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Save Point: Viewpoint Like A Missile

Somewhere in South America, 1980

Imagine your viewpoint like a missile.

Imagine that, with your minds eye, you sweep forward, at first along the treetops, then down below them, following a half-made trail that is barely a trail, burned in places, swooping aside of tree limbs and other obstacles occasionally as the path requires. Moving onward inexorably, until at last you reach your target.

Cleo flings herself forward and down, and the missile sweeps almost silently past her shoulder, the barest impression of heat and vastly rapid movement until it spins out sideways and catches a tree branch near the drop into the valley ahead. The explosion is small, soggy if anything, briefly blackening and igniting the greenery until put out by the ever-present rain.

She has no idea how she knew it was coming, but she is still thinking of the long-ago exercise they put her through, project 'Eye of Re', an experiment in remote sensing that was backed more because it cost almost nothing than because of any definite results. As she throws herself over the edge of the valley, legs flailing quite deliberately to control her fall, she finds herself remembering it again, the 'instructor', who was some sort of questionable mysticist and known confidence trickster, whispering in her ear.

Imagine your viewpoint like a missile.

This is no convenient slope that a hasty traveler might fling themselves down, sliding safely until they reach the bottom. Every step of it is steepness, trees, protruding branches snapped off and desiring to make a swift end to the fallen. Mosses, lichen, deadly loops of snarled vines are everywhere. She crashes through some things, steps off from branches as they shatter underfoot, snatches at the stems to slow herself down. She keeps expecting the exposed rocks and broken edges to finally punch through and into the pads on her feet in pain and blood, but somehow it they never quite manage to penetrate. She hurtles to a halt at long last, wrapped and surrounded by the overgrowth, her back in pain where even three types of vertebrae wasn't enough.

She stays still and silent, looking out through the stems, certain that her path must have been lost in all that. Looking at the valley spread out below.

The climate is the worst of all weather to arrive in. It's getting late and the gathering storm clouds, already drizzling, have filtered the sunlight low across the valley walls into a quite spectacularly menacing blaze of golds and oranges, dark and low lit. Soon they will be cutting off the light entirely, and the full force of a torrential downpour will descend upon the valley beneath.

Lightning cracks, but distantly, yet then there is another sound, somewhere closer, like the report of a large firework detonating. The sound is the same as the strangely ineffective missile that whispered past her ear, when it either ranged out or hit a tree. Further away, another such sound answers the first. Some false read is being pursued in her place.

The valley, itself, looks exactly as reported. It's literally in the middle of nowhere, because even coca-leaf growers, drug dealers, and small rebel militias can't be bothered to come so far out from their target markets. A satellite photograph obtained for her from 'somewhere' by 'someone' shows the flat lower slopes of the valley to have been cleared and planted with various grasses for farming. There were people here, at least until a few days ago, before the mother of all storm warnings percolated its way up the river by unreliable ancient radios and hand-carved rumour. A news-paper article, in the nearest official dialect, shows an initiative to collect and propagate a rare plant called a 'cats-claw' that can be grown to the size of a small sapling and then stripped for bundles of medicinal bark. These and other obscure plants were to be farmed for a profit, but she has only memorized the shapes of the leaves, to let her know she's in the right place.

The dull report of another detonation echoes unexpectedly in the distance, against the sound of increasing rainfall. It's far away, and she resigns herself to having to put up with such occasional startlements for at least the foreseeable future.

For practicality, she's wearing relatively little, less than she'd like now that something is wandering around taking shots with second-rate rocket propelled grenades. The ability to live off the land, to natively survive in the deep rainforest, was the advantage she had intended to exploit in an area where traveling the muddy and easily sabotaged tracks in a badly-repaired range rover was simply asking to be kidnapped at gunpoint by a militia and repeatedly raped for casual light fun. True, she could then burn them alive, but that would create problems and questions all of its own. So, she simply parked outside the last outpost of actual civilization, hid her ride with fallen branches and the fronds of huge ferns, and made her way on foot through the forest canopy.

