There it was, unambiguous, absolute. The original of Michel Charpentier’s 3D model; the landscape of Fahad’s pictures. A bare bleak flatland, red stone and sand. A cluster of flat-topped mounds. Low cliffs ribboning away into the tawny haze towards the ghostly outline of rounded hills. All this sitting under a kind of dome or cap woven from faintly flickering light the colour of the inside of an oyster shell.
Drury was pointing towards one of the mounds. ‘Your little friend says there’s something in there.’
‘Fahad is here? I thought he was with you.’
‘That’s what I wanted McBride to think. No, I sent your little friend on ahead a couple of days ago. He says that he’s found something. And you’re going to tell me if he’s right.’
Drury dismissed the two men and led Chloe across a stretch of stony ground. Flat black stones like gravemarkers were embedded here and there, half-buried by sand and dust. Elder Culture stuff. Chloe didn’t like to look at them too closely. They had a faint but distinct aura, like radioactive openings into some other, utterly hostile dimension.
Several tents were pitched behind a half-buried shelf of ordinary sandstone, shivering in the rip of the wind. Drury unzipped a flap in the largest and Chloe followed him into a blue space with three sleeping compartments down one side. A man in a canvas director’s chair looked up from the tablet in his lap; a big, shaven-headed man in a red quilted jacket, squatting on his heels near a space heater, stood up.
Drury and his two men pulled down their masks and stripped off their goggles; Chloe followed their example. They made a crowd under the slanting membrane of the tent’s roof. The air was warm and stale. There was a strong sharp tingling odour, like the taste of a battery on her tongue.
‘I thought there were two of them,’ the man with the tablet said.
He wore a baseball cap pulled low, blue jeans, a black leather jacket. Amusement flickered in his sharp gaze.
‘Her boyfriend had an accident,’ Drury said. ‘What’s cooking, Tommy? Give me some good news.’
‘We extended an exploratory tunnel into that mound the kid fell in love with. Found a void he got very excited about. It seems pretty much intact, but empty. No activity, as far as I can tell.’
‘As far as you can tell. What about the kid?’
‘He’s out there now. You can’t keep him away. Luke is looking after him; Riley and Logan are patrolling the perimeter; Niles and Patrice are making the tunnel safe. We had a roof fall. The mudstone is as friable as old cat shit.’
‘And you’re doing what? Apart from sitting on your arse in this cosy tent.’
‘Keeping an eye on the general situation,’ Tommy said. ‘The magnetic anomalies are stable, but something’s definitely coming online. You saw the light effects. Plus this fucking dust is getting thicker.’
‘The edge of the storm?’
‘That’s still maybe fifty or sixty kilometres away,’ Tommy said. ‘Call this a local intensification of pre-existing conditions.’
‘There have been more critters checking in,’ the shaven-headed man said. He had a tattoo of two praying hands on his neck, Believe written across them in cursive script. ‘We took down a bunch this morning. Like turkeys in a shooting gallery.’
‘Something’s bringing them here,’ Tommy said. ‘The lights, maybe.’
‘Some actual hard facts would be good,’ Drury said.
‘About this weird shit? I’m just a humble archaeologist. I don’t do weird shit.’
‘Everything you dig up on this planet is weird shit.’ Drury held out his hand; Tommy gave him the tablet. Drury flicked through images, now and then showing one to Tommy and asking him what it was or what it meant. None of Tommy’s answers seemed to satisfy him; at last Drury held the tablet towards Chloe. ‘See this?’
Some kind of map: different shades of greens, white contour lines. After a moment, she realised that the contours were the mounds.
‘Magnetic anomalies,’ Drury said. ‘Remnants of some kind of machinery under the mounds. Spaceships, maybe, if this really is a space port. If the kid really is telling the truth.’
‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you?’ Tommy said to Chloe. ‘The kid’s familiar. Ugly Chicken.’
‘It’s real,’ Chloe said.
‘I don’t doubt that, given what’s been going on here. What does it look like?’
‘Like your worst nightmare. I hope you get to see it soon.’
Tommy smiled, looked at Drury. ‘Love the attitude. Do I get to keep her, afterwards?’
‘We’ll talk about after when there’s an after.’ Drury pointed at the shaven-headed man. ‘Take me to this mound. Chloe, you come too. You can tell me if it feels right.’
He seemed calmer, almost happy. Chloe felt a small measure of relief. As long as he was happy, she thought, he wouldn’t do anything bad. And thought then that she was beginning to get a touch of Stockholm syndrome, sympathy for the people who had kidnapped her and would almost certainly kill her when they didn’t have any more use for her. She had to remember that. She had to make herself valuable. Play this out any way she could.
Out in the whip of the wind and dust, trying to keep up with Drury and the shaven-headed man as they strode across the uneven ground to the nearest mound. A narrow trench three metres deep had been dug halfway around its circumference, exposing a close-woven lattice. She felt another dizzy wash of déjà vu. Remembering the mural in the nun’s chapel. The basket-weave struts of the spire, and something indistinct crawling through or over them…
Drury was saying something about broken towers. He was shouting through his mask, shouting to be heard over the whine of the wind, telling her that the river had flooded the area many times, depositing alluvial material and burying the towers that had stood here.
‘Tommy surveyed it when we first came out,’ he said. ‘Those magnetic anomalies I showed you weren’t there then. Something somewhere has been switched on. Something is waking up.’
‘I think I can feel it,’ Chloe said, although she couldn’t. But if Drury thought she was some kind of clairvoyant or human dowsing rod, channelling alien energy patterns, she might be able to win a little wriggle room.
‘Yeah…?’ He was staring at her through the goggles of his mask.
She said, ‘When I first met Fahad, I felt as if someone else was there. This is like that, only much stronger.’
‘You mean this Ugly Chicken.’
‘Maybe.’
She was glad she was wearing the goggles and mask; she’d always been hopeless at lying.
Drury studied her, then said, ‘Come with me,’ and he was off again, striding towards the neighbouring mound.
There was another trench, with a generator standing at its edge and air hoses snaking into the maw of a low tunnel. The noise of jackhammers came out from it. Two men stood in the lee of a solitary boulder, both wearing red quilted jackets. Drury must have bought a job lot. One of the men was burly, a rifle slung at his shoulder; the other was slender and unarmed. With a jolt, Chloe realised that it was Fahad. While Drury talked to the burly man, she told Fahad how glad she was to see him, asked him how he was.
‘We found it! The black room! We found it, and he’s in there now.’
‘Ugly Chicken? What is he doing, Fahad? Is he talking to you?’
‘They took the bead from me. Rana’s bead.’ Fahad was happy and excited. Talking quickly, jiggling from foot to foot. ‘But it doesn’t matter. He isn’t in it any more. He’s in the black room. He’s inside the system. He’s fixing things so he can go home.’
‘I thought this was his home.’
Fahad looked at her, eyes dark and serious behind his dusty goggles. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘What’s he doing, Fahad? What are you doing?’
‘It will be wonderful. You’ll see.’