Dragon_Bridge & Sword_The Final War

by JC Andrijeski

  Immediately, he got a ping for the opposite wall.

  Clicking out, he switched directions with his feet.

  He broke into a jog by the time he’d crossed a quarter of the room. He’d felt movement in the construct as soon as he opened his light.

  They were definitely coming for him.

  Reaching the organic wall, he didn’t wait but laid his palms on the rippling dark-green surface. Feeling the organic with his light, directly that time, he immediately sensed the security protocols. He didn’t wait but slid further into the Barrier, talking to the organic directly.

  Let me in… he told it. There has been a mistake. Chasing subject. Time limited…

  …no mistake dehgoies revik security clearance denied…

  I’m with security, he sent, pushing harder on the decision-making protocol as he worked to run a real hack with his light. Not Dehgoies Revik. You have made a mistake. Identity wrong.

  …no mistake identity confirmed dehgoies revik aka sword not authorized for entry activate gas in fourteen seconds if subject does not maintain security mandated distance and wait for removal by arriving team…

  Telekinesis will override, Revik sent, more to see what it would say.

  …telekinesis will activate construct protocol six-seven-nine-ought-four…

  Disable, Revik sent. You are ordered to disable at once.

  He entered the coding sequence, but the fucking thing kept morphing as soon as he’d broken down the structure. Wrapping his light around the different entry points, he pushed harder.

  Disable protocol, or security breach is imminent.

  Cannot disable only father disable security clearance six-seven-nine-ought-four.

  Revik grimaced.

  What is inside? he sent, trying to push a different lever as he continued to manipulate the wall’s aleimic structure. Describe contents of room.

  …cannot authorize information dissemination dehgoies revik aka sword not authorized for description of contents activate gas in seven seconds if subject does not retreat to security mandated distance…

  Taking his hands off the wall, Revik backed off.

  He continued to back off until he felt the security protocol switch off.

  Standing a few yards from the sentient wall, he slid into the Barrier again, trying to see or feel what lived on the other side of the wall.

  A Barrier field protected it, which wasn’t surprising.

  The density of that field was, however. He couldn’t see or feel a single thing through it, even using the higher structures of his light.

  He could feel the pull to enter the room.

  Something beyond that door tugged at his light like a fucking magnet.

  Urgency tightened his chest as he felt the construct activity increase. That urgency hurt him somehow, flaring his nearly nonstop separation pain even as it sharpened the more tactical areas of his mind and light.

  Whatever he’d come here to find, some part of it lived beyond that fucking door. Without having any logical way to be sure of that, Revik was sure of it anyway.

  He could feel that higher part of his light agreeing. More than that, he imagined he felt memory there, some resonance he couldn’t explain. Maybe like missing limb syndrome, he felt some part of himself that Allie had separated from the Dreng’s construct, reminding him.

  Secrets. He’d known secrets.

  He might not have even consciously known a lot of them.

  They would knock him out if he went in there.

  More to the point, he knew Menlim might use it as an excuse to negate their agreement, hook him to wires, throw him in a Barrier prison, start hacking his light for real. Then he’d be on a real countdown. Not only for being here, but for his life. For Allie’s and his daughter’s lives. Once they hacked him for real, he had few doubts who his first target would be––assuming they really had figured out a way to keep him alive without his wife.

  They’d have him go after Cass once Allie was dead.

  They’d have him hunt his daughter. They’d have him hunt Maygar.

  He knew all that. He knew.

  But he and Allie talked about that. They had no good choices.

  Every choice was bad. Some were worse than bad.

  They also didn’t have the luxury to be careful. They didn’t have the luxury of time. They didn’t have the luxury of not risking anyone they loved. They didn’t have the luxury of not risking themselves. None of those options were open to them, after Dubai.

  Revik’s own mind was a ticking time bomb.

  With Lily’s life and light linked to theirs, even Revik leaving would never be enough, not unless they were willing to hand her over to Menlim and the Dreng.

  He and Allie agreed.

  They agreed on all of it, as hard as it was.

  Clenching his jaw, he checked his wristwatch. Even being conservative, Menlim would have people down here in minutes. That was assuming they could get here in less than half the time it took him.

  He stepped closer to the wall.

  Immediately the alarms re-ignited. Feeling a charge of electricity shiver through his aleimi, he closed the gap between himself and the sentient organic in two more strides, once more laying his palms on the wall.

  That time, he didn’t wait.

  He jacked into the Barrier at once––far enough that time to see the sentient machine’s entire aleimic structure. Once he had, he snapshotted it, rotated it once, twice, snapshotting it again, until his mind catalogued every detail of its shape and form.

  He unfurled his light.

  …and hooked into every point of contact or structure he could find.

  To see and access all of it, he had to trigger a number of those higher structures in his light. Even so, he took care to avoid any combination he normally used for the telekinesis, knowing that would likely be enough to activate the security protocol and knock him on his ass.

