm and encouraging, others not so much. “Let’s go.” I led the way back through the squashed doorway and picked my way through the debris to the city side of the building.

There were four of them, just as Selene had said, fifty meters away now and striding briskly and purposefully in our direction. They were dressed like the fishermen I’d seen the previous evening, except that there was only one in this group wearing a hat. The other three made up for that fashion deficiency with long black rods slung over their shoulders. I didn’t spot any obvious reaction to our sudden appearance, but I noted that their angle of approach shifted a few degrees toward us. Possibly someone in the city had spotted our arrival, but had lost track of us between the dock and the building.

And like the fishermen, they had a small entourage of ferret-sized creatures scampering along at their sides.

I eyed the group, wondering if it would look more friendly and less threatening for us to walk toward them and meet in the middle or for us to stand our ground right here. My mental coin flip came up heads; touching Selene’s arm, I started walking.

Again, there were no obvious reactions to our approach. Still, I kept my eyes on those staves. If they were just bo sticks designed to club one’s opponent into submission, great. If the rods were the sheaths for very narrow swords, I could deal with that, too.

If they were plasmics or firearms, that would be an entirely different matter.

I was still running the possibilities through my mind when I heard a muttered word from the alien in the hat. In perfect unison the other three swiveled their rods around to point at us as they all continued walking.

“Gregory?” Selene murmured.

“Keep going,” I said, forcing my hand to stay away from my plasmic. It was perfectly natural for people in an isolated community to be wary of strangers. “Try to look friendly.”

We’d made it another two steps when Hat Man muttered again and the four of them stopped. A third command, and the alien on the right-hand end of their line shifted his rod to point at the ground beside him. The ferrets, clearly picking up on the cue, scampered out of the way. One of the alien’s long fingers did something to the rod—

And a lightning bolt flashed from the end and blasted into the ground.

I don’t know if Selene jumped. I know I did. “Gregory?” she repeated, more urgently this time.

“Keep walking,” I said again, lifting my hands to shoulder level. Not quite a gesture of surrender, but definitely emphasizing the fact that I wasn’t going for my own weapon. “They’re giving us a choice: Keep walking and make contact, or turn and run like rabbits.”

“With them holding electrical discharge weapons at our backs?”

“There’s that,” I conceded. “On the other hand, they could have shot us already if they were in a shooting mood. Let’s accept their warning, play it cool, and see where it leads.”

The aliens watched as we approached, all three lightning guns now back to being pointed at us. We’d closed the distance to five meters away when Hat Man took a step forward and held up a hand. I took the cue and brought us to a halt. “Hello,” I called cheerfully to him. “My name is Gregory Roarke. This is Selene.”

For a moment Hat Man stared at me. Then, very deliberately, he turned his face to Selene and said a few words in a melodic, singsong language.

Beside me, Selene stiffened. “What?” I muttered.

“He spoke,” Selene breathed. “Gregory, he spoke.

I frowned at the oddness of her comment. Of course he spoke. We’d both heard him saying incomprehensible words.

Unless what she meant—“Are you saying you understand him?”

“I—no, not completely,” she fumbled, confusion in her pupils. “But some of the words were ours. Or maybe just sounded like ours. Maybe I just thought he was…” She broke off.

“Assume for a moment his words were your words,” I said, eyeing Hat Man closely. “What do you think he said?”

“It sounded like…” She hesitated. “Like you return now from the sky?”



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