I had my mother’s eyes. I hadn’t known that.
Now I did. The eyes looking down on me were the same ones that I’d seen looking back from every mirror I’d ever passed, from every photograph or vid that had been taken of me at Sanctum. They matched the kind smile on the figure’s lips—the same expression I wore at times myself, not the one that came out when I was trying to smile, but the one I saw sometimes out of the corner of my eye in a reflection, the one that just happened, instead, when I was truly happy. My mother had worn that smile well, and easier than I did.
The hologram kept shifting in and out of focus as the fading machine kept trying valiantly to fulfill its long-unneeded purpose, my mother’s face shifting in and out of a blur, looking down at me with the same hazel eyes that had always felt like an anomaly in my own makeup, not quite a match for my dark brown complexion or my kinky, tightly curled hair. They fit her face better, I think.
She wore a lab coat and held a tablet in one hand, the other raised in greeting; I stood before her, soaked and dripping and bedraggled, dressed in ratty castoffs and combat armor, holding tightly to the grip of a gun. We couldn’t have looked more different; we couldn’t have looked more the same.
Then she was gone—the hand I hadn’t known I’d raised to try and touch her face pushed through the image of the Barious who came next, and then the projector flickered out again and I was left alone in the dark. Suddenly I was leaning against the wall behind the projector, leaning and sobbing and almost screaming, but not quite, the sound more keening than that, filling the station around us with a banshee wail.
Then Jane was holding me, and Javier, and Marus. They pulled me down to the slick tile of the station floor and just held me, let me spend all my grief and all my pain in that wailing, keening scream as they held me tight and refused to let me go. The projection returned, bathing us all with light, cycling through the team members again—still facing us, the projector’s sensors orienting the image still functioning—and when the ghostly image of my mother returned again, I looked up at her from the embrace of my family, and my sudden grief was spent, gone as fast as it had come.
“At least now I know,” I whispered to them. “At least now I know what she looked like. I have that now. I didn’t before.”
“Our cameras caught it, kiddo,” Javier said to me, his hand on the back of my head. “We’ll get you a printout, to keep with you. You don’t have to lose her again.”
“Thank you. I’m . . . come on.” I shook my head, smiling now, through the tears and the mist; we were packed so tight the motion brushed me up against all of them at once. “You guys can let me up now. I’m good. I’m good.”
“I’m not. Good lord, I’m still crying.” Marus wasn’t lying; he was wiping tears from his face. You’d think a hard-as-nails, do-whatever-it-takes intelligence operative wouldn’t be that susceptible to powerful emotion, but nah. Marus was a big old softy, one of the most empathetic people I’d ever known.
“Schaz is ready to open the door, Esa,” Jane told me. “Are you—”
I nodded, even though I was still staring at the projector—it had just cycled off of my mother’s image again, back through the majority Barious of the rest of her research team. “I’m good,” I said again, and it actually felt true. “Let’s get in there. Find out what that glowing bastard wants with me.”
A sharp electrical crack, and a flood of sparks showering through the mists, originating from the panel Jane had been working on; then the holograms cut off abruptly, and the overhead lights began to shift on instead, even as the door started to groan. I stood—we all did—and we lifted our weapons.
My mother had been a scientist. I was something else. I didn’t know quite what that was yet—not exactly a soldier like Jane, but not the leader or guiding light the Preacher expected me to be, either—but whatever it was I would eventually become, right now, the answers we sought lay in my past, not my future.
Time to step into the lab where I’d been born.
CHAPTER 9
We left the low, shifting mists behind as we stepped through the door, this area of the station still having been sealed off; Schaz sealed it up again behind us, and suddenly the corridors got a great deal quieter, the sound of falling water having been a near constant for the past twenty minutes or so. Jane started forward again, her footsteps the only noise echoing against the corridor walls, but she didn’t make it very far before she stopped, and held out her hand.
She was facing another door; I raised up Bitey to my eye, shrugging my shoulders as I did, very purposefully trying to shut down the powerful emotions—positive and negative both—that had overwhelmed me moments before. No, we weren’t expecting a fight, but the fight you weren’t expecting would kill you just as fast as the one you were prepared for; usually even faster. Another one of Jane’s maxims.
“What have we got?” Javier asked Jane from the back of the line.
“Some sort of common area in front of us,” she said. “Not a lab, but maybe a kind of gathering place. It’s an atrium, multiple stories tall; a fair amount of dead plants. The labs branch off of there, including some sort of factory floor on the top level, reaching farther back into the spire.” She wasn’t picking all this up from her HUD—station walls tended to be sealed against exactly the sort of differing-spectrum scans that would have let her see straight through the doors if they’d been made of wood instead—so Schaz must have been relaying camera feeds to her from the interior. “It’s fairly dark inside, but what I’m picking up . . . it’s not good.”
“The dead are in there?” Marus asked. I’d almost forgotten that was what had brought us here—not the fact that this had been the lab where my parents worked, but that this was the lab where the Cyn, for whatever reason, had gathered those who had still been on-station when he attacked.
