We shuffled down to the water's edge in a wide file. All of us except Aemos carried weapons.
It looked like a sea. Green water, showing white at the breakers.
'Liquid ammonia/ Aemos said, his voice a low crackle over the vox.
There was something strange about it.
'Do you see it?' he asked me.
What?'
'The waves are moving out from the shore.'
I looked again. It was so obvious, I had missed it. The liquid wasn't rushing in and breaking, it was sucking away from the shore and rolling back into itself.
It was chilling. So simple. So wrong. My confidence withered. I wanted to strip off the claustrophobic suit and cry out. And I would have, except for the stark red warning lights on the atmosphere reader built into my suit's bulky left cuff.
What was it Maxilla had said? The saruthi had tormented the men of the Promethean? I didn't know for a moment if the unnatural behaviour of the sea was their doing – how could it have been? But I understood how insidious, distressing torment might have played upon them.
Fischig and Betancore had approached the first of the arches. I looked across and saw them dwarfed by the unsymmetrical structure. The next in the line was three hundred metres away, and they seemed regularly spaced. Each one, as far as I could see, was irregular in a different way, though the size and proportions were identical.
Bequin was kneeling on the shoreline, brushing the sand aside gently with her gauntlet. She had found what was perhaps the most distressing detail so far.
Under the sand, a few centimetres down, the ground was tiled. Tessellated, irregular octagonal tiles, just like the ones she had found on the floor of the mine working at North Qualm. Once more, they fitted perfectly, impossibly, despite their shape.
The more of them she uncovered, the more she brushed the sand away.
'Stop it/ I said. 'For our sanity, I don't think it's worth trying to discover if they cover the entire beach/
'Can all of this… be artificial?' she asked.
'It can't be/ said Aemos. 'Perhaps the tiles and the arches are part of some old structure, long abandoned, that has since been flooded and covered with the dust… due to… to…'
He didn't sound at all convincing.
I crossed to Fischig and Betancore and stood with them gazing up at the first arch. It was wrought from that odd, unknown metal we had seen on Damask.
What do we do know?' Fischig asked.
'Well, I hate to state the obvious/ said Aemos from down the beach, 'but the last row of these we found formed a deliberate pathway that led the Essene in here. Should we assume this serves the same purpose?'
I stepped forward, through the broad, towering shape of the first arch. 'Come on/1 said.
We walked for what I estimated was perhaps twenty minutes. Estimated. All of our chronometers were dead. After the first few minutes we began to
hear a distant, repetitive boom; a low, almost sub-sonic peal like thunder that rolled out from somewhere far away over the sea. Or seemed to. It came every half minute or so. There were long intervals of silence, and just when we'd thought we'd heard the last, another boom would come. Like the crunch of our own footsteps, we could hear it through the suits, even with our vox circuits switched off.
I voxed to Maxilla. 'Can you hear that?'
There was a crackle, and no immediate reply. Then a sudden burst of transmission. Maxilla's voice:'… as you instruct, Gregor, but it's not going to be easy. Say again… what did you say about Fischig?'
'Maxilla! Repeat!' I began, but his voice continued over the top, incoherent. It wasn't a reply. I was just picking up his voice. I felt my spine go cold.
More static.
Tell Alizebeth, I agree with that! Ha!'
It went dead.
I looked back at the others. Their pale faces gazed out of the tinted brown faceplates like ghosts.
"What… was that?' I murmured.
'An echo?' Aemos whispered. 'Some kind of transmission anomaly caused by the atmosphere and the-'
'It's not a conversation I've ever had.'
Another boom of thunder rolled across the dry, softly lit shore.
After my estimated twenty minutes, we passed through what was suddenly the last arch. We all stopped. Ahead of us, the land rose more steeply, into hills and low ridges. The terrain there was darker, inhospitable. The overall radiance had dulled, and the sky was a deep green, oozing into blackness over the hills. There… there were more in the row!' Fischig exclaimed. 'More arches!' He was right. The octagonal colonnade had disappeared as we passed through the last arch. I stepped back through, imagining perhaps that from the other side the arches might reappear. They didn't. The booming continued. We set off towards the hills. Bursts of static hissed through our vox units. Transmissions/ said Lowink. He fiddled with his vox-channels. 'I can't tune them in, but they're chatter. Military. Back and forth.' Our quarry, perhaps.
