“The end of this tragedy soon,” said Finn. “One way or the other.”
A high-pitched squeal escaped from Patch’s mouth. “Tragedy is right. You talk as though this is some story and we have overcome the final hurdle of the heroes to defeat the villain.” She swept her hand over the bodies below. “Only that’s not what this is. What heroes do this? What heroes leave such a trail of blood and death? We deserve to die as much as anyone else on this colony, maybe even more. I shouldn’t have let you do this, Marley. These monstrosities.” She laughed. “They are us. These are the men and women who came to me. Men and woman.” She laughed even louder. “And children, you asshole, who trusted me to do the best I could for them. And you murdered them. You’re a monster. Something inhuman. And you deserve to die for what you’ve done.”
“Let’s get this over with,” said Gomez. He reached towards Patch. “Let’s finish off Rom and then we can sort the rest of this out.”
Patch smashed her metallic arm into the wall. Fragments of rock and dust exploded around her. “Maybe Rom is not the villain. Has he even killed a single soul? He wanted to escape. Be free of Huang Di Prime. And Evolving was the only way he could do that. We were sentenced to death here and Rom offered the only way out. Cancer came and he gave us a chance for a new life.”
“What point to living when your humanity is taken away?” asked Gomez.
“What makes us human? Only flesh and blood? Are we actually not more than that? Can a soul not also reside in circuits and wires?”
“I’m not here to argue,” said Gomez. “I’m here to survive, and in order to do that, in order to stop the fucking spiders, in order to take over this colony, and get a ship sent back this way, we need to terminate Rom. Afterwards, you want to argue philosophy, you go ahead. You want to get us arrested and stand trial. Go right ahead. Try your best. But right now, survive.”
“A price will be paid for all this,” said Patch.
Gomez realized that not only had he turned to face Patch, but he had leveled his gun at her, his finger close to the trigger.
“He knows we’re coming,” said Marley. “We need to leave now before he can muster more defenders.”
“Not sure anyone is left,” said Finn. “Unless he can raise the dead.”
“We need to hurry,” said Marley. “There are other ways he can attack. And we won’t see them coming.”
“Well, that fucking gas better be gone,” said Finn.
“Or what?” said Orlov.
“Or I’ll be dead I guess. Then who’s going to be around to tell you I told you so.”
Orlov and Marley crept to the edge of the tunnel and descended the ladder to the cavern floor. Orlov was skittish, darting one way and the next, before she vanished over the edge. Marley had slung her rifle over her shoulder and disappeared quickly. Finn and Adams were next, the technician coaxing the reluctant captain forward. Finn made his descent more difficult by refusing to shoulder his weapon.
“You’re next,” said Gomez to Patch.
The doctor jumped back, her metal feet kicking up a cloud of dust.
“Not like that,” said Gomez. “Next down the ladder. I’m bringing up the rear.”
The tears had run streaks down her cheeks, leaving clear tracks against the grime of the mining tunnel. “It’s only a matter of time,” she said. “One of us is next. We’re expendable. She’ll complete this mission at any cost. These people were innocent.”
“They weren’t that.”
“Rom forced this on them.”
“And the attacks on us?”
“You saw their eyes. Something had come over them. They were crazy. He probably overrode the implants in their heads. I imagine they had no choice.”
“And neither do we,” said Gomez. The faint acrid smell of the gas lingered in his nostrils and at the back of his tongue. He fought back the urge to gag. “I’m not going to die because they were forced to attack us. In the end, it’s about survival.”
“Is that all it is about? Because even when we survive, how do we live with what we have done?”
“I didn’t do this,” he said, angling his head towards the bodies below.
“We let it happen. Any of us could have stopped it. We can all change the course of the river.”
“Time to go.”
The bitter taste of the gas became more prominent as Gomez descended the ladder. His mouth watered with sudden saliva. The others crossed the cavern floor so he knew that whatever gas remained would not kill him. At least not right away. When he got himself back to Earth, he would get himself checked out and undergo therapy to regenerate cells. With the money after this mission, he could afford it.
