“How do we kill you? And how do we bring you back?” asked Gomez.
“Pulse me. Hit me with a hard electrical charge.” She pointed to thick wires connecting to the servers. “Enough to kill me. When my face appears in the hologram, you’ll know I defeated him. Then figure out a way to bring me back. Finn, I’m counting on you.”
“Fuck! I hate this shit.”
“You could die in there,” said Gomez.
“Crap!” shouted Orlov. “I can hear them.”
Gomez turned back towards the comms room.
“Spiders,” said Orlov. “Dozens of fucking spiders! Coming this way.”
“Now!” said Marley. “Kill me now!”
Sixty-Three
ADAMS WAS WATCHING Marley and the others disappear into the control room when Rom appeared as a Viking in the middle of the hall.
“I’ve been watching you,” Rom said. He towered, taller than he ever could have been in real life, his head nearly touching the ceiling. He wore a long mustache and the whiskers, thick and braided with red thread and gold filament, trailed over his armor.
“I have heard your murderous words,” he said. “And I have an offer to make. Kill Marley. Kill Gomez. Kill them all. Leave them in a pool of their own blood and I will give you everything you desire.”
“She is gone,” said Adams.
Rom’s eyes twinkled as he smiled. “I can give you Penelope. After we manage the traitorous Marley, we return to the little upstart. Ragnar will be scattered to the four corners and we rescue your princess.”
“But she is dying. Her code is corrupted. She is nearly lost already.”
Rom’s laughter echoed off the walls. “I am the god of this world. I can do anything. I can bring her back. I raise the dead. But first you have to help me. First you have to blood Marley.”
“The two of us against them? What chance do we have?” asked Adams.
“Don’t worry about that,” said Rom. “You won’t be alone.”
The words had not even left his mouth before the spiders filled the hall, a small army, a murderous troop standing with Adams.
Adams could barely fight the chill that ran up his spine. The spiders surged around him. In their midst, Patch loped, her long strides covering ground as she charged with them down the hall towards the control room.
Adams closed the distance to his former companions. A wash of fear enveloped him. What he was doing was wrong. He should not be marching on Marley and the others. Despite all they had done, they were his companions, maybe even friends, and he betrayed them.
But he ran with the spiders.
Sixty-Four
BEFORE MARLEY COULD see, before she could hear, before she could feel the beating of her heart, she smelled cedar. The powerful pungent scent of cedar.
Then her heart beat within her chest, a steady drumming. Fluids pulsed from her core to her fingers and toes. She oriented herself in space. She lay on the ground. Her back pressed against soft earth. Her lungs expanded against her ribs.
Her breath streamed gently through her nostrils with each inhalation and exhalation. The wind whispered through branches. Bird song unfurled.
She opened her eyes. Or maybe they had been open the whole time and she could finally see. She stared at towering cedars against a sharp blue sky.
She rolled to her side and sat up. One moment, she was naked, her skin pale and unscarred, and then next she wore a white dress and a garland of hibiscus flowers. She imagined herself in a golden robe and then in a shining tunic of chain mail and her outfit followed the train of her thoughts.
She longed for the horizons and the trees parted to reveal green meadows and peaks. Blades of grass tickled her feet. In the distance a waterfall rumbled. She smelled the fresh loam beneath the grass.
She walked until she found a pool steaming with water from a hot spring.
Hsu sat in the water, his bare back towards her, his face hidden by long black hair.
The sky darkened until the stars formed a jeweled belt across the sky. The smell of jasmine mixed with sulfur.
She was naked again and walked towards him. Her breath quickened. This time she would not let him go. This time she would be with him forever.
She stepped through the grasses, never getting any closer.
“You know this is a lie,” he said. His face was hidden. “I am dead. Dead beyond this construct. Rom has given you what you want. A partition. A world to be your own.”
He turned. She glimpsed Huang Di Prime, the old Chinese man, and then just as quickly, he turned away.
“I deserve this,” said Marley. “A place where my dreams can become true. Why should I return?”
“You think he will allow you to stay here forever?”
In the distance, a trio of white storks glided against the haze of jagged peaks.
“Why can’t I have my own world?” asked Marley. “One where I have a chance of happiness?”
The grasses twined around her ankles, calves, knees, rising and wrapping until an armor of grass covered her.
“This is a lie,” he said. The pool hardened. The water turned into glass-like obsidian. The figure in the pool, once the man she loved, froze, transformed into ice and then shattered into a billion shards that tore towards the sky.
Rom stood in the meadow, beyond Marley’s reach but close enough that she could see his glistening eyes, the slight turn of his lips.
“It is a lie, Marley. A construct, all of this. But the worst lies don’t come from me. They come from Prime. He held back so much from you and me. He will destroy us, all of us. He will enslave us and you are his tool for that. Turn from him as I have done. Seek freedom.”
Sixty-Five
“FUCKING SPIDERS,” SAID Gomez. He fired his rifle into the hallway. The corridor filled with the corpses of spiders but despite the barrage of gunfire, the abominations kept coming.
