The Company of the Dead (63 page)

Lightholler approached the blanket and laid a hand against the coarse fabric. “Through here?”

“Uh-huh.”

Morgan eased himself to the floor with a grimace. He eyed the cavern and said, “Looks different with the power out. Looks more like what it is.”

“And what is that?” Malcolm asked softly.

“A gateway,” Morgan replied.

Kennedy parted the blanket’s folds.

Morgan stared.

Unpowered, the carapace was faithful to its name, more shell than device. It was as if the force that nestled within the baroque exterior had been extinguished.

She’s dead in the water, bud.

No, not extinguished. Something still pulsed within the dense black-silver canopy. The ozone was a faint presence within the smoky haze, and it was colder here. Nothing obvious, just the slightest prickle of his skin against his clothes.

The major will get her going
, Morgan thought.
We’ll get there, Hardas
.

Sure we will.

* * *

Malcolm fell forwards, clutching her abdomen. She heard a voice— Joseph’s —swearing, and felt arms grab her, cradling her slow pirouette.

The floor heaved. She closed her eyes. Bile burned the back of her mouth and it took every effort to hold back the contents of her engorged throat. Blood whipped within her veins, steel-tipped lashes of ice.

“It’s alright,” a voice said. “Slow breaths. Deep breaths. Don’t fight it.” Strong arms embraced her. A strange scent that was the loamy earth, but also smouldering coals, enfolded her in a secure cocoon.

“It can’t be,” she said in a small voice.

“Of course not.”

She looked up into the deep brown of Tecumseh’s eyes. He held her tightly. She fought the urge to flinch away from the medicine man. Joseph observed their exchange, pale-faced. The others remained standing, their eyes fixed on the machine.

“It
can’t
be,” she repeated.

Tecumseh’s voice was warm and persuasive. “Accept that realisation and look upon it again.”

She glanced up, hesitantly, trying to glimpse it from a safe angle—if such a thing was possible. Joseph was watching her anxiously. Tecumseh crooned the words of an unknown tongue in her ear.

The wounded beast crouched on twelve metal segments in a nest of its own matted cable.

Tecumseh’s song wound its course, soothing her mind as his arms supported her body.

An intelligence seemed to lurk behind the mirrored casement of its sculpted shell. She came to realise that it was only a reflection of the onlookers.

Tecumseh’s song faded into a sigh.

She turned to him and said, “Thank you.”

The medicine man nodded slowly.

“How did you know what would help me?” she murmured.

“This is what happens when any of my brothers first view the device. You see what we have seen. Your sense of being here before will fade.”

“You should have warned me,” she whispered to Joseph.

“What would have sufficed?”

He was a prick and a bastard and absolutely correct.

Tecumseh shot her a mischievous grin and said, “You should see it when it’s powered up.”

She gave a nervous laugh and rose to her feet, trembling. She crossed to Joseph’s side and cast Tecumseh a final discomforted look of thanks. He bowed and stepped back into the shadows.

Lightholler gazed in absolute wonder.

It was a spider; silvery-black, frozen in a web that was the distal extensions of its own limbs. Ornate cowling veiled a sleeping power that pledged an infinity of promises. He had to blink a number of times to put the machine into perspective.

Doc and another man were checking an assortment of cords that wound into a Medusa’s knot at the carapace’s underbelly. Lightholler traced the cords to a freestanding generator that was in turn plugged into a fitting in the cement-rendered wall.

He shifted his gaze to take in the entire cavern. The carapace occupied the bulk of the hollow. Computer monitors perched idle on wide unmanned consoles; a wall of shelves was crammed with documents and maps. A gantry, secured to the ceiling, could be rotated to offer access to the vehicle. There was only one etching adorning the thick walls here: a solitary buffalo, painted in fine strokes of red and white, defiantly facing the hunched machine. A bunk bed, up against the far wall, seemed out of place. There was a small night table adjacent to it, crowded with books and a crude model of the carapace that had been broken into two segments. Above the bed was a pale patch of wall where something had once hung.

Malcolm was back on her feet. He’d seen her drop to the ground, yet had been unable to move from his place, held as frozen as the inert machine. She gave him a look that wasn’t reproachful but kept her glance away from the carapace.

