Martyr E-Book

B. K. Evenson

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 501

Beschreibung

We have seen the future. A universe cursed with life after death. It all started deep beneath the Yucatan peninsula, where an archaeological discovery took us into a new age, bringing us face-to-face with our origins and destiny...

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part One: Puerto Chicxulub

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Part Two: Confined Spaces

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Part Three: The Noose Tightens

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

Part Four: The Descent

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

Part Five: Collapse

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

Part Six: Hell Unleashed

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

Part Seven: The End Of The World

62

63

64

65

Epilogue

2

3

Acknowledgments

MARTYR

B.K. EVENSON

TITAN BOOKS

Dead Space™: Martyr

Print Edition ISBN: 9780857681751

E-book Edition ISBN: 9780857686565

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group

144 Southwark Street

London

SE1 0UP

First Edition January 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2011 by Electronic Arts, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

www.deadspacegame.com

Design by Greg Collins.

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Not for sale in the United States, its territories and dependencies, the Republic of the Philippines and Canada.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc.

The creature charged and he dived out of the way. It slammed into the side of the circular chamber with a loud crunch, the wall panel buckling. He pulled himself up, aching all over, and limped to the other side of the chamber.

It was twice the size of a man. It moved forward by swinging from its spiky, chitinous arms to its feet and back again, with incredible speed.

He watched as it turned around, oriented itself, and then charged again, the floor shaking.

He waited until the last possible second and then leapt again, his arm torn open this time by one of its spikes. The creature bellowed in rage or frustration, turning all about, trying to locate him. By the time it finally did, he was on the opposite side of the chamber, as far away from it as he could get.

Okay, he thought, gripping his injured arm, now it’s my turn.

It charged him again. This time, instead of throwing himself sideways, he dived between its arms, sliding under it and up against its soft abdomen. He pulled his knife out and slit across its dead flesh, tearing it open as much as he could, then scrambled quickly up and away, stumbling across the room.

Before he got far, it caught him by the foot and swung him like a doll and let go. He smashed into the wall, hard. He tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. He had felt the air rush out of him when he hit the wall, but it was more than that. Perhaps his back was broken.

He expected the creature to charge again, but it didn’t. Instead, it approached him leisurely, almost curiously. He watched it approach, and his fear began to build.

The grotesque creature loomed over him. It struck him once, brutally, knocking him back against the wall. For a moment he thought he might pass out, but suddenly the room took on an intensity and crispness that it hadn’t had before.

The creature lifted him up in the air, gave again its bellowing call. It shook him violently before bringing his head into its maw.

A moment later it tore his body in half. A moment after that he was dead.

PUERTO CHICXULUB

1

Chava woke up earlier than usual that day, just before the sun rose. His mother and sister were still asleep. His father was gone, traveling again. When the boy asked him where he went, he was always evasive, and Chava had learned not to ask further. He took a ladleful of water from the bucket and drank it, careful not to wake his sister. He poured another into the basin and washed his face and hands and arms before quietly slopping the rest onto the dirt floor.

He was still sleepy. He watched his sister move restlessly, giving a little moan. Why had he woken up early? He had been in the middle of a frightening dream. There was something chasing him. A strange, stumbling creature, something that moved in lurches and starts, something that seemed at once alive and dead. He shook his head, wondering how something could be both alive and dead.

He slipped into his clothes and left the shack, careful to stop the piece of aluminum that served as a makeshift door from clacking behind him. Outside, he could smell the salt in the air, could see, a few hundred meters away, the slate gray waves. The tide was out, the waves gentle now, hard to hear from this distance.

Something lingered in his head, a noise, a strange sound: a whispering. It was saying words but in a language he couldn’t understand, so softly that he couldn’t even tell where one word stopped and another started. He tried to force the sound out, but though it receded, it didn’t go away. It just hid itself somewhere deep in the back of his skull, nagging at him.

His dream rushed forward to fill the space. The creature had been large, just a little bigger than a man. He was watching it from behind. In the dream, at first he had thought it was a man, but when it turned, he saw that it was missing part of its face, the jaw. There was something wrong with its arms as well, but the dream was blurry and he couldn’t make out what it was exactly. It watched him with eyes as blank and inhuman as the eyes of a fish. And then, in a single bound, hissing, it had been on him, its slavering half jaw trying to sink broken teeth into his throat.

He was wandering, not really aware of where he was going, trying to fight off the bits of dream playing out in his semiconscious mind. He was surprised to find himself down at the shoreline. To the left, the coast was empty. Down the coast to his right, far in the distance, were two or three fishermen, standing in the surf, trying to pull something in. Whatever it was, the boy knew, would almost certainly be deformed and taste of oil. It would be a challenge to choke down. It was no longer safe to fish. The sea here was polluted and starting to die, and similar problems were working their way inland as well.

He’d heard his father talking angrily about it. Crops that even a few years back had been healthy and strong now came up stunted if they came up at all. The only supposedly safe food was the patented foods grown in controlled environments by mega-corporations, food that few could afford. So the choice, his father said, was either to eat food that slowly killed you or go broke on food you couldn’t afford, while everyone went on destroying the world.

He started walking toward the fishermen, but something hindered his steps, slowly turning him. He began moving down the beach in the other direction, where it was deserted.

Or almost deserted; there was something there, something rolling in the surf.

A fish maybe, he thought at first, but as he walked forward, it seemed too large to be a fish. And the shape was wrong. A corpse maybe, a drowned man? But when it flopped back and forth in the tide, he knew he was wrong. That it was wrong.

The hair started to stand on the back of Chava’s neck. He walked toward the thing, trying not to listen to the rising cacophony of whispers taking over his head.

