All Adan could do was hold on to Gavin and the zoelith and pray the tremors would pass. He looked around for a cart or something to transport Gavin out of there, but there was nothing, just memory containers, the celerium column, the giant chronotrace, and a few tables. He tried to pray out loud, but all that came out was, “please, please, please…”
A ceiling panel crashed at Nox’s feet, narrowly missing his head. “I’m leaving!” he shouted. “I don’t want to be buried in this Welkin tomb.”
Adan thought it was best to let him go. There was no point in all three of them dying down here.
Nox wagged his head and gave Adan a look which clearly told him how much of a fool he thought he was. Then he turned and sprinted off through the quivering doorway, scooping up the contingency trigger from the floor as he went.
The ground near Adan jerked and the massive column of celerium in the center of the room began to totter. Fear melted his resolve. His heart bubbled like liquid in his chest. He was just about to release the zoelith and drag Gavin away when he felt his friend stir at last.
Gavin looked around the room, his eyes unfocused. “What’s happening?”
“It’s a quake,” Adan said as calmly as he could. Gavin’s revival restored to him some measure of hope. But was it too late? “We have to get out of here.”
Adan pulled Gavin away just as the celerium pillar toppled over and smashed into the floor where they had been. It rolled past them, crushing scores of memory arrays before it collided with the wall.
He felt Gavin’s mind connect to his, but he was still in something of a daze. “But the Repository. There’s so much data here—your memories—my memories; they have to be here somewhere. If we leave this place…”
Adan stared out at the rows of memory cubes and cabinets full of remin fluid. How many lives were contained in those shelves? How much knowledge? How much history? He thought about what it would mean to have his identity back, about what it would mean for Gavin—a thousand questions answered, their lives restored, their world made whole.
His eyes darted to the ceiling caving in around them. A massive sheet of rock fell away and crashed near the door, burying the five assessors there and sending shockwaves throughout the lab. Dozens of cabinets opened, sending more memories cascading to the floor. Almost nothing remained left in the shelves.
It would be madness to stay.
“We have to go.” With that thought, Gavin snapped out of the daze he was in; he realized the same thing Adan had: if they stayed here they would die.
They took off running towards the door, dodging the falling debris. Adan stumbled once, but kept on his feet, as they shot out into the hallway. The corridor buckled and twitched as they sprinted down its length, like a giant arm seized by spasms.
They caromed down the passage, tossed from side to side so that Adan thought there was no way they would ever reach the doorway. The tunnel was closing in around them. He was running as fast as physically possible, heedless of the waves of cascading debris and pummeling rocks. Was the end of the tunnel already closed? He couldn’t tell. There was barely any light. Then, like a break in a storm, they somehow burst through onto the edge of the bridge.
The chamber before them was buried in so much rock, metal, and dust it was barely recognizable. The carefully arranged stacks of containers were all toppled and broken, most of them filled with rock and bits of metal from the ceiling, which crumbled apart as they watched.
The chances of them making it across this room were no better than they had been for making it down the hall, but there was nothing for it. Adan flung himself onto the wrecked bridge and slid to the bottom, landing awkwardly on his ankle, but feeling nothing because of his bioseine. Gavin managed to get down more smoothly, though he lagged a few steps behind.
They clambered their way through the jumble of crushed containers, rocks, and debris, stumbling every third or fourth step as the landscape shifted and changed beneath them. A few rocks pelted Adan in the head, but nothing large enough to knock him down.
When they reached the remains of the bridge on the opposite side, Adan glanced up. All he could see was a dusty haze drifting across the threshold of the bridge. He could only hope Nox’s rope was still hanging from the shaft above. Even if it was, they had to get up the fallen bridge to reach it and the twisted steel girders were shaking so violently he didn’t know how much longer they would hold.
Adan and Gavin hurled themselves onto the bottom of the bridge and began scrambling their way up the trembling latticework. They had barely begun their ascent when the bridge jerked so wildly it shook both of them loose and sent them tumbling back down into the morass below. A fist-sized rock grazed Gavin’s head as he struggled to his feet. Adan feared he might black out, but he grimaced and rushed back towards the bridge. Adan grabbed hold of the span alongside him and they launched their ascent anew. The framework had snapped from its moorings in several places. It was dangerously close to detaching from the wall altogether. Seeing this, they climbed all the more recklessly, knowing that if they fell back down, the bridge might not be there for a third attempt.
And then, just like that, the bridge stopped shaking. The room was still rumbling, but the beams only quivered slightly. Not wanting to miss their chance, they shimmied up the last few sections of the skeletal frame like they were being pushed from below by invisible hands.
Adan reached the top first, but instead of climbing onto the solid ground, he bent down to make sure Gavin achieved the ledge as well. As he grabbed the arm of his friend, from the shaft above him came a noise that drowned out all other sounds in the room. It sounded like a terrible explosion was ripping through the upper floors. The noise was brief and soon died away, but was replaced by another, more ominous sound. A primordial hum rattled through the building, racing through the structure above them, as if the building itself were howling in a mad protest against the devastation being wreaked upon it. The clamor intensified by the moment.
