Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (37 page)

Overhead, the crater wall exploded.

The concussion knocked Lot off his feet. Pain knifed through his injured knee. Then his head slammed against a wall of rock, and that was worse. Maybe he blacked out for a second. He had to open his eyes. Urban was hauling on his arm, while a rush of debris swept around them, a river of gravel and stone. Urban dragged him up on top of it while they continued their downward slide, the land moving beneath them.

The toe of the debris hit the vegetation. Lot tumbled into the whipping stems of a dense shrub. Urban’s clawing fingers wrenched free of his arm. The landslide swept around him. Hanging suspended in the fragile branches, head downslope, face up to the sky, he caught a glimpse of the crater rim. It was far above him now and it was . . . melting? Boiling?
Disintegrating
. Like a high-speed video of organic decay, it was breaking down into a shimmering particle soup. Billows of steam roared upward, obscuring most of the rim, developing into a gigantic thermal plume.

The branches broke. Lot held on long enough to get his feet under him; then he was stumble-running down a scree-covered slope, past half-buried bushes and, finally, under the shelter of trees. He saw Urban ahead of him, and through the obscuring leaves, the green glint of water. Alta was already down there. She jittered on the shore of the river, screaming at them to hurry up, hurry up.

Urban was limping badly, so Lot caught him in a few steps. He got his arm around his shoulder and took some of his weight, so they slid down the balance of the slope together. The roaring steam bore down on them, searing the back of his neck where his hood dangled uselessly, while Alta pointed behind them, her mouth open as if she were screaming, though her voice was inaudible against the pounding gush of the steam.

“Into the water!” Lot shouted. He could hardly hear himself. He was half-carrying, half-dragging Urban now, riding their own momentum down the slope. Urban sensed their imminent collision with Alta and tried to pull up, but Lot wouldn’t let him. They slammed into her, knocking her into the water. The impact ripped away his grip on Urban, but did nothing to slow his forward progress. He plunged into the river, green water closing over his head and he hoped that Urban and Alta would stay down, stay under as long as they could.

T
HE RIVER WAS DEEP AND FAST
here as it chugged through the gorge. Lot bumped along the scoured bottom, staring up at an expanse of green-tinted light, streaks of foam like green clouds far overhead, the roar of the river in his ears and the high-pitched crunch of his pack against the river bottom. It held him down. He twisted free of it and rose, floating, soaring in the current, a fabric of green waving around him, carrying him in a vast, intricate flow, eddies and tiny whirlpools tracking along his sides, spinning, aligning the viscous water and giving it form, green among green, Gent beside him now, eyes like faded emeralds, blank as emeralds.

Lot wrenched away. He sought the surface, but the direction eluded him. Green everywhere. The pressure of the Communion tugged at him. It
knew
him. He felt its want as it pulled him under, fitting him into a shattered intellectual pattern that quickly coalesced in powerful order all around him, an amalgam of diffuse minds taking solid form, growing outward like frost across a dark oceanic surface, self fading. Information flow: link to link, he fed on data rising from the Well’s oceanic depths, mostly cold chem-flow, but hot currents too: UV/light/radio burst of sensory input from a planktonic cloud of tiny sentries scattered across the nebula. Pirating their data, his reach leaped wide. He could feel Null Boundary moving through dimly scattered edges, a sharp, fluted, diamond body, blazing fusion jets dumping velocity in profligate abandon, a solemn human voice in the radio spectrum
a debt owed, a debt owed
. A façade. The mindless sentries of the Well hardly cared, but
he
could feel its wrongness. Tremulous suspicions and the land torn beneath him, the sky torn overhead, alien panic obeying ancient, opaque commands, destroy information content destroy—

His shoulder struck something hard, and the pain slammed him back into his own limited awareness. His head burst above the foam. He gasped in a great gush of air; his lungs forswore collapse for a little longer.

T
HE RIVER SWEPT FREE OF THE GORGE
, and immediately slowed, its velocity spread out now across a wider track though it still moved with good speed. Trees stood on banks of mud, bending over the water, forming a lacy canopy that did not quite meet in the middle, and it was through that gap that Lot could see the great column of steam still rising, well back up the ridge.