Something shrieks and whistles through the air high ahead. There was something wrong with the rocket on that one, she assumes.

Her light survival gear is a simple thing, inspired by the clothing of the tribes that used to live here before they were all driven out by changing times. So she has a miniscule loin-cloth to protect her snatch, and for the western touch, some sports-armor that guards her shins, fore-arms and shoulders. Fingerless leather gloves and footless leggings with a slight silvery sheen underly the plates, to prevent the straps from biting into her skin in the humid climate. None of it is ballistic except the main breast-piece, but that makes her faster and more agile than any other such potential opponent.

She's bought along a couple of expendable machete-style swords, plain metal with a flat finish that makes them easy to maintain. Not too heavy and useful at close quarters. There's also a tent of sorts made of unbelievably fine mesh that can be easily compressed into a small packet and tied to that back of her bra-strap next to her waterskin. Fastened to a couple of high branches to surround her, it makes a conveniently insect-free place to stay the night.

It's kind of twisted, but she very much enjoys crouching between that night's branches to take her morning piss. It's like she gets to scent-mark the whole rainforest as being hers.

The charm of the morning rainforest, however, is currently being rapidly swept away by the onset of evening and the ever-increasing rainfall, which is starting to soak into her crotch where she has her scantily-clad tail planted on soggy vines and wet dirt. Since the action seems to have moved on without her, she decides it's time for the potentially dangerous dash across the relatively open part of the valley floor.

Possible cover is provided by some small remains of ancient ruins in places, made of the local stone but reduced now to the low remains of walls barely high enough to crawl prone behind. She's really not qualified to judge which culture built them, although she read the only existing archaeological reports in the basement of a small and poorly ventilated municipal library in the regional capital. The larger remnants are distinctly Maya, but there's no way to know who built any of the underlying stonework, it's simply too ancient and too much time has passed.

As she shimmies in her best about-to-pounce stripper style behind some of the anonymous debris, tail waving, an extended chain of lightnings briefly illuminates the head of the valley, which is already being obscured under deepening cloud-shadow and the threat of night. Rain-water is starting to drip from her ears, but the light of the storm gives her a chance to examine the single most remarkable archaeological feature of the valley as a whole, the only reason why it rated a paper at all in the first place, in fact.

What would otherwise simply be a high waterfall at the head of the valley has been modified, run through a sort of stone culvert of broad dimensions into a massive structure resembling the mouth of a jaguar, through which the water falls. Far, far below, the pool into which it plummets has also been modified, lined with carefully placed stone blocks to form a perfectly circular receiving aperture which descends to unknown depths like an artificial cenote.

What interested her most about the, admittedly perfunctory, report was that design of the whole structure seems to be far more sophisticated than history would allow for. The older parts of the pool and culvert are apparently assembled from precision-edged, interlocking blocks, specifically stated in the report to have the same dimensions as those used at Puma Punku, but curved. The flow from the culvert seems to run through some sort of underground waterway after striking the pool, eventually welling up in the depths of the lake lower in the valley, which in turn overflows through an outlet further down to contribute to the river below. But the sheer depth and intensity of the current precluded any exploration of what might be down there during the few days of fieldwork involved.

The reason why this suddenly matters so much is the storm upriver, and which is steadily descending. Under any other circumstances, the river would be in full spate, a deadly churning torrent to sweep under anything that might be so unlucky as to fall in it. But here, the water descends, makes its way underground and then wells directly up, only gaining speed again somewhat distantly where it overflows the outlet into the main river.

Which means that a brave and suitably motivated person might perhaps be able to swim across to the far shore of the flooded lake, avoiding the otherwise empty area of open ground which, completely without cover, leads around it. And so far she's seen no sign of significant debris from upstream in the lake, which suggests to her that passage through the under-ground waterways has filtered most of it. The lake is flooded, yes, but near the surface much of the water is clear, direct runoff from the rain reaching the valley floor.

