Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  The second soldier holding Wen had let him go and was reaching for his weapon. The bug lanced his chest with both forelegs and then opened them outward as the other soldiers leveled their weapons at it and fired. The nerve guns had no effect.

  Behind them another bug unfolded from the main hatch like a nightmare flower and swarmed the closest soldier with horrifying speed as yet another drone blossomed into the bomber.

  Broben saw a service .45 in a sludge of bloody chunks two feet away. He reached for it, but his hand would only flop like a landed fish. He tried to get up but his legs only kicked stupidly.

  A bug stopped with one leg planted in the slurry of blood and entrails and fine circuitry that had been the man who’d beat hell out of Wen. It turned toward Broben with a nauseating jittery motion. A foreleg came up.

  Broben tried again to grab the pistol. The bug rushed to him and the thin, sharp-jointed legs straddled him. He looked up into glassy eyes or cameras above a delicate fringe of waving feelers. He tried to raise a hand against the looming thing, tried to will himself to stand. His body only jerked and flailed.

  Something pressed against his neck and he felt a sharp sting. His muscles relaxed and he slumped over into the warm blood on the deck. He sat up immediately and raised his fists to the bug. It turned away and scurried into the radio room.

  Broben looked at his hands. He had raised his hands. He had sat up.

  He braced himself against the bulkhead and pushed himself up to his feet. The ringing in his ears had lessened. He had to piss so badly it burned.

  Another bug unfolded through the main hatch. This one held a folded belt of .50-caliber ammunition and a bundle of flight suits. It picked its way past the mutilated soldiers and immobilized crew, tracking through the thick red curd that now runneled along the center of the deck. It stopped in front of Broben and held the ammo belt out to him.

  Broben bent to take it but the belt was heavier than he could carry. The bug set it down beside him in a thickening tapioca of blood and organs, then skittered off toward the bomb bay.

  The other crewmen were now struggling to their feet. Broben staggered to Wen. The flight engineer looked like something a mob had worked over with tire irons, but he was still breathing. It was more than Broben had expected.

  Wen opened his eyes and blinked away blood.

  “Monkey wrench?” Broben said.

  *

  The crewmen stared dumbfounded as the bugs speedily returned the ammo belts to their cans and convoluted feeds and expertly reloaded the machine guns.

  “Just ignore ’em,” Wen called out from the deck, where Broben tended his injuries as best he could from one of the bomber’s rudimentary first-aid kits. The only pain med in the zippered canvas wallet was morphine, which Wen refused, so Broben couldn’t do much more than mop him up.

  A viscous soup of blood and organs and biomechanical body parts had collected down the center of the main compartment like bilgewater, and Sten was using a seatboard to bale the vivid slop out the reopened bomb bay doors. It smacked the ground with a sound like a wet mop slapped against a concrete wall.

  “So you just say the secret word and your little pals know to come rescue us?” Broben asked as he taped a Carlisle bandage onto Wen’s nose, which looked like a hammered tomato.

  Wen shook his head. It looked like it hurt. “Not exactly,” he said. “It just meant Sic ’em. Like an SOS to every bug in the place.” He chuckled and then winced.

  Broben sat straighter. “Wait a second. That’s happening all over this joint?” He waved at the carnage.

  Wen nodded. “Them poor sumbitches are probably busier’n a cat burying shit on a marble floor right now,” he said. His grin was ghastly.

  thirty-five

  Yone set his palm against a gray door in the white corridor. “Here,” he said, and shut his eyes. “I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?” His eyeballs moved beneath the lids.

  Farley and Wennda traded a look, and each knew that the other was remembering Yone saying I don’t feel entirely rational. To humor him Wennda went to the door and set a hand against it. The moment her fingertips touched it she snatched it back. She stepped back and frowned at her hand.

  “Did you get shocked?” Farley asked.

  “Not—shocked. It felt alive.” She kept looking at her hand.

  “Wennda.”

  She looked up as if surprised to see him there.

  “You all right?” asked Farley.

