Broken Crescent (9 page)

The alien came with a new bucket and took the old one.

Nate didn’t move from the corner. He was shivering and weak, and it felt as if his insides were melting away.

He tried to eat, but he threw up again. When he managed to pull himself up on the bucket, he had diarrhea as thin as his urine.

Not good,
Nate thought.

He couldn’t stand up to get the next meal. He dragged himself across the floor without paying much mind to what lived in the straw. He felt around for the broth, and fearing he’d vomit again, left the hard bread. He sucked the broth through his teeth leaving the solids in the bowl.

That he managed to keep down.

His time was spent mostly in semiconscious darkness. He was so weak that sometimes he didn’t reach the bucket. When the alien came and saw this, it responded by fetching more straw and shoveling away the most solid part of the mess.

He tried to play with code in his head, but the fever had scrambled the focus of his mind.

He would wake up, shouting into the blackness. . . .

“Is this what you want? @, you fucker? Why? What the hell is the point? I’m going to rot away here and not even know where the fuck I am. If you wanted something out of me, you bastard, boy, did you blow it. . . .”

“I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to do this to you. But tell those CNN bastards to back off. . . .”

“You ‘Mission Impossible’ bastards did it, I admit it. I’m Azrael, I’ll sign anything, you can all stop the act now. . . .”

“Microsoft will
always
have security holes, they have a business cycle that’s based on a two-year product turnaround no matter what shape the software’s in. If it wasn’t for folks like me, testing the holes, you think they’d even code the patches?”

“You know, I don’t think I’m going to make Thanksgiving dinner.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s not like I killed anyone . . .”

“Who the fuck else would you want running your network security?”

“Please, God, don’t let me die down here.”

When they came for him, Nate was lucid enough to know what was happening, to know how bad off he was. He was suffering from some filth-borne disease. Dysentery, cholera, or some other infection was dehydrating him. The diarrhea wouldn’t stop, and he could barely keep the broth down. He could feel his own ribs, and under a scraggly beard it felt as if his cheek-bones might slice open his face.

When the robed figures gripped his arms, it was more to hold him upright than it was to restrain him.

The walk was exhausting, but Nate didn’t have a choice, they forced him to go on. A few times Nate stumbled and nearly collapsed, but they held on, dragging his feet behind him.

They pulled him through corridors, and up stairs, until Nate could smell the sea air again. It was a shock to be suddenly reminded that there was, in fact, a world beyond the stone walls that had imprisoned him.

They took him through a plain wooden door that opened into a massive arcade. Unlike the dungeons that they’d been in up to now, this long gallery was wide, well-lit, and clean. Huge tapestries hung from the walls and light shone in from small windows set near the top of the vaulted ceiling. Statues flanked the tapestries, showing figures that were unquestionably human, and of the same breed as his captors. The tapestries carried scenes of warfare, showing cities burning and people being slaughtered. Nate saw that the battles all seemed to be between the humans and alien creatures like the one that had brought him his daily bucket.

One of the last tapestries showed a
thing
. Nate couldn’t name it, but it had the same insect-tentacle-plantlike characteristics as the defaced sculpture he had seen on the hillside what seemed like a millennium ago. It hovered over a blasted landscape, piled with smoldering bodies.

They didn’t stop to allow Nate a better look. They were headed for the massive doors at one end of the huge gallery.

They entered a great circular chamber and dragged him to a high chair set in the center of the room. He faced a tall U-shaped desk that half circled him. Ten masked figures looked down at him from behind that desk. Their masks were all equally elaborate, with shining highlights of silver, gold, ivory, and precious stones. All were different. Nate saw Scarface’s red devil mask, but he also saw a clown, a cat, some sort of bird, an abstract pattern with no nose or mouth, and a frowning face that was very realistically human.

Nate saw the box that held his clothes sitting off to the right. The padlock was gone and it was guarded by a pair of Scarface’s cronies with the red-yellow devil masks.

After setting Nate down, the pair who had carried him walked up to the desk and conferred with Scarface. Nate looked around. His skin felt flushed and his neck felt rubbery. He knew he was too weak to make a run for it, even though the doors were still open behind him.

As he watched, two of the toga-clad aliens closed the doors.

Nate looked back at the desk facing him and realized that he was the focus of attention. He called out, “What do you want? Just let me go and you’ve got it.”

No one responded. At this point he didn’t expect them to.

Another pair of cronies left Scarface’s side, taking a small box, and walked over to Nate. They set the plain-looking box down at the foot of the chair Nate sat in, almost under his feet.

