The Descent Part 12

We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth.

-HOMER, The Odyssey Fort Riley, Kansas 1999.

On these wide plains, seared in summer, harrowed by December winds, they had conceived Elias Branch as a warrior. To here he was returned, dead yet not dead, a riddle. Locked from sight, the man in Ward G turned to legend.

Seasons turned. Christmas came. Two-hundred-pound Rangers at the officers' club toasted the major's unearthly tenacity. The hammer of G.o.d, that man. One of us. Word of his wild story leaked out: cannibals with b.r.e.a.s.t.s. No one believed it, of course.

One midnight, Branch climbed from bed by himself. There were no mirrors. Next morning they knew he'd been looking by the b.l.o.o.d.y footprints, knew what he'd seen through the mesh grille covering his window: virgin snow.

Cottonwoods came to green glory. School hit summer. Ten-year-old Army brats racing past the hospital on their way to fish and swim pointed at the razor wire surrounding Ward G. They had their horror tale exactly backward: in fact, the medical staff was trying to unmake a monster.

There was nothing to be done about Branch's disfigurement. The artificial skin had saved his life, not his looks. There was so much tissue damage that when it healed, even he could not find the shrapnel wounds for all the burn scars. Even his own body had trouble understanding the regeneration.

His bones healed so quickly the doctors did not have the chance to straighten them. Scar tissue colonized his burns with such speed that sutures and plastic tubing were integrated into his new flesh. Pieces of rocket metal fused into his organs and skeleton. His entire body was a sh.e.l.l of cicatrix.

Branch's survival, then his metamorphosis, confounded them. They openly talked about his changes in front of him, as if he were a lab experiment gone awry. His cellular 'bounce' resembled cancer in certain respects, though that did not explain the thickening of joints, the new muscle ma.s.s, the mottling in his skin pigment, the small, calcium-rich ridges ribbing his fingernails. Calcium growths k.n.o.bbed his skull. His circadian rhythms had tripped out of synch. His heart was enlarged. He was carrying twice the normal number of red blood cells.

Sunlight - even moonbeams - were an agony to him. His eyes had developed tapetum, a reflective surface that magnified low light. Until now, science had known only one higher primate that was nocturnal, the aotus, or night monkey. His night vision neared triple the aotus norm.

His strength-to-weight ratio soared to twice an ordinary man's. He had double the endurance of recruits half his age, sensory skills that wouldn't quit, and the VO2 max of a cheetah. Something had turned him into their long-sought super soldier.

The med wonks tried blaming it all on a combination of steroids or adulterated drugs or congenital defects. Someone raised the possibility that his mutations might be the residual effect of nerve agents encountered during past wars. One even accused him of autosuggestion.

In a sense, because he was a witness to unholy evidence, he had become the enemy. Because he was inexplicable, he was the threat from within. It was not just their need for orthodoxy. Ever since that night in the Bosnian woods, Branch had become their chaos.

Psychiatrists went to work on him. They scoffed at his tale of terrible furies with women's b.r.e.a.s.t.s rising up among the Bosnian dead, explaining patiently that he had suffered gross psychic trauma from the rocketing. One termed his story a 'coalition fantasy' of childhood nuclear nightmares and sci-fi movies and all the killing he had directly seen or taken part in, a sort of all-American wet dream. Another pointed at similar stories of 'wild people' in the forest legends of medieval Europe, and suggested that Branch was plagiarizing myth.

At last he realized they simply wanted him to recant. Branch pleasantly conceded. Yes, he said, it was just a bad fantasy. A state of mind. Zulu Four never happened. But they didn't believe his retraction.

Not everyone was so dedicated to studying his aberrations. An unruly physician named Clifford insisted that healing came first. Against the researchers' wishes, he tried flus.h.i.+ng Branch's system with oxygen, and irradiated him with ultraviolet light. At last Branch's metamorphosis eased. His metabolism and strength tapered to human levels. The calcium outgrowths on his head atrophied. His senses reverted to normal. He could see in suns.h.i.+ne. To be sure, Branch was still monstrous. There was little they could do about his burn scars and nightmares. But he was better.

