Silence, and then the flat bang of the rifle being shot.
“I told you they were tough,” Tom said a couple of seconds later.
Another bang.
“I would like to go back to my teammates now,” Tom said, after a moment. “I know they are scared. I’m scared. You’ve destroyed our data, and you’ve made sure we can’t talk to our base. We can’t stop you from doing whatever you plan to do here. We’re not going to be a problem.”
Muttering, and a few seconds later, the soldier showed back up in the frame, walking backward to keep his weapon trained on Tom, talking urgently into a headset.
“Look, what the fuck do you want me to do with this guy?” he was saying, intelligibly now that he was closer. “We were told there weren’t going to be people here. We were told they wouldn’t be here until we were long gone. Now I’ve got this fucker, and others in my squad are babysitting his pals.”
He stood, listening into his earpiece.
“Well, but that’s my point,” the soldier replied to whoever he was talking with. “We already took down the helicopter. We don’t have to do anything to these assholes. Just strip them down and send them out into the jungle. They’ll be dead before any of their pals show up. Why waste the bullets?”
Another pause, and then a sigh.
“Jesus. Fine,” the soldier said. “We’re being paid extra for this. And I want even more for taking down the chopper.”
Every eye in the room turned to Satie, who sat there, grimly. He had already heard this part before.
“Yeah. Yeah. Fine. All right,” the soldier said, and then walked out of frame again.
A few seconds later, Tom said, “You don’t have to do this.”
Then there was another flat report from the rifle. And another.
The room was silent except for a few quiet sobs. Everyone knew what had just happened off-screen.
Unexpectedly the soldier returned into frame, looking about.
“Fucker is looking to see if he got caught,” Niamh said.
Before he could spot the phone, he had another problem on his hands; the jungle creatures, attracted by the noise and the sudden release of blood, were converging. The soldier raised his rifle, threatening, and went out the opposite side of the camera frame in a hurry. In a few seconds, there was the image of creature limbs hustling by, chasing him.
“I’d like to think they caught him and ate him,” Danso said.
“You didn’t see anything of Tom when you got there,” MacDonald said to me and Kahurangi.
We both shook our heads.
“We didn’t see any remains, either of us, or any of the invaders, whoever they are,” I said, pausing the video. “The soldier was right. The creatures would take anything they could get with them into the trees.”
MacDonald nodded, unhappy.
“What the hell are they doing?” Danso asked. “Why are they even there?”
“I have the answer,” I said. I closed the video file we were watching and pulled up another. “There’s a few videos in between the one we just watched and what I’m showing you,” I said. “The phone automatically chops up the videos into about five-minute chunks. It’s a memory-saving thing. This is good because it means that when the battery died we didn’t lose all the video.” I pulled up the particular video I was looking for.
“What are we looking at?” MacDonald asked as I let the video play.
I pointed to several barrel-size objects in the field of view, arrayed several meters from each other. “These things,” I said.
“What are they?”
“I don’t know. But I think they’re being used to create a perimeter around Bella and her eggs.”
“Okay, but why?” Danso asked.
“Because of this,” I said, pointing at the video.
In the video, the barrel-looking things suddenly started glowing. Then there was a flash that overwhelmed the camera sensor, and a crack like lightning had just struck.
When the sensor was clear again, Bella, her eggs, the barrels, and all the interlopers were gone.
“All right,” Niamh said, after the video had stopped. “How the fuck did they just do that?”
CHAPTER
23
My day had been long, and exhausting, and inexpressibly soul crushing. After barely tasting my dinner, I decided I needed to go to bed early and try to get some sleep. This resulted in a few hours of not sleeping, running the day’s events in my head, and staring at the potted plant gifted to me by Sylvia Braithwhite.