Revelations (25 page)

The scramble down to the valley floor wasn’t as difficult as Emily imagined it was going to be. The clay kicked out by the object’s entry was dense enough to support their weight, and it had formed a number of almost sedimentary levels, creating a natural set of steps that at least allowed for some confident footholds on the way down. The hard part was the exhausting climb back up the opposite side.

Emily winced when Thor yelped in pain as she tried to encourage him to climb up the sun-scorched side. Hours of exposure to the heat of the day had baked the ground to the point that it was just too hot to touch, and the pads of Thor’s paws were as tender as a human’s bare feet on the scorching clay.

“I’m not leaving him,” said Emily as she shaded the dog the best she could with her body.

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” said MacAlister as he knelt down beside the panting dog. “But if we don’t get him out of this sun as quickly as possible he’s going to get heatstroke. Thor, come here, mate.”

The dog obediently trotted the couple of steps to MacAlister’s side, tail and head down, ribbons of drool dropping from the soft lips of his muzzle.

MacAlister stripped off his own backpack and laid it on the floor, quickly retrieving his water canteen, rifle, and binoculars and slinging them over his shoulder. “I’ll grab the pack on our way back,” he said, as he reached down and picked up the dog with both arms as if he weighed nothing.

Emily wasn’t quite sure who was more surprised, herself or Thor, as MacAlister began climbing up the wall toward the top of the embankment. MacAlister positioned the dog against his chest and slipped one arm securely under his furry butt while he used his free hand to pull himself up the slope of the trench. Thor, his head perched over the soldier’s right shoulder, regarded Emily wide-eyed and unblinking.

“Don’t look at me,” Emily mumbled to the dog, “you wanted to come along.” Then she grabbed a handful of roots jutting out from the valley wall and began to pull herself up after them.

Emily heaved herself over the lip of the embankment and rolled over onto her back, her heart pounding in her chest, utterly exhausted. Her hands felt raw and her shoulder muscles throbbed, stiff from the climb. Her legs were the only thing that didn’t ache, and she again thanked her years of biking for providing her with a good strong pair of pins. She fumbled her canteen and unscrewed the top, spilling some of the water over her face to wash the stinging sweat from her eyes. Sitting up she took two long pulls on the water that was now just a degree or two short of being reclassified as hot.

“You okay?” MacAlister’s voice sounded as though he had just taken a light stroll rather than pulled himself and a dog weighing close to one hundred pounds up a two-hundred-foot embankment. Thor padded over to her, sniffed her once in greeting, and proceeded to clean himself as if being carried around was the most natural thing in the world for him.

“I’m fine,” said Emily as she climbed to her feet and offered her hand to Reilly, whose head had just appeared above the edge of the chasm. He took it and allowed Emily to help pull him over the lip.
He looks how I feel
, she thought.

This side of the chasm had suffered a similar fate to the one they had just hiked over from: half-incinerated with shattered, spikey remnants of the alien flora stuck up from the ash-covered ground like Punji stakes, waiting to impale them. The red jungle started up again just a few hundred feet away. But beyond it, rising above the canopy as though it had been Photoshopped into place, Emily could see the mountain range they needed to reach, just a few miles away it looked like. Its west face was covered to the midpoint by alien plants, but from there on up, only sporadic clots of red ran along the mountain.

“Catch your breath,” said MacAlister as he swallowed water from his canteen, sloshing some over his face.

Minutes passed and Emily pulled herself to her feet as they set off again. They picked up the pace, moving at a fast walk as they headed out, and Emily welcomed the shade of the giant leaves of the canopy as they once again stepped into the jungle and pushed on toward the mountain.

The gradient of the ground beneath their feet began to increase the farther in they walked. Emily could tell when they hit the foothills of the mountain range because ahead of them; she could see the black-and-purple roots of trees rising above the ones they still had to climb over. They moved quickly now, with a definite sense of purpose.

“Let’s get to the top ridgeline of the jungle. We’ll stay under cover to avoid detection and then move closer about a half mile or so; that should give us enough elevation to get a clear view of the crater,” MacAlister ordered.

Emily could feel the muscles in her calves complaining as the gradient increased sharply. They climbed higher and higher. The canopy overhead began to thin out as the alien trees and plants grew less and less abundant. The ground lost its almost carpet-like softness of fallen leaves and lichen, replaced by rocks about the size of apples that threatened a twisted ankle or a sudden landslide with every step they took.

A quarter mile of walking later and MacAlister signaled for them to stop.

“This should do,” he said, hunkering down in the bowl of a nearby tree’s roots. He pulled the binoculars from the case again, and Emily took that as a sign to pull out the digital camera he had supplied her with when they’d landed. She fit the telephoto lens onto the camera body and turned it on, sighting through the viewfinder to check it worked.

“Reilly, you’re providing cover. Let’s keep as low to the ground as we can, follow my lead, and then we can all get the hell out of here. This place gives me the bloody creeps.”

That was the first time Emily had heard MacAlister give any kind of admission of nervousness. The light-hearted delivery did not match the frown lines crinkling his forehead.

“Okay. Ready?” asked MacAlister. Emily and Reilly both nodded. “Let’s go.” He headed directly up the slope of the hill at a jog, crouched low, past the final line of trees toward an outcropping of rock he had spotted about seventy yards farther up the side of the mountain. Emily followed his lead, avoiding the occasional rock that bounced past her, dislodged by MacAlister’s combat boots. She found herself denying the temptation to stop and look back, to just take a quick peek at what was in the damn hole.

All three made their way to the outcrop, using the enormous chunk of stone that jutted out from the mountainside to block any view of their presence from below. They leaned against the cold rock, panting for breath in its shadow.

