Then maybe the Titans weren’t as oblivious to humans as had been assumed.
EIGHTEEN
Met near Sparta
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Kat Socolov said as they walked along under another hot sun.
“Sometimes a dangerous practice,” N’Gana responded.
They’d all pretty well cast off everything except a vine belt that had been twisted and looped and held their batons and other weapons and tools, and Father Chicanis had made a leaf and vine backpack for his cherished communion set. Oddly, the nudity didn’t seem to bother any of them, not even the priest, or particularly turn anyone on, either.
“If this mixture melts away our precious artificial substances,” asked Kat, “then it’s gonna melt away those password cubes as well, isn’t it?”
“I told you, they will be sufficiently below ground to have escaped this. We’ve seen areas under the old road-works here where things are remarkably well preserved if they’re kept out of that rain and the elements,” the colonel replied.
“Oh, sure—they might well be there, if nobody’s taken them, if they’re still where the incomplete records said they were, and so on. That’s not the point. The thing is, so we get there, we get down, we illuminate everything somehow, and Hamille, here, gets through the holes in the foundation and brings them back to us. Then what? The moment we bring them up here to the surface, they’re gonna be rained on. If we retrace our path, it’s another ten days to two weeks, even if we figure out how to get back to the island. By that time they’ll be mush and you know it. We’re stuck.”
N’Gana wasn’t at all bothered. “There is a contingency plan for everything,” he told her. “I have already determined a method to get around that.”
“Yeah? What?” Harker put in, curious himself.
“First things first. If we don’t have it, the rest is moot.” Kat Socolov whispered to Harker, “I bet he didn’t even think of it until now.”
But Harker had more respect for the colonel than that. He just wondered if the contingency plan, whatever it was, did not involve sacrificial deaths. He couldn’t get out of his mind the image of that freebooter down here, probably naked, certainly at least as defenseless as they were, possibly stalked by something or someone running from the Titans themselves, knowing that his information was valuable but that he himself could not leave.
The mission, the colonel had said over and over again, was the only thing that mattered. Strong talk for a soldier for hire, but, unlike the pirate, not all of them would need to die to get that information out.
“How well do you think we’ll fit in down here in the Stone Age?” Harker asked her in a loud whisper.
She stared at him. “You really think it’ll come to that?”
“It could. That’s the most likely scenario, at least temporarily, maybe permanently if they don’t find a way to get us off.”
She shrugged. “We haven’t really been tested on much yet here, even with the loss of our stuff. This place almost seems designed to let a small number of people live on, so long as they remain apes who talk.”
“Huh?”
“Look at us! The climate’s warm enough all year to keep us comfortable like this, there’s a year-round growing season for edible fruits and even vegetables, as we’ve found, if you know how to look for them. Plenty of water, and no large predators. The trick is to not draw any attention to yourself, so no fires, no building of structures—in effect, no real artifacts. We’ve grown comfortable under those rules in just a few days. Imagine what being like that for maybe fifty, sixty years has done to the survivors. I’m already losing track of time. One day looks like another, one grove or one field of tall grass looks like another. I’m beginning to think that my life’s project is going to be myself.”
“Your watch still has a date in it,” he noted.
“I lost it a while back. Makes no difference anyway. I have some kind of weird sense that this place changes you—or that something is doing it.”
He’d tried to get her to elaborate on that, but to no avail.
The old Grand Highway had proven reliable and comfortable as a path up to now, but at some points it had presented problems. The bridges were gone, so coming to rivers and streams meant wading or in some cases swimming. All of them could swim, and none of the distances or depths had been too great, but now they came around a bend and faced their greatest challenge.
It was the delta of a large and complex river system, and the road vanished right into it. It was extremely muddy, and the current seemed slow, but it was clearly quite an obstacle.
Father Chicanis was baffled. “There is no river like this. Not here! I would have remembered such a thing! It wasn’t even on the aerial surveys! There is a river between Sparta and Ephesus, but this can’t be it! We have been following the road and we are still west of Sparta, I’m sure of it!”
“Well, it’s here now,” the colonel sighed. “It is difficult to say if the channel is deep, or what might lie in it, but I see a series of mud bars and mud and rock islands there. I suspect that most of it is shallow, since, if you look carefully, you can see rusted and twisted remnants of the highway here and there. Well, we won’t attempt it today. I would say we camp early and see if we can get some real rest. Tomorrow we can start testing it out.”
Harker looked it over. It appeared as shallow as he said, but you never knew about this kind of river. They had deep spots, and treacherous eroded stuff just beneath the surface that could cut you to ribbons. Often the bottoms were quagmires, too, sucking you down if you tried walking even in the shallows.
It was a good kilometer across to the next solid anything; in between were fingers of mud and rock piled up here and there as the big river slowed before finally emptying into the sea.
“What about a raft?” Kat Socolov suggested. “If we can make something out of the driftwood or something here, we could pole across.”
“Possibly,” Harker responded. “But I’m not sure I like trusting myself to something cobbled together and held by these vines. One sharp rock below and you’d be in the middle of a disintegrating and possibly dangerous bundle of sticks. Flotation is a good idea, but on a one-to-one personal level, I think. Not one big raft, but a lot of little things that float.”
Next to dinner, that was the highest priority. There were few clues to what they might use floating down the river itself, so they used what light was left to test various pieces of wood, particularly those that looked as if they had floated down a fair piece.
As this was going on, they walked upriver along the riverbank, looking mostly down for a couple of kilometers, after it was clear that there was a significant bend there that might trap flotsam and jetsam. Harker found himself in the lead, and he rounded the curve and suddenly stopped dead still in his tracks. He put up a hand that silenced those coming behind him, and they approached with a lot more stealth.
Mogutu got to him first. “What is it?” he barely whispered.
Harker gestured. “Up ahead, maybe fifty meters. Look at the mud.”
It was fairly flat and soaked through, pretty much like the part they were walking on, and it didn’t take a moment for first Mogutu, then the others to see what had spooked Harker.
Just as they had left footprints in the wet mud behind them, there were footprints in the mud just ahead. Footprints that ended at just about the fifty-meter mark, stopped, then turned and walked back diagonally and into the brush.
“Think they’re new?” Kat asked him apprehensively.