  He also worked fast.

  Maybe faster than he ever had for something like this.

  He connected his aleimi to those structures before he’d taken a complete breath.

  Then he ignited that harder light.

  …crushing a few dozen of those structures at once.

  He didn’t wait.

  Exploding the next handful even faster than the first, his light spread, moving like liquid fire, not hurrying but not hesitating or slowing. His mind remained tightly focused, methodical as he explored every fragment of that semi-dimensional field. He broke every piece of structured aleimi he could find, snapping and exploding individual nodules like bits of glass.

  Most of the big ones he broke in simultaneous bursts.

  Then, gradually, as he got all of those, he began hunting stragglers one by one as they fought to morph and recombine in front of him.

  A few of those morphed fast enough to elude him, so he had to find them again.

  He broke them faster the second time.

  It seemed to take a long time. Too long.

  Eventually, though, he ran out of the things to break.

  The space grew quiet. Dark.

  Well, not dark precisely, although it felt that way to Revik’s aleimi in comparison to the living mass of before. Now the light field around the wall seethed in slow motion patterns like a pond faintly stirred by wind.

  No intent lived there. No mind… no thoughts.

  None of those mathematically precise geometric patterns remained.

  When his vision cleared, the wall had gone dark in the physical, too.

  He scanned it, a surface scan that time. From the outside, it appeared dead. Or maybe blank, like an amoeba instead of a well-trained guard dog. Entering those surface layers cautiously with his light, Revik activated the manual switch for the door.

  At once, the mechanism ignited, moving the panel smoothly into the wall.

  Nenzi… a voice spoke in his head.

  It was so loud Revik looked up, sure it was a loudspeaker.

  Nenzi… nephew. You are br
eaking our agreement.

  Realizing it was a Barrier communication, via the construct, Revik felt his jaw harden.

  He glanced back at the door.

  It was most of the way open now. He checked the timepiece on his wrist, realized less than a minute had gone by. Peering through the still-widening gap in the wall, he wondered if it would be enough to stand here, to look into that other space.

  The room on the other side remained totally dark however, shielded somehow from the light of the room in which Revik stood.

  He would have to go inside to see.

  Nenzi, the voice repeated. Our agreement. You are breaking it.

  Am I? he muttered in his own mind.

  Yes, the voice answered at once. You are.

  Revik could almost hear the clicking purr of the aged seer. He could almost see the frown of disapproval, him folding his hands at the base of his back, yellow eyes staring down at him from that skull-like face. He was likely wearing one of those fucking suits, his gray goatee precisely trimmed, feet tucked into expensive leather boots.

  The shtick of a Dreng living in a seer’s corpse.

  It hit Revik only then that he hadn’t seen any of Menlim’s bodies down here.

  He must keep them elsewhere. Somewhere even darker and deeper than this fucking cave.

  The precise voice grew colder.

  We agreed that your access to sensitive information would of necessity be limited as per the terms of our agreement, Menlim reminded him. We agreed, both of us, that this would be necessary for this tenuous partnership of ours to work, given your role here… and the stipulations about your own light… and the fact that you made it clear you would never let yourself feel any loyalty to me, nephew, no matter what transpired––

  I also remember you agreeing not to call me nephew, Revik’s mind muttered.

  He didn’t expect any response to that.

  He didn’t get one.

  The construct’s motion over his head brought aspects of his higher structures online almost without him willing it, making his light flare brighter in the immediate Barrier space. He looked at the open doorway and into that darkness, fighting back and forth in his mind.

  They’d knock him out.

  He knew they would.

  Menlim’s voice grew even colder, stripped of any pretense of politeness.

  If you cross that threshold, nephew, our agreement with one another is void. Be aware of that. And be aware that I warned you before you did what you are about to do. Menlim’s voice grew louder in Revik’s mind. I did not trick you or try to hide my intentions. I told you outright what I would do. Which is significantly more courtesy than you have afforded me.

  Revik felt a prickle of warning grip somewhere in his spine.

  But he had to do this.

  He had to, he told himself.

  If he didn’t, it was all for nothing.

  He’d risked his family for nothing.

  Even as he thought it, his legs propelled him towards the opening in that organic wall.

  45

  CREATURE

  LIGHT IGNITED AROUND him, the second Revik stepped through that opening. His foot landed on another green-tiled floor, darker than the one he’d just left.

  Looking up, he realized only then how high the opening in the wall stretched. It formed an organic-looking opening, as much oval or triangle as rectangle, at least twenty feet in height. Revik had the disconcerting thought it looked like walking into a womb, like a curtain parting between the thighs of some gigantic creature.

  He looked up at it as he passed through, feeling his muscles tense as his light reacted to the new construct he entered.

  Not construct.

  This wasn’t a construct.

  He came to a dead stop.

  Feeling alarm bells going off all over his light, Revik tensed just inside the opening, holding his breath as his heart thudded in his chest.

  His life was in danger.

