Текст книги "Sand"

Автор книги: Hugh Howey

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6 • Danvar

Hap reached the building before Palmer. It was a sandscraper that put all the sandscrapers of Springston to shame, could swallow all of them at once the way a snake could eat a fistful of worms. The top was studded with goodies, bright blooming flashes of metal untouched by scavengers: threads of pipe and wire and who knew what else. Palmer could feel his skin crawl, even with the sand pressing him so tight.

I’m taking a sample, Hap said.

Normally they would grab something loose from the ground, an artifact or scrap of metal, and rise up with it. Palmer pushed deeper and watched Hap scan the vast landscape of the building’s roof. The adrenaline and the sight of such riches made it a little easier to move the sand—the sudden rush of willpower and desire helped as well—but breathing had become an effort.

Nothing loose, Hap complained, exploring the roof. The top of the building had to be as large as four blocks of Springston.

I’ll break something free,Palmer said. He was now as low as Hap. Lower. His competitive spirit had driven him down past the edge of the building, dipping well past three hundred meters. The concept of breaking a personal record was lost in the rush of such a discovery. Such a monumental discovery. He worried no one would believe them, but of course their goggles would record everything. They would store the entire dive, would map the shapes beneath them, those great pillars reaching up like the fingers of a deity long buried.

And now the palm of this great god, the ground between the scrapers, was dimly visible. It was studded with bright metal boulders that Palmer recognized as cars, all preserved in great shape, judging by the signal bounce. But it was hard to read the colors this deep. He was in unfamiliar territory. As if to highlight this, the air indicator in his visor went from green to yellow. One of his tanks had gone dry, a dull click as a valve switched over. Not a problem. They weren’t going any deeper. This was halfway. And he would use less air going up. Fuck, they were going to get out of here. They were going to do this. Just needed to look for something to break loose, a souvenir.

He probed for any sand that might be inside the building, sand he could grab and flow toward himself in order to breach the scraper and grab some small artifact. The flat wall before him had the signal bounce and the wavering shimmer of colors that screamed glass . Hollow,he told Hap. I’m ramming it.

Palmer formed a sandram with his mind, pictured a hardening of the sand in front of him and a loosening of the sand around that. His left hand twisted and turned inward the way it did when he concentrated, and he could feel himself sweating inside his suit despite the coolness of the deep sand. The ram was there. He made himself knowthe ram was there. And then he threw it forward, flowing the sand around it, losing control of the sand around his body for a moment, feeling it tighten everywhere at once like a coffin, his throat held fast by two great palms on his neck, chest wrapped with a wet and shrinking blanket, arms and legs tingling as the blood was cut off, and then the ram hit the building and dissipated, and Palmer had the sand flowing around him once again.

He took a deep breath. Another. It felt like pulling air through a narrow straw. But the flashes of light in his vision stopped their blinking. Palmer sank a little, but finally he righted himself. The view before him had changed. There was sand inside the building now. He had shattered the glass. A wavering patch of purple told him that there was air in there. A hollow. Artifacts.

I’m going in,he told Hap.

I’m going in, he told himself.

And then the sandscraper swallowed him.

7 • A Burial

For as long Palmer could remember, he’d dreamed of being a diver, dreamed of entering the sand—but he had since learned that it was the exitingthat took practice. A diver quickly learns a dozen flashy ways to get into a dune, each more spectacular than the last, from falling face first into the sand and having it softly claim him, to jumping backward with his arms over his head and disappearing with the slightest of splashes, to having the sand grab his boots and spin him wildly on the way down. Gravity and the welcoming embrace of flowing sand made many a glorious entry possible.

Exiting required finesse. Palmer had seen many a diver come sputtering out of a dune, sand in their mouth and gasping for air, clamoring with their arms as they lost concentration and got stuck up to their hips. He had seen many more come flying out with such velocity that they broke an arm or smashed a nose as they came spinning back to earth. Boys at school tried flipping out of dunes to disastrous and often hilarious results. Palmer, on the other hand, tried always to aim for a calm and unspectacular arrival, just like his sister. She told him the calm looked braver than the boast. Look like a pro. Pretend that one of those ruined sandscraper lifts still worked and was depositing him on the topmost floor. That’s what he aimed for. But that was not how he arrived just now.

