Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (3 page)

“In the corridor. She’ll try to stop us—”

A strange sound stirred in the far distance, a muffled roar blended of deep bass notes and high-pitched accents that set Lot’s nerves on edge.

One of the huddled women muttered, “Oh, I hate that sound.” Someone else hushed her. A baby fussed.

Alta surprised Lot with a quick hug. “Don’t worry. That’s nothing. Just the Silkens, trying to scare us.”

Lot thought she might be wrong. “I want to look.” He got to his feet and edged toward the door. Alta followed, her approval sliding coolly over his sensory tears.

In the corridor Lot saw more people—several hundred armored troopers sitting on the floor, their backpacks on. There wasn’t room to walk between them. They were silent, but their anxiety spoke loudly in the absence of words. They stared vacantly: at the walls, at their hands. Lot knew they were listening. He listened too.

The distant roar grew louder, the keening overnotes more strident. Lot could almost believe he heard Jupiter’s name in that wail. Alta nudged his elbow. “If we stay calm, we’ll be all right.”

“Something’s wrong down there.” He could taste it on the air, panic and terror like dark sparks flashing against his cheeks.

“It’s not good,” Alta admitted. “But Lot,
you
could get through. The troopers will let you pass, and I’ll take care of you. We can get there together—”

A startled voice interrupted her. “Lot, what are you doing awake?”

He looked up, recognizing the medic who’d taken him away from Jupiter. Sweat glistened on her cheeks. He could smell her quiet terror. Still, she tried for a reassuring smile. “Come back inside. You’re not well. You should be sleeping. You need to give your medical Makers time to heal you.”

“I don’t like to sleep.”

“He can’t dream,” Alta said. Lot could tell she didn’t like the medic.

The medic didn’t seem too fond of her, either. “We all have our duties, Alta Antigua, and mine is to keep the two of you safe. Come inside. We’ll be following Jupiter before too long.”

Alta caught Lot’s hand. He looked in her eyes, and knew she wanted to run. But there was no room to run in the packed corridor, and the sense drifting up from below was only growing worse.

“Let’s go inside, Alta. Just for now.”

Her anger cut sharply across his senses. He felt suddenly self-conscious. The troopers were watching them. He felt their tension climbing, a cloud of flammable emotions building over their heads. He didn’t want it to ignite. “
Please
, Alta.”

Accusation lay in her eyes. But she went with him back into the loading bay, where the medic gave them both a drink and a ration packet before taking up a protective position at the door.

Lot ate standing up, listening to the murmur from the corridor. The wailing had faded, but the fear was thicker than ever. Lot could feel it tripping through his heart. He tried hard to ignore it. “I saw your mama,” he told Alta. “She went down ahead of Jupiter.”

“I know. If I were nine years older, I could have been in the advance troops too.”

Lot remembered the flash of the incendiary grenade and felt glad that she was only eleven. But he didn’t say it out loud.

He thought about his own mother. She was a captain too, and had her own troops to look out for. “They’ll wait for us in the Well.”

“Hey.” Alta’s mood suddenly brightened. She stuffed the last of her ration packet into her mouth, then caught Lot’s hand. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

She wouldn’t say what it was, but her gaiety was infectious, so he ran with her across the loading bay’s open floor, toward a faint glow of white light. As they drew closer, he could see that the light was seeping up from a crescent-shaped pit. It lit the surface of a massive, curving wall on the pit’s opposite side. A narrow channel ran in a vertical path up the wall’s face.

Lot edged closer. A transparent shield surrounded the pit, sealing it off from floor to ceiling. He stood with his hands against the shield, looking down. Alta stood behind him, grinning.

The curved wall descended deep into the pit. Several levels below, a bright light shone against it. Lot could see a scoring, a warping of the wall’s surface there, as if it had been partially melted. Below the damaged section the wall was dark. But he could see it again farther down—much farther down—where it plunged into a glowing green crescent. Except it wasn’t a wall anymore. Distance had resolved it into an infinite silver cylinder.

“The elevator column!”

“You’re right, Lot. They’ll be waiting for us. They’ll be waiting down there.”

He stared into the pit, knowing he was looking at a two-hundred-mile drop into Deception Well.

