Providence - Max Barry Page 0,95
For two days, they made steady progress. In all that time, the tornado at its peak didn’t move or dissipate. Sometimes individual tendrils broke away, especially near the top where it disappeared into the cloud, but never for long. She had developed an idea of what it might be, but didn’t want to think about it until she was sure.
Every half hour, they rested. Anders checked the lightning gun over and over, as if it might spontaneously charge itself when he wasn’t looking. Beanfield sat bent over, looking at the ground. Jolene amused herself by wondering how Service was going to spin this. She was almost sad she wouldn’t get to see the enormous snow job that would be required to sell the idea that losing a Providence and its crew was actually some kind of victory. Or, she supposed, an inspirational and valiant loss that nothing could have prevented except perhaps increased military funding. Maybe she didn’t need to see that. Maybe she could imagine it.
On the third day, she poked her head out of a fissure to check their surroundings and saw a low depression. It was only a few hundred yards away, and a rare feature in an otherwise empty landscape, so she resolved to investigate. She and Anders left Beanfield, who couldn’t move quickly, climbed the fissure wall, and crossed the open rock, Anders carrying the lightning gun, the converter bouncing against the small of her back. The horizon remained clear both of land-bound salamanders and fliers. Now that she was above the heat haze, she was able to confirm something she’d suspected for a few hours: There was a second hill, farther away than the first, also with a twisting tornado at its peak. They slowed as they reached the crater. Anders raised the gun. Whether the thing would even work, they had yet to discover. But there were no salamanders here, either. The depression was full of liquid orange gunk.
“So what’s this, now,” said Anders.
She stared at it. It was thick, brighter in the center of the pool, darker at the edges, where it seemed to be congealing. It wasn’t at all like what they’d swum through as they fled the jetpod. It actually put her in mind of lava, a substance that rose to the surface and formed a hard crust. Which made sense; that was how planets formed. Hot stuff bubbling up from below, then cooling and going hard. But seeing it in glutinous form made it impossible to deny the conclusion that had been forming in her head for days.
“Maybe this is a volcano, too,” Anders said. “A baby one, just getting started. It’s making rock, see?”
“This isn’t rock.”
He looked at her. “What?”
She gestured at the landscape. “None of this is rock.”
“It looks like rock,” he said. “What is it?”
“Resin.”
Realization crossed his face. “The whole planet?”
“It’s not a planet,” she said. “It’s a hive.” She turned to look at the two hills and their tornadoes. But of course they weren’t tornadoes. They were salamanders, coming out of the ground in streams, venting like gas.
Anders followed her gaze. “Ah, fuck it.” He turned in a circle as if seeing the landscape for the first time. “Fuck me.”
How many salamanders? They had vented at this rate for days. Must be hundreds of thousands. Millions. Which meant that it wasn’t even correct to call this a hive, she realized. It was the hive. A planet-sized salamander factory.
Her body felt abruptly heavy. She sat. Everything was heavy right now.
“This is what we’ve been looking for,” Anders said. “Since the start of the war. If Service knew . . .”
Every Providence would converge and burn this place to ash. But there was no way to tell them. They were in VZ. She, Anders, and Beanfield wouldn’t even survive another twenty-four hours unless they found something to feed the converter.
Anders hunkered down beside her. “So what do we do?”
She didn’t want to answer, but there was no other option. “We go there.”
He looked, in case something else had appeared on the landscape recently. “What are you talking about? There are a million salamanders.”
“We can