Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

“No fooling around, Orlov. You come back right away.”

  “If I don’t, you come after me, right, boss?”

  Gomez waited in silence with the others. What would he do if she did not come back right away? Would he walk into the cloud of dust, blindly groping, until his hands found her soft skin? But what if he only found cold metal? Would he even call her name or would he just unload his pistol? She enjoyed the spider form too much and too quickly. It was almost as though she had no desire to return to her old form or even some prosthetic semblance of it. Gomez wanted her back and whole again. He wanted to rewind the days to before this damned colony, when he could have allowed himself to be swallowed in her warm embrace and the scent of her skin.

  But she would never be the same again.

  Gomez cursed his train of thoughts. He cursed the goddamned mission. He cursed Marley.

  A few moments later, Orlov emerged from the unsettled cloud. A fine layer of dust covered her. “Finn did a good job. For a change. The tunnel is sealed.”

  “One way now,” said Gomez.

  The lights on their rifles and headlamps built into their VR goggles lit the tunnel green.

  After the others had set out, Gomez lingered to make sure that nothing came after them. He hated the tunnels. In fact, he feared them. He had always had a tinge of claustrophobia and the time that he had spent in the deep sleep coffins only had made things worse. He never let anyone know but it bit into his thoughts.

  The green light flooded the tunnel. The walls were smooth bored from where machines had drilled a path beneath the surface. This section must have had regular use at one time before being abandoned because a wire with lights ran along the ceiling. However, in several places, the wire hung frayed and stretched to the floor as if it had been torn from its seating.

  They passed more rundown borers, dozers, and dump vehicles. The transports were old, from a time when the mining operations were manual rather than automated. Finn had crept into a few to try to get them to start but their batteries were drained. Gomez wondered how long this tunnel had been abandoned.

  At regular intervals, chemical tanks had been built along the walls, and several of them had rusted through and the rock beneath looked to have been melted by a caustic agent and then hardened, giving Gomez the sense of walking on a river frozen in time.

  Patch saw him pause at one of the tanks. “There were stories. Of the early days. Back when we didn’t know any better. The company wanted expediency. Before the machines arrived. They used chemicals to accelerate the tunneling. Fucking tanks corroded. Hundreds died in a fog of bitter gas. Closed these tunnels forever. Let’s hope those gases have cleared out.”

  Gomez let Patch catch up to the others.

  Orlov crept along the floor behind him. He paused and then waited until they were side by side.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Lucky to be alive.”

  “That spider skeleton?”

  “Never imagined anything like this. I try not to think about it. Not really. Only want to get out of here.”

  “Me, too.” He stole a glance at her figure hanging in the chassis. Desire filled him at the sight of her near naked body. The spider legs, long and metallic, the sharp ends scratching against the ground, sent chills up his spine. “I’m sorry. I never should have accepted this mission. God, if I only knew…”

  “But we don’t know, do we? Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.”

  “I should have protected you better. I never should have let them take you and what they did… God, I’m sorry, Orlov. I … I … Can you ever forgive me?”

  She laughed. “I died. In that hall. On that table. Now I have been reborn in a dream world. Maybe a nightmare world. But, Gomez, there is no going back. We can’t turn back time. We can’t undo what has been done.”

  “You trusted me. I should have done more.”

  “We are where we are.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Lost in space following a mad woman trying to find a murderous fiend deep in the darkness.”

  Marley suddenly hissed at them from further up the tunnel. She squatted, one fist raised. The others bunched behind her.

  Gomez ran up to her. “What is it?” he whispered.

  “Listen,” she said peering into the tunnel ahead. “Voices.”

  Fifty-Four

  THE VOICES CAME from a giant cavern.

  Marley peered from behind a chemical tank and into the giant cave complex below. The circular cave towered a hundred meters, the entirety of its space bathed in a pale light.

  The cavern looked to once have been a staging and transfer area. Tanks of chemicals, the shells of looted machines, and empty container carts filled the cavern. An elevator shaft constructed of rusted girders climbed to the distant ceiling. Along the other walls, tunnels disappeared like the spokes of a wheel. The place once must have been a major hub of activity for the abandoned mining colony.

  Only now the mining activity had ceased and it was no longer abandoned.

  Rom’s nightmares filled it.

  Marley choked back a sudden gasp.

  Hundreds of spiders, butchered humans attached to arachnid frames, milled about in the cavern. They ate, they fought, they fucked.

  But the horror did not stop with the spiders.

  Rom had created other monstrosities.

  Human heads attached to small carts, people who had their arms replaced with metal wings that looked too heavy to lift them off the ground, a whole squad of men and women who had rifles and blades where hands had once been. But worse than anything it was not only men and women that Rom had experimented upon. It was also children.

  Marley’s legs felt weak and she steadied herself against the chemical tank.

  “What’s he done?” hissed Gomez.

  “An army,” said Marley. “Standing between us and Rom.”

  “They’ll slaughter us. We need to turn back,” said Gomez.

