Hunter’s Run

Almost.

With every hour that passed, every forest and lake that appeared, drew near, and slipped away, the thought of the European he’d killed grew in Ramon’s mind, his presence sharpening pixel by pixel, becoming more real, until he could almost, almost, see him sitting in the copilot’s seat, that stupid look of dumb surprise at his own mortality still stamped on his big pale face – and the more real his ghostly presence became, the deeper Ramon’s hatred for him grew.

He hadn’t hated him back at the El Rey; the man had just been another bastard looking for trouble and finding Ramon. It had happened before more times than he could recall. It was part of how things worked. He came to town, he drank, he and some rabid asshole found each other, and one of them walked away. Maybe it was Ramon, maybe it was the other guy. Rage, yes, rage had something to do with it, but not hatred. Hatred meant you knew a man, you cared about him. Rage lifted you up above everything – morality, fear, yourself. Hatred meant that someone had control over you.

This was the place that usually brought him peace, the outback, the remote territory, the unpeopled places. The tension that came with being around people loosened. In the city – Diegotown or Nuevo Janeiro or any place where too many people came together – Ramon had always felt the press of people against him. The voices just out of earshot, the laughter that might or might not have been directed at him, the impersonal stares of men and women, Elena’s lush body and her uncertain mind; they were why Ramon drank when he was in the city and stayed sober in the field. In the field there was no reason to drink.

But here, where that peace should have been, the European was with him. Ramon would look out into the limitless bowl of the sky, and his mind would turn back to that night at the El Rey, the sudden awed silence of the crowd. The blood pouring from the European’s mouth. His heels drumming against the ground. He checked his maps, and instead of letting his mind run freely across the fissures and plates of the planetary surface, he thought of where the police might go to search for him. He could not let go of what had happened, and the frustration of that was almost as enraging as the guilt itself.

But guilt was for weaklings and fools. Everything would be all right. He would spend his time in the field, communing with the stone and the sky, and when he returned to the city, the European would be last season’s news. Something half remembered and retold in a thousand different versions, none of them true. It was one little death among all the hundreds of millions – natural and otherwise – that happened every year throughout the known universe. The dead man’s absence would be like taking a finger out of water; it wouldn’t leave a hole.

Mountains made a line across the world before him: ice and iron, iron and ice.

Those would be the Sawtooths, which meant that he’d already overflown Fiddler’s Jump. When he checked the navigation transponders, there was no signal. He was gone, out of human contact, off the incomplete communication network of the colony. On his own. He made the adjustments he’d planned, altering his flight path to throw off any human hounds that the law might set after him, but even as he did so, the gesture seemed pointless. He wouldn’t be followed. No one would care.

He set the autopilot, tilted his chair back until it was almost flat as his cot, and, in spite of the reproachful almost-presence of the European, let the miles rolling by beneath him lull him to sleep.

When he woke, the even-grander peaks of the Sierra Hueso range were thrusting above the horizon, and the sun was getting low in the sky, casting shadows across the mountain faces. He switched off the autopilot and brought the van to rest in a rugged upland meadow along the southern slopes of the range. After the bubbletent had been set up, the last perimeter alarm had been placed, and a fire pit dug and dry wood scavenged to fill it, Ramon walked to the edge of a small nearby lake. This far north, it was cold even in summer, and the water was chill and clear; the biochip on his canteen reported nothing more alarming than trace arsenic. He gathered a double-handful of sug beetles and took them back to his camp. Boiled, they tasted of something midway between crab and lobster, and the gray stone-textured shells took on an unpredictable rainbow of iridescent colors when the occupying flesh was sucked free. It was easy to live off this country, if you knew how. In addition to sug beetles and other scavengable foodstuffs, there was water to hand and there would be easy game nearby if he chose to stay longer than the month or two his van’s supplies would support. He might stay until the equinox, depending on the weather. Ramon even found himself wondering how difficult it would be to winter over here in the north. If he dropped south to Fiddler’s Jump for fuel and slept in the van for the coldest months …

After he’d eaten, he lit a cigarette, lay back, and watched the mountains darken with the sky. A flapjack moved against the high clouds, and Ramon rose up on one elbow to watch it. It rippled its huge, flat, leathery body, sculling with its wing tips, seeking a thermal. Its ridiculous squeaky cry came clearly to him across the gulfs of air. They were almost level; it would be evaluating him now, deciding that he was much too big to eat. The flapjack tilted and slid away and down, as though riding a long invisible slope of air, off to hunt squeakers and grasshoppers in the valley below. Ramon watched the flapjack until it dwindled to the size of a coin, glowing bronze in the failing light.

