Something Coming Through

48. Downriver

Mangala | 30 July

The plane was a sturdy banana-yellow four-seater with blunt wings cantilevered above its cabin. It flew low, bouncing in sudden air pockets, rising and dipping alarmingly but always pressing on against the buffeting headwind, its prop burring like an angry hairdryer.

The pilot, a young Italian guy dressed like a WW2 air ace in a leather jacket with a fleece collar, said it was hairy weather and getting worse. ‘Part of the storm must have pushed ahead of the rest.’

‘But you can fly in it. You can get us there,’ Vic said. He was strapped in beside the pilot; Nevers was on the bench seat behind, crammed in amongst camping equipment that Vic hoped they wouldn’t need.

‘I can get you there, no problem,’ the pilot said. ‘But maybe I can’t wait around as long as you’d like.’

The plane followed the river as it ribboned across the red and grey landscape. The pilot navigated by landmarks, now and then consulting a map displayed on the tablet on his knees. The horizon all around was obscured by a deep ochre haze in which fugitive whips of light flickered. Static discharges, according to the pilot.

‘Fucks up the instrumentation, but as long as we can see the river we’ll be fine.’

Vic wished that he could share the young man’s optimism. He was heading into the unknown, looking for who knew what, in the company of someone he couldn’t trust. It was some kind of plan, but definitely not the kind he’d imagined.

At last the plane flew over a curved range of hills and dropped towards a wide basin floored with a chaotic terrain of broken blocks and narrow canyons: an ancient impact crater bisected by the course of the river. The pilot pointed down, jabbing his forefinger three times for emphasis, said they were going in.

‘Where do we land?’

‘On hills on the far side. Don’t worry. We use the headwind to brake us.’

Vic’s stomach airily lifted as the plane bucked in conflicting currents of air. A range of hills resolved out of the haze, barren slopes suddenly looming in the windscreen. The plane’s nose pitched up and the prop roared and with a sudden bang they were down, rolling uphill towards a crest, crunching over stones and turning sideways, lurching to a halt.

The engine cut off and the blurred disc of the prop resolved into three spinning blades, stopped. In the quiet cabin, Vic could hear his heartbeat and the whine of wind outside. Behind him, Nevers said calmly, ‘Not bad.’

They unloaded quickly, wearing goggles and face masks because of the dust, hunched in the chilly gale. The heavy roll of the inflatable boat, a tent, food and water. It made a small mound that they covered with a ground sheet, pegging its flapping margins firmly into the hard dry ground.

‘How long can you wait?’ Vic asked the pilot. ‘A day? Two?’

‘Not even a day, in this,’ the pilot said. He shook hands with Vic like an executioner measuring him for the drop, Vic slung the rifle he’d borrowed from Karl Schweda over one shoulder and his kitbag over the other, and he and Nevers set off.

They descended into a long draw and crossed a dry stream bed and climbed the slope beyond. The bleary unsleeping eye of the sun was fixed at the horizon, cold and red and huge in the dun sky. Jagged black tufts bent in the wuthering wind. The abrasive hiss of dust. The slope topped out and they started across a rough tableland. Irregular slabs of rock set in drifts of sand; dry gulches packed with leathery vegetation. They cut around the smaller gulches, scrambled down into the larger ones and climbed back up. Navigating by the fixed point of the sun because they had lost sight of the river.

Vic was sweating under his layers of clothing, couldn’t quite get his breath inside the mask clamped over his mouth and nose. Grit chafed his elbows and knees. He stopped every so often to swap the strap of his heavy kitbag from one shoulder to the other, wiped dust from his goggles. He was definitely out of condition. Too old for this Boy Scout shit.

Nevers waited patiently each time Vic halted, calmly scanning the empty landscape that faded into reddish-brown haze in every direction. He had jammed his left hand in the pocket of his jacket, which gave him a slight list as he walked, but otherwise he seemed unencumbered by his gunshot wound.

Vic looked all around too. He had the uneasy feeling that someone was following them, just out of sight.

They passed through a field of stacks of flat rocks piled higher than a man, like figures in some long-abandoned game. The feeling of being followed grew stronger. Once Vic thought he saw something flicker at the edge of his vision and spun around and walked backwards for a few paces, seeing only rock stacks fading into the diesel haze.

They climbed into a gulch too big to navigate around, pushing through presses of stiff leathery vegetation, splashing through a trickle of water at the bottom, scaled the other side. Vic hauled himself up using the vegetation as handholds. His arms and legs ached. The strap of the kitbag cut into his shoulder and its weight unbalanced him; once he fell to his knees and stayed there, helpless with fatigue, until Nevers came back and hauled him to his feet.

There was a short string of Boxbuilder ruins at the top of the slope. Vic unhitched the kitbag and flopped down on a flat stone in their lee, unable to do anything but breathe.

Nevers stood a little way off, looking towards a faint smudged glow at the horizon. After a little while he came over and squatted beside Vic and asked him what he thought the weird light was.

‘The pilot said it was some kind of static discharge.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Is your friend telling you different?’

‘I don’t have a spooky connection with him, if that’s what you’re thinking. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Right. Powered by eidolons.’

‘I believe he’ll find plenty of those where we’re heading.’

‘He’d better. Because if there’s any trouble, he’ll have to do most of the heavy lifting. I haven’t ever fired a gun in anger, not even back in the good old Wild West days.’

‘My friend is ready to help in any way he can,’ Nevers said. ‘As am I.’

