Текст книги "Ammonite"

Автор книги: Nicola Griffith

Соавторы: Nicola Griffith,Nicola Griffith
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The second night, she simply lay on her back and wriggled until snow covered everything but her face. She woke to a world of seamless white and hunger sharp as a rodent’s tooth. The sky was soft and milky, like the plain; it was as if she stood inside a hollow pearl. It made her dizzy. She finished the locha and hung the empty skin back on her saddle. If she found nothing to fill it with, she could always try to eat it.

This time she had to kick the mare to get her moving.

Marghe woke on her third morning alone to find that her hunger had passed from pain to a dull ache; she knew she was hungry, but she no longer minded so much. The snow underfoot was as soft and white as the furred back of the mythical cyarnac. Today, it was beautiful. She smiled to herself as she looked around. Everything seemed dusted with crystal. When she brushed snow from her sleeves, every fiber of her overfur was magically clear. She studied her saddle dreamily: every pore on the leather was distinct. She could have spent hours watching the light in tiny droplets of ice on the mare’s coat. Hunger was no longer important. She heaved the saddle onto the mare and blood flowed warm and strong through her veins. Her limbs felt smooth and light. Today, she felt… fine.

The mare kept her head down, cropping the frozen ice moss, while Marghe tightened the girth. The wooden buckle slipped easily into its usual hole and the buckle itself nestled comfortably into the slight bed it had worn into the leather. But the straps were too loose. Too loose. She took a step backward and forced herself to see loose skin and jutting ribs instead of individual hairs. Her horse was starving. So was she.

The mare pawed aside more snow, cropped. Marghe watched and licked her lips, thinking of ice moss. When it was cooked and dried it could be ground like flour and made into flat cakes. Raw, it would not be poisonous, but probably indigestible. But she had to eat something.

She squatted and scraped bare a small patch of moss. She yanked it up, a clump at a time, and set it aside. There was something else she wanted to try first. The ground was hard as iron; she had to lean her weight onto her knife blade and twist the point until she loosened a tiny lump of soil like frozen gravel.

It took hours to cut a vertical hole about the size of her forearm. Her mare kept cropping and pawing, cropping and pawing.

Marghe rolled up her sleeve and thrust her bare arm down the hole. She closed her eyes against the searing cold, began her breathing. In and out, in and out. Hold. In. Out. Hold. In the left nostril, out the right. Hold. The extra oxygen made her dizzy. She visualized the corpuscles rushing red and busy through her arm to her finger, back up to her shoulder, through the pulmonary vessels, the heart, and out again in a gushing rush. Hot red. Hot. And full of information. She sank her entire awareness into her arm. Listened with it, extended her own electromagnetic field as she had learned to do, dowsing. Out and out, thinner, diffuse. Wait.

There was nothing at first. No trace of snow worms, as she had hoped. Then she sensed a far‑off scratching, pushing. A ruk.

She opened her eyes. What had Aoife said? The need breeds the skill.

Keeping her breathing soft and her movements slow, she unfastened the palo from her belt, pulled it to about half its length, and wedged her knife behind the fastening strap. Then she crouched over the hole, makeshift spear poised.

The ruk came, beetling its way through the stone‑hard ground. Every sense open, every muscle ready, Marghe waited. The ruk came closer; she could hear the rasp of its thick armored skin against the dirt. A snout pushed through one wall of the hole and Marghe thrust. Hunger made her slow. The ruk scuttled away, back the way it had come.

As she had known she might, Marghe vomited up the raw moss as soon as it reached her stomach. The mess steamed in the brittle air for a moment before beginning to ice over. The temperature was still dropping. She sucked snow to take away the foul taste in her mouth and willed her breathing steady. She must think now, or die.

Aoife had told her tales of tribeswomen who punched holes in the neck veins of their mounts and drank the blood. But she was unskilled, and the horse would probably bleed to death before cold plugged the vein. It was an old, half‑starved beast; it could not afford to lose even a cupfull of blood. She needed it alive. Her only hope was to get to Ollfoss, or at least the boundaries of Moanwood where she could make a fire, collect nuts, shelter herself from the snow… Even with the horse, she might not get there. Without, she certainly would not.

There was nothing to eat here and the temperature was dropping. She would head east and hope.