2

Michael Altman rubbed his eyes and looked away from his holoscreen. He was a tall man in his early forties, with dark hair going just a little gray at the temples and lively blue green eyes. Normally, he had a keenly intelligent gaze, but today his face was a little drawn, a little weary. He hadn’t slept well the night before. He’d had bad dreams, visceral stuff—all death, blood, and gore. Nothing he wanted to remember.

“That’s odd,” said James Field, the geophysicist whose lab he shared. Field ran stubby fingers through his thinning white hair and leaned back, his chair creaking beneath him, as he stared across the room at Altman. “Altman, did you get these same readings?”

“What readings?” Altman asked.

Field spun a copy of his holoscreen Altman’s way. It showed a Bouguer/Salvo gravity map of the 110-mile diameter of Chicxulub crater. The crater had been left when a ten-kilometer bolide had struck the earth 65 million years ago.

James Field, now in his late fifties, had spent most of his career micromapping the crater for the state-owned Central American Sector Resource Corporation (CASRC). He focused mainly inland along the perimeter of the trough, where small concentrations of key minerals might be found and quickly extracted. Since people had already been doing the same for hundreds of years, this mainly meant going back for quantities small enough that earlier teams, before the resource crisis, had deemed them unworthy of retrieval. It was slow, tedious work, as close to being an accountant as you could get and still be a geophysicist. That Field actually seemed to enjoy this job told Altman more than he wanted to know about him.

Altman, on the other hand, had been in Chicxulub only a year. His girlfriend, Ada Chavez, an anthropologist, had gotten funding to study the contemporary role of Yucatec Mayan folktales and myths. He’d managed to pull just enough strings and call in enough favors to get a small grant so he could follow her to Mexico. He was supposed to be profiling the underwater portion of the crater, providing a map of likely geological structures beneath the half mile or so of sea muck by gathering data from both satellite imaging and underwater probes. It was, in theory, a strictly scientific project, but he knew that whatever information he gathered the university would sell to an extraction company. He tried not to think about that. The work was slow and not very rewarding, but he tried to tell himself it wasn’t quite as pointless as what Field was doing.

He looked at Field’s holoscreen carefully. It looked normal to him, the gravity readings typical.

“What am I looking for?” asked Altman.

Field furrowed his brow. “I forget you’re new,” he said. “I’ll zoom in on the center.”

The center of the crater was in deep water, about a half dozen miles from their laboratory. Altman leaned toward the monitor, squinted. A darkness at the heart of the crater revealed a gravitational anomaly.

“Here’s what it looked like a month ago,” said Field. “See?”

He flashed up another profile. In this one, the darkness in the center wasn’t there, Altman saw. He checked the first profile. The readings everywhere but the center were the same.

“How’s that possible?” he asked.

“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” said Field. “It wouldn’t just change like that.”

“Probably just an equipment malfunction,” said Altman.

“I’ve been working here a long time,” said Field. “I know an equipment failure when I see one. This isn’t one. The anomaly appears both on the satellite images and the underwater scans, so it can’t be.”

“But how could it change?” asked Altman. “Maybe a volcanic eruption?”

Field shook his head. “That wouldn’t give this sort of anomaly. Plus, the other instruments would have sensed it. I can’t explain it. There’s something wrong,” he said, already reaching for his phone.

3

As he got closer, Chava became more and more nervous. It wasn’t a fish or anything like it. It wasn’t a sea turtle or a dog or a jaguar. He thought maybe it was a monkey, but it was too big to be a monkey. He crossed himself and then crossed two fingers for protection, but kept moving forward.

Even before he could see it clearly, he could hear it breathing. It was making a strange huffing noise, like someone trying to retch up something he was choking on. A wave pounded in and for a moment the huffing stopped, the creature swallowed up by the water and foam. Then the water ebbed and left it panting on the damp sand. It flopped over and swiveled something like a head in his direction.

It was like the creature in his dream, but much worse. It was not human, but seemed as though it once had been human. Its neck looked like it had been flayed free of skin, the reddish pith underneath flecked with white splotches, oozing slowly. What looked to be eyes were only empty sockets covered with veined, opaque membranes. The jawbone seemed to have vanished entirely, leaving only a flap of loose skin and a hole where the mouth should have been. The huffing noise came from that opening, along with a bitter, acrid smell that made Chava cough.

The creature was hunched over, its fingers webbed, a thin leathery membrane running between its elbow and hip like a bat’s wing. It tried to stand, then fell back again into the damp sand. There were two large red lumps bigger than his fists on its back. They were growing.

Mother of God, thought Chava.

The creature gave a sound like a groan, the lumps on its back pulsing. The bones in its arms cracked, the arms themselves twisting, becoming less human. It coughed up a milky liquid that hung in strands from the hole in its face. The back split open with a loud cracking sound, spraying blood, and exposing spongy gray sacs that filled and deflated; filled and deflated.

Chava was unable to move. The creature suddenly swiveled its head, staring at him with its eyeless face. Its muscles tightened and the gaping hole pulled back into a poor imitation of a smile.

Chava turned on his heel and began to run.

4

A few minutes later, Field had spoken to Ramirez and Showalter, two other geophysical scientists working in the area. They had confirmed it: they were getting the same readings as Field. It wasn’t an equipment problem: something had changed at the heart of the crater itself.

“But why?” asked Altman.

Field shook his head. “Who knows?” he said. “Showalter thought it might have to do with seismic activity focused directly at one of the sensors, but even as he suggested this was already talking himself out of it. Ramirez is as confused as we are. He’s talked to a few others, none of whom seem to know what’s going on. Something’s shifted, something’s different, but nobody knows why it’s changed or even what it could be. Nobody has ever seen anything quite like it.”

“What should we do?” asked Altman.