This exit was more like being belched out from the sand’s unhappy maw. He was spat sideways through the small avalanche that had slid inside the building and was ejected into the open air.

Palmer landed with a thud and a crunch, first on his shoulder, then sprawling painfully to his back, his tanks jolting his spine. The swimming purples vanished as his visor was knocked from his eyes. There was sand in his mouth, his regulator half out, his lungs emptied by the impact.

Palmer removed the mouthpiece and coughed and spat until he could breathe again.

Breathe again.

The air was foul and musty. It smelled like dirty laundry and rotting wood. But Palmer sat in the utter and complete dark of eyelids squeezed tight on moonless nights, and he took another cautious sip. There’s air in here, he told Hap, speaking with throat whispers, but of course his friend couldn’t hear him. His visor band had been knocked askew, and anyway he was no longer buried in sand, had no way of projecting his voice.

Shouting wouldn’t do, either. Palmer fumbled for his dive light and flicked it on. A world of the gods unfolded dimly before him. He turned away from the avalanche of sand, which seemed to writhe and creep ever inward as the deep dunes snuck inside to seek solace from their own crushing weight.

The objects in the room were recognizable. Artifacts just like those found beneath Springston and Low-Pub. Chairs, dozens of them, all identical. A table larger than any he had ever seen, big as an apartment. Palmer tugged off his fins and set them aside. He lowered his air tanks to the floor and killed the valve, made sure he saved his oxygen. Powering down his suit and visor, he relished the chance to gather himself, to give his diaphragm a rest from the struggle of breathing against the press of sand, a chance for his ribs to feel whole again.

On a side table, his expert salvaging eyes spotted a brewing machine. The pipes were rusted and the rubber appeared brittle, but it would fetch fifty coin at market. Double that, if his brother Rob could get it working first. The brewer was still plugged into the wall as if someone expected to use it still. The fit and finish of everything in the room felt eerily advanced and ancient at the same time. It was a feeling Palmer got from all the relics and spoils of a dive, but here the feeling overwhelmed, here it hit him on an inconceivable scale—

There was a crash and the hiss of advancing sand behind him. Palmer startled, expecting the drift to crush the rest of the weakened glass and consume him with his visor up on his head and his suit powered down. Instead, there was a thump and a grunt as Hap tumbled into the room.

“Fuck—” Hap groaned, and Palmer hurried to help him up. Sand slid around their feet as it found its equilibrium. It was wet and packed enough that it wasn’t free to flow inside and fill the room. Not immediately, anyway. Palmer had swum through enough smaller buildings in shallower sand and had seen what sand would do if given the time.

“There’s air,” Palmer told Hap. “A bit foul. You can take your visor off.”

Hap stumbled around in his fins a moment as he regained his balance. He was breathing heavily. Wheezing and gasping. Palmer gave him a chance to catch his breath.

Once he got his goggles off, Hap blinked and scanned the room. He rubbed the sand out of the corners of his eyes. His gaze seemed to flit across all the coin stacked here and there in the shapes of ancient things. And then he found his friend’s face, and the two of them beamed at one another.

“Danvar,” Hap said, wheezing. “Can you fucking believe it?”

“Did you see the other buildings?” Palmer asked. He was out of breath as well. “And I spotted the ground another three hundred meters or so further down.”

Hap nodded. “I saw. I couldn’t have gone another meter, though. Fuck, that was tight.” He held his goggles to his face for a moment, checking his readouts most likely, and frowned. Hap shrugged his tanks off.

“Don’t forget to kill your valve,” Palmer said.

“Right.” Hap reached to spin the knob. There was sand stuck to his face and neck where he’d been sweating. Palmer watched his friend shake a veritable dune out of his hair. “What now?” he asked. “Do we poke around? You got dibs on the brewer?”

“Yeah, I already spotted the brewer. I say we check a few doors, catch our breath, and then get the fuck out of here. If we stay longer than two bottles should last, our friends up top might think we only made it as far as the lastassholes, and then they’ll close that tunnel on our asses. I don’t think I have enough air to get all the way back to the surface without that shaft.”

“Yeah…” Hap appeared distracted. He popped off his fins, shook the scoop out of them, and dragged his gear away from the drift invading through the busted window. “Good move popping through the glass like that,” he said. “I just saw you disappear, but I couldn’t see inside.”