Before she pulled on her gloves, she took a long look at her hands. The’bones showed gaunt through white skin. There was not an ounce of fat left on the whole of her body; the cold had melted it away. In a matter of days her body would be scavenging upon itself, absorbing muscle until she was nothing but loose skin and bone. A generous estimate would give her another four or five days, survival, if she carried on as she had been doing. To reach the forest she knew she needed to stretch those four or five days into at least seven or eight. She would have to close parts of her body down when they were not needed. It was possible, theoretically; she knew how. But this was not a controlled environment with monitoring hookups and attendant medics, and she was already seriously undernourished.

She climbed into the saddle. The clouds were low and rounded, as featureless as a basket of eggs. An alien sky. All alone under an alien sky. Somewhere up there, Sara Hiam was sitting in the Estrade, wondering if her vaccine worked. Somewhere up there, too, was a satellite that if it just came nearer and lower could pick up her SLJC, beam it to the nearest relay, to Danner. A sled could get here in four or five days. Oh, and then she would have hot tea, or soup, and bread, and the smiles of a woman she knew. And all the time she ate and drank and had her hands bandaged she would be heading back to Port Central, to safety.

No, she had done enough dreaming. The only reason she should look at the sky was to determine the weather. She was alone. No one was going to rescue her. Not Sara or Danner, not Lu Wai or Letitia. Not even Aoife. As Cassil had said, she was alone, an orphan under this sky. No one knew her. Here she was Stranger Woman, or the SEC rep. Not Marguerite Angelica Taishan, not Marghe. She wondered if that person existed anymore.

Once she had her mount headed in the right direction, she began trance breathing.

Marghe never really remembered the next few days. She rode in half trance through the white and cold and silence. Sometimes there were brief flurries of snow. Twice each day she would swim up from her trance to swing from the saddle and dig out ice moss for the horse, which was getting too tired to find its own. While the horse ate, she would concentrate on opening and closing veins around her body, sending her blood pounding into hands, feet, and face where patches of skin were white and dead from frostbite. Each time, it became harder to shake off her trance and force her body to move.

When she slid from the saddle on the sixth day, her legs would not hold her. She crumpled onto the snow and had to persuade blood around her body before she could stand and clear snow for the horse. When she tried to remount, she could not. The leg in the stirrup trembled and shook but could not lift her body. Fear, sudden and sharp, flashed under her skin, setting a muscle by her eye twitching. Her breath whistled. She had to get back into that saddle. She leaned her face against the mare’s ice‑shagged withers and rested a moment. She could do it. Blood to her upper arms, to her thighs and calves. Breathe. Gather.

She part jumped, part hauled herself up by the saddle horn until she lay belly‑down across the mare’s back. She dragged her right leg over and was astride and upright. She swayed as the horse started its slow, plodding walk.

It was the wind that woke her, driving hard and cold into her left cheek from the north, from a sky the gray yellow of lentil scum, a sky full of snow.

The horse was stumbling and weaving; Marghe could feel it tremble and sag at each step. The wind died and the first flakes of snow wobbled down like moths. Within minutes the wind was back, driving the flurry into a blizzard of ice blades. She could think of nothing to do but force the horse on. Ice and snow whipped through fur and hair, past eyelashes and under fingernails, to reach places Marghe had thought long numb. The horse staggered, but righted itself.

Marghe tried to guess at how long the storm would last; at least a day, maybe two. She doubted she would survive it. It would take too much effort to stop her mount and climb down, so she simply allowed the horse to wander as best it could. She felt very peaceful.

When the mare fell, she did so without warning, her front legs crumpling like scythed wheat. Marghe fell free and looked at the wreckage, then crawled over to touch the mare’s neck in apology; the horse was alive, but would not be getting up again.

The blizzard hissed around her. Her hands were so numb with cold that she could hardly feel the bone haft when she pulled out her knife; she had to hold her eyes to slits, and the snow gathered on her lashes made it impossible to see if she was grasping it properly. Spicules of ice clung to the mare’s mane; she stroked it, and sang. Singing seemed like a good idea. It was some wavering tune she remembered from her first childhood visit to a temple. She wanted the mare to hear something other than the blizzard before it died.

While she sang, she scraped a mound of snow up against the big vein that snaked along the thin neck. Then she showed the old mare her blade, smiled, and pushed the knife in.

