Chapter 3: The Apex

Gunsmith had found the source of the rotten stench, a scattering of fish. They lay in twos and threes on the mud, giving off the smell one expected of corpses. Of course, fish couldn't stand up in the first place, much less dead ones.

Gunsmith surveyed the little rise. It covered less than a hundred square meters and stood noticeably higher than the surrounding ground. He wondered why fish would have died in a place like this, and so many of them, too. There were several species of tropical fish, and the scattered bodies might have numbered more than thirty or forty.

At first he thought the local tribespeople had done it, but on reflection that didn't seem right. Why would anyone go to the trouble of catching fish, neither to eat nor to keep, only to throw them onto high ground to rot and stink? Then he wondered whether some animal had done it, but soon realized that was even less likely. Animals didn't use nets or hooks. They would leave at least some wounds on any fish they caught, but judging by the condition of these fish…

A thought flashed through Gunsmith's mind. He immediately walked over to a nearby tree and leaned in to examine its trunk. Sure enough, there were watermarks that hadn't completely dried. The lower part of this tree must have been submerged. In other words, not long ago this place had been a river or a pond. The wet silt underfoot supported that, too.

That meant these fish had died because, a few hours earlier, the water level here had dropped several meters in an instant, leaving them no time even to swim away. But this was clearly high ground. If the water had once reached this high, shouldn't the entire surrounding area have been underwater?

Gunsmith walked down the slope and checked the surrounding trees. The exposed portions of their trunks were uniform in color. Only the roots at the very bottom had been submerged. That left just one explanation for this strange phenomenon. The water level hadn't changed. That patch of ground had suddenly risen on its own.

An earthquake? He hadn't felt anything. Had some enormous ancient beast rolled over underground? Was this a joke?

Gunsmith was intensely curious. Inventors generally had that problem from childhood. Once he discovered something strange, he couldn't rest until he'd gotten to the bottom of it.

It was noon, ordinarily time to stop for lunch and a rest, but Gunsmith wasn't going to have an appetite until he solved this mystery. So he came up with a very direct approach. Dig.

He took a few things out of his backpack and made himself a pair of crude gloves from two pieces of cloth. He didn't need separate fingers for this job anyway, so he simply fastened the two cloth mitts with seat belts to keep silt from getting under his nails, and started digging by hand.

The mud had been underwater and took little effort to scrape away. Gunsmith dug like a dog burrowing into the ground, so fast that before long he was down inside the hole.

After about an hour of this, he was more than ten meters underground. To keep himself from being buried by sliding mud as he worked, Gunsmith didn't dare dig a vertical shaft. His hole was funnel-shaped, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Every time he dug another meter or two deeper, he had to go back and widen the opening, which added considerably to the work. Still, he wasn't exactly a normal human being, and the labor didn't tire him.

Just as Gunsmith was beginning to feel a little stupid for slogging away out in the wilderness over such a far-fetched theory, one swipe of his hand struck something extremely hard, sending a painful jolt through his fingers.

“A rock? Please, anything but a rock,” Gunsmith muttered to himself. He cleared away the last layer of mud and saw exactly what he'd been hoping to see.

It was indeed no rock. It was metal.

“Hahahahaha!” Gunsmith burst into wild laughter. For a moment, he thought he'd dug up an alien spaceship.

As he cleared away more mud, Gunsmith gradually abandoned that guess in favor of an even more incredible idea—beneath this swamp stood a pyramid built of metal.

That would put this rise, or rather this pond, directly above its apex. For some unknown reason, the structure below had risen, pushing up the ground. If there hadn't been a swamp on top, the ground might have split open instead of bulging upward.

Gunsmith soon stopped digging. There was no telling how immense the thing beneath this pointed top might be. It could be as large as a city, which would put the apex an awfully long way above the base. If he dug down along its sloping exterior, he might still not reach the end after several kilometers.

Pushing off from the metal, he leaped back to the surface. He lit a fire and roasted two nutria he'd caught yesterday, pondering what to do next as he ate.

The sensible approach would be to fill the hole back in and return with an engineering crew when he had the chance. Gunsmith, however, had never been particularly sensible. He couldn't wait to find out exactly what lay below, when it had been buried, and why it had only recently risen. The abnormal magnetic field here surely had something to do with this thing. Perhaps there was some lost ancient civilization inside…

The further he pursued the thought, the more fiercely Gunsmith's curiosity burned. Coming here today had been a stroke of luck. If he let this opportunity slip, there was no telling whether he'd ever find the apex again. A compass was useless here, and the terrain was exceptionally complex and changeable. He might never get another chance.

Once he'd filled his stomach, his original escape plan was completely forgotten. This was no time to be worrying about his next meal or a place to sleep. A gigantic mass of metal lay buried deep beneath a jungle beyond the reach of human civilization. How could Gunsmith possibly leave it alone?

He checked his pack, put it on, then took out the bone gun and aimed at the metal apex down in the pit. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger.

The bone gun sounded slightly different from an ordinary handgun, its report somewhat more muffled. Its bullets resembled highly condensed blocks of energy. On contact with a target, they adjusted their energy according to its structure and strength, so the harder the object they struck, the greater the force and energy produced. Against a human body, for example, their power was about the same as an ordinary bullet's. Against steel, it rose to the level of an armor-piercing round. If one hit diamond, the excess energy might cause an explosion.

Of course, passing through a surface or medium too weak to stop even an ordinary bullet wouldn't trigger this energy conversion. Water, air, and the synthetic fibers in the outer layer of a bulletproof vest were examples. This was Gunsmith's exclusive weapon. Even the Empire had not acquired the technology.

Gunsmith had thought shooting through the metal wouldn't be too difficult. By his estimate, something this large couldn't be harder than diamond. His estimate was correct. The apex wasn't as hard as diamond, but judging by the result of his shot, it wasn't far off.

That tiny bullet struck the metal apex more than ten meters underground with the force of a C4 explosion. The blast wave sent Gunsmith flying. He hadn't been remotely prepared for it and ended up hanging like a monkey from a distant tree.