The prison’s exterior walls were still in fairly good shape. Above them rose multiple guard towers, their glass windows broken out and the paint long since stripped off. Only one section of barbed-wire fencing remained on the perimeter; the rest lay in tangled heaps on the ground.
Michael considered radioing Discovery to see if its AI, Timothy Pepper, had detected any exhaust plumes from the defectors. But he quickly decided it was too great a risk, and the airship was likely too high to pick up anything on the surface.
“Radio silence, everyone,” he said.
If there were hostiles down here, Michael didn’t want to give them a heads-up that Team Raptor had landed. The three divers and their drone were on their own now, without aerial support from Discovery.
He gave the signal to advance, and the team moved down the other side of the hill, weapons shouldered and pointed at the prison. Cricket kept behind them, moving apace and scanning for signs of life.
The three divers fanned out into combat intervals as they closed the gap between the hill and the former prison’s outer concrete walls.
Michael felt the terrain change underfoot and stopped to brush dirt off the cracked asphalt of a road. It led to the front of the compound and a closed steel door covered in rust and pocked with bullet holes.
He checked the digital map on his HUD and this time managed to match it with another road coming from the east—the same direction as the ocean.
Michael gave more hand signals.
The team continued to the outer wall of the prison while he went to check this second road. His gut told him the best evidence of life would be any tracks he might find.
So far, he didn’t see any footprints, hoofprints, or vehicle tracks. Nothing to indicate that anything bigger than a bug lived in this toxic wasteland. Cricket wasn’t coming back with anything conclusive, either.
Magnolia and Trey took up position against the wall. He gave a nod to their mirrored visors before running out into the open with Cricket hovering after him.
Keeping low, he didn’t stop until he got to the intersection. A crooked pole jutted up beside the road, two and a half centuries after the nuclear blast that should have blown it down. The directional sign, however, was long since reduced to flakes of rust.
Michael checked the ground and quickly found something that could be recent. Bending down, he studied the dirt and dust that had covered what looked like tire tracks.
He looked east, back toward the bay where they had flown in over the ships. The vessels could have belonged to Cazador pirates under el Pulpo’s command, but there was no record of their coming here—which was part of the reason he had decided to check it out. More likely, the tracks and the ships had been left by someone else.
But they could not possibly have been here when the bombs fell.
A chill ran through him when a whistle of the wind sounded eerily like a Siren’s wail. The noise passed, and again the landscape fell into silence.
He scanned the road for heat signatures and found nothing but small creatures that lived in the toxic dirt. Lightning forked over the western horizon. He faced south, where explosions of light inside a towering mass of cumulus looked like bombs going off. The storm was moving toward their position.
He hurried back to the wall, where Trey waited.
“Where’s Mags?” Michael whispered.
Trey started moving along the side of the wall to the next corner. Around the edge, Magnolia stood behind a hunk of broken wall, looking inside the former prison yard. She was frozen like a statue.
“I’ve got a reading,” she said without turning.
Michael considered sending Cricket in but decided to keep the robot back for now. He brought up his rifle and took a position on the left side of the wall. Then he glanced inside the rectangular prison compound.
A guard tower rose in the middle of the facility, its empty window frames overlooking concrete courts covered with the dirt and dust of centuries. Several basketball hoops remained, but where there had once been nets, Michael spotted something that looked almost like flags.
Movement at the base of the poles flickered across his night vision, but he couldn’t make it out. He switched to infrared to see dozens… no, hundreds of small creatures on the courts.
“What are we looking at?” Trey asked, moving next to Michael.
“Rats,” Magnolia replied.
“But what are they doing?”
Michael brought his scope back up to his visor but still couldn’t see much.
“Hold here,” he said. “I’ll check this out.”
Michael moved through the opening in the wall, careful not to snag his suit on a curl of rebar sticking out of the broken concrete.
Keeping low, he ran toward the guard tower, not stopping until he got there. He inched around the corner for a better view of the courts. The sound of thousands of clicking teeth grew louder as he closed in.
For a moment, he felt the sensation of something watching him, and he froze, scanning the buildings in the rectangular compound. The few windows and doors were broken and leading into darkness, where eyes could watch his team from the shadows.
Michael spotted a promising entrance that might lead to the guts of the prison, and the source of the signal. He looked back to the hole in the wall, where Trey and Magnolia were still waiting.
His hands told the story without a word spoken. Then he took off running, past the concrete fields, not slowing his pace even when he saw what the rats were feasting on.
Heart pounding, Michael took cover inside an open door, trying to keep from panting. But that was nearly impossible, and he found himself sucking in air.
When he looked back out the door, he saw skeletal remains of several humans in the courtyard. The rats meant they had to be recent kills.
He tried to slow his heartbeat. You’ve got this, Tin. He had told himself the same thing when he got scared as a kid.
He turned down the hallway to peer into the inky darkness. Switching from infrared to night vision, he made out the old passage. Ceiling panels hung loose, and sections of tile floor had sheared off.
But what the hell was the cylinder on the floor?
He brought the scope up to his visor and zoomed in on what looked an awful lot like a cryo chamber. Several were scattered in the hallway, with skirts of glass surrounding the vats.
There was no use going inside or sending Cricket in. Someone, or something, had beat Team Raptor here.
But that still didn’t make any sense. If these chambers were holding survivors for 250 years, it was one hell of a coincidence their being raided within days of the team’s arrival. More puzzling still, what on earth were cryo chambers doing in a prison?
Michael pushed aside the questions and moved back out into the yard. He ran past the rats, not looking at the remains they were feeding on. This time, a new sound replaced the din of nails and teeth—a screech reminiscent of baby Sirens.
Before he could react, a wave of black swooped away from the broken windows of the guard tower and slammed into him. A pair of wings wrapped around his visor, and he peered out at the deformed eyes of a bat the size of his head.
He flailed his arms, screaming as the creatures covered his body like an adhesive that he couldn’t get off.
“Hold on, and don’t move!” Magnolia yelled.
Michael froze, knowing just what she was about to do. He felt the pressure lighten on his natural arm as she used one of her two crescent blades to cut through the flesh of several bats.
The hissing made him flinch.
“Don’t move!” she shouted again.
Cricket hovered over their heads, using a blowtorch to burn the bats off Michael’s armor.
The screeching rose into a strident cacophony around him as she went to work with her blades, hacking the beasts from the air and off his body.