Field shrugged, thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. He sat running his fingers through his thinning hair, staring at nothing. “Nothing much we can do on our own,” he finally said. “I’ll file a report with CASRC and see what they advise. Until I hear back, I suppose I’ll just keep on with the readings.”

With a sigh, Field turned back to his screen. Altman just stared at him, disgusted.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Are you even curious?”

“What?” said Field, turning back. “Of course I am, but I don’t know what to do about it. We tried to figure it out, and everybody else is just as confused as we are.”

“And that’s it? You’re just going to give up.”

“Not at all,” said Field, his voice rising. “I told you: I’m filing a report with CASRC. They’ll be sure to have some ideas. That seems the best way to handle it.”

“And then what, you wait a few weeks for someone to read the report and then a few more weeks for a response? What goes on in the meantime? You just keep taking readings? What are you, a company man?”

Field’s face flushed dark. “There’s nothing wrong with following protocol,” he said. “I’m just doing my job.”

“This could be huge,” said Altman. “You said yourself it’s not like anything you’ve seen before. We’ve got to try to figure it out!”

Field pointed one shaky finger at him. “You do what you want,” he said in a low, quavering voice. “Go ahead and be a maverick and see where it gets you. This is a big deal, and it needs to be handled properly. I’ll do my job the way that I know it should be done.”

Altman turned away, his lips a tight line. I’m going to find out what’s going on, he vowed, even if it kills me.

Hours later, Altman still hadn’t gotten any further than Field. He called every scientist he knew in or around Chicxulub, anybody at all with an interest in the crater. Each time he hit a wall, he’d ask the person on the other end who else they thought he should call and then called them.

By a quarter to five, he still hadn’t gotten anywhere and had run out of names. He ran back over the data and correlated it with what he could get his colleagues to send him. Yes, there definitely was a gravitational anomaly. Something had shifted with the electromagnetic field as well, but that was all he knew.

Field, who like any good bureaucrat quit promptly at five every day, had begun to transmit his data and to pack up.

“You’re leaving?” asked Altman.

Field smiled and heaved his pear-shaped bulk out of the chair. “Nothing left to do here today,” he said. “I’m not paid overtime,” he explained, and then walked out the door.

Altman stayed on another few hours, going over the data and maps again, searching for precedents for shifts like this in records about the crater itself or about similar sites, records that stretched all the way back to the twentieth century. Nothing.

He was just on the way out the door himself when his phone sounded.

“Dr. Altman, please?” said a voice. It was barely louder than a whisper.

“This is Altman,” he said.

“Word has it you’ve been asking around about the crater,” said the voice.

“That’s correct,” he said, “there’s this odd anomal—”

“Not over the phone,” the voice whispered. “You’ve already said too much as it is. Eight o’clock, the bar near the quay. You know where that is?”

“Of course I know,” said Altman. “Who is this?”

But the caller had already hung up.

5

By the time Chava came back, dragging along his mother and a few of the other people from the nearby shantytown, the creature had changed again. The wet gray sacs on its back were larger now, each almost the size of a man when fully inflated. Its arms and legs had somehow joined, melding into one another. The flayed quality of the neck had changed, the flesh now looking as if it were swarming with ants.

The air around it had taken on an acrid yellow sheen. It hung in a heavy cloud, and when they got too close, they found it difficult to breathe. One man, a small but dignified-looking old drunk, wandered into the cloud and, after staggering about coughing, collapsed. Two other villagers dragged him out by the feet and then began to slap him.

Chava watched until the drunk was conscious again and groping for his bottle, then turned back to stare at the creature. “What is it?” Chava asked his mother.

His mother consulted in whispers with her neighbors, watching the thing. It was hard for Chava to hear everything they were saying, but he heard one word over and over again: Ixtab. Ixtab. Finally his mother turned to him. “Who is Ixtab?” Chava asked nervously.

“Go fetch the old bruja,” she told him. “She’ll know what to do.”

The bruja was already heading toward the beach when he came across her. She was moving slowly, leaning on a staff. She was old and frail, most of her hair gone and her face a mass of wrinkles. His mother claimed that she had been alive when the Spaniards killed the Mayans, a thousand years before. “She is like a lost book,” his mother had said another time. “She knows everything that everyone else has forgotten.”

She carried a pouch slung over one shoulder. He started to explain about the creature, but she silenced him with a gesture. “I already know,” she said. “I expected you sooner.”

He took her arm and helped her along. Others from the shantytown were coming down the beach as well, some walking as if hypnotized. Some wept; some ran.

“Who is Ixtab?” asked Chava suddenly.

“Ah, Ixtab,” said the bruja. She stopped walking and turned to face him. “She is a goddess. She is the rope woman. She hangs in the tree, a rope around her neck, and her eyes are closed in death, and her body has begun to rot. But she is still a goddess.”

“But is she dead?”

“The goddess of suicide,” mused the bruja. “She is the hanged goddess, the goddess of the end. And she gathers to her those who are dead by uncertain means.” She stared at the boy intently. “She is a very harsh mistress,” she said.

Chava nodded.

“Tell me,” the bruja said to him, “did you dream last night?” Chava nodded.

“Tell me your dream,” said the bruja, and then listened carefully as he recounted it confusedly, in bits and pieces.

She gestured forward, at the people running in front of them, at the crowd of people around the strange creature up ahead. “These, too,” she said, “they have shared our dream.”

“What does it mean?” asked Chava.

“What does it mean?” she asked. She pointed a shaky finger at the creature ahead, its gray sacs now almost twice the size of the man, the cloud of noxious gas growing. “Here you see what it means.”

“We dreamed it and we made it real?” asked Chava, amazed.