One morning, eleven months after arriving, ill with daylight and the open air, Branch was told to pack up. He was leaving. They would have discharged him, but the Army didn't like freaks with combat medals b.u.mming around the streets of America. Posting him back to Bosnia, they at least knew where to find him.

Bosnia was changed. Branch's unit was long gone. Camp Molly was a memory on a hilltop. Down at Eagle Base near Tuzla, they didn't know what to do with a helicopter pilot who couldn't fly anymore, so they gave Branch some foot soldiers and essentially told him to go find himself. Self-discovery in camouflage: there were worse fates. With the carte blanche of an exile, he headed back to Zulu Four with his platoon of happy-go-lucky gunners.

They were kids who'd given up shredding or grunge or the 'hood or Net surfing. Not one had seen combat. When word went out that Branch was going armed into the earth, these eight clamored to go. Action at last.

Zulu Four had returned to as much normalcy as a ma.s.sacre site could. The gases had cleared. The ma.s.s grave had been bulldozed flat. A concrete marker with an Islamic crescent and star marked the site. You had to look hard to still find pieces of Branch's guns.h.i.+p.

The walls and gullies around the site were cored with coal mines. Branch picked one at random and they followed him in. In later histories, their spontaneous exploration would become known as the first probe by a national military. It marked the beginning of what came to be called the Descent.

They had come as prepared as one did in those early days, with handheld flashlights and a single coil of rope. Following a coal miner's footpath, they walked upright - safeties off - through neat tunnels trimmed with wood pillars and roof supports. In the third hour they came to a rupture in the walls. From the rock debris spilled onto the floor, it seemed someone had carved his way out from the rock.

Following a hunch, Branch led them into this secondary tunnel. Beyond all reckoning, the network went deeper. No miner had mined this. The pa.s.sage was raw but ancient, a natural fissure winding down. Occasionally the way had been improved: narrow sections had been clawed wider, unstable ceilings had been b.u.t.tressed with stacked rock. There was a Roman quality to some of the stonework, crude keystones in some of the arches. In other places the drip of mineral water had created limestone bars from top to bottom.

An hour deeper, the GIs began to find bones where body parts had been dragged in. Bits and pieces of cheap jewelry and cheaper Eastern European wrist.w.a.tches lay on the trail. The grave robbers had been sloppy and hurried. The ghoulish litter reminded Branch of a kid's Halloween bag with a rip in it.

They went on, flas.h.i.+ng their lights at side galleries, grumbling about the dangers. Branch told them to go back, but they stuck with him. In deeper tunnels they found still deeper tunnels. At the bottom of those, they found yet more tunnels.

They had no idea how deep it was before they quit descending. It felt like the belly of the whale.

They did not know the history of man's meanderings underground, the lore of his tentative exploration. They hadn't entered this Bosnian maw for love of caving. These were normal enough men in normal enough times, none obsessed with climbing the highest mountain or soloing an ocean. Not one saw himself as a Columbus or a Balboa or a Magellan or a Cook or a Galileo, discovering new lands, new pathways, a new planet. They didn't mean to go where they went. And yet they opened this hadal door.

After two days in the strange winding corridor, Branch's platoon reached its limit. They grew afraid. For where the tunnels forked for the hundredth time and plunged still lower, they came upon a footprint. And it was not exactly human. Someone took a Polaroid photo and then they di-di maued it back to the surface.

The footprint in that GI's Polaroid photo entered the special state of paranoia usually reserved for nuclear accidents and other military slips. It was designated a Black Op. The National Security Council convened. The next morning, NATO commanders met near Brussels. In top secrecy, the armed forces of ten countries poised to explore the rest of Branch's nightmare.

Branch stood before the council of generals. 'I don't know what they were,' he said, once more describing his night of the crash in Bosnia. 'But they were feeding on the dead, and they were not like us.'

