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“We need a map,” Blake said. “Lars, can you and Abe work out some orienteering notes?”
“Sure thing, boss,” said Lars. “We’re crawling along as it is.”
“I figure we’ll be out here a few days,” said Blake. “I don’t want to go any faster than we have to, so take your time.” From that moment, Abe and Lars counted steps, took compass readings, and noted peculiar trees, boulders, ravines, washes, and other geographical features.
“Ume is the real artist,” said Abe. “You should see his freehand renditions of Emelia.”
“Amelia Earhart?” asked Blake.
“Who?” said Abe. “No, Emelia from Re: Zero.”
“What’s Re: Zero?”
“Come on, Blake,” said Lars. “It’s an anime. Has a time loop in it. All-time classic, but the web-novel is completely lost in its own glorious detail. The show producers are having a real hard time world-building in an interesting way.”
“I don’t think so,” said Abe. “I like how they’re sorting through all the detail.”
“Oh, come now, Abe,” Lars retorted. “You can’t be serious: that season three second arc was excruciating."
“How dare you!” said Abe.
“Listen,” Blake said, “the both of you: I don’t want to hear one more word about this anime or that one about the alpaca while we’re out here. Is that clear?”
Lars and Abe exchanged glances and laughed. Abe said, “Anyway, yeah, we should take these notes back to Umezawa to have him draw a map for us.”
“I remember his Emelia being rather busty,” said Sano.
“Well, I mean…” stammered Abe. “…to be fair, he was being true to the anime. It’s a commentary, you see, on…uh…the…” Come on, Stoic: a commentary on what?
“A commentary on what?” said Sano.
“Yeah, Abe,” said Lars. “A commentary on what?”
Blake sighed, keeping his eyes down the mountain.
“Is that an airplane?” said Abe, pointing. “Oh, no, it’s just a big bird of some sort.”
“Nice try,” said Lars. He pulled out his binoculars. “Just say fan service and be done with it already. But you’re right, it’s a big bird of some sort. Looks like a big hawk or an eagle. Probably scavenging.”
“Fine,” said Abe. “Amelia’s busty figure is fan service, but she’s still a powerful character.”
Blake interjected: “I’m going to send you home by yourself—or I would if I could. I need you to get us shelter when we make camp.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sano. “I find her rather weak and stupid.”
What about it, Stoic? Sano is obviously mentally deranged, but you can’t possibly contradict her. What a nice pickle you’re in! On the one hand, she’s utterly wrong about Amelia being a weak character, but, on the other hand, you haven’t the fortitude to argue your own case before the strong woman!
Abe felt his heart shoot into his throat. He swallowed hard and said, “Well, you’re totally wrong about that, then.” He felt as though he might faint.
“What did you say?” Sano said.
Lost forever, Stoic. We hereby bestow on you another point toward the True Stoicism Award. To give up any chance at blissful love altogether in defense of a beloved anime: you are approaching an actual ideal of stoic behavior.
“I said…” Abe began, but Blake cut him off.
“Shut up, the both of you. The all three of you.” Sano giggled prettily. Abe watched her figure sway back and forth beneath the mounds of insulating material. Oh, Stoic, what have you forfeited? Abe fought back tears. Crying would be worse than throwing up.
After a few hours of a halting march which yielded several miles of traverse around a portion of the mountain, they stopped to eat, drink, and rest. When Lars slipped his pack onto the ground out of the wind, his eyes grew wide with sudden realization. Blake was trying to start a fire, but he saw Lars’s excitement.
“What? What is it?”
“I totally forgot about the high-calorie survival tablets!” Lars exclaimed. “I lined my pack with them and just absolutely plumb forgot. Absolute dunderheaded error.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Stop yakking, then, and hand them over!” said Blake.
“Yeah,” said Lars. He was running his hand along a bit of fine material that followed the inside of the zipper. “Enough for one man to survive for a hundred and twenty days, properly rationed. Something like twelve-hundred calories a tablet.” He distributed a tablet to each member of the scouting party.
