20.

Karl Graylock, Kiona Thayer, and Gage Pembleton were desperate and dazed with hunger after eight days of exhausting snowshoeing in a brutal deep freeze. Walking on unraveling snowshoes, they trudged through the endless night, up the side of Junk Mountain, their every step resisted by frigid knives of screaming wind and pelting sleet.

Less than two hundred meters up the slope of Junk Mountain, Graylock's snowshoes finally came apart beneath him. First his left foot plunged through the sagged webbing, and then his right foot tore free of its rotted binding. "Scheisse," he cursed under his breath, fearful of triggering an avalanche.

Pembleton poked at the snow with his walking stick. "It's pretty hard-packed," he gasped in the thin air. "You didn't sink much past your ankles." He tapped the side of his snowshoe with the stick. "We probably don't need these anymore."

"Probably not," Graylock said. Thayer and Pembleton pulled off their snowshoes. Graylock gathered up the broken pieces of his footwear and stuffed the fragments into folds and under flaps on his backpack; they'd make decent kindling once they dried. Looking up the slope, directly into the path of the gale-driven sleet, he winced and said, "Let's keep going."

Graylock remembered the way to the Caeliar's redoubt as well as Pembleton did, so he took the lead as they ascended into the lashing gusts of the storm. It was up to Pembleton to keep watch for the local predator that had slain Mazzetti weeks earlier. All Thayer had to do was keep herself upright while hiking uphill over ice and snow with her braced foot.

From a distance, the three survivors would have looked all but identical. Mummified in multiple layers of the now-sullied silver-gray Caeliar fabric, only their heights distinguished them; Pembleton was the tallest, followed by Graylock, and then Thayer. It occurred to Graylock that they had not seen one another's face in more than a week. As the temperatures had plummeted, they had resisted removing any but the tiniest strips of their swaddling, and then only for absolute necessities.

In the mad swirls of sleet that surrounded him, his view of the path ahead was limited to its next few meters. Fighting gravity to push his weakened body up the mountainside left his head spinning. The next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees, dryheaving through his face wrappings.

Hands closed tentatively around his arms. Thayer and Pembleton labored to pull Graylock back to his feet.

"Don't quit on us now, you Austrian clod," Thayer said.

He wobbled as he found his footing. "Well, since you asked so nicely," he mumbled to her. "Gage, can you...?"

"Take point? Sure." Pembleton stepped past Graylock and led the trio up the slope, past icicle-draped rock formations. Towering snowdrifts had formed against the windward side of the huge black crags that jutted from the pristine slope.

Concealed beneath a deep blanket of snow, the shape of the terrain had become unfamiliar to Graylock's eyes. He hoped that Pembleton's wilderness combat training would enable him to find the entrance to the Caeliar's buried laboratory.

The effort and the exhaustion, the hunger and the pain...they all blurred together as Graylock forced his aching muscles to go through the motions: taking one step and then another, walking where Pembleton had walked, never looking back.

His eyes felt leaden, and an overpowering desire for rest sapped his will to continue. So cold I can't even feel it anymore, he mused, poised on the edge of a hallucination. He was all but ready to collapse face-first into the snow when a mitten-wrapped hand yanked him forward.

"I found it," Pembleton said. "The tunnel's pretty slick, but I think we can make it down. Come on!"

The three survivors doffed their backpacks and huddled around a cave in the snow. It looked like an enlarged version of a trapdoor spider's lair. The sides of the opening were sheathed in ice and dusted with clinging snow that had gathered in a long, shallow slope at the bottom. Graylock peered cautiously over the edge and down the icy incline. "It's mostly clear," he said. "But how-"

A quick push sent him headfirst over the edge. He put out his hands by reflex. They slipped over the ice and did nothing to slow him down as he caromed off the sides, but the snow piled at the end broke his fall, and he was able to use his arms to guide himself down the slope on his chest. Then he slid to a stop in the pitch-dark corridor that led to the shielded lab.

He got up, dusted himself off, and walked back to the opening. When he glared up at his two comrades, Kiona said, "Sorry. Impulse."

"I'm fine, thanks for asking," he said, projecting wrathful sarcasm. "Get down here."

Graylock stepped back and waited. Seconds later, Thayer slid feet-first onto the snow and glided on her b.u.t.tocks into the corridor. He helped her up, and she called back up to Pembleton, "Clear!" Next, the trio's backpacks were dropped, and Thayer helped Graylock recover them and move them to one side. After the third one, Thayer again yelled back, "Clear!"

