The Third Gate (16 page)

In other words, Hirshveldt was probably the last person one would expect to start seeing things.

Now that they had stopped moving, legions of mosquitoes and other biting insects began hovering around them in increasing numbers. The smell of the Sudd—a raw, earthy, putrescent stench—was inescapable. Opening his duffel, Logan slipped out his digital camera, adjusted the settings manually, and took several shots of the vicinity. This was followed by a slow pan with a video camera. Returning these to his bag, he brought out a half-dozen test tubes, took samples of the mud and vegetation, then stoppered the tubes and put them aside. Finally, he pulled a small handheld device from the duffel. It sported a digital readout, an analogue knob, and two toggle switches. Stepping carefully into the bow of the airboat, Logan switched it on, then adjusted the knob, sweeping the device slowly in an arc ahead of him.

“What’s that?” Hirshveldt asked, his professional curiosity aroused.

“Air ion counter.” Logan examined the display, adjusted the knob again, did a second sweep. He’d done a basal reading back on the Station before getting into the airboat. The air here was more ionized, but not significantly enough to be alarming—approximately five hundred ions per cubic centimeter. He pulled a notebook from his pocket, made a notation, then replaced the ion counter in his bag.

He turned to Hirshveldt. “Can you describe what you saw, please? I’d appreciate as much detail as possible.”

Hirshveldt paused, obviously combing his memory. “She was tall. Thin. Walking slowly, right about here, over the surface of the swamp.”

Logan looked out over the labyrinthine tangle of vegetation. “While walking, did she stumble or slip?”

The machinist shook his head. “It wasn’t normal walking.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it was slow, really slow—as if she was in a trance, maybe, or sleepwalking.”

Logan wrote in his notebook. “Go on.”

“There was this faint blue glow around her.”

Glow—the glow of sunset, the glow of imagination, or the glow of an aura?
“Describe it, please. Was it steady, like incandescent light, or did it waver like the aurora borealis?”

Hirshveldt slapped away a mosquito. “It wavered. But that was slow, too.” A pause. “She was young.”

“How do you know?”

“She moved like a young person moves. Not like an old woman.”

“Skin color?”

“The glow made it hard to tell. It was pretty dark out, anyway.”

Logan made more notations. “Can you describe what she was wearing?”

A pause. “A dress. High-waisted, almost translucent. A long ribbon was tied around her waist and trailed down past her knees. Over it was a—a triangular kind of thing that hung down around her shoulders. Same material, I think.”

Egyptian shawl cape
, Logan thought as he made notes. The garb of nobility, or perhaps of a priestess. Like the one Tina Romero claimed had gone missing from her office. He’d asked her about it; she told him she planned to wear it to the celebratory closing party Stone always held at the end of a successful expedition. “Would you recognize her if you saw her again?” he asked.

Hirshveldt shook his head. “It was too dark. Anyway, the thing
on her head made it hard to see her face. Even when she looked at me.”

Logan stopped in midnotation. “She looked at you?”

The machinist nodded.

“
At
you? Or just in the direction of the Station?”

“As I stared, she stopped walking. Then—just as slowly—she turned her head. I could see the glow of her eyes in the dark.”

“You said she had a thing on her head. What did it look like?”

“It looked like … the body of a bird. A feathered bird with a long beak. It covered her head like a hat. The wings came down on both sides, over her ears.”

A Horus falcon, mantling. Priestess, without a doubt
. Logan made a final note, then slipped the notebook into the duffel bag. “When she looked at you, did you get any kind of feeling or sensation?”

Hirshveldt frowned. “Sensation?”

“You know. Like, a welcome? An acknowledgment?”

“Funny you should mention that. When I first saw her out there in the swamp, she seemed … well, sad, almost. But then she turned to look at me and I felt something else.”

“Yes?” Logan urged.

“I felt anger. Real anger.” Another pause. “I don’t know why I felt that. But a funny feeling came over me then. My mouth went all dry, like I couldn’t swallow. I looked away a minute, wiped the sweat from my eyes. When I looked back—she was gone.”