No laser gun had caused that. The first explosion, yes, accompanied by a great crack of thunder, that could have been from the city. But something had happened after that. The Well had objected. It had writhed in a suicidal foam of self-destruction. General destruction.
Destroy information content destroy
. Insubstantial words inadequate to frame the vision he’d brushed in the Communion. There, the meaning had been far more deeply felt. He’d caught memories of other woundings. Terrible woundings, the Well responding with indiscriminate dissolution
destroy information content
willing to rend itself to dissolve the aggressor. Willing to rend anything that was not a recognized part of the Well, anywhere within the system.

The current swept Lot into the bank, where he caught the loop of an exposed tree root with fingers numbed by the cold water. He scaled the knobby wood, climbing to the top of the fragile, overhanging bank. There he collapsed between the buttressing walls of the tree’s surface roots. The river grumbled on below him, while overhead animals chittered in the canopy.

The world he could see was only a skin over layers of finer processes: first the conscious veneer of the Communion, and beneath that the unconscious deeps of the Well itself. Lying on the riverbank, he tried to discern some hint of it, but he could not.

Ord shifted on his shoulder, making him jump. “You’re still here?” he blurted in surprise.

A tentacle unfurled to pat his cheek. “Lot needs to eat. Lot needs to sleep.”

“Lot needs to find Urban and Alta,” he muttered. And across that concern there gathered another layer of anxiety as he recalled what Yulyssa had blurted during her frantic message: half of city security in open rebellion. It didn’t seem possible. He’d assumed that the election-night riot had ended within minutes after mass arrests. But if security had fallen apart . . .

Lot thought about asking Ord to contact Yulyssa. But wouldn’t authority use the signal to target him?

He needed to talk things over with Urban and Alta. Together they could figure out what to do.

He stood up, feeling a weakness in his limbs: the debt for days of deprivation. What little food he’d had was at the bottom of the river now. He pulled his hood partially up, activating the radio. “Alta,” he called. “Urban.” He waited a moment for an answer, then tried again. When he got no response, he queried the suit. “Is the radio working?”

“Equipment diagnostics green light.”

“Why can’t they hear me?”

The suit didn’t answer.

Lot crouched on the riverbank, carefully examining both shores. “Alta!” he yelled. His voice reverberated through the forest. “Urban!” He waited several seconds, listening for a response, then yelled again. He heard no answering cry. Neither could he get any trace of them through his sensory tears. But if they’d stayed in the water (he flashed on the cool green deeps, the helpless way hair and limbs would sway in an insensate current) their passage would have left no trace that he could read. He tried the radio again, then called a few more times. But he got no response beyond the mindless echo of his own voice.

His isolation weighed on him, made worse because he knew, closeby, was the Communion, and maybe he could slide beneath the visible skin of this world and reach it, pirate the Well’s oceanic currents of data and find them. If he knew how. If he dared. His heart boomed. He could drown within the Communion, as easily as he could drown in the river, his self dissolving across the links of its sensorium.

He took refuge in ignorance. He didn’t know how to peer under the skin, short of half-drowning himself. “Urban!” he yelled again. The silence hung on. So finally, he started down the river, knowing that if they were ahead of him he would pick up their trail, and if they were behind, then they were likely already dead.

CHAPTER

27

T
HE VEGETATION GREW IN LUSH, ALMOST IMPENETRABLE
thickets on the riverbank, forcing Lot away from the shore and into the forest. Under the trees the air was still and close. Scent would not disperse far. Still, Lot hunted for some sign of Alta or Urban. He used the radio. And whenever he could, he pressed a path back to the water to search and call.

Along the way he passed numerous mounds. Some were almost four feet tall and six across, but most were small, little more than knee-high. Plants didn’t grow on them, so they were easy to identify. He beat a wide berth around the first few, but as time passed, his caution faded and he drew closer, sometimes even laying his hands on their hot surfaces.

