Metamorphosis Alpha 2

by Craig Martelle (ed)

  “It’s waterworks,” Raxel said. “Unless you are allergic to rusted pipes and water, nothing down here can hurt you.”

  “That is so not true,” Jad said. “Work crews never come down here unless they are armed.”

  Bekka looked back up. The angle was bad, but with her eyes she caught a bit of the micro expressions on Jad’s face. He was sincerely worried, if not flat out scared. Although he was a bit naive, he was not the one to panic without reason.

  “Is that what you want?” Jad asked. “My death on your conscious?”

  “I am not programed to have a conscious,” Raxel said in a cold tone.

  “Is that a joke?” Jad looked down toward Bekka. “I can’t tell if your robot assassin is joking or not.”

  “She’s messing with you,” Bekka said. “She’s only half robot.”

  The catwalks stacked for six or seven flights, and below that Bekka saw the rippling of water. The whole lower area of the waterworks must be flooded. Hopefully the pipe they needed to access wouldn’t be under.

  The water rippled again, reflecting light in a way that it shouldn’t. Instead of shimmering it flickered, like a laser striking a fan.

  Bekka gasped. It wasn’t water.

  “Incoming!” Bekka yelled.

  The not-water rose, reaching a brighter light source. What Bekka had mistaken for ripples were in fact flittering metallic wings, moving so fast that the light danced off them. It was a whole swarm, numbering in the hundreds.

  “Flitters.” Raxel mocked spitting. “I hate flitters.”

  Time slowed. Jad and Raxel froze as if still processing what was happening; neither would be prepared. It was up to Bekka to make the first move.

  The flitters were beautiful. Each had two transparent wings that glistened as if covered with ice, while their bodies were so small she could fully wrap her hand around one of them. A cold blue light ebbed from the holes of their porous cores, giving them the look of fancy coral a collector might keep in an aquarium.

  “We are going to die!” Jad yelled.

  “Quiet.” Raxel slapped him in the back of the head. “They want you to panic.”

  The first of the flitters reached Bekka. Their stained-glass wings cut into the back of her fingers and knuckles as she shielded her face. Each slice into her skin was thinner than a paper cut. There was no blood, but each stung and burned.

  Not meaning to, Bekka grunted in pain. The glowing cores of the flitters shown brighter, soaking in the sound. More flitters flocked toward her, their wings biting into her ears and the exposed half of her scalp.

  Chapter 5: The Vault

  Bekka’s only goal was to hold out, trying to buy time for Raxel to get on the offensive. To do that, she would need to make a bit of noise to keep the flitters focused on her. “Raxel, a bit of help here!”

  “On it!” Raxel charged away from Jad, disappearing behind pipes, though Bekka could still hear the stomping of Raxel’s feet on the catwalk. It was just enough noise to draw a fraction of the flitter swarm away from Bekka.

  “What do we do?” Jad said in what Bekka was sure was supposed to be a whisper, but instead was so loud that five flitters abandoned her, and flew straight up for him. They struck his face and he backed away, out of view, yelling in pain. The shrill squeals drew away the rest of the nasty creatures that had been attacking Bekka, leaving her free.

  “Crumlickers,” Bekka swore, making sure it was extra loud. Bekka thwacked the handle of her sonic dagger against the railing of her catwalk. In terms of pure volume it was nothing compared to Jad’s cries of pain. “Alright you beasties, you want noise? I can do that.”

  Bekka rolled the back of her tongue, letting loose a high pitched yell. She had no way of knowing for sure, but from the few times she had come across flitters, she suspected that different pitches offered varied flavors and that the higher the pitch, the more the delicious the sound tasted to them.

  The flitters, that had been dining on Jad’s sobs, sprung into the air, and beelined toward Bekka. Waiting till the last moment, when she would be fully swarmed, Bekka jumped off the the catwalk, landing onto a parallel line of pipes.

  The flitters caught her, this time tearing into her legs and arms. With no other choice she jumped. Pain radiated across her body, as if every nerve had a needle drilling into it. She screamed and the glow of the flitters shone brighter.