She gave him a toothless smile and cackled. “You think you are so powerful?” she asked, and started shuffling forward again. “You think we are so powerful? No,” she said. “We could not make this. Our dream is a warning.”

“A warning?”

“The dream tells us there is something wrong,” she said. “We must set it right.”

For a time they walked through the sand without speaking, the old woman breathing heavily. Chava could already hear the hissing from the creature, louder than the crash of the surf.

“Have you begun to dream awake?” the bruja asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked, frightened.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “I can hear in your voice that you have. You must be careful. It found you first. It means to take you. Chicxulub: you know what this word means?”

The boy shook his head.

“And yet you have lived in this town all your life,” she scolded him. “You have lived within a word that you do not know.”

He was silent for a moment, then asked, “Is that bad?”

She made a noise with her lips but did not answer. Apparently it wasn’t a question worth answering.

“What does Chicxulub mean?” he asked after another moment.

She stopped briefly and with the tip of her stick drew a figure in the sand. It was two lines twisting around each other.

He crossed his fingers and imitated it by making the sign of protection he had learned as a child. She nodded. “What is this?” he asked.

She didn’t say anything. She spread her toothless mouth wide, which looked for a moment disconcertingly like the jawless maw of the creature on the beach.

“Tail of the devil,” she said. “The devil has started to wake and thrash its tail. If we cannot coax it back to sleep, then this will be the end of us.”

6

There was no reason to go, Altman thought. It was silly, probably someone’s idea of a joke. You ask enough questions, and it was inevitable that someone would screw with you. The last thing he needed was to start thinking espionage and conspiracy. He needed to figure this out rationally and scientifically. So instead of going to the bar, he just went home.

When he arrived, Ada was already there. She was sitting at the table, leaning back in the chair, asleep, her long dark hair tucked behind her ears and cascading over her shoulders. Altman kissed her neck and woke her up.

She smiled and her dark eyes flashed. “You’re later than normal, Michael,” she said. “You haven’t been cheating on me, have you?” she teased.

“Hey, I’m not the one who’s exhausted,” he said.

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said. “Had the worst dreams.”

“Me, too,” he said. He sat down and took a deep breath. “Something weird is going on,” he said. He told her about what he and Field had discovered, the calls he had made, the general sense that he felt, and that others seemed to share, that something was off.

“That’s funny,” said Ada. “And not in a good way. It was the same with me today.”

“You discovered a gravitational anomaly, did you?”

“Kind of,” she said. “Or at least the anthropological equivalent. The stories are changing.”

“What stories?”

“The folktales, they’re starting to change, and quickly, too. That doesn’t happen, Michael. It never happens.”

Altman was suddenly serious. “Never?”

“Never.”

“Shit.”

“They keep speaking of the devil’s tail,” she said, “a kind of twisted pronged thing. When they mention it, they cross their fingers, like this.” She raised her middle and index fingers, crossed them. “But when I try to get them to talk about it, they fall silent. They’ve never been like that with me before. It’s like they don’t trust me anymore.” She brushed the top of the table with her hand. “You want to know what’s strangest of all?”

“What?”

“Do you know how they say ‘tail of the devil’ in Yucatec Maya? Same name as the crater: Chicxulub.”

Altman felt his throat go dry. He looked at the clock. A quarter to eight. Still time to make it to the bar after all.

7

For a while, nobody spoke. They just stood there, watching the bruja, who, in her turn, steadying herself on Chava’s shoulder, just watched the creature.

“You see,” she said in a whisper that was nearly drowned out by the creature’s wheezing. “It is growing bigger.”

She reached deep into her pouch and pulled out a handful of something. She began to dance, tracing a slow circle around the creature, just at the edge of the cloud the creature was creating for itself. She dragged Chava along with her, sprinkling something in the sand before her. It was a wandering dance, off-kilter, almost drunken. At first the others just watched; then slowly one or two began to follow, then a few more. Some shook their heads, as if breaking out of a trance.

When she stood directly across from the creature’s head, she stopped and began turning in place. Soon everyone was doing this, watching the bruja, falling into place, slowly forming a complete circle. They turned around the creature, some of them standing knee deep in the surf.

She swung her staff before her, stepped back, and stepped forward again. The others followed. Chava stepped too far and found himself coughing, having breathed some of the gas the creature was emitting. His eyes stung; his throat itched.

The bruja lifted her hands, her index and middle fingers crossed. Chicxulub, she murmured, and turned again. The word went up mangled from the mouths of the others, like a groan.

The bruja slowly turned and walked away, her back straighter and her stride firmer than on the walk over. She walked a few yards back from the circle and dug into the sand until she unearthed a piece of driftwood, then turned and rejoined the circle again. She nodded and gestured at Chava until he, too, left the circle and came back with driftwood. One by one the others followed, wandering out of the circle and coming slowly back.

The skin that formed the gray sacs on the creature’s back had thinned and thinned as the sacs grew. Now it was almost transparent. The sacs slowly billowed up until they were taut and then deflated, going about halfway slack before swelling again. It was a terrible thing to watch. Chava kept expecting them to burst.

The bruja was dancing again. She lifted her chunk of driftwood high, gave a toothless smile, and threw it at the creature.

It struck the creature softly in the face and fell to the sand just below it. The creature didn’t react at all.

“Now you,” said the bruja to Chava. “Higher. And harder.”

He threw his piece of wood high and hard, at the leftmost sac. It struck the sac near the bottom and tore it just slightly. Air began to hiss out. The bruja raised her hands and brought them down and the others threw their pieces of wood as well. One or two missed, one or two bounced off, but more than a few tore the sacs, some quite deeply. Air rushed out of them; the acrid cloud slowly began to disperse.

“Now, go,” the bruja said to Chava, her voice hoarse. “You see the nameless man there, stumbling drunk as usual. Run to him and take his bottle and bring it back to me.”

