The Chaos Chronicles

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  Ik made urgent sweeping gestures with his hands. Rasp. "—trying to find out—would not purposely do such a thing—never!"

  "What wouldn't he do?" Bandicut cried, turning between the Hraachee'an and the foreman-shadow. "What's gone wrong?"

  The floor shook, and there was a deep KERCHUNNNNK! that sounded like an enormous brace collapsing. The foreman-shadow cried out like violin strings breaking, and with a frantic wave swept most of the other shadow-people toward the recess where the first group had vanished. There was another flash, then they too were gone. The remaining three shadow-people hugged close to the consoles near the window.

  "My God, Ik—what's happening?"

  Ik touched the control pedestal, and for a few seconds, an atomic fire danced in his face. He looked dazed as he turned to Bandicut. "I believe the malfunction is spreading. I cannot decipher enough to be certain, but I think it was caused by the contamination that I told you of."

  Bandicut stared at Ik, open-mouthed. "The thing that caused the tornado, and the ice attack? Then what are we—oh, Ik, no." This was way out of Bandicut's league. Ik was going to intervene, to try to undo whatever it was that his friend Li-Jared might have done that had set off the contamination in a new round of destruction. "Ik, you aren't proposing we go up against that thing, are you?"

  "The shadow-people call it the—" rasp "—demon—bogey—" rasp rasp

  Bandicut could feel his translator-stones spinning through his thoughts, trying to find the right word.

  "—the—" rasp "—boojum." Ik snapped his mouth shut and turned to look out the window.

  Boojum.

  /// ??? ///

  Bandicut's mind was reeling. /Look under "fairy tales," Charlie. The Boojum was the deadliest kind of snark. This can't be real./

  Ik turned back. "It may be aware of us, as well."

  "Aware of us?" Bandicut stared out the window at irregularly erupting flames.

  "It seems that the boojum has seized control from the shadow-people. They are terrified of what it is doing, but they can't seem to stop it." Ik peered back out the window.

  /Hell's bells./ Bandicut turned, hesitantly, toward the consoles.

  /// What are you going to do? ///

  /I don't know. This has to be some sort of—I just thought maybe I should have a look at the console. It's probably just a big datanet, right?/

  With a strange mixture of confidence and desperation, he stepped to the nearest pedestal. The object mounted on top of it was neither a sculpture nor a console screen; however, within certain of its concave surfaces he found himself peering into places of deep and somehow distorted darkness—as though they were not quite part of this physical continuum. He felt a cold breeze ripple up his spine as he brushed his fingers over the surface. He couldn't quite discern the surface; his fingers slid off without any sensation of touch. But his gaze was caught. And now there were sparkling points of light down in the twisted darkness, and whispering voices that he could not quite understand. But he could not turn away from them.

  His wrists burned.

  /// The stones are trying . . . ///

  He shuddered, echoes reverberating of his melding with the translator back on Triton. But these voices were different; they chittered and shrieked coldly. He felt unwelcome here. But they were far from being in complete harmony; he was aware of many voices, controlling myriad systems and subsystems, and they were not all in agreement, not at all. They were screeching, crying, pattering, whispering, drumming.

  Nothing was clear, except certain unmistakable currents of power that ran through this thing he had touched. And he slowly became aware that he was dangerously close to getting in the way of that power . . .

  "Hraaachhh! John Bandicut!"

  Something was pulling on his arm. Ik. Bandicut struggled to wrench his eyes from the console. He felt one of those voices reaching up, catching, and tugging at his thoughts. It held him for an instant of glaring scrutiny, then let go—but not before he felt the thing identify and recognize him. As it released him, shivering, he broke the contact and backed away from the console, reeling dizzily. That thing he had just touched was overriding all of the safety controls out in the factory.

  He didn't know what it was. But he knew this: he had just revealed himself to something within the system, something that hadn't quite known him before, something . . . malevolent.

  "John! Come!" Ik pulled him over to the window. The remaining three shadow-people were fluttering like unhappy bats at their presence, but Ik rasped something sharp at them, and they kept their distance.

  Bandicut tried to see what was happening beyond the window, but it was like trying to pick out a landscape at night by flickering lightning. Smoke. Shadows. Strobelike flashes. When they were gone, he did not know what he had seen.