“Thanks. And this is good, catching our breath. It would’ve been tight getting back up. We can get our strength.”

“Amen. Hey, did you happen to spot the other divers on the way down?”

Palmer shook his head. “No, did you?”

“Naw. I was hoping they’d stand out.”

Palmer agreed. There was almost nothing more valuable to salvage than another diver. It wasn’t just their gear—which could run a pretty coin—it was getting cut in on any bounties they had or wills they’d left. Every diver was afraid to some degree of being buried without a tombstone, and so the bone-bounties, as they were called, made every diver a comrade of the dead.

“Let’s try those doors,” Hap said, pointing at the double set at the far end of the room.

Palmer agreed. He got there first and ran his hands across the smooth wood. “Fuck me, I’d love to get these out of here.”

“You get those out of here and you could fuck someone prettier than me.”

Palmer laughed. He gripped the handle, and the metal knob turned, but the door was stuck. The two of them tugged, grunting. Hap braced his foot on the other door, and when it finally gave way, the both of them went tumbling back into the table and chairs.

Hap laughed, catching his breath. The door creaked on its hinges. And there was some other sound, a popping like a dripping faucet, like a great beam settling under some weight. Palmer watched the ceiling closely. It sounded like the scraper was adjusting itself, like its belly was grumbling around these new morsels in its gut.

“We shouldn’t stay long,” Palmer said.

Hap studied him a long while. Palmer could sense that his friend was just as afraid as he was. “We won’t,” he agreed. “Why don’t you go first. I’ll save my dive light in case yours burns out.”

Palmer nodded. Sound thinking. He stepped through the door and into the hallway. Across from him, there was a glass partition with another door set in it, a spider web of cracks decorating the glass, the effect of the building settling or being crushed by the sand. There appeared to be a lift lobby on the other side of the partition. Palmer had been in a few lifts in smaller buildings, found them a good way to get up and down if a building was full of sand. The hallway he stood in extended off in both directions, was studded with doors. To his right, there was a high desk like some kind of reception area, but everything was so damn nice. He coughed into his fist. Hopefully the air here wasn’t—

Behind him, the door slammed. Palmer whirled in panic, thinking the drift must’ve flowed into the room and pinned the door shut, burying their gear. But he was alone in the hallway. Hap was gone.

Palmer tried the door. The handle turned, but the door wouldn’t push open. He could hear the rattle on the other side as something was pressed against the door.

“Hap? What the fuck?”

“I’m sorry, Palmer. I’ll come back for you.”

Palmer slapped the door. “Stop fucking around, man.”

“I’ll come back. I’m sorry, man.”

Palmer realized he was serious. Lowering his shoulder, he slammed against the door, could feel it budge a little. Hap must’ve shoved a chair under the knob. “Open the goddamn door,” he yelled.

“Listen,” Hap said. His voice was distant. He was across the room. “I burned my air getting down here. One of us needs to go up and tell the others what we found. I’ll get more bottles and come back, I swear. But it’s gotta be me.”

“I’ll go!” Palmer shouted. “That’s my air, man. I can make it back up!”

“I’ll be back,” Hap called out. Palmer could hear a faint hiss as valves were opened and a regulator was tested. Hisvalves. Hisregulator.

“You motherfucker!” Palmer shouted. He tried the adjacent door, but it wouldn’t budge. He went back to ramming himself against the first door. He jerked the handle toward him as tight as he could, then threw his shoulder into the wood, thought he felt the chair budge a little. Again and again. The door opened a crack. And then a gap. Enough to get his arm through. He reached inside and felt the rim of the chair, held it while he pulled the door shut tight against his arm, and the chair popped off the knob and went tumbling. Palmer shoved his way inside, banging his elbows on the two doors, swimming between those priceless walls of wood, tripping over the upturned chair, to see Hap still on the floor, tugging on a flipper.

Hap scrambled to his feet as Palmer raced around the table and past the long row of chairs. His friend lowered his visor down over his wide eyes, had a grimace of determination on his face as he staggered toward the slope of sand, running awkwardly in his fins, one of them flapping with its buckles loose.

