Earth Thirst (18 page)

“This is too much like an orchard or a vineyard—the sort of layout that makes it easy to harvest fruit. This is order for order's sake,” I explain. “This is the way corporations think.”

That stops her. “Big Ag?”

I shake my head. “Does the thought of a multinational agricultural conglomerate investing in a tree farm in the middle of the Pacific Ocean make sense to you?”

“Only if there is a functional profit model. But why couldn't this be an Arcadian project?”

“We don't do things this way,” I point out. “We know better.”

“Silas,” she says, tapping her lower lip as she walks along the row. “I don't like this. It doesn't track well.”

I'm having similar thoughts. “I know.” Secutores is the security arm of some corporate entity, one that has the wherewithal to make the chemical weed killer. There's no reason they couldn't also have an arm that does pharmaceutical or biotech research. I start to replay my conversation with Callis, wondering if there was something I missed.

“Silas,” she says again.

“What?”

“There's a road.”

I hurry over to where she is standing. I had thought the gap between the rows of trees was a grid border—how the planners were separating the distinct plots of specific tree species. But it is definitely a road of packed dirt, wide enough that two cars could squeeze past each other. I kneel and scrape up a handful of the dirt, sniffing it carefully. I don't smell anything terribly pungent and I taste the dirt cautiously.

“Okay,” Mere says. “What are you doing?”

It's faint, but there's a bitterness to the soil that shouldn't be there. “They cleared this path,” I say after spitting the dirt out.

“Cleared it? How?”

“I don't know, but it's not as toxic as I thought it might be.”

“And yet I have just watched you eat dirt because you wanted to check toxicity?”

“TCDD,” I say. “It's a persistent contaminant found in dioxins, which are the basis for a lot of herbicides.”

“So you were tasting for poison. In the dirt.”

“Yes. There was growth here that needed to be cleared away. Look, the Amazon rain forest takes up how much of Brazil?”

“Most of it?”

“And yet it started as a tree farm.”

“It did?”

“Yes, but the natives didn't farm all of it. They only farmed the areas that were convenient for them. The rest they let grow wild. Over several thousand years. It didn't happen overnight. There is a mix of order and chaos in the arrangement of the trees.” I gesture at the rows of trees around us. “This is order.” I point at the road. “This is order, too, but it came
after
the trees. Do you see?”

“I get it,” she says, nodding and looking at the trees again. “Not all of these trees are farmed. Some of them were here originally. Someone came later and, well,
farmed
it, I guess.”

“And at that time, they needed a road.”

“And someplace to hang out, like the cross-shaped building I saw.” She nods and claps her hands together. “Well, mystery solved then. Is there more dirt eating to do or can we go find this place?”

“After you,” I say, gesturing along the road.

We keep it on our left, walking between the rows of trees, and it doesn't take us long to reach the building site. It's not far from the wall of the crater, about a half kilometer from the gap which looks out over the ocean. There's nothing graceful about the building. It's made from pre-fab Chinese materials, and it looks like it was spit out of a first year architecture student's design program. Everything is framed by right angles. Calling it
utilitarian
would be to upsell the intent of the builders.

There are no external lights, though I can hear the distant rumble of a generator running. Motion-sensitive lamps run along the roofline, and we stay beneath the trees so as to not inadvertently announce ourselves. A field of antennae and a pair of satellite dishes huddle together on the roof of the northern wing. The only doors are an unmarked set in the front. There are no windows and no second floor, though over the central hub, there is a square concrete block—the sort of shape that would house the machinery for an elevator.

“What is it?” Mere asks when I lean against a nearby tree and massage my temples.

The memories are coming back again. The open sky. White feathers. Old stone carvings. A cistern of cold water. None of it is connected to anything, though. It's all out of reach. I've had this happen before, when I've gone someplace familiar. It kicks things loose. I know Mother helps us carry the burden of our years when we go into her embrace, and it rarely is a problem. Not like this.

“It's nothing,” I say. I stare at Mere's moonlit face, her features knotted with concern, and I realize I can't remember what happened after I took Kirkov's knife.

