Something Coming Through

39. Drive-Through McDonald’s

Mangala | 24 July

One by one they stepped out onto the surface of the planet: ordinary poured concrete, a bright yellow feathery weed caught in a crack, shivering in the chill breeze. The shuttle loomed above them, casting a vast shadow across container stacks and low buildings.

Chloe wondered if she should say something, some kind of small step/giant leap shit, but Henry was already leading Fahad to the far end of an aisle between two stacks, and she hurried after them. Her jacket turned red, then blue, then red again as she walked past different containers. A stocky man in a high-vis vest and a hard hat was waiting by a low-slung vehicle. John Cerdan, according to the ID badge clipped to his vest. Fahad hung back, saying he thought the contact was a woman; Cerdan said, ‘You mean the Doc? She waits outside. I take you to her, but you must do everything I tell you. For a start, put on these.’

They donned the vests and hard hats that he handed them, hung visitor badges strung on lanyards around their necks, and climbed into the vehicle. Cerdan drove at a good clip past row after row of containers, past a crane perched on four struts that each terminated in pairs of wheels with tyres taller than a man. Fahad wanted to know if their driver worked for Dr Morange?

‘I’m a friend of the Doc,’ Cerdan said. ‘And I don’t care who you are, or why you’re here. All I do is get you out while everyone enjoys the holiday.’

They drove across an expanse of bare concrete to a pole gate in the perimeter fence. Cerdan slowed the vehicle, raised a hand to a woman sitting in a glass booth, the pole jerked up, and they were outside.

Warehouses on one side of the road and a slope of scrub rising on the other, a distant glitter beyond the edge of the shuttle’s shadow that must be the city. Petra.

The electric cart drew up beside a filthy Subaru Outback parked on the shoulder of the road. A grey-haired woman climbed out and shook hands and exchanged a few words with Cerdan and cast a shrewd gaze over Chloe and Fahad, like a farmer assessing new stock.

‘The very definition of a motley crew,’ she said. She was in her fifties, with a broad face and small dark suspicious eyes, dressed in baggy blue jeans and a moth-eaten roll-neck sweater. ‘I am Hanna. Dr Hanna Babbel. Where is your equipment?’

‘You’re supposed to supply everything we need,’ Henry said.

‘We’ll see about that. I’ve had little warning and even less information. You better get in before someone wonders what we are up to.’

As she drove them away from the terminal, Hanna Babbel told Henry that she knew this was something to do with the Elder Culture sites she’d checked out, no more than that. ‘They tell me, my bosses on Earth, that you will explain.’

‘It’s in the nature of a treasure hunt,’ Henry said. He was riding in the passenger seat; Chloe and Fahad were on the bench seat behind. Fahad leaning forward, saying, ‘Are those fireworks?’

Clusters of coloured stars were flowering and fading in the dark blue sky above the city.

‘Landing Day nonsense,’ Hanna said dismissively. She was driving fast and erratically, square hands clamped on the wheel. Her fingernails were clipped short; the little finger on her left hand was missing. ‘An excuse for people to stop work and get drunk. So you are looking for some type of Elder Culture artefact, no doubt. Or perhaps you search for one of the so-called lost cities.’

‘Something like that,’ Henry said.

‘You need my help but you do not trust me with the truth.’

‘The truth is, we don’t really know what we’ll find,’ Henry said.

‘I see. What it is, I get two phone calls from Earth, first time in many weeks. The first tells me to look for excavation sites licensed by a company called Sky Edge Holdings. The second tells me to expect guests and give them any help they ask for. Even though I have my own work to do, and it is not the kind of work you can stop, just like that.’

Fahad looked at Chloe, eyebrows raised. As if to say, see what we get, instead of what we were promised?

Chloe asked Hanna Babbel about her work.

‘They didn’t tell me about you. So I suppose I should not be surprised they didn’t tell you about me.’

‘They said you are a biologist. They didn’t go into much detail, but I’m sure it must be interesting, working out here,’ Chloe said, trying to find a way to get past this woman’s bristling suspicion.

Hanna said, ‘I have been here for eleven years. I was part of the crew that Karyotech Pharma sent to study the biota. We were preparing an expedition to the southern hemisphere when the funding dries up and the others go home. I still collect plants and animals, samples of soil and rock, and send them back to Earth. What they do with it I do not know because they do not tell. And I have my own work, on biochines. Mangala has more kinds than anywhere else, at least three distinct clades.’

