Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (33 page)

They ate quickly, squatting in the shade of the trees. “We need to refuel the suits,” Urban said, looking thoughtfully at the green rind in his hands. “I wonder if they can use this stuff?” He started playing with the tubes that fed out of his pack, while carrying on a soft conversation with his DI. Lot listened for a while, but the food in his belly had made him sleepy and soon his attention drifted to the darting pattern of a swarm of tiny flies as they buzzed over a rotting ahuacatl that had smashed against the leaf mold. Another spoiled fruit looked half-eaten. He could see the scrape marks of small, sharp teeth in the exposed green flesh. Some of the flies were buzzing very close to him now, their black bodies like darting specks in his vision. He jumped at a sudden, sharp sting on his cheek.

Alta looked at him, eyes wide. “There’s blood there.”

He swiped at the spot. A minute smear of blood reddened his finger.
Biting flies?

Urban crouched at his side, taking a closer look. “You think it’s poisonous?”

Lot shrugged, wondering the same thing himself, but not wanting to admit it. “Our Makers can handle it.”

Alta’s fear touched him then, like a dark mist under the trees. The city suddenly seemed very far away. What was going on there, in the aftermath of the riot?

“Let’s get out of here,” Alta said.

They slipped back up to the road. Lot emerged last. As he stepped out onto the gray surface, he thought he heard a rustling noise behind him. Turning quickly, he saw a blurred smear of motion deep in the shadowed brown world under the low-hanging branches. The disturbance took only a second to slide out of sight and into the deeper forest.

“Fury?”

Urban had already gone with Alta several steps up the road. Now he looked quizzically back at Lot.

“A warden’s trailing us.”

Urban’s face darkened. “You still have those capsules we took from the other one?”

“Yeah.”

“Get ’em out. We might have to use them.”

Lot retrieved them from his pocket, giving one to Urban. They experimented a minute, until Urban managed to eject a stream of the poison—so fine it couldn’t be seen—but they all knew it was working because at the point of impact the road began to melt and boil in a self-sustaining reaction that swept outward in an ever-widening circle, chewing up the pavement, forcing them to scramble out of the way. “Oh shit,” Urban whispered, when the infection approached the edge of the pavement without showing any sign of slowing down.

“No,” Alta said, still backing away. “It can’t keep going. It has to have some limiting mechanism—”

The boil reached the edge of the road. Lot held his breath. But Alta was right; the reaction failed to spread into the forest. And when he looked again, he saw that the damage to the road had slowed, and soon it stopped entirely. The pavement had not quite been melted fully across.

“
Thank you
,” Alta whispered, though it wasn’t clear to whom her gratitude was directed.

“Yeah, fun stuff,” Urban said. He fingered the capsule cautiously, before slipping it into his suit pocket.

Lot put the other one away. The melted section of the road glittered, its surface rough and uneven . . . though it was still discernibly a road—unlike Captain Antigua, who had not much resembled a human by the time the warden’s disassembly Maker finished with her.

Lot tried to push the thought away.

He turned to Urban. “Did you find a way to refuel the suits?”

Urban shook his head. “Bit garbage. The suit design is so primitive, it doesn’t have the nanomech to handle anything but dilute liquid recycling.”

Lot puzzled over that. “You mean pee?”

“Hope you’ve got a high sugar content in your urine.”

Lot groaned. “Sounds like an awfully slow way to refuel.”

Alta seemed confused. “Refueling never seemed important. We wanted to bring enough juice to get here. Nothing else mattered.”

Lot stared at her in consternation. He wanted to yell at her,
What were you thinking when you brought us here?

But they’d been in it together, he knew that. And the reason they’d done it involved nothing of thought, or planning. It was all about the way Jupiter had left them. Lot knew he would have come here if it meant dropping naked and alone into the forest.
Why
he felt that way he still couldn’t say.

W
ITH THE CALORIC ENERGY OF THE AHUACATL
flush in their veins, they moved quickly, keeping strictly to the center of the roadway. At first they went in dead silence, listening for any telltale rustle. But by the time the road began its climb out of the valley they’d relaxed a little. Lot had been trailing behind, his gaze roving constantly over the vegetation and the shimmering heat waves rising on the roadbed. Now he hurried a bit, catching up with Alta. She glanced at him warily. He stepped a pace farther away, trying not to let it touch him. “Did Gent talk to you about this?” he asked her. “Did he say what he expected to do when . . . ?”

