The Descent

'Pram?' Santos called into the darkness ahead. 'Asalamu alaikum.' Thomas knew the greeting. Peace unto you. But there was no reply.

'Pram is an armed guard I hired to watch over the site,' de l'Orme explained. 'He was a famous guerrilla once. As you might imagine, he's rather old. And probably drunk.'

'Odd,' Santos whispered. 'Stay here.' He moved up the path and out of sight.

'Why all the drama?' commented Thomas.

'Santos? He means well. He wanted to make a good impression on you. But you make him nervous. He has nothing left tonight but his bravado, I'm sorry to say.'

De l'Orme set one hand upon Thomas's forearm. 'Shall we?' They continued their promenade. There was no getting lost. The path lay before them like a ghost serpent. The festooned 'mountain' of Bordubur towered to their north.

'Where do you go from here?' Thomas asked.

'Sumatra. I've found an island, Nias. They say it is the place Sinbad the Sailor met the Old Man of the Sea. I'm happy among the aborigines, and Santos stays occupied with some fourth-century ruins he located among the jungle.'

'And the cancer?'

De l'Orme didn't even make one of his jokes.

Santos came running down the trail with an old Japanese carbine in one hand. He was covered in mud and out of breath. 'Gone,' he announced. 'And he left our gun in a pile of dirt. But first he shot off all the bullets.'

'Off to celebrate with his grandchildren would be my guess,' de l'Orme said.

'I'm not so sure.'

'Don't tell me tigers got him?'

Santos lowered the barrel. 'Of course not.'

'If it will make you feel more secure, reload,' said de l'Orme.

'We have no more bullets.'

'Then we're that much safer. Now let's continue.'

Near the Kali mouth at the base of the monument, they veered right off the path, passing a small lean-to made of banana leaves, where old Pram must have taken his naps.

'You see?' Santos said. The mud was torn as if in a struggle.

Thomas spied the dig site. It looked more like a mud fight. There was a hole sunk

into the jungle floor, and a big pile of dirt and roots. To one side lay the stone plates, as large as manhole covers, that de l'Orme had referred to.

'What a mess,' said Thomas. 'You've been fighting the jungle itself here.'

'In fact I'll be glad to be done with it,' Santos said.

'Is the frieze down there?'

'Ten meters deep.'

'May I?'

'Certainly.'

Thomas gripped the bamboo ladder and carefully let himself down. The rungs were slick and his soles were made for streets, not climbing. 'Be careful,' de l'Orme called down to him.

'There, I'm down.'

Thomas looked up. It was like peering out of a deep grave. Mud was oozing between the bamboo flooring, and the back wall – saturated with rainwater – bulged against its bamboo shoring. The place looked ready to collapse upon itself.

De l'Orme was next. Years spent clambering around dig scaffolding made this second nature. His slight bulk scarcely jostled the handmade ladder.

'You still move like a monkey,' Thomas complained.

'Gravity.' De l'Orme grinned. 'Wait until you see me struggle to get back up.' He cocked his head back. 'All right, then,' he called to Santos. 'All clear on the ladder. You may join us.'

'In a moment. I want to look around.'

'So what do you think?' de l'Orme asked Thomas, unaware that Thomas was standing in darkness. Thomas had been waiting for the more powerful torch that Santos had. Now he took out his pocket light and turned it on.

The column was of thick igneous rock, and extraordinarily free of the usual jungle ravaging. 'Clean, very clean,' he said. 'The preservation reminds me of a desert environment.'

'Sans peur et sans reproche,' de l'Orme said. Without fear and without reproach.

'It's perfect.'

Thomas appraised it professionally, the material before the subject. He moved the light to the edge of a carving: the detailing was fresh and uncorroded. This original architecture must have been buried deep, and within a century of its creation.

De l'Orme reached out one hand and laid his fingertips upon the carving to orient himself. He had memorized the entire surface by touch, and now began searching for something. Thomas walked his light behind the thin fingers.

'Excuse me, Richard,' de l'Orme spoke to the stone, and now Thomas saw a monstrosity, perhaps four inches high, holding up its own bowels in offering. Blood was spilling upon the ground, and a flower sprang from the earth.

'Richard?'

'Oh, I have names for all my children,' de l'Orme said.

Richard became one of many such creatures. The column was so densely crowded with deformity and torment that an unsophisticated eye would have had trouble separating one from the other.

'Suzanne, here, she's lost her children.' De l'Orme introduced a female dangling an infant in each hand. 'And these three gentlemen, the Musketeers I call them.' He pointed at a gruesome trio cannibalizing one another. 'All for one, one for all.'

It went much deeper than perversion. Every manner of suffering showed here. The creatures were bipedal and had opposing thumbs and, here and there, wore animal skins or horns. Otherwise they could have been baboons.

'Your hunch may be right,' de l'Orme said. 'At first I thought these creatures were either depictions of mutation or birth defects. But now I wonder if they are not a window upon hominids now extinct.'

'Could it be a display of psychosexual imagination?' Thomas asked. 'Perhaps the nightmare of that face you mentioned?'

'One almost wishes it were so,' de l'Orme said. 'But I think not. Let us suppose our master sculptor here somehow tapped into his subconscious. That might inform some of these figures. But this isn't the work of a single hand. It would have taken an entire school of artisans generations to carve this and other columns. Other sculptors would have added their own realities or even their own subconscious. There should be scenes of farming or hunting or court life or the gods, don't you think? But all we have here is a picture of the damned.'

'But surely you don't think it's a picture of reality.'

'In fact I do. It's all too realistic and unredemptive not to be reality.' De l'Orme found a place near the center of the stone. 'And then there's the face itself,' he said.

'It's not sleeping or dreaming or meditating. It's wide awake.'

'Yes, the face,' Thomas encouraged.

'See for yourself.' With a flourish, de l'Orme placed the flat of his hand on the center of the column at head level.

But even as his palm lighted upon the stone, de l'Orme's expression changed. He looked imbalanced, like a man who had leaned too far forward.

'What is it?' asked Thomas.

De l'Orme lifted his hand, and there was nothing beneath it. 'How can this be?' he cried.

'What?' said Thomas.

'The face. This is it. Where it was. Someone's destroyed the face!'

At de l'Orme's fingertip, there was a crude circle gouged into the carvings. At the edges, one could still make out some carved hair and beneath that a neck. 'This was the face?' Thomas asked.

'Someone's vandalized it.'

Thomas scanned the surrounding carvings. 'And left the rest untouched. But why?'

'This is abominable,' howled de l'Orme. 'And us without any record of the image. How could this happen? Santos was here all day yesterday. And Pram was on duty until... until he abandoned his post, curse him.'

'Could it have been Pram?'

'Pram? Why?'

'Who else even knows of this?'

'That's the question.'

'Bernard,' said Thomas. 'This is very serious. It's almost as if someone were trying to keep the face from my view.'

The notion jolted de l'Orme. 'Oh, that's too much. Why would anyone destroy an artifact simply to –'

'My Church sees through my eyes,' Thomas said. 'And now they'll never see what there was to see here.'

As if distracted, de l'Orme brought his nose to the stone. 'The defacing is no more than a few hours old,' he announced. 'You can still smell the fresh rock.'

Thomas studied the mark. 'Curious. There are no chisel marks. In fact, these furrows look more like the marks of animal claws.'

'Absurd. What kind of animal would do this?'

'I agree. It must have been a knife used to tear it away. Or an awl.'

'This is a crime,' de l'Orme seethed.

From high above, a light fell upon the two old men deep in the pit. 'You're still down there,' said Santos.

Thomas held his hand up to shade the beam from his eyes. Santos kept his light trained directly upon them. Thomas felt strangely trapped and vulnerable. Challenged. It made him angry, the man's disrespect. De l'Orme, of course, had no

inkling of the silent provocation. 'What are you doing?' Thomas demanded.

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'While you go wandering about, we've made a terrible discovery.'

Santos moved his light. 'I heard noises and thought it might be Pram.'

'Forget Pram. The dig's been sabotaged, the face mutilated.'

Santos descended in powerful, looping steps. The ladder shook under his weight. Thomas stepped to the rear of the pit to make room.

'Thieves,' shouted Santos. 'Temple thieves. The black market.'

'Control yourself,' de l'Orme said. 'This has nothing to do with theft.'

'Oh, I knew we shouldn't trust Pram,' Santos raged.

'It wasn't Pram,' Thomas said.

'No? How do you know that?'

Thomas was shining his light into a corner behind the column. 'I'm presuming, mind you. It could be someone else. Hard to recognize who this is. And of course I've never met the man.'

Santos surged into the corner and stabbed his light into the crack and upon the remains. 'Pram.' He gagged, then was sick into the mud.

It looked like an industrial accident involving heavy machinery. The body had been rammed into a six-inch-wide crevice between one column and another. The dynamic force necessary to break the bones and squeeze the skull and pack all the flesh and meat and clothing into that narrow space was beyond comprehension.

Thomas made the sign of the cross.

We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth.

– HOMER, The Odyssey

5

BREAKING NEWS

Fort Riley, Kansas

1999

On these wide plains, seared in summer, harrowed by December winds, they had conceived Elias Branch as a warrior. To here he was returned, dead yet not dead, a riddle. Locked from sight, the man in Ward G turned to legend.

Seasons turned. Christmas came. Two-hundred-pound Rangers at the officers' club toasted the major's unearthly tenacity. The hammer of God, that man. One of us. Word of his wild story leaked out: cannibals with breasts. No one believed it, of course. One midnight, Branch climbed from bed by himself. There were no mirrors. Next

morning they knew he'd been looking by the bloody footprints, knew what he'd seen through the mesh grille covering his window: virgin snow.

Cottonwoods came to green glory. School hit summer. Ten-year-old Army brats racing past the hospital on their way to fish and swim pointed at the razor wire surrounding Ward G. They had their horror tale exactly backward: in fact, the medical staff was trying to unmake a monster.

There was nothing to be done about Branch's disfigurement. The artificial skin had saved his life, not his looks. There was so much tissue damage that when it healed, even he could not find the shrapnel wounds for all the burn scars. Even his own body had trouble understanding the regeneration.

His bones healed so quickly the doctors did not have the chance to straighten them. Scar tissue colonized his burns with such speed that sutures and plastic tubing were integrated into his new flesh. Pieces of rocket metal fused into his organs and skeleton. His entire body was a shell of cicatrix.

Branch's survival, then his metamorphosis, confounded them. They openly talked about his changes in front of him, as if he were a lab experiment gone awry. His cellular 'bounce' resembled cancer in certain respects, though that did not explain the thickening of joints, the new muscle mass, the mottling in his skin pigment, the small, calcium-rich ridges ribbing his fingernails. Calcium growths knobbed his skull. His circadian rhythms had tripped out of synch. His heart was enlarged. He was carrying twice the normal number of red blood cells.

Sunlight – even moonbeams – were an agony to him. His eyes had developed tapetum, a reflective surface that magnified low light. Until now, science had known only one higher primate that was nocturnal, the aotus, or night monkey. His night vision neared triple the aotus norm.

His strength-to-weight ratio soared to twice an ordinary man's. He had double the endurance of recruits half his age, sensory skills that wouldn't quit, and the VO2 max of a cheetah. Something had turned him into their long-sought super soldier.

The med wonks tried blaming it all on a combination of steroids or adulterated drugs or congenital defects. Someone raised the possibility that his mutations might be the residual effect of nerve agents encountered during past wars. One even accused him of autosuggestion.

In a sense, because he was a witness to unholy evidence, he had become the enemy. Because he was inexplicable, he was the threat from within. It was not just their need for orthodoxy. Ever since that night in the Bosnian woods, Branch had become their chaos.

Psychiatrists went to work on him. They scoffed at his tale of terrible furies with women's breasts rising up among the Bosnian dead, explaining patiently that he had suffered gross psychic trauma from the rocketing. One termed his story a 'coalition fantasy' of childhood nuclear nightmares and sci-fi movies and all the killing he had directly seen or taken part in, a sort of all-American wet dream. Another pointed at similar stories of 'wild people' in the forest legends of medieval Europe, and suggested that Branch was plagiarizing myth.

At last he realized they simply wanted him to recant. Branch pleasantly conceded. Yes, he said, it was just a bad fantasy. A state of mind. Zulu Four never happened. But they didn't believe his retraction.

Not everyone was so dedicated to studying his aberrations. An unruly physician named Clifford insisted that healing came first. Against the researchers' wishes, he tried flushing Branch's system with oxygen, and irradiated him with ultraviolet light. At last Branch's metamorphosis eased. His metabolism and strength tapered to human levels. The calcium outgrowths on his head atrophied. His senses reverted to normal. He could see in sunshine. To be sure, Branch was still monstrous. There was little they could do about his burn scars and nightmares. But he was better.

One morning, eleven months after arriving, ill with daylight and the open air, Branch was told to pack up. He was leaving. They would have discharged him, but the Army didn't like freaks with combat medals bumming around the streets of America. Posting him back to Bosnia, they at least knew where to find him.

Bosnia was changed. Branch's unit was long gone. Camp Molly was a memory on a hilltop. Down at Eagle Base near Tuzla, they didn't know what to do with a helicopter pilot who couldn't fly anymore, so they gave Branch some foot soldiers and essentially told him to go find himself. Self-discovery in camouflage: there were worse fates. With the carte blanche of an exile, he headed back to Zulu Four with his platoon of happy-go-lucky gunners.

They were kids who'd given up shredding or grunge or the 'hood or Net surfing. Not one had seen combat. When word went out that Branch was going armed into the earth, these eight clamored to go. Action at last.

Zulu Four had returned to as much normalcy as a massacre site could. The gases had cleared. The mass grave had been bulldozed flat. A concrete marker with an Islamic crescent and star marked the site. You had to look hard to still find pieces of Branch's gunship.

The walls and gullies around the site were cored with coal mines. Branch picked one at random and they followed him in. In later histories, their spontaneous exploration would become known as the first probe by a national military. It marked the beginning of what came to be called the Descent.

They had come as prepared as one did in those early days, with handheld flashlights and a single coil of rope. Following a coal miner's footpath, they walked upright – safeties off – through neat tunnels trimmed with wood pillars and roof supports. In the third hour they came to a rupture in the walls. From the rock debris spilled onto the floor, it seemed someone had carved his way out from the rock.

Following a hunch, Branch led them into this secondary tunnel. Beyond all reckoning, the network went deeper. No miner had mined this. The passage was raw but ancient, a natural fissure winding down. Occasionally the way had been improved: narrow sections had been clawed wider, unstable ceilings had been buttressed with stacked rock. There was a Roman quality to some of the stonework, crude keystones in some of the arches. In other places the drip of mineral water had created limestone bars from top to bottom.

An hour deeper, the GIs began to find bones where body parts had been dragged in. Bits and pieces of cheap jewelry and cheaper Eastern European wristwatches lay on the trail. The grave robbers had been sloppy and hurried. The ghoulish litter reminded Branch of a kid's Halloween bag with a rip in it.

They went on, flashing their lights at side galleries, grumbling about the dangers. Branch told them to go back, but they stuck with him. In deeper tunnels they found still deeper tunnels. At the bottom of those, they found yet more tunnels.

They had no idea how deep it was before they quit descending. It felt like the belly of the whale.

They did not know the history of man's meanderings underground, the lore of his tentative exploration. They hadn't entered this Bosnian maw for love of caving. These were normal enough men in normal enough times, none obsessed with climbing the highest mountain or soloing an ocean. Not one saw himself as a Columbus or a Balboa or a Magellan or a Cook or a Galileo, discovering new lands, new pathways, a new planet. They didn't mean to go where they went. And yet they opened this hadal door. After two days in the strange winding corridor, Branch's platoon reached its limit. They grew afraid. For where the tunnels forked for the hundredth time and plunged still lower, they came upon a footprint. And it was not exactly human. Someone took a Polaroid photo and then they di-di maued it back to the surface.

The footprint in that GI's Polaroid photo entered the special state of paranoia

usually reserved for nuclear accidents and other military slips. It was designated a Black Op. The National Security Council convened. The next morning, NATO commanders met near Brussels. In top secrecy, the armed forces of ten countries poised to explore the rest of Branch's nightmare.

Branch stood before the council of generals. 'I don't know what they were,' he said, once more describing his night of the crash in Bosnia. 'But they were feeding on the dead, and they were not like us.'

The generals passed around the photo of that animal track. It showed a bare foot, wide and flat, with the big toe separate, like a thumb. 'Are those horns growing on your head, Major?' one asked.

'The doctors call them osteophytes.' Branch fingered his skull. He could have been the bastard child of an accidental mating between species. 'They started coming back when we went down.'

There was, the generals finally accepted, more to this than just a coal hole in the Balkans. Suddenly, Branch found himself being treated not like damaged goods, but like an accidental prophet. He was magically restored to his command and given free rein to go wherever his senses led him. His eight troops became eight hundred. Soon other armies joined in. The eight hundred became eighty thousand, then more. Beginning with the coal mines at Zulu Four, NATO recon patrols went deeper and wider and began to piece together a whole network of tunnels thousands of meters below Europe. Every path connected another, however intricately. Enter Italy and you might exit in Slovakia or Spain or Macedonia or southern France. But there was no mistaking a more central direction to the system. The caves and pathways and sinkholes all led down.

Secrecy remained tight. There were injuries, to be sure, and a few fatalities. But the casualties were all caused by roofs collapsing or ropes breaking or soldiers tripping into holes: occupational hazards and human error. Every learning curve has its price. The secret held, even after a civilian cave diver by the name of Harrigan penetrated a limestone sinkhole called Jacob's Well in south Texas, which supposedly transected the Edwards Aquifer. He claimed to have found a series of feeder passages at a depth of minus five thousand feet, which went deeper still. Further, he swore the walls contained paintings by Mayan or Aztec hands. A mile deep! The media picked it up, checked around, and promptly cast it aside as either a hoax or narcosis. A day after the Texan was made a fool in public, he disappeared. Locals reckoned the embarrassment had been too much for him. In fact, Harrigan had just been shanghaied by the SEALs, handed a juicy consultant's fee, sworn to national secrecy, and put to work unraveling sub-America.

