The bay in which the Typhon was parked was only one in a row of bays receding into the distance. Many were damaged—filled with rubble, roof collapsed. Most looked empty. More distant ones looked as if they held the flensed skeletons of other typhons.
Large and terrifying as the Typhon was, the thing was dwarfed by the sheer scale of its surroundings. This was the largest man-made space Farley had ever seen. The tunnel walls were slightly curved, as if some inconceivably large and powerful bore had dug them and melted the walls to a smooth gloss. A large groove that ran the length of the tunnel bisected large circular designs outside each repair bay. Another groove ran from each design to the bay itself.
The facility had to extend for miles, and for all Farley knew it descended for miles as well. He saw several open-framed, two-seater vehicles, and wheeled equipment sleds—from little upright carts the size of refrigerator dollies to slabs that looked as if they could have hauled a small house. In the bays were massive platform lifts and huge articulated cranes. Some of these still held components. Others had fallen with their burdens. The vast space was lit the same sickly green as the faint glow that emanated from the well in the middle of the crater. The air was musty and smelled of dirt, oil, faint copper. Time.
Farley and Wennda stared at the stream of bugs marching past the lethal body of the Typhon. Wennda was scraped-up by the fall and from being dragged, but she seemed otherwise uninjured. Farley put an arm on her shoulder and she put a hand on his.
“Do you think we can get back up the crevice?” she whispered.
“You kidding? I’ll race you.”
He helped her up, and they turned to see Yone still staring at the Typhon as he stood beside the line of bugs crawling from the crevice opening. One side of his face had been scraped raw in the fall, and the top of his jumpsuit was spotted with blood. As Farley and Wennda walked toward him, Farley could feel the Typhon behind him, like knowing that a sniper had you in his sights.
“Come on,” Farley told Yone. “Let’s take our chances back in the crevice.”
“I quite agree.”
The opening was just wide enough for one yard-wide bug, if it turned sideways to get through. The thought of going belly-to-belly with the bastards to get back into the crevice made Farley’s skin crawl, but he’d take rubbing bellies with the bugs over the Typhon any day.
He watched the bugs crawl out of the crevice opening. “Stay close behind me,” he told Wennda and Yone, and headed for the entrance.
All the bugs stopped moving. The one that had just emerged from the opening stayed in front of it and raised its forelegs. Farley pulled up short and Wennda and Yone bumped into him.
“It doesn’t look good,” said Wennda.
“I’ll go left,” said Farley. “If our friend there moves with me, you two run in.”
“All right,” Wennda said after a moment.
“Okay.” Farley displayed his opened hands to the bug and sidled to the left. Several of the eye lenses shifted to follow him. The rest stayed trained on Wennda and Yone. The bug did not move.
Farley lowered his hands and sighed. He stepped back and so did Wennda. The bugs resumed their steady stream.
Wennda nodded at the Typhon. “That’s the only other direction,” she said.
“Then there’s no use crying about it. Let’s go.”
“We are just going to walk by that thing?” Yone asked.
“Well, I think we should tiptoe, but yeah,” said Farley.
Don’t think of it as mice sneaking by a sleeping cat, Farley told himself as they walked single file in the metal groove beside the line of scavenger drones that crawled past the Typhon. Think of it as ants crawling in front of a lion. Lions don’t care about ants. Ants aren’t on the menu.
The groove was five feet wide and at least that deep. Wennda walked in front, Farley at the rear. Farley wanted Wennda close, but Yone’s injured leg meant that someone had to keep an eye on him in case he faltered.
Ahead and to the right lay the Typhon. Farley tried not to stare at the thing but it was impossible. They were trying to sneak past something longer and wider than the Morgana that had almost knocked the bomber out of the sky.
The sky was full of these bastards once. That’s what Yone said. Battalions of living machines that darkened the skies. That fought without fear or hesitation. Without mercy. All you’ve got to do is walk by one of them without being seen. Nothing to it, Captain Midnight. Stay in line, keep moving, keep quiet, and maybe one day you can live to hold hands with a pretty girl back where you belong.
He almost made it.
Farley alternated between keeping an eye on Yone and Wennda and straining to take in as much detail as he could of what he had somehow come to think of as his nemesis. He saw that the Typhon’s tail section was asymmetrical but aerodynamic, flaring into a kind of fluke that acted as a horizontal stabilizer, like the tail of a dolphin. The skin was dark and mottled and patched in many places. The bugs that swarmed it seemed to be repairing it. Arclights flashed from the tips of forelegs delicately spotwelding damaged sections. Other bugs opened the pliable skin to perform electrical repairs or surgery, or both. One bug swept a foreleg along an intake vent or a gill slit, then crawled inside.
Throughout it all Farley felt a sense of breathing, of extensive systems working to keep a very old and complicated thing functioning. It felt like standing next to a vast pressure cooker whose needle was well into the red. Farley’s jaw ached from clenching his teeth.
He watched a bug run from the bay with a piece of equipment like a relay runner. He looked back at the hangar and did a doubletake.
The Fata Morgana floated in front of the Typhon.
Farley understood right away that he was seeing some kind of solid-looking projection, like the tabletop images in the Dome. But it was full-sized and it looked absolutely real. The bomber’s right rear elevator was damaged. Flak and bullet punctures riddled the hull. The Morgana flew low in the northern fissure toward the pale rectangle of the Redoubt in the distance, a disorienting vista receding past the far end of the hangar bay.
From the foreground a bright orange streak shot toward the bomber and narrowly missed as she banked right. The top turret rotated and began shooting back. The image jolted as the rounds hit home.
The image froze.
The Typhon’s enormous head cocked right.
The image enlarged. Farley could see Wen through the turret bubble as he fired on the Typhon.
On its massive metal slab the Typhon unfolded a wing. Something swelled on the underside near the creature’s body. It swiveled slightly. Ahead of the Typhon, the image receded until the whole bomber could be seen. Streaks fired from what was now a rod projecting from beneath the Typhon’s wing. Impact marks stitched along the top of the Morgana’s fuselage until they tore apart the turret bubble.
The image froze.
The Typhon turned its head and looked right at Joe Farley.
Farley went cold all over. His breath caught. Everything went far away. Nothing existed but that enormous streamlined head. No light but the pale dead ovals of its eyes. It sees me, Farley thought. It sees me and I’m going to die. He willed himself to move. He could not move.
Then he was falling backward and he hit the metal floor of the groove and saw stars and heard voices. Wennda? Yone?
All at once it all let go. “It saw me,” Farley said. “We’ve got to go, we’ve got to move, it saw me.”