Something Coming Through

49. Downriver

Mangala | 28–29 July

‘No need to thank me for dealing with the man who killed your friend,’ the tall man with the ponytail, Danny Drury, told Chloe. ‘Billy had it coming. He had an attitude. Thought that because he’d been in the Paras he knew better than his boss. If you don’t make the same mistake, we’ll get along fine. Okay?’

Chloe stupidly nodded. She was the numb centre of a ringing calm.

‘Okay,’ Drury said, and spoke into a walkie-talkie, telling someone that he had secured the woman but that the man, Harris, was dead. ‘Billy bought it too.’

The voice crackling out of the walkie-talkie said something about not finding McBride.

‘Come on back,’ Drury said. ‘There’s some tidying-up to do.’

He handed Chloe goggles and a mask. After she’d fitted them over her eyes and mouth he fastened her wrists with a cable tie and with an oddly delicate courtesy helped her climb onto the bench seat of his speedboat.

‘As long as you don’t give me a reason to shoot you, we’ll get along fine,’ he said.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Chloe said.

‘I think you know where.’

A Range Rover roared up; four men tumbled out. While they carried the bodies of Billy and Henry away, Drury spoke with the driver, a bearded man with a piratical eyepatch. The men came back and two climbed into the Range Rover; it executed a three-point turn and sped away.

Drury went off through the stand of lightning trees. One of the men who’d stayed behind inspected Chloe with a cold direct stare; the other pulled down his face mask and lit a cigarette and said something that made them both laugh. They wore red quilted jackets and desert camo pants, were armed with small sub-machine guns with blunt barrels, slung carelessly over their shoulders. Chloe looked away. That jolt of alarm when a crew of big noisy young men came barrelling up onto the top deck of the night bus: it was nothing to what she felt now. Shock had numbed her to the bone and one of her shoes had filled with water when she had climbed into the boat. A fine spray of Henry’s blood dotted her hands.

There was a flash of blue light beyond the trees; Drury came back at a run. He told one of the men to give him his sub-machine gun and a spare clip, and walked over to the other boats, two aluminium-hulled skiffs with big outboard engines. Gunfire hammered holes low in the hull of the nearest, the hard percussion echoing out across the river, and Drury pulled out the empty clip and jammed in the spare and shot up the second skiff. He tossed the sub-machine gun back to its owner and the three men crowded into the speedboat.

As they swerved out into the brown flood, heading downriver, Chloe turned to watch the funeral pyres of the burning RVs as they dwindled and faded into the murk. Thinking of Henry, trying to formulate a prayer or a promise. He had children somewhere, she thought, and remembered the empty coffin at her mother’s funeral and vowed that she’d make sure that he went home. If she survived this she’d make sure he went home.

The speedboat slammed down the middle of the wide cold river, following its lazy loops through stony land hazed by dust. It was way past midnight. Chloe hunched in a corner of the bench seat she shared with Drury, remembering the trip down the Thames from Freedom Tower after the Jackaroo avatar had been assassinated. An age ago. Another world.

Drury and the two men up front said little to each other and completely ignored Chloe. Which was fine by her. Drury was a rival of McBride’s, but he was no friend of hers. He had kidnapped Fahad. He had shot the man who had shot Henry. Shot him to see how the ray gun worked, what it did. Shot him because he could. And she was absolutely certain that if she and Fahad couldn’t give him what he wanted he’d kill them. He’d probably kill them anyway. So she had to stay alert. Be ready to take any chance she could.

She fell asleep, woke as the boat nosed towards a gravel beach. The men cranked up a camping stove and boiled a pot of coffee. Drury handed her an aluminium mug and she held it between her bound hands and sipped while he fired up a chunky tactical radio with a whip aerial and a telephone handset. Telling the person at the other end that he couldn’t hear one fucking word in three. Saying, ‘He did what? Inside?’ Looking at Chloe and slinging the radio’s strap over his shoulder and walking off down the beach, talking at length out of earshot, coming back and telling her, ‘Things are moving along nicely.’

She needed to pee. Another humiliation. Drury opened a folding knife and asked her if she was going to be good, shrugged when she didn’t answer and cut the cable ties at her wrists.

‘Run a hundred kilometres in any direction, there’s nothing but river and rocks,’ he said.

One of the men gave her a roll of toilet paper; she squatted behind a clump of grey wirewool, pretending that her captors weren’t in earshot.

Drury insisted on tying her wrists when she came back. She was given a sleeping bag and lay amongst the others on the hard cold ground, trying not to see Henry dropping down after he’d been shot, nothing like the way it was in films, trying not to see the bubble of blood rising between his lips. She woke to the same dull light and the same cold wind. Her captors fried up bacon and eggs; she ate a leathery fried egg between two slices of spongy sliced white bread and washed it down with tea. The men pissed into the river; she went behind the clump of wirewool again.