Logan thought back to the curse of Narmer.
His tongue will cleave to his throat
. Looking around in the gathering dark, he felt his skin prickle. It was back again: that evil he’d felt so strongly when the generator caught fire. It was almost like a physical presence, whispering to him malevolently over the drone of insects.

He turned back to Hirshveldt. “I think it’s time for us to get back to the Station. Thanks for your time.”

“You bet.” The machinist seemed just as eager to leave the swamp. He fired up the airboat and they made their way painfully back toward the welcoming lights.

24

From the vantage point of Mark Perlmutter—in the “Crow’s Nest” atop Red—the two figures in the airboat looked ridiculous, bumping and thumping their way back toward the Station across the godforsaken swamp. What the hell were they doing out there, anyway—testing a malaria vaccine, maybe?

As if in response to this conjecture, a buzzing sounded in his ear and he quickly shooed the insect away.
Better get busy or I’ll be one big mosquito bite myself
. Anyway, it wasn’t Perlmutter’s business what those two were up to—this was only his second Porter Stone assignment, but already he’d learned that so many crazy things went on, it just didn’t make sense to ask questions.

Turning away from the gathering dusk, he focused his attention on the mast—the periscope-like metal structure that enclosed the various microwave antennas and pieces of broadcasting/receiving
apparatus the Station depended on for its link to the outside world. The low-frequency radio transmitter had been acting a bit wonky, and—as communications assistant—it was Perlmutter’s job to climb up the damn mast, all the way to the Crow’s Nest above the canvas that enclosed Red, and see what was what. Who else was going to do it? Not Fontaine, communications chief and his boss—at two hundred and seventy pounds, the guy probably wouldn’t make it past five rungs.

It was getting dark fast, and he switched on a flashlight to examine the transmitter. He’d already checked out the wiring, circuit board, and transceiver down below in the communications room, and had found nothing; he was betting the problem lay with the transmitter itself. Sure enough—a two-minute inspection uncovered a frayed wire whose end had come loose from the main assembly.

This would be a snap. Perlmutter paused a moment to apply some more bug dope to his neck and arms, then he reached into his utility satchel for the cordless soldering gun, heat sink, solder, and flux. Balancing the flashlight on the mast, he cut off the damaged end with wire cutters, then—once the gun was hot—applied the flux and, carefully, the solder.

Putting the soldering gun aside, he scrutinized his work with the flashlight. Perlmutter was proud of his soldering skills—sharpened by years of working with ham radio equipment as a youth—and he nodded to himself as he inspected the clean, shiny joint. He blew on the wire gently to help it set. He’d test things out once he got back to the communications room, of course, but he felt 100 percent sure this was the problem. Of course, over dinner he’d elaborate a bit on the difficulty of the repair for Fontaine’s benefit. If the dig succeeded, there would be bonuses, big bonuses—and Fontaine would have a say in the size of Perlmutter’s own.

He slipped the housing back over the equipment, then turned away, glancing once again over the landscape as he waited for the gun to cool down. The airboat had vanished, and the Sudd spread away in all directions, black and endless. It looked as if yet another rain shower was going to start any minute. The lights of the Station,
scattered below him across the six separate wings, twinkled brightly. From his vantage point, he could see the long strands of light marking the marina curtain; the faint glow from the windows of Oasis; the endless little rows of dancing white that marked the exterior catwalks and the pontoon walkways that joined the wings to each other. It was a cheerful sight—and yet Perlmutter did not feel cheered. The little city of lights merely punctuated the countless miles of dark wilderness that surrounded them, merely helped underscore the fact that they were hundreds of near-impassable miles from help or even a trace of civilization. On the inside—in the dormitory housing, at work in the communications room, or relaxing in the library or lounge—it was almost possible to forget just how alone they were. But up here …

Despite the warmth of the night, Perlmutter shivered.
If the dig succeeded …
Talk of the curse of Narmer had been growing in recent days. At first—as the project got under way, and word of what they were after slowly filtered out among the crew—the curse had been a joke, something brought up over beers to get a laugh. But as time went on, the talk had grown more serious. Even Perlmutter, who was the most committed atheist you’d ever want to see, had started to get the heebie-jeebies—especially after what had happened to Rogers.

