Interlopers, p.1
Interlopers, page 1
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Interlopers
An ACE® Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2001 by Thranx, Inc.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0793-2
AN ACE BOOK®
Ace Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
IMPRINT and the “IMPRINT INITIAL” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
First edition (electronic): September 2001
One
Khuatupec was hungry.
He stirred within the stone. As solid and impermeable as it was beautifully carved, it stood upright alongside its unformed and uninhabited basaltic kin. No light penetrated the ancient temple where the stones reposed. None had entered for hundreds of years. The absence of illumination did not matter to Khuatupec. Light meant nothing to him. He and his kind utilized means and methods of perception that did not require its presence.
Within him boiled The Hunger; a sere, seething whirlpool of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Considering how long it had been since last he had fed, it was surprising the discomfort was not worse. Yet he contented himself. For the first time in living memory, food was at hand. Something to eat. Something to suck at.
He divined its presence nearby, had been aware of it for some time now. Some days would see it draw tantalizingly close, others would find it moving maddeningly away. There was nothing Khuatupec could do but wait. In order for him to be able to feed, physical contact with the food was necessary. Because of his nature, his situ, that contact had to be initiated by the food itself. He envied others of his kind who could move about more freely in search of sustenance. Most of them were much smaller than he, however, and needed less feeding. His kin were multitudinous and diverse, but there was only one Khuatupec. He. Him.
Having been patient for so many centuries, he would perforce have to be patient a while longer. But it was frustrating to have so much fresh food so close at hand yet be unable to taste any of it.
Khuatupec waited within the carved stone, and brooded, and contemplated the ecstasy that was eating. Soon, he persuaded himself. Soon enough the taste, the pleasure, the exhilaration of feeding would once more be his. He wondered which of the food would be the first to make contact.
The condor descended in a lazy spiral, great hooked beak and immense black wings inclining in the direction of something unseen and dead. It reminded Cody of the much smaller turkey vultures that haunted the skies above the family ranch back home. Wiping perspiration from his forehead, he crouched down and resumed gently blowing dust from the punctured skull in the center of square N-23.
The hole in the hoary cranium was large enough to admit his little finger. Working carefully within the delimitating grid of white cord that was suspended above the soil, he finished cleaning the skull before gently depositing it in a waiting box padded with bubble paper. Unlike the Incas, for whom considerable evidence of the primitive surgical procedure existed, there was no record of the Chachapoyans practicing trepanning. If detailed study of the skull turned out to prove that they had employed the procedure, the results might serve as the basis for a formal paper. “Evidence of cranial medical practices among the Chachapoyans circa A.D. 1100-1400—Apachetarimac site, Amazonas Province, northern Peru.” An effort suitable for Archaeological Review, certainly, with a slightly more sensationalized version made available for Discover magazine or Popular Science.
Pictures—he needed pictures. Straightening, he turned and reached for the rucksack that was lying on the higher level nearby. On the far side of the excavation, Langois and Kovia were working on their knees on opposite sides of a cracked monochrome pot. It displayed several of the same designs that decorated the tawny limestone walls that formed the ancient citadel. Unlike the Incas, whose dark stonework tended to be smooth and featureless, the Chachapoyans had incorporated an assortment of patterns into the foundations of their round stone houses and rectangular temples. So far, diamonds, waves, and undulating figures that suggested serpents had been discovered.
Pots were rare. Apachetarimac was not Tucume or Pacatnamu, ancient cities that had hardly been touched by archaeologists or tourists. Around their weathering adobe pyramids lay millions upon millions of potsherds, relics of a thousand years of pottery-making by cultures with magical names: Chimu, Moche, Lambayeque. The Chachapoyans had not left behind nearly as many clay vessels depicting their lives and beliefs. Nor were the Calla Calla Mountains as conducive to the preservation of pottery as was the dry coastal desert. The cracked pot was a fine discovery. Even so, Cody did not envy Langois and Kovia. He was content with his punctured skull.
After taking several close-ups of the skull as it rested in its box, he removed it and set it on the chest-high dirt ledge nearby. Checking the position of the sun, he tried to establish what he thought was the most dramatic angle for another photo. He could shoot up against the sky, but finally decided to use the distant mountains as background. Wearing their blankets of green and soaring to heights of fourteen thousand feet and more, they would make a colorful backdrop for the dark brown bone.
Apachetarimac, he mused as he clicked off shots on the digital camera and then checked them in the view-screen. Having conquered and absorbed the Chachapoyans as they had the majority of cultures in western South America, the Incas had rechristened many of the cities inhabited by their new subjects. They had left behind few clues as to the reasons for some of their choices. Some, like Machu Picchu and Ollyantaytambo, were obvious. Apachetarimac, which translated from the Quechua as “sacred talking spot,” was not. If his skull were capable of speech, it probably could have provided some answers. But the brain that had once inhabited the weathered, dark brown ovoid had long since become food for worms.