Drury didn’t bother to retie Chloe’s wrists, this time. She followed him into the speedboat and they set off again. After a couple of hours they passed through a shoal of sandbanks. The largest were crested with what she supposed was vegetation. Shocks of blood-red filaments; stiff tangles of jointed, semi-translucent tubes; heaps of blue-green bubbles quivering in the cold wind; low stacks of stiff plates that glistened like wet leather. Monocultures of different plants from different biological clades passing by like exhibits in a botanical garden or special effects in a movie.

The goggles fastened over her eyes slightly distanced her from the world. Cold wind blew into her face. Dust scratched at the rim of her mask, settled in her hair and the creases of her clothes. She jammed her hands between her knees for warmth.

Things like bundles of knotted rope slid from a sandbank and lashed away into deeper water. More special effects. Then the speedboat cut past the last of the sandbanks and there was only the river again.

Lunch was a cheese and tomato sandwich and a bottle of water.

They were running close to the bank of the river now. Passing cliffs of banded sandstone, fluted and rounded into fantastic shapes by erosion. An arch stepped out into the flow of the river like a bridge; the speedboat steered around the far side and the river bent and there were fleets of small islands again, with blunt prows upstream and long tails of gravel downstream. Several were crowned with skinny towers clad in what looked like pitted porcelain. The wind keened and fluted around them as they spun by.

Chloe asked Drury if they were Elder Culture ruins; Drury said he had no idea.

‘My expert in this alien shit told me they could be ruins or they could be nests. The kind wasps or termites make.’

A couple of hours later, Drury took out his radio and fiddled with it, talked briefly to someone, then leaned forward and told the two men in front that everything was good.

The dust haze thickened, blew aside to reveal a cliff or bluff of red rock bulging over the river, sloping down run-outs of rubble, and a rocky shore. There was something funny about the sky, a pearly gleam or shine like the reflected glow of spotlights.

The speedboat throttled back and turned, puttering into a sleeve of water pinched between tilted shelves of rock. The motor cut. The speedboat drifted past a small motor cruiser, grounded on a steep fan of pebbles.

The men stirred around Chloe. One of them helped her climb over the side of the speedboat and she followed them, splashing through icy ankle-deep water to the shore. Drury took her arm and steered her up a slope, pebbles rolling and turning underfoot, to its crest.

She stopped, gripped by freezing déjà vu.

There it was, unambiguous, absolute. The original of Michel Charpentier’s 3D model; the landscape of Fahad’s pictures. A bare bleak flatland, red stone and sand. A cluster of flat-topped mounds. Low cliffs ribboning away into the tawny haze towards the ghostly outline of rounded hills. All this sitting under a kind of dome or cap woven from faintly flickering light the colour of the inside of an oyster shell.

Drury was pointing towards one of the mounds. ‘Your little friend says there’s something in there.’

‘Fahad is here? I thought he was with you.’

‘That’s what I wanted McBride to think. No, I sent your little friend on ahead a couple of days ago. He says that he’s found something. And you’re going to tell me if he’s right.’

Drury dismissed the two men and led Chloe across a stretch of stony ground. Flat black stones like gravemarkers were embedded here and there, half-buried by sand and dust. Elder Culture stuff. Chloe didn’t like to look at them too closely. They had a faint but distinct aura, like radioactive openings into some other, utterly hostile dimension.

Several tents were pitched behind a half-buried shelf of ordinary sandstone, shivering in the rip of the wind. Drury unzipped a flap in the largest and Chloe followed him into a blue space with three sleeping compartments down one side. A man in a canvas director’s chair looked up from the tablet in his lap; a big, shaven-headed man in a red quilted jacket, squatting on his heels near a space heater, stood up.

Drury and his two men pulled down their masks and stripped off their goggles; Chloe followed their example. They made a crowd under the slanting membrane of the tent’s roof. The air was warm and stale. There was a strong sharp tingling odour, like the taste of a battery on her tongue.

‘I thought there were two of them,’ the man with the tablet said.

He wore a baseball cap pulled low, blue jeans, a black leather jacket. Amusement flickered in his sharp gaze.

‘Her boyfriend had an accident,’ Drury said. ‘What’s cooking, Tommy? Give me some good news.’

‘We extended an exploratory tunnel into that mound the kid fell in love with. Found a void he got very excited about. It seems pretty much intact, but empty. No activity, as far as I can tell.’

‘As far as you can tell. What about the kid?’

‘He’s out there now. You can’t keep him away. Luke is looking after him; Riley and Logan are patrolling the perimeter; Niles and Patrice are making the tunnel safe. We had a roof fall. The mudstone is as friable as old cat shit.’

‘And you’re doing what? Apart from sitting on your arse in this cosy tent.’

‘Keeping an eye on the general situation,’ Tommy said. ‘The magnetic anomalies are stable, but something’s definitely coming online. You saw the light effects. Plus this fucking dust is getting thicker.’

‘The edge of the storm?’

‘That’s still maybe fifty or sixty kilometres away,’ Tommy said. ‘Call this a local intensification of pre-existing conditions.’

‘There have been more critters checking in,’ the shaven-headed man said. He had a tattoo of two praying hands on his neck, Believe written across them in cursive script. ‘We took down a bunch this morning. Like turkeys in a shooting gallery.’