The generals pa.s.sed around the photo of that animal track. It showed a bare foot, wide and flat, with the big toe separate, like a thumb. 'Are those horns growing on your head, Major?' one asked.

'The doctors call them osteophytes.' Branch fingered his skull. He could have been the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of an accidental mating between species. 'They started coming back when we went down.'

There was, the generals finally accepted, more to this than just a coal hole in the Balkans. Suddenly, Branch found himself being treated not like damaged goods, but like an accidental prophet. He was magically restored to his command and given free rein to go wherever his senses led him. His eight troops became eight hundred. Soon other armies joined in. The eight hundred became eighty thousand, then more.

Beginning with the coal mines at Zulu Four, NATO recon patrols went deeper and wider and began to piece together a whole network of tunnels thousands of meters below Europe. Every path connected another, however intricately. Enter Italy and you might exit in Slovakia or Spain or Macedonia or southern France. But there was no mistaking a more central direction to the system. The caves and pathways and sinkholes all led down.

Secrecy remained tight. There were injuries, to be sure, and a few fatalities. But the casualties were all caused by roofs collapsing or ropes breaking or soldiers tripping into holes: occupational hazards and human error. Every learning curve has its price.

The secret held, even after a civilian cave diver by the name of Harrigan penetrated a limestone sinkhole called Jacob's Well in south Texas, which supposedly transected the Edwards Aquifer. He claimed to have found a series of feeder pa.s.sages at a depth of minus five thousand feet, which went deeper still. Further, he swore the walls contained paintings by Mayan or Aztec hands. A mile deep! The media picked it up, checked around, and promptly cast it aside as either a hoax or narcosis. A day after the Texan was made a fool in public, he disappeared. Locals reckoned the embarra.s.sment had been too much for him. In fact, Harrigan had just been shanghaied by the SEALs, handed a juicy consultant's fee, sworn to national secrecy, and put to work unraveling sub-America.

The hunt was on. Once the psychological barrier of 'minus-five' was broken - that magical five-thousand-foot level that intimidated cavers the way eight thousand meters once did Himalayan mountaineers - the progress plunged quickly. One of Branch's long-range patrols of Army Rangers. .h.i.t minus-seven within a week after Harrigan went public. By month five, the military penetration had logged a harrowing minus-fifteen. The underworld was ubiquitous and surprisingly accessible. Every continent harbored systems. Every city.

The armies fanned deeper, acquiring a vast and complex sub-geography beneath the iron mines of West c.u.mberland in South Wales and the Holloch in Switzerland and Epos Chasm in Greece and the Picos Mountains in Basque country and the coal pits in Kentucky and the cenotes of Yucatan and the diamond mines in South Africa and dozens of other places. The northern hemisphere was exceptionally rich in limestone, which fused at lower levels into warm marble and beerstone and eventually, much deeper, into basalt. This bedrock was so heavy it underlay the entire surface world. Because man had rarely burrowed into it - a few exploratory probes for petroleum and the long-abandoned Moho project - geologists had always a.s.sumed that basalt was a solid compressed ma.s.s. What man now found was a planetary labyrinth. Geological capillaries stretched for thousands of miles. It was rumored they might even reach out beneath the oceans.

Nine months pa.s.sed. Every day the armies pushed their collective knowledge a little further, a little deeper. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Seabees saw their budgets soar. They were tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots - three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves. Tanks and Humvees and deuce-and-a-half trucks pouring ordnance, troops, and supplies into the inner earth.

By the hundreds, international patrols descended into the earth's recesses for more than half a year. Boot camps s.h.i.+fted their theater training. Jarheads sat through films from the United Mine Workers about basic techniques for shoring walls and maintaining a carbide lamp. Drill instructors began taking recruits to the rifle ranges at midnight for point-and-fire practice and blindfolded rappels. Physician a.s.sistants and medics learned about Weill's disease and histoplasmosis, fungal infections of the lungs contracted from bat guano, and Mulu foot, a tropical cave disease. None were told what practical use any of this had. Then one day they would find themselves s.h.i.+pped into the womb.

