The bridge was their final landmark.
In the brilliant light, looking out from high on a windy ridge, the landmark resembled a rigid thread, dark and insubstantial against the silver-white chamber wall. Sheered off in the stratosphere, it was hundreds of kilometers too short. There was no escape route for them. But it was their destination. More than three years had been invested in reaching this place, and that was enough reason to keep marching past the usual fatigue. Yet this was exceptionally rough country, even for Marrow. And worse, the captains were traveling across the grain of every local fault and stream, and the little stretches of flat ground were choked with old jungles and elaborate deadfalls.
Reaching the last high ridge, they found more ridges waiting in ambush, and the bridge was a fatter thread, but still agonizingly distant.
They collapsed under the next ridge.
It wasn’t a true camp. They were lying where they fell in a rust-cushioned bowl surrounded by raw nickel, and when a mist turned into a hard rain, they ignored it. Thousands of zigzagging kilometers and three years had made Washen and her team indifferent to this little dose of weather. They lay on their backs, breathing when they needed, and quietly, with soft exhausted voices, they made themselves mutter hopeful words.
Imagine the other captains’ surprise, they told each other.
Imagine, they said, when we come out of the jungle tomorrow…! Won’t all this be worth it, just to see the surprise on their noble faces…?
Except no one was waiting to be caught off guard. Late that next day, they arrived at the bridge and found a long-abandoned encampment, overgrown and forgotten. The solid, trusted hilltop where the bridge was rooted had been split open by quakes, and the hyperfiber was a sickly, degraded black. The structure itself was tilting precariously away from them. Dead doors were propped open with a simple iron post. A makeshift ladder reached up the dark inner shaft, but judging by the frosting of soft rust, no one had used the ladder for months. If not for several years.
Circling through the jungle, Broq found a sketchy path. They picked a random direction and followed the path until it was swallowed by the black vegetation. Then they turned and retraced their course until the path was wide enough that a person could jog, then run, relaxing because someone had been down this way. Someone was here. And suddenly Washen was in the lead, streaking ahead at a full sprint.
But the time they reached the’ river bottom, everyone was breathless.
The path bled into a wider, well-worn trail, but they had to slow again, panting as they jogged, coming around every bend with a jittery sense of anticipation.
In the end, they were the ones with surprised faces.
The six captains were trotting in the bright shadows. Some trick of the light hid the woman standing before them. The light and her mirrored uniform kept Washen from seeing her until the familiar face seemed to pop into existence. Miocene’s face, unchanged at first glance. She looked regal and well chilled. “It took you long enough,” the Submaster deadpanned. And only then was there a smile and an odd tilt to the face, and she added, “It’s good to see you. All of you. Honestly, I’d given up all hope.”
Washen swallowed her anger along with her questions.
Her companions asked the obvious question for her. Who else was here? they wondered. How were they making do? Did any machinery work? Had the Master been in contact with them? Then before any answers could be offered, Diu inquired, “What sort of relief mission is coming for us?”
“It’s a cautious mission,” Miocene replied. “So cautious that it fools you. It makes you believe that it doesn’t even exist.”
Her own anger was rich and strong, and well practiced.
The Submaster beckoned them to follow, and as they walked in the bright shade, she explained the essentials. Aasleen and others had cobbled together several telescopes, and at least one captain was always watching the base camp overhead. From what they could see, the diamond blister was intact. Every building was intact. But the drones and beacons were dead, and the reactor was off-line. A three-kilometer stub of the bridge was next to the blister, and it would make the perfect foundation for a new structure. But Miocene shook her head, quietly admitting that there wasn’t any trace of captains, or anyone else, trying to mount any sort of rescue attempt.
“Maybe they think we’re dead,” said Diu, desperate to be charitable.
“I don’t think we’re dead,” Miocene countered. “And even if we were, someone should be a little more interested in our bones, and in answers.”
Washen didn’t say one word. After three years of hard work, lousy food, and forced hopefulness, she suddenly felt sick and desperately sad.
The Submaster slowed her pace, working her way back through the questions.
“Every machine was ruined by the Event,” she explained. “That’s our little name for that very big phenomenon.The Event. From what we’ve pieced together, the buttresses merged. Those beneath us, and those above us. And when it happened, our cars and drones, sensors and AIs, were left as so much fancy trash.”
“Can’t you fix them?” asked Promise.
“We can’t even be sure how they were broken,” Miocene replied.
People nodded, and waited.
She offered a distracted smile, admitting, “We are surviving, however. Wooden shelters. Some iron tools. Pendulum clocks. Steam power when we go to the trouble. And enough homemade equipment, like the telescopes, that lets us do some toddler-type science.”
The trail made a slow turn.
The jungle’s understory had been cut down and beaten back, leaving the mature trees to give precious shade. The new encampment stretched out on all sides. Like anything built by determined captains, the community was orderly. Each house was square and strong, built from the gray trunks of the same kind of tree, iron axes squaring them up and notching them and the little gaps patched with a ruddy mortar. The paths were lined with smaller logs, and someone had given each path its own name. Center. Main. Left-behind. Rightbehind. Golden. And every captain was in uniform, and smiling, standing together in careful lines, trying to hide the weariness in their eyes and their sudden voices.
More than two hundred captains shouted, “Hello!”
In a practiced chorus, they shouted, “Welcome back!”
Washen could smell their sweet perspiration as well as an assortment of home-brewed perfumes. Then the wind gusted, bringing her the rich, very familiar odor of bug flesh broiling over a low fire.
A feast was being prepared, in their honor.
She spoke, finally. “How did you know we were coming?”
“Your bootprints were noticed,” Miocene reported. “Up by the bridge.”
“I saw them,” said Aasleen. She stepped forward, glad to take credit. “Counted them, measured them. Knew it was you, and came home to report.”
“There’s a quicker route than the one you found,” Miocene cautioned.
“Quicker than three years?* Diu joked.
Am embarrassed laughter blossomed, then fell away. Then Aasleen felt like telling them, “It’s been closer to four.”
She had a clever quick face, skin black as band iron, and among her peers, she seemed the only happy soul -this one-time engineer who had gradually become a captain, and who now had the responsibility of reinventing everything that humans had ever accomplished. Starting from scratch, with minimal resources… and she couldn’t have looked more contented…
“You didn’t have clocks,” she warned them. “You were living by how you felt, and humans, left without markers, fall into thirty- or thirty-two-hours days.”