He pulled Gavin up onto the ledge as the rushing sound shook the air around them. It vibrated through the core of Adan’s being, reducing whatever courage he had left to rubble. Fear was the only thing which animated his limbs now. He and Gavin shambled into the shaft. For one brief moment Nox’s rope fluttered before them, the single strand which held all the world together. Then the cord shivered and went slack, dribbling onto the floor into a useless pile, their hope of ascending the shaft falling with it. As if the rope had been the building’s last defense against the noise, an ear-splitting roar descended upon them.
His gaze drawn irresistibly upwards, Adan watched as a bluish glow stifled the opening and a massive flow of neophosphorous spilled down the shaft. It slapped the ground in front of Adan with a punishing boom and then paused for half a moment, the bulbous shapes inside it like hungry eyes searching for victims upon which to feed.
Its prey in sight, the swarming brightness poured over Adan and Gavin unchecked. It swept them over the ledge and back into the somatarch chamber, enveloping their bodies before they even hit the ground. They became one with the luminous flow of death. They bounced in a violent slosh along with the garbled wreckage, their bodies merely two more bits of debris sucked into the churning maelstrom.
Somehow, in the pandemonium swirling around them, Adan felt Gavin clutch his hand.
“Just keep holding your breath,” came the strangely unpanicked thoughts of his friend. “Your bioseine will keep you alive until we find a way out of this.”
Despite Gavin’s attempt to stir his hopes, Adan felt nothing but terror in face of the beautiful, suffocating glow seething around him on every side.
His mind went to Sierra. She would not be there to save him this time, but that was not what mattered. What mattered was that he would never see her again.
Thirty-Three
Awakening the Sentients
Sierra opened her eyes in the darkness. Shaking off the last bit of haziness still clouding her mind, she felt her way up the w
all and onto her feet. Her first thought was of Adan. She reached out to him with her mind, but could not sense him anywhere.
She whispered urgently into the dark, “Adan…” straining to listen for an answer.
Using her bioseine to guide herself up and down the tunnel, she felt along the floor to see if perhaps he was lying there unconscious, but found nothing. She was alone.
With no sign of him in the passage, she crawled back to the edge of the shaft leading down. A faint light glimmered from the maintenance tunnel below, not nearly as bright as it had been before.
She grabbed the cutter and carefully made her way down the shaft, placing her hands and feet into the notches she’d carved out. All the way down she mentally prepared herself for the long drop to the floor below, but when she got to the end, a pile of rubble had been amassed in the tunnel. It was so high she could almost step down onto it from the shaft.
Easing down onto the jumble of rocks she saw that the passage had suffered extensive damage. It was completely blocked by a cave-in on one side. It looked like the tunnel up in Oasis after the quake.
Bits of the track lighting poked through from beneath the rocks and also ran further down the tunnel. She began her search for Adan at once. She climbed over the rubble for several microslices before she spotted a bit of grayish clothing peeking out from between the rocks near the floor. As she drew closer, she saw that it was attached to an arm. Fighting back the urge to break down, she crept closer. But even after she reached it, the light wasn’t good enough to tell whether or not it was Adan. With trembling hands, she removed some of the smaller rocks on top of the arm. She sent them tumbling down the pile until at last she glimpsed a face, staring up at her in death. She sighed a deep sigh of relief, recognizing the mangled visage of a dead somatarch. Its clothes were gray from the dust and debris which had buried it.
She started to turn away when she caught sight of something glinting beneath the rocks near the creature’s shoulder. Digging until she could reach it, she uncovered the shattered remains of an oscillathe. The outer casing was crushed and broken, but as she pulled it free from the rubble and peeled off one of the panels, she noticed a snatch of bright yellow hiding underneath some cabling. Wedging her fingers into the weapon’s guts, she worked it back and forth until it slipped free.
It was a bismine chip. As she examined the crystal she could hardly believe it. It was completely intact and nearly at full charge.
The cutter, though dented and banged up, was still functional. She hurriedly swapped out the old chip for the new one. Placing her arm back inside the recharged tube, she twisted her wrist and smiled as the yellow blade returned to life.
A thrill of excitement ran through her momentarily, but she was still no closer to finding Adan. She could carve the whole pile of rocks into little pieces, but doing so might bring the whole thing crumbling down on her if she wasn’t careful, and it might make it impossible to get back up in the shaft. There had to be a better way to find him. She sat down amongst the piles of rock and stared out into the long, dark tunnel, wondering what had happened to him and whether or not she would be able to go on without him.
I’ve lost everything, she thought to herself, everyone I know and cared about is gone.
Memories from her life in the esolace flooded back as they often did. She had lived through loss and pain there as well. It had felt so real then, but this—this made all those experiences seem like nothing.
Adan, where are you? I need you, she called out in her mind, wishing there was some way he could hear her now. The memory of their last exchange inside the shaft came back to her. I want you to know something, he had said, but he hadn’t finished.
If I ever do find you again, Adan, Sierra told herself, I’ll listen, I’ll find out what you wanted to say. I promise you that.