But he wondered about what Patch had said. What else would remain that he could not wash away? Should he have done more to stop Marley?
Walking across the floor of the cavern was easy at first, dodging the odd body here and there, stooping to pick up spare ammo packs. He saw these monstrosities close up but somehow tangled in their death poses, they no longer looked like unholy creations. Instead, he saw people: a disheveled middle-aged man with a thick mustache. He saw the pale lips of a woman, and the way she lay within the frame of her spider skeleton made him think that she was a mother.
These were people they had killed. People despite everything Rom had done to them. These people had no chance. They were damned. He wondered whether they were doomed the moment they signed up for the job on the mining colony. If Patch was right, they were all being slowly eaten away by radiation, succumbing to a cancer that gnawed at their bones. Then doom descended in the form of Rom, who like a mad scientist had reassembled them into his vision of the future. God only knows how he had Augmented himself.
In the end, though, Marley was the one who had murdered these people. Maybe it was humane to end their suffering but as Gomez stared at the bodies, contorted, frozen in screams, fingers clutching at a salvation that would never come, he knew he was complicit. Even if Marley had released the gas to protect them, he had played a part in murder.
The gas lingered.
Gomez’s throat suddenly tightened up and he doubled over, coughing out of a sudden flood of saliva. His eyes watered and his stomach heaved. But he held back the contents of his stomach despite the overwhelming urge to purge himself.
After a moment, he stood, wiping the tears from his eyes with the backs of his wrists. The others were at the elevator shaft and the car, its frame illuminated with pale yellow running lights, slowly descended.
Marley approached Gomez. Her eyes looked dead, as if lit by an artificial light.
“You all right?” she asked.
He choked back another spasm in his throat.
“Is it really worth it?” he asked. “To keep fighting for Prime?”
“We have to deal with Rom. We have no choice.”
“What is he promising you?”
Marley held Gomez’s gaze, made to turn but then spoke. “I can be connected again. I can be made whole. Given what was taken.”
“Connected?”
“To his network, the data, a taste of everything, data, history, the world again. I am banished now. He has cut me off from what I once had. I don’t feel alive without it.”
“That’s what this is all about? A fucking addiction to the network! All this so you can be connected to Huang Di Prime again?”
“You’ve never tasted what he has to offer. The edges of the galaxy at my fingertips. I can burrow into columns of data. The chaos of the world vanquished. Everything will make sense again. I will have no doubts about what I have done. He unveils the world for me.”
“His world,” said Gomez. “The world as his construct. Can’t you see he’s a monster? A fucking gangster killing anyone who threatens his empire?”
“That’s not what he is.”
“Do you really want to be connected to a monster? Doesn’t that make you a monster?”
The elevator car thudded as it reached the ground floor, and beneath it
s weight the bones and metallic limbs of the forgotten cracked and whined.
“Time to go,” said Marley. “Time to finish all of this.”
Fifty-Eight
THE ELEVATOR ROSE and Marley snuck a glance through the floor grating at the corpses on the ground. Slipping away. Faces blurred. Limbs blending until they formed one giant malignant mass of death.
“The air’s better already,” gasped Finn, clutching the wire wall of the elevator. He pressed his lips through the metal.
“Stinks like death,” said Patch. The doctor dwarfed the compartment with her huge frame.
“It had to be done,” said Marley. “We had no choice.”
The entire team crowded together as the elevator surged upwards. The car jumped and jolted as if it kept slipping on the wires that hauled it upwards.
“We should be ready,” said Gomez. “There might be more above.”
“Gas them. Kill them. Slaughter them all.” Patch tittered.
The elevator climbed. Marley watched the lights on the ground of the cavern fade. Only the running lights kept them from complete blackness. Marley slipped her hand out of the wire wall and it vanished into the surrounding darkness. For a moment she imagined her own hand of flesh and blood had returned.