The blood was impossibly red, pumping onto the white snow. The mare sighed and her eyes glazed as the moisture froze. The pumping blood slowed to a trickle. Marghe cursed and scrambled to the saddle to get the empty locha skin. She held it up to the vein, but the container’s mouth was too narrow; the skin stayed flaccid, with only about a cupful of blood inside. Marghe scooped up a mouthful of bloodied snow. She held it on her tongue until it melted and warmed. It was sweet, metallic. She waited a little while before her next mouthful. It stayed down.

There was already a drift of snow gathering by the carcass. Not much time. She picked up the knife again and sawed at the dead mare’s belly. Her hands were clawed with cold and the knife was small. She kept dropping it. Again and again she picked it up and hacked. It was very messy, very tiring. She could hardly see. Now and again she stopped to rest, wipe the ice crystals from her eyes, and swallow another mouthful of bloody snow. By the time she was finished, her furs were slimed from cap to boots, but she had several slices of raw meat lying beside her in the snow. She opened her furs and dropped the red, slithery strips inside against her skin where her body heat would stop the meat from freezing.

The blood had given her a little energy, but there was still hard work to do. She shoveled at the snow, dragging great armfuls alongside and between the forelegs, then the hindlegs, of her dead mount. The saddle had to be cut free; she hauled it to lie halfway between the stiffening, outstretched legs. Then she pushed snow against legs, carcass, and saddle until a waist‑high wall rose around her. Using her knife again, she made a great, three‑sided cut in the mare’s hide. With all the subcutaneous fat gone, it was easy to shear the skin away from the internal membranes in one piece. It was more difficult to drag the flap of skin, about two feet square, over her head and pull its edges down to meet the snow wall.

The result was cramped and stifling, but a shelter of sorts. It was all she could do. She huddled down around her precious cupful of blood and few tatters of meat, all that kept her from death, and breathed deep into her belly. There was nowhere to go from here.

Marghe’s feet were numb now and the blizzard still raged. She chewed on her last strip of meat, knowing that this one, like all the others, would not give her enough energy to keep warm.

The day wore on. With her snow mask pressed tight against nose and mouth, and her face pressed against the fur of her hood, she could hardly breathe. She could not get rid of the persistent image of herself as a blowfly egg, waiting to hatch into a maggot in the rotting flesh of the horse’s carcass.

The numbness in her feet crept to her knees. She was not sure if it was frostbite or a result of her restricted circulation, but moving would mean lifting the skin flap, and the wind would whip away all her hoarded warmth in a heartbeat. She was too weak to survive that. If the blizzard did not stop soon, she would grow weaker and weaker until her heart stopped.

She did not want to die. Even now, half suffocated and starving, with patches of skin dying on her face and hands, she refused to give up. This was not how her life was meant to end, frozen and stinking and alone, forever listed as missing, unless she turned up entombed in an iceberg drifting down the eastern coast between the mainland and the Necklace Islands. She refused to die.

Think.

There was a story her father had told her once, about the organic chemist who had been searching for the solution to the structure of a certain molecule and had fallen asleep and dreamed up the answer: the benzene ring. Her father had used the story to illustrate several of his annoying sayings, like Where there’s a will there’s a way, and Westerners teach their children how not to think, and Relax, let it come in its own time. Right now her hunger and fear were blotting out everything else. She needed a clear mind, a relaxed body; she needed to be still, and let it come. Perhaps there was a solution to all this, a solution as perfect, elegant, and obvious as the benzene ring.

Her hands were numb now, as well as her legs. When she unstoppered the locha skin, the tiny movement sent agony into all fingers except the third and fourth on her left hand. She drank the last mouthful of thick, clotted blood and then rubbed her hands as best she could inside her gloves. Feeling did not return to the two fingers. Frostbite–a clear signal that parts of her body were now shutting down permanently.

Think or die.

But could death really be any worse than this pain in her back, pain from curling around a bottle of blood almost inside the belly of a dead horse? Might it not be preferable to feeling bits of herself die of frostbite, and rot? Death, whatever else it was, would surely be peaceful, not like this constant diamond hiss of cold, this endless grinding fear and pain and struggle. If she just gave up, gave in, who would know, and what difference did it make?

She did not have the answers.