Every week the ma.s.s of 3-D, four-color worm lines expanded laterally and vertically beneath their maps of Europe and Asia and the United States. Junior officers took to comparing the adventure to Dungeons and Dragons without, exactly, the dragons or dungeons. Wrinkled noncoms couldn't believe their luck: Vietnam without the Vietnamese. The enemy was turning out to be a figment of one very disfigured major's imagination. No one but Branch could claim to have seen demons with fish-white skin.

Not that there weren't 'enemies.' The signs of habitation were intriguing, sometimes gruesome. At those depths, tracks suggested a surprising spectrum of species, everything from centipedes and fish to a human-sized biped. One leathery wing fragment stirred images of subterranean flight, temporarily reviving Saint Jerome's visions of batlike dark angels.

In the absence of an actual specimen, scientists had named the enemy h.o.m.o hadalis, though they were the first to admit they didn't know if it was even hominid. The secular term became hadal, rhyming with cradle. Middens indicated that these ape creatures were communal, if seminomadic. A picture of harsh, grinding, sunless subsistence emerged. It made the brute life of human peasantry look charming by comparison.

But whoever lived down here - and the evidence of primitive occupation at the deeper levels was undeniable - had been scared off. They encountered no resistance. No contact. No live sightings. Just lots of caveman souvenirs: knapped flint points, carved animal bones, cave paintings, and piles of trinkets stolen from the surface: broken pencils, empty c.o.ke cans and beer bottles, dead spark plugs, coins, lightbulbs. Their cowardice was officially excused as an aversion to light. Troops couldn't wait to engage them.

The military occupation went deeper and wider in breathless secrecy. Intelligence agencies triumphed in embargoing soldiers' mail home, confining units to base, and derailing the media.

The military exploration entered its tenth month. It seemed that the new world was empty after all, and that the nation-states had only to settle into their bas.e.m.e.nts, catalog their holdings, and fine-tune new sub-borders. The conquest became a downright promenade. Branch kept urging caution. But soldiers quit carrying their weapons. Patrols resembled picnics or arrowhead hunts. There were a few broken bones, a few bat bites. Every now and then a ceiling collapsed or someone drove off an abyssal roadway. Overall, however, safety stats were actually better than normal. Keep your guard up, Branch preached to his Rangers. But he had begun to sound like a nag, even to himself.

The hammer dropped. Beginning on November 24, 1999, soldiers throughout the subplanet did not return to their cave camps. Search parties were sent down. Few came out. Carefully laid communications lines went dead. Tunnels collapsed.

It was as if the entire subplanet had flushed the toilet. From Norway to Bolivia, from Australia to Labrador, from wilderness bases to within thirty feet of suns.h.i.+ne, armies vanished. Later it would be called a decimation, which means the death of one in ten. What happened on November 24 was its opposite. Fewer than one of every ten would survive.

It was the oldest trick in the history of warfare. You lull your enemy. You draw him in. You cut off his head. Literally.

A tunnel at minus-six in sub-Poland was found with the skulls of three thousand Russian, German, and British NATO troops. Eight teams of LRRPs and Navy SEALs were found crucified in a cavern nine thousand feet beneath Crete. They had been captured alive at scattered sites, herded together, and tortured to death.

Random slaughter was one thing. This was something else. Clearly a larger intelligence was at work. System-wide, the acts were planned and executed upon a single clockwork command. Someone - or some group - had orchestrated a magnificent slaughter over a twenty-thousand-square-mile region.

It was as if a race of aliens had just breached upon man's sh.o.r.es.

Branch lived, but only because he was laid up with a recurring malarial fever. While his troops forged deeper below the surface, he lay in an infirmary, packed in ice bags and hallucinating. He thought it was his delirium speaking as CNN broke the terrible news.