“They’re in there, somewhere,” Jane agreed. “I can’t see where.”
“Only one thing to do, then,” Javier said, gesturing with his shotgun. “Open it up.”
Jane nodded, and touched the access lock. The door hissed open—still enough power for that, apparently—and we stepped out into the wide open space before us.
Once it probably would have been beautiful, the terraced upper levels designed to flow gracefully down, wide spiral stairs linking each avenue. Much of the empty open area near the top of the atrium had been given over to canopies of large trees from multiple worlds, growing up from the well-tended gardens that made up much of the common area below. A place of greenery and life for the inhabitants of the sterile labs, a kind of arboretum, a place of calm and depressurization where they could remind themselves of what they were working for, what they were trying to save.
Except now, all the trees were dead, their bare branches snaking upward like skeletal hands reaching up from tombs, and most of the cunningly recessed lighting was either outright depowered or at minimum malfunctioning, flickering on and off and lending the shrouded paths that wound through the gardens a kind of sinister aspect. Too, here were the first telltale signs of combat: splintered bullet holes in the tree trunks, bloodstains in various species’ shades on the ground, a few blackened patches in the gardens or on the paths where they’d tried to use explosives to slow the menacing figure that must have seemed to have stepped out of their nightmares.
Still no bodies, though.
“Forward?” I asked Jane, still holding Bitey to my eye.
“Forward,” she nodded, and did just that, still following the tracker that would lead us to all the dead.
I’ll give whoever had designed the atrium this: they’d done a bang-up job mimicking a natural landscape. The paths actually rose and fell slightly, like a real landscape would, and here or there they carved around large boulders or other “natural” obstacles, giving a winding, kind of pleasantly aimless feeling to the actually rigidly designed walkways through the gardens. Of course, the effect was somewhat ruined by the long-dead trees above us and the shell casings littering th
e ground that we had to carefully step over.
The flickering lights only amplified my quiet unease with the place, and I wasn’t the only one: I could see Jane’s hand tighten on the combat grip of her rifle as well. The experience was just too similar to our trek through Valkyrie Rock, except there, the bodies had been everywhere, not just gathered in the central bonfire. Here, the Cyn had made sure to put them all in the same place, even though, as far as we knew, he’d never planned to return here—hadn’t done so in the seventeen years since he’d arrived—and had never intended that anyone else find whatever grisly tableaux he’d left behind, either.
We came up another rise in the path below us, and as the walkway curved, slightly, we could see around one of the large, dead trees, to a truly massive specimen of timber that was likely the exact center of the atrium, reaching all the way to the ceiling and spreading its now-dead branches out in all directions. I couldn’t even tell what species it might have been, though, because my attention was stolen by the fact that the huge tree was also where the Cyn had left all the bodies.
They had been hung from the branches; they had been nailed to the trunk. They’d been chained or tied or otherwise attached somehow, making the titanic tree seem more corpse than wood. Even for a being of infinite energy and with terrible reserves of patience, it must have taken hours; there were dozens of bodies, at least. And that wasn’t even the most disturbing part.
The organic species’ faces were missing, just like with the bodies we’d found on Valkyrie Rock—burned straight off, I’d imagine by the Cyn’s grasping hand, no different than the palm-print he’d left on Jane’s shoulder as a memento of her scuffle with him back on the asteroid. Human or Tyll or Vyriat, it made no difference; he’d grabbed them around the face with one hand and pressed inward, until he was scorching bone. Desiccated and almost mummified by seventeen years in the climate-controlled atmosphere of the station, the mouths of the withered corpses all hung wide below their blistered faces, each ruined visage more disturbing than the last.
The majority of those he’d tied to the tree, though, weren’t organic at all; they were—had been—Barious, just like the majority of faces projected from the hologram outside had been. Odessa Station had been operated by a majority-Barious sect, after all. Almost to a unit, the Barious had died the same way, their chests burst open, the fusion battery that operated as their “heart” turned into a live grenade buried in their metallic skin. He hadn’t melted the Barious’s faces, though I’d imagine he could have; he burned hot enough if he chose.
Instead, he had given them masks.
Each and every one of the synthetic race that had been hung from the tree wore finely detailed, well-crafted masks, strapped to their metal faces with wire. The macabre decorations resembled humans, and Wulf, and Tyll, and Klite—almost every organic species was represented, adorning the Barious dead. Not just with cheap party masks, either: these were almost lifelike, the fake skin supple—god, I hoped it was fake skin—the glassy eyes carefully attached, each hair an individual strand among thousands. I’m fairly sure that where there were teeth, hinted at behind some of the lips—fully visible in a few, where the metallic mouths had been stretched out in a mocking simulacrum of screaming—the teeth were real. Each mask would have had to have been crafted individually, by hand, then carried from the Cyn’s ship all the way here; even if the tram had still worked at that point, it would have been a haul. That was a lot of effort to go to for his . . . art. For whatever the hell this was.
What in the fuck? What in the hell was the point of all this?
“What in the fuck . . .” Javier and I apparently had roughly the same thought process. “This . . . this doesn’t . . . this makes no sense.”