  Her fingers caught the rim of another catwalk, but her momentum was too much and she lost her hold. Her left shoulder bounced off a hard surface and she spun, landing face first onto a line of thin pipes that felt hot against her cheeks.

  Curling into a ball, Bekka tried to keep quiet, but the flitters had her. They cut into her abdomen, her thigh, and anywhere they could reach. With every slice she moaned and grunted.

  A metallic ringing sounded through the waterworks. It echoed off the walls, and all Bekka could do was pinpoint the source as coming from somewhere far above her. As more and more of the flitters abandoned her to investigate the noise, she heard a voice singing…

  “Through the meadows,

  Beyond the dome,

  I met a wise lass who tore at my heart.

  She was the light in the darkest dark.

  From the meadows,

  Back to the dome,

  She is the one who makes me feel at home.”

  It was an oldie, a song that was popular when Bekka had been a child. It was also hers and Jad’s song. They had danced to it the night they had met. Bekka had never heard Jad sing. She knew he could, but he was always so secretive about it. Probably because it wasn’t proper etiquette for the heir of House Felton to show such emotions in public.

  Jad finished a second verse, and by the time he was done, every one of the flitters had left Bekka, disappearing into the darkness above. She rolled onto her back and took a long breath. Her whole body hurt as if she had been covered with burns from head to toe.

  A grinding static echoed across the waterworks. Bekka recognized it as Raxel’s radiation detector. The cyborg must have rerouted it through speakers, and was using it to draw the flitters from Jad. That was good. That meant they were all far enough from each other that if they timed it right, they could play catch with the flitters, each managing to save the others from being attacked.

  Letting out a long sigh, Bekka stood. It was going to be her turn next and the more she thought about it, the more it seemed frivolous. They could toss the flitters back and forth as they made their way through the waterworks, but it would be a tedious endeavor and time was not in their favor. Soz and House Felton security would figure out soon where they had gone and that meant the flitters simply needed to be dealt with so that they could move on.

  There was really only one option and it pained Bekka to do it. She cradled her sonic dagger, supporting it as if it were an injured animal. She hated to be weaponless, going into the vault, but she had no choice. Flicking the dagger on, the sound blade sprung to life. She jammed it into one of the warm thin pipes she stood on. A beam of steam hissed out and the dagger rattled, clanking about loudly, forcing a rattling to simmer up and down the pipe.

  Bekka waited, looking upwards, watching for the flitters. Slowly they came, first one or two on their own, scouting. As the first drew closer to the sound, the entire swarm appeared, flying and weaving through the piping to reach her.

  As quiet as she could, Bekka jumped to a catwalk. The flitters ignored her. They were too busy swarming the sonic dagger, their soft blue glows growing brighter with each passing microncycle.

  “We are good,” Bekka called into the darkness. Not a single flitter moved toward her.

  “What did you do?” Jad called from somewhere above.

  “Spent my knife,” Bekka called back. “It should buy us enough time to cut our way out of here.”

  “Cut?” Jad asked. “Where are we going?”

  “We are cutting our way to your family vault.”

  It took Bekka, Jad, and Raxel fifteen quantums to climb down
to the right pipe. After a hundred meters of crawling, Raxel cut through its wall, and they were able to drop into concrete hallway. To the right was darkness and to the left were the doors to House Felton’s vault.

  “I’ve never actually been here,” Jad said. “Dad has always been hush-hush about it.”

  “How are we on time?” Bekka asked.

  “We have maybe ten quantums,” Raxel said. “I think ditching Jad’s tracker kept them off us, but now we must be showing on their security feeds again.”

  “Start hacking,” Bekka said.

  “Wait, hold-on!” Jad said. “That’s my family’s vault!”

  “What,” Raxel stood straight, meeting Jad’s eyes, “makes you think you can stop either of us from breaking into that vault?”

  “I can’t stop you, but I can stall you, buying security more time. You have to know, this is a death sentence. There can’t be anything in there worth your lives.” Jad turned from Raxel and stared at Bekka. “Your life is too valuable.”