Palmer ran and dove after Hap, who jumped headfirst into the sand. The drift gave way, absorbing him, but Palmer caught one of his fins. The sand was hard and unyielding; it knocked Palmer’s breath out as he crashed into it. He looked down at his hands, at the flipper that had come loose. His friend was gone. And he had taken Palmer’s air with him.

8 • What Pirates Do

Hap kicked his way out of the building and into a wall of sand. So thick. He hadn’t been prepared, felt like he was moving through mush. [3]3
  Wet sand.


[Закрыть]He concentrated on the flow, tried to breathe, realized he had a fin missing. Goddamn. He was going to die out here. Die right on top of fucking Danvar.

He coaxed a sip of air out of Palmer’s regulator. There was sand in his mouth. Hadn’t had time to clear it off. Fuck, the look on Palmer’s face. But what choice did he have? Stay down there and wait for Palmer to come back for him? Fuck no. Fuck that.

He loosened the sand above him and kicked off the hard pack below. It was almost impossible to move his arms. He let the sandflow do most of the work, tried to remember all the older divers who laughed at noobs for using fins in the first place. It wasn’t kicking, it was thinking that moved a man. That’s what they said. He’d never believed them. He tried to now. He tried to breathe. So damn hard to breathe. Like a tourniquet across his chest, like his ribs were knitted together, like the whole world was sitting on top of him.

Up. He made the mistake of looking down, could feel the pull of gravity, the sucking of those purples and blues, that hard earth far below, fading now, becoming invisible, just a handful of buildings until there was only one, and then he kept his visor pointed up, looking for the blinking transponders, watching the gauge drop back to under three hundred meters. Two fifty. Hell yeah, a breath. He sucked on the tanks, was damn glad for Palmer’s lungs for once, wasn’t jealous in the slightest, and as he rose up and up he felt that distance between him and his friend grow, that crushing depth, and some part of him knew, some dark sliver, that there was no going back. He had discovered Danvar. Him. It would be for some other asshole to risk his neck exploring it, pulling up all those artifacts. Hell, he hadn’t even grabbed that brewer. Hadn’t been any time. Breathing deeply now, sucking the tank down from yellow to red, he got under a hundred meters and no longer cared how much air was in the tank. He could get there. He could make it. The transponders above were blindingly bright. The orange and yellow glow of the shaft walls could be seen. Hap kicked straight for the white beacons and the soft bottom of the shaft, his legs sore, his ribs bruised from the effort, a joy in his throat—

Hap!

He heard the faint murmur in his jawbones. Palmer. Probably got his head in the sand, his visor on, holding his breath and yelling after him. Hap didn’t answer, didn’t raise the voice that happens in a man’s throat when he whispers in his mouth, when he thinks aloud. He kept those thoughts to himself.

Hap, you fucker, get back here! Hap–!

Hap didn’t hear the rest. His head broke through the bottom of that well. He lifted himself up clumsily, dragging his legs out of sand softened by the vibrations of his suit, until he was sputtering and balled up in the open air once more.

He spit out his regulator. The tanks were empty. Hap moved the visor up to his forehead and took a few deep breaths in the pitch black. He fought the temptation to whoop for joy, to whoop for surviving. The others would be waiting up on that metal hatch and might hear him. Act cool. Act like you’ve done this before. A fucking hero, that’s what he was. A legend. He’d never pay for a drink in any dive bar for the rest of his life. He flashed forward to himself in old age, in his forties, weathered and gray, sitting in the Honey Hole with two girls on his lap, telling people about the day he discovered Danvar. Palmer would have some heroic role to play. He’d see to that. He’d have the bartender buy him another round so he could toast Palmer’s name. And the girls…

With his dive light on and his suit off, he fumbled for one of the dangling ropes, knotted it securely under his arms, gave it three sharp tugs. Oh, the girls. He thought of the girls as the slack went out of the rope. Almost too late, he remembered the beacons, which weren’t cheap, and reached for his. The rope caught and started lifting him. Hap yelled for them to wait and scrambled after Palmer’s beacon, which was worth a good twenty coin. He got his fingers on it as the rope began to haul him up, clutched the small device in his palm. While they hauled him through the shaft, he kept his one flipper on the wall to keep him from bouncing around and tucked the two transponders into the belly pocket on his suit. Fuck. He’d made it.