The hunt was on. Once the psychological barrier of 'minus-five' was broken – that magical five-thousand-foot level that intimidated cavers the way eight thousand meters once did Himalayan mountaineers – the progress plunged quickly. One of Branch's long-range patrols of Army Rangers hit minus-seven within a week after Harrigan went public. By month five, the military penetration had logged a harrowing minus-fifteen. The underworld was ubiquitous and surprisingly accessible. Every continent harbored systems. Every city.

The armies fanned deeper, acquiring a vast and complex sub-geography beneath the iron mines of West Cumberland in South Wales and the Holloch in Switzerland and Epos Chasm in Greece and the Picos Mountains in Basque country and the coal pits in Kentucky and the cenotes of Yucatàn and the diamond mines in South Africa and dozens of other places. The northern hemisphere was exceptionally rich in limestone, which fused at lower levels into warm marble and beerstone and eventually, much deeper, into basalt. This bedrock was so heavy it underlay the entire surface world. Because man had rarely burrowed into it – a few exploratory probes for petroleum and the long-abandoned Moho project – geologists had always assumed that basalt

was a solid compressed mass. What man now found was a planetary labyrinth. Geological capillaries stretched for thousands of miles. It was rumored they might even reach out beneath the oceans.

Nine months passed. Every day the armies pushed their collective knowledge a little further, a little deeper. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Seabees saw their budgets soar. They were tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots – three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves. Tanks and Humvees and deuce-and-a-half trucks pouring ordnance, troops, and supplies into the inner earth.

By the hundreds, international patrols descended into the earth's recesses for more than half a year. Boot camps shifted their theater training. Jarheads sat through films from the United Mine Workers about basic techniques for shoring walls and maintaining a carbide lamp. Drill instructors began taking recruits to the rifle ranges at midnight for point-and-fire practice and blindfolded rappels. Physician assistants and medics learned about Weill's disease and histoplasmosis, fungal infections of the lungs contracted from bat guano, and Mulu foot, a tropical cave disease. None were told what practical use any of this had. Then one day they would find themselves shipped into the womb.

Every week the mass of 3-D, four-color worm lines expanded laterally and vertically beneath their maps of Europe and Asia and the United States. Junior officers took to comparing the adventure to Dungeons and Dragons without, exactly, the dragons or dungeons. Wrinkled noncoms couldn't believe their luck: Vietnam without the Vietnamese. The enemy was turning out to be a figment of one very disfigured major's imagination. No one but Branch could claim to have seen demons with fish-white skin.

Not that there weren't 'enemies.' The signs of habitation were intriguing, sometimes gruesome. At those depths, tracks suggested a surprising spectrum of species, everything from centipedes and fish to a human-sized biped. One leathery wing fragment stirred images of subterannean flight, temporarily reviving Saint Jerome's visions of batlike dark angels.

In the absence of an actual specimen, scientists had named the enemy Homo hadalis, though they were the first to admit they didn't know if it was even hominid. The secular term became hadal, rhyming with cradle. Middens indicated that these ape creatures were communal, if seminomadic. A picture of harsh, grinding, sunless subsistence emerged. It made the brute life of human peasantry look charming by comparison.

But whoever lived down here – and the evidence of primitive occupation at the deeper levels was undeniable – had been scared off. They encountered no resistance. No contact. No live sightings. Just lots of caveman souvenirs: knapped flint points, carved animal bones, cave paintings, and piles of trinkets stolen from the surface: broken pencils, empty Coke cans and beer bottles, dead spark plugs, coins, lightbulbs. Their cowardice was officially excused as an aversion to light. Troops couldn't wait to engage them.

The military occupation went deeper and wider in breathless secrecy. Intelligence agencies triumphed in embargoing soldiers' mail home, confining units to base, and derailing the media.

The military exploration entered its tenth month. It seemed that the new world was empty after all, and that the nation-states had only to settle into their basements, catalog their holdings, and fine-tune new sub-borders. The conquest became a downright promenade. Branch kept urging caution. But soldiers quit carrying their weapons. Patrols resembled picnics or arrowhead hunts. There were a few broken bones, a few bat bites. Every now and then a ceiling collapsed or someone drove off an

abyssal roadway. Overall, however, safety stats were actually better than normal. Keep your guard up, Branch preached to his Rangers. But he had begun to sound like a nag, even to himself.

The hammer dropped. Beginning on November 24, 1999, soldiers throughout the subplanet did not return to their cave camps. Search parties were sent down. Few came out. Carefully laid communications lines went dead. Tunnels collapsed.

It was as if the entire subplanet had flushed the toilet. From Norway to Bolivia, from Australia to Labrador, from wilderness bases to within thirty feet of sunshine, armies vanished. Later it would be called a decimation, which means the death of one in ten. What happened on November 24 was its opposite. Fewer than one of every ten would survive.

It was the oldest trick in the history of warfare. You lull your enemy. You draw him in. You cut off his head. Literally.

A tunnel at minus-six in sub-Poland was found with the skulls of three thousand Russian, German, and British NATO troops. Eight teams of LRRPs and Navy SEALs were found crucified in a cavern nine thousand feet beneath Crete. They had been captured alive at scattered sites, herded together, and tortured to death.

Random slaughter was one thing. This was something else. Clearly a larger intelligence was at work. System-wide, the acts were planned and executed upon a single clockwork command. Someone – or some group – had orchestrated a magnificent slaughter over a twenty-thousand-square-mile region.

It was as if a race of aliens had just breached upon man's shores.

Branch lived, but only because he was laid up with a recurring malarial fever. While his troops forged deeper below the surface, he lay in an infirmary, packed in ice bags and hallucinating. He thought it was his delirium speaking as CNN broke the terrible news.

Half raving, Branch watched his President address the nation in prime time on December 2. No makeup tonight. He had been weeping. 'My fellow Americans,' he announced. 'It is my painful duty...' In somber tones the patriarch enunciated the American military losses incurred over the past week: in all, 29,543 missing. The worst was feared. In the course of three terrible days, the United States had just suffered half as many American dead as the entire Vietnam War total. He avoided all mention of the global military toll, an unbelievable quarter of a million soldiers. He paused. He cleared his throat uncomfortably, shuffled papers, then pushed them aside.

'Hell exists.' He lifted his chin. 'It is real. A geological, historical place beneath our very feet. And it is inhabited. Savagely.' His lips thinned. 'Savagely,' he repeated, and for a moment you could see his great anger.

'For the last year, in consultation and alliance with other nations, the United States has initiated a systematic reconnaisance of the edges of this vast subterranean territory. At my command, 43,000 American military personnel were committed to searching this place. Our probe into this frontier revealed that it is inhabited by unknown life-forms. There is nothing supernatural about it. Over the next days and weeks you will probably be asking how it is that if there are beings down there, we have never seen them before now. The answer is this: we have seen them. From the beginning of human time, we have suspected their presence among us. We have feared them, written poems about them, built religions against them. Until very recently, we did not know how much we really knew. Now we are learning how much we don't know. Until several days ago, it was assumed these creatures were either extinct or had retreated from our military advance. We know differently now.'

The President stopped talking. The cameraman started back for the fade-out. Suddenly he began again. 'Make no mistake,' he said. 'We will seize this dark empire.

We will beat this ancient enemy. We will loose our terrible swift sword upon the forces of darkness. And we will prevail. In the name of God and freedom, we will.'

The picture immediately switched to the Press Room downstairs. The White House spokesman and a Pentagon bull stood before the roomful of stunned journalists. Even in his fever, Branch recognized General Sandwell, four stars and a barrel chest. Son of a bitch, he muttered at the TV.

A woman from the LA Times stood, shaken. 'We're at war?'

'There has been no declaration of war,' the spokesman said.

'War with hell?' the Miami Herald asked.

'Not war.'

'But hell?'

'An upper lithospheric environment. An abyssal region riddled with holes.'

General Sandwell shouldered the spokesman aside. 'Forget what you think you know,' he told them. 'It's just a place. But without light. Without a sky. Without a moon. Time is different down there.' Sandy always had been a showboat, thought Branch.

'Have you sent reinforcements down?'

'For now, we are in a wait-and-see mode. No one goes down.'

'Are we about to be invaded, General?'

'Negative.' He was firm. 'Every entrance is secured.'

'But creatures, General?' The New York Times reporter seemed affronted. 'Are we talking about devils with pitchforks and pincers? Do the enemy have hooves and horns on their heads and tails, and fly on wings? How would you describe these monsters, sir?'

'That's classified,' Sandwell spoke into the mike. But he was pleased with the

'monsters' remark. Already the media was demonizing the enemy. 'Last question?'

'Do you believe in Satan, General?'

'I believe in winning.' The general pushed the mike away. He strode from the room. Branch slid in and out of fever dreams. A kid with a broken leg in the next bed channel-surfed endlessly. All night, every time Branch opened his eyes, the TV showed a different state of surreality. Day came. Local news anchors had been prepped. They knew to keep the hysteria out of their voices, to stick with the script. We have very little information at this time. Please stay tuned for further information. Please remain calm. An unbroken stream of text played across the bottom of the TV screen listing churches and synagogues open to the public. A government Web page was set up to advise families of the missing soldiers. The stock market plunged. There was an unholy mix of grief and terror and grim exuberance. Survivors began trickling upward. Suddenly the military hospitals were taking in bloodied soldiers raving childishly about beasts, vampires, ghouls, gargoyles. Lacking a vocabulary for the dark monstrosity below, they tapped into the Bible legends, horror novels, and childhood fantasies. Chinese soldiers saw dragons and Buddhist demons. Kids from Arkansas saw Beelzebub and Alien.

Gravity won out over human ritual. In the days following the great decimation, there was simply no way to transport all the bodies up to the surface just so they could be lowered six feet back into the ground. There wasn't even time to dig mass graves in the cave floors. Instead, bodies were piled into side tunnels and sealed away with plastic explosives and the armies retreated. The few funeral services with an actual body featured closed caskets, screwed shut beneath the Stars and Stripes: NOT TO BE VIEWED.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was put in charge of civil defense education. Lacking any real information about the threat, FEMA dusted off its antiquated literature from the seventies about what to do in case of nuclear attack, and handed it out to governors, mayors, and town councils. Turn on your radio. Lay in

a supply of food. Stock up on water. Keep away from windows. Stay in your basement. Pray.

Foreboding emptied grocery stores and gun shops. As the sun went down on the second night, TV crews tracked national guardsmen taking up lines along highways and ringing ghettos. Detours led to roadblocks where motorists were searched and relieved of their weapons and liquor. Dusk closed in. Police and military helicopters prowled the skies, spotlighting potential trouble spots.

South Central Los Angeles went up first, no surprise there. Atlanta was next. Fire and looting. Shootings. Rape. Mob violence. The works. Detroit and Houston. Miami. Baltimore. The national guard watched with orders to contain the mobs inside their own neighborhoods, and not to interfere.

Then the suburbs lit up, and no one was prepared for that. From Silicon Valley to Highlands Ranch to Silver Spring, bedroom commuters went rampaging. Out came the guns, the repressed envy, the hate. The middle class blew wide open. It started with phone calls from house to house, shocked disbelief twisting into realization that death lurked beneath their sprinkler systems. Strangely, suddenly, they had a lot to get out. They put the ghettos to shame with their fires and violence. In the aftermath, the national guard commanders could only say that they had not expected such savagery from people with lawns to call their own.

On Branch's TV, it looked like the last night on earth. For many people it was. When the sun rose, it illuminated a landscape America had been fearing since the Bomb. Six-lane highways were choked with mangled, burned cars and trucks that had tried to flee. Pitched battles had ensued. Gangs had swept through the traffic jams, shooting and knifing whole families. Survivors meandered in shock, crying for water. Dirty smoke poured into the urban skies. It was a day of sirens. Weather copters and roving news vans cruised the fringes of destroyed cities. Every channel showed havoc.

From the floor of the US Senate, the majority leader, C.C. Cooper, a self-made billionaire with his eye on the White House, clamored for martial law. He wanted ninety days, a cooling-off period. He was opposed by a lone black woman, the formidable Cordelia January. Branch listened to her rich Texas vowels cow Cooper's notion.

'Just ninety days?' she thundered from the podium. 'No, sir. Not on my watch. Martial law is a serpent, Senator. The seed of tyranny. I urge my distinguished colleagues to oppose this measure.' The vote was ninety-nine in favor, one opposed. The President, haggard and sleepless, snatched at the political cover and declared martial law.

At 1:00 p.m. EST, the generals locked America down. Curfew began Friday at sunset and lasted until dawn on Monday. It was pure coincidence, but the cooling-off period landed on the ecclesiastical day of rest. Not since the Puritans had the Old Testament held such power in America: observe the Sabbath or be shot on sight.

It worked. The first great spasm of terror passed over.

Oddly enough, America was grateful to the generals. The highways got cleared. Looters were gunned down. By Monday, supermarkets were allowed to reopen. On Wednesday, children went back to school. Factories reopened. The idea was to jump-start normalcy, to put yellow school buses back on the street, get money flowing, make the country feel returned to itself.

People cautiously emerged from their houses and cleaned their yards of riot debris. In the suburbs, neighbors who had been at one another's throats or on top of each other's wives now helped rake up the broken glass or scoop out ashes with snow shovels. Processions of garbage trucks came through. The weather was glorious for December. America looked just fine on the network news.

Suddenly, man no longer looked out to the stars. Astronomers fell from grace. It

became a time to look inward. All through that first winter, great armies – hastily buttressed with veterans, police, security guards, even mercenaries – poised at the scattered mouths of the underworld, their guns pointed at the darkness, waiting while governments and industries scraped together conscripts and arsenals to create an overwhelming force.

For a month, no one went down. CEOs, boards of directors, and religious institutions badgered them to get on with the Reconquista, anxious to launch their explorations. But the death toll was well over a million now, including the entire Afghani Taliban army, which had practically jumped into the abyss in pursuit of their Islamic Satan. Generals cautiously declined to send in further troops.

A small legion of robots was commandeered from NASA's Mars project and put to use investigating the planet within their own planet. Creeping along on metal spider legs, the machines bore arrays of sensors and video equipment designed for the harshest conditions of a world far away. There were thirteen, each valued at five million dollars, and the Mars crew wanted them back intact.

The robots were released in pairs – plus one soloist – at seven different sites around the globe. Scores of scientists monitored each one around the clock. The 'spiders' held up quite well. As they crept deeper into the earth, communication became difficult. Electronic signals meant to flash unimpeded from the Martian poles and alluvial plains were hampered by thick layers of stone. In a sense, the labyrinth underfoot was light-years more distant than Mars itself. The signals had to be computer-enhanced, interpreted, and coalesced. Sometimes it took many hours for a transmission to reach the top, and many hours or days to untangle the electronic jumble. More and more often, transmissions simply didn't surface.

What did come up showed an interior so fantastic that the planetologists and geologists refused to believe their instruments. It took a week for the electronic spiders to find the first human images. Deep within the limestone wilderness of Terbil Tem, beneath Papua New Guinea, their bones showed as ultraviolet sticks on the computer scan. Estimates ranged from five to twelve sets of remains at a depth of twelve hundred feet. A day later, miles inside the volcanic honeycombs around Japan's Akiyoshi-dai, they found evidence that bands of humans had been driven to depths lower than any explored, and there slaughtered. Deep inside Algeria's Djurdjura massif and the Nanxu River sink in China's Guanxi province, far below the caves under Mt. Carmel and Jerusalem, other robots located the carnage of battles fought in cubbyholes and crawl spaces and immense chambers.

'Bad, very bad,' breathed hardened viewers. The bodies of soldiers had been stripped, mutilated, degraded. Heads were missing or arranged like masses of bowling balls. Worse, their weapons were gone. Place after place, all that remained were nude bodies, anonymous, turning to bone. You could not tell who these men and women had been.

One by one, their spiders ceased to transmit. It was too soon for their batteries to go dead. And not all of them had reached their signal threshold. 'They're killing our robots,' the scientists reported. By the end of December, only one was left, a solitary satellite creeping on legs into regions so deep it seemed nothing could live.

Far beneath Copenhagen, the robot eye picked up a strange detail, a close-up of a fisherman's net. The computer cowboys fiddled with their machinery, trying to resolve the image, but it remained the same, oversized links of thread or thin rope. They keyed in commands for the spider to back up slightly for a wider perspective. Almost a full day passed before the spider transmitted back, and it was as dramatic as the first picture sent from the back of the moon. What had looked like thread or rope was iron circlets linked together. The net was in fact chain mail; the armor of an early Scandinavian warrior. The Viking skeleton inside had long ago fallen to dust. Where there had been a desperate black struggle, the armor itself was pinned to the

wall with an iron spear.

'Bullshit,' someone said.

But the spider rotated on command, and the den was filled with Iron Age weaponry and broken helmets. The NATO troops and Afghani Taliban and soldiers of a dozen other modern armies were not, then, the first to invade this abyssal world and raise arms against man's demons.

'What's going on down there?' the mission control chief demanded.

After another week, the transmission bursts conveyed nothing more than earth noise and electromagnetic pulses of random tremors. Finally the spider quit sending. They waited three days, then began to dismantle the station, only to hear a transmission beep. They hastily jacked the monitor in, and at long last got their face. The static parted. Something moved on screen, and in the next instant the screen went black. They replayed the tape in slow motion and sweated out electronic bits of an image. The creature had, seemingly, a rack of horns, a stub of vestigial tail. Red eyes, or green, depending on the camera filter. And a mouth that must have been crying out with fury and damnation – or possibly maternal alarm – as it bore down on the robot.

It was Branch who broke the impasse. His fever spiked and he resumed command of what had become a ghost battalion. He leaned over the maps and tried to plot where his platoons had been that fateful day. 'I need to find my people,' he radioed his superiors, but they would have none of it. Stay put, they ordered.

