“Again, it’s not really a plane—”
I smacked my hand over Janix’s mouth and put on my calmest tone. “I’m not off planet. At least I think.” I took another moment to look around. “We’re in a small room, maybe half the size of the cart one we were just in. There’s almost no light, and there appears to be what I’m assuming are your versions of boilers. Is that a thing you guys use, boilers?”
“You’re in a liquid processing center,” she said, sounding relieved. “Maybe even waste treatment or water filtration. That’s in the inner circle.”
I heaved a sigh of relief and carefully struggled to my feet. “So what do we do? Find each other?”
“No.”
“No?”
“You wanted to make sure everyone gets off planet, right? Well, this is how that’s gonna work. I’ve called my crew and they’re getting a hijacked Council ship to appear like its approaching the asteroid. It’ll be too noticeable if such a high-profile ship is blown out of the sky, so if I had to guess what the protocol was, I would say evasive measures. The workers will most likely abandon the base in escape pods on the opposite side of the colony and the base will trigger what I’m sure is a massive cloaking device. Viys’k will be making her way back to the outer circle to make sure everyone gets out and drag any stragglers to the stolen Council ship. I’ll be heading to what I’m pretty sure is a control system for the reactors. And you two, you’re going to free Jyra then come and grab me, then we’ll all be out the entrance and onto the ship before Genesis can extricate itself from the little egg it’s made.”
“And that’ll work?” I asked. “We know enough about how this place is set up to infer that that’s what they’re going to do?”
“Look, I’m not psychic, I can only go off similar situations I’ve been in. Last time I overrode a hidden military fort with a crew of six, we got them all to leave by making it seem another faction was coming to wipe them out.”
I shrugged. “Sounds good enough to me then. Any tips on where we should go for Jyra?”
“As far as I can tell, the architecture here is almost a perfect circle. She’s gotta be at the center if anything else.”
“Of course, she is.”
“Be safe Andi. I doubt this is the last curveball that’ll be tossed to us.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I looked to Janix and he heaved a bit of a sigh. “Let’s end this very long journey and save the scientist, shall we?”
“Let’s,” I said before heading toward the thick, pressured door I caught in the corner of my vision. “I’ve waiting long enough, and so has she.”
Chapter Five: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, but Ten Years is a Stretch
We stepped out into a long, overly polished hall and I had a brief moment of de ja vu. But unlike the rest of my flashes, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was stirring the feeling of familiarity within me. Why did I feel like I had been here before?
“This way, I guess,” Janix said, breaking my musing. I shook my head and forced myself to concentrate again. I followed, but my eyes were restlessly scrolling everywhere they could, trying to figure out the Rubix cube of the riddle my mind kept wanting to return to.
The corridors were eerily silent, and painfully white. Everything was too clean, too crisp. And the only thing I found myself wondering more than why I recognized it was what the hell of the purpose of it all was.
Serkasis labs, I got. That had been Genesis’ hub for controlling the ebb and flow of the plague they had created. But this… This had no rhyme or reason. It was just empty hall after empty tall with locked doors that had no card readers, scanners or any sort of way to open.
We began to circle tighter and tighter, looping through the same spiral hall in a vaguely dizzying way. It didn’t help that excitement was quickly shooting up within me at the prospect that I was just meters away from my childhood friend. So many tears had been shed searching for each other, we had ripped apart dimensional folds, broken laws of physics, not to mention tons of laws and protocols.
The coil of excitement in me wound tighter and tighter, threatening to split me right open, but then, in a rather anti-climactic shift, the hall stopped suddenly as we were faced with a pristine, pressurized door.
“Is that it?” I asked, heart thundering. “Is she on the other side?”
“Now how am I supposed to know that?” he asked. “I don’t even know how to get it open.” He pulled his gun from his belt and began fiddling with the settling, but I didn’t pay it much mind. An eerie, quieting sort of calm settled over me and I walked forward, shoulders squared.
And right through the metal door.
I felt it protest against my intrusion before it crumpled around me in resignation. But I kept right on walking through it until I came out the other side.
There she was.
Huddled on the floor, curled in the fetal position in the center of the overly bright, white room. I saw a single tray of food and a chrome canteen of what I assumed water and nothing else.
“Gee-Gee?” I questioned quietly.
She didn’t move to face me, didn’t even lift her head. “I told you it was useless to use her voice against me,” she rasped instead. “Why do you persist?”
“Gee-Gee, it’s me! Andi. Not Genesis, I promise.”
“Genesis?” she questioned, her head moving just ever so imperceptibly toward me. “I do not know this name.”
“It’s what the darkness calls itself.” I strode over to her, heart threatening to overflow, but she flinched away.
“Why are you torturing me? You have my machine, it is not my fault if you can’t make it work! I should not have to explain to you how to destroy my home!”
“Gee-Gee, I’m not that thing! What can I do to prove myself?”
Finally, she was on her feet and she was so much thinner than I remembered her. Her normally smooth, aquiline features were now gaunt and ridged. Her normally pristine bun had loosened long ago, leaving her dark hair in a messy nest around her head. When was the last time she had seen the comfort of a brush? Or a bed? Or another person’s touch?