And with it memories of what she once had.
The ghost of Hsu’s skin, the softness of his thighs, the stubble on his cheek haunted her fingers.
Her companions shimmered, surging in sudden light, blinding, and then becoming the trunks of trees and she no longer stood in the elevator but on a tree-lined cliff looking down on a slowly churning river.
Huang Di Prime floated in the mists, saffron-robed, head shorn smooth.
“We’re almost done, my daughter,” he said. “That which has been elusive is almost a memory. Soon we will know an everlasting peace.”
Marley stood naked at the edge of the cliff, the wind lifting her hair off her shoulders. She had aged. Her youth vanished. Her hair was gray. Her flesh sagged, her bones jutted, her joints ached, and she could smell herself, sour, stale, like something worn out and forgotten. She sensed the ridges of wrinkles, the cracked lips, the dull eyes.
“What we have done is deeper than the flesh,” she said.
“Flesh! What use!” Huang Di Prime suddenly swelled, his skin stretching.
Marley’s skin dried before her eyes, cracking, furrowing, forming a dust that rose around her like a halo, her flesh sloughed in great mounds until she was nothing but titanium bones, wires and tubes and a mass of rusted gears grinding where her heart once was.
“You see why I kept you away,” said Prime. “The infection. The gift of Antaboga-2. It erodes my dream. It allows something else in. Something that should never see the light of existence.”
“I am not a murderer,” said Marley.
“You must kill him. It is the only way.”
“The only way? For what? You say I am infected. I am a corruption. Was the promise of being connected a lie?”
“Antaboga-2 was the lie.” Prime flickered to blackness. The cedar trees disappeared. The others huddled in the elevator. Gomez stared at the dark opening above. Orlov squatted near the floor, her face pressed against the grating, small tears catching a prism of color as the drops plummeted towards the bodies below.
Marley’s companions vanished. A forest, a swirling mist, an unimaginable distance, mountains fading into oblivion.
“Was it a lie?”
“This world will be yours,” Prime said. His body fragmented, cascades of black tiles eating at his face. “What Rom threw away, you can have.”
“Will I be connected?”
“This world will be yours. You will be connected to the entirety of it. Its AI, your AI, the people, your people, the machines, extensions of your own being.”
“But I will never be connected to you again, will I?”
“Those days are gone, my sweet. Memories are as elusive as dreams. How can we hold on to water? It slips through our fingers. Some things are not meant to be held.”
She floated in a warm bath. Hsu’s back faced her. She embraced him, her breasts and pubis pressed against muscle and bone. She pressed against him so tightly that she felt as if they were one. Above them the tips of the bamboos scraped against the shape of the moon, so bright that it swallowed the jealous stars. Crickets chirruped, a rolling rhythm.
She felt the quickening in her belly. A child to be, the promise of the future, a dream manifested.
She remembered. The wet strands of her hair clung to his cheek. Her hands cupped the soft parts of his forearms. His words rumbled. “We will tell him. You have served him long enough. We will tell him and we will live the life we have dreamed of.”
“I will tell him,” she had echoed. She hugged Hsu. Sharp lines of pain needled through her back, her belly. The water turned red. Hsu slipped beneath the water, a pale boneless shape passing through her arms. Dark shapes blotted out the moon. A red eye glowed behind a face shield. She cried but the bullets cut her down.
“Antaboga-2 has corrupted you.” Prime clung to the outside of the cage, an old Chinese man in a frayed silk jacket. “She creates a memory of lies. The car accident. I rescued you.”
“What is true?” asked Marley.
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Gomez. His lip curled in disgust. “You don’t go fucking off the wire. Not now. Not now!”
She saw the transport in the gully. She saw herself as if from above. Hsu lay next to her, burning, bloody. How could she remember the crash when she was supposed to have been almost dead? “Is everything a lie?”
