The drones hesitated, turned, fled, and we followed.
The long climb up stairs of cut stone and steel was a nightmare of darkness and billowing smoke. It got worse when more drones joined us, and we became part of an immense file of women, children, a few men, all clambering up those narrow, suffocating stairwells. The power was down in some sectors, and by flickering emergency lights I glimpsed people running, collapsed partition walls, smashed glass. In the hospital areas, and in the strange chambers where the mamme had lived, squads of people were working busily, pushing beds and wheelchairs out of damaged rooms. But the air thickened rapidly, and it became stiflingly hot; the ventilation systems must have failed.
I just pushed my way through the mobs of drones. My only priority was getting out of there: myself, Lucia, and the baby, for not once did I release her hand.
It was only when I got aboveground that I got a clear sense of what was happening.
Peter had placed his Semtex skillfully. He had broken open the upper carapace of the Crypt. The result was a great crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with a plume of gray-black tufa dust hanging in the air above it. Workers from the nearby offices and shops, clutching their cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world. There was a remote wail of sirens, and a lone cop was doing his best to keep the onlookers away from the hole.
And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands.
Dressed alike, with similar features, and now obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them. Most of them came out over one lip of Peter’s crater, in a kind of elliptical flood. At the edge of the ellipse were heavier, older women, some of them with their arms linked to keep out strangers. At the center of the mass were the younger ones, some cradling infants, and here and there I saw hospital workers carrying the heavy chairs of the mamme-nonne. Nobody was in the lead. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who probed forward in turn. As they reached the buildings at the sides of the road the flowing ellipse broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining. They probed into doorways and alleyways, swarming, exploring. In the dusty light they seemed to blur together into a single rippling mass, and even in the bright air of the Roman afternoon they gave off a musky, fetid odor.
FOUR
Chapter 49
As the shuttle skimmed low over the surface of the frozen planet, it was the circle of the dead that first struck Abil.
Not that, in those first moments, he understood what he was seeing.
Captain Dower was piloting the shuttle herself, an effortless display of competence. The planet was far from any star, and the shuttle was a bubble, all but transparent, so that the hundred tars and their corporals flew as effortlessly as dreams over a plain of darkness. Below, Abil could see only the broad elliptical splashes of paleness picked out by the flitter’s spots. The ground was mostly featureless, save for the subtle texture of ripples in the ice — the last waves of a frozen ocean — and, here and there, the glistening sheen of nitrogen slicks. Dower had said the ocean of water ice had probably frozen out within a few years, after the Target had been ripped away from its parent sun by a chance stellar collision, and then the air rained out, and then snowed.
Abil looked into the sky. This sunless world was surrounded by a great sphere of stars, hard as shards of ice themselves. In one direction he could see the great stripe that was the Galaxy. It was quite unlike the pale band seen from Earth: from here it was a broad, vibrant, complex band of light, littered with hot young stars. The Third Expansion of humankind now sprawled across tens of thousands of light-years, and had penetrated the dust clouds that shielded much of the Galaxy’s true structure from Earth. When he looked back the other way, the fields of stars were unfamiliar. He wondered where Earth was — though surely Earth’s sun would be invisible from here.
Once, all of humanity and all of human history had been confined to a single rocky world, a pinpoint of dust lost in the sky. But since humankind had begun to move purposefully out from the home planet, twenty thousand years had shivered across the face of the Galaxy. And now, in the direction of home, every which way he looked he was seeing stars mapped and explored and colonized by humans. It was a sky full of people.
His heart swelled with pride.
Captain Dower called, “Heads up.”
Abil looked ahead. The spots splashed broad lanes across the ice, diminishing to paleness toward the horizon. But they cast enough light that Abil could see a mountain: a cone of black rock, its flanks striped by glaciers. All around it was a broad, low ridge, like a wall around a city. The diameter of the rim walls must have been many miles. There was some kind of striation on the plain of ice inside the rim wall, a series of lines that led back toward the central peak.
Dower turned. Her metallic Eyes glinted in the subtle interior lights of the shuttle. “That’s our destination. First impressions — you, Abil?”
Abil shrugged inside his skinsuit. “Could be an impact crater. The rim mountains, the central peak—”
“It isn’t big enough,” came a voice from the darkness. “I mean, a crater that size ought to be cup-shaped, like a scoop out of the ice. You only get rim mountains and splash-back central peaks with much larger craters. And anyhow I haven’t seen any other craters here. This planet is a sunless rogue. Impacts must be rare, if you wander around in interstellar space.”
That had been Denh. She was in Abil’s unit, and Abil needed to get back in the loop.
“So,” he said, “what do you think it is, smart-ass?”
“That peak is tectonic,” Denh said. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like granite to me.”
Dower nodded. “And the rim feature?”
“… I can’t explain that, sir.”
“Honesty doesn’t excuse ignorance. But it helps. Let’s go see.”
The shuttle dropped vertiginously toward the ground.
The profile of the rim feature was — strange. It was a raised ridge of some gray-white, textured substance. It ran without a break all around that distant mountain. It had a bell-shaped profile, rising smoothly from the ice on either side, and a rounded summit. Its texture was odd — from a height it looked fibrous, or like a bank of grass, trapped in frost. Not like any rock formation Abil had ever seen.
The shuttle slowed almost to a stop now, and began to drift down toward the upper surface of the rim feature.
Abil saw that distance had fooled him. Those “fibers” were not blades of grass: they were bigger than that. They were limbs — arms and legs, hands and feet — and heads: human heads. The rim was a wall of the dead, a heaping of corpses huge enough to mimic a geological feature, naked and frozen into incorruptibility.
Abil was astounded. Nothing in the predrop briefings had prepared him for this.
“It’s a ring cemetery,” Dower said matter-of-factly. “Warren worlds are subtly different, but the template is the same, every damn time.” She glanced around sharply at the hundred faces. “Everybody okay with this?”