He ran quickly around the circle and to the small but dignified dark-haired drunk who had gotten too close to the cloud earlier and almost died. The man turned and smiled at him. Before he could react, Chava grabbed the bottle he’d posted between his feet and fled back to the bruja.

She took it from him and uncorked it. Behind them the drunk was protesting, some of the others holding him back. “Hold your breath,” she said to Chava as she gave him the bottle. “You must pour this on the wood and on the creature itself.”

His heart pounding, Chava took a deep breath and rushed forward. The torn skin of the sacs had already begun to knit itself back together. The bags were still mostly deflated but were beginning to rise. He upended the bottle, splashing the creature and the wood around it, and then rushed back to the bruja, his eyes swollen and stinging.

The bruja lit the top of her staff on fire and carefully moved forward, touching it to the creature’s head.

Both the creature and the driftwood caught fire immediately. She dropped her staff, letting it burn, too. The creature hissed and thrashed, but never tried to escape from the flames. The gray sacs on its back turned to ash and blew away. Eventually it stopped moving altogether.

The bruja, swaying, led them once again in a slow, stuttering dance. Chava found his feet naturally following it, adapting to it, almost as if someone else were moving his legs. He wondered how many of his fellow villagers felt the same way. The village drunk, he saw, wasn’t part of the circle; he stayed at a little distance, swaying slightly, staring at the fire, his brow furrowed. They kept on, tracing slow curving motions in the air, until all that was left of the creature was a charred, smoldering skeleton. Stripped of its flesh and burnt to a crisp, it looked almost human.

8

He ordered a bottled beer and made sure it came with the cap still sealed. As he waited on his change, he scanned the bar, trying to determine who might have telephoned him. The small bar’s only inhabitants were half a dozen scientists from the North American sector—it could have been any one of them.

He sat down at a table. He’d just opened the beer and taken a sip when a man approached him. The man was pale skinned and thin, wearing a jumpsuit, his hair cropped short. Altman guessed he must be a technician of some sort.

“You’re Altman,” the man said. It wasn’t a question.

“That’s right,” said Altman. “And you are . .”

“I only give my name out to friends,” he said. “Are you a friend?”

Altman stared at him.

“All right,” said the man. “Maybe you don’t make friends right off the bat. Okay, whatever you think of what I tell you, if anybody asks, you didn’t hear it from me.”

Altman hesitated only a moment. “All right,” he said.

“Shake on it?” the man suggested.

The man extended a hand. Altman took it, shook. “Hammond,” the man said, “Charles Hammond.” He pulled out the table’s other chair and sat down.

“Nice to meet you,” said Altman. “Now suppose you tell me what’s going on.”

Hammond leaned in closer. “You’ve been noticing things,” he said. “You’re not the only one.”

“No?” said Altman coolly.

“I’m in communications. Freelance, mostly industrial installations.” He reached out and poked Altman’s chest lightly with a finger. “I’ve been noticing things, too.”

“Okay . . .”

“There’s a pulse,” Hammond said. “Slow and irregular, and very weak, but strong enough to fuzz up other signals just a little. I’m a perfectionist. When I set something up, I like it to be crystal clear. Things that don’t bother other people bother me. That’s why I noticed it.”

He stopped. Altman waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, Altman took a sip of his beer and asked. “Noticed what?”

Hammond nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “At first I thought it was a problem with the communications terminal I was installing for DredgerCorp.”

“I didn’t know DredgerCorp had a place here,” interrupted Altman. That, as much as anything, was an indication to him that something odd was going on. DredgerCorp was one of the shadiest of the resource retrieval corporations, the sort of company willing to swoop quickly into an area under the radar of the local government, strip-mine or bore and take as much as they could before it was noticed, and then swoop quickly away again.

“Officially they don’t. Just got here. Very hush-hush,” said Hammond. “I’m not supposed to know who they are. Anyway, at first I thought it was a loose connection, something off just enough to give a minor electrical discharge that gave the line an occasional slight hiss every so often. So I took the thing apart.

Nothing wrong with it. So, I put the thing back together. The hiss still came. Sometimes once or twice a minute, lasting a few seconds, sometimes not even that. Maybe you missed something, I told myself. I was just about to take the fucker apart again when I thought maybe I better check another terminal in the same system. Same problem. I was just about to tear DredgerCorp’s whole system apart when something dawned on me: maybe it wasn’t just in this system but in other places as well.”

“And?”

Hammond nodded. “Everybody’s picking it up, but nobody’s noticing. It’s not a problem with one system. It’s an electromagnetic pulse, weak and irregular, broadcasting from somewhere.”

“So what is it?”

“I did some investigating,” said Hammond, ignoring Altman’s question. “I set up a few receivers, triangulated the pulse. It’s irregular enough that it took me a little while to figure out where it’s coming from. And when I did, I decided it couldn’t be right. So I moved the receivers, triangulated again, and this time I was sure of where it was coming from.”

“Where?”

Hammond leaned even farther in, putting his arm around Altman’s shoulders and bringing his lips close to Altman’s ear. “Remember,” he whispered. “You didn’t hear this from me.”

Altman nodded.

“From the crater,” whispered Hammond. “From the exact center of Chicxulub crater, under a kilometer or two of muck and rock. Right where you found your anomaly.”

“Oh my God,” said Altman. He explained to Hammond what Ada had been hearing. “Three different things,” he said. “All of them leading back to Chicxulub crater.”

Hammond leaned back, nodding his head. “My thoughts exactly,” he said. “Maybe the pulse has been there all the time and nobody noticed it until now. Maybe we’re only hearing it now because our equipment is more sensitive. But I think I would have noticed it before now. That’s not the kind of thing I miss. But here’s my question to you: Is it a pulse or is it a signal?”

