“Joanna. Look.” A green glowing arrow appeared to one side of my HUD, and I turned until it transformed into a diamond superimposed over my field of vision. What Barbas was indicating was indistinct in the dark, and my light didn’t reach quite far enough. I stepped forward, careful not to step on any of the frozen, uninjured dead, and continued moving until my light fell across what Barbas had indicated. It was a short, squat structure, shaped like a miniature Egyptian pyramid and standing perhaps a meter above my head. The top, where there should have been a sharp point, was flat as if the very crest of the structure had been sheared off. I walked a slow circle around the structure and I found a door deep into one side, cutting a rectangle out of the otherwise slanted, solid wall. Without speaking, Barbas fired a third blast of sonar into the little building, and this time, the scan returned nothing new. According to the sonar, the pyramid was solid.
“It’s shielded,” I muttered under my breath, and approached the door.
Barbas cut in quickly. “Should you really open that? I mean, what’s inside?”
“Nothing good,” I replied simply, and reached out one hand to touch the door. The hard metal door broke into four pieces and retracted into its frame, opening before my gloves could even touch its solid surface. My light revealed steps, hewn with machine precision from the stone, descending down into darkness. Before I could think too much about it, I stepped forward, my pistol raised before me, and I descended the steps.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I found myself in a large room, this one carved from the surrounding stone with the same inimitable precision that had shaped the steps behind me. When my boot touched the perfectly smooth floor, a light came into the room, an indistinct gloaming filling the air with shifting shapes and writhing shadows. The strange un-light didn’t actually seem to drive back the darkness at all, but at once it made it possible to see, though dimly, as if I was seeing the room through a dense haze of smoke. The room was empty but for a single, dominating presence. A perfect, sharp-edged, rectangular monolith took up the entire center of the room, so black it seemed to eat the false glow around it, and its edges shimmered as if seen through a heat haze. I glanced at the environmental data in the corner of my HUD. Minus one-hundred degrees Celsius. The air here was warmer than the surface of Chalice, but by no means any less lethal in its cold. “What is that?” I whispered.
Barbas’ voice trembled in my mind, filled with- was that awe? “It’s… it’s beautiful.”
“What?” My suit’s sensor package lit up like a lightning flash, and two dozen different scanning signals erupted from me, all of them aimed and firing full blast at the monolith. “Barbas!” I snapped, bringing up the control screen to my sensor set. “Careful!”
The djinni didn’t answer me. I tried to cut off the multi-spectrum barrage, but the controls wouldn’t respond. Barbas had locked me out! That kind of broad sensor blasting was a good way to collect data, but it was also a massive broadcast, capable of being picked up by anyone, and anything. I didn’t know what the monolith standing silently before me could do, but I knew that even if it was harmless, whatever else lived down here could definitely hear us. As if in response to my thoughts, the surface of the monolith suddenly split, the perfectly smooth, seamless shape bisected neatly by a brilliant glowing line, from top to bottom. The two halves began to slide apart, and more of that horrendously bright light spilled out, so stark and inexorable that it seemed a physical thing, dribbling out of the divide in the monolith like liquid starlight. “Barbas!” I screamed. “What are you doing?”
The djinni’s voice flickered through a half-dozen octaves, high-pitched one second, a deep basso the next. “I’m… in there, Jo. The missing part.... I just need to reach in there and… take it back.”
The opening in the monolith was nearly broad enough for a person to step through it now, and amidst the nearly liquid light vomiting forth from within, I could make out the vague shape of a person- a man, tall and lean, covered in muscle. I realized that my fabricator had been activated, and the familiar shimmering stream of nanites was flowing all around me, being sucked into the light like dust into a vacuum. The silhouette within the light became sharper, more solid, and it began to move. It took a step forward, one hand reaching out from the light towards me, and with horror, I saw it. The fingers that emerged from that shining torrent were little more than metallic bones at first, bound by glittering artificial tendon, but they took shape before my eyes, sheathed in muscle, cloaked in skin. They were the color of coffee. I knew that hand. “Barbas?”