“Should supplement the hunger reflexes quite well,” said Blake, with undisguised joy. “The chewing of the meat and the sheer caloric intake of the tablet. Good going!”
“Ha, the SHTF tomfoolery pays off, again!” Lars was exultant. “I told her it would be worth all the money.”
When they had eaten, Lars and Abe assembled the radio and Yagi antenna to take a feel of the progress of their mission. “Sure enough,” Lars said. “We’re drawing nearer to the western station, or it’s moving toward us.” The four of them listened intently as Abe swept the antenna back and forth to demonstrate the general direction of the two signals. After about ten minutes of listening, Lars said, “I mean,” he said, “it’s still only a best guess. Atmosphere, transmission angle, transmission strength, metal in the mountain, deer droppings: anything between us and them could be altering the signal strength.”
“Best guess?” asked Blake.
“Best guess? I’d say they’re stationary and we’re moving toward them, that particular party.”
“How far?”
“No idea. No way to know. Not twenty miles, but maybe nineteen, maybe three.” Lars shrugged.
Blake sat, pondering. Eventually he said, “They’re awfully active. Transmissions every three or four minutes.”
“I’ve thought about that,” said Lars. “I think they’re not the best-trained outfit in the world. You know what I mean? They have been dumb as a dead possum since the very beginning. Lethal, but dumb. The pilots, the missiles, the helicopters, this search net: not one bit of it looks like an outfit that knows how to recover lost goods in the wilderness.”
“How do you mean?” said Blake. “I think I know where you’re going, but what do you mean?”
“Well, they’re armed to the gills, obviously, and without the magic superpowers or whatever, we’d be dead, but they ain’t moving. They should be moving, if they’re a net. They should be flying over, dropping transponders and the like, keeping a constant eye, you know? I figure those fellows down yonder are just plain bored, so they’re chatting back and forth over the radio. Got nothing else to do.”
“I wonder about that,” said Blake. “I think you’re on the right track. Obviously, I don’t have a better explanation, but I also think Jim hasn’t been entirely open about the operation he’s with. There’s too much metal in him for him to just be hand-waving a lifetime of entry and exit from a super-secret corporate world-conspiracy conglomerate. You wouldn’t eventually figure out that it was ‘Bob’s Super Wacky Human Experimentation, Inc.?’”
Abe and Sano giggled.
“Or whatever,” Lars said.
“Yeah,” said Blake.
“The one hole in my way of understanding the thing—and this really bothers me—is how they knew we were at the crash site, and instantly. Was it by chance, you know? Or were they up in the air and we just happened to be there when they got there? I don’t like it. Seems to me they had the location rigged for alert, but for who? They don’t know us. They know Jim. Or did they somehow count up all the corpses against the passenger manifest? And that would be some doing, what with all the carnage. No, I think it was somehow wired up to down below, even after they took the wreckage.”
“And how did they do that?” Abe asked.
The four of them sat, watching the fire slowly peter out. Abe began to shiver. The others pulled close against the cold.
“None of us has a way to make heads or tails, do we?” said Lars.
“Well,” said Blake, rising, “we’ve got to move closer to the signal source before we camp for the night. Here’s something to consider, though: we might be miscounting.”
“Miscounting?” said Lars.
“We’re consolidating too quickly. We’ve got a couple of pilots in on something. Jim, the dingus. The first-class passengers he shot. The missiles. The cloud of nanotechnology. The first helicopter we never saw. The second helicopter. The removal of the wreckage. Now we have two radio signals, and even though we can’t understand them, we think they’re two parties of one entity. What if it's two entities, both competing against each other to find the dingus, but, because we've put a few wrenches in their works, they're in contact with each other to coordinate? And what if they're coordinating because several other entities are trying to find the dingus? And so forth...”
Lars’s eyes grew wide. Abe felt his eyes mimic Lars’s. Sano’s brows were arched high, and her gorgeous blue eyes, as well, were wide.
“Yeah,” Blake continued. “Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t think each one of these represents a single entity per; I think we’re too quick to think we have only two or three, counting the government.”