  “I’m fine, why?”

  “You’re breathing hard. Your face is red and you’re sweating like crazy.”

  She set the hand against her chest. Her heart was hammering like mad. “I feel like I just ran,” she said. “No. Like I want to run.”

  “I think we better get away from here.”

  “It’s here,” said Yone.

  They turned at his voice. Yone looked and sounded like a man talking in his sleep. “In here,” he said.

  “Good,” said Farley. “It can stay there.”

  “Maybe you should touch the door,” suggested Wennda.

  “And maybe I shouldn’t. Because from where I’m standing I’m the only one of us making any sense.”

  Yone slapped the door with a palm. “Here!” he said.

  “I don’t think that trick’s going to work this time,” Farley said. “We’re looking for a way out, not a door that gives us the willies.”

  “Not the door.” Yone pressed his raw cheek against the door. He looked purely crazy. Like a spurned lover haunting the porch of his obsession. “The locus,” he said. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “Why on God’s green earth would I want to do that,” said Farley. But he stood behind Yone and put his hand against the door—

  *

  Farley had once donated plasma in the “Blood for Britain” drive. They’d drawn blood and centrifuged it to separate the plasma, then hung a bottle of his whole-blood cells on a stand and slid an IV needle into his arm. But the cells weren’t body temperature anymore, and he could feel them coursing up his arm until they reached his heart. Like a cold wire drawn through the beating life of him. He’d felt a brief fear that his heart would stop, and then the cells warmed and his apprehension passed. But there had been that unexpected moment of mortal dread.

  *

  —put his hand against the door and something not electricity coursed up his arm. Some cold surge that vividly recalled those blood cells taken from his body and rendered strange and reintroduced. A snake in his blood sidewinding toward his core, and then a flooding in his heart both foreign and familiar. Pure and powerful and formless and mindless. And yet he sensed intent.

  Beside him Yone laughed lightly. It seemed to come from far away. “They made a god,” he said.

  Farley’s scalp crawled. He snatched his hand back from the door. The sudden painful silence made him aware that he’d been hearing a sustained ringing.

  Wennda was looking at him. Her flushed appearance a bit reduced. Had she said something?

  Shake it off, Captain Midnight. Farley turned and pulled Yone from the door. Yone flinched violently and said something unintelligible, then twisted his arm away from Farley and pressed himself back against the door like a frightened boy clinging to his mother’s legs.

  “Did you feel it?” Wennda asked.

  Farley looked at his hand. “I felt something,” he admitted. “I don’t know that I’d say it was alive, but it was something. I think we’re going to have to drag him with us.” He stopped in the midst of waving at the door. It stood open and Yone was gone.

  *

  Curving rows of workstations faced a dull gray screen that occupied most of the front wall. An overturned tumbler at one station, its contents long ago evaporated. Farley would have bet his crush hat it had been coffee. It was the first genuinely human thing he had seen down here.

  On the left side of the viewscreen wall was a door with a handle and a square window at head height. Farley tried the handle. The door was unlocked
.

  Farley looked at Wennda. She shrugged. He opened the door and stepped through.

  Immediately he felt the overwhelming sense of invasion he had felt when he had touched the hallway door. A sense of power, of intent. A wash of bright green light, loud ringing in his ears. Urge to run, blind panic breaking through.

  He stood on a small railed platform at the top of a narrow treadplate staircase that descended at least two hundred feet along a sheer stone wall. It looked out over a space that would have fit a dozen typhon repair bays. The distant walls were crowded with pipework, beams, ladders, railed walkways, catwalks, stairs.

  On the floor of that vast space was a machine the size of a battleship.

  Farley felt sudden vertigo at the unexpected vista. The railed platform seemed precarious and insubstantial. He pressed back against the opened door.

  Beside him a voice said, “Here.” He looked to see a woman pushing a wheeled chair into the doorway. Wennda? What was she doing here? He hadn’t seen her in years. No, that wasn’t right. He had just been with her. Where had he been with her?