“A signal?”

“It’s a little irregular, but it still has a pattern to it. I can’t swear to it, but I think it’s something that’s being deliberately made. Down there, under millions of tons of water and rock.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Altman.

“No,” agreed Hammond. “And it gets stranger.” He came in close again, and this time Altman saw something in his eyes, a haunted look. “I told DredgerCorp about the pulse, figure it’s my job to do so. I don’t want them blaming me for it, want to make it clear that it’s something that everybody is experiencing, even if no one’s noticing it. And what do you think they say?”

“What?”

“ ‘Have you told anybody else?’ That’s an exact quote. Before I know it, they’ve got me signing a gag order. In exchange for certain monetary considerations, I can’t talk about the pulse, not to anybody. I haven’t, until now, with you.”

“What do you think it means?” asked Altman.

“What do you think it means? Let me ask you something. Who is the only person that a secure communications system isn’t secure from?”

“Who?”

“The guy who installs it. From me. If you’re putting a system in, you can loop yourself into it in a dozen different ways without anybody being the wiser. I do that from time to time as a matter of course, just to keep my wrist limber. A hobby, really.” His voice grew almost inaudible. “I did it with DredgerCorp.”

“And?”

“It didn’t last long,” he said. “Ten days after I put the system in, they tore it out. Flew someone in from the North American sector to do it, someone in-house this time.”

“They must have known the system wasn’t secure.”

“No way for them to tell,” said Hammond. “They couldn’t have known for sure. They’re on to something. There’s something at the bottom of the crater, something valuable, maybe even something unique. Lots of speculation about it from the communications I was able to intercept. But after about three days, things went cryptic; they started coding everything.” He reached into his pocket, took out his holopod. “Take a look at this,” he said. “Up close. Don’t let anyone else see.”

“What is it?” asked Altman.

“You tell me.”

Altman shielded the holopod in his hands, watched the image that appeared, rotating slowly between his palms. It was just a digitally imaged representation. It was impossible to know what it was made of or what it looked like exactly, but he could get at least some idea. A shimmering three-dimensional shape, in two parts, thick at the base and coming to two points near the top. It was clearly something man-made rather than a natural formation, no doubt about that. Or was that just the digital model making him think that? It reminded him of something. It looked like two separate strands, joined at the bottom, but twisted around each other, though it might have been a single tapering structure with a perforated center.

He stared at it a long time, watching it slowly turn. And then he remembered. It was the shape Ada had made with her fingers, crossing them over each other, the sign she’d said many of the villagers were now making.

“Tail of the devil,” he whispered, not realizing he’d said anything aloud until he saw Hammond’s startled expression.

He clicked the holopod off, handed it back to Hammond.

“I got that off the com system before they tore it out,” Hammond said. “According to the message appended to it, they cross-indexed all the information they had—worked with the pulse and the anomaly and probably some other things that neither you nor I are aware of yet. And this is what they came up with. This is what’s at the heart of the crater.”

They sat in silence awhile, staring at their glasses. “So, a pulse starts up,” said Altman finally. “Maybe a signal of some sort. Something at the center of the crater, something that appears to be not a natural geological formation but a man-made one.”

“Constructed, yes,” said Hammond, “but who’s to say manmade?”

“If not man-made, then . . .,” said Altman. And then suddenly he got it. “Shit,” he said, “you think it’s something inhuman, something alien?”

“I don’t know what I think,” said Hammond. “But yes, that’s what some of the folks at DredgerCorp thought.”

Altman shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked nervously around the bar. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “Why me?”

Hammond jabbed his chest again with his finger. “Because you were asking. This stuff has been going on for a while,” he said. “Others must have noticed it. But you’re the only one who contacted everyone you thought might have the answer. You know what that tells me? That you don’t work for anyone. That you want to know for yourself.”

“Surely other people are thinking about it, too.”

“Let me put it this way,” said Hammond. “Someone is trying to suppress this. Maybe DredgerCorp, maybe someone bigger than that. A lot of people know what’s happening, but nobody’s talking about it. Why? Because they’ve been bought. Why did I talk to you? Because I don’t think you’ve been bought.” He drained his bottle dry, then gave Altman a steady stare. “At least not yet,” he said.

9

It was only once he was walking the bruja back to her shanty that things really stopped making sense. One moment she was there, walking beside him, talking softly to him, and then the next she was gone. Not only was she gone, but as he looked back, the only tracks in the sand were his own.

He went on, ahead to her shanty. Perhaps she had left him and gone there. Perhaps he had simply not been paying attention.

When he arrived, he rapped lightly on the crumpled sheet of tin that served in lieu of a door. Nobody answered. He knocked again, harder this time. Still no answer.

He knocked again. And again. Still no answer.

In the end, curiosity won out over fear. He took a deep breath and carefully pulled the sheet of tin aside far enough for him to duck inside.

It was dark. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust.

At first, he couldn’t see anything except the shaft of light entering through the crack of the door. But he smelled something, a rich and pungent smell, almost metallic—he couldn’t quite place it. Then slowly he began to make out dim shapes. A table, scattered with indistinct objects. A basin, turned over on the packed earth floor. There, at the far end of the room, he saw a straw-and-grass pallet, and on it, under a tattered blanket, the shape of a body.

He called out to her. “Bruja!” The form in the bed didn’t move.

He moved slowly across the room until he stood just over the bed. Cautiously he reached out and touched the form through the blanket, shook it slightly.

“It’s me,” he said. “Chava.”

She was on her side. He tugged her over, flipped her onto her back, and the blanket slipped down to reveal the bruja’s wide staring eyes and her slit throat.