'That's not right,' Branch said, but did not argue. He turned from the radios, shouldered his Alice pack, and grabbed his rifle. He walked between the German armored column parked at the mouth of the Leoganger Steinberge cave system in the Bavarian Alps, deaf to the officers shouting to him to halt. The last of his Rangers, twelve men, followed like black wraiths, and the Leopard tank crews crossed themselves.

For the first four days the tunnels were strangely vacant, not a trace of violence, not a whiff of cordite, not a bullet scar. Even the highlights strung along walls and ceilings worked. Abruptly, at a depth of 4,150 meters, the lights ceased. They turned on their headlamps. The going slowed.

Finally, seven camps down, they solved the mystery of Company A. The tunnel dilated into a high chamber. They rounded left onto a sprawled battlefield.

It was like a lake of drowned swimmers that had been drained. The dead had settled atop one another and dried in a tangle. Here and there, bodies had been propped upright to continue their combat in the afterlife. Branch led on, barely recognizing them. They found 7.62-mm rounds for M-16s, a few gas masks, some broken Friz helmets. There were also plenty of primitive artifacts.

The combatants had slowly dried on the bone, constricting into tight rawhide sacks. The bowed spines and open jaws and mutilations seemed to bark and howl at the rubberneckers passing among them. Here was the hell Branch had been taught. Goya and Blake had done their homework well. The impaled and butchered were horrible. The platoon wandered through the grim scene, their lights wagging. 'Major,' whispered their chain gunner. 'Their eyes.'

'I see,' said Branch. He glanced around at the rearing, plunging remains. On every face, the eyes had been stabbed and mutilated. And he understood. 'After Little Bighorn,' he said, 'the Sioux women came and punctured the cavalry soldiers' ears. The soldiers had been warned not to follow the tribes, and the women were opening their ears so they could hear better next time.'

'I don't see no survivors,' moaned a boy.

'I don't see no haddie, either,' said another. Haddie was the hadal, whoever that was.

'Keep looking,' Branch said. 'And while you're at it, collect tags. At least we can bring

their names out with us.'

Some were covered with masses of translucent beetles and albino flies. On others a fast-acting fungus had reduced the remains to bone. In one trough, the dead soldiers were glazed over with mineral liquid and becoming part of the floor. The earth itself was consuming them.

'Major,' a voice said, 'you need to see this.'

Branch followed the man to a steep overhang where the dead had been laid neatly side by side in a long row. Under their dozen light beams, the platoon saw the bodies had been dusted in bright red ochre powder, and men sprinkled with brilliant white confetti. It was a rather beautiful sight.

'Haddie?' breathed a soldier.

Beneath the layers of ochre, the bodies were indeed those of their enemy. Branch climbed across to the overhang. Close up now, he saw that the white confetti was teeth. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and they were human. He picked one up, a canine, and it had chip marks where a rock had hammered it from some GFs mouth. He gently set it back on the ground.

The hadal warriors' heads were pillowed on human skulls. At their feet were offerings.

'Mice?' said Sergeant Doraan. 'Dried-up mice?' There were scores of them.

'No,' said Branch. 'Genitals.'

The bodies differed in size. Some were bigger than the soldiers. They had the shoulders of Masai, and looked freakish next to their comrades with bandy legs. A few had peculiar talons in place of fingernails and toenails. If not for what they'd done to their teeth, and their penis sheaths made of carved bone, they would have looked quasi-human, like five-foot-tall pro linebackers.

Also scattered among the hadal corpses were five slender figures, gracile, delicate, almost feminine, but definitely male. At first glance, Branch expected them to be teenagers, but under the red ochre their faces were every bit as aged as the rest. All five of the gracile hadals had shaped skulls, flattened on back from binding in infancy. It was among these smallest specimens that the outside canines were most pronounced, some as long as baboon canines.

'We need to take some of these bodies up with us,' Branch said.

'What we want to do that for, Major?' a boy asked. 'They're the bad guys.'

'Yeah. And dead,' said his buddy.

'Proof positive. It will begin our knowledge about them,' Branch said. 'We're fighting something we've never really seen. Our own nightmares.' To date, the US military had not acquired a single specimen. The Hezbollah in southern Lebanon claimed to have taken one alive, but no one believed it.

'I'm not touching those things. No, that's the devil, look at him.'

They did look like devils, not men. Like animals steeped in cancers. A lot like me, thought Branch. It was hard for him to reconcile their humanlike forms with the coral horns that had bloomed from their heads. Some looked ready to claw their way back to life. He didn't blame his troops for being superstitious.

They all heard the radio at the same time. A scratchy sound issued from a pile of trophies, and Branch carefully rooted through the photographs and wristwatches and wedding and high school graduation rings, and pulled out the walkie-talkie. He clicked the transmit button three times. Three clicks answered.

'Someone's down there,' said a Ranger.

'Yeah. But who?' That gave them pause. Human teeth crackled under their boots.

'Identify yourself, over,' Branch spoke into the radio.

They waited. The voice that replied was American. 'It's so dark in here,' he groaned.

'Don't leave us, man.'

Branch placed the radio on the ground and backed away.

'Wait a minute,' said the chain gunner. 'That sounded like Scoop D. I know him. But we didn't get his location, Major.'

'Quiet,' Branch whispered to his troops. 'They know we're here.' They fled.

Like worker ants, the soldiers scurried through the dark vein, each bearing before him one large white egg. Except these were not eggs, but balls of illumination, cast round and individual by each man's headlamp. Of the thirteen yesterday, there were just eight left. Like souls extinguished, those other men and lights were lost, their weapons fallen into enemy hands. One who remained, Sergeant Dornan, had broken ribs.

They had not stopped moving in fifty hours, except to lay fire into the pitch blackness behind them. Now, from the deepest point, came Branch's whispered command: 'Make the line here.' It passed, man by man, from the strongest to the stricken up the chain. The Rangers came to a halt in a forking passage. It was a place they had visited before.

The three stripes of fluorescent orange spray paint upon the Neolithic wall images were a welcome sight. They were blaze marks made by this same platoon, three to indicate their third camp on the way down. The exit was no more than three days up. Sergeant Dornan's tiny moan of relief filled the limestone silence. The wounded man sat, cradled his weapon, laid his head against the stone. The rest of them went to work prepping their last stand.

Ambush was their only hope. Failing here, not one would reach the light of day, which had taken on all the King James connotations they had ever known. The glory of the light of day.

Two dead, three missing, and Dornan's broken ribs. And their chain gun, for chrissake. The General Electric gun with all its ammo. Snatched whole from their midst. You don't lose a weapon like that. Not only did it leave their platoon without suppressing fire, but someday some bravo like themselves was going to meet its solid wall of machine-gun fire made in America.

Now a large party was closing fast upon their rear. They could clearly hear the approach on their radio as things, whatever they were, passed by the remote mikes they'd placed on their retreat. Even amplified, the enemy moved softly, with serpentine ease, but quickly, too. Now and then one brushed against the walls. When they spoke, it was not in language any of these grunts knew.

One nineteen-year-old spec 4 hunkered by his ruck, fingers trembling. Branch went to him. 'Don't listen, Washington,' he said. 'Don't try to understand.'

The frightened kid looked up. And there was Frankenstein. Their Frankenstein. Branch knew the look.

'They're close.'

'No distractions,' Branch said.

'No sir.'

'We're going to turn this thing around. We're going to own it.'

'Yes sir.'

'Now those claymores, son. How many in your ruck?'

'Three. Everything I got, Major.'

'Can't ask for anything more than that, can we? One here, I'd say. One there. They'll do just fine.'

'Yes sir.'

'We stop them here.' Branch raised his volume slightly for the other Rangers. 'This is the line. Then it's over. Then we go home. We're almost out, boys. Get your sunscreen ready.'

They liked that. Except for the major, they were all black. Sunscreen, right.

He moved up the line from man to man, spacing the mines, assigning their fields of fire, weaving his ambush. It was a spooky arena down here. Even if you could put aside these bursts of cave paintings and strange carved shapes and the sudden rockfall and flash floods and the mineralized skeletons and the booby traps. Even if you made this place at peace with itself, the space itself was horror. The tunnel walls compressed their universe into a tiny ball. The darkness threw it into freefall. Close your eyes, and the mix could drive you mad.

Branch saw the weariness in them. They had been without radio contact with the surface for two weeks. Even with communications, they couldn't have called in artillery or reinforcements or evacuation. They were deep and alone and beset by bogeymen, some imagined, some not.

Branch paused beside the prehistoric bison painted on the wall. The animal had spears bristling from its shoulders, and its entrails were trampled underneath. It was dying, but so was the hunter who had killed it. The stick figure of a man was toppling over backward, gored by the long horns. Hunter and hunted, one in spirit. Branch set the last of his claymores at the feet of the bison and tilted it upon little wire tripod legs.

'They're getting closer, Major.'

Branch looked around. It was the radioman, with a pair of headphones on. One last time he perused his ambush, saw in advance how the mines would flower, where the shot would fly true, where it would skip with terminal velocity, and which niches might escape their explosion of light and metal. 'On my word,' he said. 'Not until.'

'I know.' They all knew. Three weeks in the field with Branch was enough time to learn his lessons.

The radioman cut his light. Around the fork, other soldiers doused their headlamps, too. Branch felt the blackness flood them over.

They had pre-sighted their rifles. Branch knew that in the terrible darkness, each soldier in his lonely post was mentally rehearsing the same left-to-right burst. Blind without light, they were about to be blinded with it. Their muzzle flash would ruin their low-light vision. The best thing was to pretend you were seeing and let your imagination take care of the target. Close your eyes. Wake up when it was over.

'Closer,' whispered the radioman.

'I hear them now,' Branch said. He heard the radioman gently switch off his radio and set aside his headphones and shoulder his weapon.

The pack advanced single file, of course. It was a tubular fork, man-wide. One, then two passed the bison. Branch tracked them in his head. They were shoeless, and the second slowed when the first did.

Can they smell us? Branch worried. Still he did not give the word. The game was nerves. You had to let them all come in before you shut the door. Part of him was ready with the claymores in case one of his soldiers startled and opened fire.

The creatures stank of body grease and rare minerals and animal heat and encrusted feces. Something bony scratched a wall. Branch sensed that the fork was filling. His sense had less to do with sound than with the feel of the air. However slight, the current was altered. Their mass respiration and the motion of bodies had created tiny eddies in the space. Twenty, Branch estimated. Maybe thirty. God's children, perhaps. Mine now.

'Now,' he uttered. He twisted the detonator.

The claymores blossomed in a single colorless buck of shot. Pellets rattled against the stone, a fatal squall. Eight rifles joined, walking their bursts back and forth among the demon pack.

The bursts of muzzle flash seared between Branch's fingertips as he held them before his glasses. He rolled his eyes up into his skull to protect his vision. But the lightning streaks of auto-fire still reached in. Unblind and yet not seeing, he aimed by

staccato stroke.

Confined by the corridors, the stink of powder filled their lungs. Branch's heart surged. He recognized one yell of the many yelling voices as his own. God help me, he prayed at his rifle stock.

In all the thunder of gunfire, Branch knew his rifle ran empty only when it quit hunching at the meat of his shoulder. He switched clips twice. On the third switch, he paused to gauge the killing.

To his right and left, his boys went on machining the darkness with their gunfire. Maybe he wanted to hear the enemy beg for mercy. Or howl for it. Instead what he heard was laughter. Laughter?

'Cease fire,' he called.

They didn't. Blood up, they strafed, pulled dry, fresh-clipped, strafed again.

He shouted once more. One by one, his men stopped firing. The echoes pulsed off into the arterials.

The smell of blood and freshly chipped stone was pungent. You could practically spit it out of your mouth. That laughter went on, strange in its purity.

'Lights,' said Branch, trying to keep the momentum theirs. 'Reload. Be ready. Shoot first. Sort it out later. Total control, lads.'

Their headlamps came alive. The corridor drifted in white smoke. Fresh blood spoiled the cave paintings. Closer in, the carnage was absolute. Bodies lay tangled in a foggy distant mass. The heat of their blood steamed, adding to the humidity of this place.

'Dead. Dead. Dead,' said a troop. Someone giggled. It was that or weep. They had done this thing. A massacre of their very own.

Rifles twitching side to side, the spellbound Rangers closed in on their vaporous kill. At last, thought Branch, behold the eyes of dead angels. He finished refilling his spare clips, scanned the upper tunnel for latent intruders, then got to his feet.

Ever cautious, he circled the chamber, threw light down the left fork, then the right. Empty. Empty. They'd taken out the whole contingent. No stragglers. No blood trails leading away. One hundred percent payback.

They gathered in a semicircle at the edge of the dead. Over by the heaped kill, his men stood frozen, their lights casting downward in a collection pool. Branch shouldered in among them. Like them, he froze.

'No fucking way,' a troop darkly muttered.

His neighbor refused the sight, too. 'What's these doing here? What the fuck these doing here?'

Now Branch saw why his enemy had died so meekly.

'Christ,' he breathed. There were two dozen or more upon the floor. They were nude and pathetic. And human. They were civilians. Unarmed.

Even mauled by the shrapnel and gunfire, you could see their awful gauntness. Their decorated skin stretched taut across meatless rib cages. The faces were a study in famine, cheeks parsed, eyes hollowed. Their feet and legs were ulcerated. The sinewy arms lay thin as a child's. Their loins were cased in old waste. Only one thing might explain them.

'Prisoners,' said Spec 4 Washington.

'Prisoners? We didn't kill no prisoners.'

'Yeah,' said Washington. 'They were prisoners.'

'No,' said Branch. 'Slaves.' There was a silence.

'Slaves? There's no such thing. This is modern days, Major.'

He showed them the brand marks, the stripes of paint, the ropes linking neck to neck.

'Makes 'em prisoners. Not slaves.' The black kids acted like authorities on the

subject.

'See those raw marks on their shoulders and backs?'

'So?'

'Abrasions. They've been humping loads. Prisoners, labor. Slaves.'

Now they saw. Cued by Branch, they fanned out. This had just gotten very personal. Spooked, high-stepping, the troops moved among the limbs and smoke. Most of the captives were male. Besides the neck-to-neck rope, many were shackled at the ankles with leather thongs. A few bore iron bracelets. Most had been ear-tagged, or their ears had been sliced or fringed the way cowboys jingle-bobbed cattle.

'Okay, they're slaves. Then where's their keepers?'

The consensus was immediate. 'Gotta be a keeper. Gotta be a boss for the chain gang.'

They went on looking through the pile, absorbing the atrocity, refusing the notion that slaves might keep themselves slaves. Body by body, though, they failed to find a demon master.

'I don't get it. No food. No water. How'd they keep alive?'

'We passed that stream.'

'That's water, then. I didn't see no fish.'

'Here we go, see here. Jerky.' A Ranger held up a foot-long piece of dried meat. It looked more like a dried stick or shriveled leather. They found more pieces, mostly tucked into shackles or clutched in dead hands.

Branch examined a piece, bent it, smelled the meat. 'I don't know what this could be,' he said. Then he did. It was human.

It had been a caravan, they determined, though an empty one. No one could say what these captives had been hauling, but hauling they had been, and for long distances and recently. As Branch had noticed, the emaciated bodies had fresh sores on their shoulders and backs, the kind any soldier recognized, from a heavy load carried too long.

The Rangers were grave and angry as they made their way through the dead. At first glance, most of these people looked Central Asian. That explained the strange language. Afghanis, Branch guessed from the blue eyes. To his Lurps, though, these were brothers and sisters. That was enough for them to think about.

So the enemy had beasts of burden? All the way from Afghanistan? But this was sub-Bavaria. The twenty-first century. The implications were staggering. If the enemy was able to run strings of captives from so far away, it could also move armies... beneath humankind's feet. Screw the high ground. With this kind of low ground, the high ground was nothing but a blind man waiting to be robbed. Their enemy could surface anywhere, anytime, like prairie dogs or fire ants.

So what's new? Who was to say the children of hell hadn't been popping into mankind's midst from the start? Making slaves. Stealing souls. Raiding the garden of light. It was a concept too fundamental for Branch to accept easily.

'Here he is, I found him,' the Spec 4 called near the back of the heap. Knee-deep in the torn mass, he had his rifle and light aimed at something on the ground. 'Oh yeah, this the one. Here's their boss man. I got the motherfucker.'

Branch and the others hurried over. They clustered around the thing. Poked and kicked it a few times. 'It's dead, all right,' the medic said, wiping his fingers after hunting for a pulse. That made them more comfortable. They gathered closer.

'He's bigger than the rest.'

'King of the apes.'

Two arms, two legs: the body looked long and supple, lying tangled with its neighbors. It was soaked in gore, some its own, to judge by the wounds. They tried to figure it out, carefully, at gunpoint.

'That some kind of helmet?'

'He got snakes. Snakes growing out his head.'

'Nah, look. That's dreadlocks. Full a' mud or something.'

The long hair was indeed tangled and filthy, a Medusa's nest. Hard to tell if any of the muddy hair-tails on his head was bone or not, but he surely seemed demonic. And something in his aspect – the tattoos, the iron ring around his throat. This was taller than those furies he had seen in Bosnia, and immensely more powerful-looking than these other dead. And yet he was not what Branch had expected.

'Bag him,' Branch said. 'Let's get out of here.'

The Spec 4 stayed as jumpy as a Thoroughbred. 'I ought to shoot him again.'

'What you want to do that for, Washington?'

'Just ought to. He's the one running the others. He's got to be evil.'

'We've done enough,' Branch said.

Muttering, Washington gave the creature a tight kick across the heart and turned away. Like an animal waking, the big rib cage drew a great breath, then another. Washington heard the respiration and dove among the bodies, shouting as he rolled.

'He's alive! He's come back to life.'

'Hold your fire!' Branch yelled. 'Don't shoot him.'

'But they don't die, Major, look at it.'

The creature was stirring among the bodies.

'Keep your heads on,' Branch said. 'Let's just walk in on this, one step at a time. Let's see what we see. I want him alive.' They were getting closer to the surface. With luck, they might emerge with a live catch. If the going got complicated, they could always just cap their prisoner and keep running. He watched it in their light beams.

