After thirty minutes, we’re only halfway down. I’m picking my way through the rubble—kicking rocks to see if they’ll move—when I hear some rocks falling farther up. Jabar and I freeze, necks craned as we scan the gray rock face for movement.
Nothing.
“Something’s coming,” whispers Jabar.
“Let’s move,” I say, stepping now with more urgency.
Keeping our heads up and eyes open, the two of us descend over the wobbling rocks. Every few minutes, we hear the clack, clack of more rocks falling from above us. Each time, we stop and scan for motion. Each time we find nothing.
Something invisible is coming down the slope, stalking us. This thing is taking its time, moving quiet and staying hidden. The oldest part of my brain senses the danger and floods my body with adrenaline. There’s a predator coming, it says. Run the fuck away.
But if I move any faster, I’ll fall and die in an avalanche of cold slate.
Now my legs are trembling as I inch my way over the rocks. Glancing down, I see there’s still at least another half hour before we reach bottom. Shit, that’s too long. I slip and gash my knee open on a rock. I bite down hard on the curse before it gets out.
Then I hear a low, animal moan.
It’s Jabar. The kid crouches on the rocks ten feet up, lying stockstill. His eyes are fixed on something above us. I don’t think he even knows that he’s making that sound.
I
“What, Jabar? What’s there, man?”
“Mountain what? What’s on the mountain, Jabar?”
“Uh, how do you say… snow cat.”
“Snow? What? Did you say a
“We thought they were gone.”
“Extinct?”
“Not anymore.”
With an effort, I refocus my eyes on the rocks above us. Finally, I catch the twitch of a tail and the predator emerges from concealment. A pair of unblinking silver eyes are watching me. The leopard knows that we’ve spotted it. It bounds toward us over the unstable rocks, heavy muscles quivering with each impact. Quiet, determined death is on its way.
I scrabble for my rifle.
Jabar turns around and slides toward me on his ass, wailing in panic. But he’s too late. The snow leopard is suddenly just a few feet away, landing on its front paws with a great bushy tail outstretched as a counterweight. That wide flat nose collapses into a wrinkled snarl, and white canines flash. The cat gets hold of Jabar from behind and yanks his body back.
Finally, I get my rifle up. I fire high to avoid Jabar. The cat shakes him back and forth, growls radiating from deep in its throat like the idle of a diesel engine. When my bullet hits it in the flank, the cat screeches and lets go of Jabar. It coils back, tail protectively wrapping around its forelegs. It snarls and screams, looking for what caused so much pain.
Jabar’s body falls onto the rocks, limp.
The leopard is divinely terrible and beautiful, and it absolutely belongs here. But this is life or death. My heart breaks as I unload my rifle on the magnificent creature. Red stains spread through the mottled fur. The big cat falls back onto the rocks, tail lashing. Those silver eyes squeeze shut and the snarl is frozen forever on its face.
I feel numb as the last echo of gunfire races away across the mountains. Then, Jabar grabs my leg and pulls himself up to a sitting position. He shrugs off his backpack, groaning. I drop to a knee and put one hand on his shoulder. I pull his robes back away from his neck to see two long stripes of blood. His back and shoulder have been shallowly filleted, but otherwise he is unharmed.
“It ate your backpack, you lucky bastard,” I say to him.
He doesn’t know whether to grin or cry and neither do I.
I’m glad the kid is alive. His people would execute me straightaway if I was dumb enough to come back without him. Plus, he’s apparently got a knack for spotting snow leopards just before they pounce. That could come in handy someday.
“Let’s get off this fuckin’ rock,” I say.
But Jabar doesn’t stand up. He stays there, crouched, staring at the bleeding corpse of the snow leopard. One of his dirt-smudged hands snakes out and briefly touches the cat’s paw.
“What is this?” he asks.
“I had to kill it, man. No choice,” I respond.
“No,” says Jabar.
He leans farther toward the cat and pushes its great bloody head to the side. Now I see something that I can’t explain. Honest to god, I just don’t know what to make of it.
There, just under the cat’s jaw, is some kind of avtomat-made collar. A pale gray band made of hard plastic is wrapped around the cat’s neck. At one point, the strip widens into a marble-sized orb. On the back of this circular part, a tiny red light pulses.
It has to be some kind of radio collar.
“Jabar. Go fifty meters lateral and plant your stick. I’m going the other way. Let’s find out where this data goes.”
By midafternoon, Jabar and I have the cat well behind us, buried under some rocks. I’ve dressed the wounds on Jabar’s back. He didn’t make a sound, probably ashamed of his hollering from before. He doesn’t know that I was too scared to scream. And I don’t tell him.
The trajectory of the radio collar transmissions leads across the nearest lake to a small inlet. We move quickly along the shore, being sure to stay on the hard-packed dirt close to the increasingly sheer mountain walls.
Jabar spots them first: footprints.
The modified SAP unit is close. Its prints track around the next bend, directly to where the radio transmissions lead us. Jabar and I look each other in the eyes—we’ve reached our destination.
“
“Good luck to you, too, buddy.”
We walk around the corner and come face-to-face with the next stage of avtomat evolution.
It sits half submerged in the lake—the biggest avtomat imaginable. It’s like a building or a giant gnarled tree. The machine has dozens of petal-like sheathes of metal for legs. Each plate is the size of a wing off a B-52 Stratofortress and covered in moss and barnacles and vines and flowers. I notice they flap slowly, movement barely visible. Butterflies and dragonflies and indigenous insects of all sorts flit across the grassy plates. Higher up, the main trunk is composed of dozens of taut cords that stretch into the sky, twisting around each other almost randomly.
The top of the avtomat towers in the sky. An almost fractal pattern of barklike structures whirls and twines in an organic mass of what looks like branches. Thousands of birds nest in the safety of these limbs. Wind sighs through the tangled boughs, pushing them back and forth.
And on the lower levels, stepping carefully, are a few dozen of the biped avtomata. They are inspecting the other life-forms, leaning over and watching, prodding and pulling. Like gardeners. Each of them covers a different area. They are muddy, wet, and some are covered in moss themselves. This doesn’t seem to bother them.
“That’s not a weapon, is it?” I ask Jabar.
“The opposite. It is life,” he says.
I notice that the uppermost branches bristle with what must be antennae, swaying in the wind like bamboo. The only recognizably metallic surface is nestled there—a gaping, wind tunnel–shaped dome. It points to the northeast.
“Tight-beam communication,” I say, pointing. “Probably microwave based.”
“What could this be?” asks Jabar.
