Monster Planet(99)

Sarah picked one of these relics for point and handed him a machete. He wasted no time but moved steadily into the trees surrounding the landing zone, his arm flashing back and forth like a pendulum, his blade clearing out undergrowth, chopping through tree roots, splattering his bandages with thrown tree sap. The others clustered up tight behind him with Sarah and Ptolemy taking the rear. It was hard work keeping up with him. They were on the side of a mountain, a rugged side that had never been developed, which might never have been touched before by human hands. Sarah's gloves tore and snagged every time she reached for a tree root to haul herself up and her boots skidded on the precariously-balanced talus of the slope. She started to sweat, even though the snow all around her reflected a cold sunlight that made her face sting. Her nose began to run and she was instantly miserable with having to snort up the snot or wipe it away with her sleeve every ten seconds. She tried to just let it run but that was excruciating'every nerve ending in her face was red and raw with the mountain air.

She needed to think. She needed to plan her next move. Yet all she wanted, all her body strained to do was go back, back to the helicopter. She had so much more to say to her father. Most of it vicious. She couldn't do that, though, not now. She had committed to violent action and she had to stay in the moment, stay on the path. It was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do.

In time'she could not have said how long it had been and in fact she wasn't wearing a watch, but it was still daylight'she reached up and found a piece of stable rock and pulled and dragged and cursed her way up until she was doubled over the top of a ridgeline, her legs on one side and her face on the other. She looked up and saw the mummies standing on the rocks like mountain goats or Sherpas or something else that can climb mountains really well. Between oxygen deprivation and sheer exhaustion she lacked the strength to curse them.

When she had stopped wheezing and was merely panting, when she had wiped the sweat out of her hair and shaken most of the pine needles out of her clothes she saw that Ptolemy was pointing at something. She followed his linen-wrapped finger and nodded. The Source was beneath them, now, down in the hollow of a valley below. She blinked her eyes. Her arcane vision was almost dominant so close to the energy supply'it was hard to see things in normal, visible light.

When her eyes did clear she found herself looking down into a modest bowl in the side of the mountain, a semi-circular valley about a hundred and fifty feet straight down the slope. There were a couple of buildings and some sculptures, their forms half-erased by wind and snow. The valley itself was full of human bones.





Monster Planet





Chapter Eleven


Fire erupted all around her. It touched the trees and filled the air with the stink of burning pitch, it ran in liquid waves over the snow and left smoldering ground behind. Ayaan dropped to her knees with her arms over her head as a second explosion tore into the roadway, a third, fire everywhere and the noise, a fourth, the noise was hammering at her, the air was jumping with it she could see pine needles leaping up off the ground as if the entire planet had been picked up and given a good shake.

She rolled onto her back and slid down into a hollow, into a little space of snow where a boulder had sunk into the earth. She reached out her hands and pulled Nilla in after her. Nilla started to speak but Ayaan shook her head no. She peered up, around the side of the boulder, and saw a helicopter hanging there in the air, close enough to touch, no, that was just her poor depth perception, the inability of her dead eyes to focus properly. The helicopter stood in the air over the flatbed, white and orange, and mummies leaned out of its crew hatch, mummies in the name of the Prophet mummies'did they want revenge? Did they seek revenge for the forty-nine mummies she had killed on Cyprus, she wondered?'and then there were more explosions, brilliant flowers spreading overhead, fire, and smoke.

Her brain rattled in her skull like an animal trying to get loose. She pulled her arms in close to her body, brought her chin down. Made herself small. Nilla's dress was stained, ruined, and they were both soaked in snow melt and splattered with cinders, some of them still on fire. Ayaan brushed at the embers on her jacket, ran her fingers through her hair to shake them loose. The helicopter just hung there in the air. Rifles started firing back from the ground, living cultists with rifles shooting at the helicopter but its pilot knew enough to stay out of range. Where were the machine guns? She had inspected the .50 caliber machine guns on the flatbed herself, had stripped and cleaned them on the long trek when she had been glad for anything to do, anything to break the boredom. Where were they, why weren't they firing back? They had plenty of range.