She actually relaxed a little. “He said we’d find Jupiter. That’s all.” She held out her hand to Urban as he dropped back to join them. Lot tried not to see it. He took another gander back over his shoulder, his gaze sweeping the heat shimmers, trying hard to focus on what counted.
Gent expected to find Jupiter . . . alive?

“Do you know if he . . . had any contact with Jupiter, since that day?”

She looked at him curiously. “He’s in all of us, Lot. I can feel his presence now, like a guiding light.”

Sound seemed muted. Lot could hear the dull wash of his own breath, the tramp of their feet. “What are you talking about?”

She looked startled. “You don’t know?”

“Alta . . .”

She stopped abruptly, her gaze troubled. “You have to know.”

“Know what?” Urban asked softly.

She looked at him, as if for reassurance. “He’s here.” She tapped her breast. “I can feel him inside me, like . . . like a plexus. Tendrils of warmth. Emotional warmth, like comfort, like love. That’s the seed, Gent said. And it’ll grow when we’re with him. It’ll fill up our bodies, and we’ll forget all the bad things we’ve ever done, all the conflicts and the jealousies. We’ll be perfect then. All of us together. Part of the soul of this world.”

She looked again to Lot, this time with a pitying gaze. “You can’t feel it?”

He shook his head, resentment rising in his throat. She couldn’t sense Jupiter. If she felt anything, it was an infatuation, a delusion, a mental illness that the monkey house had not detected. He didn’t need her sympathy.

But in her dismay, she missed the shift of his mood. “I don’t understand. It was the same for Gent. It was the same for everyone else in the quarter. But not for you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Lot, you should know him best.”

His temper snapped. “I don’t know him at all!”

She stiffened, but she held her ground. “Then I’m sorry for you. But if Jupiter’s left you a harder path to walk, it’s for a reason. You have to believe that.”

“I don’t believe anything.” He turned away from her and strode fast up the road, feeling like an idiot and on fire and not understanding why. After a few minutes he remembered to be alert for the wardens’ telltale blur. Alta and Urban trailed behind him. He could hear them talking sometimes, though he didn’t try to understand the words. Slowly, his attention shifted back to the forest.

As Kheth swung round to late afternoon, animal life began to stir. Lot could hear a distant chorus of hooting, and closer, a bell-like clanging call, rising over a piping bird song.

The road climbed the valley wall, its broad expanse supported on pillars that held it like a shelf above the forest canopy. As Lot neared the peak of the ridge, an eerie ululation rose from somewhere just below. He paused, gazing over the ornamental rail. Through a break in the trees he saw something moving. At first he thought it was a warden’s blur, so closely did its mottled brown and black hide match the leaf litter through which it crawled. But after a second, his mind distinguished its shape: it was a serpent. Or at least, that part of the thing that he could see was serpentlike. Tentacular. It slid from his view without giving him a look at its head, leaving him uncertain of its real appearance. But he had the distinct impression that it had been huge. The sliding section he’d seen had been twelve feet or more. At least it had been moving away from the road.

A few minutes later he reached the ridgetop—and the end of the road. He stared in surprise at the abrupt termination. The edge of the pearly gray paving looked as if it had been torn, twisted, ripped off from a ribbon of similar tissue. The ragged edge had been stretched thin as human skin in some places. Beyond was only undisturbed forest.

He glanced back over his shoulder. Behind him all was normal. He could look back into the valley and see the black terminal building, the elevator column rising from it like an overlay dividing the sky. Alta and Urban were small figures, trudging steadily up the slope.

He frowned again at the unfinished road, wondering which way they should go now. On the far side of the ridge, the land fell away in an exaggerated panorama that echoed on a grand scale the slopes of Silk. Narrow valleys cut the slope like giant claw marks. Steep ridges rose between them, thrusting knife-edged profiles into the hazy late-afternoon sky. In a few places the brown, upside-down teardrops of recent landslides scarred the nearly vertical valley walls, but for the most part the land wore a uniform skin of hearty green.