  It was really in danger––and not from Menlim.

  Unmoving apart from his eyes, he held his breath, staring around at the round, pulsating walls of the room, feeling like he was in a giant organ. His mind catalogued dimensions, scanning every centimeter of space he could see without turning his head.

  He looked for security systems and found none. He looked harder, using more areas of his light, trying to discern the specific nature of the threat.

  The room was entirely empty.

  For a long moment, he couldn’t make sense of what he felt, what he was even reacting to. He could feel the danger increasing rather than lessening, sending more and more urgent warnings to some baser, more animal-like part of his mind and light, but he still couldn’t identify anything in the room as the specific source of the threat.

  Then he realized what it was.

  There was no construct in here.

  He was feeling the room itself.

  The room pulsed with life. Not guard-dog life, like what he’d felt in that sentient elevator––this was something else altogether.

  The longer he tried to discern the nature of the exact presence behind the walls of that room, the less adequate the term “artificial intelligence” or “living machine” felt to describe it. Neither of those categories felt adequate to describe this.

  Awareness lived here. More than awareness. More than sentience even.

  Revik couldn’t find the words in his mind for what he felt inside that space.

  Something… something really fucking different lived here.

  Pain filled him, more fear as he thought of Allie, of how he might have just fucked things permanently for both of him. Whatever this thing was, it was deeply dangerous. Lethal dangerous, but more than that, more than just his body’s death.

  This thing felt like the end of the world.

  A real end, maybe for seers as well as humans.

  Maybe for the Earth itself, and everything living on it.

  He couldn’t explain why he thought so. No images rose in his mind of the exact scenario that might unfold through the animal that lived in these walls.

  It just felt like truth.

  Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t live yet. It wasn’t operational or online, but it would be. Once it went active for real, the Dreng might not need any of them anymore––at least, not in any kind of living, sentient state.

  This thing felt like it was designed to remove the random factor.

  It was designed to render human and seer minds obsolete.

  He sucked in a breath.

  The thing was fucking scanning him.

  Even that was too simple a word for what it did.

  He felt the touches like skin on skin, like it caressed the unclothed parts of him as it circled his light and body in that open space. Light and air shimmered; he caught flickers of images, like it was presenting different aspects or projections to him to see how he might react.

  Fingers, hands, eyes, a tail coiled around his leg… a cock rubbed against his ass, making him flinch violently, turning his head to see no one there.

  He lurched forward, deeper into the room, unable to help himself.

  The feeling of being touched there withdrew with the rest.

  Revik felt his bowels tighten. He looked around, glimpsed more of those flickers and shapes even as that sickness coiled deeper in his gut.

  The presence writhed closer––suffocatingly close.

  It circled Revik’s light a second time. Pulling on him again, that time on his light instead of his body. He felt the separation pain highlighted, images of Lily flickered behind his eyes… Allie… Maygar… his mother.

  Allie with that other male… Allie opening her light. Allie feeling pain for someone else, for whoever that motherfucker was… Allie pushing Revik out…

  His separation pain grew excruciating, mixing with another, deeper, darker pain.

  Abandonment. It felt like something closer to death, being lost.

  Losing his family.

 
Losing his family all over again. His mother. His father.

  His sister, who Lily’d been named for.

  His heart clenched in his chest. His throat closed, cutting off his breath.

  Making another pass, the creature in the room enveloped all of him.

  Not bothering with flickers, it invaded his light totally, absorbing him inside a physical-feeling wave of presence and energy. The sensation made Revik freeze, losing his breath again. The fear grew indescribable, more than he could think past––worse than any case of claustrophobia or trauma he could remember in his light. It raised the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck, the reaction intense enough that he stopped breathing. He knew he might have voided his bladder if it hadn’t held his body and light so intensely.

  He couldn’t move.

  Or maybe he just knew not to move.

  Maybe he knew if he moved, this thing might decide to snap his fucking spine.

  Presence. Life. Mind. Knowing. Intent.

  None of those words encompassed the myriad of meanings for which Revik’s light continued to search. He felt so much coming off the thing and through it, he couldn’t capture most of that with any part of his mind or light.

  He caught snippets only––impressions.

  The thing’s curiosity, its annoyance with what Revik had done to its pet AI left guarding that outside wall. Layers of emotionless indifference… calculation, assessment… what might have been contempt, or perhaps simply dismissal of him, now that it could see him for what he was.

  Revik felt it assessing the implications around his being here at all, some connection to outside events, some wave of intricate threads and timelines he couldn’t glimpse.

  Those weren’t simply about the City or the Dreng or his wife or the world.

  Those expanded outward, encompassing a timeline so intricate Revik couldn’t make sense of it even in the highest parts of his light. Threads wove in and out and into one another, clicking across tracks. This thing manipulated levers, strands, nodes, pieces, moving them in concert or one by one simply to see the effect on the rest.

  Revik felt most of that as a bare whisper in the highest parts of his light.