Where it might have made another person queasy to think of it in such a setting, the prospect of the evening meal set off a mild chain reaction in Cody’s stomach. Though tall and lanky of build, he was no more immune to the pangs of hunger than were his smaller colleagues. A steady diet of physical labor in the thin air at nearly ten thousand feet worked up ravenous appetites. Frowning slightly, he placed the skull back in its padded box and wondered if today dinner might be any different from what was expected. He doubted it. Vizcaria, the camp cook, was nothing if not predictable. Cody would gladly have handed over ten bucks for a decent chicken-fried steak.
He would have to be satisfied with the thought and the memory. Here in the heights of the Calla Calla Mountains there were no roads and no restaurants. Choctamal, the nearest town, was three days’ hard ride to the north on the back of a plodding, crotch-splitting mule. The nearest real restaurant was in the provincial capital of Chachapoyas, another four hours’ frightening ride down a narrow, single-lane road boasting some of the longest, steepest drop-offs Cody had ever seen. Coming as he did from the relatively flat hill country of south-central Texas, he had a harder time than some of his friends with the thousand-foot precipices that seemed to lie beneath every bend in the lonely dirt track. Frankly, he preferred the mules to the brake-pad-deprived minibuses and pickups.
“Looking good, Mr. Westcott!” a voice boomed from above. Langois and Kovia glanced up briefly before returning to their own work. Dr. Harbos would query them in due time.
Martin Harbos, Ph.D., was director of the excavations at Apachetarimac. Five-ten or so, he was half a foot shorter than the senior graduate student laboring beneath him. A candle or two shy of sixty, he still had more hair than anyone else on the project, though every strand had long ago turned a startling silvery-white, the blatant hue of a cheap Santa Claus wig. Rather than being a consequence of normal aging, the network of deep lines that crevassed his face was inherited from his ancestors. His skin was burned brown from years of field work, and beneath his shirt and shorts small, corded muscles exploded like caramel popcorn. He had the bluest eyes Cody had ever seen, a ready sense of humor, and the ability to flay a student naked with a casual, sometimes off-hand comment.
Today he chose to be complimentary. “Trepanning?” He was crouching at the edge of the excavation, peering down at the skull in the box.
“I’d like to think so, Dr. Harbos.” Though friendly, even jovial, the professor insisted on the honorific. Fraternizing between officers and enl isted men was limited on Harbos’s shift, Cody thought with a hidden smile. “It’ll take lab studies to confirm or deny.” He indicated the packaged skull. “The edges of the cavity are pretty regular, but it could have been made by a weapon.”
Harbos nodded. “Or something else.” His expression was sympathetic. “It’s always frustrating when you find something potentially exciting in the field and know that it won’t be properly identified for months.” Straightening, he moved on, keeping clear of the rim of the straight-sided excavation so as not to knock dirt or pebbles into the hole.
Pleased with this mildest of compliments, Cody carefully began to fold the lid of the box closed, bending the corners of the cardboard so the top would stay shut until it could be reopened in the field lab. Somewhere, a bird chirped. The paucity of birds in the semi-cloud forest was striking. Unlike elsewhere in the Andes, here they kept to themselves, as if their boisterous warbling might disturb the sleeping mountains.
Except for the condors and the buzzards, of course. Ever on the lookout for harbingers of death, they had a job to do that required constant patrolling of the translucent blue sky. Their occasional appearances provoked admiring comment from those of his fellow students who hailed from the city, which he ignored. Back home, such aerial visions were common as dirt.
He wondered how many other intact skulls might lie buried and waiting to be found nearby. By the standards of the remarkable but little-known Chachapoyan culture, Apachetarimac was not a big site, no more than four hundred meters long by ninety wide. Gran Vilaya, for one, boasted far more individual structures, and Cuelap was more physically imposing. But Apachetarimac remained one of the most impressive, occupying the top of a forest-clad mountain whose sides fell away sheer on three sides. Walls of cut limestone over a hundred and twenty feet high formed the basis of the citadel, with the interior structures rising higher still. Combined with dense overgrowth, its inaccessibility had kept it hidden from the outside world for the last five hundred years.
Locals whose farms clung with the tenacity of dirty spider webs to the sides of nearby mountains knew of its existence but had no reason to speak of it to the outside world. While they had made it plain they didn’t care for the busy visitors who delighted in digging in the dirt, neither did they attempt to interfere with the excavation. The presence of a pair of Peruvian federal policemen, camped on site to prevent looting and ward off any wandering narcotráficos, also served to keep the superstitious locals from causing any trouble.
“Well, does inspiration strike, have you been bitten by a fer-de-lance, or is this paralysis due to an inability to decide whether to go forward, back, or simply wait for instructions?”
He turned sharply. The only time Alwydd could look down on him was when he was standing in a hole. Not that she was particularly short, but he was the tallest person in camp. For that matter, he was the tallest person in this immediate region of Peru, height not being a notable characteristic of the local indios and mestizos.