The cold of the stone was seeping into Vic’s behind, but he was too tired to care. He could sit here and let Nevers and the Jackaroo avatar do their thing. Whatever it was. Nothing good, that was for sure. Vic had confiscated the wire that generated the avatar and zipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket, and he was pretty sure that it had something to do with the feeling that something was following them. He was in control right now, but his rifle and pistol wouldn’t do much good against an alien ghost, and he suspected that Nevers would do anything to stop the bad guys getting hold of whatever it was they were hunting, and that he’d take Vic down too, if it came to it.

‘Don’t forget that we’re here only to collect evidence,’ Vic said. ‘We sneak in and we see what’s what and document it and we get out. That’s it. We can deal with the bad guys later.’

That was what he’d told Nevers before they’d set out, but even he didn’t really believe it now. Truth was, he’d never really believed it.

Nevers shook a couple of tablets into his palm and dry-swallowed them.

Vic said, ‘Is your arm giving you trouble?’

‘It’s fine. Why don’t you let me carry that kitbag for a while? We can’t have far to go now.’

‘I can manage. Well, maybe I need a hand to get to my feet…’

They went on. Nevers was keyed up, getting ahead of Vic and waiting impatiently for him to catch up. Vic plodded on, remembering how light he’d felt when he’d first arrived. He had long ago grown accustomed to Mangala’s gravity, but Nevers had an eager bounce in his step. It made Vic uneasy.

They passed through another regiment of stacked stones, some in close clusters, others spaced in long lines. Vic’s feeling that he was being stalked returned; when a shadow appeared in the haze, off to the left, a bolt of panic snapped through him and he stupidly unslung his rifle. He stood his ground as the shape grew larger and more distinct: a low-slung biochine the size of a large dog stumping along on three pairs of legs, a stiff spiky tail stuck out behind. It was mostly yellow, blotched with triangles of deep orange and rust.

Vic tracked it with his rifle as it went past and vanished into the haze.

‘An actual alien beast,’ Nevers said. The bastard sounded delighted.

‘They’re mostly harmless,’ Vic said, although he wasn’t sure what kind of biochine it was. Nothing he’d seen before, but he was a long way from home…

He slung his rifle on his shoulder and they walked on. Hazy glimpses of more biochines moving through the murk. Disturbed by the oncoming storm perhaps, except they seemed to be headed into it, moving in the same direction as Vic and Nevers, towards the smudge of skyglow. Once, a swarm of rat-sized things chittered past on long angular legs, scrambling over rocks, gone before Vic had properly registered their presence.

And then Nevers suddenly stopped and crouched down. Vic plodded up to him, discovered the abrupt edge of a low cliff that curved away on either side as if some giant had taken a bite from the land. Another impact crater, maybe.

The cliffs were footed in fans of fallen rocks. Beyond, level ground stretched into the haze beneath silky ribbons of frozen light. Vic scanned the scene with his field glasses. The dim shapes of a couple of flat-topped mounds. A biochine as big as a car trundling towards them. The rocky margin of the river, and there, yes, a cluster of tents. Vanishing as a scud of dust blew past, reappearing. Orange and blue in the sere landscape.

A flicker of movement off to his left: three bright red spiny footballs rolled over the edge and fell to the rocks below.

‘Something is drawing those things here,’ Nevers said.

‘I see tents, but I can’t see any people. Then again, I can hardly see anything in this shit.’

‘If we aren’t going to move closer, perhaps my friend can find out something.’

‘We’ll try something else first,’ Vic said, and unbuckled the kitbag and drew out an aluminium case and snapped it open.

The quadcopter nested in black foam padding was the shape of a flying saucer and the size of a dinner plate, with four fans caged beneath it and a pair of stereoscopic cameras in a fixed housing. Vic unpacked the joystick control and tablet display and switched on the little machine. It rose up, hovering at eye level and transmitting an image of himself and Nevers to the tablet in his lap.

‘I need you to spot for me,’ Vic said, and handed Nevers his pair of binoculars. ‘Guide me in towards those tents, out at about eleven o’clock. Tell me if I get too low to the ground or too close to some rock.’

He rubbed his hands together, took a breath, and sent the little quadcopter out above the edge of the cliff. An updraught caught it and knocked it sideways; it tilted and spun before its autogyro routine kicked in and stabilised it.

‘Try not to fly it into the ground,’ Nevers said.

‘Just point me at those tents,’ Vic said. ‘I’ll do the rest.’

He flew high at first, yo-yoing in the gusty wind, views of the ground pitching and spinning on the screen, half the time showing only sky. It was a lot harder than he remembered, back when he’d used drones to stake out drug corners. Beside him, Nevers gave terse instructions, and at last the orange and blue blooms of the tents appeared on the tablet’s screen.

Vic painstakingly edged the drone towards them.

‘No sign of anyone at home,’ he said, after a couple of minutes spent trawling about.

‘You might want to head to the left,’ Nevers said. ‘I thought I saw some activity around one of those mounds.’

Vic kicked the drone higher and spun it around, saw what Nevers meant.

Things were stalking and crawling and humping around the perimeter of the mound as if on patrol. Things were standing here and there like sentries — Vic was reminded of a documentary he’d seen about meerkats, although these dark spiky sentries were in no way cute. He saw a shallow trench and guided the quadcopter towards it, saw a small opening in the side of the mound.

‘Looks like someone has been busy,’ he said.

‘Perhaps the bad guys are trapped inside,’ Nevers said. ‘Can you get the drone any closer?’

‘I don’t want to get too low, in case one of those biochines takes a swipe at it,’ Vic said.

And someone else said, ‘You can stop wanking around with that toy, lads. Time to get real.’

Vic rolled over and sat up. Three men stood there. Two were aiming rifles at him and Nevers. The third was Cal McBride.