The two women covered ground low and fast and almost silently, and after only a few hundred meters Neb felt like a steam engine chugging along after two gazelles. He had to keep wiping sweat from his eyes when his eyebrows got overpowered, but he didn’t make so much as a grunt of complaint. He just focused on the task until Anna brought them to a halt near the top of a small rise.
The base was a collection of small squat buildings surrounded by a wall topped with razor wire, set at the foot of the steep mountains. Sections of the wall had been destroyed or knocked over, the protective wire dangling uselessly. The terrain was scarred with the marks of old battles -- there were partially overgrown blast craters and pockmarks on the walls that caught the evening shadows. In one place a perfectly circular hole had been cut through the wall, its clean edges standing out starkly against the crumbling scene. ‘What did that, I wonder,’ Anna said, as she shaded her eyes and examined the scene, but none of them had the first idea.
The village of Abinaum was east of the military base, to their left as they looked at it, and at some point it had been a pleasant little place of steep roofs and large gables and narrow winding streets. But now many houses were half-destroyed or missing. The whole scene spoke of decay and neglect and abandonment. There were an endless number of places to hide and wait.
‘It’s a fucking tactical nightmare, I’ll give it that,’ Grey said.
‘You know anything about this place, Doc?’ Anna asked Neb.
He shook his head. ‘When Buzz said the name Abinaum it rang the faintest of bells, but… no. I don’t think I do.’
‘Well get fucking thinking,’ Anna said, her words not softened to be a joke. The harshness caught Neb by surprise, and he straightened.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered formally.
‘We need to get closer,’ Anna said, ignoring him again. ‘Land is higher to the east, towards the mountains. Let’s circle around and approach from that side.’
They moved quickly through heat and dust, and Neb found it easier to dig deep and keep up this time. Anna’s formality had stung, even though she had every right to it as the ranking officer. It was as if the previous night had never happened for her. And as he thought about it, he realized that in some sense, that was true. Anna lived in the present, and she did what she wanted. He was starting to regret letting any of it happen.
They were constantly on guard but saw no movement. If someone had told Neb that the base had been abandoned for twenty years, he could have believed it. But appearances were almost certainly deceptive. They stopped and watched for several long minutes but saw nothing of note, and then circled around further until they came to the bank of the river. The water was fast and deep. There was a bridge about a klick ahead towards the mountains, but Anna decided against risking it. Too exposed.
‘Seems quiet,’ Gray whispered.
Anna kept her eyes on the base. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the action was happening indoors,’ she said. ‘Assuming all the transport crates were empty on arrival, everyone is desperate to get some weapons.’
She might have been right, Neb thought, but if so there was no external sign of it. They stayed still for ten more minutes or so, watching nothing happen. Despite the importance of the situation and the danger of it, Neb felt his attention wander. He was tired to his bones in a way that was familiar to him from training. That was why the training had been so hard, after all; to prepare body and mind for the real thing. But it only partially helped. He found himself scanning the surrounding landscape, trying to maintain his focus and awareness, trying not to think of the night before, and somehow his eyes fixed on a straight line high up on the mountain slope. He lost it almost at once and it took him a few moments to find it again. He was almost certain it was the edge of a doorway, high above the military base.
He pointed it out to Anna and Grey. Both women followed the line of his outstretched hand and shaded their eyes against the last of the evening light, trying to make out what was up there.
‘Wish I had my fucking scope,’ Grey said.
‘It’s small, whatever it is,’ Anna answered. ‘Religious maybe? Temple? Shrine?’
Abinaum. Shrine. A link very nearly formed in Neb’s mind, but didn’t quite get there.
‘Could be,’ he answered.
They stared until they convinced themselves they had nothing more to learn. If they tried to climb up the slope they would be clearly visible to anyone in the military base. And despite its air of abandonment, it was almost certainly crawling with hostile forces.
‘We better head back,’ Gray said, checking her watch, ‘or Buzz will be saying our eulogies.’
Eulogies.
Neb gasped. ‘Carving!’ he blurted.
They both looked at him, eyebrows raised.
‘Abinaum is a place where there were stonemasons,’ Neb said. ‘I remember now. It’s referenced in Ross and Fitzgerald, a famous Main textbook. Almost nothing is known about Abinaum except that the Main used stone from here for what they called the Origin Ritual. Nothing is known about the ritual, either.’ He looked around wide-eyed, seeing the scene anew.
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‘Okay,’ Anna said. ‘But that does any of that have to do with anything?’
‘Well if they took stone from here there should be a quarry or something, right?’ Neb said. ‘But we haven’t seen anything. So my guess is the stone comes from the mountains.’
They were still looking at him blankly.
‘Which means there must be tunnels,’ Neb continued, unable to hide his impatience. ‘The stone comes from somewhere, and if there’s no obvious mine…’
‘I see,’ Anna said calmly, and her gaze went back to the shrine, which was now almost certainly not a shrine, but a mine entrance. ‘That does put a new spin on things. Let’s head back and report.’
They were back before Buzz’s deadline and relayed their findings rapidly. Buzz assimilated the new information in his usual instant way. ‘We need to find another entrance,’ he said. ‘Not the one on the hill, that’s too exposed. We move at sundown.’