Far below, a thread of gold held the horizon. Lot frowned, then realized it was the ocean, reflecting Kheth’s burnished light.

A cool breeze moved up the slope, bearing with it a sense of human presence. Lot stiffened. Then he held his breath, focusing all his concentration on impressions drawn in by his sensory tears.
Jupiter
. The aura was weak, barely perceptible on the failing breeze, but he had no doubt of its identity.
Jupiter
.

Somewhere below them, and whole.

CHAPTER

24

H
E TURNED AT THE SOUND OF A STEP, STARTLED
, because he’d thought Alta and Urban were still a hundred yards or more behind. He froze as he recognized a warden. With its camouflage mode switched off, its skin was a dull jade green. It stood facing away from him, staring into the forest along the descending spine of the ridge. He couldn’t see its face. Who possessed it?

He edged away, back over the ridgetop, back where Urban and Alta were still climbing up. His fingers slipped into his pocket, to curl around the capsule. The warden on the road turned to look at him. Its mouth opened, but no sound came forth. Its face scrunched up in a parody of severe mental effort.

“This has nothing to do with you!” Lot shouted at it. “Leave us—”

The face changed, startling Lot so badly his shouted defiance broke off. Its features blanked, then quickly re-formed in minute detail. Its mouth was beaded with hundreds of tiny mouths; its eyes the same. Every shadow of Sypaon’s features was drawn with a sequence of speaking lips. But Lot heard no sound; sensed no emotion from her.

She seemed to realize the pointlessness of her efforts, for the face blanked again. Then she turned and plunged into the brush.

Almost immediately, a loud sound of thrashing vegetation erupted from the forest, punctuated by a steamy hiss. An acrid, acid stink exploded from the site. Lot scrambled back, as a plume of white smoke filtered out of the leaves.

Urban and Alta had heard the commotion. They called to him. Lot started to look back, to turn in their direction, when the vegetation under the smoke plume exploded upward. From amid the chaos of spinning leaves and swirling steam he watched the serpent rise.

It was like no snake he’d ever seen in the VR. Its head was a flattened disk ringed by a fringe of arm-long tentacles patterned in black and brown, smaller versions of the exaggerated tentacle that had evolved into its massive body. As it reared high among the trees, it lifted its head, exposing the underside of the disk, where it held the warden’s jade body clenched in a black, star-shaped . . . Lot could not quite bring himself to think
mouth
. It was a pit, a black hole, and the inset points of the dark star worked on the warden like teeth.

The warden had frozen. The green gel did not flow. It had become inanimate bait, basted in an acidic drool that made Lot’s eyes burn even at a distance of almost fifty yards.

With a sudden, ringing knell, the obvious truth of it hit him. Sypaon had tried to warn him. And when that failed, she’d lured the thing out of hiding.

The spell that held him shattered. He jumped back six feet as the serpent tossed its head in a grotesque spasm of chomping, swallowing, primitive effort to work the warden into its belly. The jade green body disappeared just as Lot turned to run. Acid spattered around him. He glanced back, to see the serpent head rise high among the trees, the black star pulsing open and closed, surrounded by a necklace of glistening blue beads that could only be eyes. The creature seemed to gather itself; then suddenly it sprang forward, falling across the road with a resounding thud. Lot jumped hard and reached the far embankment as a stream of acid sprayed past his legs.

Down the road he could see Alta and Urban. They’d stopped yelling. Alta’s eyes showed white all around as she darted with Urban up the embankment and into the shelter of the bordering forest. Lot caught all that in a glimpse as he balanced on a cushion of soft soil. Then he sprang up the embankment himself, to the top of the road cut, crashing through the shrubbery, sending clouds of glassy-winged insects into the air. Behind him a sizzling crackle and hiss arose, and he felt the heat of acid burning through the foliage.

He was over the ridge. The descending slope was steep, barely thirty degrees from vertical. He found himself in a half-controlled bounding slide, zigzagging down between the tree trunks. The soft ground gave way under his feet at every step, tumbling behind him in tiny avalanches of humus and soil. Overhead, the canopy blocked out most of the daylight, allowing only a thin understory of ferns and head-sized green globes accented by the occasional spindly sapling. He could hear no sound of pursuit.