Kennedy spoke. “We don’t know how the interface works. We don’t know where the atoms slip up against each other, or how it is that the carapace slides through. We don’t know how here and now becomes there and then.”

Lightholler said, “Thank you, Joseph.”

It was okay now. Everything was okay. He understood Morgan and Hardas and Shine and Kennedy and the ghost dancers. He understood Wells.

He believed.

Morgan remained transfixed. It was Doc who broke the spell.

He approached them as they stood staring at the machine and led them to one of the consoles. He outlined the situation. Despite its altitude, the atomic blast’s discharge had battered the installation. Waves of gamma radiation had white-capped a sea of ionised particles in a brief, sudden pulse that had assaulted every operational electronic device in the region. There was no way of knowing the radius of the effects, since communications were down.

The radar was down.

The carapace was down.

Some of the damage was superficial and some was permanent. The carapace could be restored to full function but the programming necessary to configure their destinations was lost. Entire sub-routines needed to be recalculated from scratch, and with all the computers disabled that process in itself would take long hours. It might not be possible.

To make matters worse, the machine required an external catalyst for its first jump. The generator that was meant to effect that leap was a burnt-out casing lying by one of the carapace’s supports. A makeshift generator was charging from an external source linked to Alpha but the juice was trickling in slowly. By Doc’s estimate they were looking at another fifteen hours before the carapace was powered up for complete extraction.

Doc turned to join a technician by one of the monitors. The major filled them in on the rest.

He began with a précis for Malcolm’s benefit, covering the journal— how they’d found it and where it had led them. She snuck cautious glances at the machine while the major summarised the manuscript’s contents. Her initial bewilderment turned to horror as Kennedy outlined the results of his first voyage in the carapace.

She asked her questions. They suggested a keen mind and supported Morgan’s theories about her prior relationship to the major. He reflected that their parting couldn’t have been acrimonious nor had it been conclusive. They completed each other’s sentences, used gestures for phrases and glances for affirmation; but nothing could soft en the blow. Sometime in the imminent future, there would be no detectable human life on the planet.

Malcolm excused herself and wandered over to the bunk bed, where she sat by the night stand toying with the model of the carapace. Tecumseh joined her. They shared quiet words.

Kennedy wrapped things up. He said his ghost dancers were already encountering Japanese soldiers at various points north and west of the Rock but there was only so much that could be achieved by the two hundred men under his command. He needed to go over the latest intelligence. He needed to get out there and brief his platoon leaders. He needed to blunt the Japanese advance.

“What you need to do is catch some sleep,” Lightholler told him.

Kennedy shrugged it off.

Malcolm returned. She seemed more at peace. Stepping alongside Kennedy, she said, “We need to talk.”

He shot Morgan and Lightholler an ambiguous look and said, “I’ll catch up with you. Get some rest yourselves.”

“Is there anything we can do to help here?” Lightholler asked.

Kennedy shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so.”

“You’ll tell us when you need us,” Lightholler insisted. “Won’t you?”

Kennedy gave him a threadbare smile. “Have you ever known me to hold back?”

Morgan put his hand on Lightholler’s shoulder and said, “Let’s scrounge up another cigarette and grab some shut-eye.”

Lightholler let himself be led back through the folds of the blanket. Morgan directed him towards the ladder but Lightholler, slipping out of his grip, drifted over to one of the walls and stared at the markings.

Morgan had been expecting this. “Captain?” he said. “John?”

But Lightholler just worked his way around the small chamber. His expression changed in the lantern’s ruby glow, adopting an intensity that was lent an edge of malice. He stopped for long moments before an illustration that depicted a flooded valley where a bird wheeled and soared above the waters. On its back, between vast wings, rode the figures of a multitude of indians. He grunted something between a chuckle and a sigh.

He’s just beheld a machine whose existence challenges every rational belief he’s ever held
, Morgan thought.
A dormant god that, when woken, was the threshold to anywhen
.