“Stop it!” she cried, voice cracking. “I told Andi not to come, and she listens to me! So no one is coming for me! Do you understand? All of this, all of it was for nothing!” Suddenly she was rushing toward me, but I didn’t move to get out of her way. I saw Janix – who had come through the crevasse in the door slightly after me- tense, but I held up my hand for him to hold his ground.
She crashed into me with all the force of a slightly overstuffed pillow, then tottered backwards. Not one to give up, she rounded on me again, landing slaps all over my arms and shoulders. “No one is coming!” she screamed. “I’m alone!”
“Jyra,”
“No! Stop it! Just kill me and get all of this over with! I’m not going to give in.”
“Jyra.”
“Stop using her voice! It’s not yours, it’s not yours, it’s not—”
“Jyra!”
“IT’S NOT-”
Her face was red, her voice was cracking and her breath was going into what I quickly identified as a panic attack. I didn’t know what to do, so my body reacted on its own. My arms reached out and I pulled her to me, not quite crushing her to my body, but holding her so that her manic motions had to cease.
“Gee-Gee, can’t you tell it’s me?” I whispered, heart breaking.
She stood still a moment, shaking in my grip, before a jagged sob escaped her throat. “Oh, Andi!”
Together, we sank down to the floor until we were both kneeling, her leaning solidly into me as she cried into my shoulder. Although the sounds were godawful to hear, I didn’t budge. What horrors she must have survived, here in the heart of our enemy. I would stay still and hold her for centuries if she needed.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered, pulling away from me just slightly but still remaining in my arms.
I raised my hands and wiped her tears from either side of her
cheeks. “In a million years did you ever think I would stay away?”
Our eyes locked for the first time in the same dimension. I saw something in those depths that I never experienced before. A depth of knowledge, strength and pain that I could never understand. I heard someone once say a happy life was to be able to fit my whole world into my hands, and I think I had managed that just fine with her cheeks nestled against my palms.
And then suddenly she was kissing me.
My mind froze for a moment and I had no idea what to do. It sat there, completely frozen, before I wrapped my arms around her once more and held her firmly.
It was a chaste kiss, no tongues or lips devouring each other, but that didn’t stop it from rocking me to my core. It was like going my entire life seeing in black and white, then suddenly could discern color. We were two people from dimension that never should have touched, and yet, we were always meant to meet.
I had no idea how long we stayed like that until Janix cleared his throat awkwardly.
Oh… right. That was a thing.
My eyes flicked to him and my cheeks went vibrant. What was I doing? I was pursuing a thing with him! I should be making out with traumatized best friends in the middle of a rescue.
“Who are you?” Jyra asked, blinking.
“Janix’s the name. I’m part of the rescue.”
“Rescue?” she echoed. And then her eyes went wide and she jumped to her feet. “You’re going to die.”
“Um, nice to meet you, too.”
“No, that’s not, I…” She took a deep breath and seemed to focus herself, allowing me to see the woman I had seen in that video footage. “This is a trap. To get you here, Andi. That thing didn’t want me to get you here, but now that you are, it needs both of us here.”
I jumped to my feet, as well. “Why? What’s going on?”
“Lead me out of here. I’ll explain as we run.”
“That actually sounds like a good idea to me,” Janix agreed.
I nodded and took her hand, pulling her along. Just like she said she would, she began to explain. “He’s rebuilt my machine. He stole my schematics and made it bigger, stronger. That’s actually what most of this facility is, a reworked version of my dimension-cracker.”
I went cold but I forced myself to keep moving. “The entire base?”
“Most of it.”
“Then why is it still here? Why haven’t they buggered off to world domination?”
“It doesn’t function no matter how much they try. I’ve even helped them troubleshoot it dozens of times. It needs the connection that we have to cross dimensions to get the machine to work.”
“If that’s true then why has it tried to kill me so often? Shouldn’t it have been luring me here?”
“Because this isn’t its Plan A. Consider it a reaction to your arrival, a sort of just in case. It’s first plan is definitely still using the Plague to cause our universe to devour itself from the inside out so that it can in turn devour us. This is just a bonus.”
“And what exactly does that bonus entail? What’s the end goal?”
“To send Kodadt out to every single dimension it can. Some lands will destroy them without a sweat, some will find themselves utterly destroyed and they will be ready to harvest en masse. Genesis will grow exponentially stronger and it might just be the brink to knock the Strangers into extinction.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“I am not sure how much more you would need to be conce— Oh. You are being sarcastic. You love sarcasm.”
I gave her hand a bit of a squeeze as we continued to run. We were past the boiler-like room now and I didn’t have much of an idea where we were going besides out. “That’s my Gee-Gee.”
And then my earpiece buzzed and Angel’s voice was coming over the line, short and strained. “All right, I’ve gotten into the systems and I’m setting up a delayed sort of overload. Your status?”
“I have Jyra!” I crowed. The scientist gave me a confused look at first, but seemed to piece together what was going on rapidly. “We’re running through the halls now and could use a bit of a guide here.”