Into the Communion
, he corrected himself, feeling a nervous tingling on the back of his neck, as if Jupiter might overhear him.

Movement caught his eye. Far below, something was sliding along the elevator column: a tiny black capsule. It burst out of shadow and into Kheth’s brilliant light as it sped down the shaft. “Alta, look!” he shouted. “There! An elevator car.” In seconds, it was lost to distance. But even before it disappeared, Lot had sighted another capsule, this one moving upward, toward the city. It vanished into shadow just as Alta craned her neck to look.

“It’s gone now, but I saw them. I saw two cars.” He sucked in a sharp breath. The army was leaving Silk. And Deception Well was waiting for them, looming like a trap, just beneath the floor.

Believe in me
, Jupiter seemed to whisper.

I do.

Alta’s mood played slick and steely against his recurring doubts. “We have to get on one of those cars,” she said.

“I know.” Yet fear resonated in his blood. It flooded the air. A thousand variations of a common emotion. Holding Alta’s hand again, he tracked the scent back to the door. The medic crouched in the entrance. She was staring down the hall, past the huddled troopers, her mouth open as she sucked in little gasps of air. Alta squeezed Lot’s hand. “I want to go
now
.”

In that moment, the keening took hold again, starting in ragged bursts, like the terrorized cries of individual voices, then rapidly gathering force. In only a few seconds it was fully orchestrated, and far louder this time than it had been before. This time, Lot was sure he heard Jupiter’s name in the ghastly chorus. This time, there was no denying that the macabre roar was a melody of human screams.

The startled troopers mounted to their feet. An anonymous woman’s voice rose over the anxious murmur. “Jupiter’s down there!”

“You’re right,” a man said. “They’re calling to him. I can hear his name.”

“They’re calling him back,” someone else cried. “He’s leaving without us. He’s leaving us behind!”

The medic stepped into the corridor. Alta pushed after her, dragging Lot along. “No, wait.” Lot tried to pull free of her grip. The air in the corridor was thick with an emotional energy poised to ignite. He didn’t want to get caught in it. This wasn’t what Jupiter had planned. “Alta, let me go!”

As if sparked by his voice, the troopers surged forward. Lot felt pressure from behind. He found himself stumbling down the sloping corridor, people shoving forward all around him. Alta held on to his hand while he struggled to keep his feet. The pace picked up. The troopers were running now, pushing to get around the bend and down, down the long corridor to the lower elevator terminus. Lot was forced to run too. Bodies pressed upon him from all sides. He felt himself lifted off his feet. He tried to scream, but there was no air in his lungs. Alta’s grip slipped. Instantly, she was swept away. Knees and elbows bumped against him. Then the floor was under his feet again, and he was struggling to stop, to go back. Someone hit him in the shoulder. He spun, slamming up against a wall. He clung to it while troopers brushed past him, the static-roar of their voices mixing maddeningly with the raw scent of their terror.

“Jupiter!” he screamed. “I’m not going with you! I’m not. I’m not.” He spun around, preparing to defend himself against anyone who would force him to go on. But the corridor was empty.

I
T TOOK A LONG TIME TO WORK UP THE COURAGE
to follow. Lot sat hunched against the wall, listening to the distant screams, afraid for Alta but too frightened to go look for her. Listening for her to come back. The lights went out, and he was left sitting in darkness.

Hours passed. The screams had long faded to silence when he found himself walking. He moved slowly, the beam of his headlamp picking out the abandoned armor, the backpacks, the bead rifles left lying on the floor. The corridor descended in a slow spiral. Bay doors stood sealed at intervals on the inside wall, their manual levers buried beneath white, scaly growths, unusable. Tunnels branched away on the opposite side. Lot peered up each one, moving his head slowly back and forth as he sought a human presence, but the only sense he got was stale. The tunnels seemed well placed to take people up to the city. Debris littered their floors, and he guessed that a lot of troopers had gone out that way. So he wasn’t the only one who’d been scared. But Alta wouldn’t have turned aside, he was sure of that. So he pressed on, determined to find her.

After several minutes he came across a cluster of three bodies. Two of the troopers were facedown, but the other—a young woman—lay on her back, her dry eyes gazing at the ceiling. After that he found bodies every few feet: mostly infants and children, but young women too, and even a few men.