Somehow this one had missed the massed headshot woven into their ambush. The way Branch had set his claymores, everyone in the column was supposed to have taken it in the face. This one must have heard something the slaves hadn't, and managed to duck the lethal instant. With instincts this acute, the hadals could have avoided human detection for all of history.

'He's the boss, all right, he's the one,' someone said. 'Got to be. Who else?'

'Maybe,' Branch said. They were fierce in their desire for retribution.

'You can tell. Look at him.'

'Shoot him, Major,' Washington asked. 'He's dying anyhow.'

All it would take was the word. Easier still, all it would take was his silence. Branch had only to turn his head, and it would be done.

'Dying?' said the thing, and opened its eyes and looked up at them. Branch alone did not jump away.

'Pleased to meet you,' it said to him.

The lips peeled back upon white teeth. It was the grin of someone whose last sole possession was the grin itself.

And then he started laughing that laughter they had heard. The mirth was real. He was laughing at them. At himself. His suffering. His extremity. The universe. It was, Branch realized, the most audacious thing he'd ever seen.

'Shoot the thing,' Sergeant Dornan said.

'Don't,' Branch commanded.

'Ah, come on,' said the creature. The nuance was pure Western. Wyoming or

Montana. 'Do,' he said. And quit laughing. In the silence, someone locked a load.

'No,' said Branch. He knelt down. Monster to monster. Cradled the Medusa head in both hands. 'Who are you?' he asked. 'What's your name?' It was like taking confession.

'He's human? He's one of us?' a soldier murmured.

Branch brought the head closer, and saw a face younger than he'd thought. That was when they discovered something that had been inflicted on none of the other

prisoners. Jutting from one vertebra at the base of his neck, an iron ring had been affixed to his spinal column. One yank on that ring, and he would be turned into a head atop a dead body. They were awed by that. Awed by the independence that needed such breaking.

'Who are you?' Branch said.

A tear streaked down from one eye. The man was remembering. He offered his name like surrendering his sword. He spoke so softly, Branch had to lean in.

'Ike,' Branch told the others.

First you must conceive that the earth... is everywhere full of windy caves, and bears in its bosom a multitude of mirrors and gulfs and beedling, precipitous crags. You must also picture that under the earth's back, many

buried rivers with torrential force roll their waters mingled with sunken rocks.

– LUCRETIUS, The Nature of the Universe (55 BC)

6

DIXIE CUPS

Beneath Ontario

Three years later

The armored train car slowed to thirty kph as it exited the wormhole into a vast subterranean chamber containing Camp Helena. The track arced along the canyon's ridgeline and descended to the chamber floor. Inside the car, Ike roamed from end to end, stepping over exhausted men and combat gear and the blood, tireless, shotgun ready. Through the front window he saw the lights of man. Through the rear, the strafed, fouled mouth to the depths fell behind. His heart felt pulled in two, into the future, into the past.

For seven dark weeks the platoon had been hunting Haddie, their horror, in a tunnel spoking off the deepest transit point. For four of those weeks they'd been living by the trigger. Corporate mercenaries were supposed to police the deep lines, but somehow the national militaries were back in the action. And taking the hits. Now they sat on brand-new cherry-red plastic seats in an automated train, with muddy field gear propped against their legs and a soldier dying on the floor.

'Home,' one of the Rangers said to him.

'All yours,' Ike replied. He added, 'Lieutenant,' and it was like passing the torch back to its original owner. They were back in the World now, and it was not his.

'Listen,' Lieutenant Meadows said in a low voice, 'what happened, maybe I don't have to report it all. A simple apology, in front of the men...'

'You're forgiving me?' Ike snorted. The tired men looked up. Meadows narrowed his eyes, and Ike pulled out a pair of glacier glasses with nearly black lenses. He hooked the wings on his ears and sealed the plastic against the wild tattooing that ran from forehead to cheekbones to chin.

He turned from the fool and squinted out the windows at the sprawling firebase below them. Helena's sky was a storm of man-made lights. From this vantage, the array of sabering lasers formed an angular canopy one mile wide. Strobes twinkled in the distance. His dreadlocks – slashed to shoulder length – helped shield his eyes, but not enough. So powerful in the lower darkness, Ike shied here in the ordinary.

In Ike's mind, these settlements were like shipwrecks in the Arctic with winter closing in, reminders that passage was swift and temporary. Down here, one did not belong in one place for long.

Every cavity, every tunnel, every hole along the chamber's soaring walls was saturated with light, and yet you could still see winged animals flitting about in the domelike 'sky' extending a hundred meters above camp. Eventually the animals tired and spiraled down to rest or feed – and promptly got fried upon contact with the laser canopy. The work and living quarters in camp were protected from this bone and charcoal debris, as well as from the occasional fall of rocks, by steeply angled fifty-meter-tall rooftops with titanium-alloy superframes. The effect, from Ike's window, was a city of cathedrals inside a gigantic cave.

With conveyor belts spanning off into side holes and an elevator shaft and various ventilation chimneys jutting through the ceiling and a pall of petroleum smog, it looked like hell, and this was man's doing. A steady stream of food, supplies, and munitions churned down the belts. Ore churned back up.

The train car glided to a stop by the front gate and the Rangers unhorsed in a file, nearly bashful in the face of such safety, eager to get past the razor wire and lay into some cold beer and hot burgers and serious rack time. For his own part, a fresh platoon would do. Already Ike was ready to leave.

A tardy MASH team came rushing out with a stretcher, and as they passed through the gate, a panel of arc lights turned them as white as angels. Ike knelt beside his wounded man because it was the right thing to do, but also because he had to find his resolve again. The arc lights were arranged to saturate every thing that entered this way, and to kill whatever lights killed down here.

'We'll take him,' the medics said, and Ike let go of the boy's hand. He was the last left in the car. One by one the Rangers had gone through the gate, turning into bursts of blinding radiance.

Ike faced the camp's gate, straining against the impulse to gallop back into the darkness. His urges were so raw they hurt like wounds. Few people understood. He had entered this Manichaean state: it was either darkness or light, and it seemed that all his gray scale was gone.

With a small cry, Ike cupped his hands to his eyes and leaped through the gate. The lights bleached him as immaculate as a rising soul. Like that, he made his way inside once again. It seemed more difficult each time.

Inside the razor wire and sandbags, Ike slowed his pulse and cleared his lungs. Following regulations, he shucked his clip, then dry-fired into the sandbox by the bunker, and showed his tags to the sentinels in their Kevlar armor.

CAMP HELENA, the sign read. HOME OF BLACKHORSE, 11 TH ARMORED CAV , had been crossed out and replaced with WOLFHOUNDS, 27TH INFANTRY . In turn, that had been replaced with the names of a half-dozen more resident units. The one constant in the upper right corner was their altitude: Minus 16,232 Feet.

Hunched beneath his battle gear, Ike trudged past troops in their field 'ninjas,' the black camos issued for deep work, or off-duty in their Army sweats or gym trunks. Whether they were on their way to training or to the mess or the basketball cage or

the PX to snarf some Zingers or Yoo-Hoos, one and all carried a rifle or pistol, ever mindful of the great massacre two years before.

From beneath his ropy hair, Ike cast side glances at the civilians starting to take over. Most were miners and construction workers, sprinkled with mercenaries and missionaries, the front wave of colonization. On his departure, two months ago, there had been just a few dozen of them. Now they seemed to outnumber the soldiers. Certainly they had the hauteur of a majority.

He heard bright laughter and was startled by the sight of three prostitutes in their late twenties. One had veritable volleyballs surgically affixed to her chest. She was even more surprised at the sight of Ike. The soda straw slid from her strawberry lips, and she stared in disbelief. Ike twisted his face from view and hurried on.

Helena was growing up. Fast. Like scores of other settlements around the world, it was evident not just in the explosion of new quadrants and settlers from the World. You could see it in the building materials. Concrete told the tale. Wood was a luxury down here, and sheet-metal production took time to develop and needed the right ores in close proximity to be cost-effective. Concrete, on the other hand, had only to be teased up from the ground and out from the walls. Cheap, quick to set, durable, concrete meant populism. It fed the frontier spirit.

Ike entered a quadrant that, two months ago, had been home to the local company of Rangers. But the obstacle course, rappeling tower, firing range, and primitive track had been usurped. A horde of squatters had invaded. Every manner of tent, lean-to, and gypsy shelter sprawled here. The din of voices, commerce, and dog-eat-dog music tracks hit him like a foul smell.

All that remained of unit headquarters were two office cubes taped together with duct tape. They had a ceiling made of cardboard. Ike parked his rucksack by the outer wall, then looked twice at the roughnecks and desperadoes wandering about, and brought it inside the doorway. A little foolishly, he knocked on the cardboard wall.

'Enter,' a voice barked.

Branch was talking to a portable computer balanced on boxes of MREs, his helmet on one side, rifle on the other. 'Elias,' Ike greeted him.

Branch was not pleased to see him. His mask of scar tissue and cysts twisted into a snarl. 'Ah, our prodigal son,' he said, 'we were just chatting about you.'

He turned the laptop so that Ike could see the face on the little flat screen, and so the computer camera could see Ike. They were video-linked with Jump Lincoln, one of Branch's old Airborne buddies and presently the commanding officer in charge of Lieutenant Meadows.

'Have you lost your fucking mind?' Jump's image said to Ike. 'I just got a field report slapped in front of me. It says you disobeyed a direct order. In front of my lieutenant's entire patrol. And that you drifted a weapon in his general direction in a threatening manner. Do you have anything at all to say, Crockett?'

Ike didn't play dumb, but he wasn't about to bend over, either. 'The lieutenant writes a fast report,' he commented. 'We only pulled in twenty minutes ago.'

'You threatened an officer?' Jump's bark was tinny over the computer speaker.

'Contradicted.'

'In the field, in front of his men?'

Branch sat shaking his head in brotherly disgust.

'The man doesn't belong out there,' Ike said. 'He got one boy mangled on a wrong call. I saw no reason to keep feeding the lieutenant's version of reality. I finally got him to see reason.'

Jump fumed as frames dropped on the computer. He finally said, 'I thought it was a cleared region. This was supposed to be a shakedown cruise for Meadows. You're telling me you ran into hadals?'

'Booby traps,' Ike said. 'Old. Centuries old. I doubt there's been traffic through there

since the Ice Age.' He didn't bother addressing the issue of being sent to baby-sit a shake-and-bake ROTC student.

The computer image turned to a wall map. 'Where have they all gone?' Jump wondered. 'We haven't made physical contact with the enemy in months.'

'Don't worry,' Ike said. 'They're down there somewhere.'

'I'm not so sure. Some days I mink they really are on the run. Or they've died off from disease or something.'

Branch grabbed at the interlude. 'It looks like a stalemate to me,' he said to Jump.

'My clown cancels out yours. I think we're agreed.' The two majors knew Meadows was a disaster. And it was certain they'd never send him out with Ike again. That was good enough for Ike.

'Fuck it, then,' Jump said. 'I'm going to bury the report. This time.'

Branch went on glaring at Ike. 'I don't know, Jump,' he said. 'Maybe we ought to quit coddling him.'

'Elias, I know he's a special project of yours,' Jump said. 'But I've told you before, don't get attached. There's a reason we treat the Dixie cups with such caution. I'm telling ya, they're heartbreakers.'

'Thanks for the burial. I owe you.' Branch punched the computer's off button and turned to Ike. 'Nice work,' he said. 'Tell me, are you trying to hang yourself?'

If it was contrition he wanted, Ike offered none. Ike helped himself to some boxes and made a seat. 'Dixie cups,' he said. 'That's a new one. More Army slang?'

'Spook, if you must know. It means 'use once, throw away.' The CIA used it to refer to their indigenous guerrilla ops. Now it includes the cowboys like you that we haul in from the deep and use for scout work.'

Ike said, 'It kind of grows on ya.'

Branch's mood stayed foul. 'Your sense of timing is unbelievable. Congress is closing the base on us. Selling it. To another pack of corporate hyenas. Every time you turn around, the government's caving in to another cartel. We do the dirty work, then the multinationals move in with their commercial militias and land developers and mining equipment. We bleed, they profit. I've been given three weeks to transfer the entire unit to temporary quarters two thousand feet below Camp Alison. I don't have a lot of time, Ike. I'm busting nuts to keep you alive down here. And you go and threaten an officer in the field?'

Ike raised two fingers and spread them. 'Peace, dad.'

Branch exhaled. He glanced around his tiny office space in disgust. Country-western loped in mega-decibels nearby. 'Look at us,' Branch said. 'Pitiful. We bleed. The corporations profit. Where's the honor in it?'

'Honor?'

'Don't hand me that. Yeah, the honor. Not the money. Not the power. Not the possession. Just the bottom line for being true to the code. This.' He pointed at his heart.

'Maybe you believe too much,' Ike suggested.

'And you don't?'

'I'm not a lifer. You are.'

'You're not anything,' Branch said, and his shoulders sagged. 'They've gone ahead with your court-martial up top. In absentia. While you were still in the field. One AWOL turns into a desertion-under-fire charge.'

Ike was not particularly devastated. 'So now I appeal.'

'This was the appeal.'

Ike didn't show the slightest distress.

'There's a ray of hope, Ike. You've been ordered to go up for the sentencing. I talked with JAG, and they think you can throw yourself on the mercy of the court. I've pulled all the strings I can up there. I told them what you did behind the lines. Some

important people have promised to put a good word in for you. No promises, but it sounds to me like the court will show leniency. They by God ought to.'

'That's my ray of hope?'

Branch didn't rise to it. 'You can do worse, you know.'

They'd argued this one into knots. Ike didn't retort. The Army had been less a family than a holding pen. It wasn't the Army that had broken his slavery and dragged him back to his own humanity and seen to it that his wounds were cleaned and shackles cut. It was Branch. Ike would never forget that.

'You could try anyway,' Branch said.

'I don't need it,' Ike softly replied. 'I don't need ever to go up again.'

'It's a dangerous place down here.'

'It's worse up there.'

'You can't be alone and survive.'

'I can always join some outfit.'

'What are you talking about? You're facing a dishonorable discharge, with possible brig time. You'll be an untouchable.'

'There's other action.'

'A soldier of fortune?' Branch looked sick. 'You?' Ike dropped it.

Both men fell silent. Finally Branch got it out, barely a whisper. 'For me,' he swallowed.

If it wasn't so obviously hard for him to have said it, Ike would have refused. He would have set his rifle in one corner and shoved his ruck into the room and stripped his encrusted ninjas off and walked naked from the Rangers and their Army forever. But Branch had just done what Branch never did. And because this man who had saved his life and nurtured him back to sanity and been like a father to him had laid his pride in the dirt before Ike's feet, Ike did what he had sworn never to do again. He submitted.

'So where do I go?' he asked.

Both of them tried to ignore Branch's happiness.

'You won't regret it,' Branch promised.

'Sounds like a hanging,' Ike cracked without a smile.

Washington DC

Midway up the escalator as steep as an Aztec staircase, Ike could take no more. It was not just the unbearable light. His journey from the earth's bowels had become a gruesome siege. His senses were in havoc. The world seemed inside out.

Now as the stainless-steel escalator rose to ground zero and the howl of traffic poured down, Ike clung to the rubber handrail. At the top, he was belched onto a city sidewalk. The crowd jostled and drove him farther away from the Metro entrance. Ike was carried by noises and accidental nudges into the middle of Independence Avenue.

Ike had known vertigo in his day, but never anything like this. The sky plummeted overhead. The boulevard spilled every which way. Nauseated, he staggered into a blare of car horns. He fought the terrifying sense of open space. Through a tiny aperture of tunnel vision, he struggled to a wall bathed in sunlight.

'Get off, you,' a Hindi accent scolded him. Then the shopkeeper saw his face and retreated back inside.

Ike laid his cheek against the brick. 'Eighteenth and C streets,' he begged a passerby. It was a woman in heels. Her staccato abruptly hurried in a wide arc around him. Ike forced himself away from the wall.

Across the street, he began the awful climb up a hillock girdled by American flags at

full mast. He lifted his head to find the Washington Monument gutting the sheer blue belly of day. It was the cherry blossom season, that was evident. He could barely breathe for the pollen.

A flock of clouds drifted overhead, gave mercy, then vanished. The sunlight was terrible. He moved on, flesh hot. Tulips shattered his vision with their musket fire of brilliant colors. The gym bag in his hand – his sole luggage – grew heavy. He was panting for air, and that stung his old pride, a Himalayan mountaineer in such a state at sea level.

Eyes squeezed tight behind his dark glacier glasses, Ike retreated to an alley with shade. At last the sun sank. His nausea lifted. He could bare his eyes. He roamed the darkest parts of the city by moonlight, urgent as a fugitive.

No prowling for him. He raced pell-mell. This was his first night aboveground since he was snowbound in Tibet long ago. No time to eat. Sleep could wait. There was everything to see.

Like a tourist with the thighs of an Olympic sprinter, he plunged tirelessly. There were ghettos and Parisian boulevards and bright restaurant districts and august gated embassies. Those he dodged, holding to the emptier places.

The night was gorgeous. Even dimmed by urban lights, the stars sprayed overhead. He breathed the brackish tidal air. Trees were budding.

It was April, all right. And yet, as he hurtled across the grass and pavement and leaped over fences and dodged cars, Ike felt only November in his soul. The night's very mercy condemned him. He was not long for this world, he knew. And so he memorized the moon and the marshes and the ganged oaks and the braid of currents on the slow Potomac.

He did not mean to, but he came upon the National Cathedral atop a lawned hill. It was like falling into the Dark Ages. An entrenched mob of thousands of faithful occupied the grounds, their squalid tent city unlit except for candles or lanterns. Ike hesitated, then went forward. It was obvious that families and whole congregations had come here and were living side by side with the poor and insane and sick and addicted.

Flying buttresses dangled huge Crusade-like banners with a red cross, and the twin Gothic towers flickered in the cast of great bonfires. There wasn't a cop in sight. It was as if the cathedral had been relinquished to the true believers. Peddlers hawked crucifixes, New Age angels, blue-green algae pills, Native American jewelry, animal parts, bullets sprinkled with holy water, and round-trip air travel to Jerusalem on charter jets.

