She unclipped the line as soon as she had her balance, then scrambled for the nearest cover. Crouched between a few large hunks of metal, she snapped off her primary lights and tried to control her breathing. She listened to the echoing shaft and passages. Distant voices from above seemed to bounce off the walls and gained a metallic, echoing quality. She used her headset as well, looking for major contacts of X.

  There it was! She could feel it like a spidery presence in her mind. The sphere was not far now. Only a hundred meters or so, probably one more level down.

  But she picked up other contacts near the sphere. The powerful sensation of the sphere dominated the others, but didn’t wipe them out completely. It was like picking out the delicate scent of pine needles—which was exactly how she perceived these smaller contacts. They were hints of pine to her. What were they?

  The more she thought about it, the more fearful she became. The contacts she was sensing could be some kind of apparatus used by the visitors. They could be weapons. Or maybe they needed gear to breathe Earth’s atmosphere. Surely, such equipment would be powered by a trace amount of X. Was that what she was sensing? A pack of aliens, clustered around the X?

  Another thought impinged on her mind as someone else came down the line. She could see the flashing lights above, even through her closed eyelids. The new thought was this: why was the X so low in the ship? It shouldn’t be this far down. Tanner and she had left the sphere closer to ground level. She felt certain that if they went down deeper, they would be too deep. They could not have gotten out of the ship by opening a nearby hatch if it had been so far down. All the hatches down there had to be sealed shut by the mud of the swamp outside. A million tons of earth was piled up out there, packed around the ship like it was a vast spearhead jammed into the ground.

  That’s when it all really sunk in: the sphere had been moved. Moved by somebody—something. And there were contacts now, small ones, all around it.

  “What’s your problem?” a female voice asked.

  A hand shook her shoulder. Malena snapped her eyes open and lifted her pistol. She put it in Sophie’s startled face.

  For a moment, both women froze. Sophie’s hand was on her accelerator, but she’d secured it on her belt before making the descent. There was no way she could pull it out in time.

  Malena studied her face. The woman was brave. She didn’t know if she was about to live or die—and frankly, neither did Malena. She tried to think clearly, to weigh her options. She could take the accelerator and threaten the rest of the team with it, demanding they give her Tanner. That might or might not work. With Haak in charge, he might just kill Tanner and kick his corpse down the shaft to show he meant business.

  Under the best of circumstances, however, Malena realized she would be left down here in this dark metal pit. With or without Tanner, it wouldn’t be a good situation for her. She didn’t have much equipment.

  She calculated they would both be safer staying with the group for now. If the visitors had gathered around the sphere and moved it to a secure location, it was going to take all of them to stay alive in this ship.

  She lowered her gun, taking it out of Sophie’s face. “Sorry,” she said. “You startled me. I was using my headset. I’ve got a fix on the sphere’s location.”

  Sophie blinked and breathed more easily. “Don’t fuck with me like that again,” she said with a hoarse voice. “Or I’ll shove that gun in your guts and pull the trigger until it’s empty.”

  Malena shrugged disinterestedly. Sophie removed her line and threw it back into the shaft. Unseen hands reeled it back up into the darkness. A few minutes later, the entire team was down in the passageway around Malena, and she felt better about her odds of survival.

  Haak came down last. He looked around, then tilted his head to one side and looked at Malena in askance. “Well?”

  “I thought you didn’t need me anymore.”

  He frowned. “I can search every shaft and passage, or you can tell me which way to go.”

  She pointed down the shaft. “It’s down another level. I’ve got a fix on it now.”

  “Another level? That puts it farther down than you said.”

  She nodded and stared at him. It took him several seconds to catch on.

  “Oh,” he said. “You mean someone moved it?”

  “Yeah, looks that way.”

  Malena expected a look of fear to cross Haak’s face. She’d been looking forward to watching the spectacle, in fact. But she was disappointed.

  “Weapons out, team. Check your ammo, we might be going in hot now. I suspect another team is working this site. I guess it was only a matter of time.”

  “Who do you think it is?” Sophie asked. She had her accelerator out, and was anxious to use it.

  “I’d put my money on the Chinese. They’ve been very aggressive lately. They have geological survey boats all over the Gulf to act as cover. Our intel says they were only a dozen miles off the coast when we arrived.”

  “Bastards,” whispered Sophie.

  Malena frowned at all of them. Not one of them had considered the idea it was the aliens themselves that had moved the sphere. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized they might be right. If it had been the aliens, wouldn’t they have taken it up higher in the ship, seeking to put it back where it had been removed? They could power their barrier again with that thing. Also, she’d noted a number of smaller X contacts. That might very well correspond to another team like this one, using small tech gadgets run by tiny quantities of X.

  Whatever the case, she wasn’t consulted in the matter. The team was on the move again, heading down the nearest shaft. At least they’d stopped prying open every small hatch they came across. With the big score so near and possibly moving away from them, they were finally focused on their primary goal.

  Sophie pulled out one of the artifacts they’d found earlier, before they’d come down to this level. Experimentally, she squeezed one of the flopping little bulbs that encircled the central unit of the alien device. The needle at the tip suddenly fountained a tiny amount of oily liquid.