Embarrassed, he fumbled for a witty response and, as always, came up with nothing. She was much too quick for him. Harbos could keep up with her, giving as good as he got, but no one else in camp had her lightning wit. She was also brilliant, and beautiful, about a year away from her doctorate, and convinced that she and not Cody ought to be Harbos’s first assistant in the field. If not wit, however, Coschocton Westcott possessed endless reservoirs of patience. In an archaeologist, that was the far more valued commodity. Brilliance was cheap.
He had never met so attractive a girl so indifferent to her appearance. From the dirt-streaked baggy bush pants to the equally frumpy beige-toned field shirt, she looked every inch a bad copy of a silent screen clown after a particularly rough car chase. The limp-brimmed hat that slumped down around her ears sat atop her head like broccoli on a stalk, rising to unnatural heights in order to accommodate the long hair wound up beneath. A mussed pixie drifting through a khaki wilderness, he mused. For all that, a most erotic pixie.
Forget it, he told himself firmly. Though he had never asked, and she had not volunteered the information, he would bet that she wrote regularly to several captivated males back in the States. Dazzling young doctors or up-and-coming investment bankers, no doubt. Gangly half-breed dirt-grubbers from West Hicksville were not likely to fit neatly into her definition of potential mate material.
Everyone had tried, he knew. He’d even seen the temptation in Harbos’s face. You had to give the good doctor credit, though. He might brush up against his students every now and then, but he was quick to voice apologies—even if he didn’t feel apologetic. It struck Cody abruptly that she was still standing there, looking down and waiting for some kind of response.
“I’m just packing Curly here for the trip to the lab.” He indicated the skull.
With the agility of a gymnast she hopped down to the mid-level shelf, careful not to kick any dirt into the excavation. Kneeling while pushing back the brim of her rumpled hat, she scrutinized the vacant-eyed skull thoughtfully.
“Not exactly the second coming of the Lord of Sipán,” she quipped tartly.
“What is?” The great, unlooted tomb of the Moche chieftain that had been discovered near the coast was unparalleled in the history of South American archaeology. Its gold, silver, and lapidary treasures were the stuff of every field worker’s dreams.
“Nothing, I suppose. If this is Curly, where are Manny and Moe?”
“Show a little respect for the dead.” He nodded toward the silent skull. “That’s a cousin of mine. Distant, but still a relation.”
Straightening, she grinned down at him, enjoying the temporary and entirely artificial adjustment to their respective height. “Don’t try that politically correct guilt crap on me, Cody Westcott.” She tapped the box with a booted foot. “This dude’s about as much your relative as Mary Queen of Scots is mine. It is a dude?”
“I believe so. Kimiko will make the final determination.” Kimiko Samms was the group’s forensic anthropologist, a specialty that required her to live in even closer proximity to the long dead than her colleagues. “I can feel a kinship across the centuries to whoever this person was.”
“Funny.” Reaching back, she scratched the arch of her behind through the soft bush poplin of her pants. “All I can feel are chigger bites.”
“Salar should have something for that. If he doesn’t, I do.” Turning away, Cody started toward the steps that had been cut into the dirt above a nonsensitive corner of the site. Sweat poured down his face, mixing with accumulated dirt and dust—archaeologist’s rouge. Time was passing and he wanted to get the skull to the field lab and return in time to do some more digging before the daylight shrank too far below the undulating green horizon. The sweat did not bother him. At Apachetarimac’s altitude the air began to cool rapidly once the sun had passed its zenith.
“What’s that?”
He almost didn’t turn. In addition to her beauty, wit, and intelligence, Kelli Alwydd was renowned in camp for her jokes, not all of them practical. At least, he mused, she hadn’t shouted “snake!” or something equally juvenile. As he paused, he wondered why he was reacting at all, giving her what she wanted. Maybe, he decided, he was a sucker for clever women. Or maybe he was just a sucker. Irrespective of the reason, he turned.
She was in the pit, having jumped down from mid-level so softly that he hadn’t heard her land. Crouching, she squinted in the receding light at a portion of grid square V-9. Only slightly uncomfortable at finding the pose as pretty as it was professional, he ambled over to join her, affecting an air of studied disinterest.
“Let me guess.” He fought to keep a lid on his trademark sarcasm. “A solid gold peanut, like those in the necklace from Sipán? Or is it just silver? Silver-and-turquoise ear ornaments, with articulated figures?”
She did not look up. “No. I think it’s another skull.” Reaching into one of her many shirt pockets, she brought out a pair of brushes: one bold, the other fine-haired sable, and began methodically flicking at the dirt in front of her feet.
He could have knelt to peer over her shoulder, stealing a small pleasure from the proximity. Instead, he walked around to crouch down in front of her, careful to step cleanly over the white cord that sliced the excavation into neat, easily labeled squares. Her brushwork was rapid and precise, like the rest of her.