••••

The disc of light above grew larger and brighter as Hap was pulled skyward. He could see the sun shining down from directly overhead, so it must already be noon. Damn. Had they been down there that long? Someone above him barked orders to the men handling the rope. He could hear men grunting as they took up the line hand over hand, lifting him in swaying jerks. When he got to the lip, Hap helped, grabbing the hot edge of the metal platform, feeling the burn through his gloves as he pulled himself up on weary arms, kicking with his feet.

Two of the pirates grabbed him by his dive suit and tanks and hauled him out.

“Where’s your friend?” someone asked, peering over the lip.

“Didn’t make it,” Hap said. He tried to take deep breaths. The old man who had checked over Palmer’s gear searched Hap’s face for a beat, and then waved his arms toward the high dune where the generator could be heard and a plume of sand filled the sky. But Brock pushed the old man’s arms down and glared up in the same direction, waving some command off. Soon everyone was looking at Hap. The dive master studied the deep shaft as if hoping Palmer would appear.

“How far’d you get?” Moguhn asked, his dark eyes flashing. “What’d you see?”

Hap realized he was still out of breath from the excitement, the adrenaline. “Danvar,” he wheezed, beaming with triumph. “Sandscrapers like nobody’s ever seen.” He looked to Brock, whose eyes shined bright. “Sandscrapers everywhere, hundreds of meters tall, like twenty or thirty Springstons put together. Artifacts all over the place—”

“You were down a long time on two tanks,” the dive master said. “We’d almost given you up.”

“We found a pocket of air in one of the tallest scrapers, so we looked around a bit.” He tried to make it sound matter-of-course. “We wanted to get you your money’s worth.” Hap beamed up at Brock. All of this would go in his stories, all would be embellished over the years.

“Did you record it all?” Brock asked in that deep and guttural accent of his. “Did you get a map of the area? Precise coordinates? Everything has to be precise.”

“It’s all stored in my visor.” Hap tapped the band pushed up on his head.

“Let’s have it,” Brock said, holding out his hand. Two of the other men were behind Hap, holding that large metal hatch open. Hap was about to say that he’d want to see the coin first when he felt his visor tugged off his head and handed over. It took him a pause to realize that Brock’s command hadn’t been directed at him at all.

“Thank you,” Brock said. He smiled at Hap. “And now, I trust you can keep a secret.”

Hap was about to answer, to tell him that he damn sure could, but he quickly realized that this wasn’t directed at him either. This flash of understanding came right before Moguhn shoved him in the chest and Hap felt himself go backwards. He windmilled his arms, stirring the air, a grunt and a helpless squeak escaping his lungs, his heels rocking back dangerously, before he tumbled into the dark.

He hit the hard wall of that deep shaft and spun down, the air whistling past his ears, his stomach up in his throat and choking off his screams. He fell swiftly. Felt a dangling rope, and the wild swinging of his arms caught a wrap. A wrap on his wrist, catching tight, and then the sting, the burn, as it caught his weight and he slid down and down, the rope whistling as it rubbed his flesh, biting, on fire, cutting through his skin and sinking to the bone, tumbling and tumbling until he hit in an explosion of agony.

His leg, his back, the tanks, and then his head, so fast it was almost at once. He couldn’t feel his body. He couldn’t feel his body. His arm was in the air, hung up in the rope. By his dive light, he could see the rope buried deep in his flesh, squeezing bone, blood racing down to his elbow.

Hap tried to move, but he couldn’t. Turning his head, he saw his boot near his shoulder. His boot was near his shoulder. And Hap realized, numbly and sickeningly, that his foot was still in it.

Oh fuck, oh fuck. His body was ruined. His mind was still aware, could see what had happened to him, and he knew it wasn’t something he would ever recover from. He was an unnatural heap, but still alive.

Far above, shadows bent over the small disk of light. Hap tried to scream up at them, yell for help, yell a curse on them for all their days, but all that leaked out of him was a whimper, a rattle. One of the shadows moved, an arm waving, and some receding part of Hap’s mind thought they were waving down at him. But they were waving beyond the rise of that great crater at whoever was holding the walls of that shaft open—because the power was killed, a connection severed, and those walls collapsed suddenly and all at once. And Hap’s mouth, locked open in quiet agony, filled with sand. And the earth sat upon his broken chest.