  Wennda left the chair in the doorway and Farley stepped away from the door. It swung and stopped against the chair. Wennda stepped out onto the platform and gasped at the view. She clutched the railing and Farley grabbed her shoulders. They looked down upon the great machine.

  It seemed to float above the flat stone acreage, an island unto itself. Countless components, disks, rings, cables, pipes, a band of something like giant pegboard set with evenly spaced staples the size of goalposts. The whole conglomeration forming a series of nested cylinders telescoping horizontally out into this vast space. The larger end was surrounded by a vertical octagonal framework set with jointed silver ducts banded with bright orange and wound around with miles of bare copper wire like an electric hub motor. The enormous octagon did not touch the cylinder at any point, and Farley saw nothing supporting it. It seemed to float before the huge machine. The green glow that now suffused everything was painfully bright in the empty center of the octagon, though from where Farley stood the nested cylinders blocked its source.

  Wennda pointed down the stairs. Far below them a lone figure descended.

  Motion made Farley glance at the door. He saw Wennda push a workstation chair into the doorway. He saw himself let go of the door. Saw the door stop against the chair.

  Farley shook his head. What the hell?

  At the rail he pulled Wennda closer. The smell of her hair. She turned her head and pointed down the stairs. Far below a lone figure descended.

  Wennda motioned that they should follow. Farley nodded. Neither of them spoke. As if it were too loud to talk. He set a hand on the rail and went down the stairs as fast as he could. Wennda’s steps behind him. There was no wind but Farley felt he faced into a howling gale. He slowed. Was he climbing? It felt like he was going up.

  Far below Yone continued his descent.

  Farley looked back at Wennda. She pointed down the stairs. The door stopped against the chair. The smell of her hair.

  Farley halted and grabbed the rail and closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I’m here. I’m Joseph Farley. Wennda is here with me. We are trying to get our friend Yone back so we can leave here.

  Pounding on the diamondplate steps. Farley opened his eyes to see Wennda catching up to him. Her eyes wide in surprise. “Joe?” she said. Not asking if he were okay. Asking if it were really him. How long has it been for her just now?

  He heard himself say, “We should go back.”

  Near the bottom of the stairs Yone vaulted the railing. Farley watched him from far away on the field-sized floor, aware of the mass of the machine behind him. On the narrow staircase higher up stood two figures. One of them was Wennda. The other was Joe Farley.

  When did we get down here? How did we get ahead of Yone? Of—ourselves?

  “What’s happening?”

  Farley turned at Wennda’s voice. The machine loomed like a metal cloud behind her. Cradled by a gantry that could have held a zeppelin. As Farley watched, the entire machine seemed to come apart like an exploded-view drawing. Millions of pieces and no two touching. Farley felt drawn thin. The pieces came together. The door stopped against the chair. Yone vaulted the rail.

  “It looks like a dynamo!” Farley told Wennda as they hurried down the stairs.

  “I don’t know what that is!” Wennda shouted back.

  The green light was so much brighter here on the floor of the cavernous space. It flickered in the center of the octagon that floated at the wider end of the machine. Power. Distortion. Intent. Here was the source.

  Farley looked for Wennda but she was gone. The machine was gone. He stood alone on the floor of an artificial cavern that was larger than any building he had ever seen. No pipes, no beams, no staircase slanting down the cliff of wall. Just green light and empty space and one man. And a sense of immeasurable time, brittle decay, inert dissolution.

  “Wennda?” Farley said into the dark.

  “Here.” Wennda pushed a workstation chair into the doorway. There was no wind but Farley felt he faced into a howling gale. “Joe?” she said, but did not seem to know him.

  Joe. My name is Joseph Mayhew Farley. I’m right here. We should go back.

  The green light strobed and Joe Farley shielded his eyes and leaned into it as he struggled forward. Yone vaulted the rail. The door hit the chair.

