Fire with Fire: Chapter Nine

ODYSSEUS

    Caine shifted the A-frame, ran a wet forearm across his more-wet brow, checked his watch: three hours until sunset and he was still playing follow-the-leader with the local. How long is this going to go on?

    Caine could have spat at himself: as long as it takes, asshole. This is first contact: not something you fit into a convenient slot on your busy day-planner. He pushed on –

    – and emerged onto a trail. An actual, groomed foot path, a little wide, by human standards. It would have been invisible had he not been looking for it: no visible damage to the surrounding vegetation, yet no growth in the harder-packed dirt, or starting up from the sides of stones worn smooth and flat. Weeds never got a chance to grow here.

    Caine pulled out his palmtop, patched into the rudimentary GPS net, synced it to the survey maps, and as he waited for the machine to orient itself, he looked up and down the trail.

    About ten meters to the left — roughly to the south — there was a broken vine: snapped clean, the two dusty-rose-colored cross sections stared at him like a pair of bright, pupilless eyes. Okay, that way then.

    The palmtop flashed readiness: the broken vine was, in fact, due south. Just a kilometer further west — although he couldn’t see it through the canopy — was the foot of the nearest mountain. The local had been pushing in that direction until he reached this north-south trail. Caine zoomed out from the map, tapped the stylus on his current location, then again on the main ruins at the extreme southern edge of the screen, made a range inquiry. 102.4 kilometers. Altitude increase of 345 meters. He turned the palmtop off to save the batteries, looked south. Okay, so you want me to follow you south. Back the way I came. Are you trying to get me to go away, to return to my start point? Or do you think I’m lost and you’re trying to help me find my way back home? Or do you have something else in mind?

    Caine slipped the palmtop back into his chest pocket, hefted the A-frame higher up onto his shoulders: only one way to find out. He started south.

    Less than a kilometer further on, the footpath split. The main trail, marked by a broken tuber, was still visible, although somewhat less distinct; it angled gently to the right, up into the hills. The other path was new, almost invisible: it was the faintest hint of parted foliage — barely a game trail. It veered sharply to the left, back east toward the river. Five meters down that trail, through two layers of overhanging mosses, Caine caught a glimpse of yet another cleanly-snapped tuber.

    I’m to follow both paths. Hmm. A tour of the local highlights

    He pulled out the palmtop, marked the position on the GPS map overlay, moved up the main trail to the right.

    He had covered about a kilometer — could see the steep, green sheltering slope through the gaps in the canopy — when the path widened and then disappeared around an outthrust spur of the mountain. Caine followed in that direction — and stopped as he turned the corner of the moss-mottled stone ridge.

    The structure — cut out of the natural rock — would have been invisible to scans. Its density and smooth outlines were consistent with, and blended directly into, the skirts of the mountain. Steps radiated out and down from a broad, out-curving esplanade. Tiers cut into either side of the rocky shoulders hemmed it in: an amphitheatre of some kind.

    Caine looked behind: nothing was following him — at least nothing he could see. He turned back toward the structure, noting the squat obelisks that followed the curved lip of the esplanade like low, roofless pillars. He approached slowly, resisted an impulse to unsling his rifle, saw hints of galleries in the shadows at the rear of the raised floor of the arena, cut back into the mountain itself.

    He stopped at the base of the stairs, uncertain, noted that the hair along his brow had become more damp. Why so anxious? Look: nothing lives here, nothing has for thousands of years. And if the local wanted you dead, you’d have been led into a deadfall pit or some other trap an hour ago. You’re supposed to see this, which means you’re probably safer now than any time since you landed in this valley. So why the jitters? Caine looked at the outthrust arc of the broad stairs, each riser almost half a meter in width, and then up at the squat obelisks. Because it’s strange, alien-looking: not like the mini-Acropolis back at Site One. And because — he looked around again — because there are no weeds. None of the stones have fallen — or, if they have, they’ve been removed. Maybe the locals — caretake this place…?

    The locals provisionally rose higher on Caine’s ad hoc scale of cultural complexity. Did they remember that these were the creations of their ancestors? Did they have a sense of history that strove to reach back into such a distant past? If they did, they were not so very different from some of the more remote tribes of Earth, only a century ago.

    Caine took out his photographic equipment slowly, as if a sudden movement would startle the stones, would scare the — well, what do I call this? The ruins? No; not the right word. The memorial? The historical preserve? Whatever it was, “ruin” was not the correct label: that term suggested the wear of ages and of neglect. This structure was, admittedly, time-worn — but there was no sign of neglect.

    He measured the steps, so strangely broad and low; each one was between fifty and fifty-one centimeters wide, but only ten centimeters high. And they were not “built”: like everything except the ring of low obelisks, they had been hewn from the native rock. Caine traversed the floor of the arena, hearing the whisper of his boots bounce back from the rock that rose up on either side, stopped in front of the rear galleries. Again, a strange architecture: the walls that faced out into the arena had been cut through, converted into openworks of intricate filigree patterns. The two doorways that led into the cavelike chamber beyond were ovate, narrowing up into a peak.

    Caine recorded and measured and inspected the site for ten minutes, checked his watch, and discovered his perceptual error: he had been here for almost an hour. He had ninety minutes — at most — before the sun started to set, and he still had the second, smaller trail to explore. He hastily stuffed his sensors and photographic gear into the top of his backpack and jogged away from the structure.

    Having been in all its chambers, he knew there was no one in the structure watching him as he left. But that didn’t diminish the sense that timeless eyes were fixed unblinkingly upon his spine as he disappeared back into the jungle.