One of them opened the box to reveal a metallic sphere about the size of a softball. It sat, cushioned by black velvet. Nate stared at it and realized that it was the most elaborately engraved thing he had seen here. Like the cuts in Scarface’s skin, the sphere’s engravings were repeated square rectilinear symbols. Only, in the sphere’s case, the individual characters—Nate was becoming convinced that these symbols represented a language of some sort—were vanishingly tiny, little more than a few millimeters across, wrapping the metal ball in a tight spiral.

Scarface chanted something in that liquid second language.

Everyone around the desk repeated the words, if that’s what they were.

At his feet, the sphere was vibrating. Nate could hear a high-frequency hum coming from it. The two masked characters next to him backed away.

Nate pushed himself upright and muttered, “This is getting fucking weird.”

The sphere resonated with his voice. It almost seemed to speak in the strange common language these people spoke.

Scarface said something.

With a tone rather like overstressed metal and fingernails across a blackboard, Nate heard the sphere speak.

“UNDERSTANDCOMPREHEND YOUUSME.”

Nate looked up at the masked people and whispered, “Holy shit.”

M
ATE STARED at the sphere as he heard its vibrations resonate in the guttural tones of his captors.
What a wonderful impression that’s going to make. How’s that going to translate?

Scarface barked something, and Nate could tell that he didn’t like what had come through his end of the sphere. “ANSWERRESPOND YOUUSME.”

Nate looked up. The sphere was weak in carrying tone, inflection, or emotion, but Nate had heard Scarface speak and the words out of his mouth, incomprehensible as they were, sounded terse.

“Yes, I understand you, somewhat.” Nate looked at all of them in turn. Who were these people? What was this place?

“NAMEIDENTITY TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”
Who are you?

“My name’s Nate Black. Look, I don’t have anything against you people. Can we come up with—”

“QUESTIONSREQUESTS TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME NOCANNOTBAD. QUESTIONSREQUESTS TELLCOMMUNICATE MEUSYOU YESWILLGOOD.”
We are the ones asking questions here.

Nate looked up at Scarface’s mask and felt afraid in a way that made him ashamed at the same time. “Please, just tell me what you want from me.” Nate’s voice cracked, and he felt dizzy. It was a good thing that they set him in a chair, because the effort of speaking might have made him collapse.

Nate saw the masked figures deliberating in whispered tones. He wondered if what he said made any sense to them.

Scarface’s voice was threatening even before the sphere got hold of it. When the words rang off the metal orb, they were dry-ice cold. “LIFEEXISTENCE YOUNATEBLACK HEREWORLDMANHOME VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER. DESCISIONCONTROL LIFEEXISTENCE YOUNATEBLACK MINEOURS. DECISIONCONTROL PAINDEATH YOUNATEBLACK YOUYOURS.”

Nate could tell a threat when he heard one. He also managed to glean one nugget of information, a name to call this place.

“HEREWORLDMANHOME”

Manhome.

“EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS ARRIVALENTRANCEINVA-SION YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

“I’m not an invasion. I’m not a spy. I was just minding my own business—”
running from the cops,
“—everything blacks out, and I end up here. I don’t want to do anything to you guys. I can cooperate, but I’m sick. I need medical attention.”

It was probably too much to hope for. They conferred a while, probably deciphering his compound sentences. Then Scarface yielded the floor. The new speaker had a feminine voice and wore a mask with a very human face—though it was a face frozen in the midst of screaming.

“EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS BLACKDARKNESSVOID YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME.”

Nate felt a little uneasy about the question. He didn’t want to tell anything about the alien presence in the void. Not only did he have a bad feeling about the thing, @, itself, but he had a gut sense that the folks here might react badly to it.

“I don’t remember exactly what happened.”

“EVENTSSEQUENCEPROCESS BLACKDARKNESSVOID YOUNATEBLACK TELLCOMMUNICATE YOUUSME. HIDELIEFALSIFY FACTSMEMORYHISTORY VIOLATIONFORBIDDENDANGER CAUSERESULT PAINDEATH YOUNATEBLACK.”

Well, if anything, these guys would be the last ones to accuse him of being nuts. Nate shook his head. “I’ll tell you anything you want—” Nate started coughing. His voice wasn’t up to a speech. The coughs shook his ribs until they ached. When it was over, he wiped his mouth and saw traces of blood. “But you’re killing me right now, holding me in that cesspit.” Nate shook his head. He was feeling a little light-headed and wasn’t exactly sure what he was saying. “I was a bad boy in high school, guys. Caused enough server problems to give me a nice long stretch in the Federal pen—which compares real well with this place, so if you have extradition to the United States please use it—you guys really have no idea what I’m talking about. . . .”