“Bodies?” Grillo asked in her ear.
She ignored him and moved sideways to look at the strange tendril from the side. It was segmented, each length of it as long as her hand, connected by bulbous sections like bony knuckles. The material was not like anything she’d seen before. Slightly opaque, and coated with a fine dust, or moisture perhaps. She moved closer and saw both theories were wrong—the spike had thousands—no, millions—of tiny thorns jutting out of it, each thin as a hair and no longer than a grain of sand.
“What is it?” David asked.
Sam shook her head. “Beats me,” she replied. She stepped around it only to be poked in her stomach by something sharp, felt even through her thick combat vest. She looked down to see another of the long, thin crystal branches protruding through the cloud.
Looking up, and around her, Samantha realized they were standing at the edge of some kind of massive lattice. A complex, chaotic system of branches made up of the queer, pale blue segments. The tips of the branches were sharp as needles.
Samantha slung her weapon and tugged at her pant leg, pulling a section of it tight and away from her thigh. Then she waddled a few steps over to a spike protruding at that height and watched in horror as it poked through the cloth like a knife through warm butter.
“Guys,” she said, “back away. Very slowly.”
Faisal turned first. “God help us,” he muttered, and froze.
Facing him, Samantha saw that the lattice of branches had grown over and around them. Even as she watched, she could see new knuckle-like tips blooming on the thorny ends of branches, and new segments beginning to stretch.
“What’s going on?” Grillo asked, urgency in his usually calm voice.
Faisal crouched low and ran, ducking under the jagged tentacles. She saw him drop to a belly crawl before he vanished completely in the soupy gray haze.
“David, go!” Samantha shouted.
But the man hesitated. The spikes were getting lower to the ground with each passing second.
“I’m out!” she heard Faisal yell from somewhere nearby.
The opportunity to flee passed just seconds later. Samantha thought they would be skewered on a thousand of the knifelike points, but the growth seemed to stop when it neared them, leaving them inside a bulbous cavity, surrounded on all sides.
“We’re trapped,” David said. Now a hint of fear shadowed his gruff voice. If any one of those spikes poked his environment suit, he’d be infected and the headaches would start. After that, if he didn’t get back to the aura in time to snuff out the early part of the infection, he’d die. Or worse.
Sam unslung her rifle again, took the clip out, and ensured no round was in the chamber. Then she flipped it around to hold it like a club.
“Samantha, I need an update,” Grillo hissed in her ear.
“There’s some kind of … growth here. I think it’s … alien.”
David nodded at her with grim determination. He’d converted his own rifle into a club as well, and stood ready to start hacking.
“We’re completely surrounded by it,” Samantha said. “Going to try to smash our way out.”
Glancing around, she realized that every direction looked the same. She couldn’t remember the path Faisal had taken. “Which way?” she asked David.
He glanced around, then dropped to a knee to study the ground. “I think he went that way,” the man said, pointing. There were so many blurred boot marks on the ground, Sam didn’t think he could really tell.
“Faisal?!” she called out.
“Here,” his voice came back. It seemed to come from everywhere, but she thought it stronger in one direction. Better than nothing, she decided, and turned to face that way.
She swung the butt of her rifle with all her strength.
The gun swept through the crystal branches with a whoosh. The bony arms rattled against the butt of the gun like dead-wood. They swayed from the impact and bounced back, vibrating silently along their length. Not a single one broke or even showed signs of damage.
After a few seconds of rattling back and forth, the branches settled back into their original positions and continued to grow. Sam felt like a diver, trapped below some kind of coral reef grown with time-lapse quickness.
Soon she and David were completely enveloped in a pocket within the strange structure, needle-sharp tips pointing at them from every direction except the ground. David crawled to the center of the cavity and sat there, glancing frantically around himself, waiting for the thorn that would puncture his suit and doom him. But the growth stopped, as if it wanted them trapped inside.
