35
COURSE CORRECTION
WHEN I REACHED the top of the circular ladder, I found myself alone with Wreg, in a room filled with so much organic material the walls were a deep, forest green.
Sensing movement as I climbed out of the hole in the floor, I looked up at an even denser piece of wall over one of the four doors leading out of the room.
Something there caught my attention––and held it.
I continued staring there as I straightened, both of my feet now on the room’s floor.
I couldn’t have said what it was I felt, not at first.
The surfaces up high shimmered liquidly as I watched, rippling like skin under a hand, or the undulation of dense muscle. I stared, fascinated as the skin rippled again, making its way around to another corner of the room. The movement was snake-like, disturbingly sensual. The smooth uniformity of it unnerved me as it rippled back the way it had come.
I found myself more and more sure it was a single consciousness.
I stepped out of the way of the ladder, but my attention remained riveted on that piece of wall. Wreg was too focused on bringing up the rest of the team to notice.
My light found the boundaries of the presence I felt.
It was definitely a machine of some kind––but it was also alive. I couldn’t quite pull apart the machine side of things, but I felt it as a set of pre-programmed instructions, like the creature’s free will was ripped away from it, its mind confined to a series of narrow lines.
Even so, it wasn’t like a normal organic.
Reading it with my light came closer to reading a highly-intelligent animal.
I followed the presence of the machine as it reconfigured around where we stood. I saw it ripple around the rim of the room again, faster, that time––and realized there were two of them.
A separate but related organism formed a band at the part of the wall near the high ceiling.
Riveted, but also faintly disturbed, I walked a little further away from the opening in the floor, giving a bare glance to the equipment in the room, which seemed to be centered around some kind of power generator. Whatever those other things were, they looked much more like regular “dead” machines. The generator took up most of the high-ceilinged space, surrounded by walls covered in paneled readings. Even the clearly organic parts of those throbbed with a low-level hum that didn’t interest my light, at least not the way the walls did above.
I watched the wall ripple backwards again, and felt that glimmer of presence strengthen. Its mate near the ceiling followed it back when it returned, until they merged into a single organism once more, pooling liquidly right above where we stood.
Something in the presences weirdly reminded me of Cass's boyfriend, Baguen.
Something in the way their aleimic light moved, almost as if––
My mind froze.
We were being scanned.
For a bare second, I just studied the tendrils the machine aimed at us. The thing deepened its scan, honing in on me, but cautiously, almost as if it was looking at me with its eyes, trying to determine if I was friend or foe.
My heart leapt to my throat as the pieces fell into place.
The damned thing wasn’t just alive––it was sentient.
My breath stopped in my lungs, my heart lurched sideways. I didn’t have time to think about all of the ramifications of its sentience, but my mind clicked forward, forcing me brutally into the cold hard facts of the situation.
My shield wouldn’t work on it. Not with us this close. This thing was alive––more of a guard dog than a machine. It could actually see us.
Once it figured out we weren’t supposed to be there, it would kill us.
Panicking, I threw up a wall of images to hide our exact physical location.
Like a mirror, I reflected the room back at the living wall. Realizing the wall could feel Barrier imprints as well as physical data, and might notice a blank spot in the room––too little light as opposed to too much––I infused the images with scatterings of aleimic imprints from the equipment and organic floors.
I felt the creature back off slightly.
I swore I felt puzzlement off the damned thing.
It still felt alive, and now like I’d managed to confuse it. It made me think of an overgrown child, or an animal sniffing something that abruptly disappeared––like a mouse vanishing into a crack in the wall. It continued to look where it thought I should be, bewildered when it couldn’t find me there.
Then it began probing more persistently in my direction, trying to find the edges of the screen I projected at it.
“Where’s Garensche?” I asked Wreg through the sub-vocals, feeling my chest tighten. I didn’t wait for his answer. “We need him. Now. I can’t keep this thing off for long.”
Wreg turned, staring at me, bewildered.
Then he looked up at the wall. Flinching when he saw the screen I was projecting there, he looked at me again, his face holding an open incredulity.
Immediately, he leaned down the ladder, gesturing swiftly with his hands.
I continued to shield his light, at the same time I projected and widened that screen of images at the organic wall to cover the others. I found the room’s cameras and covered those with the screen as well.
Turning my head only then, I watched Wreg’s face as he seemed to be communicating with someone else below.
The larger part of my mind continued to focus solely on the living machine. I tried to assess where it was in its examination of me.
It was starting to suspect the images it could see in our part of the room were originating from somewhere. It was looking for their source now. It kept picking up the different aleimic imprints I reflected and then losing them again before it could identify their source.
Looking around as I tried to figure how much of the wall itself the sentient portions covered, I subvocalized to Wreg again.
“Hurry,” I said, urgently. “It knows I’m here. It’s trying to figure out if I’m a friend or not. I can’t confuse it for much longer. I’m worried it might still be able to get behind me.”
