Steven Boyett - Fata Morgana

“All my better ideas involve being somewhere else right now.”

“Roger that.”

Shorty popped up again. “Martin says there’s a bandit shadowing us at eight o’clock level,” he said.

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Broben.

Through the control wheel Farley felt a faint shudder. The slowly lowering landing gear was adding drag.

“Get Martin on a waist gun and tell Boney to get in the top turret,” Farley ordered. “If it’s not one of ours, it’s history, got it?”

“Seven thousand,” Broben said.

“And tell Wen I need an engine, dammit.” Farley steered the bomber across the enormous bowl while Shorty relayed his orders. The surface looked rippled in places, waves hardened into rock formations splashed out from a common center. A crater? Ten miles wide? More like the caldera of some inconceivably large volcano. But this was no gouged mountain, it was a huge hole ripped out of a vast plain and radiating cracks bigger than the Grand Canyon.

He heard Boney climb into the top turret stand behind him.

Reflections played off the front windshield, and Farley realized he was looking at a shimmering column of air above the shadowed center of the crater. It looked the same as the disturbance in the air beneath the flak field above Zennhausen, and he didn’t want any part of it. He pointed it out to Jerry and turned to glide around it even though it would cost them even more altitude.

Above and behind him Boney called, “Bandit! Bandit eight o’clock level!” as Martin yelled, “What the hell is that?”

The jackhammering of .50s filled the cockpit.

“Shorty,” Farley began, and then something hit the bomber so hard it tore the controls from his hands. Fata Morgana slewed sideways and pitched right and began to plane down toward the ruined surface of that shifted world.

Wennda crouched behind a rockfall on the valley floor and studied the vast translucent wall of the massive Redoubt a kilometer away. Sunlight gleamed the wall’s top third. Canyon shadow slanted across its gridded surface below. The wall was made of large rectangular panels of some dense glasslike substance with a faint green tint. Panels here and there were cracked and chipped, some missing outright and covered with metal or plastic.

The Redoubt wall ran the width of the fissure, and rose up five hundred feet. The wedge of canyon behind it had been roofed over with the same material.

A cluster of tall buildings rose within that space. As if some enormous dam of pale green glass across the canyon had drowned a city and left it on display like some cruel god’s aquarium. Random lights glowed steady in the stark towers.

Wennda glanced at the other three members of the small reconnaissance party crouched beside her. Arshall and Sten were good soldiers and hard workers, fast, efficient, and skilled. Arshall farmed a plot with his older sister and their parents. Sten was a machinist who fabricated replacement parts for old equipment. Reliable men who trusted her to lead. They did their job and didn’t argue. Well, not much. In any case, they weren’t a worry.

The fourth member of their party was the worry.

Yone leaned against the rockfall and studied the translucent wall with Wennda’s priceless binoculars. He was small and thin and dark-haired, absorbed in his surveillance. Among them but not of them, as likely he would always be.

Wennda frowned at Yone’s back as he surveyed the place where he’d once lived. Will I really kill him if he runs? Will I have a choice? Maybe that’s why I brought Arshall and Sten. Because they won’t hesitate if it comes to that.

She glanced at Arshall and saw him frowning at Yone, and wondered if he was thinking something similar.

Yesterday their small recon team had quietly left the Dome and made the crater crossing. There was no foraging to be done. No game lived here, and none of them would have known how to hunt it if it had. Sparse weeds and vines had taken root in carbon-rich patches of crater floor, but there was nothing to eat or drink except what the team brought with them. It was unforgiving going. They slept in their clothes in the shelter of oddly undulant rock formations, smooth curved berms that once had briefly moved as ripples until they’d cooled to stone. At night the party lit no fire, and by day they traveled in the narrowing arc of shadow that crept eastward on the canyon floor until high noon, then thickened west to east as the unremitting sun shrank toward the blunt horizon. They followed the perimeter because no one dared go near the mound at the center of the crater. A vast well lay in its middle like a hole punched through the world. By day a column of air shimmered above it, as if a pillar of heat rose from the pit, or some great agitation in the deep churned what lay above. At night the vast bore glowed a faint pale green. Over it the insubstantial column glimmered in the nighttime air, distorting the hard sprawled stars that passed behind it.

Everyone knew what lived down in that well. If it was alive. A weapon from the old world, protecting something stored deep in the well like a dragon guarding treasure. Sometimes it emerged to soar across the blighted air. The Typhon, it was called. Parents warned their children, Behave or the Typhon will come after you, and its vague menace stalked their dreams.

These were the fixtures of their bleak and fractured landscape, rough-hewn icons in a broken world: A living machine guarding a deep well in the center of a vast crater radiating canyon cracks. Opposing cities on opposite sides, self-contained and struggling to survive a world stripped bare. This dire tableau a rude-carved history of catastrophe.

But in the last few days there had been odd changes in the shimmering column. Flickers and flares and undulations. Brief solidifications like some textured shaft of coruscating glass. Wennda thought it could be an indication that the Redoubt had managed to defeat or evade the Typhon and gain access to the crater well. Something down there was powering that vast display, perhaps the thing the Typhon protected. And if the Redoubt had got hold of that kind of power, there was no telling what they might unleash.

Two years ago the column had exhibited similar behavior. Wennda had wanted to lead a recon team then, too. But then Yone had arrived, escaped from the Redoubt to seek asylum, and the ensuing argument over what to do with him had eclipsed any suggestion of an investigative team.

Now the massive fixture of their landscape was acting up again, and the man whom many of her people thought might be a Redoubt spy was crouched before her studying the very place he might be trying to return to—and Wennda had practically escorted him here.

But no one knew the Redoubt as Yone claimed to, and if her people’s ancient enemy had finally managed to gain access to the crater well, Wennda definitely wanted him along. If it turned out Yone had lied to them and really was a Redoubt spy, then only three of their party would be coming back. Wennda would have some explaining to do, but she was used to that. And she doubted anyone would grieve too much about the loss of a spy and an unplanned mouth to feed.

Yone flattened the binoculars and turned away from the Redoubt, frowning as he sat back against the shattered boulder.

Wennda held out a hand and Yone gave her back the prized binoculars. “See anything different?” she asked. “It can’t have changed very much in two years.”

Yone gave his characteristic quick nod and twitch of a smile. “Nothing I can see from here,” he said. He had an odd accent and a precise way of speaking. People in the Redoubt were very different, Yone had said. Different speech, customs, organization.