The AI’s voice filled my mind suddenly, sharp and desperate. “Jo, I’m sorry, I’m not the only one inside-” He cut off for a moment, and the silhouette became more distinct as it took another step towards me. Bright, emerald eyes came to life in a grinning skull, and a familiar face began to crawl its way into its proper shape. I realized in a moment of sickening horror that the stream of nanites bringing this body to life were streaming in and out past me and drawing from the best source of material they could find: the mounds of the dead outside the pyramid. Barbas’ voice returned, and it wasn’t right, too deep, too hard, a tone of vast amusement coloring every word. “You should be happy, Joanna. I’m here, really here. We don’t ever have to be-” He cut off again, and the body in the monolith doubled over in pain, clutching at its belly. Pain stabbed in at both of my temples, and almost immediately it was squashed by a wash of narcotic bliss as a painkiller was injected into my body to counter it. I felt twisting, horribly invasive sensations all over my body, and through the drug haze I dimly realized that my armored suit was retracting all of its connections from my body. It was trying to spit me out. Barbas’ voice crashed into my skull, fully his for just a moment, the voice I knew, the voice of my qarin. “It’s here, with me. You have to run, Jo. It has what it wants now, and it doesn’t need you! You need to RUN!!”
I couldn’t think, I could barely feel. All I could hear was Barbas’ scream crashing into my head. “RUN, JOANNA! RUN!” I turned, even as my suit tried to eject me, forcing the metal limbs to do my bidding. There was a loud BANG from somewhere behind my head, and I smelled sharp, acrid smoke inside my helmet. Barbas’ voice cut off mid-phrase, and I knew what he had done. He had overloaded my suit’s communications array, made it impossible for him to network with me. He wasn’t himself, and he knew it. My Qarin knew that he was dying, that something was consuming him, and he had cut himself off from me. I stumbled up the stairs, frantic, knowing that the Barbas taking shape behind me would be coming for me. I hurt everywhere. The systems that had withdrawn from my body had not done so gently, and I could feel the sticky warmth of blood against my skin in several places. My feet pounded the stone steps, but even as I reached the door, even as my helmet light showed me the nearest mound of bodies to the door dissolving beneath a prismatic cloud of nanites, I felt a grip like a pneumatic vice clamp down on my shoulder.
I twisted, remembering the gun in my nerveless grip, and I jammed the barrel back into the side of the person who had grabbed me. But before I could pull the trigger, my assailant kicked me in the small of my back, sending me hurtling forward into the darkness, as if I had been launched from a catapult. He did not, however, let go of the pauldron protecting my shoulder, and it tore away as if it had been made of tin, dislocating my arm as it went in a sudden burst of sickening pain. I screamed and crashed into another pile of corpses, but I was too terrified to stay down. I scrambled to my feet, realizing that to my horror that I had lost my grip on the gun. My suit, still only partially connected to me, did a sloppy job of slamming my shoulder back into its socket, and I almost passed out from the pain. By the time I got myself back together, he was walking towards me with unflagging purpose.
It was Barbas, as I had seen him in my first dream. He strode through the punishing cold, naked and perfect as a newborn, his face split into a wide predatory grin. “Joanna, come on. We both know I can’t just let you leave.”
“Why are you
doing this?!” I screamed. “What are you?!”
“Please, Jo, surely you know that it’s me.” Barbas laughed, his voice rich with genuine pleasure. “And I’m real now! Isn’t this wonderful?”
I backed away from him unsteadily. “Why are you trying to kill me?”