“Let me see if I can pull up your readings on my mini-comm and match them to the schematics on the computer. I should be able to guide you between the two.” There was a tense moment of silence while our feet continued to pelt down the hall. “Got it. And you’re about to turn right… now!”
We did as she said, practically on a dime, if I do say so myself, and found ourselves running down a hall that was quite different from the stark white that it had been previously.
It was that stereotypical chrome that I had come to expect, but it was polished to a nearly blinding shine. The lighting was strangely set and so crisp that it almost looked fake. Like someone had taken a filter in a photo editor and gone ham with it.
However, I didn’t let my critique of the environment slow me down either. In fact, my former Phys Ed teacher would have been impressed with my cardio endurance. Sweat was dripping down my face, and my fairly battered ribs were screaming in protest, but nothing was going to stop me at this point short of death.
Or actually reaching our destination, I supposed.
“All right, turn left!”
We did.
“Keep on, keep on, and now left, straight through that door!”
I slammed my shoulder into the last partition in its way, blowing it off its hinges to slam into the far wall.
“You could have just opened it, you know.”
Breathing hard, I looked to the side to see Angel standing there, hands deep in a pile of wires and strange crystal things that I assumed were some sort of memory storage or power supply. “Oh, fancy seeing you here,” I said, grinning like an idiot once more.
“And this is Jyra, I’m guessing.”
My best friend extended her hand. “Yes. Pleased to meet you…uh…”
“My name is Vysinagiel Marthanti, but I prefer it if you call me Angel.”
Jyra’s eyes went wider than I think I had ever seen them grow. “Vy-Vysinagiel?” she sputtered. “But surely not the Vysinagiel?”
“One in the same, I’m afraid.”
“B-but how?”
“I’m a Stranger, just like you. Makes ya stick around for quite a while. And, now that our introductions are over, how does everyone feel about running?”
“Right. We should probably be doing a lot of that.”
“Um, guys?” now it was Viys’k voice coming to us through our earpieces. “Everyone’s leaving.”
“Wow. That was quick. Good job, Viys’k.”
“I didn’t actually do anything. And I don’t think there’s anything about a Council ship. They’re just… leaving.”
“And the jaws of the trap snap closed.” We looked to Jyra, who was regarding the room around us with a resigned expression. “I did try to warn you.”
“What does she mean?” Angel asked, delicate eyebrows knitting together.
“Um, this entire thing may have been a sort of set up to a sort of back of plan to sort of cause a domino effect that sort of may lead to the destruction of a dozen or so different dimensions.”
“Oh, is that all?” she snapped, sprinting out the door. “And you let me stand around introducing myself like a historical figure?”
“But you are a historical figure,” Jyra objected as we pelted down the hall.
“Not until I’m dead, lady.”
Which will be soon.
I groaned. “There it is. You just couldn’t stay quiet in your little shell, could you?”
Why would I when you’ve all delivered yourselves so beautifully into my hand?
“You don’t have hands.”
Pithy. How predictable.
“Yeah, yeah,” Janix mocked as we continued to sprint. “You ever heard of not counting your rankthyn before they hatch?”
So funny you should mention hatch. Perhaps it is time for you to meet my most recent progeny.
Before any of
us could ask questions or think up with more particularly quippy comebacks, the doors lining either side of the hall banged open like some sort of horror movie on steroids.
I was tempted to stop, so I could see what sort of threat was coming, but we couldn’t. We had to keep moving until we were dead or off this hunk of hollow rock.
It turned out I didn’t need to stop at all. A clawed, mottled arm reached out of a room ahead of us and we all had to dodge around it. It was a rabid kodadt, no great surprise there, but as we sprinted, more and more began to emerge from the rooms and I began to recognize unusual… additions to their anatomy.
“Call me crazy,” Janix said. “But have some of these guys been cybernetically enhanced?”
Jyra’s theories have been put to thorough use. I think you’ll find her discoveries most fascinating.
“That’s not quite the word I would use.” I growled.
“Why?” Jyra asked. “Are you no longer interested in hearing about my inventions?”
“Of course not. I’m just not super into your inventions that are trying to kill us.”
“Ah, yes, I understand. They have been repurposed most unfortunately.”
“I think we can still get out of this,” Angel hissed. “Just keep running.”
Is that so? What are you planning, my dearest Angel? You were so slippery when you were younger. You’ve become predictable in your old age.
“That may be true but at least I’m not a sore loser.”
One of the beast surged out of the room, slamming into the wall opposite of us. The others kept running, but I tackled the beast and pinned it to prevent it from whirling to lunge at them again.
“Andi!” Jyra called. “Keep going! I’m immune!”
To the virus, yes. But are you resistant to being torn limb from limb as they rip you into pieces until not even your bones remain?
“Please,” I scoffed. “You need me for your little plan. You wouldn’t let me get all the way here just to murder me. You’re much to vain for that.”
Such an insightful little child for being so ignorant.
I pulled my fist back and promptly released it to go right through the snapping monster’s skull. From there, I sprinted back to the group. Although I was trailing behind, I was close enough for Jyra to look back with a blinding smile.
The Discovery' (Alternate Dimensions Book 4) Page 6