The sun was only an hour high when he stopped to rest. He chose a site by the river where a tree had recently fallen, tearing an open space in the bank. He walked out on the trunk—its diameter only slightly less than his own height—taking a seat on a thick cushion of moss. Already, the day was oppressively hot. He lay down on his belly, folded hands pillowing his head while he stared at the steadily flowing current. Green water dripped down the rounded sides of the log, pressed out of the mosses by his weight. Something screamed a loud, ugly note high in the canopy on the other side of the river. In the center of the stream, something else swam just beneath the surface, leaving a trail of V’s in its wake. He tried not to think about Urban and Alta. But not thinking left his mind curling around a central void that expanded with the passing seconds, a weighty darkness poised to fully infiltrate him.

Ord touched his cheek. “Lot needs to eat.”

The gentle voice ran in ripples through his mounting depression, a kinetic input to disturb the deadening latticework of his mood. He smiled faintly. “Hey Ord, you got anything to eat?”

“Yes, yes! Good Lot.”

He raised his head in surprise, but Ord had already dropped over the side of the log, into the calm water trapped between the fallen tree and the riverbank. Lot sat up, watching Ord’s wavering image move slowly along the bottom, apparently exploring the underside of the fallen log. Soon a tentacle snaked up the mossy surface, and Ord pulled itself up again. Its other tentacle coiled around a collection of snails. They had tawny gold shells, and looked just like the snails in the koi ponds at Vibrant Harmony.

“Safe,” Ord said, using its dexterous tentacles to pull one of the creatures out of its shell. The snail’s soft body stretched for a moment, then snapped free. Its tentacles immediately contracted, and its flesh began to foam. Ord held the specimen out to Lot. “Eat it please good Lot.”

His body greeted the proposition with a bout of nausea. “But it’s alive.”

“Smart Lot.”

“It’s an
animal
.”

“Know its name?”

It was a game Ord had played with him when he’d been nine and still unfamiliar with the Silkens’ language. He answered the query as accurately as he could. “Writhing, tormented mollusk.”

“Smart Lot. Yes. Please eat.”

His blood felt feathery, empty. Hesitantly, he took the bit of flesh out of Ord’s tentacle. It felt squishy and dreadfully soft.

He’d seen carnivorous eating in the VR, but that had been drama. He’d never thought about doing it himself, in real life, real creatures dying inside his gut. He almost retched then, the taste of acid burning in the back of his throat. “It’s an Earth species, isn’t it? From our clade?”

“Yes, Lot.”

He popped it quickly into his mouth. He couldn’t bring himself to chew it, so he just swallowed hard. He waited a moment, half-expecting to feel it wriggle inside him. He got ready to puke. But instead a sensation of warmth spread out from his stomach, soothing, dizzying. He lay back against the soggy moss, while a slight buzz rang in his ears. Ord handed him another shelled snail and this time he ate it mechanically, not sitting up. Another and another until he’d had ten. “No more,” he told Ord.

He gave his body a few minutes to settle the meal; then he got up and paced the log. Still no hint of Urban or Alta. So he moved on, telling himself that at the ocean shore, everything would be pushed out into the open.

H
E’D GONE ONLY A FEW HUNDRED YARDS
when Ord leaned down over his shoulder and announced, “A message for Lot.”

“Yeah?” He turned his head eagerly. “Is it Yulyssa?”

“
Lot?
” Her voice emerged from Ord’s mouth with an anxious edge. “Lot, are you there?”

He started. “You’re in real time?”

“Yes, Lot. Thank goodness. You’re okay?”

His hackles rose. Communication with the Well was strictly controlled. If authority wanted to target him, they’d just had their signal. Suspicion tightened across his mind. “Is Kona with you?”

Yulyssa hesitated. Weighing options? “He’s not with me.”

Something in her voice told him she was lying. Authority was always lying to him. His frustration broke through: “Kona! You hear me? Urban’s gone. He’s missing. You tried to kill us this morning. And maybe it worked. Alta’s lost too—”

“Lot.” Kona’s cool reason sliced through Lot’s dumb ado rant. “I need you to listen. The situation’s slipping out of control.”

“Never been under control,” Lot growled. “Never. We hold on and we ride.”

“Maybe. But it’s gone too far. What happened this morning, it was a mistake.”

“No shit! You boiled the back off that ridge.”

“That wasn’t us—”

“You fired on us!”

“—thority abandoned the guns! They stopped after the first barrage.”