Half raving, Branch watched his President address the nation in prime time on December 2. No makeup tonight. He had been weeping. 'My fellow Americans,' he announced. 'It is my painful duty...' In somber tones the patriarch enunciated the American military losses incurred over the past week: in all, 29,543 missing. The worst was feared. In the course of three terrible days, the United States had just suffered half as many American dead as the entire Vietnam War total. He avoided all mention of the global military toll, an unbelievable quarter of a million soldiers. He paused. He cleared his throat uncomfortably, shuffled papers, then pushed them aside.

'h.e.l.l exists.' He lifted his chin. 'It is real. A geological, historical place beneath our very feet. And it is inhabited. Savagely.' His lips thinned. 'Savagely,' he repeated, and for a moment you could see his great anger.

'For the last year, in consultation and alliance with other nations, the United States has initiated a systematic reconnaissance of the edges of this vast subterranean territory. At my command, 43,000 American military personnel were committed to searching this place. Our probe into this frontier revealed that it is inhabited by unknown life-forms. There is nothing supernatural about it. Over the next days and weeks you will probably be asking how it is that if there are beings down there, we have never seen them before now. The answer is this: we have seen them. From the beginning of human time, we have suspected their presence among us. We have feared them, written poems about them, built religions against them. Until very recently, we did not know how much we really knew. Now we are learning how much we don't know. Until several days ago, it was a.s.sumed these creatures were either extinct or had retreated from our military advance. We know differently now.'

The President stopped talking. The cameraman started back for the fade-out. Suddenly he began again. 'Make no mistake,' he said. 'We will seize this dark empire. We will beat this ancient enemy. We will loose our terrible swift sword upon the forces of darkness. And we will prevail. In the name of G.o.d and freedom, we will.'

The picture immediately switched to the Press Room downstairs. The White House spokesman and a Pentagon bull stood before the roomful of stunned journalists. Even in his fever, Branch recognized General Sandwell, four stars and a barrel chest. Son of a b.i.t.c.h, he muttered at the TV.

A woman from the LA Times stood, shaken. 'We're at war?'

'There has been no declaration of war,' the spokesman said.

'War with h.e.l.l?' the Miami Herald asked.

'Not war.'

'But h.e.l.l?'

'An upper lithospheric environment. An abyssal region riddled with holes.'

General Sandwell shouldered the spokesman aside. 'Forget what you think you know,' he told them. 'It's just a place. But without light. Without a sky. Without a moon. Time is different down there.' Sandy always had been a s...o...b..at, thought Branch.

'Have you sent reinforcements down?'

'For now, we are in a wait-and-see mode. No one goes down.'

'Are we about to be invaded, General?'

'Negative.' He was firm. 'Every entrance is secured.'

'But creatures, General?' The New York Times reporter seemed affronted. 'Are we talking about devils with pitchforks and pincers? Do the enemy have hooves and horns on their heads and tails, and fly on wings? How would you describe these monsters, sir?'

'That's cla.s.sified,' Sandwell spoke into the mike. But he was pleased with the 'monsters' remark. Already the media was demonizing the enemy. 'Last question?'

'Do you believe in Satan, General?'

'I believe in winning.' The general pushed the mike away. He strode from the room.

Branch slid in and out of fever dreams. A kid with a broken leg in the next bed channel-surfed endlessly. All night, every time Branch opened his eyes, the TV showed a different state of surreality. Day came. Local news anchors had been prepped. They knew to keep the hysteria out of their voices, to stick with the script. We have very little information at this time. Please stay tuned for further information. Please remain calm. An unbroken stream of text played across the bottom of the TV screen listing churches and synagogues open to the public. A government Web page was set up to advise families of the missing soldiers. The stock market plunged. There was an unholy mix of grief and terror and grim exuberance.

