'You're saying man killed them?'
'At least indirectly. Their food chain was ruptured. They were fleeing. From us.'
'Nuts,' scoffed Gitner, lying on his back on a sleeping pad. 'In case you missed it, those are Stone Age points sticking out of them. We had nothing to do with it. These guys got killed by other hadals.'
'That's beside the point,' said Troy. 'They were depleted. Famished. Easy prey.'
'You're right,' Ike said. He didn't often enter group discussions, but he had been following this one intently. 'They're on the move. The whole world of them. This is their diaspora. They've scattered. Gone deep to avoid our coming.'
'What's it matter?' said Gitner.
'They're hungry,' said Ike. 'Desperate. That matters.'
'Ancient history. This bunch died a long time ago.'
'Why do you say that?'
'The accretion of flowstone. They're covered in it. At least five hundred years'
worth, probably more like five thousand. I haven't run my calculations yet.' Ike went over to him. 'Let me borrow your rock hammer,' he said.
Gitner shoved it into Ike's hand. These days he seemed chronically fed up. Their endless debate about hadal links to humanity gnawed at what little good humor he'd ever had. 'Do I get it back?' he said.
'Just a loaner,' Ike said, 'while we sleep.' He walked over and placed it flat next to the wall and walked away.
In the morning, Gitner had to borrow another hammer to cut his free. Overnight the hammer had been covered with a sixteenth of an inch of clear flowstone.
It was a matter of simple arithmetic. The refugees had been slain no more than five months ago. The expedition was following the trail of their flight. And it was very near to fresh.
Even the mercenaries had come to depend on Ike's infallible sense of danger. Somehow the word got around about his climbing days, and they nicknamed him El Cap for the monolith in Yosemite. It was a dangerous attachment, and it annoyed Ike even more than it annoyed their commander. Ike didn't want their trust. He dodged them. He stayed out of camp more and more. But Ali could see his effect, all the same. Some of the boys had tattooed their arms and faces like Ike's. A few started going barefoot or slinging their rifles across their backs. Walker did what he could to stem the erosion. When one of his ghetto warriors got caught sitting cross-legged at prayer, Walker put him on sentry duty for a week.
Ike resumed his habit of staying a day or so ahead of the expedition, and Ali missed his eccentricities. She woke early, as always, but no longer saw his kayak plying out into the tubular wilderness while the camp still slept. She had no proof he was growing more remote from them, or her. But his absences made her anxious, especially as she was falling asleep at night. He had opened a gap in her.
On September 9 they detected the signal for Cache II. They had crossed the international date line without knowing it. They reached the site, but there were no cylinders awaiting them. Instead they found a heavy steel sphere the size of a basketball lying on the ground. It was attached to a cable dangling from the ceiling a hundred feet overhead.
'Hey, Shoat,' someone demanded. 'Where's our food?'
'I'm sure there's an explanation,' Shoat said, but was clearly baffled.
They unbolted the curved casing. Inside, seated in poly-foam, was a small keypad with a note. 'To the Helios Expedition: Supply cylinders are ready for penetration at your prompt. Key in the first five numerals of pi, in reverse, then follow with pound sign.' They guessed it was a precaution to safeguard their food and supplies from any possible hadal piracy.
Shoat needed someone to write down pi for him, then keyed it in. He tapped the pound key, and a small red light changed to green. 'I guess we wait,' he said.
They made camp on the bank and took turns spotlighting the underside of the drill hole. Shortly after midnight, one of Walker's sentinels called out. Ali heard the scraping of metal. Everyone gathered and shone their lights upward, and there it was, a silvery capsule sinking toward them on a glittering thread. It was like watching a rocketship land. The group cheered.
The cylinder sizzled on touching the river, then slowly lowered onto its side and the cable looped in a tangle in the water. Its metal sheath was blued with scorch marks. They mobbed it, only to fall back from its heat.
None of the penetrators at Cache I had been seared this way. It meant the cylinder had passed through some kind of volcanic zone, probably a tendril of the Magellan Seamounts. Ali could smell the sulfur smoking on its skin.
'Our supplies,' someone lamented. 'They're getting cooked inside.'
They made a bucket brigade, passing plastic bottles up and down the line to splash on the cylinder. The metal steamed, colors pulsing from one thermal complexion to another. Gradually it cooled enough for them to cog off the bolts. They got their knives into the seams and pried the hatch loose and threw open the doorway.
'God, what's that stink?'
'Meat. They sent us meat?'
'The heat must have started a fire in there.'
Lights stabbed at the interior. Ali looked over shoulders, and it was hard to see for the smoke and stench and heat pouring through the hatch.
'Good Lord, what have they sent us?'
'Are those people?' she asked.
'They look like hadals.'
'How can you say that? They're too burned to tell,' someone said. Walker pushed to the front, Ike and Shoat right behind him.
'What is this, Shoat?' Walker demanded. 'What is Helios up to?'
Shoat was rattled. 'I have no idea,' he said. For once Ali believed him.
There were three bodies inside, strapped one above the other in a makeshift cradle of nylon webbing. While the cylinder was vertical, they would have been suspended in the harnesses like smoke jumpers.
'Those are uniforms,' someone said. 'Look here, U.S. Army.'
'What do we do? They're all dead.'
'Unbuckle them. Get them out.'
'The buckles are melted shut. We'll have to cut them out. Let it cool off some more.'
'What were they doing in there?' one of the physicians wondered to Ali.
The dead limbs lolled. One man had bitten off his tongue, and the flap of muscle lay on his chin. Then they heard a moan. It came from below the hatch opening, where the third man hung suspended and out of their reach.
Without a word, Ike vaulted into the smoking interior. He straddled the bodies at hatch level and slashed at the webbing, clearing out the dead first. Crawling deeper, he got the third man cut free and dragged him to the hatch, where a dozen hands finished the extraction.
Ali and a few others were tending the dead, laying bits of burned clothing across their faces. The man uppermost in the cylinder, where the heat and fire would have been worst, had shot himself through the mouth. The middle man had strangled on a strap now fused into his neck. Their clothing had caught fire, leaving them dressed only in their harnesses and strapped with weapons. Each bore a pistol, a rifle, and a knife.
'Check these scopes out.' A geologist was sweeping the river with one of the soldier's rifles. 'These things are rigged for sniper work at night. What were they coming to hunt?'
'We'll take those,' Walker said, and his mercenaries collected all the other weapons. Ali helped lay the third man on the ground, then stood back. His lungs and throat had been seared. He was coughing up a clear serous fluid, and his temperature control was shot. He was dying. Ike knelt beside him, along with the doctors and Walker and Shoat. Everyone was watching.