“Welcome to our last few weeks,” Jane told him, though in truth, this was well beyond even the Cyn’s somewhat inexplicable actions as we’d encountered them before. This went well beyond burning corpses, or even triggering a nuclear detonation: this was . . . purposeful, not intended for his enemies, not intended for us. This had been for himself.
He’d enjoyed it.
“It’s laid out, very specifically,” Marus said, staring up into the branches of the tree. “No two species set next to each other; none allowed to touch. This wasn’t just random, meant to strike fear in whomever saw it—this was . . . it was a design. Had a purpose.”
“This motherfucker’s purpose is to be crazier than a bag of cats,” Jane told him roughly. “Don’t go looking for meaning in it, Marus—that’s a black hole, there’s no light at all beyond that pull.”
Marus shook his head, though, stepping closer—off the path, onto the twisting roots of the tree where they emerged from the once-carefully-tended earth. The empathy in him earlier, the deep reserves of feeling that had allowed him to share my pain: it also allowed him to peer into the mind of the . . . being . . . that had done this. “He removes the organic species’ faces because he doesn’t want them to have identity—they don’t deserve it, haven’t earned it. The masks on the Barious serve almost the opposite purpose; it’s a mockery, an indignity, an insult. Despite what they perceive as the great differential between themselves and the other species, to him, they might as well be organic. He is as far beyond them not just as they are beyond us, but so far past what they are that the difference between them and us is miniscule, meaningless. He doesn’t like that Barious think they’re so far evolved, so purpose-built; he wants to remind them that he is the superior being, the supreme creation of the cosmos, not them.”
“Great,” Javier told him. “He has a psychopath’s pathology. Wonderful. Did we really need to know that? I mean, couldn’t we have pretty much guessed it by the trail of bodies he’s left in his wake?”
Marus turned, gave him an apologetic smile, which only served to make the grisly scene more morbidly terrifying. “Sorry,” he said. “Occupational force of habit. Psychological profiles can be very useful, in my line of work.”
I swallowed, still staring up at the gallows tree. “Yeah, I’m with Javier and Jane on this one, Marus,” I said. “Crazy motherfucker is crazy—that’s about all I need to know. He came here for a reason, and . . . whatever the fuck this is, whether it’s a monument or an offering or a morbid goddamn re-creation of his primary school art-fair project, I doubt very much it was actually his purpose here. Can we move on from the murder tree, please?”
“Esa’s right,” Jane nodded, sweeping the area with her HUD, the light playing up one of the spiraling stairs. “The fighting leads into some of the labs up on the third story, up past the factory floor—they were falling back, defending something, likely his goal. That’s where we should head.”
Javier shut his eyes for a moment. “Of course it had to be on the third story,” he said.
“What’s the problem?” I asked him.
“That means we have to go up the stairs. And the stairs go up right past that fucking thing.” He nodded at the tree again. “We’ve been here all of two minutes, and I’ve already had my fill of looking at the terrible corpse tree, thank you very much.”
CHAPTER 10
We made our way up the stairs, level by level, past the gruesome icons that the Cyn had made out of the dead. At the third landing, the atrium opened up yet again, the top floor stretching out past the walls below, the ceiling continuing up—another wide-open space, this one bounded on one side by the atrium itself and on the far end by a long window, stretching all the way across the wide expanse. The window was just a few stories above the shifting fog below, looking out over the roiling sea of clouds that made up the atmosphere beyond us. It was like we were on an oceangoing ship, staring out at the tempest-tossed waves.
I couldn’t figure out what use the scientists had for all that space—the various equipment and gear scattered across the level, empty tables and what looked like generators didn’t seem to fit with the larger pieces of machinery: it was as if it had been half laboratory space, half factory floor. Most of the machinery was trashe
d, ruined—there had been real fighting here, where they had made their last stand, melted metal and holes in the floor from explosions.
Still: didn’t matter. The Cyn’s goal hadn’t been here, either: once he’d dispatched the defenses on the factory floor, he’d continued on to another set of doors, just off the floor proper. We could tell by the trails of blood. I peered in through a window beside the entranceway; a medical center of some sort.
I think we might have literally been looking in on the room where I was born. Where I’d been born, and where my parents had died.
We entered the medbay; the central console within had been damaged by an explosion. Whether that had been from the Cyn himself, or whether it had been a last ditch effort by the defenders of the station to destroy whatever it had been that he had come for, I wasn’t sure. Jane echoed my thoughts as she studied the damage, and said, “It’s a link to the dedicated server for this complex—information even the central AI couldn’t access. They compartmentalized their information. Good for them.” Jane always admired paranoia.
“Didn’t work, though.” Marus knelt by an access port on the damaged machine; the lock on the door had been melted off. We all knew what did that. “Looks like he wired in, here.”
Jane was already busy stretching a wire from another console in the wall to the breached port below, plugging Schaz into the laboratory mainframe. “This is great and all,” Schaz told her as Jane wired her in, “but I can’t see anything. The power to the servers is down. If you want me to find out what he was after, you’re going to have to restore power to the server room.”
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