Survivors began trickling upward. Suddenly the military hospitals were taking in bloodied soldiers raving childishly about beasts, vampires, ghouls, gargoyles. Lacking a vocabulary for the dark monstrosity below, they tapped into the Bible legends, horror novels, and childhood fantasies. Chinese soldiers saw dragons and Buddhist demons. Kids from Arkansas saw Beelzebub and Alien.

Gravity won out over human ritual. In the days following the great decimation, there was simply no way to transport all the bodies up to the surface just so they could be lowered six feet back into the ground. There wasn't even time to dig ma.s.s graves in the cave floors. Instead, bodies were piled into side tunnels and sealed away with plastic explosives and the armies retreated. The few funeral services with an actual body featured closed caskets, screwed shut beneath the Stars and Stripes: NOT TO BE VIEWED.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was put in charge of civil defense education. Lacking any real information about the threat, FEMA dusted off its antiquated literature from the seventies about what to do in case of nuclear attack, and handed it out to governors, mayors, and town councils. Turn on your radio. Lay in a supply of food. Stock up on water. Keep away from windows. Stay in your bas.e.m.e.nt. Pray.

Foreboding emptied grocery stores and gun shops. As the sun went down on the second night, TV crews tracked national guardsmen taking up lines along highways and ringing ghettos. Detours led to roadblocks where motorists were searched and relieved of their weapons and liquor. Dusk closed in. Police and military helicopters prowled the skies, spotlighting potential trouble spots.

South Central Los Angeles went up first, no surprise there. Atlanta was next. Fire and looting. Shootings. Rape. Mob violence. The works. Detroit and Houston. Miami. Baltimore. The national guard watched with orders to contain the mobs inside their own neighborhoods, and not to interfere.

Then the suburbs lit up, and no one was prepared for that. From Silicon Valley to Highlands Ranch to Silver Spring, bedroom commuters went rampaging. Out came the guns, the repressed envy, the hate. The middle cla.s.s blew wide open. It started with phone calls from house to house, shocked disbelief twisting into realization that death lurked beneath their sprinkler systems. Strangely, suddenly, they had a lot to get out. They put the ghettos to shame with their fires and violence. In the aftermath, the national guard commanders could only say that they had not expected such savagery from people with lawns to call their own.

On Branch's TV, it looked like the last night on earth. For many people it was. When the sun rose, it illuminated a landscape America had been fearing since the Bomb. Six-lane highways were choked with mangled, burned cars and trucks that had tried to flee. Pitched battles had ensued. Gangs had swept through the traffic jams, shooting and knifing whole families. Survivors meandered in shock, crying for water. Dirty smoke poured into the urban skies. It was a day of sirens. Weather copters and roving news vans cruised the fringes of destroyed cities. Every channel showed havoc.

From the floor of the US Senate, the majority leader, C.C. Cooper, a self-made billionaire with his eye on the White House, clamored for martial law. He wanted ninety days, a cooling-off period. He was opposed by a lone black woman, the formidable Cordelia January. Branch listened to her rich Texas vowels cow Cooper's notion.

'Just ninety days?' she thundered from the podium. 'No, sir. Not on my watch. Martial law is a serpent, Senator. The seed of tyranny. I urge my distinguished colleagues to oppose this measure.' The vote was ninety-nine in favor, one opposed. The President, haggard and sleepless, s.n.a.t.c.hed at the political cover and declared martial law.

At 1:00 p.m. EST, the generals locked America down. Curfew began Friday at sunset and lasted until dawn on Monday. It was pure coincidence, but the cooling-off period landed on the ecclesiastical day of rest. Not since the Puritans had the Old Testament held such power in America: observe the Sabbath or be shot on sight.

It worked. The first great spasm of terror pa.s.sed over.

Oddly enough, America was grateful to the generals. The highways got cleared. Looters were gunned down. By Monday, supermarkets were allowed to reopen. On Wednesday, children went back to school. Factories reopened. The idea was to jump-start normalcy, to put yellow school buses back on the street, get money flowing, make the country feel returned to itself.

