Survival (26 page)

Mac made it through five of Brymn's publications before Jabulani called them to the studio at the far end of the lab, learning little more than a respect for the Dhryn's grasp of nonlinear analysis. Trying to follow his reasoning for the dating of certain Chasm artifacts had taken her mind completely off what they were trying to do.

Standing in front of the cubicle where she was supposed to re-create the sounds of the alien, however, Mac began to wonder if she hadn't made a mistake not trying to remember the sounds beforehand. “I didn't hear speech,” she told them doubtfully.

“You can't know that,” Denise said firmly, pulling a headset over her ears. “There was a time people didn't believe orcas had local dialects.”

“Any information might help,” Trojanowski added, coming to stand beside her. “Do your best. That's all.”

Jabulani smiled confidently and waved her inside. “Easy as can be, Little Mackenzie. You give me a starting point—whatever you can recall,” he said as Mac stepped into the small soundproofed room in the back corner of the lab. “I'll echo it back. Each time I do, you tell me how to make what you hear now more like what you heard then. Ask me anything and I can do it. I am a genius,” he added with a sly wink.

She couldn't argue with him there
. Mac took the only seat, a built-in bench. Two strides in any direction and she'd bump into a padded wall. When Jabulani closed the door, it blended into wall as well. Before she could react to the closeness of the space, his rich voice filled it. “We're ready to start. Your first sound, Mackenzie.”

“Give me a minute,” she asked.

How to start?
Experimentally, she scratched her fingernails on the bench surface.
Definitely
not
that sound
. Mac tried sitting absolutely still, only to have her ears fill with the pounding of her heart, the air through her lungs. After a few seconds, she was convinced she could hear her stomach digesting the salmon sandwich.

She couldn't “hear” anything else.
“It's too quiet,” she complained, feeling foolish.

“Understood. Stand by.”

Five slow breaths later, Mac abruptly realized she could hear the ocean under the pod supports.
Tide moving through,
she judged, finding that odd for the middle of the afternoon until she caught on to the trick. “Clever,” she complimented Jabulani, who must have checked the charts for conditions that night.

“A genius, am I. Keep listening.”

The ocean faded into background, in part because Mac was so accustomed to the sound in her life that she herself tuned it out. Overlaying it came the babble of water over stone, with a touch of wind through drying leaves.
Her garden
. He even replicated the clink of her suspended salmon touching one another as they swayed in their hangers.

“Try lying down.” Trojanowski's voice. “The way you were when the sound woke you in your office.”

True, the floor space wasn't much larger than her mattress had been
. Mac laid down, then, remembering, rolled on her back. “Turn out the lights, please.”

Darkness pressed against her face. She drew it into her lungs, imagining the scents of her office. “The power was off when I woke up.”

The water and wind from her garden died away. Only the lapping of the ocean and the occasional snick of salmon to salmon remained.

Mac concentrated.
Where to start?
“Rain on a skim cover,” she suggested.

The room filled with an irregular drumming on metal and plastic.

“Softer.” It quieted. “Only from the upper left of the room—and sharper, crisper.”

Not bad,
Mac thought, listening to the result.

“Now, short little bursts, not continuous.” Jabulani obliged. “Vary the—the—” she hunted for a word and growled to herself.

“Pardon?”

“Sorry. I don't know how to describe it. It was as if the thing moved across different surfaces, so the noise changed in small segments, but very quickly.”

This time, a sequence of sounds played through. Mac shook her head, although they couldn't have seen her in the dark even if there had been a window. “Stop!”

She listened to the silence and the echo came back through her memory. “Not rain. Ice pellets. Sleet.”

The modified sound played again.
Skitter skitter.

“That's it!” Mac shouted, sitting up in the dark. “Soften the edge on the last third.”
Skitter . . . scurry!
“Yes. Yes. More of that ending sound. The other happened in between.”

She listened to
scurry . . . skitter . . . scurry
and hugged herself tightly. Like this, in the dark, it was as if the alien had somehow crawled in with her.

They wouldn't have seen it.

Mac controlled her imagination. “Okay,” she said rather breathlessly, “you've got the first sound. It made that frequently. I believe it was from its movement. Body parts or maybe feet.”

“Leave those determinations for later,” Trojanowski ordered. “Can you give Dr. Sithole direction and volume?”

They played with the sound until Mac felt dizzy, but she was reasonably sure they'd mapped it as she'd heard it that night in her room. “Sound number one done,” she said, standing up and fumbling her way to the bench.

“Ready for number two?” Trojanowski asked.

“Yes. A bit of light please,” she asked.

“Whatever you say, Little Mackenzie.”

The illumination came from the ceiling and floor—rose pink. Mac spared a moment to wonder what Denise had been thinking.

“This might be easier,” she said hopefully. “A drop of water hitting a hot pan.”

“Or it might not.” She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “A much hotter pan. Cut out the sound of the drop landing. It's what happens afterward.”

“Close. Keep the ‘spit.' Lose the ‘sizzle.' Add—add popcorn popping.”

“Popcorn?” Trojanowski's voice.

“Try this, Mackenzie.”

Now that she heard the combination again, Mac realized there had been another sound sandwiched between the louder two. Maddeningly, she could only tell something was missing, but had no idea what. “It's right as far as you have it,” she told Jabulani finally. “There should be more to it, but I can't remember.”

“No problem, Mackenzie. Locations and direction.” They mapped the sound in her office.

“One more, Dr. Connor, unless you've remembered more than three.”