‘You also report on the work of the Prof’s rivals,’ Henry said. ‘You’re well paid for it. And you’ll be well paid for this, too. We need your help to find out where an artefact came from. You’ll help us get equipped, and if it comes to it you’ll ride along with us. So no more sob stories about your work being interrupted. Because this is your work, right now.’

‘I will of course do my best to help,’ Hanna said stiffly.

‘I know you will.’ Henry was pointing again. ‘What’s that? A McDonald’s?’

‘Yes. Drive-through. Very new.’

‘This place is a lot more civilised than I thought it would be,’ Henry said.

‘The city is,’ Hanna Babbel said. ‘Outside it, not so much.’

‘Here be dragons,’ Chloe said.

‘Things far stranger than dragons.’

They were driving through the city’s outskirts now, along an elevated four-lane highway. Hanna Babbel commented on places wheeling by. A shopping mall. ‘The biggest on the planet, for what it’s worth.’ Factories where electronics were assembled, where clothes and shoes were made.

‘We have thousands of new immigrants with every shuttle,’ Hanna said. ‘We have to find work for all of them. We also have a big problem with crime. Too many people who don’t want to work to earn a living come up here looking for a free ride. The Jackaroo imposed the lottery system on the UN, and we suffer the fallout. See that glass tower? That’s the UN building. The tallest in the city. Where our Lords and Masters live.’

It was twenty, twenty-five storeys high, standing above a clutter of roofs like a lighthouse above the sea. The city was mostly a low-rise sprawl, a little like the old part of Marrakesh, where Chloe and Dave had gone on their first and last holiday together. Yet amongst the mundane buildings were clusters of tree-like things, skinny stalks terminating in dark, fluffy puffballs, actual alien plants, and in the hazy distance a scalloped range of hills glowed in the level orange sunlight.

They left the ring road and drove past factory buildings, down a long street lined with bars and shops, cafés and small businesses. Lawyers, assayers, pawnshops, laboratories offering carbon dating, neutron bombardment, gas chromatography, MRI…A busy traffic of scooters and trucks and battered cars. People at a bus stop. A small cinema advertising a film that Chloe had seen last year.

Narrow streets spalled off on either side of this main drag, twisting around clusters of pitch-roofed shacks and compounds walled with roughly mortared concrete blocks or fenced with corrugated iron. Hanna lived in one of these compounds, at the end of a deeply rutted track. An electric gate topped with barbed wire rolled back to reveal a big square of red dirt, with a trailer home and a long wooden shed on one side, raised beds of vegetables and a polytunnel on the other, a cluster of cages at the far end. Angular things paced or sprawled inside the bars and wire mesh of the cages. Alien critters. Biochines.

Fahad walked towards them. Chloe went after him.

There were a couple of dozen of the things, rat-sized, cat-sized, wolf-sized. It was difficult not to see them as mutated versions of Earthly creatures. Weird giant insects. Clockwork armadillos. Some had six legs, some four. Some had armoured plates on their shoulders or hindquarters, shaped into articulated helmets around their heads. Clusters of tiny black eyes, mouths like sphincters, or complicated mouthparts that folded back to reveal drill-bit tongues, or combs armed with hooks and spines.

The biochines stirred as Fahad approached. Whining and chittering and squealing. Cheap horror-film sound effects. A tall skinny armoured thing a little like a giant praying mantis reared against the bars of its cage, screeching like a saw cutting metal, clawed forelimbs raking the air.

Fahad turned to Chloe. ‘I can feel him! I can feel him trying to speak to them!’

Chloe felt a touch of Fahad’s excitement. It was the first time that Ugly Chicken had manifested itself since they’d climbed into the shipping container. ‘What does he want?’

Fahad looked at the mantis thing. It was thrusting its tiny head back and forth between the bars. A thick yellow froth dripped from squirming mouthparts. ‘I don’t know…’

Now Henry Harris and Hanna Babbel bustled up, the biologist telling them to leave her biochines alone, grabbing Fahad’s arm when he didn’t move, saying, ‘Can’t you see you’re upsetting them?’

