“I don’t think there are any wolves here. Probably jackals.” She shoveled in another forkful of pasta. “Surely you must have done some reading about this place too, Whispr. It just looks empty, but it’s not.” In the starlight her eyes seemed to shine. “Jackals have to eat, so that means there are other creatures here besides them.”
“I get that,” he muttered. “They probably survive on the corpses of stupid trekkers like us.”
She gazed back at him in the darkness, shaking her head. “Sometimes I think your pessimism will outlive you, Whispr. You’ll die but it’ll hang around, like a gray ghost in mourning. Until it can infect somebody else and make them as miserable as you are.”
Having concluded his meager meal and tossed the biodegradable container far enough into the night to ensure that any wandering ants would have easy access to it without having to go over or through him, he settled down beneath his thin blanket.
“I’ll remind you one more time, doc: it’s that pessimism that’s helped keep you alive.”
She acknowledged the truth of his observation, rose, and threw her own food container far away. The surrounding silence swallowed up the slight clatter it made as it hit the ground. Whispr tried not to stare as she stretched and, as usual, he failed. While he grew more edgy and anxious the nearer they got to their goal, Dr. Ingrid Seastrom only became more beautiful—and not because of recent minor repair, replace, and regeneration maniping. She turned to look back at him.
“We’re going to do this, Whispr. We’re going to make it to Nerens, get inside, and find out what the thread is all about.”
Tucked beneath the blanket, he mumbled his usual misgiving. “You still believe that if we get to Nerens we can get in.”
She regarded his prone, huddled form. “Of course. Precisely because no one is supposed to be able to get to Nerens. Everyone will assume we belong there because only those who belong there are allowed to be there.”
“Circular logic, doc. Doesn’t hold up.”
She blinked. “I didn’t think you were familiar with something like circular logic, Whispr.”
“Why would you think that?” He rolled over. The ground was hard, but so were the pavements of Savannah, and he had spent plenty of nights thereon. “The street overflows with circular logic. You look like a lawbreaker, so the cops pick you up. If the cops pick you up, you must be a lawbreaker. If you look like a riffler when you walk into a store, the operators assume you are a riffler and you’re treated like one.” He coughed lightly. “I could go on, but I’m tired.”
“Sleep well, then.” She settled down and cocooned herself within her own blanket. Serenaded by unseen silver-backed jackals she drifted off to sleep.
For a long time Whispr lay awake, unable to join her. He didn’t trust the bitch-burble of the four-legged variety any more than he did that which originated from the two-legged kind.
THEY PAUSED AT LEAST once every thirty minutes to check their position on their communicators. Understandably, Morgan Ouspel’s route took them inland and kept them away from the single forbidden north–south road. After several days they lost sight even of scattered 4×4 tracks. That did not mean the rocky, uninhabited terrain was never visited. A floater would leave no mark except where it set down.
They were walking parallel to a dry wash. While Ouspel’s course followed the winding arroyo precisely, they saw no reason to navigate every twist and turn. Hiking beside instead of within its five-meter depth allowed them to avoid the rocks and sand at the bottom while cutting off the sharper bends. Staying up top would save time and permit easier trekking.
It also, however, left them exposed.
Fortunately Whispr’s enhanced hearing allowed him to pick up the sound before they were spotted.
“Down!” Without waiting to see if she was following he scrambled madly down an eroded slope and into the riverbed. “Don’t wait, don’t look around—hide!”
As she hurried after him she looked around anyway, and saw nothing. “What—Whispr, I don’t see …?”
“Searcher! Get down here!”
By the time she reached the bottom she was moving so fast that she stumbled into him and nearly caused the both of them to fall. Though she weighed more than his attenuated form, the strength in his wiry arms allowed him to catch and stabilize her. The shock of the close physical contact momentarily unnerved him. He wanted to hold on, not to let go. He finally released her because he did not want both of them to die.
“Here!” He gestured frantically toward a rocky overhang. Without pausing to see if the narrow opening was already occupied by scorpions or snakes he dropped to his belly onto the sand and slithered beneath the opportune cover. Though he left the most room for her, Ingrid still had to struggle to wiggle back far enough so that she would not be visible from overhead. There was no time to remove her backpack. She could feel it scraping against the rock, threatening to trap her.
A minute passed, then several. The sun beat down from above. A couple of jet-black, nearly spherical tok-tok beetles moseyed comically along the canyon floor. The absence of sound, of even a querulous bird, was deafening.
“Whispr, maybe all you saw was another crow.” Jammed beneath the overhanging rock, her right leg was beginning to cramp. “We could take a look and …”
“Crows don’t reflect light. Stay put.”
Though she complied with his instruction, frustration increased with each passing minute. Her leg began to throb. Ample experience had shown that her companion was more than a little prone to paranoia. Indeed, he embraced it. In the course of their journey together he had raised previous false alarms; maybe this was another. How long did he expect her to lie here, facedown in gravel and sand?
“Look, Whispr: if there was anything out there then it’s gone by now.” She started to crawl forward—only to have him grab her arm. Her glare was murderous. “Let go of me right …!”
