It was a good plan, she had to admit. The easily moved towers were by far the quickest way to erect such a barricade. And yet their movement might also be the fatal flaw. “You’re assuming the subhumans can’t push the towers.”
“I am, yeah,” he said. His Australian accent was softer than Neil’s had been, but every now and then he said something that brought the late tycoon back to life in a way that Zane could not. “It beats a knife fight.”
Tania forced herself to swallow her concerns. It was unclear if the aura towers still did anything at all, but if there remained a purpose to them, the last thing she wanted to do was have the colonists return to find them scattered to who-knows-where. Yet Karl had to do something, and she could think of no better option. “Okay. Don’t waste any more time talking to me then. Report in when it’s done.”
“Cheers,” he said, and signed off.
She’d barely drawn her next breath when Tim shouted down from the pilot’s cabin. “Tania, you should see this!”
The hatch at the top of the ladder was still open, but she already had her excursion suit on and this one was nothing like the svelte model she’d worn last time. The one she’d worn to Colorado, and left in the mud at the base of Camp Exodus’s wall. “Tell us, Tim. We’re both suited and can’t come up.”
“Right, sorry.” His voice had a slight quiver to it. “Remember those pointy bits that stuck out from the bottom of the Key Ship?”
“What about them?” Skyler had thought they might be a weapon. Tania feared they were the nozzles of a massive engine.
“They’re gone.”
She blanched, and cursed whoever had built this tin can for not putting a vid screen down here. “Gone? As in retracted? Vanished?”
“Yes … Wait, No. Hang on.”
Seconds passed. Tania felt subtle changes in her weight. Tim must be turning the small ship to get a better view.
“Tania, where those towers were I now see Elevator threads. Hundreds of them, stretching down.”
She tried to absorb the ramifications of this and rammed into a mental stumbling block that went part and parcel with anything the Builders did: Why? Why so many in one place? Why put one in Darwin, one in Belem, then concentrate orders of magnitude more on a third site so late?
Perhaps the other two sites were just test locations, or outposts, in their eventual colonization of Earth. And this site represented what would become their hub. A capital city, or something like it.
“Skyler and Ana,” Vanessa said. Her voice shattered Tania’s mental picture like a rock through a window. “They’re down below, somewhere, aren’t they?”
Tania shook her head. “They should be in Darwin by now, or even on their way back to Belem.” She didn’t feel the need to correct her by adding Russell Blackfield’s name to the list.
“They should be, yes. But maybe not. And we can go check.”
“Hmm?”
Vanessa spread her hands. “Bring a climber over here and go down. They might need our help. They might … if they failed, we could still finish the mission.”
“We finish our task first,” Tania said, more stern than she’d intended. “After that, it’s worth preparing for, at least. Tim?”
He answered instantly. “I already asked them to prep a climber and send it over.”
“Good man.”
“Thanks. But Tania?”
“Yes?”
“The door is tucked in the middle of that maze of Elevator threads.”
She hadn’t considered that. On the first visit, Jenny had had the decency to position their craft directly over the hexagonal door before unleashing her betrayal. That maneuver would be impossible now. The graphene cords were thin to the point of being invisible, so piloting into that mess was out of the question. The threads were so strong that a solid impact would likely slice the vehicle in two without leaving so much as a scratch on the exotic material. Either that or the tiny ship would be flung back from the thing like an arrow off a bowstring. “Get us as close as you can,” Tania said. “We’ll wiggle through somehow.”
Another shift in weight as Tim corrected their course. Ten minutes passed, long enough for Tania to cycle twice through feelings of fear and resolve. The only thing that remained constant, through everything that had happened, was the doubt. She couldn’t shake the idea that all of this, the installation of these objects, amounted to the digging of one’s own grave. It made no sense to her, of course. Certainly there were much easier ways to wipe out a planet with minimal effort, so she concluded there must be some other purpose. She simply doubted that the purpose the Builders had in mind would be a desirable outcome for humanity.
“Patching Karl in,” Tim said.
Tania flipped her comm on. “Karl, I’m listening.”
“Bad news,” he said. He was practically shouting, the sounds of battle heavy in the background. “The towers refuse to move.”
“What?”
“They won’t budge, no matter what we try. Ammo is low—”
“Get out of there,” Tania said. “Leave now.”
“It’ll be eight hours before the next climber returns.” Somewhere near him a woman screamed.
“Karl, listen,” Tania said. “I didn’t want to say it before because I didn’t want to be wrong. I think the auras are gone.”
“Gone? Wait, you think?”
“I was in the Clear in Colorado, just like you when you first set foot in Belem. I had the headache, so I’m not immune. But then it stopped. It stopped right before the subhumans started this assault. I think SUBS has switched off, and the auras, too.”
“I … Tania, Christ. I think I get what you’re suggesting, but I don’t know.…”
She tried to fill her voice with a confidence she didn’t feel. “You can’t hold out there any longer, correct?”
“That’s an understatement.”
“And the subhumans only want to reach the Elevator. So let them. Move into the city and wait it out. Take the comm, and tomorrow or the next day we’ll coordinate a plan to retake the camp. Understood?”
“Okay. I read you,” came the stiff reply. “Signing off; it’s getting ugly down here.”
“Be safe,” Tania said even as the connection closed. She leaned back and shut her eyes, wondering when the time would come when all crises were behind them and some actual progress could be made. Years away, she suspected.
“Okay,” Tim said from above. “This is about as close as I’m willing to go. Nearest thread is ten meters away.”
“Nice flying,” Tania replied. “Seal your hatch; we’ll get our helmets on now.”