  Watching this, Malena suddenly understood what these objects were. They had to be syringes. She smiled and shook her head. They’d plundered an alien medical kit.

  -24-

  Even when everyone knows what they’re doing, vertical travel down alien shafts takes time. The team couldn’t afford to go all at once, not even in an emergency situation. To do so would leave them vulnerable. Caught on what amounted to a metal cliff face, they could be slaughtered if any rival group appeared. Malena understood the logic, but she didn’t enjoy the slow pace. As a team of two, she and Tanner had made better time.

  While they waited their turn, Tanner approached her. He sat beside her, but watched the others as they worked their equipment and made the descent one at a time.

  “When it comes down to it,” he said quietly, “you can’t hesitate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll know.”

  “You mean you’re going to try to break free of the group?”

  He finally looked at her and shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe. I’m talking about when we get hit. This is looking bad to me. This site is getting crowded. We’ve got Haak’s team, plus others in the field. Don’t forget the frozen visitors and the one with the missing hand. That’s way too many players. We’ll all run into each other at some point. Things might not go like they did with the Cubans. We might be the team that gets wacked next time.”

  The more Malena thought about it the more she didn’t like it. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the next bloody ambush—especially if she was on the losing side.

  “What are you trying to tell me? Shoot the second I see trouble?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “You did pretty well against that alien machine. I’m just warning you that I think we’ll be in action again soon. When things go bad, a person usually gets a second or two to react. Of course, the first guy to get hit doesn’t get that time, he’s just screwed. But the rest of the team gets a chance. Not long, just time enough to make a single fast decision. Go with your gut like you did before, and you might survive. Freeze up, think about your options, and you’ll die.”

  “Uh, thanks,” she said.

  Tanner nodded and got up. He patted her shoulder. His hand lingered a second before he moved away.

  Haak had begun eyeing them by this time. When they parted, his attention went back to his team.

  Malena thought about what Tanner was trying to tell her. He seemed to think he’d given her some kind of critical insight to survival. Maybe he had. She decided to try to remember what he’d said. After all, she’d been in action a few times now, but he was a veteran.

  One chance, one choice, go with your gut. Move and move fast. More than ever, she wished she’d gone through whatever training program agents were typically given. She really felt like she needed it now.

  Her turn came next. She rappelled down to the next level. Somehow, she didn’t like it down there. The air was cooler—even cold and dank. There was moisture on the metal walls. Droplets of cold water were clinging to the sharpest points of steel, occasionally dripping off into the darkness far below. How long was this ship? It seemed like it must be a mile in length. She had no idea how deep these shafts were, or what was at the bottom of them.

  She felt with her mind for the small bits of X she’d sensed down here, clustered in a tight region. Haak demanded to know what was ahead, and she told him what she could.

  “They haven’t moved since we came down here,” she said, “that much I know.”

  “All right. Sophie, you’re on point. Keep that accelerator hot.”

  The redhead moved forward gamely. Sophie didn’t hesitate, not for a second. Malena watched her, impressed. She moved from cover to cover, obstacle to obstacle, down the long passageway. It seemed to Malena that this passage was different from the others that were higher up. There were still the same familiar assortment of shapes, but they were bigger down here. The anvils were three feet high and the clusters of wicked, spiraling blades had twice as many tines. Each cluster resembled a stag’s rack of antlers built of knives.

  “Latch,” Sophie called back. “No hostile contact.”

  Haak waved his crew forward. They moved quickly, one at a time. Everyone held their weapons with white-knuckled hands.

  They didn’t see the big ball of X. What they did see was another large latch on the floor of the passageway. The latch was L-shaped like all the others—but bigger. The door it opened was at least six feet wide.

  “Two forward, two aft,” Haak said. “Everyone else spin this latch open.”

  They set to working on it, and had it open after two minutes of grunting and straining. They had to put their backs into it, placing their combat boots on handy anvils and pushing with their arms, butts or shoulders—any way they could get leverage.

  Slowly, the big latch twisted open like a clock hand being forced to move. It squeaked and groaned. Malena couldn’t help but wonder at the power of the creatures who used these latches as simple door handles. Were these easy to open for them? Could just one of them do it unaided?

  Finally, the latch clicked. Getting the door open was the next challenge. In most cases, gravity had helped open hatches. Now, it worked against them. They had to lift the full weight of the circular door, since it was in the floor of the passageway. They used everything they had, but muscle alone wasn’t enough. They had to set up a winch to get it open. Fortunately, the walls were adorned with plenty of things to anchor the equipment.

  Haak waved Sophie forward again. He stood well back from the edge.

  Crouching, Sophie crawled up to the lip of the hatchway and stared downward. Her face was bathed in a yellow light. Her eyes were big, and she didn’t speak.

  “Well?” Haak demanded. He watched her with compressed lips. His accelerator was in his hands and ready to fire.

  Sophie turned and looked at him. “I think its gold. Gold and jewels.”

  Whatever Haak had been expecting her to report, this wasn’t it. His demeanor changed immediately. He strode quickly to her side and gazed down into the chamber under the passageway. A smile appeared on his face then, one of the first Malena had ever seen there.