A militia was signing up volunteers – 'muscular Christians' for guerrilla strikes on hell. The muster table was piled with literature and Soldier of Fortune magazines, and manned by frauds with Gold's Gym biceps and expensive guns. A cheap training video showed Sunday-school flames and actors made up as damned souls pleading for help.

Right beside the TV stood a woman missing one arm and both her breasts, naked to the waist, daring them with her scars like glory. Her accent was Pentecostal, maybe Louisiana, and in her one hand she held a poisonous snake. 'I was a captive of the devils,' she was testifying. 'But I was rescued. Only me, though, not my poor children, nor all the other good Christians down deeper in the House. Good Christians in need of righteous salvation. Go down, you brothers with strong arms. Bring up the weak. Carry the light of the Lord into that Stygian dark. Take the spirit of Jesus, and of the Father, and the Holy Spirit....'

Ike backed away. How much was that snake woman being paid to show her flesh and proselytize and recruit these gullible men? Her wounds looked suspiciously like surgery scars, possibly from a double mastectomy. Regardless, she did not speak like a former captive. She was too certain of herself.

To be sure, there were human captives among the hadals. But they were not necessarily in need of rescue. The ones Ike had seen, the ones who had survived for any length of time among the hadals, tended to sound like a sum of zero. But once you'd been there, limbo could mean a kind of asylum from your own responsibilities. It was heresy to speak aloud, especially among liberty-preaching patriots like these tonight, but Ike himself had felt the forbidden rapture of losing himself to another creature's authority.

Ike made his way up the steps dense with humanity and entered the medieval transept. There were touches of the twentieth century: the floor was inlaid with state seals, and one stained-glass window bore the image of astronauts on the moon. Otherwise he might have been passing through the crest of a Black Plague. The air was filled with smoke and incense and the smell of unwashed bodies and rotten fruit, and the stone walls echoed with prayers. Ike heard the Confiteor blend with the Kaddish. Appeals to Allah mixed with Appalachian hymns. Preachers railed about the Second Coming, the Age of Aquarius, the One True God, angels. The petition was general. The millennium wasn't turning out to be much fun, it seemed.

Before dawn, mindful of his debt to Branch, he returned to 18th and C streets, Northwest, where he had been told to report. He sat at one end of the granite steps and waited for nine o'clock. Despite his premonitions, Ike told himself there could be no turning back. His honor had come down to a matter of the mercy of strangers.

The sun arrived slowly, advancing down the canyon of office buildings like an imperial march. Ike watched his footprints melt in the lawn's frost. His heart sank at the erasure.

An overwhelming sadness swept him, a sense of deep betrayal. What right did he have to come back into the World? What right did the World have to come back into him? Suddenly his being here, trying to explain himself to strangers, seemed like a terrible indiscretion. Why give himself away? What if they judged him guilty?

For an instant, in his mind a small lifetime, he was returned to his captivity. It had no single image. A great howl. The feel of a mortally exhausted man's bones hard against his shoulder. The odor of minerals. And chains... like the edge of music, never quite in rhythm, never quite song. Would they do that to him again? Run, he thought.

'I didn't think you'd be here,' a voice spoke to him. 'I thought they would need to hunt you down.'

Ike glanced up. A very wide man, perhaps fifty years old, was standing on the sidewalk in front of him. Despite the neat jeans and a designer parka, his carriage said military. Ike squinted left and right, but they were alone. 'You're the lawyer?' he asked.

'Lawyer?'

Ike was confused. Did the man know him or not? 'For the court-martial. I don't know what you're called. My advocate?'

The man nodded, understanding now. 'Sure, you might call me that.'

Ike stood. 'Let's get it over with, then,' he said. He was full of dread, but saw no alternative to what was in motion.

The man seemed bemused. 'Haven't you noticed the empty streets? There's no one around. The buildings are all closed. It's Sunday.'

'Then what are we doing here?' he asked. It sounded foolish to him. Lost.

'Taking care of business.'

Ike coiled inside himself. Something wasn't right. Branch had told him to report here, at this time. 'You're not my lawyer.'

'My name is Sandwell.'

Ike could not fill the man's pause with any recognition. When the man realized Ike had never heard of him, he smiled with something like sympathy.

'I commanded your friend Branch for a time,' Sandwell said. 'It was in Bosnia, before

his accident, before he changed. He was a decent man.' He added, 'I doubt that changed.'

Ike agreed. Some things did not change.

'I heard about your troubles,' Sandwell said. 'I've read your file. You've served us well over the past three years. Everyone sings your praises. Tracker. Scout. Hunter-killer. Once Branch got you tamed, we've made good use of you. And you've made good use of us, gotten your pound of flesh back from Haddie, haven't you?'

Ike waited. Sandwell's 'us' gave an impression that he was still active with the military. But something about him – not his country laird's clothes, but something in his manner – suggested he had other meat on his plate, too.

Ike's silences were starting to annoy Sandwell. Ike could tell, because the next question was meant to put him on the spot. 'You were piloting slaves when Branch found you. Isn't that correct? You were a kapo. A warder. You were one of them.'

'Whatever you want to call it,' Ike said. It was like slapping a rock to accuse him of his past.

'Your answer matters. Did you cross over to the hadals, or didn't you?'

Sandwell was wrong. It didn't matter what Ike said. In his experience, people made their own judgments, regardless of the truth, even when the truth was clear.

'This is why people can never trust you recaptures,' Sandwell said. 'I've read enough psych evaluations. You're like twilight animals. You live between worlds, between light and darkness. No right or wrong. Mildly psychotic at best. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been folly for the military to rely on people like you in the field.'

Ike knew the fear and contempt. Precious few humans had been repossessed from hadal captivity, and most went straight into padded cells. A few dozen had been rehabbed and put to work, mostly as seeing-eye dogs for miners and religious colonies.

'I don't like you, is my point,' Sandwell continued. 'But I don't believe you went AWOL eighteen months ago. I read Branch's report of the siege at Albuquerque 10. I believe you went behind enemy lines. But it wasn't some grand act, to save your comrades in the camp. It was to kill the ones that did this to you.' Sandwell gestured at the markings and scars on Ike's face and hands. 'Hate makes sense to me.'

Since Sandwell appeared so satisfied, Ike did not contradict him. It was the automatic assumption that he led soldiers against his former captor for the revenge. Ike had quit trying to explain that to him the Army was a captor, too. Hate didn't enter the equation at all. It couldn't, or he would have destroyed himself long ago. Curiosity, that was his fire.

Unawares, Ike had edged from the creep of sunbeams. He saw Sandwell looking. Ike caught himself, stopped.

'You don't belong up here.' Sandwell smiled. 'I think you know that.'

This guy was a regular Welcome Wagon. 'I'll leave the minute they let me. I came to clear my name. Then it's back to work.'

'You sound like Branch. But it's not that simple, Ike. This is a hanging court. The hadal threat is over. They're gone.'

'Don't be so sure.'

'Everything is perception. People want the dragon to be slain. What that means is we don't have any more need for the misfits and rebels. We don't need the trouble and embarrassment and worry. You scare us. You look like them. We don't want the reminder. A year or two ago, the court would have considered your talents and value in the field. These days they want a tight ship. Discipline. Order.'

Sandwell kept the fascism casual. 'In short, you're dead. Don't take it personally. Yours isn't the only court-martial. The armies are about to purge the ranks of all the rawness and unpleasantry. You repos are finished. The scouts and guerrillas go. It

happens at the end of every war. Spring cleaning.'

Dixie cups. Branch's words echoed. He must have known about, or sensed, this coming purge. These were simple truths. But Ike was not ready to hear them. He felt hurt, and it was a revelation that he could feel anything at all.

'Branch talked you into throwing yourself on the mercy of the court,' Sandwell stated.

'What else did he tell you?' Ike felt as weightless as a dead leaf.

'Branch? We haven't spoken since Bosnia. I arranged this little discussion through one of my aides. Branch thinks you're meeting an attorney who's a friend of a friend. A fixer.'

Why the duplicity? Ike wondered.

'It takes no great stretch of the imagination,' Sandwell went on. 'Why else would you put yourself through this, if not for mercy? As I've said, it's beyond that. They've already decided your case.'

His tone – not derisive but unsentimental – told Ike there was no hope. He didn't waste time asking the verdict. He simply asked what the punishment was.

'Twelve years,' Sandwell said. 'Brig time. Leavenworth.'

Ike felt the sky coming to pieces overhead. Don't think, he warned himself. Don't feel. But the sun rose and strangled him with his own shadow. His dark image lay broken on the steps beneath him.

He was aware of Sandwell watching him patiently. 'You came here to see me bleed?'

he ventured.

'I came to give you a chance.' Sandwell handed him a business card. It bore the name Montgomery Shoat. There was no title or address. 'Call this man. He has work for you.'

'What kind of work?'

'Mr Shoat can tell you himself. The important thing is that it will take you deeper than the reach of any law. There are zones where extradition doesn't exist. They won't be able to touch you, down that far. But you need to act immediately.'

'You work for him?' Ike asked. Slow this thing down, he was telling himself. Find its footprints, backtrack a bit, get some origin. Sandwell gave nothing.

'I was asked to find someone with certain qualifications. It was pure luck to find you in such delicate straits.' That was information of a kind. It told him that Sandwell and Shoat were up to something illicit or oblique, or maybe just unhealthy, but something that needed the anonymity of a Sunday morning for its introduction.

'You've kept this from Branch,' Ike said. He didn't like that. It wasn't an issue of having Branch's permission, but of a promise. Running away would seal the Army out of his life forever.

Sandwell was unapologetic. 'You need to be careful,' he said. 'If you decide to do this, they'll mount a search for you. And the first people they'll interrogate are the ones closest to you. My advice: Don't compromise them. Don't call Branch. He's got enough problems.'

'I should just disappear?'

Sandwell smiled. 'You never really existed anyway,' he said.

There is nothing more powerful than this attraction toward an abyss.

– JULES VERNE, Journey to the Center of the Earth

7

THE MISSION

Manhattan

Ali entered in sandals and a sundress, as if they were a magic spell to hold back the winter. The guard ticked her name off a list and complained she was early and without her party, but passed her through the station. He gave some rapid-fire directions. Then she was alone, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to herself.

It was like being the last person on earth. Ali paused by a small Picasso. A vast Bierstadt Yellowstone. Then she came to a banner for the main exhibit declaring THE HARVEST OF HELL. The subtitle read 'Twice Reaped Art.' Devoted to artifacts of the underworld, most of the exhibit's objects had been brought back to the surface by GIs and miners. All but a few had been stolen from humans and brought into the subplanet to begin with, thus 'twice reaped.'

Ali had come well ahead of her engagement with January, in part to enjoy the building, but mostly to see for herself what Homo hadalis was capable of. Or, in this case, what he was not capable of. The show's gist was this: H. hadalis was a man-sized packrat. The creatures of the subplanet had been plundering human inventions for eons. From ancient pottery to plastic Coke bottles, from voodoo fetishes to Han Dynasty ceramic tigers, to an Archimedean-type water screw, to a sculpture by Michelangelo long thought destroyed.

Among the artifacts made by humans were several made from them. She came to the notorious 'Beachball' made of different-colored human skins. No one knew its purpose, but the sac – once inflated, now fossilized as a perfect sphere – was especially offensive to people because it so coldly exploited the races as mere fabric.

By far the most intriguing artifact was a chunk of rock that had been pried from some subterranean wall. It was inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphics that verged on calligraphy. Obviously, because it was included in this 'twice reaped' display, the curators had judged it to be human graffiti that had been taken down into the abyss. But as Ali stood pondering the slab of rock, she wondered. It did not look like any writing she had ever seen.

A voice found her. 'There you are, child.'

'Rebecca?' she said, and turned.

The woman facing her was like a stranger. January had always been invincible, an Amazon with that ample embrace and taut black skin. This person looked deflated, suddenly old. With one hand locked upon her cane, the senator could only open one arm to her. Ali swiftly bent to hug her, and felt the ribs in her back.

'Oh, child,' January whispered happily, and Ali laid her cheek against the hair cropped short and gone white. She breathed in the smell of her.

'The guards told us you've been here an hour,' January said, then spoke to a tall man who had trailed behind her. 'Isn't it what I predicted, Thomas? Always charging out ahead of the cavalry, ever since she was a child. It's not for nothing they called her Mustang Ali. She was a legend in Kerr County. And you see how beautiful she is?'

'Rebecca,' Ali rebuked her. January was the most modest woman on earth, yet the

worst braggart. Childless herself, she had adopted several orphans over the years, and they had all learned to endure these explosions of pride.

'Oblivious, I'm telling you,' January went on. 'Never looked in a mirror. And when she entered the convent, it was a dark day. Strong Texas boys, she had them weeping like widows under a Goliad moon.' And January, too, Ali recalled of that day. She had wept while she drove, apologizing again and again for not understanding Ali's calling. The truth was that Ali no longer understood it herself.

Thomas stayed out of it. For the moment, this was the reunion of two women, and he kept himself incidental. Ali acquired him with a single glance. He was a tall, rangy man in his late sixties, with a scholar's eyes and yet a hard-beaten frame. He was unfamiliar to Ali, and though he was not wearing a collar, she knew he was a Jesuit: she had a sense for them. Perhaps it was their shared oddity.

'You must forgive me, Ali,' January said. 'I told you this would be a private meeting. But I've brought some friends. Of necessity.'

Now Ali saw two more people circulating through the far end of the exhibit, a slight blind man attended by a large younger man. Several more elderly people entered a far door.

'Blame me, this was my doing.' Thomas offered his hand. Apparently, Ali's reunion was at an end. She had thought the entire day belonged to her and January, but there was business looming. 'I've wanted to meet you, more than you know. Especially now, before you started out for the Arabian sands.'

'Your sabbatical,' the senator said. 'I didn't think you'd mind my telling.'

'Saudi Arabia,' Thomas added. 'Not the most comfortable place for a young woman these days. The sharia is in full enforcement since the fundamentalists took over and slaughtered the royal family. I don't envy you, a full year draped in abaya.'

'I'm not thrilled with the prospect of being dressed like a nun,' Ali agreed.

January laughed. 'I'll never understand you,' she said to Ali. 'They give you a year off, and back you go to your deserts.'

'But I know the feeling,' Thomas said. 'You must be eager to see the glyphs.' Ali grew more wary. This was not something she had written or told to January. To January, Thomas explained, 'The southern regions near Yemen are especially rich. Proto-Semitic pictograms from the Saudis' ahl al-jahiliya, their Age of Ignorance.'

Ali shrugged as if it were common enough knowledge, but her radar was up now. The Jesuit knew things about her. What more? Could he know of her other reason for this year away, the step back she had taken from her final vows? It was a hesitation the order took seriously, and the desert was as much a stage for her faith as for her science. She wondered if the mother superior had sent this man covertly to guide her, then dismissed the thought. They would never dare. It was her choice to make, not some Jesuit's.

Thomas seemed to read her misgivings. 'You see, I've followed your career,' he said.

'I've dabbled in the anthropology of linguistics myself. Your work on Neolithic inscriptions and mother languages is – how to put this? – elegant beyond your years.' He was being careful not to flatter her, which was wise. She was not easily courted.

'I've read everything I could find by you,' he said. 'Daring stuff, especially for an American. Most of the protolanguage work is being done by Russian Jews in Israel. Eccentrics with nowhere to go. But you're young and have opportunities everywhere, yet still you choose this radical inquiry. The beginning of language.'

'Why do people see it as so radical?' Ali asked. He had spoken to her heart. 'By finding our way back to the first words, we reach back to our own genesis. It takes us that much closer to the voice of God.'

There, she thought. In all its naïveté. The core of her search, mind and soul. Thomas seemed deeply satisfied. Not that she needed to satisfy him.

'Tell me, as a professional,' he asked, 'what do you make of this exhibit?'

She was being tested, and January was in on it. Ali went along with them for the moment, cautiously. 'I'm a little surprised,' she ventured, 'by their taste for sacred relics.' She pointed at strands of prayer beads originally from Tibet, China, Sierra Leone, Peru, Byzantium, Viking Denmark, and Palestine. Next to them was a display case with crucifixes and calligrams and chalices made of gold and silver. 'Who would think they'd collect such exquisitely delicate work? This is more what I would expect.' She passed a suit of twelfth-century Mongolian armor, pierced and still stained with blood. Elsewhere there were brutally used weapons and armor, and devices of torture... though the display literature reminded viewers that the devices had been human to begin with.

They stopped in front of a blow-up of the famous photo of a hadal about to destroy an early reconnaissance robot with a club. It represented modern mankind's first public contact with 'them,' one of those events people remember ever after by where they were standing or what they were doing at the moment. The creature looked berserk and demonic, with hornlike growths on his albino skull.

'The pity is,' Ali said, 'we may never know who the hadals really were before it's too late.'

'It may already be too late,' January offered.

'I don't believe that,' Ali said.

Thomas and January traded a look. He made up his mind. 'I wonder if we might discuss a certain matter with you,' he said. Immediately, Ali knew this was the purpose of her entire visit to New York, which January had arranged and paid for.

'We belong to a society,' January now started to explain. 'Thomas has been collecting us from around the world for years. We call ourselves the Beowulf Circle. It is quite informal, and our meetings are infrequent. We come together at various places to share our revelations with one another and to –'

Before she could say more, a guard barked, 'Put that down.'

There was a sudden commotion as guards rushed down. At the center of their alarm were two of those people who had come in behind Thomas and January. It was the younger man with long hair. He was hefting an iron sword from one of the displays.

'It is for me,' his blind companion apologized, and accepted the heavy sword into his open palms. 'I asked my companion, Santos –'

'It's all right, gentlemen,' January told the guards. 'Dr. de l'Orme is a renowned specialist.'

'Bernard de l'Orme?' Ali whispered. He had parted jungles and rivers to uncover sites throughout Asia. Reading about him, she had always thought of him as a physical giant.