With utter lack of ceremony he slapped his other hand over her mouth. Her eyes widened. Declarations of muffled outrage spent themselves against his splayed and none-too-clean palm.
Then she heard it, and froze.
The searcher drone was of a type she had never seen before. Those employed by the city of Greater Savannah came in several body types depending on the municipal division that operated them. Those utilized by the fire department carried small tanks of highly concentrated fire suppressant, or escape ladders, or other emergency equipment. Medical drones packed first-aid kits and waldos that when operated by doctors seated at hospital control-room monitors could perform emergency triage right at the site of an accident. Police searchers were armed and armored. But this one …
Humming softly on its repulsors it headed down the arroyo and glided directly past their hiding place. Whispr pushed his face into the sand but a fascinated Ingrid could not keep from staring. Perhaps the shadows saved them. Or maybe the drone fortuitously happened to be scanning the other side of the canyon when it passed. Coated in heavy-duty flex-black that helped to power it, it traveled in near silence, the only sound being the steady soft hum of its dampened engine. From the top several antennae protruded. From the sides extended—she could not be sure they were gun barrels but she had no intention of finding out. Beneath the power-paint was what she took to be armor. The searcher was not only intended to fight, it was clearly designed to withstand a first attack and offer a devastating response. In the silence she could hear her heart pounding.
Its rate quickened when she felt something moving against her leg.
Looking down the length of her body and seeing the snake slithering across her calves she let out an involuntary gasp. Outside their hiding place the searcher, which had moved on down the gully, suddenly paused. Hovering, it turned slowly from side to side, utilizing fixed-forward scanners to search the terrain directly in front of it. It did not turn around.
The snake was huge, more than four meters in length and a glossy, dark olive-green hue. So dark it was almost black. Staring hard and
not moving a muscle Ingrid fought to remember all she had read about this part of the world while crossing the Atlantic on the plane from Miavana. The Namib was home to a number of poisonous serpents and with its distinctive sheen this one was most likely …
A black mamba. The second largest venomous snake in the world. Two drops of its venom were enough to kill a person. A snake this size would pack twenty to twenty-five such drops in one bite. They were aggressive and fearless.
She released her bladder. Both her first-aid kit and Whispr’s contained doses of adaptive antivenin, but if she was bit out here by a mamba this big it was doubtful she would survive.
At least, she thought as total and complete terror threatened to overwhelm her, as a physician she would be fully aware of the symptoms and effects as the poison consumed her.
Turning to follow the warm curves of her body, the snake came toward her face.
It had a deceptively small head, she thought. Smooth of side, wicked in outline, with bright dark eyes. As its heavy, muscular body climbed up her torso and advanced onto her left shoulder it felt as if someone were pulling a steel cable across her back. While it advanced its tongue flicked in and out just like in the nature vits she had seen while relaxing in her codo. Her wonderful, climate-controlled, view-enhanced, utterly civilized, snake-free codo back in Savannah. She tried to will herself to that remembered distant domestic paradise, away from the lethal serpent, away from the hard, cool, pebbly ground on which she lay confronting one kind of death inside the shallow cave and an entirely different one drifting on the air of the dry ravine outside. She closed her eyes.
The weight stayed a little longer, and then it was gone. She was still alive. Opening her eyes she saw the snake moving away from her. It was making a leisurely slither for the other side of the canyon.
She was not the only one who noted its passing. Beside her Whispr had raised his head. He was gaping wide-eyed not at the retreating reptile but at her. It took her a moment to interpret his expression.
Admiration.
Then they were both pushing their faces into the hard ground as the earth outside their hiding place vomited skyward.
At first Ingrid thought she had been shot, only to realize that the sharp stings assailing her head and shoulders were a consequence of being struck by shattered rock and not bullets. Looking up she saw more chunks of rock falling to the ground. These were interspersed with dust, sand, and bloody fragments of the unlucky mamba. Having detected unauthorized movement behind it, the finely tuned searcher had pivoted in the air and fired its primary weapon. Analyzing the organic debris that resulted and determining that the original form was no longer a possible threat, the machine recorded the relevant information on its internal drive and broadcast it to its home docking station.
Deep within the SICK, Inc. complex at Nerens, a bored security technician perfunctorily made note of the fact that Searcher Eighteen had killed a snake. All the facility’s armed searcher drones were supposed to be programmed to recognize and spare a long list of Namib wildlife, but the admonition was one that was enforced by the division only indifferently if at all. Among Chief of Security Het Kruger’s minions the possibility of a sudden raid by infuriated representatives of the World Wildlife Fund was not foremost among their daily concerns.
As soon as the searcher had moved out of sight down the ravine Ingrid started to scramble out from beneath the stone overhang. Given the adrenaline surging through her veins the stronger but lighter Whispr was hard put to restrain her.
“Not yet!” he hissed. “It’s too soon.” He nodded toward the curve of the arroyo where the searcher had vanished. “It might be lingering just around the first corner, or it might decide to come back and do a double check.”
“Double check, hell!” she said. Her full attention was focused on the darkness that lay at the back of the cave. “What if there are more snakes in here?” A sour gorge rose in her throat and she fought it down. “What if—what if this is a den?”