    After reaching the narrow, newer trail, he followed it for five hundred meters and then stopped: up ahead, there was a break in the canopy, large enough to let in a considerable volume of Delta Pavonis’ fading honey-colored rays. Caine took another dozen steps, glad for the opportunity to enjoy standing in some bright, unobstructed light. His day-end fantasies concocted a convenient shelf of rock, handy kindling, a campfire: all so real he could almost smell it –

    He could. He could smell it. Burned wood, or plants — like a grass fire.

    He unshouldered the rifle and moved off the trail, but kept it in sight, ten meters to his left. He edged forward, paralleling it as the canopy thinned and the light grew — and revealed a broad, open circle of dirt. What the hell –?

    Hell. Yes, hell would smell like that. It wasn’t just the odor of burnt grass: it was meat, too. But not cooked: incinerated. He did not sweat, but felt his temples pulsing hard and fast: it was a different species of terror than he had felt while facing down a charging Pavonosaur. This was a sharp, cold wariness — because any bush could hide death, and any thicket could conceal the worst foe of all:

    Humans. They had been here. This was their — his — work, Caine realized as he crept to the edge of the circle of dirt, and pushed at it with his boot. Scorched rock underneath. He rose, rifle muzzle tracking along the brush-line as he moved into the center of the ring, the charnel smell rising around him. He probed with his boot; more burnt rock underfoot, but at the far edge, another smell: gasoline. Thick and pungent, like avgas.

    And something else, at the very edge of the circle: a footprint. But not human. Splay-footed, with the heel-print deeper than the front, it looked like a cross between a duck’s and a human’s foot. Four front toes — long and without any evidence of a strong metatarsal bridge — angled back into a wide, flat sole that flared out again where the heel erupted into a bifurcated back toe. But that rear digit had not left the kind of deep, crisp-edged imprint consistent with a sharp rear talon: it, too, was soft, flexible.

    He followed the footprint out of the circle — and stopped: three freshly broken tubers. Just five meters in front of him. All in a row. What could it mean?

    Then he looked down and he knew what it meant. End of the trail.

    To the right and the left were oval cocoons — or would that be coffin-garlands? — of the fuchsia and indigo flowers, propped up into tented arches by their jointed, stick-like vines. Inside each colorful shell was a single, usually charred, bone. More footprints were here — dozens, some older, some recent.

    He counted: there were thirty-seven of the memorials, stretching away into the brush in either direction. The northernmost end of the burial line was marked by a cluster of snapped tubers, and, looking down as the sun’s light faded from honey to amber, he saw a metallic glint. He knew what it was before he picked it up: a spent shotgun casing. The brass collar was twice as high as a commercial round, and its side was stamped with a single “0″: single-aught buckshot. A favorite with mass murderers of innocents — and a match for what Caine had seen winking at him from Bendixen’s bandoliers. Using a lens-wipe from his photo kit, he picked up the shell casing, wrapped it, put it in his other chest pocket. Bastards.

    As he emerged back into the small clearing, he saw movement in the bush, crouched, but knew — from the strange sideways rush and then stillness — that it wasn’t human. The local had followed — or waited for — him here.

    More motion on the other side, and a rush of air in the trees behind him. Scratch that: the locals are here. All around me.

    Caine held the gun away, knew what he had to do even while several million years of carefully-evolved self-preservation instincts roared negations so loud that he couldn’t think. So he acted.

    He crouched down, reached far forward, laid the rifle in the direct sunlight. Then he frog-walked a step back, waited another moment, and kneeled. He bowed his head.

    The only thing he heard was the blood pounding in his ears — and he listened to it for what seemed like a very long time. Then, from the left, came a shuddering whistle that slowly turned into what was clearly recognizable as a thin keening. Two more “voices” rose up from the right, then many from the higher branches of the canopy behind him. He lost count, knowing only that there were many — dozens, probably.

    And then nothing. As if someone had found the off-switch for their grieving, it was over. He looked up, heard a single, dwindling swooping noise in the trees behind him. And that was all. He was alone again.

    He rose slowly, picked up his weapon, looked at the sun. Where to sleep tonight? I need to find some flat rock, a good clear area — and he suddenly knew that he had seen only one suitable place since leaving the camp where he had killed the Pavonosaur twenty years ago this morning. The mountainside amphitheatre. He expected to feel fear, but didn’t. Not because he had become brave — he knew he hadn’t — but because he was too tired by the many successive shocks, fears, and enigmas of the day. He headed back up the trail.

    So when he arrived at the head of the trail — where it met the western extension which led to the amphitheater, and the broad northern trail which led back toward the site of his encounter with the Pavonosaur — he was beyond being surprised to discover the local waiting there for him. Caine stopped, realized he was still carrying his gun in his hands, shouldered it. The local made a low noise — something like a buzzing purr — and set off on the northern trail. Caine, shrugging to no one but himself, followed without a word.

    Following behind the local, Caine noticed what he had not before: that the creature’s — no, the being’s — legs had a “reverse knee,” like a dog or a cat, but that it stood and walked in a plantigrade fashion: its full foot in contact with the ground. However, when the local used a bit more speed, he leaned forward into the motion and came up onto his toes, shifting into a typical digitigrade stance. Which produced the distinctive loping gait that Caine had seen in the thermal-imaging footage from the Navy recon VTOL.

    Four times within the first five or six kilometers, Mr. Local turned aside, led them into the brush for a few hundred yards. Each time their detour ended at another — albeit smaller — burnt dirt clearing. Caine was beyond outrage or even pity: that was for later, for a time and a place at which the responsible parties could be made — somehow — to pay for their deeds.