People cautiously emerged from their houses and cleaned their yards of riot debris. In the suburbs, neighbors who had been at one another's throats or on top of each other's wives now helped rake up the broken gla.s.s or scoop out ashes with snow shovels. Processions of garbage trucks came through. The weather was glorious for December. America looked just fine on the network news.

Suddenly, man no longer looked out to the stars. Astronomers fell from grace. It became a time to look inward. All through that first winter, great armies - hastily b.u.t.tressed with veterans, police, security guards, even mercenaries - poised at the scattered mouths of the underworld, their guns pointed at the darkness, waiting while governments and industries sc.r.a.ped together conscripts and a.r.s.enals to create an overwhelming force.

For a month, no one went down. CEOs, boards of directors, and religious inst.i.tutions badgered them to get on with the Reconquista, anxious to launch their explorations. But the death toll was well over a million now, including the entire Afghani Taliban army, which had practically jumped into the abyss in pursuit of their Islamic Satan. Generals cautiously declined to send in further troops.

A small legion of robots was commandeered from NASA's Mars project and put to use investigating the planet within their own planet. Creeping along on metal spider legs, the machines bore arrays of sensors and video equipment designed for the harshest conditions of a world far away. There were thirteen, each valued at five million dollars, and the Mars crew wanted them back intact.

The robots were released in pairs - plus one soloist - at seven different sites around the globe. Scores of scientists monitored each one around the clock. The 'spiders' held up quite well. As they crept deeper into the earth, communication became difficult. Electronic signals meant to flash unimpeded from the Martian poles and alluvial plains were hampered by thick layers of stone. In a sense, the labyrinth underfoot was light-years more distant than Mars itself. The signals had to be computer-enhanced, interpreted, and coalesced. Sometimes it took many hours for a transmission to reach the top, and many hours or days to untangle the electronic jumble. More and more often, transmissions simply didn't surface.

What did come up showed an interior so fantastic that the planetologists and geologists refused to believe their instruments. It took a week for the electronic spiders to find the first human images. Deep within the limestone wilderness of Terbil Tem, beneath Papua New Guinea, their bones showed as ultraviolet sticks on the computer scan. Estimates ranged from five to twelve sets of remains at a depth of twelve hundred feet. A day later, miles inside the volcanic honeycombs around j.a.pan's Akiyos.h.i.+-dai, they found evidence that bands of humans had been driven to depths lower than any explored, and there slaughtered. Deep inside Algeria's Djurdjura ma.s.sif and the Nanxu River sink in China's Guanxi province, far below the caves under Mt. Carmel and Jerusalem, other robots located the carnage of battles fought in cubbyholes and crawl s.p.a.ces and immense chambers.

'Bad, very bad,' breathed hardened viewers. The bodies of soldiers had been stripped, mutilated, degraded. Heads were missing or arranged like ma.s.ses of bowling b.a.l.l.s. Worse, their weapons were gone. Place after place, all that remained were nude bodies, anonymous, turning to bone. You could not tell who these men and women had been.

One by one, their spiders ceased to transmit. It was too soon for their batteries to go dead. And not all of them had reached their signal threshold. 'They're killing our robots,' the scientists reported. By the end of December, only one was left, a solitary satellite creeping on legs into regions so deep it seemed nothing could live.

Far beneath Copenhagen, the robot eye picked up a strange detail, a close-up of a fisherman's net. The computer cowboys fiddled with their machinery, trying to resolve the image, but it remained the same, oversized links of thread or thin rope. They keyed in commands for the spider to back up slightly for a wider perspective.

Almost a full day pa.s.sed before the spider transmitted back, and it was as dramatic as the first picture sent from the back of the moon. What had looked like thread or rope was iron circlets linked together. The net was in fact chain mail; the armor of an early Scandinavian warrior. The Viking skeleton inside had long ago fallen to dust. Where there had been a desperate black struggle, the armor itself was pinned to the wall with an iron spear.