That thought crystallized her resolve. If Adan was buried under that rock, he was most likely dead. But he wasn’t buried here. Somehow he had escaped. She was sure of it. She would find him, and she would find the others. She had the cutter, and she knew the location of the vault. It was time to stop feeling sorry for herself and do what she came here to do: save her friends.
Sierra clawed her way back up to the top of the rubble pile. Pulling herself through the opening in the ceiling, she tackled the ascent with renewed purpose. It was not long before she got back to where she had last been carving, just below the vault.
Whipping out the cutter, she plowed through the last section of rock until she was just outside the wall of the vault. She left the rock so thin, she probably could have smashed through with her foot.
Sitting on the little lip she had carved at the top of the shaft, she cut a small hole in the wall. A waft of cold air blew across her face, letting her know she had broken through. She took a moment to collect herself. Though the assessor’s map had proven accurate down to the last detail it didn’t say anything about which prisoners were in which cells.
The opening gave her a view along the floor of an alloyed room. From her vantage point she could see at least a dozen bodies, all stiff and frozen, lying in various positions. Though she could see some of their faces, she did not recognize any of them. Then again, they were so lifeless and pale they barely looked human at all.
As far as she could tell there were no assessors and that was the most important thing. She widened the opening further, scraping metal and rock back into the shaft behind her. When she judged the hole large enough, she pushed herself into the chamber.
Crouching beside a nearby body she withdrew Raif’s makeshift zoelith from a pouch she wore on her belt. It was a silver strip about the width of her thumb with two small bismine crystals the size of a fingernail on either end. Not enough to power something as large as the cutter, but sufficient for a zoelith. She attached the device to the forehead of the closest person she saw and moved to the chamber door and waited for it to revive him. If someone came in and saw what she was doing, she had the cutter on her arm, ready to defend herself.
“Who are you?” came a voice, startling Sierra out of her thoughts.
She snapped back around to see the person she had been trying to activate holding the zoelith. She had been so intent on watching the door she hadn’t noticed when he came to. He rose stiffly from the floor, rubbing his bluish arms. His movements were jerky and slow, but his eyes were alert.
“My name is Sierra,” she said. “I’m here to get you out.”
“What is this place? Where am I?” he asked.
“It’s a storage vault underneath Oasis. I came down here with some other Sentients to rescue the ones the Admins captured. We got separated, though. I’m the only one who made it as far as I know. But we’re going to get out of here—we’re going to get everyone out of here.”
“I’m Halerin,” he said, nodding with some difficulty. “I was in the Sentient cell in block A-12.”
“Listen,” she said, taking care to keep her voice low. “I don’t like using my bioseine, but it would be best if we communicate on the Collective channel from now on. I can tell you everything much more quickly that way. I’m a Sentient like you from the surface. You can trust me.”
Halerin surveyed the frozen bodies around him. After taking a moment to think things over, he opened up his mind to hers. Sierra gave him everything he would need to know about the plan to free the others, as well as everything that had happened to her up to that point in her journey into Manx Core.
“I noticed in the information you retrieved from the assessor that there is an emergency panel on each one of these doors,” he told her. “If they’re triggered, it will cause a zoetic stimulant to be released into the air which will re-activate everyone in the cell.”
“You’re right,” she replied. “I hadn’t noticed that. But won’t it also alert the Admins to our presence?”
“Yes, but we’ll be discovered the moment we open that door anyway.”
“Good point.”
“Why don’t you trigger the pan
els while I keep watch in the hallway. I’ll alert you if any assessors come.”
She took the cutter and traced the outline of the door with the yellow blade. There was a flash of light around the edge as the door jerked away from the wall and tilted towards her. The two of them grabbed the metal slab from either side and leaned it up against the wall. It was so cold, it burned her hands. She rubbed them together fiercely and the feeling returned.
Out in the narrow hallway the floor was made of smooth stone. The walls and ceiling were covered in metal plates. Halerin stayed by the entrance while Sierra found the emergency panel. Not surprisingly, she lacked access to connect to it, but she simply sliced away the protective housing and reached inside. She connected the inner activation panels manually to trigger it. A pale blue cloud issued forth from the walls near the floor and quickly enveloped the room. It had a sharp, sterile smell.
She found the panel on the door opposite the first one and did the same thing. After that, she traced the outline of the door and caught it before it fell. As before, Halerin helped her prop it against the wall. The room beyond was already filled with smoke.
Sierra moved automatically now, urgency driving her to finish her work, certain the security forces would arrive at any moment. They repeated the same process with the remaining two doors and panels along that passage. She ran to the T-intersection at the end of the hall. Taking the left side first, she triggered the emergency panels and broke the seals around two more doors before doubling back down the other branch. With Halerin keeping watch in the first hall, she had to let the slabs she cut from the doors fall to the floor.
She had just flipped the final trigger and finished tracing the outline of the last door when Halerin’s thoughts flickered back into her mind.
“Two assessors just entered the passageway. They’ve spotted me. I’m heading your way.”
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 63
