The Descent Part 14

'No,' said Branch. 'Slaves.'

There was a silence.

'Slaves? There's no such thing. This is modern days, Major.'

He showed them the brand marks, the stripes of paint, the ropes linking neck to neck.

'Makes 'em prisoners. Not slaves.' The black kids acted like authorities on the subject.

'See those raw marks on their shoulders and backs?'

'So?'

'Abrasions. They've been humping loads. Prisoners, labor. Slaves.'

Now they saw. Cued by Branch, they fanned out. This had just gotten very personal.

Spooked, high-stepping, the troops moved among the limbs and smoke. Most of the captives were male. Besides the neck-to-neck rope, many were shackled at the ankles with leather thongs. A few bore iron bracelets. Most had been ear-tagged, or their ears had been sliced or fringed the way cowboys jingle-bobbed cattle.

'Okay, they're slaves. Then where's their keepers?'

The consensus was immediate. 'Gotta be a keeper. Gotta be a boss for the chain gang.'

They went on looking through the pile, absorbing the atrocity, refusing the notion that slaves might keep themselves slaves. Body by body, though, they failed to find a demon master.

'I don't get it. No food. No water. How'd they keep alive?'

'We pa.s.sed that stream.'

'That's water, then. I didn't see no fish.'

'Here we go, see here. Jerky.' A Ranger held up a foot-long piece of dried meat. It looked more like a dried stick or shriveled leather. They found more pieces, mostly tucked into shackles or clutched in dead hands.

Branch examined a piece, bent it, smelled the meat. 'I don't know what this could be,' he said. Then he did. It was human.

It had been a caravan, they determined, though an empty one. No one could say what these captives had been hauling, but hauling they had been, and for long distances and recently. As Branch had noticed, the emaciated bodies had fresh sores on their shoulders and backs, the kind any soldier recognized, from a heavy load carried too long.

The Rangers were grave and angry as they made their way through the dead. At first glance, most of these people looked Central Asian. That explained the strange language. Afghanis, Branch guessed from the blue eyes. To his Lurps, though, these were brothers and sisters. That was enough for them to think about.

So the enemy had beasts of burden? All the way from Afghanistan? But this was sub-Bavaria. The twenty-first century. The implications were staggering. If the enemy was able to run strings of captives from so far away, it could also move armies... beneath humankind's feet. Screw the high ground. With this kind of low ground, the high ground was nothing but a blind man waiting to be robbed. Their enemy could surface anywhere, anytime, like prairie dogs or fire ants.

So what's new? Who was to say the children of h.e.l.l hadn't been popping into mankind's midst from the start? Making slaves. Stealing souls. Raiding the garden of light. It was a concept too fundamental for Branch to accept easily.

'Here he is, I found him,' the Spec 4 called near the back of the heap. Knee-deep in the torn ma.s.s, he had his rifle and light aimed at something on the ground. 'Oh yeah, this the one. Here's their boss man. I got the motherf.u.c.ker.'

Branch and the others hurried over. They cl.u.s.tered around the thing. Poked and kicked it a few times. 'It's dead, all right,' the medic said, wiping his fingers after hunting for a pulse. That made them more comfortable. They gathered closer.

'He's bigger than the rest.'

'King of the apes.'

Two arms, two legs: the body looked long and supple, lying tangled with its neighbors. It was soaked in gore, some its own, to judge by the wounds. They tried to figure it out, carefully, at gunpoint.

'That some kind of helmet?'

'He got snakes. Snakes growing out his head.'

'Nah, look. That's dreadlocks. Full a' mud or something.'

The long hair was indeed tangled and filthy, a Medusa's nest. Hard to tell if any of the muddy hair-tails on his head was bone or not, but he surely seemed demonic. And something in his aspect - the tattoos, the iron ring around his throat. This was taller than those furies he had seen in Bosnia, and immensely more powerful-looking than these other dead. And yet he was not what Branch had expected.

'Bag him,' Branch said. 'Let's get out of here.'

The Spec 4 stayed as jumpy as a Thoroughbred. 'I ought to shoot him again.'

'What you want to do that for, Was.h.i.+ngton?'

'Just ought to. He's the one running the others. He's got to be evil.'

'We've done enough,' Branch said.

Muttering, Was.h.i.+ngton gave the creature a tight kick across the heart and turned away. Like an animal waking, the big rib cage drew a great breath, then another. Was.h.i.+ngton heard the respiration and dove among the bodies, shouting as he rolled.

'He's alive! He's come back to life.'

'Hold your fire!' Branch yelled. 'Don't shoot him.'

'But they don't die, Major, look at it.'

The creature was stirring among the bodies.

'Keep your heads on,' Branch said. 'Let's just walk in on this, one step at a time. Let's see what we see. I want him alive.' They were getting closer to the surface. With luck, they might emerge with a live catch. If the going got complicated, they could always just cap their prisoner and keep running. He watched it in their light beams.