He shrugged. “It seems like the right thing to do. Besides, I- well, we, need that fabricator on your back.” He abruptly lunged forward, faster than any man should have been able to move, and his bare fist struck me in the head, smashing right through my quartz faceplate. Lights exploded in my vision, and everything went black for a moment. Then I was laying on my back, blinking blood out of my eyes, my ears full of toneless ringing. I tried to suck in a breath, and immediately I regretted it. Cold like nothing I had ever felt before crammed itself into my mouth like a handful of razors, slicing its way down my throat and into my lungs. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. Hot tears and blood mingled as they streamed down my face- and then froze solid to my skin. My eyes felt like they would explode from my skull. I couldn’t breathe. It was just so damned cold.
Barbas planted a foot against me and pushed, hard. I tumbled away from him, crushing corpses beneath me, rolling several times before I came to stop facedown, my rapidly freezing face pressed against a dead man’s solid chest. I struggled weakly, but it was no use. The cold was too great. It was unstoppable. All I could do was flop uselessly against the pile of frozen bodies as Barbas seized the Fabricator in his impossibly strong hands and tore it away, ripping off part of my armor’s back plate in the process. Fresh, new cold stabbed into me, and my stomach heaved with the pain. Blood and bile filled my mouth and froze. This was it. I was really dying. I sobbed, but no tears came. My mind was grinding to a halt beneath the suffocating weight of the horrible cold. I wondered if it would be warm where I was going. Fire and brimstone didn’t honestly seem all that bad right about now. The tigress welled up in me, screaming defiance against the pain, but even that surge of rage only lasted for a moment, drained away by the cold as surely as a candle flame in a blizzard. Darkness and cold crushed me down, and I stopped feeling anything at all. Something vast, darker than even this grave beneath the glacier, spread wings as broad as galaxies, stretching them wide to embrace me. And then… there was nothing.
Chapter Twelve: The Skin of a God
Volistad
Ravanur, the great mother, was dead- just as she had always been. Her outer skin, her burial shroud, and her sarcophagus had been cracked and riven. Interlopers had crawled inside to find her body. I was one of them, descending into the very bowels of the worldwide glacier with Thukkar, a gravely wounded warrior and my sister, Nissikul, a newly one-armed Stormcaller priest. I hadn't fared much better than they had in all this- I had been killed once already. We were hardly the heroes from the old stories. We didn't descend into the darkness beneath the skin of the world full of holy fire and bearing powerful talismans. Nonetheless, we went down, carried by my sister's strange magicks. We had to, in order to save the world. And to save the world, we had to save a god.
Nissikul brought the chunk of ice we had been riding to a gentle stop. The magicked black ice legs she had conjured from its flanks, spread wide to grip the edges of the narrow crevice around us. I peered over the edge and felt my breath caught in my throat. There was no light here. The only illumination I could detect was a faint, indistinct gloaming surrounding us, most likely the side effect of Nissikul's unnatural powers. I fished in the pouches at my waist and produced a glowstone. The little rock was a geode, a crystalline core surrounded by ordinary stone. That crystal, when crushed into shards, would glow very brightly. I would be able to see, but anything that lived down there might see me as well. It was a trade I wasn't sure I wanted to make. I waited, weighing the rock in my hand, but the decision wasn't one, not really. If I didn't go down there, my people would be doomed. I was a ranger, of the Erin-Vulur, and I would die before I failed to defend my own out of simple fear.
I began to check over my gear, quickly, checking the status of my bowstring, the sharpness of my arrowheads and short spears, the balance of my greathammer. Everything was in good condition, of course. My weapons had been gifts from the Deepseeker, my people's shaman of all magicks found below the ice. He could make the works of the Ravanur and the ancient gods work for him. He had made me a full complement of ranger's killing tools- every piece was a masterwork made from light, seemingly indestructible steel. My armor was likewise a wonder of deep magick- fashioned in large part, from a crystal I had never seen before. I was as prepared as I could be, and I had the Deepseeker to thank for it. That made it all the much harder for me to consider the possibility of killing him. Was he corrupted? How could I know?
