The colonel had their fullest attention. Shoat didn't dare interrupt.
'It reminds me a lot of a bounty,' said Walker. 'According to this, I get so much for every hand, foot, limb, ear, and/or eye that I deliver intact and healthy. That's your hands, your feet, your eyes.' He found the part. 'Let's see, at three hundred dollars per eye, that's six hundred per pair. But they're only offering five hundred per mind. Go figure.'
The outcry went up. 'This is outrageous.' Walker waved the contract like a white flag. 'You need to know something else,' he boomed out. They stilled, somewhat. 'I've put my time in down here, and it's time to smell the roses, if you will. Dabble in politics, maybe. Do some consulting work. Spend some downtime with my wife and kids. And that's where you come in.'
They drew quiet.
'You see,' said Walker, 'my aim is to get filthy rich off you people. I mean to collect every penny of this entire schedule of bonuses. Every eyeball, every testicle, every toe. Do you ever ask yourselves who you can really trust?'
Walker folded his contract and closed it in his daybook. 'Let me submit that the one thing in this world you can always trust is self-interest. And now you know mine.' Shoat was paying painful attention. The colonel had just threatened the expedition's union – and saved it. But why? wondered Ali. What was Walker's game?
He clapped the King James against his thigh. 'We are beginning a great journey into
the unknown. From now on, this expedition will operate within guidelines and the protection of my judgment. Our best protection will be a common set of ideas. A law. That law, people, is mine. From here on, we will observe tenets of military jurisprudence. In return, I will restore you to your families.'
Shoat's neck made a slow extension, turtle-like. His soldier of fortune had just declared himself the ultimate legal authority over the Helios expedition for the next year. It was the most audacious thing Ali had ever seen. She waited for the scientists to raise the roof with their protests.
But there was silence. Not one objection. Then Ali understood. The mercenary had just promised them their lives.
Like any expedition, they settled into themselves by inches. A pace developed.
Camp broke at 0800. Walker would read a prayer to his troops – usually something grim from Revelation or Job or his favorite, Paul to the Corinthians – The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light – before sending a half-dozen ahead to audit the risks. The scientists would follow. The porters brought up the rear, protected-driven, it was becoming evident – by the silent soldiers. The division of labor was succinct, the lines uncrossable.
The porters spoke Quechua, once the language of the Incas. None of the Americans spoke it, and their attempts to use Spanish were rebuffed. Ali tried her hand at it, but the indios were not disposed to fraternizing. At night the mercenaries patrolled their perimeter in three shifts, guarding less against hadal adversaries than against the flight of their own porters.
In those first weeks they rarely saw their scout. Ike had vaulted into the night of tunneling, and kept himself a day or two ahead of them. His absence created an odd yearning among the scientists. When they asked about his welfare, Walker was dismissive. The man knows his duty, he would say.
Ali had presumed the scout was part of Walker's paramilitary, but learned otherwise. He was not exactly a free agent, if that was the term. Apparently Shoat had purchased him from the US Army. He was essentially chattel, little different from his hadal days. Ike's mystery mounted, in part, Ali suspected, because people were able to attach their fantasies to him. She limited her own desires to eventually interviewing him about hadal ethnography, and possibly assembling a root glossary, though she could not get that orange out of her mind.
For the time being, Ike did what Walker termed his duty. He found them the path. He led them into the darkness. They all knew his blaze mark, a one-foot-high cross spray-painted on the walls in bright blue.
Shoat informed them the paint would begin degrading after a week. Again, it was an issue of his trade secrets. Helios was determined to throw any competitors off their scent. As one scientist pointed out, the disappearing paint would also throw them off their own scent. They would have no way of retracing their own footsteps.
To reassure them, Shoat held up a small capsule he described as a miniature radio transmitter. It was one of many he would be planting along the way, and would lie dormant until he triggered it to life with his remote control. He compared it to Hansel and Gretel's trail of crumbs, then someone pointed out that the crumbs Hansel dropped had all been eaten by birds. 'Always negative,' he griped at them.
In twelve-hour cycles, the team moved, then rested, then moved again. The men sprouted whiskers. Among the women, roots began to grow out, eyeliner and lipstick fell from daily fashion. Dr. Scholl's adhesive pads for blisters became the currency of choice, even more valuable than M&M's.
Ali had never been part of an expedition, but felt herself immersed in the tradition
of what they were doing. They could have been whalers setting sail, or a wagon train moving west. She felt as if she knew it all by heart.
For the first ten days their joints and muscles were in shock. Even those hardy athletes among them groaned in their sleep and struggled with leg cramps. A small cult built around ibuprofen, the anti-inflammatory pain tablet. But each day their packs got a little lighter as they ate food or discarded books that no longer seemed so essential. One morning, Ali woke up with her head on a rock and actually felt refreshed.
Their farewell tans faded. Their feet hardened. More and more, they could see in quarter-light and less. Ali liked the smell of herself at night, her honest sweat.
Helios chemists had infused their protein bars with extra vitamin D to substitute for lost sunshine. The bars were dense with other additives, too, boosters Ali had never heard of. Among other things, her night vision grew richer by the hour. She felt stronger. Someone wondered if the food bars might not contain steroids, too, eliciting a playful round of science nerds flexing their imaginary new musculatures for one another.