‘Something’s bringing them here,’ Tommy said. ‘The lights, maybe.’

‘Some actual hard facts would be good,’ Drury said.

‘About this weird shit? I’m just a humble archaeologist. I don’t do weird shit.’

‘Everything you dig up on this planet is weird shit.’ Drury held out his hand; Tommy gave him the tablet. Drury flicked through images, now and then showing one to Tommy and asking him what it was or what it meant. None of Tommy’s answers seemed to satisfy him; at last Drury held the tablet towards Chloe. ‘See this?’

Some kind of map: different shades of greens, white contour lines. After a moment, she realised that the contours were the mounds.

‘Magnetic anomalies,’ Drury said. ‘Remnants of some kind of machinery under the mounds. Spaceships, maybe, if this really is a space port. If the kid really is telling the truth.’

‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you?’ Tommy said to Chloe. ‘The kid’s familiar. Ugly Chicken.’

‘It’s real,’ Chloe said.

‘I don’t doubt that, given what’s been going on here. What does it look like?’

‘Like your worst nightmare. I hope you get to see it soon.’

Tommy smiled, looked at Drury. ‘Love the attitude. Do I get to keep her, afterwards?’

‘We’ll talk about after when there’s an after.’ Drury pointed at the shaven-headed man. ‘Take me to this mound. Chloe, you come too. You can tell me if it feels right.’

He seemed calmer, almost happy. Chloe felt a small measure of relief. As long as he was happy, she thought, he wouldn’t do anything bad. And thought then that she was beginning to get a touch of Stockholm syndrome, sympathy for the people who had kidnapped her and would almost certainly kill her when they didn’t have any more use for her. She had to remember that. She had to make herself valuable. Play this out any way she could.

Out in the whip of the wind and dust, trying to keep up with Drury and the shaven-headed man as they strode across the uneven ground to the nearest mound. A narrow trench three metres deep had been dug halfway around its circumference, exposing a close-woven lattice. She felt another dizzy wash of déjà vu. Remembering the mural in the nun’s chapel. The basket-weave struts of the spire, and something indistinct crawling through or over them…

Drury was saying something about broken towers. He was shouting through his mask, shouting to be heard over the whine of the wind, telling her that the river had flooded the area many times, depositing alluvial material and burying the towers that had stood here.

‘Tommy surveyed it when we first came out,’ he said. ‘Those magnetic anomalies I showed you weren’t there then. Something somewhere has been switched on. Something is waking up.’

‘I think I can feel it,’ Chloe said, although she couldn’t. But if Drury thought she was some kind of clairvoyant or human dowsing rod, channelling alien energy patterns, she might be able to win a little wriggle room.

‘Yeah…?’ He was staring at her through the goggles of his mask.

She said, ‘When I first met Fahad, I felt as if someone else was there. This is like that, only much stronger.’

‘You mean this Ugly Chicken.’

‘Maybe.’

She was glad she was wearing the goggles and mask; she’d always been hopeless at lying.

Drury studied her, then said, ‘Come with me,’ and he was off again, striding towards the neighbouring mound.

There was another trench, with a generator standing at its edge and air hoses snaking into the maw of a low tunnel. The noise of jackhammers came out from it. Two men stood in the lee of a solitary boulder, both wearing red quilted jackets. Drury must have bought a job lot. One of the men was burly, a rifle slung at his shoulder; the other was slender and unarmed. With a jolt, Chloe realised that it was Fahad. While Drury talked to the burly man, she told Fahad how glad she was to see him, asked him how he was.

‘We found it! The black room! We found it, and he’s in there now.’

‘Ugly Chicken? What is he doing, Fahad? Is he talking to you?’

‘They took the bead from me. Rana’s bead.’ Fahad was happy and excited. Talking quickly, jiggling from foot to foot. ‘But it doesn’t matter. He isn’t in it any more. He’s in the black room. He’s inside the system. He’s fixing things so he can go home.’

‘I thought this was his home.’

Fahad looked at her, eyes dark and serious behind his dusty goggles. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘What’s he doing, Fahad? What are you doing?’

‘It will be wonderful. You’ll see.’

‘I mean, what are you doing, helping these men?’

‘As if I have a choice. As if we have a choice.’

‘Did Drury hurt you?’

‘No, no. He was very kind. He told me about McBride, my father…’ Fahad paused, then said, ‘Mr Harris. He is here too?’

‘He’s dead, Fahad. Shot and killed by one of Drury’s men.’

The words tasted like old coins on her tongue.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fahad said. ‘Truly. But I’m glad you’re here. I want you to see.’

For a moment, Chloe thought he was going to explain everything, but then he looked past her and she turned, saw Drury coming towards them. She stepped forward and hugged Fahad, said quietly, ‘Drury killed your father. If he told you any different he was lying.’

‘He said you’d say that,’ Fahad said, and disengaged himself.

Drury’s hand fell on Chloe’s shoulder. ‘You can come with me,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe to leave the two of you together.’