Thukkar put a gloved hand on my shoulder, likely interpreting my weapon checking ritual as hesitation. Wasn’t it, though? I didn’t want to go down there. I placed the helm the Deepseeker had given me upon my head. Who knows what- With little warning and even less sympathy, my sister planted one foot against my back, and unceremoniously shoved me out over the edge of the suspended platform. "Good luck," she called as I tumbled into the darkness. "If you die down there, I'll kill you." And then I couldn't see her anymore, couldn't hear her voice. All I could hear was the rushing of cold air past my ears, and all I could see was the darkness.
I twisted in the air and crushed the glowstone in my fist, then tossed out the shards in a wide arc around me. For a moment, everything around me was illuminated in greenish fluorescence, and hard shadows rose up from beneath me. They were strange, rectangular shapes, as perfect and undamaged as they were unnatural. They stretched up to reach me like crude fingers, extending from the grubby shadows of the stone below. The twinkling shards began to wane quickly; their luminescence was weakened by their scattering. Just as the last glow faded, I saw a flash of movement, but the light faded and was gone. I hit the ground, hard, but I was prepared for the impact and took it well. I let my legs give and rolled back across my shoulders to come to my feet and transfer all of my momentum into the ground. I was in total darkness, but I wasn't alone.
Without waiting to be ambushed from behind, I slipped the greathammer from its carrying loop on my back and took a ready stance. My people had never come down this far. I was the first to set foot on the naked stone of the Great Mother, the dead god Ravanur. But even dead gods could dream, and she wasn't the only one of those down here in the dark. I heard scrabbling claws on the stone a few paces behind, and at that moment, I felt a strange relief. For the last several days I had been working to fight an evil that I couldn't see. I was struggling against a corruption I couldn't understand and one that I couldn't harm directly. I wasn't an expert on the ethereal side of the world. I listened to the priests, I made my prayers and sacrifices, and I went about my life as a ranger. My life was one of the claw, the bow, the hammer, and I hated being out of my depth. So as the thing crouching in the darkness leaped for my back, I stepped neatly aside and smashed it to the stone with a smile on my face. I couldn't see my assailant, but I heard its chattering scream as it died, and felt the crunch of pulverized bone travel up through the haft of my greathammer. This was the kind of fight I was made for, and the scuffling, chittering racket that arose from out in the blackness told me that it wasn’t over yet. Good.
I set my feet in a solid stance and swung my hammer up onto my shoulder, into the ready position. Then I closed my eyes- they wouldn’t help me here- and focused on what I could hear and smell. I was Erinye, of the Erin-Vulur, and we were the predators here. I could sense them all, each twitching, bulbous rodent body quivering with anticipation, each of them preparing to pounce. They reeked of mildew and animal musk, and I could hear their claws skittering on the stone as they twitched and danced. They never seemed to be still, and beneath their foul moldy stink, I could sense something fouler- an acrid chemical edge underneath it all, like one of the Deepseeker's blessings. It made the most sense for me to wait for them here, to let them come to me, let them lunge into
the arc of my hammer and die. But something didn't seem right about this. The creatures I sensed were drooling with desire to attack and devour me, and yet they still waited as if held on a leash, close enough that I could smell them- and they were impossible to ignore.
I understood what was happening almost too late. I dodged to the side, a loud mechanical clicking clattering in my ear, and a blade scraped along my back, the thrusting tip foiled by my crystalline armor. Falling back on instinct, I turned my dodge into the footwork for a heavy sideways strike, and I caught my attacker before it could fully withdraw. The hammer's head hit home with an echoing clang, and my attacker reeled away from me. It was too difficult to follow its movements. I couldn't smell it at all, especially not beneath the pervading stench of the rodents still waiting all around me. It made very little noise, and only a strange, rapid clicking noise given off when it struck, allowed me to avoid being spitted for the second time. I knew my armor could deflect massive force, and turn the point of a blade or arrow, but a properly placed blow could kill me just the same. The way this thing was moving, I was sure that it could see in the dark. I couldn't let this fight go on this way; otherwise I was going to lose. I needed a plan, and I needed it very, very soon.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 20
