“In the story, Raven first meets the girl outside her father’s house. She isn’t lost like I was in the vision. She doesn’t have to follow the river, and she doesn’t have to thaw it out with her song. I figured that part was my subconscious telling me how to get out of here.”
Pierce nodded. “You blacked out when you touched that thing.” He pointed at the orb Fiona still held in her hand. “Maybe it was telling you what to do, but your subconscious used the story to put it into a context you could understand.”
“Why that particular story?” Gallo asked. “Have you been thinking about it recently?”
Fiona shook her head.
“Do you think it means something?” Pierce asked.
Gallo shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m a historian, not a psychologist. But it’s an interesting story.”
“Seems like your basic turning of the year myth,” George said. “The sun vanishes as the solstice approaches. A deity — in this case the raven, a winter bird — transforms into a human to bring it back.”
“Well that’s one way to interpret it,” Gallo countered. “But if, as you suggest, that orb is trying to tell us something, maybe we need to open our minds to other possibilities.”
Pierce gave a noncommittal grunt. “Are you getting anything from it now, Fi?”
“I don’t think so. But it feels like we’re still going the right way.”
Thousands of years of water flowing through the surrounding karst, eroding the limestone as it followed the path of least resistance, had created a cave system that was easy to navigate. Lazarus, however, seemed to grow anxious as he brought up the rear.
Pierce dropped back. “Should we be worried?” he whispered.
“Always.” Lazarus gave him a tight smile. “Those things back there—”
“The trilo-pedes?” Fiona asked, looking back at them.
“Private conversation,” Pierce said with a tight smile. He forgot how well-trained her ears were at detecting language, even when the words were whispered. And he had to admit, her name for the enormous arthropods was appropriate.
“There were a lot of them in that pool,” Lazarus went on. “And it looked to me like they were drawn to us. Or to that thing Fiona is carrying.”
“You think there might be more of them here, in the cave?” Pierce found himself wishing that Fiona had brought along one or two of her golems. Before venturing into the ice tunnel, Fiona had uttered a short command, ‘Tesioh fesh met,’ one of the very few phrases in the Mother Tongue she had mastered, to disassemble the golems, just to avoid confusion if the buried city was ever discovered again. With the threat from the trilo-pedes neutralized by the ice, there was little reason to keep the golems, and besides, she could always make more if the need arose.
“I think there are probably a lot more of them here,” Lazarus said. “This is their primary habitat, not that pool. They’ll have the advantage here, even over Fiona’s golems. I’ll feel a lot better when we’re back under the sun. Until then, all we can do is keep moving.”
“George,” Gallo called out. “Look at this.”
Pierce jogged forward to join her and found her examining a wall adorned with streaks and splotches of black and red. It didn’t take too much imagination to see animal shapes, and human figures.
“Looks like we’re not the first people to discover this cave,” she said.
“That’s a good sign, right?” Fiona said. “It means there’s a way out.”
“No,” Pierce countered. “It just means there was a way out twenty thousand years ago. A lot could have changed since then.”
Before Pierce could amend his pessimistic assessment, there was a splash behind them, followed by a scrabbling sound. Pierce turned his headlamp toward the sound, just as something emerged from the river channel, heading right for them.
It was a trilo-pede, but bigger, with an armored thorax as broad as a queen-sized mattress, tapering into another six-feet of segmented tail.
It also wasn’t alone.
“Just once,” Pierce grumbled, “it would be nice to have a few minutes to look around.”
ELEVEN
I made them.
Carter felt a mild surge of panic at Fallon’s revelation. He would not have made the admission if he had any intention of allowing her to walk out the front door.
She wasn’t afraid of him, though. Not by a long shot. Her panic arose from the possibility of what might happen if the man was stupid enough to threaten her.
Yet, there had been no threat, not even an implicit one. Fallon did not come across as a mad scientist or a maniacal Bond villain, crowing about having the power of life and death in his hands. Rather, he seemed almost embarrassed.
Not ‘I just caused a global catastrophe that killed thousands of people’ embarrassed, Carter thought. More like ‘Whoopsie, I just backed over your cat’ embarrassed.
“We haven’t established a connection yet,” Tanaka snapped. He was afraid of what she might do with the knowledge. “This was purely an optical test. The earthquakes couldn’t have been caused by anything we did.”
“Come on, Ishiro,” Fallon countered. “Coincidences like that just don’t happen.” He looked at Carter again. “Let’s get you up to speed.”
“She’s a biologist—”
“She’s a scientist, led here, and to you, by impressive deductions. Let’s read her in. Maybe she’ll give us a different slant on this.”
Carter’s anxiety ebbed a few degrees. Whatever else these men were, they weren’t madmen bent on destroying the world.
Fallon returned to his seat at the head of the table and began entering commands into a laptop. One of the wall screens began changing. Without looking away from what he was doing, Fallon said, “I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with what it is we’re trying to do here.”
Carter advanced and took a seat at the table. As she sat down, she took out her phone and laid it on her thigh. “By here, you mean Tomorrowland…or is it Space Tomorrow?”
Fallon gave a mirthless laugh. “I wanted to call the company Tomorrowland, but Disney sicced their lawyers on me.”
“Lawyers.” Carter smiled. She also tapped the icon on her phone screen to open a voice-chat application that would stream every word uttered in the room to Dourado in Rome. “As I understand it, you’re trying to develop robotic systems to advance space exploration.”
“Exploration. Colonization. We were supposed to have moon bases and space stations by the dawn of the twenty-first century. What happened? A loss of vision, that’s what. Well, that and the fact that space is exceptionally hostile to organic life. Science fiction did us all a huge disservice by making it look easy.”
He gave a dismissive snort, then seemed to realize that he was straying from the point. “Colonizing space…building space stations and livable habitats is possible. You probably saw my robots when you came in. To borrow a phrase from an old TV show, ‘We have the technology.’ With just the robots I have here at Tomorrowland, I could build a self-sufficient lunar base in six months, using raw materials from the moon itself. But the real goal…the Holy Grail…is terraforming. Making the other planets in the solar system habitable.” He paused a beat. “You’re familiar, I assume, with the concept of the Goldilocks Zone?”
Carter nodded. “It’s the hypothesis that life can only exist in a very specific range of temperatures. Earth is just the right distance from the sun. Venus is too close, and therefore, too hot. Mars is too far away, too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface.”