  Haak gripped the sides of the hatchway and swung himself down into it. The rest of the team circled around, looking down.

  Malena couldn’t resist any longer. She stepped up and looked over their shoulders.

  The scene inside the chamber wasn’t what she’d been expecting. She’d thought perhaps it was some kind of lost treasury, like a pirate’s buried cache. What she saw instead reminded her of museum storerooms. There were shelves of a sort, built all of metal of course. These shelves were embedded at even intervals in the walls of the chamber. What was most interesting was the gleaming objects on the shelves they did have an amber cast to them. They were filled with golden light and the greenish objects inside were jewel-like, but cut into rectangular shapes.

  “What are they?” she heard herself asking.

  “Loot,” answered a big man named Carl. “This is what we came for.”

  He jumped down into the hatch without being told to. Haak didn’t seem to mind. He was busy pulling a few of the jewels out. He examined one, then dropped it on the floor of the chamber. It shattered there like glass.

  The rest of the team pressed forward. Malena went with them. She had to see what these things were. As she slipped down into the open hatchway, she saw that Tanner remained in the passageway. He was just sitting there in the dark, leaning against a wall.

  Malena dropped into the chamber and approached the farthest wall. She touched the array of rectangular objects delicately. They resembled glass slides such as she’d worked with in microbiology classes. Each had jewel-like nodules embedded within it. She pulled one out of its golden encasement and the entire array sparked and flickered. Were these slides interacting somehow? She wasn’t sure.

  The piece she’d withdrawn was lovely. It reminded her of geological specimens she’d seen in college. This one was a mix of green with traceries of gold between the green spots. It was like a piece of liquid amber with emeralds embedded, cut into slices by a lathe.

  “What are these things, Haak?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Computer wafers, probably. As far as I’m concerned they’re garbage. I see a marble of X powering the connective racks. Everyone take apart one of these things and put the X power source into my pouch for safe keeping. If we can’t find Miss Marin’s fabled lodestone, we’ll at least have something to take back with us. But move fast. We’re out of here in five.”

  All around the chamber, the team tackled the boxes. They withdrew one jeweled slice after another. In most cases, they simply dropped the artifacts on the floor and let them smash there. Malena winced at each tinkling crash. It seemed like such a waste to her. She took the opportunity to secure several of them in her pack. No one seemed to notice or care.

  But when she’d removed most of the wafers, she saw a marble-sized ball of X in the back. As she reached for it a gloved hand slapped hers down. The blow stung, and she withdrew her hand.

  Sophie stepped forward and ripped out the X with a grunt. She waved her accelerator under Malena’s nose.

  “No stealing now,” she said. “That’s our X. Keep your hands off.”

  Malena felt like punching her. The two women glowered at one another. She watched as Sophie stowed the X then flashed Malena a final, taunting smile.

  “Who’s up top?” Haak called. “Put down the line, please.”

  Nothing happened. Malena moved forward, frowning. “Tanner?”

  Silence.

  Haak’s expression changed. “He’s run off. Figures. I’m surprised he waited so long. Sophie, jump up there and get the line, please. Adrian, give her a leg up.”

  The two moved forward and operated like an experienced pair of gymnasts. They’d clearly practiced the maneuver, and it showed.

  Sophie was launched up through the hatchway. She had her accelerator on her hip. They all watched quietly. Malena could hear every ringing step of Sophie’s boots up there, walking on the hull above them. A line was tossed down.

  “Anchored,” Sophie said, her voice echoing from above.

  Then she said something else. No one caught it. Haak frowned and grabbed the line. He looked up into the dark hatchway.

  “What was that? Report.”

  Silence.

  For the first time, Malena saw Haak look worried. He hung onto the line and stared up through the hatch. The rest of the team drew weapons. They all stared at the big round hole in the ceiling.

  “Sophie, have you made contact?” Haak asked, using his radio. “Report, please.”

  After another moment of silence, the big guy named Carl stepped forward. “I’ll go,” he said.

  Haak waved him away. He motioned toward Malena. “Use your headset. She’s got X on her. Where is she?”

  Malena closed her eyes for a second. She didn’t feel anything outside the chamber they were in. She shook her head. “I can’t sense anything past these walls. Maybe they’re blocking the contacts somehow.”

  Haak nodded. “Same here.” He waved Carl forward.

  The big man walked up and gave the line a hard yank. To everyone’s surprise, it didn’t pull taut. Instead, it gave slack. It began coming down, coiling into Carl’s face.

  “It’s wet,” he said.

  He pulled again, and reeled it in. At the end of the line was a surprise no one wanted to see. Boots came into view first, then legs wearing fatigues. They were shapely, muscular legs. Carl reached up with a croaking cry and tried to take Sophie down gently. But the line went taut again when her waist appeared.

  Malena saw the accelerator there, dangling from her belt. Sophie had never even drawn it. She hadn’t liked Sophie, but now she didn’t want her to be dead.

  The line ran with blood and Sophie’s legs dangled down into the chamber loosely. “I think she has a pulse still,” shouted Carl. “Help me up. I have to get her down.”