He looked around again. The blackness seemed to be pressing in on him from all sides, squeezing him almost, pushing against his chest, making it hard to breathe.…

That did it. He grabbed the still-warm soldering gun and other materials, threw them into his satchel, and closed it up. Kneeling in the Crow’s Nest, he unzipped a half circle of the protective tarp, exposing an opening to the inside of Red. Below was a vertical tube, lit infrequently by LEDs, into which the housing of the mast descended, like a pipe cleaner into a pipe. Slipping the satchel over one shoulder, he grabbed the rungs, descended past the tarp, paused to zip it closed again, then continued down. He climbed carefully—it was thirty feet to the bottom, and he sure as hell didn’t want to fall.

Reaching the base of the mast, he fetched a deep breath, wiped
his sweaty hands on his shirt. He’d go check out the low-frequency radio, make sure its gremlins had been exorcised. Then he’d look for Fontaine, no doubt grabbing himself an early dinner.

But as he prepared to leave the mast enclosure, Perlmutter paused. There were two hatches leading out of the enclosure. One led to the hallway containing the science labs and the communications room. The other led to Red’s power substation. Fifteen minutes earlier, when he’d stepped into the mast enclosure, the substation hatch had been closed.

Now it was open.

He took a step forward, frowning. Normally the substation was a lights-out facility, operating without need of human intervention. The only time anybody would have to go in would be to make repairs. But if there was something wrong with the electrical system, he’d have been the first to know. He took another step forward.

“Hello?” he said into the darkness. “Anybody in there?”

Was he going crazy, or had he just seen a dim light deep within the substation extinguish itself?

He licked his lips, stepped through the hatch into the substation. What the hell—there was a puddle of water here. What was going on? Had some kind of a leak to the outside formed?

He took another step forward, simultaneously fumbling for the light switch. “Hello? Hell—”

And then his world exploded in a concussion of pain and furious, inviolable white.

25

At nine thirty the following morning, the internal phone in Logan’s office rang.

He picked it up on the third ring. “Jeremy Logan here.”

“Jeremy? It’s Porter Stone. Am I interrupting anything?”

Logan sat up. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Then come to the Operations Center, if you would. There’s something here I think you ought to see.”

Logan saved the file he’d been working on—a write-up of his conversation with Hirshveldt the evening before—then stood up and stepped out of his office.

He had to stop and ask directions twice before he found his way. The people on the Station seemed jumpy this morning—and it was hardly surprising. The previous evening, a communications worker named Perlmutter had been badly, almost fatally, electrocuted. Logan
had pieced together the story from various mutterings he’d overheard during breakfast: how the worker had stepped into a puddle of water in which a live electrical wire had been lying. “It was Fontaine, his boss, who found him,” Logan had heard someone say. “Horrible. Like he was covered in soot, almost, blackened from the electrical burns.”

Logan had been irresistibly reminded of the curse of Narmer.
His limbs will turn to ash
. Rather than mentioning this to anyone, he mentally shelved it for later consideration.

Unlike the previous tragedy at the generator, there had been no follow-up meeting to analyze this accident, to try to determine cause. Logan assumed that one had not yet been scheduled—or, perhaps, it had been confined to the very highest levels of management. He did know that Perlmutter was in serious condition and was being closely monitored by Ethan Rush.

The Operations Center, located deep within White, turned out to be the large, monitor-stuffed space he’d visited before. Once again, Cory Landau—the cherub with the Zapata mustache—was manning the futuristic central cockpit. On a nearby screen, Logan noticed the wireframe CAD image representing the extent of the dig mapping. Its extent had advanced dramatically since the first time he’d seen it.

Ranged around Landau were Porter Stone, Tina Romero, and Dr. March, all of whom were staring at one of the larger monitors that displayed what looked to Logan like a kind of greenish soup, punctuated by lines of static.

As he entered, Stone looked over. “Ah, Jeremy. Come take a look at this.”

Logan joined them at the central cockpit. “What is it?”