Unconcerned, de l'Orme went on touching the early Saxon blade and leather-wrapped handle, seeing it with his fingertips. He smelled the leather, licked the iron.

'Marvelous,' he pronounced.

'What are you doing?' January asked him.

'Remembering a story,' he answered. 'An Argentine poet once told of two gauchos who entered a deadly knife fight because the knife itself compelled them.'

The blind man held up the ancient sword used by man and his demon both. 'I was just wondering about the memory of iron,' he said.

'My friends,' Thomas welcomed his sleuths, 'we should begin.'

Ali watched them materialize from the darkened library stacks. Suddenly, Ali felt only half dressed. In Vatican City, winter was still scourging the brick streets with sleet. By contrast, her little Christmas holiday in New York City was feeling downright Roman, as balmy as late summer. But her sundress served to emphasize these old people's fragility, for they were cold despite the warmth outside. Some wore

fashionable ski parkas, while others shivered in layers of wool or tweed.

They gathered around a table made of English oak, cut and polished before the era of great cathedrals. It had survived wars and terrors, kings, popes, and bourgeoisie, and even researchers. The walls were massed with nautical charts drawn before America was a word.

Here was the set of gleaming instruments Captain Bligh had used to guide his castaways back to civilization. A glass case held a stick-and-shell map used by Micronesian fishermen to follow ocean currents between islands. In the corner stood the complicated Ptolemaic astrolabe that had been used in Galileo's inquisition. Columbus's map of the New World occupied a corner of one wall, raw, exotic; painted upon a sheepskin, its legs used to indicate the cardinal directions.

There was also a large blow-up of Bud Parsifal's famous snapshot from the moon showing the great blue pearl in space. Rather immodestly, the former astronaut took a position immediately beneath his photo, and Ali recognized him. January stayed by her side, now and then whispering names, and Ali was grateful for her presence.

As they seated themselves, the door opened and a final addition limped in. Ali at first thought he was a hadal. He had melted plastic for skin, it seemed. Darkened ski goggles were strapped to his misshapen head, sealing out the room light. The sight startled her, and she recoiled, never having seen a hadal, alive or dead. He took the chair next to her, and she could hear him panting heavily.

'I didn't think you were going to make it,' January said to him across Ali.

'A little trouble with my stomach,' he replied. 'The water, maybe. It always takes me a few weeks to adjust.'

He was human, Ali realized. His shortness of breath was a common symptom of veterans freshly returning to higher altitudes. She'd never seen one so physically marauded by the depths.

'Ali, meet Major Branch. He's something of a secret. He's with the Army, sort of an informal liaison with us. An old friend. I found him in a military hospital years ago.'

'Sometimes I think you should have left me there,' he bantered, and offered his hand to Ali. 'Elias will do.' He grimaced at her, then she saw it was a smile – without lips. The hand was like a rock. Despite the bull-like muscles, it was impossible to tell his age. Fire and wounds had erased the normal landmarks.

Besides Thomas and January, Ali counted eleven of them, including de l'Orme's protégé, Santos. Except for her and Santos and this character beside her, they were old. All told, they combined almost seven hundred years of life experience and genius

– not to mention a working memory of all recorded history. They were venerable, if somewhat forgotten. Most had left the universities or companies or governments where they had distinguished themselves. Their awards and reputations were no longer useful. Nowadays they lived lives of the mind, helped along by their daily medicines. Their bones were brittle.

The Beowulf Circle was a strange gang of paladins. Ali surveyed the chilly bunch, placing faces, remembering names. With little overlap, they represented more disciplines than most universities had colleges to contain.

Again, Ali wished for something besides this sundress. It hung upon her like an albatross. Her long hair tickled her spine. She could feel her body beneath the cloth.

'You might have told us you would be taking us from our families,' grumbled a man whose face Ali knew from old Time magazines. Desmond Lynch, the medievalist and peacenik. He had earned a Nobel Prize for his 1952 biography of Duns Scotus, the thirteenth-century philosopher, then had used the prize as a bully pulpit to condemn everything from the McCarthy witch-hunts to the Bomb and, later, the war in Vietnam. Ancient history. 'So far from home,' he said. 'Into such weather. And at Christmas!'

Thomas smiled at him. 'Is it so bad?'

Lynch made himself look deadly behind his briarwood cane. 'Don't be taking us for granted,' he warned.

'You have my oath on that,' said Thomas more soberly. 'I'm old enough not to take one heartbeat for granted.'

They were listening, all of them. Thomas moved from face to face around the table.

'If the moment were not so critical,' he said, 'I would never trespass upon you with a mission so dangerous. But it is. And I must. And so we are here.'

'But here?' a tiny woman asked from a child's wheelchair. 'And in this season? It does seem so... un-Christian of you, Father.'

Vera Wallach, Ali recalled. The New Zealand physician. She had singlehandedly defeated the Church and banana republicans in Nicaragua, introducing birth control during the Sandinista revolution. She had faced bayonets and crucifixes, and still managed to bring her sacrament to the poor: condoms.

'Yes,' growled a thin man. 'The hour is godforsaken. Why now?' He was Hoaks, the mathematician. Ali had noticed him toying with a map that inverted the continental shelves and gave a view of the surface from inside the globe.

'But it's always this way,' said January, countering the ill humor. 'It's Thomas's way of imposing his mysteries on us.'

'It could be worse,' commented Rau, the untouchable, another Nobel winner. Born to the lowest caste in Uttar Pradesh, he had still managed the climb to India's lower house of Parliament. There he had served as his party's speaker for many years. Later, Ali would learn, Rau had been on the verge of renouncing the world, shedding his clothes and name, and throwing himself onto the pathway of saddhus living day to day by gifts of rice.

Thomas gave them several more minutes to greet one another and curse him. In whispers to Ali, January went on describing various characters. There was the Alexandrian, Mustafah, of a Coptic family that extended on his mother's side to Caesars. Though Christian, he was an expert on sharia, or Islamic law, one of the few to ever be able to explain it to westerners. Saddled with emphysema, he could speak only in short bursts.

Across the table sat an industrialist named Foley, who had made several side fortunes, one in penicillin during the Korean War, another in the blood and plasma industry, before going on to 'dabble' in civil rights and underwrite numerous martyrs. He was arguing with the astronaut Bud Parsifal. Ali recollected his tale: after teeing off on the moon, Parsifal had gone searching for Noah's Ark upon Mount Ararat, discovered geological evidence of the Red Sea parting, and pursued a legion of other crazy riddles. Clearly the Beowulf Circle was a crew of misfits and anarchists.

Finally they had gone full circle. It was Thomas's turn. 'I am lucky to have such friends,' he said to her. Ali was astonished. The others were listening, but his words were for her. 'Such souls. Over many years, during my travels, I've enjoyed their company. Each of them has labored to bend mankind away from its most destructive ideas. Their reward' – he wryly smiled – 'has been this calling.'

He used that word, calling. It was no coincidence. Somehow he had learned that this nun was faltering in her vows. The calling had not faded, but changed.

'We've lived long enough to recognize that evil is real, and not accidental,' Thomas went on. 'And over the years we've attempted to address it. We've done this by supporting one another, and by joining our various powers and observations. It's that simple.'

It sounded too simple. In their spare time, these old people fought evil.

'Our greatest weapon has always been scholarship,' Thomas added.

'You're an academic society, then,' Ali stated.

'Oh, more like a round table of knights,' Thomas said. There were a few smiles. 'I

wish to find Satan, you see.' His eyes met Ali's, and she saw that he was serious. They

all were.

Ali couldn't help herself. 'The Devil?' This group of Nobel laureates and scholars had made evil incarnate into a game of hide-and-seek.

'The Devil,' Mustafah, the Egyptian, wheezed. 'That old wives' tale.'

'Satan,' January corrected, for Ali's benefit.

They were all concentrating on Ali now. No one questioned her presence among them, which suggested she was already well known to them. Now Thomas's recitation of her Saudi plans and the pre-Islamic glyphs and her protolanguage quest took on force. These people had been studying her. She was getting head-hunted. What was going on here? Why had January brought her into this? 'Satan?' she said.

'Absolutely,' January affirmed. 'We're dedicated to the idea. The reality.'

'Which reality would that be?' Ali asked. 'The nightmarish demon of malnourished, sleep-deprived monks? Or the heroic rebel of Milton?'

'Hush,' said January. 'We may be old, but we're not silly. Satan is a catchall term. It gives identity to our theory of a centralized leadership. Call him what you want, a maximum leader, a caudillo. A Genghis Khan or Sitting Bull. Or a council of wise men, or warlords. The concept is sound. Logical.'

Ali retreated into silence.

'It's a word, no more, a name,' Thomas said to her. 'The term Satan signifies a historical character. A missing link between our fairy tale of hell and the geological fact of it. Think about it. If there can be a historical Christ, why not a historical Satan? Consider hell. Recent history tells us that the fairy tales had it all wrong, and yet right. The underworld is not full of dead souls and demons, yet it has human captives and an indigenous population that was – until recently – savagely defending its territory. Now, despite thousands and thousands of years of being damned and demonized in human folklore, the hadals seem very much like us. They have a written language, you know,' he said. 'At least they did, once upon a time. The ruins suggest they had a remarkable civilization. They may even have souls.'

Ali couldn't believe a priest was saying such things. Human rights were one thing; the ability to know grace was something entirely different. Even if the hadals proved to have some genetic link with humans, their capacity for souls was theologically unlikely. The Church did not acknowledge souls in animals, not even among the higher primates. Only man qualified for salvation. 'Let me understand,' she said. 'You're looking for a creature named Satan?'

No one denied it.

'But why?'

'Peace,' said Lynch. 'If he is a great leader, and if we can come to understand him, we may forge a lasting peace.'

'Knowledge,' said Rau. 'Think what he might know, where he might lead us.'

'And if he's merely the equivalent of an ancient war criminal,' said the soldier Elias,

'then we can seek justice. And punishment.'

'One way or another,' said January, 'we're striving to bring light to the darkness. Or darkness to the light.'

It sounded so naïve. So youthful. So seductive and abundant with hope. Almost, thought Ali, plausible – hypothetically. And yet, a Nuremberg trial for the king of hell? Then she saddened. Of course they would be attracted to tilting at windmills. Thomas had drawn them back into the world, just as they were dying out from it.

'And how do you propose to find this creature – being, entity – whatever he is?' she asked. It was meant to be a rhetorical question. 'What chance do you have of finding an individual fugitive when the armies can't seem to find any hadals at all? I keep hearing that they may even be extinct.'

'You're skeptical,' Vera said. 'We wouldn't have it any other way. Your skepticism is crucial. You'd be useless to us without it. Believe me, we were just like you when

Thomas first presented his idea. But here we are, years later, still coming together when Thomas calls.'

Thomas spoke. 'You asked how do we hope to locate the historical Satan? Like reaching into mud, we must feel around and then pull him loose.'

'Scholarship,' said the mathematician Hoaks. 'By revisiting excavations and reexamining the evidence, we compile a more careful picture. Like a behavioral profile.'

'I call it a unified theory of Satan,' said Foley. He had a businessman's mind, given to strategy and output. 'Some of us visit libraries or archaeological sites or science centers around the world. Others conduct interviews, debrief survivors, cultivate leads. In this way we hope to outline psychological patterns and identify any weaknesses that might be useful in a summit conference. Who knows, we may even be able to construct a physical description of the creature.'

'It sounds like such... an adventure,' said Ali. She didn't want to offend anyone.

'Look at me,' Thomas said. There was a trick of light. Something. Suddenly he seemed a thousand years old. 'He's down there. Year after year, I've failed to locate him. We can no longer afford that.'

Ali wavered.

'That's the dilemma,' said de l'Orme. 'Life's too short for doubt, and yet too long for faith.'

Ali recalled his excommunication, and guessed it had been excruciating.

'Our problem is that Satan hides in plain view,' de l'Orme said. 'He always has. He hides within our reality. Even our virtual reality. The trick, we're learning, is to enter the illusion. In that way, we hope to find him out. Would you please show Mademoiselle von Schade our little photo?' he asked his assistant.

Santos spread out a long roll of glossy Kodak paper. It showed an image of an old map. Ali had to stand to see its details. Most of the group gathered around.

'The others have had the benefit of several weeks to examine this photo,' de l'Orme explained. 'It's a route map known as the Peutinger Table. Twenty-one feet long by one foot high in the original. It details a medieval network of roads seventy thousand miles long that ran from the British Isles to India. Along the road were stage stops, spas, bridges, rivers, and seas. Latitude and longitude were irrelevant. The road itself was everything.'

The archaeologist paused. 'I had asked you all to try to find anything out of the ordinary on the photo. I particularly directed your attention to the Latin phrase 'Here be dragons,' midcenter on the map. Did anyone notice anything unusual in that region?'

'It's seven-thirty in the morning,' someone said. 'Please teach us our lesson so we may eat our breakfast.'

'If you please,' de l'Orme said to his aide.

Santos lifted a wooden box onto the table, brought out from it a thick scroll, and began to unroll it delicately. 'Here is the original table,' said de l'Orme. 'It is housed here in the museum.'

'This is why we were brought to New York?' complained Parsifal.

'Please, compare for yourselves,' said de l'Orme. 'As you can see, the photo duplicates the original at a scale of one-to-one. What I wish to demonstrate is that seeing is not believing. Santos?'

The young man drew on a pair of latex gloves, produced a surgical scalpel, and bent over the original.

'What are you doing?' an emaciated man squeaked in alarm. His name was Gault, and Ali would later learn that he was an encyclopedist of the old Diderot school, which believed that all things could be known and arranged alphabetically. 'That map is irreplaceable,' he protested.

'It's all right,' de l'Orme said. 'He's simply exposing an incision we've already made.' The excitement of an act of vandalism in front of their eyes woke them up. Everyone came close to the table. 'It is a secret the cartographer built into his map,' de l'Orme said. 'A well-kept secret. If not for a blind man's bare fingertips, it might never have been discovered. There is something quite wicked about our reverence for antiquity. We've come to treat the thing itself with such care that it has lost its original truth.'

'But what's this?' someone gasped.

Santos was inserting his scalpel into the parchment where the cartographer had painted a small forested mountain with a river issuing from its base.

'Because of my blindness, I'm allowed certain dispensations,' de l'Orme said. 'I touch things most other people may not. Several months ago, I felt a slight bump at this place on the map. We had the parchment X-rayed, and there seemed to be a ghost image underneath the pigment. At that point we performed surgery.'

Santos opened a tiny hidden door. The mountain lifted upon hinges made of thread. Underneath lay a crude but coherent dragon. Its claws embraced the letter B.

'The B stands for Beliar,' said de l'Orme. 'Latin for "Worthless." Another name for Satan. This was the manifestation of Satan concurrent with the making of the Peutinger Table. In the Gospel of Bartholomew, a third-century tract, Beliar is dragged up from the depths and interrogated. He gives an autobiography of the fallen angel.'

The scholars marveled at the mapmaker's ingenuity and craft. They congratulated de l'Orme on his detective work.

'This is insignificant. Trivial. The mountain on this doorway lies in the karst country of the former Yugoslavia. The river coming from its base is probably the Pivka, which emerges from a Slovenian cave known today as Postojna Jama.'

'The Postojna Jama?' Gault barked in recognition. 'But that was Dante's cave.'

'Yes,' said de l'Orme, and let Gault tell them himself.

'It's a large cave,' Gault explained. 'It became a famous tourist attraction in the thirteenth century. Nobles and landowners would tour with local guides. Dante visited while researching –'

'My God,' said Mustafah. 'For a thousand years the legend of Satan was located right here. But how can you call this trivial?'

'Because it leads us nowhere we've not already been,' said de l'Orme. 'The Postojna Jama is now a major portal for traffic going in and out of the abyss. The river has been dynamited. An asphalt road leads into the mouth. And the dragon has fled. For a thousand years this map told us where he once resided, or possibly where one of his doorways into the subplanet lay. But now Satan has gone elsewhere.'

Thomas took over again.

'Here before us is another example of why we can't stay in our homes, believing we know the truth. We must unlearn our instincts, even as we depend on them. We must put our hands on what is untouchable. Listen for his motion. He's out there, in old books and ruins and artifacts. Inside our language and dreams. And now, you see, the evidence will not come to us. We must go to it, wherever it is. Otherwise we're merely looking into mirrors of our own invention. Do you understand? We must learn his language. We must learn his dreams. And perhaps bring him into the family of man.' Thomas leaned on the table. It gave a slight groan beneath his weight. He looked at Ali. 'The truth is, we must go out into the world. We must risk everything. And we must not return without the prize.'

'Even if I believed in your historical Satan,' Ali said, 'it's not my fight.'

The meeting had adjourned. Hours had passed. The Beowulf scholars had gone off, leaving her alone with January and Thomas. She felt weary and electrified at the

same time, but tried to show only a smooth face. Thomas was a cipher to her. He was making her a cipher to herself.

'I agree,' Thomas replied. 'But your passion for the mother tongue helps us in our fight, you see. And so our interests marry.'

She glanced at January. Something was different in her eyes. Ali wanted an ally, but what she saw was obligation and urgency. 'What is it you want from me?'

What Thomas next told her went beyond daring. He was toying with a yellowed globe, and now let it spin to a halt. He pointed at the Galápagos Islands. 'Seven weeks from now, a science expedition is to be inserted through the Pacific floor into the Nazca Plate tunnel system. It will consist of roughly fifty scientists and researchers who have been recruited mostly from American universities and laboratories. For the next year, they'll be operating out of a state-of-the-art research institute based on the Woods Hole model. It's said to be located at a remote mining town. We're still working to learn which mining town, and if the science station even exists. Major Branch has been helpful, but even military intelligence can't make heads or tails out of why Helios is underwriting the project and what they're really up to.'

'Helios?' Ali said. 'The corporation?'