Nothing
is both a lie and the truth. There are chemicals in my blood. TCDDs, even. While I may have staved off the worst of the poisonous effects, there are some lingering malignances that are causing decay.

Remember your priorities.
The voice in my head isn't mine, and it isn't Talus's either. Who said that to me first, or was it something beaten into the meat of my brain by years of soldering?
Know your mission. Make it to the next checkpoint. Don't think about the big picture, son. You're not trained to think. You're trained to kill. Kill one of the enemy. Find another one. Repeat. Keep it simple.
So many variations over the centuries. Don't think. Mind the plan.

Memory is insidious. It can become a burden too heavy to carry. That is why we let Mother leach it away when we rest in her embrace.
There. There. Let me take care of everything. Let Mother take away the pain.

Remember your priorities. Survive. Kill everyone else.

No, that's not true.

I remember the boat and the storm. Aeneas holding on to the tiller. His eyes forward, not looking back. “Remember our families,” he shouts at me.

Remember those we left behind.

I slump against the trunk. It's a Surian cedar. Australian Red Gold. Our boat was made from cedar planks, though the cedars of the ancient Mediterranean were much different from their Australian counterparts—not even the same family. But the wood, the wood was the same: strong, resilient. So much of history was built from trees like this. So much history was… burned.

I jerk upright, startling Mere who was reaching out to shake me.

“Smoke,” I say. “I smell smoke.”

It's faint, the sort of distant aroma of a wood fire a thousand yards away, and it's not from wood. There are chemicals in the smoke too. Plastics. Synthetic fibers. Paper. “You saw a heat bloom,” I remind Mere.

She fumbles for my optics, puts them on, and stares at the building. “It's the whole building,” she says, “but it's more yellow than red now.”

“Because it is cooling off.”

I walk out into the open area that has been cleared around the building. Mere squeaks behind me, but when nothing happens—when the motion-sensitive lights don't flash on—she follows. I walk up to the front doors of the lab and touch the panels gingerly. They're warmer than the outside air, but not by much. “There's been a fire,” I tell Mere as she comes up behind me. “The building is a hermetic environment. Nothing gets in or out.”

“Wait,” Mere says as I grab the handle of the door. “If the fire has burned everything inside, then it's an oxygen starved environment. What happens when you open that door?”

“Nothing.” I tap my ear. “Do you hear it? There's a generator running somewhere. And I can smell the burn. It's faint, but it's there. An environmental system is still running. There's a tiny leak somewhere.”

There's a keycard reader next to the door, but the activity lights on it are dark. I brute force the door, and for a half-second, I fear Mere is right. The fire is waiting for us, and I've just given it a big dose of fresh air. But all that comes out of the lab is a foul commingling of everything that has been burned.

TWENTY

W
e prop the door open and wait a little while, just to be sure. When nothing seems to change, we venture inside.

The lab is dark, both from a lack of light and from the layer of ash that covers everything. The fire burned while it could, and the more combustible materials went up quickly. If there was a fire suppression system, it never went off. The walls are scorched black, the paint and wallpaper gone. Metal struts for movable walls and desk units are still there, but the synthetic and plastic overlays are all melted or gone. There's a large planter—several meters in diameter—in the center of the lobby that held a few flowering shrubs, but they're nothing but blackened sticks poking out of char-covered dirt.

There are a few bodies too, twisted in unnatural positions. Mere gags when we find the first one, though she doesn't vomit. “Were they dead before the fire reached…?” she mumbles through her hand.

“From smoke inhalation?” I shrug. “Let's hope so.”

There are four wings off the central hub: the entrance, where the few rooms off the central hallway seem to have been administrative; two research wings, though it is difficult to tell exactly what sort of research was done—the lab equipment (what hasn't been melted and charred by the fire) is used for chemical analysis, protein therapy studies, and biological tissue analysis; and the last wing, opposite the entrance, that looks to be more administrative services—executive offices, a kitchen, a quartet of conferences rooms, and a break room. The elevator in the central hub has a large set of doors—freight-sized doors. There is only one button on the pad next to the doors, and it isn't marked.