Somehow this one had missed the ma.s.sed headshot woven into their ambush. The way Branch had set his claymores, everyone in the column was supposed to have taken it in the face. This one must have heard something the slaves hadn't, and managed to duck the lethal instant. With instincts this acute, the hadals could have avoided human detection for all of history.

'He's the boss, all right, he's the one,' someone said. 'Got to be. Who else?'

'Maybe,' Branch said. They were fierce in their desire for retribution.

'You can tell. Look at him.'

'Shoot him, Major,' Was.h.i.+ngton asked. 'He's dying anyhow.'

All it would take was the word. Easier still, all it would take was his silence. Branch had only to turn his head, and it would be done.

'Dying?' said the thing, and opened its eyes and looked up at them. Branch alone did not jump away.

'Pleased to meet you,' it said to him.

The lips peeled back upon white teeth. It was the grin of someone whose last sole possession was the grin itself.

And then he started laughing that laughter they had heard. The mirth was real. He was laughing at them. At himself. His suffering. His extremity. The universe. It was, Branch realized, the most audacious thing he'd ever seen.

'Shoot the thing,' Sergeant Dornan said.

'Don't,' Branch commanded.

'Ah, come on,' said the creature. The nuance was pure Western. Wyoming or Montana. 'Do,' he said. And quit laughing.

In the silence, someone locked a load.

'No,' said Branch. He knelt down. Monster to monster. Cradled the Medusa head in both hands. 'Who are you?' he asked. 'What's your name?' It was like taking confession.

'He's human? He's one of us?' a soldier murmured.

Branch brought the head closer, and saw a face younger than he'd thought. That was when they discovered something that had been inflicted on none of the other prisoners. Jutting from one vertebra at the base of his neck, an iron ring had been affixed to his spinal column. One yank on that ring, and he would be turned into a head atop a dead body. They were awed by that. Awed by the independence that needed such breaking.

'Who are you?' Branch said.

A tear streaked down from one eye. The man was remembering. He offered his name like surrendering his sword. He spoke so softly, Branch had to lean in.

'Ike,' Branch told the others.

6 - DIXIE CUPS.

First you must conceive that the earth... is everywhere full of windy caves, and bears in its bosom a mult.i.tude of mirrors and gulfs and beedling, precipitous crags. You must also picture that under the earth's back, many buried rivers with torrential force roll their waters mingled with sunken rocks.

-LUCRETIUS, The Nature of the Universe (55 BC) Beneath Ontario Three years later

The armored train car slowed to thirty kph as it exited the wormhole into a vast subterranean chamber containing Camp Helena. The track arced along the canyon's ridgeline and descended to the chamber floor. Inside the car, Ike roamed from end to end, stepping over exhausted men and combat gear and the blood, tireless, shotgun ready. Through the front window he saw the lights of man. Through the rear, the strafed, fouled mouth to the depths fell behind. His heart felt pulled in two, into the future, into the past.

For seven dark weeks the platoon had been hunting Haddie, their horror, in a tunnel spoking off the deepest transit point. For four of those weeks they'd been living by the trigger. Corporate mercenaries were supposed to police the deep lines, but somehow the national militaries were back in the action. And taking the hits. Now they sat on brand-new cherry-red plastic seats in an automated train, with muddy field gear propped against their legs and a soldier dying on the floor.

'Home,' one of the Rangers said to him.

'All yours,' Ike replied. He added, 'Lieutenant,' and it was like pa.s.sing the torch back to its original owner. They were back in the World now, and it was not his.

'Listen,' Lieutenant Meadows said in a low voice, 'what happened, maybe I don't have to report it all. A simple apology, in front of the men...'

'You're forgiving me?' Ike snorted. The tired men looked up. Meadows narrowed his eyes, and Ike pulled out a pair of glacier gla.s.ses with nearly black lenses. He hooked the wings on his ears and sealed the plastic against the wild tattooing that ran from forehead to cheekbones to chin.

He turned from the fool and squinted out the windows at the sprawling firebase below them. Helena's sky was a storm of man-made lights. From this vantage, the array of sabering lasers formed an angular canopy one mile wide. Strobes twinkled in the distance. His dreadlocks - slashed to shoulder length - helped s.h.i.+eld his eyes, but not enough. So powerful in the lower darkness, Ike s.h.i.+ed here in the ordinary.

In Ike's mind, these settlements were like s.h.i.+pwrecks in the Arctic with winter closing in, reminders that pa.s.sage was swift and temporary. Down here, one did not belong in one place for long.

Every cavity, every tunnel, every hole along the chamber's soaring walls was saturated with light, and yet you could still see winged animals flitting about in the domelike 'sky' extending a hundred meters above camp. Eventually the animals tired and spiraled down to rest or feed - and promptly got fried upon contact with the laser canopy. The work and living quarters in camp were protected from this bone and charcoal debris, as well as from the occasional fall of rocks, by steeply angled fifty-meter-tall rooftops with t.i.tanium-alloy superframes. The effect, from Ike's window, was a city of cathedrals inside a gigantic cave.