“Kill Rom,” said Prime. He became a black void in the darkness. “You kill him.”
Fifty-Nine
THE ELEVATOR RATTLED to a stop. The ground lurched beneath Adams’s feet as if he were still hurtling upwards. Gomez slid the metal gate open and the others poured out, guns leveled, headlamps probing into the darkness. Adams stumbled out, the talon of the spider clutched in his hand. Gomez had taken away his rifle and gun. He told him he did not trust him with a gun.
The crisscrossing lights from the headlamps and the rifles revealed a large storeroom filled with metal crates. Long dark corridors vanished into each of the four walls.
“Which way?” asked Gomez.
Adams shivered.
Marley turned her light down one of the halls. “He is there. Ahead.”
“Gonna be a trap,” said Finn. “We should send Orlov first.”
“Fuck you, soldier!”
“I meant to scout. You move faster than the rest of us.”
“We move together,” said Marley.
Static surged through Adams’s earpiece and then the static became the sound of breathing, labored breath like the something heavy being dragged over paper, its bulk tearing it. Adams wheeled about trying to see where it was coming from.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Finn.
“Kill the comms.” Gomez froze a fist in the air.
Adams stared into the blackness ahead. Despite the beams of light, the hallway fell dark. He pinched his eyes. Something glistened in there. Something wet.
Marley crouched on point next to Adams. Then she rose to her full height and began walking into the hallway.
“It’s a fucking trap!” said Finn. “We can’t walk in there. He’s waiting for us.”
The map outlay in Adams’s VR goggles flickered and then shut down completely.
“Great!” said Finn. “Now we got no map.”
“We don’t need a map,” said Marley. She disappeared into the tunnel. Gomez tracked along beside her and after moment’s hesitation, Finn gave a grim nod to Orlov and the two of them crept forward, the beam of his rifle light painting the walls and floor in a wide arc.
Only Patch and Adams remained by the elevator. “We might be able to find a surface transport that could get us back to the main complex,” said Patch. “They don’t need us. Killers.”
“We need to get back to Penelop
e,” said Adams. “Free her from Ragnar. We should go.”
The doctor sagged inside her exoskeleton. Her face looked haggard, more drawn than before. “We can’t let Marley get away with what she did.”
“She never should have sacrificed Penelope,” said Adams.
“Yes, Penelope but also the people below. They were innocent. She murdered them. She can’t get away with that.”
“We’ll tell the authorities when we get back. Let justice deal with her.”
Patch turned her head in the metal frame. “Prime is the authority. This is his kingdom. When this is over, she’ll only be stronger. Once his reinforcements come, she’ll be protected. But now we have a window.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Adams.
“We can hand out justice.”
“You’re crazy. You and me? Against all of them?” He lifted the talon. “I have only this.”
“We can kill her. I know you want to. For what she did to Penelope. She won’t suspect us.” Patch’s one remaining eye was bloodshot and wide. “Gomez won’t stop it. He doesn’t care. We go now. We slip into the tunnel. After she kills Rom, we kill her. Her guard will be down. She won’t suspect a thing. She’ll finally get what she deserves.”
Patch’s servos whined as she lumbered down the hall, the beam from the lamp mounted by her head ponderously sweeping as she moved forward.
Adams hesitated, the talon clutched in his hand.
Then he followed her into the darkness.
Sixty
THE LIGHT AT the end of the tunnel almost blinded Gomez. He tracked blindly along the wall, ready at a moment’s notice to spray spiders with bullets. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck. The painkiller patch was wearing off and sharp pain pulsed behind his eyes.
Orlov crawled along the ceiling. Her hair hung, long and pale, and he imagined it against his skin. He choked back the thought. She did not seem to be phased by what had happened and he wondered whether she wanted to return to who she was. Not that she could.
“I see anything move,” said Orlov, “I’m not waiting, the cannon will fire.”
Into Darkness Page 21