“We’re stuck in here,” Samantha said for Grillo’s benefit. “Some kind of plant, I don’t know. It’s surrounded us and the tips will cut David’s suit if he moves.”
“Try a grenade,” Grillo said.
Samantha filed that advice. She’d not yet reached that level of desperation. Kneeling, she wiped her right hand across her shirt to dry it, then reached out and tapped the side of one branch with her index finger, as gently as she could. The semi-transparent stick, which snaked off into the cloud in a line roughly parallel to the ground, swayed slightly from the pressure. Sam examined her finger and saw a dab of moisture there. Water? Some kind of secretion? She couldn’t be sure, but it tingled.
Leaning in close, she noticed fine wisps of mist coming from the microscopic thorns along the length of the branch. “I think this thing is creating the cloud,” she said, to no one in particular.
“Grenade?” David asked.
“Hold on,” Samantha said. “If it shatters and falls on us, you’ll be fucked.”
He grunted. “Good point.”
Slinging her weapon again, Sam held out her hands to either side of the closest branch, twitched her fingers, then gripped it below a knuckle a half meter down its length.
Pinpricks of pain forced her to yank her hands away. “Son of a damn bitch” she barked, examining her palms. A hundred little dots of blood formed and welled. “Jesus H. fucking Christ that hurts.” She unzipped her combat vest and gripped the white tank top beneath to put pressure on the wounds. Her hands began to feel cold and numb, as if she’d rubbed eucalyptus oil into them, and she gripped her shirt tighter, biting her tongue against the pain, until the sensation subsided.
Sam sat down next to David, aware of his measured breaths through the speaker on his suit.
“Sod this,” he growled. “Grenade.”
“No,” Samantha said. She let go of her shirt, leaving two dark red handprints on it, and flexed her fingers over and over until the numb feeling vanished entirely.
Knowing it futile, she searched the pockets of her vest and pants for a pair of gloves, and found none. She rarely carried them unless on a mission somewhere cold.
In another pocket she found a chrome Zippo lighter, dented and scuffed. She’d picked it up in Japan, she thought, but couldn’t recall for sure. Worth a try, she figured, and moved back to the edge of their pocket within the lattice.
She rolled the knobby igniter, swallowing a bit of pain from the still-raw needle pricks on her thumb. It failed to catch, and she had to thumb it four more times before the sparks finally lit. A meager yellow flame sprouted from the tip of the lighter and held.
Slowly she guided her hand underneath the same branch she’d tried to break. When the flame licked a portion of the crystalline stick, it turned beet red and shrank away. The red discoloration rippled along the length of the branch, fading into the cloud. Soon the thin arm of the alien structure absorbed the redness and returned to its original pale blue.
Sam jabbed the flame under it again, and once again the branch recoiled away, as if growing in reverse. She kept the flame under it, watching in fascination as the length receded and pulses of bright red coloration flowed along its length.
“It doesn’t like fire,” she said brightly. “We need to make a torch.”
It took a few minutes to improvise one. David’s assault rifle was modular and easily broken down. He removed the butt of it to serve as the handle of their torch. Sam pulled her vest off and set it on the ground, then hoisted her bloodied shirt over her head. David actually averted his eyes at her partial state of nudity, only refocusing on the torch when she pulled her vest back on. The thick nylon rubbed against her skin like sandpaper.
Then she took apart the Zippo while David kept a close vigil on the hundreds of needle-tipped branches around them. Sam dumped the lighter fluid onto the shirt, but only a few drops came out. “Shit,” she muttered. “Grillo, anything flammable in your vehicles? Liquor, a butane stove, anything?”
“We’re checking,” he said.
Sam quickly reassembled the lighter, before all the fumes vanished. She rolled the wheel and this time it produced a flame on the first try. Brow furrowed in concentration, she held it to the makeshift torch and watched with grim satisfaction as the torn, bloodied cloth took flame.
“We found some road flares,” Grillo said in her ear. “Would that work?”
“Worth a shot,” she said. “Faisal! You still there?”