The outcropping was a wedge-shaped protuberance of limestone and granite, the top rough but comparatively flat considering it was on the side of a mountain. It formed a perfect ledge to observe the crater from. MacAlister led them up the blind side before dropping down onto his belly as he began to slither across the ledge toward the lip that overlooked the crater, less than a mile away.

“Sit and stay,” Emily told Thor, making sure the dog understood he was to stay in the shadowed coolness of the high leeward edge of the outcrop. She followed MacAlister, sliding herself across the rough surface of the outcropping on her belly, holding the camera off the ground in front of her with one hand as she crawled forward. Pieces of gravel dug into her knees and chest, but she barely felt the discomfort, her eyes fixed on the ledge and MacAlister, who was propped up on his elbows, his binoculars already to his eyes. Emily slowly edged herself elbow-by-elbow next to MacAlister. When she finally slipped in beside him she had an unobstructed line of sight down into the crater.

“Holy…shit!” she whispered.

Even without the aid of the telephoto lens or Mac’s binoculars, Emily could see that what was hidden in the shadowed crater could not possibly be from this planet. As the ship—and there was now no doubt whatsoever in her mind that this thing in the crater
was
a starship, a spaceship, whatever you wanted to call it—had slid along the ground creating the ravine they had just travelled along. It had also pushed a huge bank of debris and dirt ahead of it and off to the sides. Part of that wall had collapsed over the front of the ship or its momentum had buried it into the ground. Either way, only the rear portion of the craft was visible.

It was a dull metallic gray. A bulbous abdomen, pitted with circular concavities, jutted out from the ground at a forty-five-degree angle into the air. What looked like giant, articulated mechanical legs sprouted from a thick tubular body, the ends of each leg had punched deep into the ground, stabilizing the craft. Emily counted ten of the legs thrust into the surrounding walls of the crater.

If there was more of the ship than that, it was below ground, buried in the wall of the crater.

Emily raised the digital camera to her eye and instinctively started taking photographs of the machine. Although she wasn’t sure “machine” was the right classification for what she was looking at. It looked almost alive, like it was some kind of massive creature, yet, it was obviously manufactured. She pulled back the focus and got several wide-angle shots, then zoomed in to get more detailed photos.

“A fucking spaceship,” she heard MacAlister whisper in disbelief, his eyes locked onto the binoculars. “Who would have believed it?”

What looked like either smoke or steam rose in thin streams from outlets periodically dotted along the length of each leg, rising into the air before dissipating quickly. And there was an odd glow around the edge of the craft, a halo of sorts; it shimmered like a heat haze distorting the view as though it was an image cast on the surface of a lake. A dull, low throbbing reverberated through the ground like a heart beating deep in the bedrock. Even at this distance, Emily could feel the throb transmitted through the stone of the outcrop she lay against and into her chest cavity.

While they watched, Emily became aware of another sound. It was a high-pitched quavering, growing quickly in volume and sharpness.

“You hear that?” MacAlister said.

“Hard not to,” Emily whispered back as she continued pressing the fire button on the camera.

The high-frequency trill suddenly transformed into a sharp metallic screech…as, unbelievably, one of the machine’s massive legs began to pull itself free from the surrounding wall of the crater, along with chunks of earth that tumbled in an avalanche of rock and dirt to the crater floor. The leg rose up into the air, extended forward, and then came down again with a resounding thump and geyser of shattered rock as the barbed tip of the machine’s mechanical leg sank itself back into the ground, this time above the lip of the crater.

“Oh, that’s just bloody priceless. The thing can walk?” said MacAlister.

A second, then a third leg followed the first, pulling free and repositioning itself on the outer edge of the crater. The throbbing pulse resonating through the rock began to beat faster and faster until it became a wavering thrum that sent the tiny pieces of rock and dust scattered across the ledge, skittering over the ground and the lip of the outcrop.

MacAlister finally dropped his eyes from the binoculars and turned to look at Emily. “I don’t like the look of this one—”

He was interrupted by a new sound, like splintering rock. It flooded upward from the crater as the articulated legs suddenly flexed in unison as they heaved the giant, gray body of the ship out of the ground and then upward, revealing the full extent of the machine’s size.

A shovel-shaped, curved “head” about the length of a football field was buried deep into the foot of the mountain on the eastern side of the crater. As it pulled free, masses of earth and shattered bedrock cascaded from it into the pit below. Emily saw the newly revealed front of the ship had a flat underside but the top was slightly curved and, given its massive size and distance, Emily estimated it must be at least four or five stories high.

For a moment the machine stood, its gray body reflecting the sunlight, then, one after the other, each leg began to move, grabbing at the ground as the machine hauled itself away from the pit. Each gigantic leg stretching forward as it nimbly, for such a massive mechanism, began to climb out from the huge pit along the side of the mountain. Each time a leg lifted and plunged back into the ground Emily felt the side of the mountain tremble, like dynamite blasting away at its face.

“Dear God, look at the size of that thing,” MacAlister said, his voice filled with a raw mixture of awe and suppressed terror as he began to scramble his way backward along the outcropping, away from the ledge.

The machine moved in a fluid, distinctly organic manner, each leg rising and falling in a perfectly timed motion that propelled it along the foot of the mountain parallel to the ravine, its spiked feet coming down on either side of it as though it was following the path it had arrived from.

Emily could hear Thor begin to whimper and then bark as the machine thumped its way past the outcropping Emily and the other survivors had chosen as their hiding place. The noise of the machine’s passing was stunningly loud, huge clouds of rock and dust were ripped from the ground as the legs lifted and then moved on, the main body blotting out the sun as it strutted across the landscape.