She looked around at this first wave of explorers. There were fifteen or twenty of them, standing in a clump and shining their flashlights. One man had drawn a big handgun and was aiming it vaguely toward the remoteness.
'Bad place to stand. Better move before something falls on your heads,' a voice said. They turned toward a niche in the rock. Inside sat a man, his assault rifle parked to one side. He had night glasses. 'Follow that trail.' He pointed. 'Keep going for about an hour. The rest of your people will catch up soon enough. And you, pendejo, the gunslinger. Put it back in your pants before someone gets shot.'
They did as he said. Lights wagging, they followed a trail that meandered around the cliff base. There was no chance of getting lost. It was the only trail.
A bleak fog hung across the floor. Rags of gas drifted at their knees. Small toxic clouds swirled at head level, blinding white in their headlamps. Here and there, licks of flame sprang up like St. Elmo's fire, then extinguished.
It was a swamp, deathly quiet. Animals had come here by the tens of thousands. Drawn by the spillage or non-native nutrients or, after a while, by the meat of earlier visiting animals, they had eaten and drunk here. Now their bones and decay spoiled among the rocks mile after mile.
Ali paused where two of the biologists were conversing by a pile of liquefying flesh and spiny bones. 'We know that spines and protective armor are the proof of expanding numbers of predators in an environment,' one explained to her. 'When predators begin devouring predators, evolution starts building body defenses. Protein is not a perpetual-motion machine. It has to begin somewhere. But no one's ever found where the hadal food chain begins.' At least to date, no one had found evidence of plants down here. Without plants, you had no herbivores; what you ended up with was an entire ecology based on meat.
His friend pried the jaws open to examine the teeth. Something scaly and clawed came crawling out, another invader species from the surface. 'Just the way I expected,' the friend said. 'Everything is hungry down here. Starved.'
Ali moved on and saw at least a dozen different sizes and shapes of skulls and rib cages, a brand-new menagerie that was not entirely new to her imagination. One set
of bones had the dimensions of a short snake with a large head. Something else had once transported itself on two legs. Another animal could have been a small frog with wings. None of it moved.
Soon Ali was sweating and breathing hard. She'd known there would be a period of adaptation to the trail, that it was going to take time to acclimate to the depths, to build up their quadriceps and adjust to new circadian rhythms. The stench of animal carcasses and the mining network's sewage didn't help. And an obstacle course of rusting cables, twisted rails, sudden ladders, and staircases made progress more difficult.
Ali reached a clearing. A group of scientists was resting at a stone bench. She got out of her pack and joined them. Farther on, the trail dropped in a deep, winding staircase. The masonry seemed old, fused with accretions. Ali looked around for carved inscriptions or other signs of hadal culture, but there was none.
'That's got to be the last of our people coming down,' a trekker said.
Ali followed his pointing finger. Like tiny comets, three points of light slowly descended in the darkness with silvery filaments for tails. Ali was surprised. For all the walking they'd done, the platforms were not so far away, maybe just a mile. Higher, at the edge of the rim, the town of Esperanza was visible against the black night, a dim bulb indeed. For a moment she saw the boomtown's painted cliffs. The bright blue color twinkled in the toxic mist like a wishing star, and so she made a wish. After their rest, the trail changed. The swamp receded. The reek of death fell away. The trail rose at a pleasant incline. They came to a ledge overlooking a flat plateau.
'More animals,' someone said.
'They're not animals.'
Once upon a time, in Palestine, people had made human sacrifices in the valley of Hinnon, later using the valley as a dumping ground for dead animals and executed prisoners. Cremation fires could be seen burning there night and day. With time Hinnon became Gehenna, which became the Hebrew name for the land of the dead. Ali had become something of a student of the literature of hell, and could not help wondering if they had stumbled upon some modern equivalent of Hinnon.
As they trekked onto the plateau, the image resolved itself. The bodies were simply men lying in an open-air camp. 'They must be our porters,' Ali said. She estimated a hundred or more men gathered here. Cigarette smoke mixed with their pungent body odor. Dozens of blue plastic drums shaped on one side to fit the human spine gave her a clue.
They had reached the rendezvous point. From here the expedition would truly launch. Like uninvited guests, the scientists waited at the edge of the encampment, not quite sure what came next. The porters did nothing to accommodate them. They went on lying about, sharing cigarettes and cups of hot drinks or sleeping on the bare ground. 'They look... tell me they didn't hire hadals,' a woman said.
'How could they hire hadals?' someone asked. 'We're not even sure they exist anymore.'
The porters' incipient horns and beetling brows and their body art, almost defective in its jailhouse shabbiness, had a certain pathos to it. Not that anyone would have pitied these men to their faces. They had the bricklike stare and keloid scars of a street gang. Their clothing was a mishmash of LA ghetto and the jungle. Some wore Patagonia shorts and Raiders caps, others wore loincloths with hip-hop jackets. Most carried knives. Ali saw machetes – but no vines. The blades were for protection, from the animals she'd been passing for the last hour, and possibly from any stray hostiles, but above all from one another.
They had fresh white plastic collars around their necks. She'd heard of convict labor and chain gangs in the subplanet, and maybe the collars were some sort of electronic shackles. But these men looked too physically similar, too familial, to be a collection of
prisoners. They must have come from the same tribe, the front end of a migration. They were indios, though Ali could not say from which region. Possibly Andean. Their cheekbones were broad and monumental, their black eyes almost Oriental.
A huge young black soldier appeared at their side. 'If you'll come this way,' he said,
'the colonel has hot coffee prepared. We just received a radio update. The rest of your group has touched down. They'll be here soon.'
Attached to his dogtag chain was a small steel Maltese cross, the official emblem of the Knights Templar. Recently revived through the largesse of a sports shoe manufacturer, the military religious order had become famous for employing former high school and college athletes with little other future. The recruitment had started at Promise Keepers and Million Man March rallies, and snowballed into a well- trained, tightly disciplined mercenary army for hire to corporations and governments.
In passing a knot of the indios, she saw a head rise; it was Ike. His glance at her lasted barely a second. She still owed him thanks for that orange in the Nazca elevator. But he returned his attention to the circle of porters, hunkering among them like Marco Polo.
Ali saw lines and arcs drawn on the stone in their midst, and Ike was shifting pebbles and bits of bone from one place to another. She thought they must be playing a game, then realized he was querying the indios, getting directions or gathering information. One other thing she saw, too. Near one foot, Ike had a small pile of carefully stacked leaves, clearly a last-minute purchase. She recognized them. He was a chewer of coca leaves.
Ali moved on to the soldiers' part of the camp. All was in motion here, men in camouflage uniforms bustling around, checking weapons. There were at least thirty of them, even quieter than the indios, and she decided the legend must be true about the mercenaries' vows of silence. Except for prayer or essential communication, speech was considered an extravagance among themselves.
Drawn by coffee fumes, the scientists found a stove perched on rocks and helped themselves, then started poking through the neatly arranged crates and plastic drums, looking for their equipment.
'You don't belong here,' the black soldier said. 'Please vacate the depot.' He moved to block them. They
