political cover and declared martial law.
At 1:00 p.m. EST, the generals locked America down. Curfew began Friday at sunset and lasted until dawn on Monday. It was pure coincidence, but the cooling-off period landed on the ecclesiastical day of rest. Not since the Puritans had the Old Testament held such power in America: observe the Sabbath or be shot on sight.
It worked. The first great spasm of terror passed over.
Oddly enough, America was grateful to the generals. The highways got cleared. Looters were gunned down. By Monday, supermarkets were allowed to reopen. On Wednesday, children went back to school. Factories reopened. The idea was to jump-start normalcy, to put yellow school buses back on the street, get money flowing, make the country feel returned to itself.
People cautiously emerged from their houses and cleaned their yards of riot debris. In the suburbs, neighbors who had been at one another's throats or on top of each other's wives now helped rake up the broken glass or scoop out ashes with snow shovels. Processions of garbage trucks came through. The weather was glorious for December. America looked just fine on the network news.
Suddenly, man no longer looked out to the stars. Astronomers fell from grace. It
became a time to look inward. All through that first winter, great armies – hastily buttressed with veterans, police, security guards, even mercenaries – poised at the scattered mouths of the underworld, their guns pointed at the darkness, waiting while governments and industries scraped together conscripts and arsenals to create an overwhelming force.
For a month, no one went down. CEOs, boards of directors, and religious institutions badgered them to get on with the Reconquista, anxious to launch their explorations. But the death toll was well over a million now, including the entire Afghani Taliban army, which had practically jumped into the abyss in pursuit of their Islamic Satan. Generals cautiously declined to send in further troops.
A small legion of robots was commandeered from NASA's Mars project and put to use investigating the planet within their own planet. Creeping along on metal spider legs, the machines bore arrays of sensors and video equipment designed for the harshest conditions of a world far away. There were thirteen, each valued at five million dollars, and the Mars crew wanted them back intact.
The robots were released in pairs – plus one soloist – at seven different sites around the globe. Scores of scientists monitored each one around the clock. The 'spiders' held up quite well. As they crept deeper into the earth, communication became difficult. Electronic signals meant to flash unimpeded from the Martian poles and alluvial plains were hampered by thick layers of stone. In a sense, the labyrinth underfoot was light- years more distant than Mars itself. The signals had to be computer-enhanced, interpreted, and coalesced. Sometimes it took many hours for a transmission to reach the top, and many hours or days to untangle the electronic jumble. More and more often, transmissions simply didn't surface.
What did come up showed an interior so fantastic that the planetologists and geologists refused to believe their instruments. It took a week for the electronic spiders to find the first human images. Deep within the limestone wilderness of Terbil Tem, beneath Papua New Guinea, their bones showed as ultraviolet sticks on the computer scan. Estimates ranged from five to twelve sets of remains at a depth of twelve hundred feet. A day later, miles inside the volcanic honeycombs around Japan's Akiyoshi-dai, they found evidence that bands of humans had been driven to depths lower than any explored, and there slaughtered. Deep inside Algeria's Djurdjura massif and the Nanxu River sink in China's Guanxi province, far below the caves under Mt. Carmel and Jerusalem, other robots located the carnage of battles fought in cubbyholes and crawl spaces and immense chambers.
'Bad, very bad,' breathed hardened viewers. The bodies of soldiers had been stripped, mutilated, degraded. Heads were missing or arranged like masses of bowling balls. Worse, their weapons were gone. Place after place, all that remained were nude bodies, anonymous, turning to bone. You could not tell who these men and women had been.
One by one, their spiders ceased to transmit. It was too soon for their batteries to go dead. And not all of them had reached their signal threshold. 'They're killing our robots,' the scientists reported. By the end of December, only one was left, a solitary satellite creeping on legs into regions so deep it seemed nothing could live.
Far beneath Copenhagen, the robot eye picked up a strange detail, a close-up of a fisherman's net. The computer cowboys fiddled with their machinery, trying to resolve the image, but it remained the same, oversized links of thread or thin rope. They keyed in commands for the spider to back up slightly for a wider perspective. Almost a full day passed before the spider transmitted back, and it was as dramatic as the first picture sent from the back of the moon. What had looked like thread or rope was iron circlets linked together. The net was in fact chain mail; the armor of an early Scandinavian warrior. The Viking skeleton inside had long ago fallen to dust. Where there had been a desperate black struggle, the armor itself was pinned to the
wall with an iron spear.
'Bullshit,' someone said.
But the spider rotated on command, and the den was filled with Iron Age weaponry and broken helmets. The NATO troops and Afghani Taliban and soldiers of a dozen other modern armies were not, then, the first to invade this abyssal world and raise arms against man's demons.
'What's going on down there?' the mission control chief demanded.
After another week, the transmission bursts conveyed nothing more than earth noise and electromagnetic pulses of random tremors. Finally the spider quit sending. They waited three days, then began to dismantle the station, only to hear a transmission beep. They hastily jacked the monitor in, and at long last got their face. The static parted. Something moved on screen, and in the next instant the screen went black. They replayed the tape in slow motion and sweated out electronic bits of an image. The creature had, seemingly, a rack of horns, a stub of vestigial tail. Red eyes, or green, depending on the camera filter. And a mouth that must have been crying out with fury and damnation – or possibly maternal alarm – as it bore down on the robot.
It was Branch who broke the impasse. His fever spiked and he resumed command of what had become a ghost battalion. He leaned over the maps and tried to plot where his platoons had been that fateful day. 'I need to find my people,' he radioed his superiors, but they would have none of it. Stay put, they ordered.
'That's not right,' Branch said, but did not argue. He turned from the radios, shouldered his Alice pack, and grabbed his rifle. He walked between the German armored column parked at the mouth of the Leoganger Steinberge cave system in the Bavarian Alps, deaf to the officers shouting to him to halt. The last of his Rangers, twelve men, followed like black wraiths, and the Leopard tank crews crossed themselves.
For the first four days the tunnels were strangely vacant, not a trace of violence, not a whiff of cordite, not a bullet scar. Even the highlights strung along walls and ceilings worked. Abruptly, at a depth of 4,150 meters, the lights ceased. They turned on their headlamps. The going slowed.
Finally, seven camps down, they solved the mystery of Company A. The tunnel dilated into a high chamber. They rounded left onto a sprawled battlefield.
It was like a lake of drowned swimmers that had been drained. The dead had settled atop one another and dried in a tangle. Here and there, bodies had been propped upright to continue their combat in the afterlife. Branch led on, barely recognizing them. They found 7.62-mm rounds for M-16s, a few gas masks, some broken Friz helmets. There were also plenty of primitive artifacts.
The combatants had slowly dried on the bone, constricting into tight rawhide sacks. The bowed spines and open jaws and mutilations seemed to bark and howl at the rubberneckers passing among them. Here was the hell Branch had been taught. Goya and Blake had done their homework well. The impaled and butchered were horrible. The platoon wandered through the grim scene, their lights wagging. 'Major,' whispered their chain gunner. 'Their eyes.'
'I see,' said Branch. He glanced around at the rearing, plunging remains. On every face, the eyes had been stabbed and mutilated. And he understood. 'After Little Bighorn,' he said, 'the Sioux women came and punctured the cavalry soldiers' ears. The soldiers had been warned not to follow the tribes,