He worked to calm her. “Listen to me, doc. I’ve spent time in the coast swamps. Not long ago, in fact. They’re bolo with bad snakes. Copperheads, water moccasins, anacondas, other bad migrants from S.A. I’ve never been bit. You leave them alone, snakes will leave you alone. They don’t like to waste their venom.” He smiled crookedly. “Kind of like cops don’t like to waste bullets.”
Her heart rate was starting to slow to something resembling normal. “How long do you think we have to hide here?”
His speculative gaze studied the expanse of sunlit ravine. “As long as you have to hide anyplace from anything, which means longer than you think. Let’s give it half an hour to be sure.”
Her eyes widened. “Half an hour!” The urine-soaked right leg of her pants was beginning to itch.
He looked over at her. “I’ll keep watch. Take a nap.”
She envisioned a second mamba crawling over her while she dozed. Or maybe a cobra this time. Investigating the strange, warm intruder. Her pants legs were securely tucked into her hiking boots, but still …
“You watch the canyon,” she told him. “I’ll watch my toes.”
2
If they stuck to Morgan Ouspel’s route (and didn’t run into any more patrolling searcher drones), Whispr estimated it would take them roughly two weeks to walk unhindered to the SICK facility at Nerens. The map and coordinates the renegade company employee had transferred to their communicators showed the location of small water holes where they could refill their compact water bottles. In an emergency the tightly folded collection fabrics contained in these compact devices could be unfurled and raised to extract a limited amount of moisture even from air as dry as that to be found in the interior of the Namib. As for sustenance, they had plenty of concentrates and he had departed Orangemund well equipped with the necessary supplements to ensure that his internally grafted NEM would function properly. Once they successfully infiltrated Nerens, Ingrid insisted they would find a way to access food and drink.
All of this was predicated, of course, on her managing to pass herself off as an employee and him as her assistant. A long reach, he told himself as he easily kept pace with the doctor. But then this entire journey had been a long reach from the day they had left Savannah. He soothed himself with the knowledge that great rewards come from taking great risks.
He continued to tell himself that as the vast treeless expanse of the Sperrgebeit stretched out before them.
INGRID WAS SURE IT was all over and that they were done for when they fell on the sleeping stranger.
Though Whispr was slightly in front of her he was not to blame. The fabric that collapsed beneath him boasted the exact color and texture of the last kilometer or so of ground they had crossed. The fact that it gave way under his very modest weight indicated how fragile were the supports that had been holding it up. The yelp her companion let out when he fell was followed by her own short, sharp scream as she scrambled to avoid tumbling in his wake and failed.
The hoarse bark of surprise that accompanied their descent did not come from either of them.
As she struggled to regain some semblance of stability, the camouflaging material in which she had become entangled was yanked away from her. Rolling to a stop, she found herself staring at the business end of a sharp-nosed shovel. Beside her Whispr confronted the point of a pick. Looking up, she saw that their captor also wielded a thick, short-barreled weapon that was trained in their direction. With his fourth arm he was shielding his eyes against the sudden influx of desert sun into his formerly concealed encampment.
She found herself staring. Like the spines of a dinosaur, the pickarm and shovelarm protruded from the Meld’s shoulders. Additional muscle together with a supportive titanium weave had been grafted on to support the extra limbs. As for the pick and shovel themselves, they were not being held by additional hands. They were his additional hands. Instead of fingers, the ladled bone at the end of each melded limb had been fused and sculpted to form the two disparate excavat
ing utensils. Each was covered with a sheath of organic Kevlar that formed a protective glove over the solid bone. Despite having seen her share of exotic melds, she had never encountered anything quite like the figure who now stood guard over them. This was, she was soon to find out, because there were no independent prospectors operating within the city limits of Greater Savannah. She grew aware that Whispr was muttering at her.
“Well, that shreds it. We’re discovered, diced, and done. It’s all over.”
“I’ll say it’s all over.” The quadridexterous speaker shifted the muzzle of his weapon so that it was aimed directly at Whispr’s face. Meanwhile the four-armed Meld kept glancing anxiously at the sky. “Where’s your floater? On its way already? Won’t do you any good. There’ll be nothing left of you but mucus after I put your bodies through the sifter!”
Ingrid had just enough presence of mind to stammer, “Floater? We don’t have a floater. What are you talking about?”
“You gonna try an’ tell me the company put you out here on foot?” As he tilted his head to one side Ingrid saw that his right eye had been replaced with a magnifier meld. The way the embedded lens complex caught the sun was unmistakable.
“The company?” She exchanged a glance with Whispr before turning back to their captor. “We don’t have anything to do with the company. We’re independent. Scientists. We’re out here on our own, studying wildlife.”
Straight and white as salt, the Meld’s long hair fell to his shoulders. In the other direction, it halted long before it got anywhere near the top of his head. “Then you know you’re here illegally. SICK doesn’t allow scientists into the Sperrgebeit unless they’re company supervised.” The muzzle of the short-barreled weapon came up and the shovelarm and pickarm withdrew. Both double-jointed utensilized arms folded up behind their captor’s back as the maniped muscles supporting them relaxed.