  "We must go through," Ik said.

  "Why? What can we do?"

  "We must try to correct the malfunction. Li-Jared went that way, and something went wrong as he passed. He may have been trying to prevent it! But this is stronger than he was!"

  The boojum. Bandicut shivered, remembering the presence he had just revealed himself to. He stared through the window, trembling with fear. What am I doing mixed up in this? he thought. "Ik, I don't even know what that is out there."

  "I understand. You need not come. But I must go." Ik strode to the place where the shadow-people had disappeared. The remaining shadow-people quivered, but did not interfere. Ik peered about, looking for a way to actuate the doorway. "I could certainly use your help, though."

  Groaning, Bandicut waved Copernicus over. He studied the wall. /Any ideas?/

  /// Try pressing your right-wrist stone there. ///

  Bandicut felt a twinge as he touched the wall. A flash of light made him blink, and he was aware of something opening, and closing, and then he was standing in near-darkness.

  They were on an immense platform that jutted out from a wall into a space of gargantuan proportions—a cavern of darkness broken by eye-searing flashes of light, and resonating with ominous booms. Bandicut shaded his eyes. It was the same view they had seen from the window, but enormously magnified in intensity. The flashes fleetingly illuminated an astoundingly long, convoluted structure that stretched from right to left as far as the eye could see. He could not begin to guess what it was.

  On his left, he saw fluttering black shapes, almost invisible except when a strobelike flash lit the place. Ik strode toward them.

  Whreeeek! Whreeeek! Whreeeek!

  Bandicut could barely hear the shadow-people over the general din, and he couldn't hear Ik talking to them at all. /Mokin' A, Charlie, what is this place?/

  "John Bandicut!" Ik shouted. "There are explosions on the factory floor! It's got to be shut down!"

  As he followed Ik across the platform, his eyes seemed to adjust to the contrast of light and dark. The shadow-people were clustered on the extreme left, with more of them fluttering down a series of ramps beyond the edge of the platform. Out in the mammoth cavern, Bandicut was beginning to make out more clearly the outlines of immense machinery, though it was still etched in shadow and strobe. Tremendous electrical discharges repeatedly shattered the darkness, but the effect was dimmed now, as if he were wearing dark glasses. /Are you doing that?/ he murmured, trying to comprehend the scene.

  /// Does it help? ///

  /Yeah, but I still can't make sense of it. For all I know, they could be building a starship in here./ The sense of enormity nearly overwhelmed his senses.

  /// Bigger than that, I think.

  I'll bet Ik was right.

  It might be a star-spanner. ///

  Before he could ask the quarx to elaborate, he saw a gout of fire below the edge of the platform, jumping and spreading, and billowing clouds of smoke. Only a little of the smoke reached the platform, but it had the biting, acrid smell of a chemical blaze. "Ik!" he coughed, backing away from the edge. "What are you going to do?"

  Ik scanned the scene with his binoculars, not answer
ing.

  A group of the shadow-people fluttered off the platform and down a spindly walkway that seemed suspended from nothing. Whreeek! Whreeek! The foreman-shadow glided toward Ik, shaking his triangle hands.

  Ik lowered his binocs and gestured. Whatever he said was lost in the din.

  Bandicut suddenly noticed Copernicus moving dangerously close to the edge of the platform. He stepped forward to call the robot back. As he peered over the edge, he glimpsed an immense, bottomless well, a tremendously wide shaft dropping away into infinity. His knees almost buckled at the sight. The shaft was half-obscured by flame and smoke, but far below, it was luminous with ghostly plasmas, glowing gases writhing upward in spirals. A great flame billowed out, closer to Bandicut, obscuring the view. But he'd seen enough to give him a sudden intuition that whatever that great shaft was, there was something wrong inside it—something in the way the plasma was surging upward. The nearer flames were bad enough; but if all that plasma energy far below were loosed upward in a single, great conflagration . . . The prospect terrified him.

  Much closer below, but lit by the glow of the plasma, he glimpsed shadow-people streaking along an access path. They seemed to be running toward the fire.

  /// They must be trying to reach

  a local control substation

  to shut things down. ///

  /But if they couldn't stop it from that control room—/

  /// Something must have been blocking them. ///

  Bandicut's thoughts were interrupted by Ik backing into him. The Hraachee'an was pointing down, shouting something to the foreman-shadow. "Control there, near the—" rasp "—tube!"