Then Pembleton joined them, landing and sliding as Thayer had. Graylock and Thayer pulled him to his feet. He brushed the snow off the backs of his legs as he asked, "Where do you think the Caeliar would be?"

"Probably near whatever energy-storage system they were living from," Graylock said. "We should probably start looking in the lab." The engineer opened his pack and removed the fire-making kit. They quickly fashioned small torches from their remaining thick branches of firewood and some strips of their old uniforms soaked in salvaged machine oil. Pembleton lit two torches with a flint and steel, pa.s.sed them to Thayer and Graylock, then lit his own. Weak firelight and ma.s.sive shadows danced on the metallic walls.

Graylock started down the corridor, and the others followed him. It felt strange to him to be back inside an artificial structure again. Their footsteps were loud and crisp on the hard floors, and they reverberated in the empty pa.s.sages. The wind sang mournful songs in the dead city's empty s.p.a.ces.

Away from the ice chute and the brunt of the wind, Graylock peeled off the layers of fabric wrapped around his head. The final layers felt glued to the front of his face, and he teased the fabric loose with gingerly tugs. As it came free, he saw why it had held fast. It was crusted with dried blood. Exposed for two weeks to extreme cold and aridity, his sinuses and lips had cracked like salt flats in the desert.

Thayer and Pembleton coaxed off their own bandages, revealing the same kind of cold-weather damage to their faces. What alarmed Graylock, however, wasn't the blood but the bones. Their cheekbones looked as if they might pierce their skin at any moment. Touching his own face, Graylock realized with horror how gaunt they all had become. We look like walking corpses.

They turned a corner, entered the lab, and found the cavernous s.p.a.ce deserted. Every corridor and chamber they had explored had deepened Graylock's profound unease; as they wandered through the open s.p.a.ce, he felt as if he were lurking in a crypt. "I think we're too late," he said. "They're gone."

"Maybe if you tried calling for them," Thayer said. "What was the name of the one you knew?"

"Lerxst," Graylock said. He looked to Pembleton for an opinion. The man shrugged as if to say, Why not? Raising his voice, Graylock called out for the Caeliar scientist. "Lerxst?"

There was no answer but the keening of the wind.

He tried again: "Lerxst?"

His voice echoed several times.

Then a sepulchral groan shook the ruined city.

"Maybe we should leave," Pembleton said, turning a wary eye toward the ceiling, while Thayer threw frightened glances in every other direction.

"Not the worst plan I've ever heard," Graylock said.

They turned to retreat from the lab-and saw a specter looking back at them. It was barely there at all, a ghostly approximation of a Caeliar's shape, as if made of steam.

Unable to mask the fear choking his voice, Graylock squeaked out, "Lerxst?"

An electric jolt spiked through Graylock's mind and rooted him to the floor. Thayer and Pembleton stood shaking beside him. Then a voice-at once feminine, malevolent, and invincible-whispered inside his thoughts as a chill like death crusted the trio's bodies and faces with a delicate layer of frost.

Sedin.

Pinp.r.i.c.ks of cold fire became unbearable stabs of pain across every square centimeter of Graylock's body. He wanted to scream and run, but he couldn't move. There was nowhere for his agony to go, so it rebounded on itself, creating a feedback loop of suffering that drowned out every other sensation. He kept expecting to pa.s.s out, to implode under the strain, but Sedin wouldn't let his mind shut down. She wouldn't let him escape; she just hammered and hammered.

No! he raged. I won't be...won't become...a...cy-

-borg.

The hunger had found new strength. Three drones, easily controlled. Two males, one female. Properly replenished, they would serve. But these were nearly depleted. The female must be preserved to produce more vessels, decided the hunger. One of the males must be consolidated for the collective good.

It read the chemical engrams of the males' minds. One was a warrior, the other an engineer. The engineer's knowledge is more valuable, the hunger concluded.

The drones' tools were crude and clumsy, but they would suffice. Organic nourishment, though inefficient, also would have to do until a more efficacious means of sustenance and maintenance could be devised. Until then, adjustments to these beings' simple genetic code would maximize their longevity and facilitate needed energy-saving biological processes.

Operating the drones as though they were limbs, the hunger used the female and the engineer to terminate the warrior. Its loss was regrettable but necessary. With care and precision, its body was cut apart, meat and fat separated from bone, the edible from the inedible. When all of the warrior's digestible fuels had been isolated, the hunger recharged her two remaining drones with the resources liberated from the third.

