“I don’t know why he activated the accelerator, or how he managed to enlist those coyote-things to help him. I don’t know if this crazy storm is related to his activities or not. Accelerator, coyotes, storm: I can’t put those three together any more than I can pull a rabbit out of a hat. But that doesn’t mean Gaggii can’t.”
A phone clanged, dissonant in the charged atmosphere of the room. The tech who answered nodded slowly as he listened, then passed the handset to the corporal. Moody watched his expression change from one of frustration to one of confusion. He hung up and stood staring off into space for a long moment, then turned to face the detective.
“That was the security kiosk at the eastside parking lot. They need advice. There’s something they think should be checked out.”
“We’re busy here.”
The young man shook his head slowly. “No, I think we ought to have a look at this. I don’t want to, but we probably should.” His tone was that of the hunter chosen to leave the cave and confront the saber-tooth.
Puzzled, Moody and Ooljee followed him out, leaving Grayhills and the tech to their weaving.
No burning eyes, no fiery otherworldly shapes leapt from dark comers to confront them. Nothing impeded their progress as they hurried toward the back of the building.
They slowed in the hallway that led to the parking lot exit. Outside, sleet continued to whiten the pavement, the half-ice spending itself violently against the wide, tinted windows that looked out on a field of cars and minivans and trucks. Farther to the east, transport traveling the north-south two-lane highway was slowing and pulling off the road. Tugging jackets and shirts tight against the sleet, drivers and passengers were leaving their vehicles to stare at what had materialized in the gravelly soil just beyond the graded shoulder.
It was big. Men in uniform were lined up alongside it to gaze at the people gathering below them. At this distance Moody could not see their expressions, but he doubted they could be any less astonished than his own. He had very good eyesight and was able to see the name on its front, but he could not read it, since it was written in a script unfamiliar to him.
The corporal surprised him by translating. The words meant nothing.
The two men from Ganado left the members of the security staff standing dumbfounded in the blowing sleet. Not a word was spoken until they’d returned to Engineering.
“It is a mistake, an error on Gaggii’s part,” Ooljee murmured as they entered the busy room.
Moody brushed moisture from his shoulders. “It’s getting out of hand. I’m beginning to get some idea of what you meant when you spoke of messing around with incomprehensible forces.”
Eyes followed them as they entered. Grayhills came over to them and put a hand on Moody’s arm. It was a good thing she did so, or the spellbound detective might have walked right through the back door and out into the next corridor.
“I take it you saw something.”
He started to tell her, hesitated. How could he explain? It was not an explainable thing. Instead he said, “Can you patch us through to the university library molly? Not the one here: the main one, in Flagstaff.”
She eyed him curiously. “I don’t see why not.” Her attention shifted to Ooljee, who had slumped in a chair nearby. “Why?”
“We need to check out a name,” Moody told her.
“A name? What name?”
“The name of a ship.”
She shook her head, her confusion deepening. “I don’t understand.”
“Y’all have lots of company. Be a good gal and run the patch.”
Watching him carefully, she resumed her seat and jacked the request. A moment later he found himself confronting an open library prompt. He entered his request and awaited a response, which appeared within the minute.
Ooljee rose to peer over his shoulder. Several techies left their stations to see what all the fuss was about.
As the library patiently informed them, “the destroyer Akitsuki, while escorting the heavy carrier Zuikaku, was hit and presumed sunk by American aircraft on the morning of October 25, 1944, during the battle for Leyte Gulf, Philippine campaign, WWII.”
“Except it didn’t sink.” Moody muttered aloud. “It went someplace else. Now it’s here, outside. In the high desert.” Grayhills turned to Ooljee. “What is he talking about?”
“Out past the parking lot.” The sergeant nodded eastward. “A Japanese destroyer from the Second World War. At least some of the crew is still aboard, no doubt wondering what has happened to them. I imagine the majority of survivors are huddled below, praying to whatever gods they prayed to in those times.”
“That’s crazy."
“I have no intention of disputing you.” His expression narrowed. “The codetalkers.”
Moody blinked, looked at his partner. “What?”
“Navaho codetalkers. An important part of tribal history. We all learn about them in school. During the second great war, before mollys, all the governments looked for ways to transmit messages that the enemy would not be able to understand. When Navahos joined the American forces, someone thought to station one at each important position. The codetalkers concocted a goofy, personal version of our language. Strange as it seems, the enemy was the Japanese. They never could figure out what kind of code the Americans were using. It wasn’t a real code; just mixed-up Navaho.”
“I don’t see how that explains that ship outside.”
“The alien web. Some codetalkers must have hit on the right phrasing. Momentarily and accidentally, but enough to access something in the web. Or maybe,” he added, his voice dropping, “Great-grandfather Laughter decided to try and make use of his sandpainting knowledge, and this ship ran into some real hatathli magic which yanked it right out of the Pacific and into…”
“Strange seas and shores,” Moody finished for him, “until our friend Gaggii started playing with the web. Now they’re back home—sort of. Wish I spoke Japanese.”
“It can’t have been deliberate on his part,” Ooljee observed. “He is just stumbling around in search of his own ends.”
Moody eyed his partner. “You’re gonna have to use the template again, ask the web where he is.”
The sergeant was dubious. “I’d rather not. Each time we access I get the feeling I am going to do something wrong, or that Gaggii will finally have figured out how to insert a
safeguard to cover his tracks and we will all end up like the men on that ship. Or the building we are in will materialize someplace else, or maybe the state of Arizona. I do not want to have to wait on someone to ‘accidentally’ bring us back a hundred years from now.”
It was an image impossible to avoid: the whole state, with all its rivers and cities and mountains and people, suddenly extracted from reality as neatly as a child would cut out a piece of map. And why just Arizona? Moody thought. Why not all of North America, or if Gaggii wasn’t careful with his parameters, the entire planet? Earth shunted to an obscure comer of an alien database, just another insignificant byte of data in a web large enough to include…
What? How vast was this web they’d stumbled upon?
Maybe that’s all it was. Just a big database devised by whoever they were. He could feel himself beginning to lose it, and Vemon Moody, Detective First, TPD, never lost it. But the scale, the immensity, the apocalyptic indifference of it all, was starting to get to him.
He could see it clearly: galaxies as directories, subdirectories of individual solar systems. Within one subdirectory, little files. One of a place called Earth, or however it was labeled. Tiny subfiles for plants and animals and human beings. Subfile for individuals: Vemon Moody, Paul Ooljee, Samantha Grayhills, Yistin Gaggii. Infinitesimally minuscule bytes easily accessed by anyone who knew how to use the web. Garbage files.