Fallon bent over another of the computers and for several seconds, the only sound in the room was the faint clicking of plastic keys. The tension multiplied with each passing second until Carter couldn’t take it anymore. “If we pull the meta-material — the Roswell fragment — out of the antenna array, would that shut it down?”
Fallon looked up at her, then at Tanaka. The Japanese scientist shook his head. “The satellite is out of our control. Removing the meta-material might make things worse.”
“Or better,” Fallon countered, jumping to his feet. “We’ll try it.”
“Marcus!”
But Fallon was already heading for the door. “Have a cart waiting for me out front,” he said, as he passed the waiting guide robot. “We’re going to the array.”
The robot slid forward, putting itself between him and the exit.
Fallon barely managed to stop short of crashing into it. “What are you doing? Get out of the way.”
“Your presence is not authorized,” the electronic voice said. “Please remain where you are. Security has been notified.”
TWELVE
A third mattress-sized trilo-pede squirmed up out of the river channel to join the other two. Their enormous shells bristled with spiny horn-like extensions, but it was the clacking mandibles that projected real menace. The four humans who had blundered into their subterranean domain were good for just one thing: food.
Lazarus started toward them, pausing long enough to shout back over his shoulder. “Get out of here. I’ll try to slow them down.”
Pierce turned away, arms wide in a herding gesture, though Fiona and Gallo needed no coaxing. They ran to the extent that the topography would allow it, but in the ambient glow from their headlamps, Pierce saw another of the creatures rising out of the river channel ahead of them. But something else came out of the river with it, a man-sized golem formed of smooth, fist-sized rocks and mud. It leapt onto the back of the nearest trilo-pede, slamming its underbelly down against the cavern floor.
Way to go, Fi! Pierce thought, intending to shout the words, but before he could follow through, the trilo-pede began thrashing, flinging pieces of the golem away like drops of water until nothing was left. Instead, Pierce said, “Bigger!”
“I don’t have anything to work with,” Fiona complained.
The ill-fated golem had bought them a few seconds, just enough time to slip past the creature. Pierce looked back, trying to gauge its speed, and saw Lazarus come up behind the monster and scramble onto its back.
The creature tried to throw him off, but Lazarus was not as easy to dislodge as a rough, hastily constructed golem. He reached down and seized one of the protruding spikes in each hand, but holding on wasn’t his intention. He flexed his legs, and then, with a howl of primal rage, he pulled. There was a sickening, sucking sound as the segments tore loose from the creature’s body in a spray of dark fluid, trailing long ropes of tissue.
The trilo-pede’s thrashing intensified, and with his handhold no longer connected to the thing’s body, Lazarus was hurled clear. He landed on his side, but somehow managed to turn the crash into a roll. Then he was back on his feet in an instant, brandishing a piece of trilo-pede exoskeleton the size of a car’s bumper. As the wounded creature struck at him, he thrust the end of the shell between the chattering mandibles, and with his full weight behind it, he rammed it deep into the trilo-pede’s body.
“George!”
Pierce turned his gaze forward again and saw the reason for Gallo’s shout. To his left, the river channel widened and flattened out, disappearing as the river spilled out onto the cavern floor, forming one enormous puddle that stretched from wall to wall. Water dripped and trickled from the walls, raining down from the stalactite-studded ceiling fifty feet overhead. The walls were riddled with gaps and holes where the flow had eroded the limestone, but none were big enough to accommodate a person. There were no other passages. This was the source of the underground river.
They had run out of cavern.
He looked back again, and saw Lazarus running with two of the giant trilo-pedes close on his heels.
“Fi, please tell me you’ve been holding back.”
The young woman did not answer, but her eyes closed and her lips began moving. Pierce wasn’t sure what she was attempting, or if she even knew herself.
Fiona was adept at creating golems, but the shortage-of-raw-materials problem had not gone away. The cavern was mostly solid. The river had long ago carried away or dissolved most of the rocks that might have been suitable for that purpose. Golems — the term had come from Jewish folklore — were an attempt to reproduce the Biblical miracle of Adam’s creation by breathing life into a body made of clay or loose soil. The emet incantation could animate a human or animal simulacrum, and to some extent, define its shape, but it couldn’t transform solid rock into something more pliable or cause a fully formed rock giant to step out of the limestone walls.
Which was not to say that could not be done. The Mother Tongue was the language of creation, the very words God had used to bring the universe into existence. In the past, Fiona had created Golems out of solid stone. A mountainside, in fact. But she had not memorized the phrases, and by the end of her ordeal, she had forgotten much of the Mother Tongue that had been revealed to her. She was relearning what she’d lost, but she was not there yet. Pierce had also seen Fiona change solid stone into something as ephemeral as smoke. Surely there was something she could do, something she could say.
“What about the sphere?” Gallo shouted, pointing to the ball of memory metal Fiona was still carrying. “Is there a way to use it?”
Fiona didn’t acknowledge the question, but a sudden chill rising up from the flooded floor of the cavern suggested that she was already working that angle. With a faint, almost musical crackling sound, the water underfoot crystallized. The ice crept up the walls like a time-lapse video of a spring thaw running backward. The walls froze. The steady dripping ceased as icicles formed on the stalactites.
Lazarus, the only one of them still moving, lost his footing. His legs shot out from beneath him and he landed flat on his back, sliding across the ice-slicked surface, out of control. The trilo-pedes pursuing him hesitated at the ice margin, probing it with their steak knife-sized leg tips, then they started forward again.
“Fi, I don’t think—”
A noise, like a series of explosions deep within the surrounding karst, cut Pierce off. The cracks and holes in the walls began spreading, opening wider like yawning mouths, as the water deep inside the rock froze and expanded. Huge chunks of limestone broke loose, spilling onto the floor all around them. The upheaval shattered the scrim of ice on the floor, and for several seconds, it was all Pierce could do to stay on his feet.
The tumult was too much for the trilo-pedes. The squirming giants twisted around and vanished back into the darkness. That was little consolation to their former prey, for at that moment the ceiling started crumbling as well.
Pierce threw up a hand in a hopeless attempt to shield himself as icicles and chunks of stone, some bigger than he was, started breaking loose and crashing down all around him.
“Get to cover,” he shouted, reaching for Fiona, intending to drag her out of harm’s way, but the cave-in was happening all around them. There was no outrunning it and no shelter.
Then something else broke through the canopy overhead.
Daylight.