When warmer weather returned, the search could begin for a new source of energy. Until then, these vessels of the hunger had to be protected and their energy conserved.

Survival would depend on patience.

Sleep, the hunger bade its drones. Sleep.

Icy seawater crashed over the gunwales of the launch as it neared the sh.o.r.e. Sedath, the second-in-command of the private icebreaker Demial, took the brunt of the chilling spray but turned his head and shut his eyes until the stinging mist abated. He opened his eyes and saw the rowers smirking at him.

"Pick up the pace, men," he said, his voice as level and professional as ever. He didn't begrudge his men a bit of amus.e.m.e.nt at his expense, but discipline had to be maintained.

At the rear of the launch sat Jestem, the Demial's athletic and weathered commanding officer, and Karai, a nervous and evasive young executive from the consortium that owned the icebreaker and employed its officers and crew. Both men were eager to be ash.o.r.e, though for different reasons. Jestem was a glory seeker, always on the lookout for another chance to grab a measure of fame and acclaim. Karai's ambition was more prosaic: He was in it for the money.

Sedath looked up at the pale sky. The sun had just peeked over the horizon, casting a golden glow on the arctic mountains. The landing party would have barely enough time to climb the slope to the lowest edge of the astounding scar that something had gouged into the primeval rock.

The scar fascinated Sedath. He had studied dozens of old topographical maps and surveyors' drawings of this peak on the Demial's months-long sea journey, and he was certain that the mult.i.tude of jagged, semi-vertical rock formations that dotted the lower slope had not been there just a few decades earlier.

It's a meteorite, he surmised. Has to be. The distribution of the debris on the slope suggests an oblique impact from above. Although the Demial's princ.i.p.al mission was to search the seabed for carbon fuel deposits, Sedath had always viewed his work aboard the arctic explorer as an opportunity to conduct scientific research far away from the meddling of the company's sponsored labs or the ideologically extreme halls of academia.

Let the commander have the glory, he mused. Karai can keep the money. I just want to run some tests on those meteorites.

The hollow sc.r.a.pe of aluminum over pebbles and sand told Sedath that the launch had reached the sh.o.r.e of the fjord. Malfomn, the ship's graying, square-jawed gendarme, got up from his seat next to Sedath and vaulted over the side of the launch. The older man landed with a splash in the frigid, knee-deep water, grabbed the prow of the launch, and towed it farther onto the sh.o.r.e. Sedath stood, laid a plank from the front benchboard to the bow, walked across it, and made a short hop to dry land.

Jestem and Karai were the next out of the launch, followed in short order by the rowers and the ship's surgeon, Dr. Marasa. To the same degree that Karai, Jestem, and Sedath himself were overcome with enthusiasm for the consortium-ordered fact-finding mission, Marasa had wanted no part of it. The weary-looking physician shivered as he took in his surroundings. "Okay, we've seen it," he grumped. "Can we go back now?"

"Quit complaining, Doctor," Jestem said. "We're heading up the slope for a closer look at whatever hit this mountain."

Marasa narrowed his eyes. "I bet it was a rock."

Jestem replied, "Just put your snowshoes on, Doctor."

Malfomn, Karai, Sedath, Jestem, and Marasa set down their backpacks, unstrapped their snowshoes, and started putting them on. Jestem was the first to finish securing his bindings. He began slide-stepping away, heading for the incline. "Come on," he called back. "We're losing the light, gentlemen!"

The rest of the group was about to set out after him when Malfomn called out, "Hold up! Everybody, stop!" All eyes turned toward the gendarme, who pointed at a nearby rocky outcropping. "What's that, between the rocks?"

It was difficult at first for Sedath to see what Malfomn was talking about. Then he began to discern artificial-looking shapes and angles lurking beneath the deep, driven snow. "Malfomn, come with me, we'll check it out."

Sedath and Malfomn split away from the group and sidestepped up a gradual hillside to the rock formation. As they got closer to it, he saw pieces of metal jutting up out of the snow and catching the morning sunlight. As soon as he was close enough, Sedath reached out with one gloved hand and tugged on the narrow beam. It shifted a bit in the snow. "Help me pull this up," he said to the gendarme.

Together they took hold of the metal bar and pulled it free of the snow. It was half again as long as Sedath was tall, and its edges were twisted and jagged, as if from shearing stress.