  Bekka felt a flush of heat and her heart beat ever so slightly faster, but as sweet of a guy as Jad was, she couldn’t be moved by words. What they sought was far more important than their own lives. She hadn’t thought she could trust Jad, but just maybe, they could? “We want the Holy Log.”

  “That?” Jad sputtered and shook his head, confused. “It’s meaningless. It’s some old religious relic from who knows when. It’s worthless.”

  “We have reason to believe it’s worth a lot,” Raxel said.

  “So that’s it then?” Jad said. “This is all down to money for you?”

  “No,” Bekka said. “We have reason to believe that your family’s Holy Log holds the secret to The Greyness. It might even tell us how to end it. That is what we are after.”

  Jad shook his head. “I know you are obsessed with—”

  “You don’t understand,” Bekka said.

  “No, I don’t.” Jad turned away. “For the longest time I thought we ended because of me. I thought I did something wrong, but that wasn’t it at all. You ended us. Your refusal to open up and be in a relationship. So, of course I can’t understand. How can I understand when you never told me anything?”

  Bekka wanted to tell him. She wanted to open up about Lila, but not like this and not now. They didn’t have the time.

  “Your silence says it all.” Jad walked away from her, approaching a hexagon shaped scanner to the right of the vault door. He waved his hand over the sensors and the vault door retracted into the wall. “If the Holy Log matters so much to you, then go. It’s yours, but this is where we end. I do not want to see or speak to you again.”

  Bekka lowered her gaze and walked past him. Raxel followed.

  Chapter 6: Loot

  The vault was a tangle of shelves, laid out more like an overstuffed warehouse than an actual vault. The shelving rose two stories high and every shelf was packed with crates and various objects from a time forgotten. Strips of white LED lights ran across the ceiling, creating soft shadows.

  “Where do you think it is?” Bekka scanned the upper shelves. The crates were metal and behind a wire cage. “The Holy Log could be anywhere.”

  “The room is too packed for my scanners,” Raxel said. “I’m going to find a dataport.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Bekka asked.

  Raxel glanced to the door to the vault, where Jad sat, with his back to the wall.

  Bekka shook her head.

  “Find us a real Domar or two,” Raxel said. “So at least financially we aren’t ending this in the hole.”

  Bekka narrowed her eyes. Raxel shrugged.

  “Fine. Do what you want,” Raxel said. “This is your show, but the next stupid thing we are going to do when this is all over better involve putting credits into my account.”

  Raxel cut right, into a cross section of the aisle, and Bekka kept walking, going deeper into the vault. She wasn’t looking for anything specific; she was more lost in thought than worrying about scavenging. Coming to the next intersection of aisles, she noticed a dark section to her left, where the lights in the ceiling were off. Her pupils expanded and even with the deep shadows she could clearly see.

  Instinct told her to avoid the area, but at the same time Bekka felt attracted to the darkness. There were always dark things in the shadows and yet at the same time the shadows were a place where she too could hide. The only thing she had never been able to hide from was The Greyness.

  She had a different life when it came. She had a well paying job and most of all she had Lila. It always came back to Lila and it always came back to that final day. There were so many good things to remember. The way Lila laughed after making a joke that made no sense. The way Lila loved to color and draw. But those memories never surfaced on their own; they came through work. It was the coming of The Greyness that ate at her with no effort.

  Bekka and Lila had been sitting on their balcony. The dome was shifting out of night mode and into day and they were eating toast with cashew butter, waiting for the lights to brighten, only they didn’t. The black of night shifted and instead the dome took on a grey shade. Not the grey of a cloudy day, but the kind of grey the sky can get before a major storm. The kind of grey that is so dark it is almost night.

  The lights and power shut down completely and all that they could see was a hanging grey void in the sky. At first Bekka thought it was glitch. Burnouts, surges, and such weren’t uncommon in the city, but this was different. It felt different. She wasn’t the only one to think so and that is when panic spread.