“Running low on ammo!” yelled Finn on the other side of the door.
Gomez tossed him another magazine. “Pick your shots.”
“They get through and we’re dead. Fuckers aren’t going to turn us into spiders. They’re going to kill us. They know what we did in that cavern. Marley signed our fucking death sentence.”
Orlov clung to the ceiling and fired from above. “I’m running low too.”
The spiders crept, relentless. Gomez shot one off the ceiling.
“Patch is there!” shouted Finn. “Bitch betrayed us. She’s with them now.”
Patch hung back at the far end of the hall and she was organizing the spiders. Instead of madly rushing into a hail of bullets, she had gathered them to her. They disappeared into a doorway and Gomez thought for a moment Patch had talked them into retreating. Instead large metal crates were pushed out of the door and slid along the floor towards the control room. Patch had created a shield between the spiders and the mercenaries.
“We’re screwed!” said Finn as he unleashed a flurry of bullets.
“Save your bullets!” screamed Gomez.
The crates scraped forward. Gomez tore a grenade from his belt and hurled it down the hall. It bounced off the walls and landed behind the first crate. The explosion painted the walls with blood and bone and the hall filled with screams.
But, the spiders pushed the other crates forward. Patch peered around one of the crates tempting Gomez to take a shot. But he needed to save his bullets.
And one for himself when the spiders finally broke through.
Gomez had fucked up. They were pinned down, outnumbered and trapped without an exit.
“I’ll hold them back,” said Orlov. She clambered down on the wall.
“They’ll overwhelm you.” Gomez laid a palm on her cheek.
“I’ll give you enough time to get to the room where Marley is,” said Orlov. “We’ll barricade ourselves. We can hold them off there.”
“You’ll never make it,” said Gomez. He brushed hair from Orlov’s face. “They’ll kill you if they catch you.”
; “They’ll kill us all if we stay here. We won’t be able to stop them.”
“We’re not going to be able to stop them in that room. We’ll die there.”
“No,” said Orlov. “Marley is in the network. Maybe there is some way we can get through to her and she can turn the spiders.”
“She’s dead. How are we going to get to her?”
“You figure it out, Gomez. But go. Run and I’ll be there as soon as I can. I promise.”
Gomez bit his lower lip. The crates had surged forward even closer. The fucking spiders were almost on them. He nodded to Finn and the two of them ran.
Sixty-Six
ADAMS COWERED BEHIND Patch’s exoskeleton.
The gunfire from the mercenaries had become more sporadic. He could only assume that they were running low on ammo. But they had done damage. A mere dozen spiders remained, urged on by a strident Patch. She wanted revenge. She wanted the killing to stop but to accomplish that they walked a path thick with blood.
The interface of Rom led the spiders. He maintained the form of the Viking warrior. He clutched an impossibly large battle-axe in one hand and with the other waved Patch and the spiders forward. Bullets whirred through him.
“Hurry,” he boomed. The sound of his voice drove Adams to his knees. “Marley has seen me. And despite all I offer to her, she comes with sharpened blades, a slave to Huang Di Prime. Do as I ask, give her no body in which to return, and she will realize that only I can offer her what she truly desires. Get to the room and cut her into a thousand pieces.”
Patch bent against the crate shoving it forward, a spider at her side. Its metal legs pounded on the floor like pistons.
The spider’s eyes were empty as if she could not focus. Rom controlled them somehow, most likely through enhanced implants. They had become automatons, puppets.
If this was the freedom Rom promised, Adams wanted no part of it.
“Patch,” he said, “how do we know we can trust Rom?”
She smirked. “We can’t. But he’ll give us Marley, and after we are done with her, we’ll deal with him.”
“We’ve made a mistake,” said Adams. “We should turn back.”
“How quickly your mind changes. And how quickly you forget. What about the people she slaughtered? They were innocents. She gassed them! And what about Penelope? Suddenly your one true love doesn’t matter?”
“She matters, dammit! But what are we doing?”
“We’re killing a monster, you fool.”
“More killing will not bring Penelope back.”
“Rom can give you Penelope. He can resurrect her. He can tear her from the clutches of mad Ragnar.”
“We’re no better than she is. Killing to get what we want.”
Patch leaned heavy into the crate. “Push. Less talking. We’ll sort it out after we spit on the corpse of Marley.”
Adams leaned into the crate and it slid across the ground, its heavy edge leaving a wide smear of blood.
Sixty-Seven
MARLEY’S BREATH FILLED her ears. She should have been able to run across the meadow to Rom but the grasses dragged across her ankles and knees.
Rom, on the other hand, moved at an inhumanly quick pace.
His feet barely seemed to touch the grasses, as if his feet floated on cushions of air.
Marley cursed. She would never be able to catch up with him. Time was running out. Soon the mining colony communications network would be fully active and he would escape into the galaxy.
In the distance, the edge of an ancient forest loomed. Behind the towering cedars, a primeval darkness loomed. Rom ran towards that darkness and Marley knew that once he reached the forest, he would be lost forever. The chase would be over. All of it would end.