“Oh yeah,” said Lars. “The government.”
“And I still think the Canadian government is part of this.”
“Might explain the incompetence,” said Lars.
At that, Blake laughed. First he chuckled, then he let the chuckle move into his belly, and, at last, he threw his head back and gave it a roaring guffaw. “Whew!” he finally said. “I don’t know why that tickled me so, but that...heh...that was funny.”
“What if they’re trying to protect us?” said Sano.
“What?” said Blake.
“What if they’re not moving in order to create a line between us and the bad guys?”
The three men shuffled, trying to hide their looks of astonishment.
She shrugged and said, “We assume many things.”
“Yes, we do,” said Blake. “Let’s move.”
They followed Blake, who was moving south and west along a careful line, slowly giving up elevation, pausing to let Abe and Lars make notes for the map and take signal strength readings. The signal strength proved to be inconsistent as they moved, but, comparing mental notes, the scout party became fairly confident that the signal was steadily trending stronger. “The signal strength couldn’t just plot a straight line,” said Lars. “That would be too easy.”
“How many miles do you figure?” asked Blake.
“A few more since we rested,” Lars said.
Blake looked around at the surroundings. “What do you think?”
“The signal is as strong as I want it to be without making a visual,” said Lars. “And the sun is going down.”
“Let’s call it,” said Blake. “Abe? Can you set us up?”
With a word, a large spruce submitted and formed a bower, as on the first night. Lars distributed calorie tablets and a bit of meat, and they slept easily on the bedsprings of fragrant spruce needles. Early the next morning, Abe said, “Thank you.” The tree bowed, loosened its contortions, and the scouting party was on its way.
After a mere thirty paces in the direction of their own shadows, Blake exclaimed quietly, “Well, well, well!” He motioned for them to lie down. “It’s a cliff: a giant bluff below us. Look!” He pointed. The mountain seemed to simply stop.
Abe’s stomach turned over when his eyes saw the vast open space where the earth should be. Clouds and fog rolled around a bit below where they were lying, and another mountain peak could be seen a fair distance away. For a terrifying moment, Abe’s faculties were telling him that they were afloat, adrift, without anchor upon the great green earth.
“I wonder how sheer it is,” said Blake. He looked at the party. “Abe, you and Lars set up the radio while Sano and I creep forward to have a look.”
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Blake and Sano crawled forward, as serpents, except with knees alternating to each side and arms pulling from over their heads. Lars and Abe set up the radio and listened. The signal was as strong as ever. Pointing the Yagi a straight ninety degrees to the east, they could still hear the return signal.
Several minutes later, Blake waved his hand, indicating that the two of them should crawl forward to join him and Sano at the edge of the cliff. When they arrived, Blake said, “I wanted you to see this.” He pointed.
“Well, I’ll be,” said Lars, in a low voice. “There’s the antenna.”
“A j-pole,” said Abe.
“Yep, and they must have some considerable number of watts going through it.”
They were looking down upon it. Its highest point was tens of feet below them, mounted atop a slender silver camper, a sizable two-wheeled contraption which had been pulled there by means of a hitch. Whatever vehicle had towed it there was not present.
“How tall do you reckon that radio tower to be?” asked Blake.
“About a hundred feet, at least,” said Lars.
“How can you tell?”
“Just guessing.”
“Dammit.”
“Yeah, Blake, I’m terrible at guessing heights. That’s about as good as I can do.”
“Well, never mind,” Blake said. “That’s good enough.” He looked to the right. “The bluff goes on forever that way.” He looked to the left. “And it goes on forever that way. No wonder they haven’t moved up the mountain. I wonder…”
And, for some reason which Abe could not fathom, Blake lifted up his head and pulled himself forward to look over the cliff. “I just want to see how sheer it is…”
“Are you stupid?” Lars asked at the exact same moment they heard a rifle shot and saw Blake wince and grab his shoulder.
“Not again,” said Abe.
Sano covered her mouth to muffle a scream.
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