He found a box of matches and with shaking fingers lit the lamp on the floor beside the bed. He pulled the blanket off, saw the knife she held in her death-clenched fist. The blade was brown with her blood. He carefully tugged the knife free and laid it flat on the bed beside her. Her other hand, he saw, was badly cut, long gashes on each of the fingers.

Ixtab, he thought.

He picked up the lamp and held it close to her face. The cut was jagged and incomplete, the bluish white of her trachea jutting out. She had been dead for some time, hours at least, maybe days. The smell in the room, he realized, was the smell of her blood. How was this possible? He’d just been with her. Or thought he had.

Shaking his head, he turned and made for the door, then suddenly stopped. In the lamplight, he saw something else. The walls were covered with crude symbols, like nothing he’d ever seen, odd twisting shapes, inscribed in blood.

Shocked, he stared at them. Slowly voices crept into his head, the bruja’s among them. He turned and fled.

10

After Altman had left, Hammond stayed on drinking. His head ached. Had it been wise to tell Altman? Had he been right about him? Maybe he was a free agent, but then again, if he were someone fishing for information, wouldn’t that be exactly what they’d want him to think, that he was talking to someone who was safe? But you couldn’t be sure that anybody was safe. You couldn’t be sure that someone wasn’t watching you right at that moment. They were always watching, always looking, and the moment you felt safest was probably the moment when they were watching you most closely, most sneakily, the moment when they’d figured out how to worm into your skull. That’s what they must have done—they must have implanted a recorder in his skull. His head hurt, had been hurting for several days now. Why hadn’t he seen it before? They were recording his brain waves; then they transmitted them to some super-secret high-tech neurolab somewhere and plugged them into someone else’s head and then knew everything he was thinking. The only thing to do was not think. If he stopped thinking, maybe he could keep one step ahead of them.

Someone was coming across the room toward him. A large man with a bushy mustache and a wrinkled, liver-spotted face.

It must be one of them. He tensed his body but remained motionless. Was there time to get to the knife in his pocket and flick it open and stab the guy? No, probably not. But he had the beer bottle in his hand. Maybe he could throw it at the man’s head. If he threw it hard enough and just right, it might knock him out. Or no, wait, he could grab the bottle by the neck and break it off. Then he’d have a real weapon. They’d never take him alive.

“Señor?” the man said, a concerned look on his face. “Is anything the matter?”

What was that voice? It was familiar: the owner of the bar. What was his name? Mendez or something. He relaxed. What was wrong with him? It was just the bartender. He shook his head. Why was he so paranoid? He didn’t usually get like that, did he?

“I’m all right,” he said. “I’d like another beer.”

“I’m sorry,” said the owner. “We are closing.”

And indeed, when he looked around he saw that he was almost the last one in the bar. Everyone was gone except for one villager, the nameless town drunk who was sunk in the corner of the room, wrapped in a dark shawl, watching him.

Hammond nodded. He stood and made for the door. The drunk followed him with his eyes. Don’t pay any attention to him, Hammond thought. He’s not one of them, he’s just a drunk. They haven’t gotten to him yet. Probably. Take a deep breath. You’re going to be okay.

He made it out into the dusty street okay. He could hear the surf against the shore, could smell the salt as well. What now? he wondered. What else? And then he thought: Home.

He was about halfway back to the complex he lived in, walking down a deserted street, when he heard something. At first, he wasn’t sure he’d heard anything meaningful at all. It was just a clattering sound and might have been caused by an animal. When he stopped, he didn’t hear it. But when he started up again, there it was, little traces of it, like a voice he couldn’t quite hear in his head. After half a block more he was sure: someone was dogging his footsteps.

He turned around but didn’t see anyone. He quickened his step a little. There seemed to be whispers coming from the shadows in front of him, but as he approached them they faded, continuing on farther along the road. He shook his head. That’s crazy, he thought. I’m going crazy. He heard again a noise behind him and wheeled around again, this time seeing someone, a dark form, a little distance away.

He stopped, stared at it. It had stopped moving, and then as suddenly as it had appeared, it stepped back into the shadows and was gone.

“Hello?” he couldn’t stop himself from saying. “Is anyone there?”

His heart had begun to thud in his throat. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife, opened the blade. It looked absurdly small, almost useless, in his hand. He started back toward the shadows where the figure had disappeared, then realized that that was probably exactly what they wanted him to do. He turned quickly around to continue the way he had been going.

Except when he turned around, he found the street in front of him wasn’t empty anymore. There were three men, two of them quite large, all faces he recognized from the DredgerCorp facility.

“Hammond?” said the smallest one, the only one of them wearing glasses. “Charles Hammond?”

“Who wants to know?” asked Hammond.

“Someone would like to have a word with you,” he said. “Come with us.”

“Who?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” the man said.

“I’m not on the clock,” Hammond claimed. “Business hours are long over.”

“You’re on the clock for this,” said another of the men.

He nodded. He pretended to relax, beginning to move toward them, then suddenly spun on a heel and ran as quickly as he could in the other direction.

Shouts rang out behind him. He ducked into an alley and ran down it, a ragged dog barking at his heels for half the length of it. He leapt over a makeshift fence and crashed through a pile of trash. Up and running again, he left the streets of the town proper and entered the shantytown.

His head was throbbing. He looked back—they were still behind him, gaining. He kept running, a stitch starting up in his side. Slower now, but still running.

By the time he reached the edge of the shantytown, they were close enough that he could hear the sound of their labored breathing. They’re going to catch me, he realized, there’s nothing I can do. He stopped suddenly, whirled around, holding the small knife in front of him.

The three men quickly fanned out, forming a triangle around him. Hammond, panting, kept moving the knife back and forth from one hand to the other. The others kept their distance, their hands up.