The carapace screamed madness to the observer. Thrust a medicine man back to his myths in the search for vindication, until he scribed the answers on cavern walls. So who could blame a young woman—who’d just made the shaky transition from jailor to collaborator—for doubling over in pain? Or even a ship’s captain—who’d staked everything on a stranger’s promise, and found every fear and hope realised in a hole in the ground in the desert— for wandering aimlessly around a chamber staring at modern petroglyphs, reassessing all of his convictions?

“That’s a flood legend,” Lightholler muttered, pointing at the final sketch, articulating the conclusion of his tangled thoughts.

“It’s a prophecy, actually,” Morgan replied.

“Really?” It wasn’t the condescending tone he’d used earlier.

“The medicine man who began the ghost dance religion foretold of a great flood that would wipe the land clean of white settlers. But just before the deluge, gigantic thunderbirds would drop from the storm clouds to retrieve the worthy. When the waters finally receded, the indians would be returned and the lands restored as they were.”

Lightholler examined the image again, curiously.

Morgan continued, “It’s unusual to see a solitary thunderbird. They were usually depicted in flocks, often accompanied by lesser bird spirits like falcons or eagles.” He pointed to the massive outstretched pinions. “The beating of its wings was thought to bring the rolling thunder. The beak snapped lightning.”

Lightholler shook his head as if to clear away disturbing thoughts. He walked to the exit, grasped the ladder’s rungs, and began to climb. Morgan waited a few moments and steeled himself for the shooting pain in his leg, then followed.

Topside, Hayes and one of the technicians were still working on the elevator. As Morgan emerged, Hayes indicated Lightholler’s silhouette beyond the entrance. Morgan joined him.

“Okay,” Lightholler said, “here’s the thing I can’t get my head around.”

“What’s that?”

“The ghost dancers know, or at least they suspect, or believe, that Kennedy has the means of going back into the past. That he can in some way restore things. Right?”

“Those who know—Tecumseh and Hayes and some of the engineers— know exactly what he has in mind.”

“But why are they satisfied with that?” Lightholler asked. “If they want the land clear of white men, why help Kennedy go back to 1911? Why not take the machine for themselves? There’s enough of them. Go to 1492 and stop Columbus in his tracks; make a pit stop in South America and dump Cortez and his conquistadors in a shallow grave?” His voice held a mixture of mistrust and dread.

“I asked Tecumseh something like that myself, once,” Morgan replied. “He didn’t even bat an eyelid. He said, ‘Stop those fools and others would arrive in their place.’ Arm the indians with machine-guns to halt the Spanish muskets and all you do is replace the white authority with a native one that would be equally deplorable. He said, ‘Had the white man not come, what lessons would we have learned?’”

“He’d given it some thought then,” Lightholler said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

Lightholler nodded.

“Does his point of view surprise you?”

“It’s a little too noble for my tastes,” Lightholler said dryly.

“You really weren’t ready for this.”

“For an elite army of negro and indian fanatics? No. I was too busy dealing with Kennedy’s personal insanity.” He gave Morgan a gauging look.

“Well, I suggest that you put your thoughts of ‘noble savages’ aside,” Morgan said. “Try to dispel a lifetime of fear and platitudes.”

“They don’t scare me,” Lightholler said.

“I’d like to believe you, but we’re the odd ones out here. A few of the ghost dancers—Tecumseh in particular—seem able to sense, on some plane, an injury that’s been dealt by the carapace. An injury to the world, to existence itself, that requires healing. I figure that if they had a hell, it would be at the bottom of the Atlantic; and if they feared a devil, he would be white and look an awful lot like Doctor Wells. So whatever their long-term beliefs are, regarding the ghost dance and the restoration of their lands, their peoples, their immediate priority is still going to be to right Wells’ wrong.”

Lightholler shivered. “Makes you feel kind of insignificant, doesn’t it?”

Morgan heeled the butt of his cigarette. “Yeah, I’ve had the same feelings myself, on and off, ever since this whole thing started.” He tapped the cold sand over the smouldering ash. “I call it perspective.”

Lightholler laughed and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Back in the prefab they arranged two mattresses on the floor. Lightholler fashioned some pillows from rucksacks and linen he’d found in one of the open lockers. They lay staring at the ceiling.