  Hreeek! ". . . Yes! . . ." Hreeek! Hreeek!

  So there were, indeed, control substations down there. Bandicut squinted down into the dizzying emptiness, and caught a faceful of smoke. Flames erupted below, rising not quite to the height of the platform, but high enough to send him reeling backward, coughing violently. He had glimpsed shadow-people on a catwalk down there, dangerously close to the flames. He blinked smoke from his tearing eyes. "What are they trying to do?" he yelled, coughing.

  The foreman-shadow fluttered around him, like a family of bats wheeling about his head. Skeeeuuuuuuuu! the foreman-shadow wailed, close to his ear.

  Charlie did something to interpret, and a visual image unfolded in his mind: three streaks of light like pointers, marking separate locations below the position of that team of shadow-people. Was that where the control units were? He got just enough of a look to make his head swim.

  A moment later, somewhere in the middle of the dark well below, he saw a great circle of plasma shiver free of the cylinder wall and begin rippling upward. The sight made him freeze like a deer in a spotlight. The glowing gases moved fast, and when they erupted from the top of the plasma tube, a powerful burst of flame shot out from somewhere beneath the platform, fanned upward by the plasma stream. Bandicut crouched for cover, but not before he saw the accessway below—and the shadow-people on it—curl and shrivel in the flame. Then it flashed up past the platform with a roar that sent all of them reeling back to the wall.

  When the blast subsided, the air was filled with a keening Skrreeeeee! Skrreeeeee! Bandicut and Ik staggered to their feet and returned cautiously to the edge. The foreman-shadow was wailing and swinging his triangle-hands in grief, or fury. The accessway below was gone, and the shadow-people with it. The foreman-shadow screeched, then darted off the left side of the platform, leading the remaining group of his people down another pathway.

  Bandicut stared after them, stunned. He felt as if it had been humans who had died moments ago. He felt Charlie struggling to say something, but the quarx was shaking in the shelter of his mind, even more affected than he was by the deaths of the shadow-people. /Charlie, I—/ He couldn't speak either.

  With an urgent cry, Ik herded them to the right, opposite the way the foreman-shadow and the others had gone. The flames cast enough light for Bandicut to make out a spiderweb of catwalks. Below, something seemed to be drawing the fire down into the huge plasma tube, which was flashing ominously.

  Ik pointed. "We must go that way! As Li-Jared did!"

  Bandicut stared at him, dumbfounded.

  "They chased him away, but he must have been trying to help. There must be a way to a control unit around all this." Ik paced along the righthand edge of the platform, studying the layout.

  "Ik, if the shadow-people can't—"

  His words were drowned out by a series of ear-numbing thuds, like artillery bursts. Bandicut heard Ik's next words through an after-rumble. "They think we and Li-Jared—" There were more bursts. Ik urged him toward a narrow ramp against the wall. It slanted down toward a maze of walkways that appeared suspended from air and darkness. Bandicut tried to yell a question to Ik. But Ik kept pointing. "Hurry!"

  Bandicut trotted down the ramp. Copernicus was behind him, his left wheels barely on the walkway, Napoleon and Bandicut's bag swaying precariously on his back. Ik followed Coppy. "I told them we would try here!"

  Bandicut nodded and kept going. He was terrified of losing his balance. The ramp intersected a wider walkway, which extended out from the wall. They were now suspended in the air, well off to the side of the platform. At the next intersection, Ik pointed down, and they descended, switching back and forth, until Bandicut was completely disoriented. Flames billowed some distance away. He glanced up, and was stunned to see a black mass above them. They were well below the platform, in the abyss of darkness. He had no idea where the shadow-people had gotten to. "Ik, if you know where we're going," he gasped, "why don't you take the lead?"

  "Hraahh! I fear you may stumble, or pause, and I won't see you."

  Bandicut drew a shuddering breath. "Yeah," he said, and plunged on downward. Thunderbolts flashed in the distance, but from here at least, he could no longer see the plasma tube.

  His relief was short-lived. He turned out onto a spindly, swaying catwalk, and after about ten meters, glanced down and saw billowing tongues of fire, clouds of smoke, and luminous plasma ghosts shimmering below him. He sucked a breath, every muscle in his body clenching.