“There’s no need for that,” said the man with the glasses. “They just want to talk to you.”

“Who’s they?” asked Hammond.

“Come on,” said the man with the glasses. “Be a good boy and put down the knife.”

“What’s wrong with him, Tom?” asked the first of the other two.

“He’s scared, Tim,” said the second, said Tom.

“I’d be scared if I was him, too,” said Tim. “Nobody likes a thief.”

“Thief? Can you really steal secrets?” said Tom.

“Now, boys,” said the man with the glasses. “You’re not helping the situation.”

There they were again, the voices in his head. But why did they need to send voices into his head if they were there in front of him? And then a terrible thought occurred to Hammond: What if there were two groups out to get him? DredgerCorp and another one as well? Or maybe even three. Or four. What did they want with him? Would they beat him? Would they kill him? Would it be even worse than that?

“Now just calm down,” said the man with the glasses, looking a little nervous now.

Someone, Hammond realized, was making a noise, a high-pitched squealing. It was a terrible thing to hear. It took him a long moment to realize that that someone was himself.

“I told you something was wrong with him,” he heard Tim say behind him.

“You’re right about that, Tim,” said Tom.

They were still there, the three of them, standing in a way that made it impossible for him to see all of them at once. He could turn and turn, but he couldn’t see them all at the same time no matter what he did. And then there were the ones in his head, too, slowly extracting things from it. God, his head hurt. He had to stop them, had to get them out of his head.

“Put the knife down, friend,” said the man with the glasses.

But that was the last thing Hammond was going to do. Instead he lunged forward and flashed his knife at the man with glasses. The man jumped nimbly back, but not nimbly enough; the knife opened a gash just below his wrist. He stood holding it, blood dripping through his fingers, his face suddenly pale in the dim light.

But Hammond had forgotten about the others. He turned and there they were, still a little way away, but moving closer. They stepped quickly back when they realized they’d been noticed.

He was still surrounded, both inside his head and outside it. There was no getting out of it. He would never get away.

And so, realizing this, heart thudding in his mouth, he did the only thing he could think to do.

“I didn’t expect that, Tim,” said Tom.

“I didn’t either,” said Tim. “This one was full of surprises. What’d they want him for, anyway?” he asked the man with the glasses.

“A few questions,” said the man with the glasses. “Nothing serious. Just a few questions.” He had wrapped his wrist in one of his shirttails. It was slowly soaking through with blood.

“Never seen anything quite like that,” said Tom. “And I hope I never do again.”

“Same here,” said Tim, shaking his head.

He took a step back to avoid the puddle of blood that was spreading from Hammond’s slit neck. He’d never seen anyone cut themselves quite so deep and so quickly. There was a lot of blood and it was still coming. He had to step back again.

How could anyone do that to himself? Tim wondered. He must have been very frightened. Or simply crazy. Or both. He squinted, massaged his temple.

“All right, Tim?” asked Tom.

“Better than him, anyway,” said Tim. “Just a little headache.”

“Me, too,” said Tom. “Terry?”

“I’ve got a headache, too,” said the man with the glasses. “Been one of those nights. Step lively, lads. Let’s get out of here before the law arrives.”

CONFINED SPACES

11

“He killed himself, just like that,” the man on the vidscreen said. It was less a question than a statement. He had a square-cut jaw and white hair that was swept back and plastered down. Even on the small vidscreen, he was an imposing man. He was wearing a uniform, but his screen had been set to dither out his insignia, to make it impossible to say just what branch of the service he was part of.

“That’s what they tell me, sir,” said Tanner.

William Tanner was head of the newly established DredgerCorp Chicxulub, the semisecret branch of the organization that had been set up hurriedly as soon as they’d had some indication that something was going on in the center of the crater.

Tanner had a military background and specialized in running black ops through dummy corporations. He was running this one under the name Ecodyne. Enter the right command into the system at the right moment, and any sign of a connection to DredgerCorp would instantly vanish from the company files. Then Tanner would vanish and reappear under another name. So far, his operations had gone well, partly because of good luck, partly because he was very good at what he did, which was why he’d been with DredgerCorp for ten years.

He didn’t know the name of the man on the screen. All he knew was that, three days before, he’d had a vid conference with Lenny Small, the president of DredgerCorp, who’d explained that they were bringing someone in from the outside. When Tanner asked who it was, Small had just smiled.

“No need for names, Tanner,” he said. He flashed a vid still of the man onto Tanner’s screen. “Here’s your man,” he said. “You tell him anything he wants to know. And you do anything he says.”

Once Small disconnected, Tanner had shaken his head. Why bring someone in from the outside? Just one more possible way for something to go wrong. Just one more hole he’d have to plug after the operation was over. Small was getting soft in his old age, drinking too much maybe, getting sloppy. Which put everyone at risk. Which put him at risk. Tanner didn’t like that.

But when he saw the guy on the screen, first heard him talk, first heard the coldness of his voice, he realized that he’d misjudged his boss. This wasn’t just anyone. This was military, someone who’d clearly seen a lot and knew better than any of them what was going on. Privately, Tanner started thinking of him as the Colonel, though he had no idea what the man’s actual rank was, or if he even had the right branch of the service. It wasn’t even possible to guess at where he might be—the background had been deliberately pixilated out, which lent an odd shimmer to the edges of the Colonel’s body. It was the Colonel who had taken the data they’d intercepted from various scientists’ reports and generated a model that gave them an idea of what might be waiting for them at the heart of the crater. It was the Colonel who immediately had the security system replaced, who had seen the potential for the technician who had installed the first system to leave a back door for himself. And when that young geophysicist named Altman started asking around about anomalies in the crater, the Colonel immediately had his phone tapped.