Fire with Fire(35)
Caine took out his photographic equipment slowly, as if a sudden movement would startle the stones, would scare the—well, what do I call this? The ruins? No; not the right word. The memorial? The historical preserve? Whatever it was, “ruin” was not the correct label: that term suggested the wear of ages and of neglect. This structure was, admittedly, time-worn—but there was no sign of neglect.
He measured the steps, so strangely broad and low; each one was between fifty and fifty-one centimeters wide, but only ten centimeters high. And they were not “built”: like everything except the ring of low obelisks, they had been hewn from the native stone. Caine traversed the floor of the arena, hearing the whisper of his boots bounce back from the rock that rose up on either side, stopped in front of the rear galleries. Again, a strange architecture: the walls that faced out into the arena had been cut through, converted into openworks of intricate filigree patterns. The two doorways that led into the cavelike chamber beyond were ovate, narrowing up into a peak.
Caine recorded and measured and inspected the site for ten minutes, checked his watch, and discovered his perceptual error: he had been here for almost an hour. He had ninety minutes—at most—before the sun started to set, and he still had the second, smaller trail to explore. He hastily stuffed his sensors and photographic gear into the top of his backpack and jogged away from the structure.
Having been in all its chambers, he knew there was no one in the structure watching him as he left. But that didn’t diminish the sense that timeless eyes were fixed upon his spine as he disappeared back into the jungle.
* * *
After reaching the narrow, newer trail, he followed it for five hundred meters and then stopped: up ahead, there was a break in the canopy, large enough to let in a considerable volume of Delta Pavonis’ fading honey-colored rays. Caine took another dozen steps, glad for the opportunity to enjoy standing in some bright, unobstructed light. His day-end fantasies concocted a convenient shelf of rock, handy kindling, a campfire: all so real he could almost smell it—
He could. He could smell it. Burned wood, or plants—like a grass fire.
He unshouldered the rifle and moved off the trail, but kept it in sight, ten meters to his left. He edged forward, paralleling it as the canopy thinned and the light grew—and revealed a broad, open circle of dirt. What the hell—?
Hell. Yes, hell would smell like that. It wasn’t just the odor of burnt grass: it was meat, too. But not cooked: incinerated. He did not sweat, but felt his temples pulsing hard and fast: it was a different species of terror than he had felt while facing down a charging pavonosaur. This was a sharp, cold wariness—because any bush could hide death, and any thicket could conceal the worst foe of all:
Humans. They had been here. This was their—his—work, Caine realized as he crept to the edge of the circle of dirt, and pushed at it with his boot. Scorched rock underneath. He rose, rifle muzzle tracking along the brush-line as he moved into the center of the ring, the charnel smell rising around him. He probed with his boot; more burnt rock underfoot, but at the far edge, another smell: gasoline. Thick and pungent, like avgas.
And something else, at the very edge of the circle: a footprint. But not human. Splay-footed, with the heel-print deeper than the front, it looked like a cross between a duck’s and a human’s foot. Four front toes—long and without any evidence of a strong metatarsal bridge—angled back into a wide, flat sole that flared out again where the heel erupted into a bifurcated back toe. But that rear digit had not left the kind of deep, crisp-edged imprint consistent with a sharp rear talon: it, too, was soft, flexible.
He followed the footprint out of the circle—and stopped: three freshly broken tubers. Just five meters in front of him. All in a row. What could it mean?
Then he looked down and he knew what it meant. End of the trail.
To the right and the left were oval cocoons—or would that be coffin-garlands?—of the fuchsia and indigo flowers, propped up into tented arches by their jointed, stick-like vines. Inside each colorful shell was a single, usually charred, bone. More footprints were here—dozens, some older, some recent.
He counted: there were thirty-seven of the memorials, stretching away into the brush in either direction. The northernmost end of the burial line was marked by a cluster of snapped tubers, and, looking down as the sun’s light faded from honey to amber, he saw a metallic glint. He knew what it was before he picked it up: a spent shotgun casing. The brass collar was twice as high as a commercial round, and its side was stamped with a single “0”: single-aught buckshot. A favorite with mass murderers of innocents—and a match for what Caine had seen winking at him from Bendixen’s bandoliers. Using a lens-wipe from his photo kit, he picked up the shell casing, wrapped it, put it in his other chest pocket. Bastards.