  "Hrrrrrlll! Come back!"

  Twisting fearfully, he saw Ik and Copernicus back at the last intersection. The catwalk was too narrow for the robot. He choked as smoke wafted into his face. He tried to turn around, but the catwalk shook too much. There was nothing but a thin guide wire for safety, and it felt as if it would shred his hands if he gripped it too tightly. He would have to trust to his balance. He took a step backward, and another . . .

  By the time he was back with Ik and Copernicus, his legs were buckling. He gasped and waved Ik onward, then followed Copernicus. He practically kept his eyes shut for the next few minutes. He tried to emulate Coppy's fearlessness, but that was beyond him. The only thing that kept him going was terror of being left behind.

  At last Ik pointed to their goal, still below them: a large vertical structure like a pillar, rising from darkness below to darkness above. Encircling it was a small platform. And on the platform was something on a pedestal. A control unit.

  He still couldn't see how to get there from here, so he wasn't ready to count it in their grasp. They were completely unprotected from the plasma tube and the flames, just like the shadow-people who had been destroyed. He glanced around through the murky darkness, trying to locate the foreman-shadow and his workers. Against the massive bulk of dark machinery, the strobing arcs, and the ghostly fire of the plasma, he had no hope. But Ik was peering through his binocs, to the left. "There!" Ik shouted, pointing toward a nest of spindly walkways on the far side of the plasma tube. Bandicut was amazed to see several moving black spots against an eruption of flames. The flames seemed to be blocking the shadow-people's path. The spots retreated in another direction, and he lost sight of them.

  /// They're trying to do the same thing we are. ///

  Bandicut grunted—and lunged forward in terror as a flame blossomed behind him, enveloping the walkway he had just
crossed. He followed Ik and Copernicus over a long catwalk, all the way across to the massive pillar that Ik had pointed to. Looking down, he could see, against the glow of the plasma, a jumbled landscape of struts and braces and incomprehensible hardware. If he fell from here, he wouldn't fall into the plasma fires. He'd break his neck on alien machinery, instead.

  "I cannot see which way to the controls!" Ik cried. The control platform was almost directly below them now. An incomprehensible spiderweb of walkways twisted around it. "I think we must—"

  Ik was drowned out by a rumble as a tremendous cloud of acrid smoke boiled up past them.

  "—go different ways!" he finished, pointing out two possible routes down. Bandicut swallowed grit and tried to follow the traceries of metal. Neither of them looked like paths that Copernicus could follow.

  Ik motioned to him to try a zigzag walkway that hugged the pillar. Ik would try a narrow catwalk that veered away from the pillar, but connected with others angling back at a lower level. Bandicut shouted to Copernicus, "You stay here!" Without waiting for a reply, he raced down a rippling flight of something like stairs, while Ik darted out across seemingly empty space.

  The stairs led to a ramp, then more steps. Flames erupted closer and closer to him as he hurried downward. The heat came in blasts, and he caught himself once on a stanchion, to keep from plunging over the edge. But his gaze went down, and he saw something happening far down in the plasma tube that made him breathless with fear: a whirling chain reaction of discharges that blossomed and multiplied in the space of a second, creating an intense and accelerating swirl of blazing plasma. It appeared to be building out of control.

  He heard a crash and looked up. Above him, a walkway had broken under Ik's weight. The Hraachee'an was dangling from a section of catwalk, swinging helplessly over empty space. "IK!" Bandicut shouted. He started to run back to help his friend.

  "NO NO NO—HRAAHHH!" Ik bellowed. "GO ON! GO ON! GO ON!"

  He knew Ik was right. It would do no good to save his friend from falling, only to have them all die in a massive plasma explosion. "Hang on!" he screamed, and continued his descent. He could see the control pedestal below him now. It was on a small platform set at the end of a short walkway sticking out from the huge pillar. Bandicut staggered to a halt next to a ladder that provided access down the pillar to the walkway. His heart nearly pounded out of his chest. He swung himself around and kicked with his feet to find the rungs. They were awkwardly shaped—more like smooth, rounded protrusions than rungs, and set too far apart. Nevertheless, he began working his way down.