  Weapons fired in the streets below when Bekka took Lila back inside. They soon learned that beyond not having power, they had no water, and the maglock to their apartment had automatically locked, trapping them inside. Bekka tried to break open the door but it was no use. It lacked an analog override.

  Time ticked by and the violence in the streets escalated. Buildings three blocks away burned and screams drowned out the sound of gunfire. Bekka suspected if she didn’t do something, she and Lila would die.

  But Bekka made a mistake. Her sense of caution doomed Lila.

  Their apartment balcony was the only option for leaving. Unfortunately they were closer to the roof than to ground level, and that meant climbing upwards. Bekka hadn’t been confident that the access hatch on the roof wasn’t power dependent, so she decided the safest move was to make the climb by herself and only to haul Lila up if there was a way to escape.

  Thanks to Bekka’s height, the climb wasn’t bad, and within twenty quantums she pulled herself onto the building’s roof. The doors to the access hatch had already been pried open, leaving a direct route to the the building’s stairwell. All she needed was to hoist Lila up and they—

  The building shook.

  A fireball erupted from below and Bekka watched as Lila was thrown from their balcony. With the curse of her unique eyesight, Bekka saw it in slow motion. One microncycle Lila was there, still looking up and watching and in the next she was over the edge of the railing. Her tiny arms flailing and the look of utter confusion on her face.

  Lila’s blue skin blackened and as much as Bekka had wanted to help, there was nothing she could do but watch her child burn. To Bekka’s horror, it wasn’t the blast that killed Lila. In those final microncycles, Lila suffered and it was the impact from the fall that ended her.

  Since the day Lila died, the dome hung frozen, caught between dusk and darkness. Bekka swore then that she would find out who was responsible for The Greyness and when she found out who, she would kill them.

  The city never recovered, not truly. The great houses survived and some, like House Felton, even managed to thrive, by diverting their resources to the energy business. The shelves in the vault around her had been filled by profiting off The Greyness.

  The further Bekka walked down the dark aisle of the vault, the more she suspected that the lights hadn’t burned out, but that they had intentionally been powered down. The strips of lights on the ceiling were
too regular, laid out in a grid pattern, forming a perfect square. In the center sat a steel tube that connected to both the ceiling and floor. Circling the tube, she saw that the backside had a pair of doors that opened onto what looked like an elevator shaft. Her gut told her that this whole section of the vault had the power cut, just to keep the elevator locked.

  “Bekka!” Raxel’s booming voice sounded through the vault. “I got it.”

  Bekka ran.

  She passed out of the darkened section of the vault and crossed two more aisles before finding Jad and Raxel standing over a knee-high metal crate. The crate had a datapad, and Raxel had a wire going from her right wrist into it.

  There was a hiss of air and the crate popped open. Inside was a petrified log. It was large enough to sit on, with its ends cut smooth and polished. Black and white marbling ran across its ends, while the bark was riddled with holes.

  “There it is Bekka.” Jad kicked the crate. “The Holy Log of House Felton. Take it and go.”

  Bekka kneeled and ran her fingers across the log. It was cold, and the edges were smooth, warn down over the ages. “How does it work?”

  “It doesn’t work,” Jad said. “It’s a log. That’s it. There is nothing mystical about it. It doesn’t have any great answers.”

  Bekka was confused. She tilted the log over, inspecting it. The whole thing was stone, and resembled a log shape, but it wasn’t anything special. That didn’t make sense. She and Raxel had confirmed through three independent sources that the log was the most powerful object in House Felton’s vault and that it alone held the secret to The Greyness.

  “No,” Bekka said. “There has to be more to it. We didn’t do this for nothing!”

  “It is nothing,” Jad said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Raxel said. “It’s too thick for me to fully scan, but there seems to be a symmetrical cavity on the bottom end.”

  Rolling over the Holy Log, Bekka found a rectangular indentation. When she pressed on it with her thumb, it clicked, and slid away, revealing a metal cube. Bekka recognized it immediately. It was a data cube, used for storing information. She tossed the cube to Raxel.