Why was she trying so hard to stay alive? If she lived through this, she might not live through the virus. If she survived the virus, Company might blow the planet to pieces. Life was nothing but a series of fruitless struggles. A sudden memory of herself as a three‑year‑old dropped into her head like a screen menu. She was in the roof garden of their house in Macau, high above the sweet smells of rot and rice wine, squatting next to an old plastic pail in which she had placed a handful of earthworms. The worms wriggled and humped their way up the sides of the pail, slipping now and again, but persisting, getting closer and closer to the rim, and freedom. She watched them with the utter concentration of all three‑year‑olds. Every time one reached the top, she leaned over and carefully flicked it back down to the bottom. It was not cruelty that prompted her; she simply enjoyed watching things try. And those worms kept trying, blindly, stupidly, stubbornly, and eventually her three‑year‑old self got bored and tipped the pail up, and the worms slithered out and burrowed safely into the dirt.

Very well. She would try to wriggle out of the pail; there would be time to worry about the quality of the dirt afterward.

Her first deep breath triggered a coughing fit that wracked her body enough to momentarily crack open the frost‑rimed skin flap, admitting a slice of air so cold her eyes streamed. She rubbed her face into the fur of her hood to dry them–ice would blind her. She was well‑practiced; her second deep breath, then her third, triggered deep muscle relaxation.

The trick to meditation was to let the mind sit in a quiet soft place full of ease and warmth. Marghe imagined that she was curled up, not under a piece of skin covered in blood‑smeared snow in the middle of a blizzard, but on the mauve and green rug that lay in front of her fireplace in Wales. She could smell the applewood logs burning; flames rubbed themselves lazily up against the soot‑stained bricks, shimmering with distant hot worlds in yellows and reds. She stared into the flames a while to see what she could see.

Hours passed. Occasionally, she put on another log from the basket, or threw on a handful of salt and sugar and watched the flames burn lavender and spring green. Then the basket was empty, only wood chips left, and the logs were burning down to embers. The embers dimmed.

She wanted to stay curled around the last remnants of warmth, try to sleep. Get up, her inner voice said, get up, but she did not want to leave. Get up, said that voice again, there are no ideas here. You must get up.

Oh, but it was hard. The door from her familiar room led to a high flight of dank stone stairs. No railing. Each step seemed taller than the last, and the higher she climbed up out of her trance, the more slippery the stone became. It would be so easy to lean backward just that little bit too far and go tumbling down, back into the room that was still warm. She set her teeth and climbed, and gradually her legs became numb and she felt her fingers turning blue and cold and curling into claws. All except two. Her ears hurt.

She woke to dark, sour quiet. Although she was too weak to move, her head was very clear. Meditation had produced no magic formula, no elegant solution to her problem. There was nothing more she could do. It was midwinter, the last day of the Moon of Knives here in the wild Echraidhe country of Tehuantepec, and the only thing left for her to do was to choose her way of dying. The warm room would be a good place in which to die. Perhaps she should go back there, put on the last of the wood chips and just fall asleep forever. There was nothing noble about dying a slow and painful death, surrounded by nothing but empty silence.

She took a slow, deep breath, let it out gently. Took another. Exhaled abruptly.

Silence?

When she breathed the next time, it was strong and deep, a breath that pumped her blood vigorously through those blood vessels that would still open, dragging with it oxygen, life. Her arms tingled with the effort of pushing up the snow‑covered flap. She peered out. Snow and sky lay pearly white and quiet. The blizzard was over.

Moving sent pain shooting through her legs. There was no way she could stand up yet. She crawled out from underneath the flap; when she was halfway out, it cracked and broke. The light was blinding after so long in the dark. She had no idea what time of day it was. Late afternoon, maybe. On all fours, she looked around. She began to laugh. She leaned back against the carcass and laughed at the sky, laughed until icy air tore into her lungs and set her coughing and she had to pull off her snow mask and smother her mouth with her hand. Even then, her shoulders shook.

To her left, looming dark on the horizon, lay the forest. Food, shelter, and firewood lay a couple of hours’ walk away. If she had gotten to this place just a little before the blizzard started, she would have seen. She would have smelled it, as she did now: an alien, green smell, the smell of strange trees unfurling in the dark, furtive and strong. Just two hours away. Half an hour on a horse. But her horse was dead and it was all she could do to sit without collapsing.

Hope gave her the strength that would have come from food, or warmth. The worm prepared to try one last time to wriggle up out of the pail. She pushed herself from sitting to kneeling, from kneeling to balancing on one foot and one knee. She had to lean against the carcass before she managed to drag the other foot up to join the first. She stood, and swayed, but did not fall over.