‘Good hunting!’ he called after it, and then smiled. Good hunting for both of them, eh? As the last of the daylight touched the top of the ridgeline on the valley’s eastern rise, Ramon caught sight of something. A discontinuity in the stone. It wasn’t the color or the epochal striations, but something more subtle. Something in the way the face of the mountain sat. It wasn’t alarming as much as interesting. Ramon put a mental flag there; something strange, worth investigating in the morning.

He lounged by the fire for a few moments while the night gathered completely around him and the alien stars came out in their chill, blazing armies. He named the strange constellations the people of São Paulo had drawn in the sky to replace the old constellations of Earth – the Mule, the Stone Man, the Cactus Flower, the Sick Gringo – and wondered (he’d been told, but had forgotten) which of them had Earth’s own sun twink ling in it as a star? Then he went to bed and to sleep, dreaming that he was a boy again in the cold stone streets of his hilltop pueblo, sitting on the roof of his father’s house in the dark, a scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him, trying to ignore the loud, angry voices of his parents in the room below, searching for São Paulo’s star in the winter sky.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the morning, Ramon poured water over the remains of the fire, then pissed on it just to be sure it was out. He ate a small breakfast of cold tortillas and beans, and disconnected his pistol from the van’s power cells and tucked it into his holster where it was a warm, comforting weight on his hip; out here, you could never be sure when you were going to run into a chupacabra or a snatchergrabber. He exchanged the soft flatfur slippers he wore in the van for his sturdy old hiking boots, and set out to hike to the discontinuity he’d spotted the night before; as always, his boots somehow seemed more comfortable crunching over the uneven ground than they had been on the city streets. Dew soaked the grasses and the leaves of the shrubs. Small monkey-like lizards leapt from branch to branch before him, calling to each other with high, frightened voices. There were millions of uncataloged species on São Paulo. In the twenty minutes it took him to make his way to a promising site at the base of a stone cliff, Ramon might have climbed past a hundred plants and animals never before seen by human eyes.

Before long, he found the discontinuity, and surveyed it almost with regret; he’d been enjoying the effort for its own sake, pausing frequently to enjoy the view or to rest in the watery sunlight. Now he’d have to get to work.

The lichen that clung to the rock of the mountainside was dark green and grew in wide spirals that reminded Ramon of cave paintings. Up close, the discontinuity was less apparent. He could trace the striations from one face to the next without sign of a break or level change. Whatever Ramon had caught in the failing light of the day before, it was invisible now.

He took the field pack from his shoulders, lit a cigarette, and considered the mountain face before him. The stones around him appeared to be largely metamorphic – their elongated grain speaking to Ramon of the unthinkable pressure and heat near São Paulo’s mantle. The glaciers, when they passed, would have carved this ground, strewing parts of any given field far from their origin. Still, the underlying stone was certainly igneous or metamorphic. The sedimentary layers, if there were any, would be higher up, where the ground was newest. It was the sort of place where a man might find the strike he’d hoped for. Uranium ore, possibly. Tungsten or tantalum if he were lucky. And even if he only found gold or silver or copper, there were places he could still sell the data. The information would be worth more than the metals themselves.

The sad irony of his profession had not escaped Ramon. He would never willingly have moved off São Paulo. Its emptiness was the thing that made it a haven for him. In a more developed colony, the global satellites and ground-level networked particulates would have made solitude impossible. São Paulo still had frontiers, limits beyond which little or nothing was known. He and the others like him were the hands and eyes of the colony’s industry; his love of the unknown corners and niches of the world was unimportant. His experience of them, the data and surveys and knowledge: those had value. And so he made his money by destroying the things that gave him solace. It was an evil scheme, but typical, Ramon thought, of humanity’s genetic destiny of contradiction. He stubbed out his cigarette, took a hand pick from the field pack, and began the long, slow process of scouting out a good place for a coring charge.

The sun shone down benevolently, and Ramon stripped off his shirt, tucking it into the back of his pistol belt. Between hand pick and his small field shovel, he cleared away the thin covering of plants and soil, finding hard, solid rock not more than a foot and a half below the surface. If it had been much more, he’d have gone back for the tools in the van – powered for minor excavations, but expensive, prone to breaking down, and with the whining electrical sound of civilization to argue against their use. Looking along the mountainside, there would likely be other places that would require the more extensive labor. All the better, then, that he begin here.