A second later Tim’s face appeared over the hatch. He motioned for Tania to come, as if he wanted to tell her a secret. His expression was strange. Not worried, but still somehow nervous. Tania glanced at Vanessa, who busily inspected the grooves of her helmet’s seal. Shrugging, Tania allowed herself to drift up to the hatch. “What is it?”
He leaned in to say something, and when Tania turned her ear toward him she felt his lips press against her cheek. The kiss was brief and warm and sent a tingle along her spine. “Come back in one piece, okay?” he said as he moved away.
“I … I’ll do that.” His action took her off guard. Belatedly, she added, “You’d better be here, waiting.”
“Count on it.”
Tania favored him with a smile and Tim responded in kind.
“Sealing the hatch,” the man said. He caught Tania’s eye one last time before the metal door closed with a deep twang. Tania waited for the small indicator light next to it to turn green, indicating a good seal. Then she drifted back down and helped Vanessa get her helmet on. For a few long minutes Tania felt a warmth on her cheek and a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. If Vanessa noticed, she said nothing.
The older, bulky spacesuits were not equipped with the fancy conveniences of the kind she’d worn on her previous visit.
Instead of a wrist-mounted thruster, Tania had to make do with a box-shaped device that hung from a strap on her forearm. It had a nozzle on the front, and a handle on either side, which meant two hands were needed to operate the thing. Easy enough when moving alone and unhindered, but Tania had both the alien object and Vanessa in tow. The immune was a quick learner, but she’d only spent a scant few hours in zero-g before they’d come over. Her movements were still too jerky, too abrupt, for her to be set loose in open space.
So Vanessa clutched the case containing the object with both arms and legs as if trying to merge with it. Tania couldn’t see her eyes through the reflective gold visor, but she suspected the woman had taken her advice and closed her eyes to ease the sense of vertigo. Per Tania’s instruction, Vanessa made no movements at all so as not to throw off Tania’s aim.
For her part, Tania decided not to attach herself to the case or her companion at all. To navigate she needed to be able to propel them in any direction, and that would be impossible if she was stuck on one side of the package. It was a risk to spacewalk without any kind of tether, but risk somehow felt normal to her now after Colorado. After everything, really.
So Tania put her back against the combined mass of Vanessa and the case, and pulsed her thruster just enough to push them all into the strange forest of Elevator threads at the pace of a slow walk.
The individual cords, illuminated by sunlight reflected off the blue and white marble below, looked like strands of spider silk. With each thread so impossibly thin, this gave the illusion of each being equidistant if she looked directly toward her destination. So Tania looked down instead. Nearer the planet the hundreds of cords blurred together into something like a single, dark column. From this perspective, individual strands closer to her would separate from that mass as she approached or passed by, making it possible—only just—to spot them in time to avoid an impact. The lamps mounted to either side of her helmet provided the second line of defense, drawing those portions of thread very close by with a different sheen than the rest.
Above her, a scant fifty meters away, loomed the underside of the Builder ship. Where before there had been hundreds of long “spikes,” as Skyler had called them, now there were shallow indents with irislike centers from which the Elevator cords emerged. Somewhere, a few hundred meters ahead, lay the hexagon door. Or so she hoped.
Despite this being her third visit, the size of the vessel still left her breathless. She could not imagine what purpose a ship of this size might serve, though she could venture a guess at the reason for such dimensions: storage. Storage for what, she had no idea, but Tania thought it a reasonable assumption that no space-faring species would bother to accelerate such mass between the stars unless they had a damn good reason.
A thread loomed directly ahead. Tania quickly, carefully, shifted herself to the right side of her combined cargo. She aimed the thruster, pulsed it for one second, then again when she felt the shift in trajectory might not be enough. Mentally she started counting seconds. The package now moving both forward and to the left, Tania gingerly climbed over to the opposite side, going underneath so as not to paw at poor Vanessa. Once the thread passed harmlessly on the right, Tania pulsed twice more to straighten their path. She stopped counting; eleven seconds. She pulsed twice again to send them back toward the original course, moved once more to the right, and after eleven seconds pulsed two final times. She felt the tingle of sweat along her spine when the maneuver finally ended.
“I felt that,” Vanessa said, her voice surprisingly even and calm in Tania’s ear.
“It’s a lot of work for one simple course correction.”
“I can only imagine.”
Tania found herself smiling. “Do you want me to talk you through it? Would that make it easier?”
“No. It’s hard not to look, and that would make me want to even more.”
“Okay.” Tania was about to say more, to try to strike up some trivial conversation, but another thread loomed. This one was off to one side but still appeared to be in their path. Tania moved to the left side again, then, at the last second, ducked underneath the case. The thread passed by harmlessly on the left, less than a meter away. She exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and forced herself to look down and forward again.
Six more corrections were needed, one of which left her stuck in a pocket of three cords that required a careful retreat. But finally, after an hour, she saw the hexagon door. At almost the same moment, the cords began to thin out, clearing the rest of her path.
“We’re here,” Tania said.
Around the hexagon door were five sigils, one each for the objects scattered across earth and their matching receptacles inside. Only three of the symbols were illuminated now, however: the oval with its wavy side, the cube with a notch on one edge, and the triangle with the missing tip that matched the object within the case Tania now pushed. Just like on her previous visits, as soon as the case was within range all but the matching symbol faded. With only the triangle lit, the door opened, revealing the long tunnel within.
“Tim? We’re going inside.”
“Copy that. Keep talking. I’m on pins and needles out here.”
“Will do,” Tania said. She turned the case so that Vanessa’s back pointed toward the door, which now looked like a gaping black pit. Then she tapped Vanessa’s shoulder. “You can open your eyes now. I need some help.”
Vanessa relaxed her grip and drifted a few centimeters off the surface of the case. Unlike Tania, she had a belt tying her to the object. “What do I do?”