“A what?”
“No time to explain. I need you and Yanni to look for more of these things.” He handed them his own hand-drawn version of Wolff’s charge placements and pointed to the forest on the opposite side of the fissure. “And if you find anything—do not touch it. Just let me know.”
“No worries, Mac. What do I know from disarming bombs?”
“And keep your eyes peeled. Whoever planted this thing could still be up here.”
Thorne responded with a reluctant nod. Yanni holstered her sidearm and unslung her blowgun. “Shhhhhhhh,” she whispered.
Twenty minutes later, MacCready shimmied out of the crevice, placing the dissected bomb on the ground beside him. And while it was no longer dangerous, he knew it had taken far too long to disarm the device.
Mac thought back to Wolff’s notebook and the multiple detonation points he would now have to deal with (too many of them and maybe not enough time), when Yanni’s voice called out.
“Lookee what we found!”
She was walking behind a blond-haired man in his early forties, hands raised over his head.
“My name is Eugen S?nger,” he said in accented English. “And under the articles of the Geneva Convention, I am officially requesting that you protect me from this savage.”
MacCready ignored the comment. “Where are the rest of these things, asshole?” he said, pointing to the bomb at his feet.
“I have been stranded. Have you seen my guides?”
MacCready winced, reminded of Corporal Kessler’s pursuit of him across the swamp. “Where do you guys come up with this shit?”
Yanni responded by poking S?nger hard, in the back of the head, with the business end of her blowgun. The man staggered forward a few steps.
“Pally,” MacCready said, “if you don’t start talking right now, you are going off the side of this fucking plateau.”
“My name is Eugen S?nger and under the articles of—”
MacCready unleashed a savage right cross that not only broke the rocket designer’s jaw but a bone in his own hand as well. S?nger fell to his knees and looked up with a blood-smeared grimace that turned into a grin.
Mac felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach. Something about the man’s expression conveyed a single fact: It was already so clearly too late.
He turned to Yanni. “Where’s Bob?” And the blood drained from his face when she pointed to the forest on the cliff side of the fissure.
The explosions felt like an insignificant series of muffled pops, compared to their ultimate effect. Wolff and S?nger had indeed done their homework, knowing exactly where, with just a few little taps, they could crack a diamond into a thousand pieces.
“Bob!”
Mac and Yanni sprinted along the plateau side of an ever-widening chain of cracks in the ground. It seemed that new crevices were yawning open every second and in every direction—except one.
“Yanni!” It was Bob’s voice and she changed direction, heading into the disintegrating earth.
“Bob!” she screamed, and as she did, Mac grabbed her wrist, yanking it with such force that for a moment he feared he’d dislocated her shoulder.
As if by magic the rumbling stopped and there, in front of them stood Bob Thorne. He was wearing a curious look on his face.
He waved. “Hey, Yanni. Mac.”
MacCready looked across the thirty-foot chasm that separated them, and what he saw was heartbreak.
“Hey, Bob.” I’ll watch after Yanni, he thought of saying.
“I know you will,” Bob replied.
And then, beginning with a disorienting lurch, a section of the plateau, more than a thousand feet tall, cast off like a ship from a pier. Carrying Bob with it, the ship sank slowly into the smoke and dust of Hell’s Gate.
Epilogue
Nostromo Base
April 1946
Only two years had passed, and the forest was already consuming the ruins of Nostromo Base. Vines were racing up the monorail supports, while bushes, some of them more than five feet tall, had sprouted from the elevated trackway itself. But the ancient stone-block road upon which the launch ramp had been anchored would survive long after the rail itself was gone.
During the coming decades, pre-Columbian roads and the vestiges of an entire civilization, hidden between Nostromo Base and the Mato Grosso Plateau, would become archaeological sites, then tourist attractions.
Irrigation canals dating back over a thousand years were about to be excavated and reactivated—supporting the increasingly expansive cattle ranches. Here and there, careless lumber cutting and agricultural practices were beginning to turn forested regions, through which MacCready had walked, into patches of dry savanna.