One step at a time, she told herself. However long it takes. She put one foot in front of the other. Not so bad. Then the other one. Look at me, she wanted to shout, look at me! It was like learning to walk all over again, with legs that did not belong to her. Her heart thumped soggily inside her ribs, but it did its job. She took another step and nearly fell over. Don’t think about it, it’s easier if you don’t think about it.

She opened her mouth and began to sing the first thing that came into her head: a nursery rhyme she had learned when she was five. I know a teddy bear, blue eyes and curly hair, roly‑poly round the town, knocking all the people down… She sang all the verses. The song faltered often and her legs trembled like reeds, but she refused to stop. The trees drew nearer. Or what looked like trees. What if an alien forest did not have nuts, or berries, or anything she could eat? Never mind that, just put one foot in front of the other, and sing.

Each step became a test of will. Eventually, she lost the struggle and fell over. She crawled. She had sung all the verses of the nursery rhyme. She began to make them up. I know a dinosaur, green of eye and red of claw, romping stomping round the town, having fun chowing down, I know a dinosaur… Her world narrowed to the stretch of ground under her hands and knees, the eighteen inches she could see before her without lifting her head. Her voice wavered like a newborn’s while she crawled on, over roots and fallen tree debris, not seeing.

Something moved.

She looked up, blinked, tried to focus. There, behind a tree. Sweet gods. It must be seven feet tall. Goth? Cyarnac? Had she come all this way just to get eaten by something like a huge teddy bear? I know a teddy bear, silver eyes and lots of hair, zipping ripping on the plain, kitting until we’re all slain… Maybe she was imagining it. Yes, she had imagined it. No such thing as giant teddy bears. She crawled on.

A woman stepped out from nowhere.

Marghe blinked again, waited for the mirage to disappear. When it did not, Marghe reached slowly, painfully for her knife. The woman’s taar skin boots and cap, the sling and palo on her belt, were all too familiar, even if the carved disk of bone at her belt was strange and her face was one Marghe had never seen before. She would kill, the woman or herself, before being taken hostage again.

The woman stepped closer, but not within knife range.

“I am Leifin. Daughter of Jess and Bejuoen and Rolyn. Soestre to Kristen.”

“Where are you from?” Marghe’s voice was a whispery croak.

Leifin leaned forward, trying to catch what she said. “I am Leifin. There is no need for your knife.” She took another step forward. “How are you named, stranger? Who are you?”

Marghe thought about that. Who was she? She was not sure. “Where are you from?” she croaked again. The knife point glittered before her eyes.

“Where am I from?” Leifin gestured behind her. “Ollfoss. Three days’ walk away or more.”

The knife point wavered. Ollfoss. Ollfoss. Marghe fell on her face in the snow.

Chapter Nine

THE GYM’S NEON strips were too bright after the cool grays of Jeep’s winter light. Danner stripped out of her fatigues and into fencing whites. Time now, she thought, to lay aside the question of what trap to set for the spy in their midst, Kahn was already warming up, whipping her foil back and forth, shadow‑lunging. Danner pulled a foil free of its holding field on the wall, tested it. She had been mulling over the spy problem for weeks now, getting nowhere. She clipped on her face guard. Later.

Kahn waited, her en gardeperfect but for a slight overextension. Danner studied her. That overextension had to be bait–but if she did not take it, she would never learn the lesson that Kahn obviously intended. She could take the blade in a bind, quarteto sixte;that should at least make her seem not wholly naive.

Neon swam down her blade, twitched as Kahn effortlessly cut over and landed the buttoned tip against Danner’s throat guard.

“The derobement,” Kahn said. “I’d like you to try it with a disengage, then lunge.”

This time it was Danner who assumed the slightly overextended en garde.

“You’re bending your wrist again.” Danner straightened it. “Better. Don’t lean forward so much.”

The world focused down to the two blades, her own steady, waiting, Kahn’s moving closer, reflecting light like the scales of a predatory pike. Danner moved. Point under, feint, lunge. Kahn parried, beat aside Banner’s foil, bent her own blade against Danner’s chest.

They parted.

“Again.”

Kahn’s mesh mask glittered like the compound eye of an insect. Metal mask, metal foil. Metal.