“Only one way to go,” Mere says. “Down.” She pushes the button, and nothing happens.

She's sweating. The ambient temperature inside the lab is higher than outside, and not just because the central air handling system has failed.

It hasn't been that long since the fire snuffed itself out.

“There has to be another access,” I point out. “Where's all the heat exchanges, the air control infrastructure? It's not up on the roof, which means it's all below ground. That has to vent somewhere.”

She nods. “And the server room. I see computer workstations, but where does the network collapse back to?”

It's odd there's only one door into the building. No windows. No emergency exits. A good design criteria if you are building something that can be hermetically sealed, but, well, Mere and I are looking at what happens when good designs become deathtraps.

There's an unmarked door near the end of the right-hand lab wing that is thicker than the others. The seal hisses when I pull it open, and colder air wafts out. Stairs, going down. We prop this door open too, and descend, feeling our way in the dark.

We reach a landing and find—by feel—another heavy door. I force it open, and weak light streams out into the stairwell. Emergency lighting, a track of tiny lights that runs along the ceiling of the hallway beyond. The hallway is nondescript and I spot a few generalized signs. Maintenance and HVAC systems. Separate from the lab upstairs, and unaffected by the fire. They're in low power mode, but they're still functional.

“We should find flashlights,” Mere says, squeezing past me.

I hesitate, looking back at the stairs that continue going down. The walls of the stairwell aren't the same prefab material of the lab. They're actually stone. We're in the bedrock of the island.

“This stairwell predates the lab,” I point out. “I know what's down there.”

The old temple.

“Silas,” Mere says, “wait a second, will you?” She's found a panel in the wall, a recessed locker of some kind. She rummages through its contents and produces a heavy flashlight. Shining its beam around, she does a quick visual check of the hall and then comes back to me. “Okay,” she says, “let's go.”

I let her lead and we descend one more floor. She shines the light down the next flight, and the stairs go down a few more metals and then end. A heavy metal grate lies across the floor. She moves the flashlight around too quickly for me to make out any details of what lies beneath the grate. I almost reach out and grab the light from her, but she steps out of reach. Trying to get my attention, she raps the handle against another security door. “One more door,” she says.

I drag myself away from the grate and pull open the door. The same dull glow of emergency lighting greets us, as well as the distinct odor of blood.

The short hall beyond the door leads to three rooms: two tiny observation lounges and an operating theater. The last has been recently used—dramatically so—and the last person out hadn't bothered to clean up. There's a dried crust of blood on the tile floor, some of it built up around the drain not far from the metal table. Several trays of used equipment sit nearby, and there are tracks in the blood as if a large cart was parked nearby for a while and then moved once the patient had been… emptied.

There's power too. Mere spots a workstation nearby with a laptop still attached to the network. She investigates it, and I hear her make a noise somewhere between surprise and alarm. “What is it?” I ask, still looking at the blood stains on the table.

I used to read the future this way, in the spatter of blood from an animal sacrifice.

Something's not right.
I recognize the scent, though I can't place it. There's panic rising in my chest, a flight response brought on by the scent of the blood. I should know what is causing it. I should—

“Silas.” Mere gets my attention. A second later, she's got her hand to her mouth and she's backing away from the laptop. As soon as the sound starts, she puts her hands over her ears.

The video is jerky, shot with a hand-held camera, but I recognize the room. And the chair. And the man in the chair.

He is being dissected while still alive, and judging by the noise he is making, they aren't using anesthetic.

I'm dimly aware of Mere running out of the room, but I can't move to stop her.

I can only watch as Nigel is taken apart.

Piece by piece.

* * *

“They knew we were coming.”

She's huddled in the stairwell, her back pressed against the stone wall. She doesn't want to look at me, her eyes dart up once—fixating on the oblong shape of the laptop in my right hand—and then return to staring at the floor directly in front of her feet.