  “Turn back where?” said Adams finally finding his voice. “We have nowhere to go. We sealed our exit. The only way to the surface is that elevator shaft. Maybe Orlov and Patch might reach it without raising an alarm. But the rest of us are fucked. All because of you, Marley. We never should have accepted this mission. We left our passengers, people who trusted us to bring them to their new home, we left them on that way station. They’ll probably die in deep sleep. And then landing on this planet when you knew it was suicide. Hendo, Penelope, even Orlov…”

  “Fuck you.” Marley ground her teeth and clenched her fists. She didn’t want to hear his words.

  “What’s Prime promising you, Marley? What’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? And when you get it, and I doubt you even will, then what? All this death and misery will somehow be erased? Fuck you, Marley, for getting us into this. You’re going to get what you deserve for all this.”

  Marley waited until the captain ran out of breath and no more venomous words spilled out of his mouth.

  “I don’t need you anymore, Adams. You get that? You understand? There’s no ship to navigate. You can’t even shoot a gun properly. I’m only keeping you around because I feel sorry for you. But you open your mouth like that again and you’ll find a bullet between your teeth.”

  “We should go back,” repeated Gomez. He stared wide-eyed out over the sea of Rom’s monstrosities.

  “And what?” asked Finn. “Wait for someone to rescue us? Ain’t no one coming for us. We return there and we die in that tunnel, seal ourselves in our own grave. I’m not going back there to die.”

  “And so we go forward?” asked Gomez. “You’ve seen them. We don’t have enough firepower to cut a path to the elevator. How the hell do we get through? Any bright ideas other than walking in to our own death?”

  “Another tunnel might lead to the surface,” said Patch pointing to the various openings around the cavern. “The elevator might not be the only way to the surface.”

  “There’s dozens of those tu
nnels,” said Gomez. “We would expose ourselves to those abominations each time we make a run for one of those tunnels. If they don’t spot us the first time, they will the next and all for the crapshoot that one of the tunnels will lead out of this hellhole. We got no guarantees that they all don’t just end in a pile of rubble.”

  “He’s right,” said Marley. “They won’t lead to the surface.”

  Marley shared a map of the tunnels through the comms channel and it displayed on their VR screens. It showed the central hub of the cavern and the various spokes of the tunnels traveling deeper beneath the surface. Not a single one connected with an access point back to the surface.

  “How’d you get this map?” asked Gomez. “What else aren’t you telling us?”

  “Huang Di Prime shared this with me.”

  “You’re connected? Right now?”

  “I wish. But no. He has sent in a copy, a minor code.”

  “Sent it in where, Marley? Is the AI here on the colony? Why haven’t we seen him?”

  Marley tapped her temple. “Only I can see him.”

  Gomez shook his head. “Is there any human even left in you?”

  “Only an implant.”

  “An AI clone can’t inhabit an implant. How much circuitry have you got up there? How much of you got replaced?” Gomez cursed. “Those EMP blasts knocking you out. Are you even human anymore? How much did he tear out when he rebuilt you?

  “We’re not here to argue about me,” she said. “We’re here to complete the mission. We need to get to the surface.”

  “Well, were not getting through that army,” said Finn.

  “Not while they’re alive,” said Marley. “But I can fix that.”

  Fifty-Five

  GOMEZ STARED AT the milling monstrosities below. They disgusted him. They had become inhuman. They were not Evolved as Rom liked to proclaim. No, they were depravities that never should have come into being. They were humans robbed of everything it meant to be human.

  But what Marley proposed – releasing the gas from the chemical tanks that littered the cavern – was murder.

  “We can’t do this,” said Patch. Her servos whined as she clutched her mechanical fists. “We can’t gas them. That’s murder. That’s worse than anything else we’ve done so far. I can’t be a part of this. I can’t.”

  The two women argued. Loudly almost, too loudly and Gomez knew if they kept it up that they would soon attract unwanted attention.

  “Keep it down,” he warned. “Your voices are going to carry and if those monstrosities hear us, we won’t have any choices at all.”

  “It’s murder!” said Patch.

  “It’s survival!” said Marley, grim lipped. “We have no other way out of here. If we retreat back into the tunnels the way we came, we have two options: either starve to death or the damned spiders find us. So what’s that leave us? Run out there with guns blazing. We’re dead before we reach the floor of the cavern. We’ll never get to the elevator. Do you think I want to do this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Patch. Her lips curled back in a snarl. “Do you? Is this what Huang Di Prime wants? Wipe out everything that stands up to him? I don’t trust you.”

  “Do you have another way? Do you think if they find us they won’t kill us? How many times have they attacked us? This last time they weren’t looking to take prisoners. What do you think they’re going to do next time?”

  “It is murder,” said Gomez stepping between the two women. “If we gas them, it is cold-blooded murder.” Patch nodded and a small smile lifted the corner of her lips. “But Marley’s right,” Gomez continued. “What choice do we have? Maybe you’re content to die here. Shit, Patch, you already said that the cancer is eating away at your bones.”

  “This makes you complicit,” said Patch. She looked to Finn and Orlov but they stared back at her, tight lipped, not willing to cross Gomez and not agreeing with him. Either way they were not standing up on Patch’s side. “What about you, Adams? Am I the only one who sees that we can’t do this? That if we do this we are no better than Rom?”