Neb felt a groan from his tired body. It was already almost dark but there would be no sleep tonight.
The sun slid slowly below the horizon and the unfamiliar stars faded into view. The air became cold, the breeze cutting. Buzz and Anna decided that it was worth risking the bridge to get south of the river and approach the town from the east, parallel to the mountain range. There were few hiding places for an ambush in the hard, shallow land.
The team set out by moonlight, the world drawn in blacks and grays. They did not use any artificial light. Neb found his heart pounding for a multitude of reasons -- the exertion, the fear of what they might find, the excitement of getting closer to the Main. Soon they saw the bridge ahead, a blackness against the blue-black sky beyond. They moved slowly and carefully along the riverbank, following the gentle curve of the water as far as they could before heading up onto the bridge itself in a burst of motion, weapons drawn, attack formation. But it was if they had the night and the world to themselves. They hustled across the bridge and bent south towards the mountain range.
The mountains cut dark slices from the sky above the horizon, and a cold wind rolled off them. Somewhere on the slope above the team was the entrance Neb had seen earlier, now invisible in the blackness. They turned away from it, further from the town and the base. There had to be another way into the mines, one that was less exposed and risky, that would let them approach the base without being seen. Spotting it at night was going to be difficult, but Buzz wanted to at least try.
The moon was bright enough to cast defined shadows on the slopes. They moved slowly and carefully but saw nothing. Neb was just starting to think that they would be better turning back and reconsidering their plans when Buzz fell flat on his face.
Meathead and Mallory were on either side of him in an instant, pistols drawn, scanning every direction in the darkness while the rest of the team dropped instinctively into defensive positions. But it was not an ambush -- Buzz had tripped over a narrow gauge railway line, almost completely buried in the sand and scrubby grass.
‘Well now,’ Buzz said, crouching down and poking around with his knife, tapping the old tracks lightly.
‘A trap?’ Gray asked.
‘Would be very subtle bait, out here in the middle of nowhere,’ Buzz said. ‘Worth the risk.’
They followed the tracks up into the mountains. The going quickly got steep, and at one point they thought they had lost the tracks completely until they found them a little further on, switch-backing upwards on narrow cuts. They walked along the track until finally it disappeared into a stone arch in the mountain.
The arch was set back into a narrow depression, and would have been invisible from ground level. The darkness within seemed denser than the outside night. Don’t go in there, said every fiber of Neb’s being. But he followed the others in without any sign of outward hesitation.
The tunnel was high, over two meters, and wide enough for two people to comfortably walk side by side. It headed almost due south into the mountain. The narrow railway continued along the tunnel floor. Neb’s heart was thumping, the pistol in his hand not much comfort. The silence seemed to get heavier the deeper into the mountain they went. They felt their way cautiously forward twenty or thirty meters, being careful not to trip on the track, before risking a dim light.
The tunnel ran straight and level ahead into the darkness. The walls were of a golden-brown coloured stone, and Neb ran his hand over it. It did not seem particularly remarkable to him. What was it that that made the stone special to the Main? He thought of the Banker’s house and the fireplace there. Stone and fire… They were such elemental things to care about for the most advanced people who had ever lived. But maybe that was the point -- one foot amongst the stars, one foot in the deep past.
‘Move it along, Doc,’ Buzz said, not unkindly. Neb had been staring at the wall, lost in thought. He hurried to catch up with the enormous shadow of Mallory ahead of him.
The tunnel bent or rose or fell in gentle curves, making it hard to keep track of their heading. The track seemed almost new here under the mountain’s protection, the shiny metal covered with only a sprinkling of dust. They came to a T-junction, and they turned right, back in the direction of the military base. Their position was not shown accurately on the map -- their presence icon was mapped only to the general area of the mountain range.
It was utterly silent in the heart of the mountain, and Neb couldn’t shake the thought that their presence was an intrusion. Just passing through, he thought, as if that might somehow ward off any angry spirits. They stopped frequently to listen but all they heard was the deep silence. Other tunnels opened on either side, like hungry mouths, and their tunnel wound up and down and over and back, making it hard to maintain a sense of direction.
‘We pictured this exactly,’ Meathead muttered, scanning the darkness. Neb knew what he meant -- they had covered many tunnel-based scenarios in their training, but without their weapons and equipment, it was all useless.
He tried to estimate how far they’d come by counting his steps and measuring the time taken, something to keep his mind occupied. He felt an alert wakefulness, almost drug-like. Something is coming to a head here. The tunnel stretched on unchanging.
But at last there was a brightness ahead, the lightening blue of the predawn sky. The tunnel had curved around to the north, and now they were looking down a side-tunnel to the world beyond. Fresh morning air flowed in, speaking gloriously of the wide open spaces beyond. Mallory was in the lead and he hustled forward. ‘Oh shit!’ he said. ‘We’re back at the original door right over the military --’
He stopped speaking in a sharp gasp. He looked down and saw that he had stepped on a pressure plate.
He stared back at the group behind him, face aghast.
‘Oh fuck,’ he said, and then it seemed as if the world had ended.