'It's actually a multinational cartel comprising dozens of major businesses, totally diversified,' January said. 'Arms manufacture to tampons to computers. Baby formula, real estate, car assembly plants, recycled plastics, publishing, plus television and film production, and an airline. They're untouchable. Now, thanks to their founder, C.C. Cooper, their agenda has taken a sharp turn. Downward into the subplanet.'

'The presidential candidate,' Ali said. 'You served in the Senate with him.'

'Mostly against him,' January said. 'He is a brilliant man. A true visionary. A closet fascist. And now a bitter and paranoid loser. His own party still blames him for the humiliation of that election. The Supreme Court eventually tossed out his charges of election fraud. As a result, he sincerely believes the world's out to get him.'

'I haven't heard a thing about him since his defeat,' said Ali.

'He quit the Senate and returned to Helios,' January said. 'We were sure that was the end of him, that Cooper would quietly go back to making money. Even the people who watch such things didn't notice for a while. C.C. was using shells and proxies and dummy corporations to snap up access rights and tunneling equipment and subsurface technology. He was cutting deals with governments of nine different Pacific Rim nations to joint-venture the drilling operations and provide labor, again hidden behind numerous layers. The result is that while we've been pacifying the regions underneath our cities and continents, Helios has gotten the jump on everyone else in suboceanic exploration and development.'

'I thought the colonization was under international auspices,' said Ali.

'It is,' said January, 'within the boundaries of international law. But international law hasn't caught up with nonsovereign territories. Offshore, the law is still catching up with subterranean discoveries.'

'I didn't understand this either,' said Thomas. 'It turns out that subterranean territory beneath the oceans is still like the Wild West, subject to the whims of whoever occupies it. Recall the British tea company in India. The fur companies in North America. The American land companies in Texas. In the case of the Pacific Ocean, that means a huge expanse of country beyond international reach.'

'Which translates as opportunity for a man like C.C. Cooper,' said January. 'Today Helios owns more seafloor drill holes than any other entity, governmental or otherwise. They lead in hydroponic agricultural methods. They own the latest technology for enhanced communications through rock. Their labs have created new drugs to help them push the depths. They've approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago, as a mission

requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics. While the rest of the world's been tiptoeing into their planetary basements, Helios has spent billions on research and development, and is poised to exploit the frontier.'

'In other words,' Thomas said, 'Helios isn't sending these scientists down out of the goodness of its heart. The expedition is top-loaded with earth sciences and biology. The object of the expedition is to expand knowledge about the lithosphere and learn more about its resources and life-forms, especially those that can be exploited commercially for energy, metallurgy, medicine, and other practical uses. Helios has no interest in humanizing our perception of the hadals, and so the anthropology component is very small.'

At the mention of anthropology, Ali started. 'You want me to go? Down there?'

'We're much too old,' January said.

Ali was stunned. How could they ask such a thing of her? She had duties, plans, desires.

'You should know,' Thomas said to Ali, 'the senator didn't choose you. I did. I've been watching you for years, following your work. Your talents are exactly what we need.'

'But down there...' She had never conceived herself on such a journey. She hated the darkness. A year without sun?

'You would thrive,' said Thomas.

'You've been there,' Ali said. He spoke with such authority.

'No,' said Thomas. 'But I've traveled among the hadals by visiting their evidence in ruins and museums. My task has been complicated by eons of human superstition and ignorance. But if you go back far enough in the human record, there are glimpses of what the hadals were like thousands of years ago. Once upon a time they were more than these degraded, inbred creatures we reckon with today.'

Her pulse was hammering. She wanted not to be excited. 'You want me to locate the hadals' leader?'

'Not at all.'

'Then what?'

'Language is everything.'

'Decipher their writings? But only fragments exist.'

'Down there, I'm told, glyphs are abundant. Miners blow up whole galleries of them every day.'

Hadal glyphs! Where could this lead?

'A lot of people think the hadals have died off. That doesn't matter,' said January.

'We still have to live with what they were. And if they're merely in hiding somewhere, then we've got to know what they're capable of – not just their savagery, but the greatness they once aspired to. It's clear they were once civilized. And if the legend is true, they fell from their own grace. Why? Could such a fall be lying in wait for mankind?'

'Restore their ancient memory to us,' Thomas said to Ali. 'Do that, and we can truly know Satan.'

It came back to that, their king of hell.

'No one has managed to decode their writings,' Thomas said. 'It's a lost language, possibly – probably – lost even to these remnant creatures. They've forgotten their own glory. And you're the only person I can think of who might find the language locked within hadal hieroglyphics and script. Unlock that dead language, and we may have a chance to understand who they once were. Unlock that language, and you may just find the secret of your mother tongue.'

'All that said, I want to be perfectly clear.' January searched her face. 'You can say no, Ali.'

But of course she could not.

BOOK 2

INQUISITION

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?

– JOB 41:1

8

INTO THE STONE

The Galápagos Islands

June 08

It seemed the helicopter was bound west forever across the cobalt blue water, landless, stained red by the sunset. Night chased her across the infinite Pacific. Childishly, Ali wished they could stay ahead of the darkness.

The islands were all but covered with intricate scaffolding and decks, miles and miles of it, ten stories high in some places. Expecting amorphous lava piles, Ali was affronted by the neat geometry. They'd been busy out here. Nazca Depot – named for the geological plate it fed to – was nothing but a vast parking garage anchored on pylons. Supertankers floated alongside, mouths open, taking on small symmetrical mountains of raw ore conveyed by belts. Trucks hauled containers from one level to another.

The helicopter sliced between skeletal towers, landing briefly to disgorge Ali, who recoiled at the stench of gases curdling into mists. She had been forewarned. Nazca Depot was a work zone. There were barracks for workers, but no facilities, not even cots or a Coke machine, for passengers in transit. By chance, a man appeared on foot among the vehicles and noises. 'Excuse me,' Ali yelled above the roar of the helicopter.

'How do I get to Nine-Bay?'

The man's eyes ran down her long arms and legs, and he pointed with no enthusiasm. She dodged among the beams and diesel fumes, down three flights to reach a freight elevator with doors that opened up and down like jaws. Some wag had written 'Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate' over the gate, Dante's welcoming injunction in the original.

Ali got into the cage and pressed her number. She felt a strange sense of grief, but couldn't figure out why.

The cage released her onto a deck thronged with other passengers. There were hundreds of people down here, mostly men, all heading in one direction. Even with the sea breeze brooming through, the air was rank with their odor, a force in itself. In Israel and Ethiopia and the African bush, she had done her share of traveling among masses of soldiers and workers, and they smelled the same worldwide. It was the smell of aggression.

With loudspeakers hammering at them to queue, to present tickets, to show passports, Ali was swept into the current. 'Loaded weapons are not permitted. Violators will be disarmed and their weapons confiscated.' There was no mention of arrest or punishment. It was enough, then, that violators would be sent down without their guns.

The crowd bore her past a bulletin board fifty feet long. It was divided alphabetically, A-G, H-P, Q-Z. Thousands of messages had been pinned for others to find: equipment for sale, services for hire, dates and locations for rendezvous, E-mail addresses, curses. TRAVELER'S ADVISORY , a Red Cross sign warned. PREGNANT WOMEN ARE STRONGLY ADVISED AGAINST DESCENT. FETAL DAMAGE AND/OR DEATH DUE TO...'

A Department of Health poster listed a Hit Parade of the top twenty 'depth drugs' and their side effects. Ali wasn't pleased to find listed two of the drugs in her personal med kit. The last six weeks had been a whirlwind of preparation, with inoculations and Helios paperwork and physical training consuming every hour. Day by day, she was learning how little man really knew about life in the subplanet.

'Declare your explosives,' the loudspeaker boomed. 'All explosives must be clearly marked. All explosives must be shipped down Tunnel K. Violators will be...'

The crowd movement was peristaltic, full of muscular starts and stops. In contrast to Ali's daypack, normal luggage here tended toward metal cases and stenciled foot-lockers and hundred-pound duffel bags with bulletproof locks. Ali had never seen so many gun cases in her life. It looked like a convention of safari guides, with every variety of camouflage and body armor, bandolier, holster, and sheath. Body hair and neck veins were de rigueur. She was glad for their numbers, because some of the men frightened her with their glances.

In truth, she was frightening herself. She felt out of balance. This voyage was purely of her own volition, of course. All she had to do was stop walking and the journey could stop. But something was started here.

Passing through the security and passport and ticket checks, Ali neared a great edifice made of glistening steel. Rooted in solid black stone, the enormous steel and titanium and platinum gateway looked immovable. This was one of Nazca Depot's five elevator shafts connecting with the upper interior, three miles beneath their feet. The complex of shafts and vents had cost over $4 billion – and several hundred lives – to drill. As a public transportation project, it was no different from a new airport, say, or the American railway system a hundred and fifty years ago. It was meant to service colonization for decades to come.

Out of necessity, the press of soldiers, settlers, laborers, runaways, convicts, paupers, addicts, fanatics, and dreamers grew orderly, even mannerly. They realized at last that there was going to be room for everyone. Ali walked toward a bank of stainless-steel doors side by side. Three were already shut. A fourth closed slowly as

she drew near. The last stood open.

Ali headed for the farthest, least crowded entrance. Inside, the chamber was like a small amphitheater, with concentric rows of plastic seats descending toward an empty center. It was dark and cool, a relief from the press of hot bodies outside. She headed for the far side, opposite the door. After a minute her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and she chose a seat. Except for a man at the end of the row, she was temporarily alone. Ali set her daypack on the floor, took a deep breath, and let her muscles unwind.

The seat was ergonomic, with a curved spine rest and a harness that adjusted for your shoulders and snapped across your chest. Each seat had a fold-up table, a deep bin for possessions, and an oxygen mask. There was an LCD screen built into every seatback. Hers showed an altimeter reading of 0000 feet. The clock alternated between real time and their departure in minus-minutes. The elevator was scheduled to leave in twenty-four minutes. Muzak soothed the interim.

A tall curved window bordered the walkway above, much like an aquarium wall. Water lapped against the upper rim. Ali was about to walk up for a peek, then got sidetracked with a magazine nestled in the pocket beside her. It was called The Nazca News , and its cover bore an imaginative painting of a thin tube rising from a range of ocean-floor mountains, an artist's rendition of the Nazca Depot elevator shaft. The shaft looked fragile.

Ali tried reading. Her mind wouldn't focus. She felt barraged with details: G forces, compression rates, temperature zones. 'Ocean water reaches its coldest temperature

– 35 degrees – at 12,000 feet below the surface. Below that depth, it gradually heats. Water on the ocean floor averages 36.5 degrees.'

'Welcome to the moho,' a sidebar opened. 'Located at the edge of the East Pacific

Rise, Nazca Depot accesses the subplanet at a depth of just 3,066 fathoms.'

There were nuggets and sidebars scattered throughout. A quote from Albert Einstein: 'Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.' There was a table of residual gases and their effect on various human tissues. Another article featured Rock Vision^TM, which produced images of geologic anomalies hundreds of feet ahead of a mining face. Ali closed the magazine.

The back page advertised Helios, the winged sun on a black backdrop.

She noticed her neighbor. He was only a few seats away, but she could barely make out his silhouette in the dim light.

He was not looking at her, yet some instinct told Ali she was being observed. Faced forward, he was wearing dark goggles, the sort welders use. That made him a worker, she decided, then saw his camouflage pants. A soldier, she amended. The jawline was striking. His haircut – definitely self-inflicted – was atrocious.

She realized the man was delicately sniffing the air. He was smelling her.

Several figures appeared at the doorway, and the presence of more passengers emboldened her. 'Excuse me?' she challenged the man.

He faced her fully. The goggles were so darkly tinted and the lenses so scratched and small, she wondered how much of anything he could really see. A moment later, Ali discovered the markings on his face. Even in the dim light, she could tell the tattoos were not just ink printed into flesh. Whoever had decorated him had taken a knife to the task. His big cheekbones were incised and scarified. The rawness of it jolted her.

'Do you mind?' he asked, and came a seat closer. For a better smell? Ali wondered. She looked quickly at the doorway. More passengers were filing through.

'Speak up,' she snapped.

Unbelievably, the goggles were aimed at her chest. He even bent to improve his view. He seemed to squint, reckoning.

'What are you doing?' she demanded.

'It's been a long while,' he said. 'I used to know these things....'

His audacity astounded her. Any closer, and she'd lay her open palm across his face.

'What are those?' He was pointing right at her breasts.

'Are you for real?' Ali whispered.

He didn't react. It was as if he hadn't heard her. He went on wagging his fingertip.

'Bluebells?' he asked.

Ali drew into herself. He was examining her dress? 'Periwinkles,' she said, then doubted him again. His face was too monstrous. He had to be trespassing against her. And if he was not? She made a note to say a quick act of contrition some other time.

'That's what they are,' the man said to himself, then went back to his seat, and faced forward again.

Ali remembered a sweatshirt in her daypack, and put it on.

Now the chamber filled quickly. Several men took the seats between Ali and that stranger. When there were no more seats, the doors gently kissed shut. The LCD said seven minutes.

There was not another woman or child in the chamber. Ali was glad for her sweatshirt. Some were hyperventilating and eyeing the door, full of second thoughts. Several had a sedated slackness and looked at peace. Others clenched their hands or opened portable computers or scratched at crossword puzzles or huddled shoulder-to-shoulder for earnest scheming.

The man to her left had lowered a seatback tray and was quietly laying out two plastic syringes. One had a baby-blue cap over the needle, the other a pink cap. He held the baby-blue syringe up for her observation. 'Sylobane,' he said. 'It suppresses the retinal cones and magnifies your retinal rods. Achromatopsia. In plain English, it creates a supersensitivity to light. Night vision. Only problem is, once you start you have to keep doing it. Lots of soldiers with cataracts up top. Didn't keep up.'

'What about that one?' she asked.

'Bro,' he said. 'Russian steroid. For acclimation. The Soviets used to dose their soldiers with it in Afghanistan. Can't hurt, right?'

He held up a white pill. 'And this little angel's just to let me sleep.' He swallowed it. That sadness washed over her again, and suddenly she remembered. The sun! She had forgotten to get a final look at the sun. Too late now.

Ali felt a nudge at her right. 'Here, this is for you,' a slight man offered. He was holding out an orange. Ali accepted the gift with hesitant thanks.

'Thank that guy.' He pointed down the row to the stranger with tattoos. She leaned forward to get his attention, but the man didn't look at her.

Ali frowned at the orange. Was it a peace offering? A come-on? Did he mean for her to peel and eat it, or save it for later? Ali had the orphan's habit of attaching great meaning to gifts, especially simple gifts. But the more she contemplated it, the less this orange made sense to her.

'Well, I don't know what to do with this,' she complained quietly to her neighbor, the messenger. He looked up from a thick manual of computer codes, took a moment to recollect. 'It's an orange,' he said.

Far more than seemed right, it irritated her, the messenger's indifference, the idea of a gift, the fruit itself. Ali was keyed up, and knew it. She was frightened. For weeks her dreams had been filled with awful images of hell. She dreaded her own superstitions. With each step of the journey, she was certain her fears would ease. If only it weren't too late to change her mind! The temptation to retreat – to allow herself to be weak – was terrible. And prayer was not the crutch it had once been for her. That was concerning.

She was not the only anxious one. The chamber took on a moment-to-moment tension. Eyes met, then darted away. Men licked their lips, rubbed their whiskers, took bites at the air. She collected the tiny gestures into her own anxiety.

Ali wanted to put the orange down, but it would have rolled on the tray. The floor was too dirty. The orange had become a responsibility. She laid it in her lap, and its weight seemed too intimate. Following the instructions on the LCD, she buckled into the seat rig, and her fingers were trembling. She picked up the orange again and cupped her fingers around it and the trembling eased.

The wall display ticked down to three minutes.

As if signaled, the passengers began their final rites. A number of men tied rubber tubing around their biceps and gently slid needles into their veins. Those taking pills looked like birds swallowing worms. Ali heard a hissing sound, men sucking hard at aerosol dispensers. Others drank from small bottles. Each had his own compression ritual. All she had was this orange.

Its skin glistened in the darkness in her cupped hands. Light bent upon its color. Her focus changed. Suddenly it became a small round center of gravity for her.

A tiny chime sounded. Ali looked up just as the time display dissolved to zero. The chamber fell silent.

Ali felt a slight motion. The chamber slid backward on a track and stopped. She heard a metallic snap underfoot. Then the chamber moved down perhaps ten feet, stopped again, and there was another snap, this time overhead. They moved down again, stopped.

She knew from a diagram in The Nazca News what was happening. The chambers were coupling like freight cars, one atop another. Joined in that fashion, the entire assembly was about to be lowered upon a cushion of air, with no cables attached. She had no idea how the pods got hoisted back to the surface again. But with discoveries of vast new petroleum reserves in the bowels of the subplanet, energy was no longer an issue.

She craned to see through the big curved window. As they lowered one pod at a time, the window slowly acquired a view. The LCD said they were twenty feet underwater. The water turned dark turquoise, illuminated by spotlights. Then Ali saw the moon. Right through the water, a full white moon. It was the most beautiful sight. They dropped another twenty feet. The moon warped. It vanished. She held the round orange in her palms.

They dropped twenty feet more. The water turned darker. Ali peered through the window. Something was out there. Mantas. Giant manta rays were circling the shaft, drafting on strange muscular wings.

Twenty feet lower, the Plexiglas was replaced by solid metal. The window went black, a curved mirror. She looked down into her hands and breathed out. And suddenly her fear was gone. The center of gravity was right there, in her grasp. Could that be his gift? She looked down the row. The stranger had laid his head back against the chair. His goggles were lifted onto his forehead. His smile was small and contented. Sensing her, he turned his head. And gave her a wink.

They dropped. Plunged.

The initial surge of gravity made Ali grab for purchase. She grasped the armrests and slugged her head against the back of the seat. The sudden lightness set off biological alarms. Her nausea was instantaneous. A headache blossomed.

According to the LCD, they didn't slow. Their speed remained a constant, uncompromising 1,850 feet per minute. But the sensation started to even out. Ali started to feel her way inside the plummet. She managed to plant her feet and relax her grip and look around. The headache eased. The nausea she could handle.