Wreg looked at me. I saw understanding reach his eyes, even as he looked up, at the band of wall near the ceiling, where most of the presence seemed to live. I realized I’d been shielding them so closely, he hadn’t felt the organic wall’s sentience at all.
“Wreg,” I said.
Garensche’s face popped up over the rim of the hole in the floor.
I saw him look around, focus on the organic, then look back at me, his eyes incredulous.
“Tell him to stop gawking and do something,” I told Wreg through the transmitter. “I’m about to get us all killed. This thing is armed.”
Wreg gestured to Garensche in a series of quick motions and Garensche pulled himself rapidly and almost gracefully out of the hole. Leaping to his feet, he made it to the section of wall by the door in three strides. After ripping off his gloves, he laid his bare hands on the outside of the smooth surface.
I shielded his light when I felt it begin to spark, rising closer to the limits of the construct I’d redesigned, pretty much on the fly––twice, now. Watching him work, and splitting my consciousness yet again, I widened the shield more, still worried about the wall behind us.
“Is it going to set off an alarm, if he fucks with that thing?” I asked Wreg, still fighting panic.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I watched the thing noticing Garensche, doubtful.
“Gar will handle it.”
I saw the massive seer glance at me after Wreg gestured another series of hand gestures at him. He winked at me reassuringly, smiling. Then he turned his focus back on the wall.
Other seers were now coming out of the opening in the floor.
One by one, they all looked at the wall of images I was projecting, then at me, then at Garensche, then finally at Wreg, who only smiled, shrugging wryly.
I didn’t care anymore. I wa
s starting to feel schizophrenic with the projector I was holding, the shield around Garensche while he talked to the damned wall, and the construct the rest of them kept jostling by trying to scan me to see what it was I was doing exactly.
Finally, my patience grew thin.
“Do you mind reigning in the freak show tourists?” I said, still not moving my lips. “Tell them to back off a little, all right? It’s distracting.”
Wreg smiled, but I saw him turn his focus back on the others.
Their probes receded.
I relaxed a little once they had, focusing more of my attention on Garensche, and on the images I continued to flash for the wall. The wall seemed to be listening to the big seer now, which took some of the pressure off me trying to distract it alone.
Finally, Garensche looked over at me, gesturing something.
Fighting not to roll my eyes when I had to admit I didn’t understand him, I felt a chuckle in Wreg before his voice rose.
“Doesn’t know hand language,” he subvocalized to me, then likely gestured the same to Garensche. “Princess,” he said to me. “He is done. You can stop the image construct.”
“The what?” I asked him.
He pointed vaguely somewhere above our heads.
“What you are doing right now,” he said with amusement. “The dual-dimension image cage you used to save all of our lives.”
I started to ask again, then decided it didn’t matter.
After a hesitation where I worried they might be wrong, I let go of the movie screen of images I’d been managing for the organic wall. I watched it dissipate into the white of the larger construct I’d created over us. The physical image melted at the same time, leaving a view of the real room behind it.
I was shaking again, so I gripped my arms in the flak jacket, taking a breath before I focused back on the construct and on Wreg.
He was watching me curiously.
“Are you tired, princess?” he said. “Do you need light?”
I thought about it. I felt strung out, my nerves stretched to the consistency of an overwound guitar string. I’d nearly gotten all of us killed by reacting too slow, gawking up at that wall like a tourist, but my light felt okay.
I gestured negative.
Smiling a little again, he indicated with his head towards the organic wall.
“Come,” he said. “We are ahead of schedule.”
“Will that be a problem?” I said, using the subvocal also.
He laughed a little, but soundlessly. “No, princess. In fact, I think I will owe your husband a dinner when this is done.”
I didn’t ask him what he meant.
Garensche had coaxed the door into creating an opening for us in the liquid metal. Nervous, I glanced up at the cameras I could see in the corners of the room, but Garensche waved off my fears. When I glanced at Wreg, he smiled.
“Imaging is no longer functioning, princess. Do not worry. Gar is good at his job.”
Nodding, I clicked back into the plans, aligning my mental picture with the layout I’d studied before coming here.
I marveled again that Revik not only let me come along for this, he genuinely seemed to want me along. The old Revik would have left me in the helicopter, likely with some superficial task––assuming he didn’t handcuff me to the seat and have someone train a gun on me for good measure. Paranoid didn’t begin to cover it, when it came to his old views around my safety.
This new Revik only asked me if I was okay going in without him. He hadn’t really explained why, only that he needed us separated for tactical reasons.
He’d already been in the Registry building for over an hour when our helicopter landed. Wreg warned me all the way back in Rio that Revik couldn’t do much to help us during the preliminary phases of our work down here, either, since he’d be over ten blocks away and distracted with his own parts of the op.
We were going after the main prize, meaning the mainframe itself.
Revik was overseeing the destruction of the organic interfaces and their temporary servers, as well as coordinating the overall op, including transport out, and the teams working to disable both the satellites and the organic storage located in various corners of the globe. Since the SCARB Registry building was where they kept the prisoners, as well, he’d also tasked himself with getting them out of the crammed cells and up to the roof.