Danner assumed the en gardemechanically, thoughts elsewhere.

Metal. If Company abandoned them, these foils would be useful, not as weapons but as trade. She extended her arm. The blades were steel, on these foils at least. Some of the others were composites, some energy blades, some smart blades. Kahn was a traditionalist: learn the basics first, she had said, you can always adapt a sound technique. So they used steel‑bladed foils with aluminum bell guards and brass pommels. Three different metals.

Kahn laid her foil alongside Danner’s. Danner started the automatic derobement.

All different kinds of metal: different trade values. And there were other metals available, like the chain‑link of the fence.

Kahn beat aside her blade, thrust hard. “You’re not paying attention.” She feinted and thrust again, forcing Danner to parry and retreat. Then she came in with a corkscrewing motion. Double bind. Danner disengaged, managed to parry Kahn’s thrust to the low line, riposted. She was panting.

“Better.” Kahn drove her back.

The fence. It was important, but she could not concentrate with Kahn’s blade flashing. The fence. Metal. If they took it down, melted it…

Kahn’s button punched into Danner’s solar plexus. Kahn tapped her foot. “You need to–”

Danner held up her left hand, trying to get her breath. “Wait.” Kahn stepped back, head tilted to one side.

Danner transferred the foil to her left hand and used her right to pull off her mask. “The fence,” she said. “That’s how we’ll do it. It’s perfect. And it’s metal.”

“So when we take down the perimeter fence,” Danner explained to Sara Hiam, who peered out from the tiny screen in Danner’s mod, “our spy, whoever she is, should find that worrying enough to call the Kurst. We’ll be listening–Sigrid up there, Letitia down here–we’ll catch her. Or them. And… well, it would just make me feel better if we took down that perimeter. There’s no history of violence from these natives; it simply serves to make us feel like we’re trapped inside, while they have the run of the entire planet. Makes good sense from a psychological point of view.”

“You don’t need to sell it so hard.”

Danner leaned forward. “But you know what the real beauty of it is? The fence is metal. Tons and tons of metal we can use as trade goods. If we get stranded here. I thought about it while I was fencing with Kahn. All the metal in those foils. We could melt it down–”

“I’m surprised you didn’t think of sharpening up the foils and using them as weapons.”

Danner did not know how seriously Hiam meant that. “The metal would be more useful as trade goods, I think,” she said carefully. “And we have plenty of other material available for weaponry. Projectiles are our best bet in a world like this: bows, slings, spears. All of which can be made without metals. And we have ceramics people who can figure out how to work this olla, for blades, if we need them. What metal we do use will go on things like plows, adzes, scissors, needles, chisels… tools.” Sara was looking at her with a curious expression, almost fondly, and suddenly Danner felt embarrassed. All her ideas suddenly sounded like the fantasies of a young girl who had once dreamed of riding a horse over the plains, yelling, waving her bow and arrows, and challenging the wind.

“You’ve done a lot of thinking.”

“Yes.”

“Good. So have I. Danner, you need to find a way to get the three of us off this platform without the Kurstfinding out. Just in case. I have one or two ideas, but there are problems.”

It was night, and Vincio was off duty, when the call from Sara aboard Estradecame through to Danner’s office.

“Hannah, we have the signal.” The doctor looked over her shoulder, said something. Danner’s screen split: Hiam on one side, Sigrid on the other. Sigrid was a pale woman, with washed‑out eyes.

“It’s the same frequency, Commander.”

“Hold on.” Danner used her wristcom. “Dogias. It’s coming through. Same frequency. Keep this channel open.” She spoke to Sigrid. “Any direction yet?”

“No. But a preliminary scan shows it at the north end, maybe northwest end of Port.”

Danner spoke into her wristcom. “Dogias, Sigrid says north, northwest.”

“I hear and obey.”

Danner sighed.

“Problems?” Sara asked from the screen.

“No. Just Dogias being herself.” She shook her head. “Hold a moment.” She punched up Lu Wai’s call. “Sergeant, we have the signal.”

“Yes, ma’am. I heard. I’m here with Letitia. I’m on it.”

“Initial direction is north, or northwest. Take Kahn.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And keep this channel open.”

“Yes, ma–”

Dogias interrupted. “I think the signal originates about three hundred meters in from the perimeter.”

Danner pulled up a map of Port Central. “There are a lot of buildings there.”