"Hello?" he called out, and that seemed eerily familiar. No reply came, and that too was as it had been.
He began to climb. The steps beneath his feet flexed and bowed, while the sky above grew no closer. Instead, the chamber gradually widened, its far wall stretching into the misty distance until he suddenly found himself standing in a grassy field.
The wind whispered across the softly undulating ground, catching dandelions on its back and spreading them everywhere. There was no sun but he could feel its warmth. When he took a step, he felt moist blades bend without breaking, and it reminded him of when he was so small that every field seemed too large to cross.
And just as when he was small, he set out to cross it anyway.
He wandered up and down the hills without ever feeling any strain, just slow progress toward a horizon that remained as clean and unperturbed as a mother's love. The breeze pushed lightly against him, caressing his face and whistling through his hair, and he journeyed ever on.
The phantom clouds gathered overhead at some point, and the grass gave way to soft soil. Day turned to moonless night, and the now blistering winds embraced him. All around stood ancient cedars like solemn witnesses. They were guardians and guideposts.
When the darkness was nearly complete, he stumbled from tree to tree and came upon a cave lit from within by light as red as blood. He felt the cold marching up behind him, and he rushed himself in ahead of its approach.
The cave was not a cave, but instead a hollow cylinder made of alabaster and bridged by a thin walkway. He began to walk its length and figures appeared on either side of him, living bodies without heads, hands, or feet. They dangled from meathooks, and turned to watch him pass.
No dread assailed him. His patience welled up like ground water in a ditch, shallow but never exhausted, and he sipped from it again and again.
He reached the far end and the cylinder was gone, replaced by a sphere whose walls were inward facing daggers. He floated in place, arms and legs outstretched, and he closed his eyes. The sphere somehow remained.
"What do you want?" he asked.
The sphere vanished and he found himself in the forest as a boy. His brother stood beside him, rising only to his spindly shoulder. His brother sniffled quietly, too proud to cry out loud.
All he saw was horror. Their dog was in front of him, whimpering and quivering, trapped in the jaws of a trap that was far too large. The steel teeth had sunk deep into his chest and side.
"No, we can get help!"
But it wasn't true. They'd walked together for hours, having left the world far behind them. If they left, the dog would suffer and die alone.
The only thing he knew for sure was that he couldn't let that happen. Something inside of him stood tall and wouldn't let him take the easy way out.
Tears raced down from his eyes, caught on his lip, seeped into his mouth. It felt like the world was ending behind his eyes.
"Please!" his brother pleaded.
He heard the same inside his heart, but he knew what had to be done. He pushed his brother back then bent down. His small hands grabbed either side of a jagged rock. The sharp edges of it bit into his fingers, and his arms burned from the strain as he hefted it above his head.
He didn't want to believe it, but he knew this was right.
His brother howled.
He screamed.
Darkness poured out of the sky like boiling oil. It washed over him until his scream faded away.
"You want to die," he said, but the seething shadow refused to answer. He and it sat together waiting until the light began again to shine.
He appeared alone in a tarnished cage made of pewter while shards of blackness and light danced outside. They bobbed up and down, flipped and spun, buoyed by some unseen and patternless current. They flashed in series and reflected a single unblinking eye.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Hush," something replied in his own voice.
He reached out and took hold of the bars, feeling the ruined surface bite into his flesh. He tried to pull them apart but they wouldn't budge.
"No escape," Hush cooed. "Only hate."
But he knew there had to be another way. If he could be placed inside the cage, there must be some way out. No trap was perfect.
"Another way," Hush said, taunting him with malevolent laughter.
A knife appeared in his hand, its pure silver blade catching flashes of the dancing shards outside. It felt heavy as defeat.
In a voice tainted by lust, Hush said, "Kill."
There always had to be another way.
A light inside of him pulsed with the rhythm of a human heartbeat. Its strength flowed into him, became him. He spun the knife in his hand and drove it into his own chest.
A voice of haunting sorrow escaped the wound, slipping out past the blade to fill the air.
"Only one way!" Hush howled.
And the cage too was gone.
He floated through the boundless solitude of space, surrounded by stars who remained far beyond his reach. New worlds coalesced in their orbits, grew old, then crumbled to dust.
A dense blackness lay ahead of him surrounded by rings of absolute light. He made of himself a spear and lanced out, diving deep into a shadow who had a name.
Harsh gravity drew him inward and down, while hatred pushed him away. Time stretched into eternity, and only his infinitesimal strength tipped the balance.
He and Hush screamed together while his sharpened tip pierced the bubbling night. Then he was inside, bathed in blood and bile that flowed into his open mouth.
"Who are you?" Hush demanded.
He tore free of creeping shadows that tried to lash his mouth. "I do what needs to be done," came his growling reply.
The black blood of Hush pumped through his veins, filling his fingers and toes like balloons. The shadows pressed at the back of his brain, threatening to shatter his skull into pieces.
"Kill!" Hush cried.
He held firm.
"KILL ME!"
He opened his heart and gentle light spilled out. It formed into tendrils, arms of loving grace that sought to embrace the shadow and dash its darkness away.