The coring charge was designed to carve a sample out of the living rock the length of an arm. Longer if it was a particularly soft stone. In the next week, Ramon would gather a dozen or so such cores from sites up and down the valley. After that, there would be three or four days while the equipment in the van sifted through the debris for trace elements and ores too slight to identify simply by looking. Once Ramon had that in hand, he could devise a strategy for garnering the most useful information in the cheapest possible way. Even as he set the first charge, he found himself fantasizing about those long, slow, lazy days while the tests ran. He could go hunting. Or explore the lakes. Or find a warm place in the sun and sleep while the breeze set the grasses to singing. His fingers danced across the explosives, tugging at wires and timing chips with the ease and autonomous grace of long practice. Many prospectors lost careers and hands – sometimes lives – by being too careless with their tools. Ramon was careful, but he was also practiced. Once the site was chosen and cleared, placing the charge took less than an hour.

He found himself, strangely, procrastinating about setting it off. It was so quiet here, so still, so peaceful! From up here, the forested slopes fell away in swaths of black and dead blue and orange, the trees rippling like a carpet of moss as the wind blew across them – except for the white egg of his bubbletent on the mountain shoulder below, it was a scene that might not have changed since the beginning of time. For a moment, he was almost tempted to forget about prospecting, and just relax and unwind on this trip, as long as he was being forced to hide out in the hills anyway, but he shrugged the temptation away – once the fuss over the European had blown over, once he went back, he would still need money, the van wouldn’t hold together forever, and Elena’s scorn if he returned empty-handed again was something he wasn’t anxious to face. Perhaps there will be no ore here anyway, he told himself almost wishing it, and then wondered at the tenor of his thoughts. Surely it could not be a bad thing to be rich? His stomach was beginning to hurt again.

He looked up at the mountain face. It was beautiful; rugged and untouched. Once he was done with it, it would never be the same.

‘All apologies,’ he said to the view he was about to mar. ‘But a man has to make his money somehow. Hills don’t have to eat.’

Ramon took one last cigarette from its silver case and smoked it like a man at an execution. He walked down to the boulders he’d chosen for shelter stringing the powder-primed fuse cord, hunkered down behind the rocks, and lit the fuse with the last ember.

There was the expected blast; but while the sound should have been a single report echoing against the mountains and then fading, it grew louder and longer instead. The hillside shifted greasily under him, like a giant shrugging in uneasy sleep, and he heard the express-train rumble of sliding rock. He could tell from the sound alone that something had gone very wrong.

A great cloud of dust enveloped him, white as fog and tasting like plaster and stone. A landslide. Somehow Ramon’s little coring charge had set off a landslide. Coughing, he cursed himself, thinking back to what he’d seen. How could he have missed a rock face that unstable? It was the kind of mistake that killed prospectors. If he had chosen shelter a little nearer than he had, he could have been crushed to death. Or worse, crippled and buried here where no man would ever find him – trapped until the redjackets came and stripped the flesh off his bones.

The angry, thundering roar quieted, faded. Ramon rose from behind the boulders, waving his hand before his face as if stirring the air would somehow put more oxygen in it or lessen the thick coating of stone dust that was no doubt forming in his nose and lungs. He walked slowly forward, his footing uncertain on the newly-made scree. The stones smelled curiously hot.

A metal wall stood where the façade of stone had fallen away; half a mountain high and something between twenty and twenty-five meters wide.

It was, of course, impossible. It had to be some bizarre natural formation. He stepped forward, and his own reflection – pale as the ghost of a ghost – moved toward him. When he reached out, his blurred twin reached out as well, pausing when he paused. He stopped the motion before hand and ghostly hand could touch, noticing the stunned and bewildered expression on the face of his reflection in the metal, one no doubt matched by the expression on his own face. Then, gingerly, he touched the wall.

The metal was cool against his fingertips. The blast had not even scarred it. And though his mind rebelled at the thought, it was clearly unnatural. It was a made thing. Made by somebody and hidden by somebody, behind the rock of the mountain, though he couldn’t imagine by whom.

It took a moment more for the full implication to register. Something was buried here under the hill, something big, perhaps a building of some sort, a bunker. Perhaps the whole mountain was hollow.

This was the big one, just the way he’d told Manuel it would be. But the find wasn’t ore; it was this massive artifact. It couldn’t be a human artifact, the human colony here wasn’t old enough to have left ruins behind. It had to be alien; perhaps it was millions of years old. Scientists and archeologists would go insane over this find; perhaps even the Enye would be interested in it. If he couldn’t parlay this discovery into an immense fortune, he wasn’t anywhere near as smart as he thought he was …

He flattened his palm against the metal, matching hands with his reflection. The cool metal vibrated under his hand, and, even as he waited, a deeper vibration went through the wall, boom, boom, low and rhythmic, like the beating of some great hidden heart, like the heart of the mountain itself, vast and stony and old.

