Creations (36 page)

They came to rest upside down, with only the crushed metal tubes of the roll cage between them and the ground. Max opened his eyes and saw a large rock right in front of his face, about two inches from his visor. Any closer and it would have shattered the glass.

He tried calling to the others but got no reply. The low humming that he usually heard from the communication loop was gone too. He could see movement, though, as the other four tried to pull themselves out from under the rover. At least they were still alive, he thought. He released his harness then twisted round to try and slide out on his side. It was hard work pulling himself past the twisted metal without ripping his suit, but eventually he made it. Only then did his thoughts return to the machine.

It was already coming toward them, leaving the colony fifty feet away and walking slowly in their direction. In another few seconds it would be on them.

“We need the bomb!” Max called, but again got no reply. The cable that had connected him to the communication loop was now hanging by his side, and there was no way they could even have heard him. Instead he looked over at the front of the rover where Ariel had been sitting with the device in his hands. Ariel wasn’t yet out of his seat, but was lying on his back, halfway out of the rover, desperately trying to pull himself the rest of the way. He seemed to be looking for something too, straining his head from side to side and running his hands over the ground as if searching by touch. It had to be the charge.

Max looked round quickly. They’d covered over fifty feet of ground as they’d rolled and there was no telling when Ariel had lost his grip on it, or how far it had been thrown. Then he spotted it, lying off to the side, with the sun reflecting off its foil cover. He ran over to it, almost falling over as he pushed back against the soil, then in one move he slid to a halt and grabbed for the thing, balancing himself with one hand while reaching down with the
other. He was now facing back toward the rover, where Safi and Harris had also managed to get themselves out. Damon was on his way out too, but Ariel still appeared to be trapped. Safi and Harris were bending over him trying to help him out and didn’t seem to have noticed that the machine was only seconds away from reaching them.

“Safi! Look out!” he shouted, but yet again there was no response; even if he turned on his suit transmitter, everyone else’s was still switched off. Then he had an idea.

He activated his own communicator and started yelling at the machine itself.

“This way! Here! Here!” he yelled. There was no way it could understand him but the transmissions might be enough to get its attention. He pulled the activation toggle for Ariel’s suit beacon on the charge and saw the red flashing light that showed it was sending out its signal. The beacon was a long-range high power device, unlike the communicator, and might have more of an effect. Then he ran back the way he’d come, not aiming for the rover, but trying to pass by close enough to distract the machine and draw it off toward the colony.

It was only when he saw the machine change course and head toward him that he realised he had no idea how to set the timer on the charge. The machine was coming for him now and unless he could destroy it himself, he knew it would take him. He ran faster, sweating with the effort as a growing patch of mist began to form on the inside of his visor, clouding his vision.

He looked down at the device in his hands as he ran and tried to make sense of the controls. It appeared to be a mechanical timer, better than electronics at coping with radiation he figured, and hopefully simpler to operate. In fact there were only two controls on the thing; a safety switch and a dial marked out in minutes. The maximum time setting was one hour, but the ten-minute mark was labelled as the minimum, as if ten minutes was the shortest countdown that could be set. It made sense for
safety, but in this situation it made the thing almost useless. It wasn’t what Max wanted to see. Yet again he felt his stomach clenching with fear, as if their last chance for survival had suddenly been taken away.

Then he realised; there had to be a way of making the thing go off sooner. Ariel and the others must have known how the timer worked. If they were planning to use it, then they must have known a way to fix it. He looked at it again and suddenly had a flash of inspiration. He turned the dial to fifteen minutes, flicked the safety switch from “SAFE” to “ARM”, and forced the dial back past ten, down past one minute, finally leaving it just one click away from zero. Then he turned, saw the machine closing in on him, and threw the charge as hard as he could.

It landed just in front of the machine. The machine stopped, reached out with one of its manipulator arms and picked the device up to examine it. Max however kept running. The nearest of the colony buildings was only thirty feet away, but nearer still was an isolated rock just three feet tall. Max got to it, threw himself to the ground behind it, then curled up with as much of his body in its shadow as possible.

The explosion was silent in the airless lunar environment, but could easily be felt as its force rippled through the ground. The only thing Max heard was a single low-pitched thud as the vibrations from the blast came through the ground and up into his body. He could see the effects though, as a spray of soil and loose rocks passed straight over him and out into the distance before splattering back down to the ground. It looked as if over a ton of material had suddenly been sent flying, maybe more. He waited a few seconds until everything seemed to have stopped, then he crawled out from his hiding place to see the effect the charge had had.

The machine was no longer there. Only parts of it could be recognised, and most of those were some distance from the site of the explosion. The place where the charge had gone off was
marked by a shallow crater, with nothing but bare rock showing where the dirt had been blasted away. The colony buildings had suffered shrapnel damage as well, and some of them looked as if they’d been hit by machine gun fire. They were further away than Max had been and much further than he would have been able to run if the rock hadn’t been there. He counted himself lucky.

Then he looked back toward the rover. Ariel was out now and the four of them were lifting the vehicle up to roll it back onto its wheels. It looked as if it had been through a bomb blast of its own, though the crates of explosives they’d tied on and the survey poles it had come with all seemed to be intact. Once it was upright they turned their communicators back on and started to assess the damage.

“Guys, I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened,” Safi said. She sounded shaken.

“Don’t be,” Ariel said. “You weren’t to blame. You had to drive fast and you had to turn fast. None of us knew that thing was going to be there.”

That seemed to be enough to settle it. “Thanks,” she said. Then she saw Max standing by the crater and came over to join him.

“Max, are you okay?” she said.

“No, I’m not,” he said. He was exhausted and was shaking so badly his legs could barely support him. He felt sick too, and his mouth was parched. “That thing nearly had me.”

“I know. You did well, though. Very well.”