Mac rubbed her neck. “Yes, I have. The first sound, the scurrying. It changed when the alien was traveling along the walkway. More of a ‘shuh' to each scurry. Not as sharp.”

Jabulani nailed it in one. Mac was relieved.

“The last sound.” She looked up. The ceiling was low enough to touch if she were standing. “It's what I heard when—” she swallowed hard. “—when it was hanging onto the pillar at the gate, right over my head. I was worried I'd lost it, so I was standing with my back against the pillar to listen. I heard what I thought was its breathing.”

“How did you feel at that moment?”

“Feel?” Trojanowski's tangential question surprised her. Mac took a moment to consider before answering. “Triumphant, I suppose. I thought I'd cornered it, could talk to it. But when I tried, it made sound number two—the spit/pop—then took off into the woods.” She shrugged to herself. “At that point, I switched back to feeling annoyed.”

“You never felt in any danger.”

“No. Why would I? It was running away from me. What are you getting at?” Mac wasn't sure she liked being cross-examined by a disembodied voice.

“I don't know. But it could matter to the interpretation of what we re-create here. Thank you. Please continue with the last sound.” His voice sharpened. “Doctors! When you're ready?”

Mac stifled a laugh, well able to imagine what was going on—not that the two couldn't restrain themselves, but they'd enjoy Trojanowski's discomfiture.

“Are you ready?

“Impress us, Genius-Man.” Mac, cross-legged on the audio lab floor, grinned up at Jabulani. He might have stripped off his raincoat and sweater, but the crowded space had been warmed by bodies and busy equipment to the point where even her shirt was sticking to her skin. The big man's well-worn khakis were drenched in sweat, but he was smiling from ear to ear. Denise played a tiny fan over the back of his neck, alternating with her own flushed face.

Trojanowski,
Mac decided, sneaking another incredulous look,
couldn't possibly be Human.
His suit and ridiculous cravat were immaculate. There wasn't a drop of moisture on his skin. It made it impossible to argue with his insistence on keeping the door closed and locked. He repaid her look with a raised eyebrow, saying: “Oh, I'm ready, too.”

“I've tweaked it so we should hear the creature as if it were here, with us.”

Mac braced herself. “Go ahead, Jabulani.”

They listened together, Mac watching Trojanowski for any reaction to the sounds filling the lab. His expression showed intense interest, nothing more.
As if he'd let his face reveal anything he didn't want it to,
Mac reminded herself.

The final sound. The
thrumming
. Mac's hands tightened around her knees in frustration. “I was so close,” she said.

“Too close,” Trojanowski commented grimly. “Move the sound files to my imp, please, Dr. Sithole. Thank you for your work.”

Mac stirred herself. “Denise, erase any copies or records. This never happened, okay?”

“I'll do no such—”

Jabulani cupped Denise's angry face in his big hands and kissed her lightly on the nose, but there was nothing light in his voice. “Yes, you will, Sweet Thing. For all our sakes. Trust me.”

Denise pulled away and began smacking switches to power down the lab, muttering something that sounded like
“same old government covercrap.”
Mac pretended not to hear as she got to her feet and stretched.

Trojanowski studiously ignored the agitated audio researcher as well, getting the files from Jabulani and pocketing his imp. “Time to go,” he announced briskly. “Thank you again, Dr. Pillsworthy.”

Before Denise could utter whatever was about to spill from her thinned lips, Mac interjected: “This could help us find Em.”

Denise's fingers fussed at the nubs of her implants. “Not arguing with that, Mac,” she said grudgingly, then scowled at Jabulani. “It's erasing records I don't countenance and you know it, Jabby.”

“Of course I do, but sometimes it's necessary to protect those—”

Trojanowski went to the door and unlocked it, as if to avoid further argument. Mac, drawn by the rush of cool, ocean-scented air as the door opened, followed close behind. She was almost through the doorway to the platform when his hand shot back to hold her in place. “Shhh.”

Mac knew better than to ask. Instead, she strained her every sense to catch what had alarmed him.

The platform was empty except for themselves.
Amazing,
Mac told herself, as the hairs on her neck rose,
how between one breath and the next, a place you knew as home could feel like a trap.
She could barely see over the rail to the stairway and down, but the activity below seemed normal enough, a reassuring cacophony of footsteps, equipment, and voices rising to where they stood. Mac lifted her gaze along the wall's curve. The next platforms were behind this one, out of her sight.

Meanwhile, Trojanowski was turning his head, so slowly and smoothly that Mac hadn't caught the movement until she glanced back at him, turning it so he could look toward her . . .

No
, she thought, her heart pounding in her ears,
so he could look
above
her
.

A low, regular,
familiar
thrumming, from overhead and behind. Mac held her breath as Trojanowski completed his movement, his eyes tracking upward. She'd have taken more comfort from his calm expression, if his face hadn't been deathly pale.

His eyes lowered to hers; in the platform's lighting they seemed dark pits behind their lenses.
Back inside,
he mouthed.

She'd been wrong, he hadn't stopped moving for an instant. His shoulders were almost perpendicular to her now and she could see one of his hands pulling something out of his suit coat.

Mac eased her weight to the foot still inside the doorframe. It flashed through her mind to argue that they had a chance to capture it, to demand answers—as quickly, she remembered the two unknowing people behind her in the audio lab, and the dozens working below on the ring, and hoped Nikolai Trojanowski was as good with his weapon as he was at secrets.