Something Coming Through

44. Wire

Mangala | 30 July

‘You’re making a bad mistake,’ Adam Nevers told Vic.

‘How so, Mr Nevers?’

‘Because you haven’t come to release me. You want to pump me for more information instead.’

‘There is this one thing I’d like to get straight,’ Vic said.

He was sitting on a plastic chair outside the steel bars of Nevers’s cell. Nevers perched on the edge of his cot in T-shirt and jeans, a bulky new bandage around his left arm.

‘And while we waste time with this nonsense, Drury is getting closer to his goal,’ he said.

Vic ignored that. ‘All it is, I was wondering how you knew that the people in the shipping container were coming to Mangala.’

‘I told you. I had inside knowledge.’

‘Buying shuttle tickets on the open market isn’t cheap. Even if it is government money, you committed a lot of resources to this. I think you needed more than the word of an informer.’

‘It’s a very special informer.’

‘I have a couple of CIs myself, but I wouldn’t take off for another world purely on the basis of something one of them said.’

‘You’re planning to go to Site 326. And if you go without me, you probably won’t come back,’ Nevers said.

Vic ignored that. ‘You came out all this way, and you can’t be sure the people you’re chasing will find anything useful. It’s Elder Culture stuff. Most of it junk. Ruins. And even if it’s functional, most of the time no one can work out what it does. But here you are. If you don’t mind me saying so, it’s as if you’re working off a personal grudge.’

‘You know the old cliché from horror movies? “Meddling in things Man wasn’t supposed to understand”? That’s what these people are doing. Meddling with a very powerful and dangerous alien artefact. I have personal experience of that.’

‘They want to find Elder Culture tech that’ll help conquer the world. And you’re — what? Their nemesis?’

‘I’m doing my job.’

‘And look where it got you,’ Vic said.

It was a cheap shot, but he wanted to rattle the man. Get him angry, and see what popped out.

Instead, Nevers looked away, as if examining something in his head, then looked back. ‘You searched my gear.’

‘Of course we did.’

‘And you found the wire?’

‘The wire?’

‘It looks like a crumpled Christmas ornament.’

‘We may have found something like that.’

‘I hoped that I wouldn’t have to resort to using it, but it will explain everything,’ Nevers said.

‘And how will it do that?’

‘I need a place where I can raise eidolons. Your friend the constable must know of somewhere like that. From what I understand, this world is basically one big haunted house.’

Karl Schweda drove Vic and Adam Nevers north along the riverbank. He wasn’t happy about it, even with Nevers handcuffed on the back seat, behind the wire screen of the cruiser.

‘We could be driving into an ambush.’

‘No one is following us. And he doesn’t know where you’re taking him.’

‘The people involved in that shootout had drones,’ Karl said.

‘You think he’s on their side?’

‘I know he is not on yours.’

Behind them, Nevers said, ‘I’m going to prove to Investigator Gayle that he needs my help.’

Five kilometres north of the town there were limestone cliffs along the edge of the river, where it had cut through stratified deposits that had formed at the bottom of an ancient, long-vanished sea. An Elder Culture had built tombs inside a deep shelf close to the river’s edge, where a friable seam had been eroded by rain and floodwater. Karl led Vic and Nevers to a narrow path that slanted down the face of the cliffs, said he’d keep watch, and handed Vic a walkie-talkie.

‘Any sign of trouble, I’ll give you a call,’ the constable said. ‘You had better come at once, because I will not wait.’

Vic had Nevers take the lead as they crabbed their way down the glassy thread of the path. Nevers favoured his left arm, but descended at a sprightly clip. Vic had trouble keeping up with him. Waves driven by the razor wind dashed on fallen rocks below; Vic felt horribly exposed, and kept his hand on his pistol.

The shelf was sheltered beneath an overhang and slanted down at the rear. The tombs were scattered along its length, small things like half-melted beehives constructed from some kind of dark glistening stone. Water seeping through the stone ceiling had created clusters of stalactites; water fell drop by drop into clear pools cupped in fringes of lime accretions, and had deposited irregular caps of bone-coloured lime on many of the tombs.

Vic, watching Nevers wander amongst the tombs and water pools, felt a shiver as a shadow detached from other shadows and drifted after the man.

There was a cluster of tombs in Petra that was haunted by eidolons. The Indian Burial Grounds. A park had been laid out around them and school parties visited, little kids learning about Elder Cultures, but Vic remembered that it had been a pretty damn frightening place when it had been first discovered, when no one knew what eidolons were, what they could do. A couple of women, one a psychologist in her former life, the other a librarian, had been amongst the first to try to communicate with them. Talking to them, showing them images on tablets, simple arithmetic and geometry. Nothing doing. The eidolons had a trophism for anything that disturbed their tombs — they’d follow a biochine as soon as follow a person — but they ignored every attempt to talk to them or snag their attention. It was like trying to talk back to a TV, the librarian had told Vic. Rachel Sweeting. They’d been sleeping together at the time, a brief fling, Vic’s second on Mangala. Back in the day, when their hold on the world seemed so tenuous that hardly anyone formed permanent relationships.

These were smaller than the eidolons in the Indian Burial Grounds, and there were a lot more of them. Twists of smoke wavering through the half-light like the ghosts of bats. Translucent projections from caches of quantum memory. Some briefly whirled around each other, like dancers in a waltz, before catching up with the others, gathering around Nevers, trailing after him as he walked back to Vic.

‘Don’t think you’re anything special,’ Vic said. ‘They’ll follow anyone.’

But he felt an edge of anticipation and alarm. He had never seen so many eidolons before.

Nevers took out a Ziploc bag and pulled out the twist of wire it contained and tossed it to the floor, stepping back as the eidolons spun around it like a pack of dogs disputing a morsel of food. The wire twisted and jiggled, one end drawing into a circle on the ground, a footing from which the other end rose like a snake, a metre of stiff wire that suddenly kindled a sharp blue incandescence that burned through the shadows whirling around it.

And something stood up. A man-shape rising out of shadow, faint and transparent, dressed in a black tracksuit and wearing sunglasses. Looking at Vic and saying, ‘Well now. Who’s this?’