With conveyor belts spanning off into side holes and an elevator shaft and various ventilation chimneys jutting through the ceiling and a pall of petroleum smog, it looked like h.e.l.l, and this was man's doing. A steady stream of food, supplies, and munitions churned down the belts. Ore churned back up.

The train car glided to a stop by the front gate and the Rangers unhorsed in a file, nearly bashful in the face of such safety, eager to get past the razor wire and lay into some cold beer and hot burgers and serious rack time. For his own part, a fresh platoon would do. Already Ike was ready to leave.

A tardy MASH team came rus.h.i.+ng out with a stretcher, and as they pa.s.sed through the gate, a panel of arc lights turned them as white as angels. Ike knelt beside his wounded man because it was the right thing to do, but also because he had to find his resolve again. The arc lights were arranged to saturate everything that entered this way, and to kill whatever lights killed down here.

'We'll take him,' the medics said, and Ike let go of the boy's hand. He was the last left in the car. One by one the Rangers had gone through the gate, turning into bursts of blinding radiance.

Ike faced the camp's gate, straining against the impulse to gallop back into the darkness. His urges were so raw they hurt like wounds. Few people understood. He had entered this Manichaean state: it was either darkness or light, and it seemed that all his gray scale was gone.

With a small cry, Ike cupped his hands to his eyes and leaped through the gate. The lights bleached him as immaculate as a rising soul. Like that, he made his way inside once again. It seemed more difficult each time.

Inside the razor wire and sandbags, Ike slowed his pulse and cleared his lungs. Following regulations, he shucked his clip, then dry-fired into the sandbox by the bunker, and showed his tags to the sentinels in their Kevlar armor.

CAMP HELENA, the sign read. HOME OF BLACKHORSE, 11TH ARMORED CAV, had been crossed out and replaced with WOLFHOUNDS, 27TH INFANTRY. In turn, that had been replaced with the names of a half-dozen more resident units. The one constant in the upper right corner was their alt.i.tude: Minus 16,232 Feet.

Hunched beneath his battle gear, Ike trudged past troops in their field 'ninjas,' the black camos issued for deep work, or off-duty in their Army sweats or gym trunks. Whether they were on their way to training or to the mess or the basketball cage or the PX to snarf some Zingers or Yoo-Hoos, one and all carried a rifle or pistol, ever mindful of the great ma.s.sacre two years before.

From beneath his ropy hair, Ike cast side glances at the civilians starting to take over. Most were miners and construction workers, sprinkled with mercenaries and missionaries, the front wave of colonization. On his departure, two months ago, there had been just a few dozen of them. Now they seemed to outnumber the soldiers. Certainly they had the hauteur of a majority.

He heard bright laughter and was startled by the sight of three prost.i.tutes in their late twenties. One had veritable volleyb.a.l.l.s surgically affixed to her chest. She was even more surprised at the sight of Ike. The soda straw slid from her strawberry lips, and she stared in disbelief. Ike twisted his face from view and hurried on.

Helena was growing up. Fast. Like scores of other settlements around the world, it was evident not just in the explosion of new quadrants and settlers from the World. You could see it in the building materials. Concrete told the tale. Wood was a luxury down here, and sheet-metal production took time to develop and needed the right ores in close proximity to be cost-effective. Concrete, on the other hand, had only to be teased up from the ground and out from the walls. Cheap, quick to set, durable, concrete meant populism. It fed the frontier spirit.

Ike entered a quadrant that, two months ago, had been home to the local company of Rangers. But the obstacle course, rappelling tower, firing range, and primitive track had been usurped. A horde of squatters had invaded. Every manner of tent, lean-to, and gypsy shelter sprawled here. The din of voices, commerce, and dog-eat-dog music tracks. .h.i.t him like a foul smell.

All that remained of unit headquarters were two office cubes taped together with duct tape. They had a ceiling made of cardboard. Ike parked his rucksack by the outer wall, then looked twice at the roughnecks and desperadoes wandering about, and brought it inside the doorway. A little foolishly, he knocked on the cardboard wall.

'Enter,' a voice barked.

Branch was talking to a portable computer balanced on boxes of MREs, his helmet on one side, rifle on the other. 'Elias,' Ike greeted him.

Branch was not pleased to see him. His mask of scar tissue and cysts twisted into a snarl. 'Ah, our prodigal son,' he said, 'we were just chatting about you.'

He turned the laptop so that Ike could see the face on the little flat screen, and so the computer camera could see Ike. They were video-linked with Jump Lincoln, one of Branch's old Airborne buddies and presently the commanding officer in charge of Lieutenant Meadows.

'Have you lost your f.u.c.king mind?' Jump's image said to Ike. 'I just got a field report slapped in front of me. It says you disobeyed a direct order. In front of my lieutenant's entire patrol. And that you drifted a weapon in his general direction in a threatening manner. Do you have anything at all to say, Crockett?'

Ike didn't play dumb, but he wasn't about to bend over, either. 'The lieutenant writes a fast report,' he commented. 'We only pulled in twenty minutes ago.'

'You threatened an officer?' Jump's bark was tinny over the computer speaker.

'Contradicted.'

'In the field, in front of his men?'