Fahad tried and failed to get free. His face was flushed with anger and excitement. ‘Let me go! This is important!’

Chloe said, ‘Fahad is carrying an artefact with an embedded eidolon. It wants to talk to your monsters.’

‘They are biochines, not monsters,’ Hanna said. ‘And they are mine. Whatever you are doing, it is hurting them.’

‘She’s right,’ Henry said. ‘Fahad, you’ve proved your point, whatever it is. Now let’s get something to eat, and we can all introduce ourselves properly.’

They sat around a roughly carpentered picnic table. Hanna dished up a couple of frozen pizzas carelessly heated in a microwave, cheese half-melted, crusts spongy and damp. Chloe picked at her food, feeling as though she had jumped out of a plane and hadn’t yet pulled on the ripcord of her chute and didn’t know if she could trust it.

She kept noticing odd details. A scatter of fossil-bearing stones set into the rough plaster of the compound’s wall. A skinny spar of what looked like translucent half-melted plastic standing in the middle of the vegetable garden. A tall, sharply pointed cone of polished black rock planted near the door of the long shed like an old-fashioned rocket ship ready for take-off. Clumps of yellow feathers stuck here and there in the red dirt.

Fahad told Hanna about Rana’s bead and Ugly Chicken, showed her some of his pictures. He didn’t tell her about his father.

‘They are not common, beads like that,’ Hanna said. ‘But they aren’t especially rare, either. I never knew of one harbouring an eidolon before, but why not?’

‘It sort of talks to me,’ Fahad said, ever-so-casually. ‘And it was trying to talk to those things. Your animals.’

‘Since they reacted to it, I must suppose it is real,’ Hanna said. ‘So. You think it makes you draw the place where it was found, and you come all this way to look around. I have heard crazier things, but not many.’

‘We need to get to one of those sites you researched, as soon as possible,’ Henry said. ‘Site 326, in Idunn’s Valley.’

He pulled up the map on his tablet. Hanna studied it and said that it would not be a difficult trip; at least, in theory.

‘It is about a thousand kilometres from here, and the roads are mostly good. As far as Winnetou, anyway. After that you will have to travel on the river, or hire a small plane. But there are some problems you must consider,’ she said, with the gloomy relish of someone who loves to impart bad news. ‘First, it will soon be night. Thirty-one days of night. Second, a big dust storm is about to roll over the area. And a little after that, it rolls over the city.’

‘And you didn’t bother to tell anyone about that until now?’

‘As I have said, no one told me why you are coming,’ Hanna said. ‘You want to do what you need to do, you must get out there quick. Soon, nothing will be moving.’

Chloe said, ‘How long will it last?’

‘The storm? Who can say? People already strip the supermarkets here, thinking it might be like the Big Blow that hit in the second year. That one lasted three months. And if you get in trouble in the middle of it, out there in the back country, no one will come to help you.’

‘I don’t know about anyone else, but I want to get this thing done and go home,’ Henry said.

‘If we wait in the city until it blows over, we can plan and prepare properly,’ Fahad said. ‘We could even look for the people my father worked for—’

‘And if we hang around here the bad guys could find out about us. Or get there ahead of us. We want to find this thing, and they do too. No,’ Henry said, ‘we’ll go as soon and as fast as possible.’

‘I will help you buy what you need,’ Hanna said. ‘But that is all. It is crazy to go out into the storm, and I have work here.’

‘The Prof wants you to help, so you’re in,’ Henry said.

Hanna was good at the slow-burn silences and imperious stares of someone who believes that she lives in a world where everyone else is slightly retarded. She aimed that stare now at Henry’s stone face.

He said, ‘I work for the Prof and so do you. You do what I tell you to do, or the UN and the local police will find out about your little fossil-smuggling enterprise. The guy at the yard, Cerdan, he’s your contact, isn’t he? Loads your stuff on the sly so you don’t have to pay Customs, or inspection taxes. Oh, don’t pretend to be surprised. Of course we know about it.’

‘I need the money for my research,’ Hanna said. ‘The Prof, she does not pay me enough.’

‘She pays you plenty. And she’ll pay for whatever we need, which you’ll get to keep when this is over. Meanwhile, why don’t we work up a list of what we need, what you already have and what we need to buy?’