Half the chamber had dropped asleep or into drugged semiconsciousness. Men's heads lolled upon their chests. Bodies dangled loosely against seat harnesses. Most looked pale, punch-drunk, or sick. The tattooed soldier seemed to be meditating. Or praying.

She made a rough calculation in her head. This wasn't adding up. At 1,850 feet per minute and a depth of 3.4 miles, the commute should have taken no more than ten or eleven minutes. But the literature described 'touchdown' as seven hours away. Seven hours of this?

The LCD altimeter soared into the minus thousands, then decelerated. At minus

14,347 feet, they braked to a halt. Ali waited for an explanation over the intercom, but none came. She glanced around at the asylum of half-dead fellow travelers and decided that information was pretty unnecessary, so long as they got where they were going.

The window came alive again. Outside the shaft's Plexi-glas wall, powerful lights illuminated the blackness. To Ali's awe, she was looking out upon the ocean floor. It might as well have been the moon out there.

The lights cut sharply at the permanent night. No mountains here. The floor was flat, white, scribbled with long odd script, tracks left by bottom-dwellers. Ali saw a creature treading delicately above the sediment upon stiltlike legs. It left tiny dots upon the blankness.

Farther out, another set of lights came on. The plain was littered with hundreds of inert cannonballs. Manganese nodules, Ali knew from her reading. There was a fortune in manganese out there, and yet it had been bypassed for the sake of far greater fortune deeper down.

The vista was like a dream. Ali kept trying to make sense of her place in this inhuman geography. But with each further step, she belonged less and less.

A gruesome fish with fangs and a greenish light bud for bait steered past the window. Otherwise it was lonely out there. Dreamless. She held the orange.

After an hour, the pod started down again, this time slower. As it descended, the ocean floor rose to eye and ceiling level, then was gone. There was a brief lighted glimpse of cored stone through the window. Then quickly the glass fell black and she was looking at herself again.

Now it begins, thought Ali, the edge of the earth. And it was like passing inside herself.

INCIDENT AT PIEDRAS NEGRAS

Mexico

Osprey crossed the bridge like a turista, on foot, wearing a daypack. He left the sunburned GIs behind their sandbags in Texas. On the Mexico side, nothing suggested an international border, no barricade, no soldiers, not even a flag.

By arrangement with the local university, a van was waiting. To Osprey's great surprise, his driver was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. She had skin like dark fruit, and brilliant red lipstick. 'You are the butterfly man?' she asked. Her accent was like a musical gift.

'Osprey,' he stammered.

'It's hot,' she said. 'I brought you a Coca-Cola.' She offered him a bottle. Hers was beaded with condensation. Lipstick circled the tip.

While she drove, he learned her name. She was an economics student. 'Why are you

chasing the mariposa?' she asked. Mariposa was the Mexican term for the monarch butterfly.

'It's my life,' he answered.

'Your whole life?'

'From childhood. Butterflies. I was drawn by their movements and colors. And their names. Painted Ladies! Red Admirals! Question Marks! Ever since, I've followed them. Wherever the mariposas migrate, I go with them.'

Her smile made his heart squeeze.

They passed a shantytown overlooking the river. 'You go south,' she said, 'they go north. Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Hondurans. And my own people, too.'

'They'll try to cross over tonight?' Osprey asked. He looked past their white cotton pants and decaying tennis shoes and cheap sunglasses to glean hints of ancient tribes, Mayan, Aztec, Olmec. Once upon a time, their ancestors might have been warriors or kings. Now they were paupers, driftwood aiming for land.

'They kill themselves trying to leave their origins. How can they resist?'

Osprey glanced across the Rio Grande's coil of brown, poisoned water at the butt side of America. Heated to mirage, the buildings and billboards and power lines did seem to offer hope – provided you could factor out the necklace of razor wire glittering in the middle distance, and the sparkle of binoculars and video lenses overseeing the passage. The van continued along the river.

'Where are you going?' she asked.

'To the highlands around Mexico City. They roost in the mountain fir stands through the winter. In the spring they'll return this way to lay their eggs.'

'I mean today, Mr Osprey.'

'Today. Yes.' He fumbled with his maps.

She stopped suddenly. They had reached a place overcome by orange and black wings. 'Incredible,' Ada murmured.

'It's their rest stop for the night,' Osprey said. 'Tomorrow they'll be gone. They travel fifty miles every day. In another month, all of the masses of monarchs will reach their roost.'

'They don't fly at night?'

'They can't see in the darkness.' He opened the van door. 'I may take an hour,' he apologized. 'Perhaps you should return later.'

'I'll wait for you, Mr Osprey. Take your time. When you're finished, we can have dinner, if you'd like.'

If I'd like? Dazed, Osprey took his rucksack and gently closed the door behind him. Remembering his purpose, he headed west into the sinking sun. His inquiry dealt with the monarchs' age-old migration path. Danaus plexippus laid its eggs in North America, then died. The young emerged with no parents to guide it, and yet each year flew thousands of miles along the same ancestral route to the same destination in Mexico. How could this be? How could a creature that weighed less than half a gram have a memory? Surely memory weighed something. What was memory? There was no bottom to the mystery for Osprey. Year after year, he collected them alive. While they wintered, he studied them in his laboratory.

Osprey unzipped his daypack and took out a bundle of folded white boxes, the same kind that Chinese food comes in. He assembled twelve, leaving their tops open. His task was simple. He approached a cluster of hundreds, held a box out, and two or three alighted inside. He closed the box.

After forty minutes, Osprey had eleven boxes dangling by their wire handles from a string around his neck. Hurrying, badly distracted by the girl in the van, he trotted across a sagging depression toward the final cluster. The depression gave way. With monarchs clinging to his arms and head, he plunged through a hole in the ground.

The fall registered as a clatter of rocks, then sudden darkness.

Consciousness returned in bits. Osprey struggled to take stock. He was in pain, but could move. The hole was very deep, or else night had arrived. Luckily he hadn't lost his rucksack. He opened it and found his flashlight.

The beam was a source of both comfort and distress. He found himself lying at the pit of a limestone sinkhole, battered but unbroken. There was no sign of the hole he'd fallen through. And his landing had crushed several boxes of his beloved monarchs. For a moment, that was more defeating than the fall itself.

'Hello,' he called out several times. There was no one down here to hear him, but Osprey hoped his voice might carry through the hole somewhere overhead. Perhaps the Mexican woman would be looking for him. He had a momentary fantasy that she might fall through the hole and they could be trapped together for a night or two. At any rate, there was no response.

Finally he pulled himself together, stood up, dusted himself off, and got on with trying to find an exit. The sinkhole was cavernous, its walls riddled with tubular openings. He poked his light into a few, thinking one of them must surely lead to the surface. He chose the largest.

The tube snaked sideways. At first he was able to crawl on his knees. But it narrowed, forcing him to leave his day-pack. At last he was reduced to muscling forward on elbows and belly, careful to scoot his flashlight and the remaining five boxes of live butterflies ahead of him.

The porous walls kept tearing his clothing and hooking his trouser cuffs. The rock cut his arms. He knocked his head, and sweat stung his eyes. He was going to emerge in tatters, reeking, farcical. So much for dinner, he thought.

The tube grew tighter. A wave of claustrophobia took his breath. What if he got wedged inside this place? Trapped alive! He calmed himself. There was no room to turn around, of course. He could only hope the artery led somewhere more reasonable.

After an awkward, ten-foot wrestling match, with both arms above his head and pushing mightily with his toes, Osprey emerged into a larger tunnel.

His spirits soared. A faint footpath was worn into the rock. All he had to do was follow it out. 'Hello,' he called to his left and right. He heard a slight rattling noise in the distance. 'Hello?' he tried again. The noise stopped. Seismic goblins, he shrugged, and started off in the opposite direction.

Another hour passed, and still the path had not led him out. Osprey was tired, aching, and hungry. Finally he decided to reverse course and explore the path's other end. The trail went up and down, then came to a series of forks he hadn't seen before. He went one way, then another, with increasing frustration. At last he reached a tubular opening similar to the one that had brought him here. On the chance it might return him to the original chamber, Osprey set his butterflies and light on the ledge and crawled inside.

He'd gotten only a short distance when, to his great annoyance, the rock snagged his ankle again. He yanked to free himself, but the ankle stayed caught. He tried to see behind him, but his body filled the opening.

That was when he felt the tube move. It seemed to slip forward an inch or so, though he knew it was his body sliding backward. The disturbing thing was, he hadn't moved a muscle.

Now he felt a second motion, this time a tug at his ankle. It was no longer possible to blame the rock for catching his cuff. This was something organic. He could feel it getting a better grip on his leg. The animal, whatever it was, suddenly began pulling him back.

Osprey desperately tried holding on to the rock, but it was like falling down a slippery chimney. His hands slid across the surface. He had enough presence of mind to hold on to his light and the boxes of butterflies. Then his legs cleared the tube, and

in the next instant his body and head popped free. He dropped to the tunnel floor in a heap. One of his boxes fell open and three butterflies escaped, drifting erratically through his light beam.

He whipped the flashlight around to fend off the animal. There in his cone of light stood a live hadal. Osprey shouted his alarm just as it fled from his light. Its whiteness startled him most of all. The bulging eyes gave it an aspect of enormous hunger, or curiosity.

The hadal ran one way, Osprey the other. He covered fifty yards before his light beam illuminated three more hadals crouching in the tunnel's far depths. They turned their heads from his light, but didn't budge.

Osprey cast his flashlight back the way he'd come. Not far enough away prowled four or five more of the white creatures. He swung his head back and forth, awestruck by his predicament. He took his Swiss Army knife from a pocket and opened its longer blade. But they came no closer, repulsed by his light.

It seemed utterly fantastic. He was a lepidopterist. He dealt with animals whose existence depended on sunshine. The subplanet had nothing to do with him. Yet here he was, caged beneath the ground, faced with hadals. The terrible fact bore down on him. The weight of it exhausted him. Finally, unable to move in either direction, Osprey sat down.

Thirty yards to his right and left, the hadals settled in, too. He flipped his light from side to side for a while, thinking that was keeping them at bay. At last it became apparent the hadals weren't interested in coming any closer for the time being. He positioned the flashlight so that its beam cast a ball of light around him. While the three monarchs that had escaped from his box fluttered in the light, Osprey began calculating how long his battery might last.

He stayed awake as long as possible. But the combination of fatigue, his fall, and adrenaline hangover finally mastered him. He dozed, bathed in light, clutching his pocketknife.

He woke dreaming of raindrops. They were pebbles thrown by the hadals. His first thought was that the pebbles were meant to torment him. Then he realized the hadals were trying to break his lightbulb. Osprey grabbed the flashlight to shield it. He had another thought. If they could throw pebbles, they could probably throw rocks big enough to hurt or kill him – but they hadn't. That was when he understood they meant to capture him alive.

The waiting went on. They sat at the edges of his light. Their patience was depressing. It was so utterly unmodern, a primitive's patience, unbeatable. They were going to outlast him, he had no doubt at all about that.

Hours turned into a day, then two. His stomach rumbled with hunger. His tongue dried in his mouth. He told himself it would be better this way. Without food or water, he might start hallucinating. The last thing he wanted was to be lucid in the end.

As time passed, Osprey did his best not to look at the hadals, but eventually his curiosity took over. He turned his light on one group or the other, and gathered their details. Several were naked except for rawhide loin strings. A few wore ragged vests made of some kind of leather. All were male, as he could tell by their penis sheaths. Each sported a sheath made from an animal horn, jutting from his groin, and tied erect with twine, like those worn by New Guinea natives.

It was easy to anticipate the end. His battery began to fail. To either side, the hadals had moved closer. The light faded to a dim ball. Osprey shook the flashlight hard, and the beam brightened momentarily, and the hadals withdrew another five or ten yards. He sighed. It was time. C'est la vie. He chuckled, and laid the blade along his wrist.

He could have waited until the last instant of light before making the cuts, but feared they might not be done well. Too shallow, and it would simply be a painful nip

at the nerves. Too deep, and the veins might convulse and close off. He needed to get the strokes right, while he could still see.

He pulled evenly. Blood jumped from the steel. It leaped out of him. In the shadows, he heard the hadals murmur.

Carefully he switched the knife to his left hand and did the opposite wrist. The knife fell from his grip. After a minute he felt cold. The pain at the end of each arm turned to a dull ache. His blood spread on the stone floor. It was impossible to separate the dying light from his fading vision.

Osprey laid his head back against the wall. His thoughts settled. Increasingly, a vision of the beautiful Mexican woman had begun visiting him. Her face had come to replace his butterflies, all of whom had died because his light was not enough. He had arranged each monarch beside him, and as he slumped sideways, their wings lay like orange and black tissue on the ground.

Off in the distance, the hadals were chirping and clicking to one another. Their agitation was obvious. He smiled. They'd won, but they'd lost.

The light shrank. It died. Her face rose in the darkness. Osprey let out a low moan. The blackness pillowed him.

On the brink of unconsciousness, he felt the hadals pounce on him. He smelled them. Felt them grabbing at him. Tying his arms with rope. Too late, he realized they were binding tourniquets above his wounds. They were saving his life. He tried to fight, but was too weak.

In the weeks ahead, Osprey returned to life slowly. The stronger he got, the more pain he had to endure. He was carried sometimes. Occasionally they forced him to walk blindly down the tunnels. In pitch darkness, he had to rely on every sense but sight. Some days they simply tortured him. He could not imagine what they were doing to him. Captivity tales swirled in his head. He began to rave, and so they cut his tongue out. That was near the end of his sanity.

It was beyond Osprey's comprehension that the hadals summoned one of their finest artisans to peel the upper layers of skin, no more, from tip to tip of each shoulder and down to the base of his spine. Under the artisan's direction, the wound was salted to prepare his canvas. Its seasoning took days, requiring more abrasion, more salt. Finally an outline of veins and border was applied in black, and left to grow over. After another three days, a rare blend of bright ochre powder was laid on.

By that time, Osprey's wish had come true. He was mad from pain and deprivation. His insanity had nothing to do with the hadals freeing him to roam in their tunnels. If madness was the password, then most of their human captives would have been free. Who could understand such creatures? Human quirks and fallibilities were a constant source of puzzlement.

Osprey's freedom was a special case. He was allowed to go wherever his whim took him. No matter which band he strayed behind, they made sure to feed him, and it was considered meritorious to protect him from dangers and guide him along the trail. He was never given supplies to carry. He carried no claim mark or brand. No one owned him. He belonged to everyone, a creature of great beauty.

Children were brought to see him. His legend spread quickly. Wherever he went, it was known that this was a holy man, captured with small houses of souls around his neck.

Osprey would never know what the hadals had painted into the flesh of his back. It would have pleased him no end. For, every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

The frontier is the outer edge of the wave – the meeting-point between savagery and civilization... the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.

– FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, The Significance of the Frontier in

American History

9

LA FRONTERA

The Galápagos Rift System, latitude 0.55°N

Promptly at 1700 hours, the expeditionaries boarded their electric buses. They were loaded with handouts and booklets and notebooks numbered and marked Classified, and were sporting pieces of Helios clothing. The black SWAT-style caps had proved especially popular, very menacing. Ali contented herself with a T-shirt with the Helios winged-sun logo printed on the back. With scarcely a purr, the buses eased from the walled compound out onto the street.

Nazca City reminded Ali of Beijing, with its hordes of bicyclists. At rush hour in a boomtown with streets so narrow, the bikes were faster than their buses. They had jobs to get to. Through her window, Ali took in their faces, their Pacific Rim races, their humanity. What a feast of souls!

Declassified maps showed boom cities like Nazca as veritable nerve cells reaching tendrils out into the surrounding space. The attractions were simple: cheap land, mother lodes of precious minerals and petroleum, freedom from authority, a chance to start over. Ali had come expecting glum fugitives and desperadoes with no other place to go. But these were the faces of college-educated office workers, bankers, entrepreneurs, a motivated service sector. As a port city of the future, Nazca City was said to have the potential of San Francisco or Singapore. In four years it had become the major link between the equatorial subplanet and coastal cities up and down the western side of the Americas.

Ali was relieved to see that the people of Nazca City looked normal and healthy. Indeed, because the subplanet attracted younger, stronger workers, the population abounded in good health. Most of the station cities like Nazca had been retrofitted with lamps that simulated sunlight, and so these bicyclists were as tan as beachcombers. Practically everyone had seen soldiers or workers who had returned to the surface several years ago suffering bone growths and enlarged eyes or strange cancers, even vestigial tails. For a while, religious groups had blamed hell itself for the physical spoliation, calling it proof of God's plan, a vast gulag where contact meant punishment. But as she looked around, it seemed the research labs and drag companies really had mastered the prophylaxis for hell. Certainly these people exhibited no deformities. Ali realized that her subconscious fears of turning into a toad, monkey, or goat had been for nothing.

The city was a vast indoor mall with potted trees and flowering bushes, clean, with the latest brand names. There were restaurants and coffee bars, along with brightly lit stores selling everything from work clothes and plumbing supplies to assault rifles. The neatness was slightly marred by beggars missing limbs and sidewalk merchants hawking contraband.

At one intersection an old Asian woman was selling miserable puppies lashed alive to sticks. 'Stew meat,' one of the scientists told Ali. 'They sell it by the catty, 500 grams, a little more than a pound. Beef, chicken, pork, dog.'

'Thanks,' said Ali.

Obviously it intrigued him. 'I went exploring yesterday. Anything that moves goes into the pot. Crickets, worms, slugs. They even eat dragons, xiao long, their snakes.' Ali peered out. A long gossamer sausage stretched beside the road, twenty feet high, a football field in length. The plastic had bold hangul lettering along the front. Ali didn't read Korean, but knew a greenhouse when she saw one. There were more, lying end to end like gigantic plump pupae. Through their opaque walls she saw fieldworkers tending crops, climbing little ladders propped in orchards. Parrots and macaws soared alongside the convoy of buses. A monkey scampered past. The subsere – the secondary population of invader species – was thriving down here.