A warning bell began to sound in the back of Ramon’s mind, and he looked uneasily around him. Another man might not have reacted to this strange discovery with suspicion, but Ramon’s people had been persecuted for hundreds of years, and he himself well remembered living on the grudging sufferance of the mejicanos, never knowing when they would find some pretext to wipe out his village.

Whatever this wall was, whatever reason it had for existing here in the twice-forsaken ass end of a half-known planet, it was no dead ruin – something was at work beneath this mountain. If this was hidden, it was because someone didn’t want it to be found. And might not be happy that it had been. Someone unimaginably powerful, to judge from the scale of this artifact – and probably dangerous.

Suddenly, the sunlight seemed cold on his shoulders. Again, he looked nervously around him, feeling much too exposed on the bare mountain slope. Another flapjack called, away across the air, but now its cries sounded to him like the shrill and batlike wailing of the damned.

It was time to get out of here. Get back to the van – maybe take a short video recording of the wall, and then find someplace else to be. Anywhere else. Even back in Diegotown, where the threats were at least knowable.

He couldn’t run back to his camp – the terrain was too rough. But he scrambled down the mountainside as recklessly as he dared, sliding on his buttocks down bluffs in a cloud of dust and scree when he could, jumping from rock to rock, bulling his way through bushes and tangles of scrub hierba, scattering grasshoppers and paddlefoots before him.

He moved so quickly that he was more than a third of the way to his camp before the mountain opened behind him and the alien came out.

High above him, a hole opened in the mountain’s side – a cave in the metal that a moment ago had not been there and now simply was. There was a high-pitched whine, like a centrifuge spinning up, and then, a breath later, something flew out of the hole.

It was square-shaped and built awkwardly for flight, like something designed to move in vacuum. Bone white and silent, it reminded Ramon of a ghost, or a great floating skull. Against the great empty blue of sky, atmosphere thin enough at the top that stars shone through the blue, it could have been any size at any distance. The strange, boxy thing hung in the sky, rotating slowly. Looking, Ramon thought. Looking for him.

Sick dread squeezed his chest. His camp. The thing was clearly searching for something, and Ramon hadn’t done anything to conceal the white dome of the bubbletent or the van beside it. There had been no reason to. The thing might not see him down here in the underbrush, but it would see his camp. He had to get there – get back to the van and into the air – before the thing from the mountain discovered it. His mind was already racing ahead – would his van outpace the flying white box? Just let him get it in the air. He could fly it low, make it hard to spot or attack. He was a good pilot. He could dodge between treetops from here to Fiddler’s Jump if he had to …

But he had to get there first.

He fled, raw panic pushing away the last shreds of caution. The demonic white box was lost from sight as he reached the edge of the scree and dove into the underbrush. The bushes and low scrub that had seemed thin and easily navigable when he’d been walking were now an obstacle course. Branches grabbed at him, raking his face and ripping his clothes. He had the feeling that the flying thing from the mountain was right on top of him, at his back; ready to strike. His breath burned as he sprinted, legs churning, back toward the van.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ he gasped. ‘Please. I wasn’t doing anything! I don’t know anything. Please. I dreamed it!’

When halfway back to the van he paused, leaning against a tree to catch his breath, the sky was empty. No ghostly box hung in the air, searching for him. He was surprised to find that his pistol was already in his hand. He didn’t recall drawing it. Still, now that he did think of it, the weight and solidity of it were reassuring. He wasn’t defenseless. Whatever that fucking thing was, he could shoot it. He spat, anger taking the place of fear. Maybe he didn’t know what he was facing, but it didn’t know him either. He was Ramon Espejo! He’d tear the alien a new asshole if it messed with him.

Buoyed by his bravado and rage, Ramon started again for the van, one eye to the skies. He had cleared more ground than he thought; the van was only a few more minutes away. Just let him get it in the air! He wasn’t going to stop to video anything, not with that thing out there sniffing for him. But he’d bring back a force from Diegotown – the governor’s private guard maybe. The police. The army. Whatever was in the hill, he’d drag it out into the light and crack its shell. He wasn’t afraid of it or anyone. He wasn’t afraid of God. His litany of denial – Please! I didn’t see anything! – was already forgotten.

He reached the meadow that contained his camp just as the alien reappeared overhead. He hesitated, torn between dashing for the van and diving back into the brush.

It was close enough that Ramon could size it now; it was smaller than he’d thought – perhaps half the size of his van. It was ropey; long white strands like the dripping of a candle making up its walls. Or its face. As it swooped nearer, Ramon felt a knot in his throat. It was too close. He would never be able to reach the van before it came between them.