The situation has an edge of the distinctly surreal, going swimming in what is essentially an armoured bikini in the light of a glorious sunset from hell as the rain batters down torrentially, getting in her eyes, intruding with sufficient force to disrupt the composition of her tears and cause a certain degree of actual discomfort. She dips her head underwater and blinks just to clear her eyes, then flicks her hair back to try and keep it from getting weighed down. The most uncanny thing is that the rainwater and even to a lesser extent the floodwater is slightly warm, and the air is humid with heat. The rain dripping off her is the same temperature as her skin, warming her whenever she raises her head to breathe.

There's no way anything could possibly trace her in all this. Visibility is terrible. Eventually she spots a small building, which seems to have been some sort of lakeside hut or cabin, with a high pier attached to it for easy access to the lake and fishing. As she pulls herself up onto the pier, it's now ankle-deep under the water, although still clearly visible, and she makes her way inside into the shock of finally being dry, if only temporarily.

The hut itself is still a foot or two above water, although this may not be the case for very much longer, and so she looks around. Anything useful seems to have already been taken by the inhabitants, who have sensibly retreated well ahead of the storm warnings.

Dripping everywhere, she manages to ignite a small, mostly used propane-burner can she finds discarded in on of the corners, and then drains the heat energy out of it to replenish her reserves. The flame shoots up and blazes intensely for a couple of seconds, then goes out completely, accompanied by a feeling a renewed well-being and thin trailers of steam drifting off her skin.

Under a small window on one of the walls, facing the lake and presumably providing a quite pleasant view under fairer conditions, there is an old wooden box radio that seems to run off a combination of batteries and hope. Her first thought is that if it runs off valves, it'll be long dead, but a quick look inside reveals that several early transistors have been wired across the gaps by some enterprising mechanic to keep it alive. She tries to tune it in, but the signal isn't very good and all she manages to catch is snatches of some sort of regional news service about how severe the storm is and how all persons should make their way most immediately to higher ground, as there have been reports of flooding. Well, what a surprise.

Whilst it is tempting to stay put, the rain and weather are still providing perfect cover and something out there is still roaming about firing highly inaccurate explosive projectiles. She reaches into the small stash tied at her back and retrieves the device that bought her to this remote place.

The inner workings of the mage compass, divested of its containing vessel, are actually quite small and reveal it to be an Azatlani gyroscopic stabilizer of the sort used in military guidance systems. Being stashed inside an airtight acrylic sphere for the thousands of years that have elapsed since its creation means that it's still in fairly good condition and actually working, for which she blesses the memory of whomever decided to keep it as a souvenir after their tour of duty ended. Measurements taken from several different locations around the world, wherever she happened to be at the time, all showed a grand total of precisely one last matching system still in existence, here in this remote valley.

Now, however, she's not so sure. There are a number of other, smaller, weaker signals moving about in the nearby area, probably belonging to whatever took a shot at her earlier. The main return is some sort of entangled coms system, state-of-the-art when it all went down and with effectively unlimited range, powered by two state-linked diamond wafers a hundredth the size of her fingernail. The other signals, however, are something she doesn't recognize that seems to be able to hitch a ride on this supposedly unbreakable transmission as long as there's a sufficient degree of geographical proximity.

She has a nasty feeling that this may indicate something that was beyond state-of-the-art back in the day. Which would account for why they're such terrible shots - things wear out after that many thousands of years. Of course, anything that's still working after that much time outside is bound to be formidable in its own right - just look at her, after all.

She starts trying to recover memories of Azatlani military techniques that she hasn't accessed in practically forever. It'll take a while to search out and decompress them, but this way they'll be ready when she really needs them. Checking to see that none of the more active signals are moving about nearby, she braces herself and heads out back into the rain.