"Do you recognize this alloy?" he asked Malfomn.

The older man shook his head. "Never seen anything like it." Nodding at the snow where they'd found it, he added, "Maybe we ought to do a little digging here, see what we find."

"Good idea," Sedath said. They retrieved their entrenching tools from the back of their packs and started shoveling away the snow and ice. Within a few minutes, beneath only a thin layer of the snow cover, they had exposed more metal pieces and a large patch of tattered, metallic-looking fabric. Lifting it and eyeing it in the sunlight, Sedath speculated, "Part of a shelter, you think?"

"Maybe," Malfomn said. "But I don't know anybody anywhere who makes shelters with materials like this-do you?"

Sedath bunched the shredded fabric and stuffed it into his pocket. "No, I don't," he said. He cast an apprehensive look up the mountainside at the raw wound in the stone and turned back to Malfomn. "We should get back to the others," he said. "Jestem wants to climb that slope and make it back to the Demial before sundown." Stepping closer to the gendarme, Sedath added in a confidential tone of voice, "Have the rowers come up here and finish digging this out while we're gone. Whatever they find, I want it wrapped in a tarp and stowed in the launch."

"Yes, sir," Malfomn said. "It'll be good for them to have work to do while we're up on the mountain."

"My thoughts, exactly," Sedath said.

The two men kick-stepped back down the hillside. Back on level ground, they split up; Sedath cut across the plain to rejoin the commander, and Malfomn detoured to the sh.o.r.e and relayed Sedath's orders to the rowers before regrouping with the climbing expedition at the base of the mountain.

"What'd you find?" Jestem asked Sedath.

"I'm not sure yet," Sedath said, and it was an honest, if evasive, answer. "Some metal and some fabric."

Jestem frowned inside his fur-lined parka hood. "Metal and fabric? Like you might find in a hastily concealed base camp?"

"Possibly," Sedath said, not refuting the commander's hypothesis, even though he had a more exotic idea of his own.

Karai shot a worried glance at Jestem. "Commander, the consortium has to defend its rights to all claims in this territory, mineral or chemical, or else we'll lose them."

"I know that," Jestem said.

"If another landing party has arrived ahead of us, we can't let them seize any materials or stake any-"

Jestem cut in, "I get it!" He nodded to Malfomn. "Keep your weapon handy, Mal. Seems like we might not be alone up here." To the rest of the group, he declared, "Let's go! Follow me."

As the climb began, Sedath pulled a corner of the fabric from his pocket and stole another look at it. It was lightweight but substantial enough that no light penetrated its weave; it slipped easily between his gloved fingertips, like gear oil. Its metallic threads reflected a rainbow of colors as they caught the light. He truly had never seen anything like it before, and he had no idea how it had been made. But if his hypothesis about its origin proved to be correct, then Sedath was about to make a great discovery for science.

Of course, if we actually find an alien s.p.a.ceship, he admitted to himself, the commander will be the one who gets famous, and Karai'll probably end up the world's richest man. The best I can hope for is to get the first look at the thing before it gets shut away in some company lab.

He grinned beneath his balaclava. I can live with that.

"Over here!" Jestem was far ahead of the rest of the group, standing near an ice fissure at the bottom of a steep cliff patched with snow. Sedath and the others hurried their pace, but only with difficulty. None of them had snowshoed in a long time, and the hike up the slope had proved exhausting for everyone-except the commander, apparently.

Malfomn and Sedath reached the fissure, where Jestem stood at the mouth of a narrow ice cave, staring into its depths. Sedath looked back and admired the view of the fjord. At its far end, near the channel, the Demial lay at anchor, silhouetted on quiet waters that reflected the dusky afternoon sky. A whistling gale sparkled the air with a dusting of ice crystals lifted from the slope around the landing party.

Karai and Marasa arrived looking wilted and sounding out of breath. The doctor said, "I promise to rig a clean drug test for anyone willing to carry me back down."

Before anyone could take Marasa up on his offer, Jestem turned and said to Sedath, "Give me your palmlight, will you?"

Sedath undid the loop that held his portable light on his belt and handed the device to Jestem-who, as a privilege of his rank, usually traveled light and expected everyone else to come prepared with whatever he might need. The commander switched on the palmlight and aimed its narrow beam down the ice shaft. He squinted and said, "Sedath, do you see that surface down there?"

Peering into the foggy gloom, Sedath replied, "I think so."

"What does that look like to you?"