The hungry darkness thrashed and wailed. It made of itself a hammer as large as the heavens, and it drew back in anger. It came down and crushed him, but he would not break. It struck again, flattening him under its rage, but he now knew nothing could destroy him.
The blows came faster and faster until the violent impacts melded into one. It beat on until he was the hammer and the malleable metal it worked, while the hidden stars sang with the voices of angels.
Then all was quiet, and he sang himself to sleep.
Chapter 34
The Devil Awakes
Marcus flew through the hospital's main hall at a deliberate pace, and the staff stopped to watch him pass. The fact his presence attracted this much attention was a bad sign, and he knew it. He'd become such an unusual sight aboard his own flagship that people couldn't help but stare and wonder.
His link represented his last real connection, and it was with an unfathomable alien consciousness driven partly mad by long isolation. He couldn't escape the feeling things were falling apart.
Nurses and doctors parted way as he flew past, up through the hospital's vertical tube and into Deep Well Six, the Fleet's secure research division.
Marcus felt more at home there, if only because the scientists were so used to freaks that he barely even registered. They all spent their days tearing alien technologies apart in hopes of unlocking ancient secrets, and Marcus was commonplace, another Eireki artifact in the collection.
The containment lab at the end of the hall beckoned to him, but he had other business to attend to. Instead, he turned and entered the dissection room's observation gallery, separated from the lab by a crystal wall.
There was a large examination table on the other side with an unusual corpse laid out on top, while cases containing the remains of various creat
ure and living machines filled the rest of the space. Even the gallery was bitterly cold, and Marcus could see puffs of his own breath in the air.
"Is this the sample from Charon?" he asked.
Doctor Kinnison looked up from his work and said, "Yes, Commander. Catalogue Reference Iota Twelve, recovered by the Beagle."
Marcus drifted up to the window while his eyes adapted to the harsh overhead light. The specimen had been completely stripped, its hardened skin cut away and muscles drawn apart, but the outline was still unnervingly familiar.
"What have you found so far?" he asked.
Kinnison set down his tools and walked around the table while removing his facemask. "Well, it's 163.5 kilos, but unusually compact for the weight. Its muscles appear to be roughly twice as dense as our own, and more cleverly designed."
Trying not to shiver, Marcus ventured, "Like Amira's myofiber then."
"Similar, to be sure. This is a different implementation, though, more powerful and more durable than Miss Saladin's product."
"What else?"
"In addition to the organs we'd expect, there are several additions which I've yet to identify. Perhaps sensory organs, but it will take time to confirm. Regardless, they appear to be symbiotic organism introduced during gestation. They're fully integrated in all but genetics."
Marcus' eyes tightened as he stared at the disassembled monster. The sight of it filled him with indescribable dread. "And those genetics, Doctor Kinnison?"
"I thought you knew, sir... It's human. There are hardly perceptible differences, but it's human."
Then there could be no doubt. The creature wasn't a match for any of the phenotypes in his memory, but this thing was Nefrem. What else could it be?
"I'll leave you to your work, Doctor," Marcus said as he turned to leave. "Keep me updated."
"As time allows, Commander."
Marcus headed back into the hall and then toward the containment lab. Its iris popped as he approached and he passed inside.
The research team had been working around the clock, and the room smelled of coffee and unwashed clothes. Kai was there sitting cross-legged on the floor, and St. Martin stood a meter away from the tank with her arms crossed.
Marcus floated up beside her and studied her for a moment. Even after three days without sleep, and three years of endless stress, she was somehow as beautiful as the day he first caught sight of her nearly two decades before. In his mind's eye, sunlight was still shining on her black ponytail as she walked across the faculty terrace clutching a stack of old notebooks tightly to her chest.
There'd been a certain bounce to her walk that made Marcus think she was looking forward to whatever the day had in store, and at the time, he wanted nothing more in the world than to run and catch-up.
The earpiece of her glasses had fresh tooth marks, and when Marcus noticed that, he realized he'd been staring just a little too hard.
"I'm out of my depth," she said.
He turned and looked toward the tank, and he was baffled all over again. The space inside was filled by a constantly shifting field of light and color, forming briefly into geometric patterns before disassembling and turning into something new, and it was damned difficult to look at. He couldn't understand how St. Martin had managed to watch it so intently the whole time.
"Legacy assures me this is all perfectly normal," Marcus said. As far as she was aware, anyway. The ship had very little recollection of the Yakara bonding process, but this seemed to match the scattered Eireki memories she could scrape.
"You know what I've learned here, Marc?"
"What?
"Precisely fuck all." She fidgeted and tightened her arms around herself. "It's nothing like I expected, and I don't have any clue what I'm looking at. I was hoping to learn something... anything at all from studying this, but it's just completely beyond me."
It wasn't as Marcus expected either. He'd imagined something fleshy and organic like in the old documentaries they watched in school. Something like a cicada's journey from larva, to nymph, to finally climbing out of its own skin and spreading its still wet wings.