He hadn’t come out and said it, but it made sense to me that if we had to kill anyone, it would be there. The Registry offices would be full of staff, even in the middle of the night, and something could always go wrong or get out of control.
From the way he talked, I also suspected he hadn’t really wanted me to be up close and personal with those cells. I couldn’t exactly resent him for that, given how I’d reacted to the version they’d mapped by hacking the security feeds.
As far as overprotectiveness went, I ranked that at about a 2 or 3, max.
I watched Wreg slide through the gap in the wall created by Garensche. Glancing back at me, Revik’s second took my hand, leading me through after him. I felt protectiveness in the gesture, but also a different confusion of emotions, as if he were still processing what had happened inside the generator room.
It occurred to me that he was grateful to be alive.
On the other side of the door, he indicated he wanted me in front of him.
I noticed for the first time that the organic gun wrapped around his forearm was live. I glanced at Jax and Nikka, and saw theirs on, as well. I walked somewhere in the middle of the line of infiltrators, with Wreg and Garensche in back of me and Nikka, Ike, Loki and the Indian-looking seer, Jax, in front.
I wondered if I should activate my gun, too. After going back and forth in my head, I decided to wait until I had a reasonably good cause––or at least until I’d calmed down, so I didn’t end up shooting one of the seers in front of me on accident.
I took stock of the new room we’d entered.
I remembered Wreg’s words as he’d briefed me on this part, in the small airport hangar in Santos. Revik had been in the other room, working through some of the transport glitches, when Wreg went over the plan with me. I picked up on part of the reason for that, too. Revik knew I wasn’t military, and wanted to make sure I coordinated well with Wreg.
Knowing him, he also probably wanted to make sure I could follow orders.
After listening to Wreg detail out our role in the whole thing, I’d been puzzled, though.
“So why does he need us there at all?” I’d asked Wreg. “If he can perform the telekinesis at a distance, why not just have us help him at the Registry building?”
Wreg just smiled.
“You have a lot of faith in your mate,” he’d said, his scarred lips twitching as he glanced at the others. When I looked around at the same set of faces, I saw more of them smiling, but I didn’t sense anything malicious behind it. I hadn’t heard any condescension in Wreg’s voice when he answered me, either.
“No, sister,” he said. “Even Syrimne cannot work blind at such a distance. It is not the distance itself that is the limitation. He must have very, very exact information to perform the telekinesis accurately. Normally, he would need to accompany us down there, to see the layout for himself.”
“So why isn’t he doing that this time?” I said.
Wreg smiled. “Because he does not have to. You will be there, princess. He can see through you, as if he were in the room himself. Once we are inside, he will use your eyes and the information we can give him regarding the power sources to determine how best to dismantle their physical machines.”
“If we’re all in there while he’s doing that, aren’t we in danger of getting blown up ourselves?” I’d smiled wanly as I looked around at the others.
“I think he will be careful about that,” Wreg said, smiling back.
Nikka had glanced over at us, too, grinning from where she’d been pulling together organic armor suits.
“Except maybe with Gar, here,
” she said, punching the giant seer in the shoulder. “He might let some stray telekinesis bang his head against a wall a few times. See if he can knock some sense into it.”
“Hey,” Garensche had said. “Who’s going to get you past the organics? Who, if not the master of machines?”
“Your machine girlfriend?” Nikka had laughed.
My lips quirked a little now, remembering this.
The memory also brought back a whisper of my fear.
I really didn’t want these people to die.
The infiltrators had spread out in front and behind, and I let my eyes scan upwards.
Smooth, vat-like tanks made of organic metal composite stretched several stories high on either side, leaving a corridor between them lined by ladders and standalone control panels. The ladders curved all the way up to the top of the fifty-foot tanks, following along their rounded sides. Pipes big enough for a large dog to walk through jutted out of the vats themselves in the smaller aisles between them. Wheel-like valve turners sat next to longer control panels at their bases, looking strangely anachronistic, like they belonged on old ships.
I tried to reconcile this with the plans I’d studied with Wreg, and remembered something to do with coolant tanks. But these were damned big to be coolant tanks, no matter how enormous the room full of dead machines ahead of us ended up being.
I found myself wondering what this room was really used for, and suspected, suddenly, that there was something here Revik wasn’t telling me.
Or maybe something Revik didn’t know himself.
Movement rippled the construct, pulling my attention off the vats.
I sent a pulse through the shield.
People up ahead. At least four. Human.
When I glanced over, Wreg was looking at me. He held up a hand to the others, who had also paused, light-footed, when they felt the pulse I’d sent.
Wreg used a series of hand gestures to signal where he wanted everyone.
I swept the area again.
The people I’d touched on felt like techs, but, given where we were, I couldn’t be absolutely certain. It was the middle of the night, but Revik said the underground facility would never be completely empty. They might have people in here 24/7, either as a security precaution or for some technical reason.
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