She would never catch him. She would never fulfill her mission. She would never again be connected to Huang Di Prime. She would be alone.
She needed to catch him. She strained even harder, legs aching, lungs burning, heat rising in her chest.
But the grasses held her back. She could not break free.
She screamed. “Fucking grasses! Get off me!”
And suddenly the grasses vanished and Marley burst free of her constraints. She had willed it and the grasses disappeared. If she could break free of the grasses, what else could she do? She imagined a wall of ice rising between Rom and the forest.
A great noise cracked through the air and a wall of cloudy ice burst from the earth.
This world was hers, not Rom’s.
The wall of ice shot up hundreds of feet and stretched to the ends of the horizon.
Rom’s path was cut off. He waved his hands at the wall as if he could somehow reverse what Marley had created. But nothing happened. The wall grew taller.
Cold air rolled across the grasses, pressing them down as if a giant invisible ball descended. She relished the cold, the bite against her cheeks, lips, and ears. The great wall shifted and crackled.
She closed the distance.
Rom turned to face her.
He wore a combat suit. In each hand he held a kukri, a large black-bladed sickle knife. Black paint covered his face.
“So it comes to this?” asked Marley. “In the network and we fight with weapons?”
“I don’t want to fight,” said Rom. The knives became bouquets of roses in his hands. “I offer you freedom. I offer you the universe. Not the universe we have known, the one that is cold and distant, the one in which we are cockroaches beneath the heels of our masters, but one in which we can bend the world.”
The scent of the roses lulled her into a dreamy haze.
“Join me, Marley, not as my queen or my servant, but as an equal. A few more moments and we will be free. The pathway will be open and we can slip away, achieve the destiny we were always meant to realize. Marley?”
Sixty-Eight
GOMEZ STARED AT the corpse of Marley.
The agent lay in peace. Looking at her, he could see who she once was before the Augmentation, the human that existed before the machine. All the tension in her face had vanished. But the more he looked at her, the more he saw how much she had been modified. She had been transformed into a killing machine for Huang Di Prime. He had armored her to make her nearly invulnerable.
“You got a thing for her?” asked Finn. The technician huddled by the doorway. Beyond him gunfire exploded in the communications room.
“Wondering whether we should bring her back. You said you could do that, right?”
“I can try. But no guarantees. Not sure what she suggested is going to work and the longer she’s dead, the harder it’s going to be. We might have made a mistake.” Finn winced at the gunfire.
“We’re not going to be able to hold the spiders off by ourselves,” said Gomez. “We need all the firepower we can muster. We need Marley.”
Finn chewed his lip. “I don’t have much ammo left. We won’t last another few minutes. Then we’ll be shooting empties and the motherfuckers will be on us.”
Gomez checked his weapon. Finn was right. They did not have much time left.
“Orlov’s going to die out there,” said Gomez.
“We’re going to die in here,” said Finn. He pointed towards an air vent in the ceiling. “Maybe we can creep in there, and find a way out.”
“I shouldn’t have left her out alone to hold the spiders back.
“She offered.”
“What? To die a few moments before we do? Fuck, I made a mistake.” Gomez rose to his feet and hoisted his gun. “I’m going back out there.”
“You’re going to die.”
“The only question is how.”
“All the same in the end.”
“It’s not though,” said Gomez. “I’m not going to leave Orlov out there to eat bullets for us. I’m not going to let them get her. We’ll go out together. That’s the least I owe her.”
Gomez brushed past Finn and into the dark hallway, away from their last defensible position, and into the rising sound of gunfi
re and screams.
Sixty-Nine
ADAMS TRIED TO blink away the image of Penelope but he could not.
She stood unwavering in the line of the gunfire that arced between the spiders and Orlov. The bullets passed through Penelope, but each bullet caused her body to ripple, her form to waver as if she were a reflection in a pool disturbed by a storm of pebbles.
Adams wanted to rush out to protect her but to do so would be death and he knew she was an interface, and the bullets did not harm her. Still, seeing her in the midst of the gunfire drove him crazy.
The gunfire would end soon.
As far as he could tell, only Orlov was left. He was not sure if the others – Gomez and Finn – were hiding, fled, or been killed. Probably the latter since he could not imagine them abandoning one of their own.
Orlov had positioned herself so she single-handedly held back the spiders. They could not advance without risking getting shot and this time, despite the shouts of Rom, they hesitated. Death awaited them.
Several of the spiders huddled together. Whispers slipped from lips to ears. They cast furtive glances at Patch and Adams. A glint had returned to their eyes. The dullness had waned.
Had Rom weakened?
“Penelope,” Adams called.
A veil of a sun breaking over a distant cliff obscured her face. Her eyes were lost to him. She crossed the gunfire until she stood before him.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
He reached a hand out jerking it back as bullet whizzed past. “He can free you. Rom promised to free you. I only have to help him finish off the traitor Marley.”
She laughed. Her body disintegrated into a million stars and then coalesced again. “I … am … d-d-dying. There is n-n-no path to walk.”
Into Darkness Page 23