  Something touched his arm and it was Wennda and he loved her and he was an old man lonely without her all these years and he told Shorty how he saw the woman that he wanted painted on his bomber and he sat at the controls at the end of his long life and wondered if there lived still in the air some path that could lead back to her. “I’m a memory of the future,” she told him. “An echo across time.” And then the sun came on.

  *

  A small man stood before him. Scabbed face, limpid eyes, filthy jumpsuit. A weak man to all appearances, and yet Farley knew otherwise. He did not seem to see Farley but stared at some point past him, tracking something moving like a cat seeing a ghost. Farley turned to look but there was nothing there. Green light and an empty cavern and a sense of brittle time.

  “Where are we?” Farley asked. “Where’s Wennda?”

  “We are at the heart of the locus,” Yone said. “I am so glad you found me.” He started to walk but Farley moved in his way.

  “Why did you come here?” Farley asked. He waved to indicate the vast and empty space.

  “I was called.” A religious fervor on his injured face. “We were called here.”

  “You said they made a god.”

  “Did I? How embarrassing.” He did not look embarrassed. His eyes were bright. “I believe I was not entirely in my right mind. The locus seems to be affecting us. Our brains. Maybe reality. How would one know which?”

  Farley held up a hand. “Just help me find Wennda so we can get the hell out of here.”

  To Farley’s surprise Yone put both hands on Farley’s arms and bowed his head. “My friend,” he said, “there is nothing in this world that I want more.”

  “But how do we get back?” Farley asked, glancing around the featureless space. “Where did everything go?”

  Yone stepped back and looked up. Farley thought of Wennda looking at the artificial sky and shouting I want more time! He looked up at the cavern sky and closed his eyes.

  *

  You can’t prepare yourself. There’s no deep breath to take, no armor to put on. Whatever god you pray to when the flak begins to burst can hold no jurisdiction here. Here the time is all a box of jumbled letter blocks. You must hold on to your sense of sequence, distill If A then B. Connect effects with causes to discern the proper order. The time fragments, reality fragments. You fragment. A bunch of chemicals organized into cells. A jumble arranged by the movement of time. Alive and aware and affecting. Actions matter every bit as much as chance. Hold onto that. To you. To Wennda. Your sense of her. Her face on the ship that brought you here. You are connecte
d.

  Go.

  *

  It hit him like a shot of whiskey on an empty stomach. Farley had to fight to stay upright. He looked up at the distant cavern ceiling and felt that he was falling.

  Directly ahead the enormous octagon hovered just outside the rim of the largest cylinder of the vast machine Farley thought of as the dynamo. A conical projection from the middle of the cylinder pointed at the center of the octagon. At the point of the cone the green light was unbearably bright. Afterimages trailed when Farley looked away. He heard a steady noise like the soft buzz of a fluorescent light with dirty poles.

  The windless gale roared silently. A hurricane inside himself.

  He stood behind Yone on a small railed platform beside a wall of pale green light so bright that Yone was a silhouette before him. The platform rested atop a spindly metal pole like a cherry picker rising from a catwalk fifty feet below. The catwalk itself an insubstantial span a hundred feet above the ground.

  Farley gripped the thin low railing with both hands. A ringing in his ears so loud it hurt.

  Yone did not seem to see him but stared out at the wall of brilliant light. Farley shouted Yone’s name but Yone did not react. Instead he braced himself against the rail and leaned out into that space and put his silhouetted hand out toward the coruscating sheet of light. On the other side of it Farley made out the dim shape of a long slim cone that tapered to a point, like an enormous spearhead that almost touched the wall of light.

  Yone turned back and Farley put a hand on his shoulder. Yone looked at him like a man accosted by a stranger raving in a different language. Not a hint of recognition in his eyes.

  “We have to find Wennda,” Farley said.

  Yone pointed down.

  “There’s nothing—” Farley broke off.

  A hundred fifty feet away he saw Wennda’s foreshortened figure walking toward the base of the machine. Her long shadow flickered.

  “Wennda!” Farley’s throat felt scoured as he shouted down at her. “Wennda!”