“I’m here.” His voice sounded faint, and in a different place than before.
She told him to run back to the barricade and get the flares from Grillo. While he did that, Sam had David stand in the center of their cavity while she walked around him, waving the torch at the closest branches. They receded more violently from the bigger flame, making a sound like two shards of glass rubbing together when they moved. Gradually she managed to increase their space to something the size of a small car. A few new branches tried to snake their way in, so she kept at it until the bright red glow of a signal flare could be seen in the haze.
“I see your torch,” Faisal said.
“Meet you halfway. Be careful, they grow back in behind you pretty quick.”
A minute later the three were reunited. Faisal handed an extra flare to both her and David, and Sam saw he had one extra stuffed into his front pants pocket. She inspected hers and saw text on the side indicating it would last for one hour.
“All right, Grillo,” Sam said. “Your mystery fog is coming from some kind of bizarro plant. Or … reef. A strange fucking alien tree. I don’t know what the hell it is, but if you want my opinion, it’s not ours. Are we done here?”
“Faisal described it to me,” Grillo said. “I think it’s worth exploring the crash site. The traitors dropped a farm platform here, and if there was something related to the Builders aboard, that would be very interesting to know. Especially if it has now been … unleashed.”
She grimaced. “The flares only last an hour.”
“Then you’d better get started,” Grillo replied.
Sam bit back a snide response and looked at her two companions. “You’re both wearing environment suits in a forest of knives. You can bug out if you want; I’ll handle this.”
In unison they shook their heads, and Sam understood. They had orders.
“Follow me, then,” she said for the second time.
With fire, traversing the nightmare forest became easy. Sam went first, swiping her makeshift torch in slow, wide arcs. The branches shrank away with their glassy crackling sound.
She glanced over her shoulder every few steps. The two soldiers waved their flares about as if they were trying to flag down an aircraft. Sparks dripped from the bright red fires, and thick smoke billowed off until it merged with the foggy soup around them.
Every ten steps or so Samantha dropped to a knee, listened for a moment, and then selected a few pieces of the rubble that littered the ground. She arranged these in an arrow pointing in the direction in which they walked.
After a few hundred meters of this, she began to see signs of the explosion that resulted when the farm platform came down. Blackened debris littered the ground, skittering away when kicked by their boots as they walked. The asphalt road, as worn as any in Darwin, had a web of cracks laced across it. In places entire chunks were gone, revealing the hardpan beneath.
The sky grew dark above them as they went. Sometimes the fog above Sam’s head would dissipate enough to see more than a few meters up. The lattice of crystalline branches extended far above their heads here, half as tall as the office buildings she knew loomed around them, hidden by the cloud and the darkness.
Then, as suddenly as it had enveloped them, the branches ended, and the cloud thinned dramatically, turning from a static, oppressive soup to a patchy, swirling, silent maelstrom. Lit by her torch and the men’s reddish flares, the wafts of fog looked like otherworldly ghosts.
Samantha called a halt and took a knee again.
She realized they’d come to the edge of a giant dome within the glassy lattice. Twenty meters high at least, and the same across, she thought, perfect in its shape. Distances were hard to ascertain as wafts of the thick fog still drifted through the area. These puffs rose from the center of the space, as if hot air pushed them from below. If she had a religious bone in her body, she might have said they looked like souls ascending.
“Heat,” she muttered. The tension of their situation, and the long walk, had masked it, but she now felt the oppressive heat of the place.
David and Faisal knelt behind her, taking in the dome in silence from behind the curved plastic masks of their environment suits. Their breaths fogged the clear material in rapid puffs that vanished a heartbeat later as processors pulled moisture from the sealed outfits. Faisal drew his towel-wrapped arm across his mask to wipe away a fine pattern of droplets. The towel looked soaked.
She glanced at each of their chests, noted the green light of containment on each, and turned back to the view.
The ground beneath the dome sloped downward. A crater, she realized, and they were perched on the lip. She followed the broken ground to the center and sucked in her breath.