  Adams shrugged and turned his head to stare back down into the gloom of the tunnels. “Death coming for us all.” He returned his gaze back to Marley. “Every single last one of us.”

  Patch released a quivering shudder and retreated out of the light and into the shadows of the tunnel. Her servos whined as she crouched into a ball. She trembled with weeping.

  “Civilians,” said Orlov. “They don’t get how bloody this world really is.” Finn bent over her making some adjustments to the mounted gun on her back.

  “And for us,” said Gomez, “is it any better? It’s a world seen through blood-streaked goggles. Don’t get me wrong. She is right. What we’re doing is wrong. Maybe even bordering on evil. But in the end it comes down to survival and in the end I am going to do whatever it takes to get the hell out of here.” He lowered his voice so that Marley who fiddled with a security panel at the end of the tunnel could not hear him. “And that includes going off mission. Our survival is the highest priority. All in, all out.”

  “Except Hendo,” said Orlov.

  “God rest his fucking soul,” said Gomez. “But it ain’t going be like that for the rest of us. We’re getting out of here. I promise you that. No matter what goes down, we’re getting out of here alive. The three of us.”

  Fifty-Six

  ADAMS CROUCHED IN the shadows. He held the fragment of the spider’s leg in his fist. The dark shape of it looked like a stiletto. He had torn it off the she-spider that had tried to kill him and he used it to kill off all those bastards that had tried to drag Penelope off. His weapon now. It had tasted blood and before long it would drink again.

  He stared at Marley who had plugged a cable interface from the back of her head to the control panel on the wall. She said she inserted a code into the security and ventilation systems. Not impossible but not something that a human could do. What hid inside of her? How deep had Huang Di Prime burrowed?

  She had become a sickness that needed to be stopped.

  Maybe Adams should do it now while she was distracted and the others were huddled in whispers. She was connected to the machine, her eyes glazing, her lips quivering. An addict getting her fix.

  Adams rose as quietly as he could. From the cavern, the denizens hummed in lost conversation. He could not believe what lived down there. At first, he had been as horrified as Gomez that the lines between humans and machines were so distorted. He saw the bodies surgically attached to metal frames. He cringed at the human limbs impossibly connected to machines. It had sickened him what had been done to those people. But then an idea had come to him. If Rom could somehow orchestrate these combinations, did he also hold the key to Penelope? Could he find the scattered parts of her being, heal it, and could he give her a material form? Could Adams one day hold her hand, even it if were of titanium?

  Adams stared at Marley. She was lost in the data transfer. Her breath rose through the ribs of her back, the biometal filled with a dull shimmer where her neck was exposed between her combat suit and her dark black hair. He would need to slip his blade around her neck, find a soft spot, and plunge it deep until the warm blood bathed his hands.

  Afterwards, he would give himself to the inhabitants of the cavern, force them to carry him to Rom where he would speak of his deed and get his reward. Ragnar was trapped, barricaded in his fortress, but Adams knew his vulnerability and would be willing to lead a force of spiders to tear down his walls and rescue his lost princess.

  Adams took a step forward, sliding his foot silently across the ground, afraid to make a single sound. Marley pivoted on her feet and looked up at Adams, the soft of her neck exposed. A vein pulsed beneath her skin.

  His hand shook.

  She pulled the wire from the port at the back of her skull and stood. The fog left her eyes.

  His hand hung slack at his side.

  “It’s done,” she said.

  From somewhere deep wi
thin the bowels of the tunnels motors simultaneously hummed to life and from vents previously unseen hot stale air surged.

  Then Adams smelled it: the stench of burnt bitter seeds.

  Moments later the screams began.

  But they did not last long.

  Fifty-Seven

  “ARE WE SURE the gas is gone?” Finn asked. Gomez had a balaclava pulled over his mouth even though he knew it would offer no protection against the toxic gas Marley had released into the cavern.

  Gomez knelt behind a barrel, his rifle propped on its surface, his palms sweaty from the shooting he had done. He had only fired a dozen times but those were some of the most difficult shots he had ever taken. While the yellow-brown gas had descended, a few of the spiders had scrambled up the girder framework, away from the cloud of death.

  Gomez had shot them as they climbed. The memory of the shots blurred. The spiders racing on the metal beams, a quick sighting through his scope, the green crosshair on a bare chest, the pulse of the gun, and the sudden explosion of blood and guts.

  A dozen shots? He could not recall exactly how many and he could not count the bodies since they fell into the mass of piled corpses below.

  Marley disconnected from the control panel. “The vents have reversed. Huang Di Prime says it is clear.”

  “As if we could trust him,” muttered Adams. “We’re expendable.”

  Patch in her giant exoskeleton leaned against the tunnel wall. When she turned to look at Gomez, her face was slick with tears.

  “Where do we go now?” asked Gomez. His palms tingled and his fingers quivered. He could feel the ghost of the gun firing in his hands.

  “To the elevator,” said Marley. “It leads to the comms complex. We are close to Rom. Look.”

  A new map overlay suddenly took shape in Gomez’s VR goggles. This time yellow indicated him and the others and from them a jagged white line ran to a single red dot: Rom. They were close. All of this could finally come to an end.