None of them was Alta.

He reached the lower terminus without realizing it. The corridor came to an abrupt end at a set of bay doors that stood half-open, their runners blocked by fallen bodies. Loathsome vapors drenched the air.

It was then that the corridor lights came back on, spilling out across a loading bay crammed with corpses pressed up against one another so that most of them were still standing, their vacant, horrified eyes staring into emptiness. Across the charnel room, bodies were piled up against the transparent shield that walled off the elevator shaft, so that the sea of corpses seemed to rise on that side. There was no elevator car in the pit.

Lot told himself that Alta was not here and that Jupiter had escaped, and that Mama had gone with him, and they were waiting for him now, down below.

Believe in me.

Suddenly his amplified hearing caught the approaching buzz of a small remote unit. He jumped. Hard training moved his exhausted hands. He flicked on his suit’s camo function and grabbed his headlamp, dropping it into a pocket. Then he pulled up his hood and pressed himself against the wall just as the little remote unit buzzed around the long curve of the corridor. No bigger than the end of his thumb, the round, golden remote darted past him on beelike wings, to enter the loading bay, where it flashed back and forth across the ghastly territory. Three other remote bees quickly followed it, and shortly after, Lot could hear the soft tramp of footfalls.

A patrol of Silken troopers jogged around the curve of the corridor. There were five of them, three with bead rifles, the others holding devices Lot could not identify. He studied them surreptitiously, his eyes mostly closed so they would not give him away. The Silken troops wore beige armor, the design similar to the armor of Jupiter’s troops. Lot could see their faces beyond their helmets’ transparent visors, so apparently their tactics were overlaid on hard reality. They wore tense expressions, not quite looking at the bodies on the floor. Several civilians followed behind them, all dressed in soft coveralls.

The Silken troopers came to an abrupt halt when they caught sight of the loading bay. It must have looked worse in reality than through the images generated by the buzzing bees. Lot pressed himself against the wall, trying not to breathe. One of the troopers stepped forward. She was a big-boned woman, massive in her armor. Her gaze swept the sea of corpses, and in her aura lay a hollow structure of disappointment and disbelief. “By the Unknown God, what have we done?”

Her language was foreign. Lot understood it, though it sounded different from the version he’d learned, almost cruel, each syllable hard and coarse in a stranger’s mouth.

Most of the civilians lingered well down the hall, but one man and a woman had come forward too, threading through the knot of stunned troopers. The woman was slim and lightly built, reminding Lot of his mother in the way she carried herself. She almost brushed against him as she stepped up beside the armored trooper. One of the remote bees swept in from the bay, to hover a few feet off her shoulder. Soft anger filled her voice: “I’ll tell you what we’ve done, Clemantine. We’ve destroyed Jupiter.” She turned to the man who had come forward with her. “And didn’t we agree that would be
right
?”

“So,” Clemantine said. “We did a damn good job.”

The man frowned. He was an imposing figure: tall and strongly built like the trooper, with dark skin and sharply intelligent eyes. His black hair was fixed in a thick mass of tiny braids, one of which had been used to loosely tie the others behind his neck. He brought a strange, cool-metal taste to Lot’s sensory tears. “You know it wasn’t meant to go this way. We didn’t guess Jupiter had so many people.” He said this regretfully, as if he might have done things differently had he known. Lot wondered. He couldn’t find any taste of shame.

“We should have guessed,” Clemantine said. “Dammit, Kona, we should have seen it coming.”

Kona
. Lot silently repeated the name.
Kona
. The dark man to whom it belonged glared at the carnage.

“At least get more crews down here,” the civilian woman said as she watched the remote bees continue to hunt among the bodies. Her long black hair was loosely bound, hanging in filamentous curves against her cheeks. Earrings glistened in the shadows behind her finely sculpted jaw. She didn’t look like a frontline trooper, and Lot wondered why she was here. “We need to sort this carnage through. These people can be restored.”

Clemantine lifted off her helmet. “Yulyssa, we don’t have more crews. Security’s fully occupied with the refugees, so all dead and critically wounded are to be routed to cold storage.”