Instead, there was only this perplexing light, the product of an ancient intelligence far beyond his own. He was watching the metamorphosis of a unique life-form which derived power like nothing else, a tick with its mouth latched onto the flesh of the universe...
Marcus said to her, "This creature has so much energy coursing through it that it doesn't have to play by the same rules we do." He wasn't sure if that was true, but it was the bullshit he felt comfortable telling himself when no reasonable answer appeared.
He added, "You'll figure it out, though. You always do, Julie."
St. Martin finally looked away from the tank, closed her eyes and slowly shook her head at him. She hated when he called her Julie, and yet there was a hint of a smile on her too-full lips.
"Whoa! Did you see that?" he whooped while pointing at the tank excitedly.
St. Martin's attention snapped back to the lightshow. "What? What was it?"
Marcus said, "It kind of looked like a duck for a second... but it's gone. Maybe it'll come back."
She swatted his shoulder and gave him a playful glare. She never recrossed her arms.
After a moment, Marcus pulled his legs up and sat cross-legged in mid-air, accidentally aping Kai's pose. He rested his head on his hand and said, "So, have we been able to detect anything in there?"
"Just... brightness," St. Martin said, wrinkling her nose.
"Doctor," one of the researchers called out. "I'm getting something here. Power output is dropping dramatically, and the active spectra are narrowing."
Marcus and St. Martin both turned back to the tank and watched with renewed vigor.
"Does this mean it's almost over?" she asked.
"I have no idea," he replied.
The patterns seemed to be coalescing into something. The shapes inside them were smaller, simpler, denser, no longer complex polygons but instead a sea of small triangles that undulated and contracted. The triangle mesh became a cage that shrank down and in, until the fierce light at the center began to take shape.
"IR band is off the charts... This thing's getting hot!"
Mist suddenly filled the tank, hiding a wobbling light somewhere within that illuminated eddies and curling billows as it bounced.
"What's going on?" St. Martin demanded.
"The fog came from Legacy," Marcus said while the ship explained it across the link. "Instinctual. She felt a heat spike and tried to douse it."
The misty tank grew dark and the entire room collectively held their breath. The first clouds faded to reveal more clouds behind them, while the floodlights refused to penetrate more than a few inches.
A thump sounded out like a ten-tonne pile driver, and Marcus shot upright while sliding St. Martin behind him. The dozens of researchers ducked behind their desks, computers, and their own hands. Kai remained calmly seated on the floor.
"Anybody?" Marcus said.
One of the younger researchers climbed back into her chair and pounded furiously at her keyboard. "Uh... anomalous readings, Commander."
"God damn it," Marcus growled. He accessed the workstation through his link and inspected the record. He'd just started to normalize the data when another thump came.
Marcus looked up at the glass in time to see a fist covered in red tile, which immediately withdrew back into the tumbling fog. A glance over his shoulder revealed Kai standing at his side.
"It'll hold," Marcus shouted to his team. He took control of the walls and made them thicker, the new material pouring in from ceiling and floor. At the same time, he switched them from a hardened shell to indestructibly soft.
He could now make out a silhouette inside the tank, shaped like a man but oddly thin and made of too many acute angles. Eyes appeared in the darkness as two points of flaring cyan.
Marcus felt a kind of fear that was altogether new, something that crawled down from his scalp, clawed
at his back and pulled at his lungs. It was the absolute faith that something angry and powerful wanted to kill him.
The figure strode out of the dark clouds like a firefighter returning from a vanquished blaze, revealing itself in the lab's pale light to be a piece of living machinery that was not yet complete. The body was like an empty framework formed of long and curved muscles, supporting clumps of smaller components connected by thick cords and slender filaments. Around the torso, these artificial muscles became a ribcage, thin blades radiating out from the pulsing hollow-drive at its core.
Armored tiles took shape on its surface then wheeled into place. The gaps between muscles filled themselves and the tiles slid over to cover them until the being was whole. The creature stood calmly full of death, a cubist man in swaths of deep blue and off-white, except for the right hand in red and burnt orange.
The head was an insect-like helmet topped with stubby spikes like a crown made of some beast's gaping jaw. Flexing gills flanked the face, and thin tubes connected the jawline to throat and collar. Inside the mask, two cyan eyes burned with unspent fury.
The creature drew back its red hand and struck again. The resulting shockwave caused the tank's wall to flex outward, then snap back and vibrate like the surface of a trampoline.
"We're not safe here," Kai said. He actually sounded frightened.
Marcus had trouble believing it, but the damned alien was probably right. "Everyone out," he barked, and the team rushed out the iris. "Kai, I need you to..."
Before Marcus could complete his thought, something exploded. There was a sound like a sonic boom, and he flew through the air until the far wall violently stopped him. Debris pelted him all over, large panes and small shards, and the pain was immediate. Flesh tore away in hunks like a hand in a garbage disposal.
Marcus cried out, and the skin around his face constricted into a tight mask. Blood poured down from above his eyes, and he tried to blink it away. He managed to see a shape approaching, and then he blacked out. It didn't matter... he really didn't want to see the next part anyway.
Long Fall Page 24
