The news was the same every day—the voynix stayed away, in an almost perfect circle with a radius of just under two miles from what could be this last human encampment on Earth—yet the numbers kept growing. Greogi had estimated at least twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand of the dull-silvery things out there in the treeless forests yesterday afternoon. There would be more at first light this morning. There were more each day. It was as certain as the weak, wintry sunrises. It was as certain as the fact that the pleading, whining, insinuating mental voice coming up from the Pit would never stop until it got free.
And then what? wondered Ada.
She could imagine. Just the presence of the thing had cast a pall over the Ardis survivors. It was hard enough just to get through the days—building and expanding their little tents and shacks, salvaging what they could from the ruins, improving their hopeless little log fort, not to mention getting enough to eat—without the Setebos baby’s evil whining in their minds.
Food was a serious issue. All the cattle had been driven away during the massacre and sonie outings had found only their rotting carcasses in distant fields and on the winter forest floor. The voynix had slaughtered them as well. And with the soil frozen and even the hope of gardens or crops or planting months away, and with the canned and preserved goods that had been in the basement of Ardis Manor now merely melted blobs under charred rubble, the forty-eight Ardis survivors depended on the hunters who went out in the sonie every day. There was no game within the four-mile circle of the voynix army, so every day two men or women with flechette guns risked a trip beyond the voynix—a longer trip every day as the deer and larger game fled the area—and every evening, if they were lucky, a mule deer or wild pig would turn on the spit above the central cooking fire. But they hadn’t been that lucky recently—they didn’t have fresh meat every day, and fewer hunts provided them an animal to kill within the increasing radius of their flights, so they preserved what they could with smoking and with the remaining precious salt salvaged from the storehouses, and they munched on their monotonously bad-tasting jerky, and they watched the voynix continue massing, and each day and night their moods grew darker with the Setebos baby constantly sending its white, clammy hands and tendrils of telepathy into their brains. Even while they slept. And like the game they hunted from the sonie, sleep grew increasingly harder to find.
“Another few days,” Daeman said softly, “and I think it will be able to tear its way out of this cage.” He took the burning torch from its niche several feet away and held it out over the Pit. The size of a small calf, its brain surface gleaming with moist, gray mucus, Setebos’ baby was hanging from the grill. Half a dozen of its tendriled hands gripped the dark iron mesh. Eight or ten yellow eyes squinted, blinked, and closed at the sudden flare of light. Two of its feeding mouths pulsed open and Ada stared in fascination at the rows of small, white teeth in each.
“Mommy,” it squeaked. It had been speaking for the last week, but its actual voice was nowhere near as human-sounding or childlike as its telepathic voice
“Yes,” whispered Ada. “We’ll call a general meeting today. Let everyone vote on the time. But we have to make final preparations for departure soon.”
The plan pleased almost none of them, but it was the best they had come up with. While Daeman and a few others stood guard on the baby, they would begin evacuating materials and people to an island they’d scouted about thirty-five miles downriver from Ardis. It was not the paradise isle Daeman had wanted to fax to somewhere on the far side of the world, but this small rocky islet was in the center of the river, the currents ran fast there, and most important, the ground was defensible.
They all assumed that the voynix were faxing in somehow, from somewhere—although daily checks of the Ardis faxnode showed that it was still inoperable. That meant that the voynix could easily follow them, perhaps even fax to the island. But the forty-eight survivors could cluster and set their camp on a grassy depression on the center knob of the isle—hunt and bring in their food via sonie the way they were doing now—and the island was so small that the voynix would have trouble faxing in more than a few hundred at a time. They might be able to kill or drive off that many.
The last men and women to leave Ardis—and Ada fully intended to be the last woman—would kill the Setebos spawn. And then the voynix would flood over this hallowed place like frenzied grasshoppers, but the rest of the survivors would be on the island and safe. Safe for a few hours, Ada guessed.
Could voynix swim? Ada and the others had searched their memories for any instance of seeing one of their slave voynix swimming way back in the ancient history before the sky fell ten months earlier, before Harman and dead Savi and Daeman had destroyed the Firmary along with Prospero’s isle. Before the end of their foolish world of parties and endless faxing and safety. No one could be sure if they had ever seen a voynix swim.
But Ada was sure in her own heart. The voynix could swim. They could walk along the bed of the river under all that water and in all that swift current if they had to. They would get to the humans on their little island once the Setebos baby was dead.
And then the survivors, if there were any, would have to flee again—but to where? Ada’s vote was for the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu since she remembered well Petyr’s description of the voynix massed there being unable to get into the green environmental bubbles clustered on the bridge towers and suspension cables. But the majority of the others had not wanted to go to the Bridge they’d never seen—it was too far away, it would take too long to get there, they’d be caught inside the glass structures high above nothing with voynix all around them.
Ada had told them how Harman, Petyr, Hannah, and Noman/ Odysseus had reached the Bridge in less than an hour, hurtling up into the fringes of space and then tearing back down into the atmosphere above the southern continent. She explained how the sonie still had that flight plan in its memory—how a trip to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu would take only a few minutes longer than the ferry down the river to the rocky island.
But they still did not want to try that. Not yet.
But Ada and Daeman continued to make their plans for that long evacuation.
Suddenly there came a sound from above the dark line of trees to the southwest—a sort of rattling, hissing noise.
Daeman unslung his flechette rifle and held it ready, clicking off the safety. “Voynix!” he shouted.
Ada bit her lip, the Setebos thing at her feet forgotten for a moment, its mental urgings drowned out by real noise. Someone by the central fire was ringing the main alarm bell. People were stumbling out of the big lean-to and the other tents and yelling to wake others.
“I don’t think so,” said Ada, almost shouting so Daeman could hear her over the din. “It didn’t sound right.”
When the bell quit clanging and the shouts died down, she could hear it more clearly now—a metallic, rasping, mechanical noise—not like the sibilant leap and rustle of a thousand voynix attacking.
Then a light became visible—a searchlight stabbing down from the sky, only a few hundred feet up, the shaft and circle of light illuminating bare branches, frozen and fire-blackened grass, the palisade walls and the shocked sentries on the crude ramparts there.
The sonie did not have a spotlight.
“Get the rifles!” Ada shouted at the group milling near the central fire. Some people had weapons. Others grabbed them and readied them.
“Spread out!” shouted Daeman, running toward the clustered crowd and waving his arms. “Take cover!” Ada agreed. Whatever this thing was, if it had hostile intentions, there was no need to help it by clustering up like fat and happy targets.