Max managed to smile.

“Come on, let’s look at what’s left of this thing,” she said, heading off toward some of the larger pieces of wreckage. She picked one of them up and turned it over in her hands, then did the same with several others. She seemed fascinated by them.

“Do you really want to get that close to it?” he said. “Even in pieces?”

“Sure, now that it’s safe,” she said. “I want to see how it worked. Those were some pretty amazing moves it was pulling. Did you see the way it ran?”

“Yeah,” Max said. “I saw.”

The pieces were like intricately carved chunks of layered stone, with fine metallic lines running through them. Safi put the piece she was examining down and continued looking around her. “So what else have we got round here?” she said, stepping through the debris. She was heading toward the colony and also toward Max’s rock. Then she stopped and looked over at the rock itself.

“That’s interesting,” she said, under her breath.

She walked up to it and looked closely at its top surface, even though there didn’t appear to be anything there. All Max could see was the remains of one of the colony’s material stores, the haystack-shaped pile smashed and scattered by the blast. However, it was obvious that something had captured her attention.

Just then the rover pulled up, battered but still driveable. Damon jumped off it, leaving Ariel and Harris in their seats.

“My God, will you look at this,” Damon said, taking in the destruction around him. “You sure know how to make a mess, Max.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll arrange to be a bit further away next time I set one of those things off.”

“That’s a good idea, I just hope you don’t get the chance to try. Listen though, we need to get going, and soon.”

Suddenly Safi’s voice cut in. “Hey, come over here and look at this,” she said.

“Look at what?” Damon said as he and Max started to walk over. Safi was still in the same place, apparently staring at bare rock.

“What do you think that is?” she said, pointing at something on top of the boulder. They bent over to see what she was looking at.

Sticking out of the rock, almost vertically, was a metallic spike about two inches long. It was needle-thin for most of its length, with a slightly bulbous section near the bottom end. It seemed to be bedded into the rock, though they couldn’t tell how far in it went. Max was surprised it had caught her eye from so far away.

“It’s part of the machine, it’s got to be,” Damon said. “Thrown out by the explosion.”

“But it’s gone right into the rock,” Safi said. “Solid rock, and it isn’t even bent. How could that happen?”

“I don’t know, that thing went up with quite a bang. Strange things can happen in explosions. It came pretty close to hitting you though, Max. Lucky the rock was there.”

Safi still didn’t seem convinced. “But it’s vertical,” she said. “It came downward, not outward.”

Just then Ariel’s voice joined them from the rover. “Safi, guys,” he said. “We need to hurry, please!”

“Sure, on our way,” Damon said. “Come on, let’s go.” He headed back toward the rover with Max following him. Safi came last, reluctantly, but not before taking one last look at the spike. Max was sure she glanced up into the sky as she left it.

They got onto the rover quickly, Safi again swapping with Harris for the driving seat. She didn’t seem so shaken or distracted now and was soon up to her usual speed. Then the ground levelled out, and thirty blissfully uneventful minutes passed before they crossed into site six and saw their destination ahead of them.

“I never expected to be back here again,” Safi said as Anchorville came into view.

So this is the place it all started, Max thought. Somehow it had looked bigger in the pictures, but it was still an imposing structure. A lattice of upright pillars and horizontal girders formed the main bulk of the factory, hundreds of yards of it stretching into the distance, topped for most of its length by an array of solar panels and reflectors. The intermittent canopy cast dark shadows over the interior, full of indistinct shapes and huge pieces of machinery, now sitting idle.

“They’ve stripped the place down since I was last here,” Safi said as she drove them alongside. “It looks so creepy now.”

It was certainly eerie, Max thought, almost as eerie as the Kambria colony had been but in a different way. That place had been alive, full of sinister, inhuman life; this place however was dead, and had been for a long time. The angular pillars and braces almost looked like some kind of ruined temple, inhabited only by shadows. The repeat pattern of the outer framework sailed past them as they drove down its length.

Safi slowed down as they approached the far end, where the inhabitants appeared to have lived. Max remembered seeing the window lights of the modules in the videos she’d shown, though, these too were now dead. Then he noticed one of the smaller modules, down at ground level, its skin seemingly peeled open from inside. Safi turned and took them toward it.

“This is where it happened,” she said, coming to a halt. She sat and looked at it for a few seconds, then she got off and walked over to it, stopping just ten feet away. Max and the others joined her but didn’t go any closer. They could see where the skin had ruptured and could also see the effects of the fire that had raged inside it, though it looked like everything it had contained was
now gone. A plaque had been added to the outside, however, with three names engraved on its surface; M. Connor, V. Wren, and at the top, N. West.

“Their ashes are here too,” she said. “In the soil. We all said that’s what we’d want if anything happened.”

“Did you know all of them?” Max said.

“Yes, I did,” she said, “not just Niall. All of them.” Then she stood in silence for a moment more before walking away, heading off toward where the other modules were grouped.

She stopped when she got to them and looked upward. They were stacked three levels high against the bulky framework of the structure, with pressurised walkways linking them on the inward side and an open stairway, like a building’s fire escape, bolted to the outside. She went to this stairway, climbed the first few steps, then turned back to face the others.

“We can get up high here,” she said. “Keep a lookout. We’ll see if anything comes our way.”

“Good idea,” Ariel said. “Let’s take the charges up as well, just in case.”

They unloaded the rover and carried the boxes of explosives up the three flights of stairs, to the wire mesh platform that circled the upper level of the site. It would have been built to provide maintenance access to the solar canopy, Max guessed, but it also made a good vantage point for them to sit and wait for rescue. They based themselves at the corner next to the stairway, then sat down on the boxes next to the safety rail. It must have looked like some kind of bizarre veranda party.

“Has anyone else ever used this site?” Max said once he was comfortable.