by K. Gorman
Power crackled through Karin’s veins. For a second, everything seemed to go still. A hush fell over them, broken only by the tap and crack of her boots and the rustle and click of her suit. From across the room, she could feel the Shadow’s gaze on her. Its Shadow dimension pulled at her, images of its quietude and hushed presence sliding through her mind.
She shook them off. In her head, Tia had already focused on the other two soldiers.
The dimension rippled as she brought her power to bear.
She clipped the second man’s gun the same as she’d done the first―a simple cut and shove job to the other dimension―but the third man was holding his too close for a clean cut. If she tried at this distance, she’d likely slice into his chest as well.
Instead, she shoved him bodily into the other dimension and stepped in after him.
The Shadow realm enveloped her in quiet immediately.
It was like stepping around a curtain. Too real to the metaphorical Wizard of Oz for her liking, but that was the truth. One second, they were in the cave full of shouting, dancing lights, cracking guns and blasters―then, the cave had grown quiet and still and dark.
Without Jon and Nomiki, it was just her own light that illuminated the surroundings.
And in the Shadow world, the darkness felt so much…more.
The colors were off, too. Where before they’d been tinted a distinct spectrum of brown shades, the occasional streak and speckle of white catching the light, it was as if someone had toggled the desaturation button on an image filter. It all seemed drained. Gray. Her light cast onto the few meters ahead of her, shining on rock and dirt. Dust hung in the air, creating a haze that shone in the whiteness of her light.
The Shadow had followed her over, too. She could feel its gaze on her back.
Her suit beeped when it registered the comms and sat link disconnect.
She ignored it, focusing instead on the surprised gasp of breath that came from ahead and to her right.
The man scrambled along the wall, wide-eyed in the beam of her light, and she let her gaze slide over him, quietly assessing.
His looks matched the area―Asian descent, likely a mix of Han Chinese and one of the local peoples, which wasn’t surprising. Earth wasn’t as much of a genetic mix as the rest of the systems. Here, ethnicity actually had a meaning. His close-cropped black hair was coated in dust, along with the rest of his face and clothes. By the streaks on his shirt and shoes, and the darker markings around his knees, he’d either fallen or been laying down, or had been working on something previously. Another stain, a bit like milk or paint, had soaked into his shoulder from another time.
She paused.
Actually, he looked like he’d been painting.
A frown pulled at her brow as he began to speak.
The precise dialect of his language was out of either her or Tia’s scope, but its tone wasn’t. They both frowned when they heard the fear in it, the desperation.
He was begging her. Pleading for something.
We look like a god damn government assassin, Tia said. Can you imagine? Of course he’s begging. Anyone would be.
If he didn’t want government assassins coming after him, maybe he shouldn’t have joined a doomsday cult, she replied.
But, even as she thought the words, they felt off to her. Even Tia felt it.
Something’s wrong, Karin thought.
I agree.
She pressed a button on her suit to allow her comms to broadcast.
“Do you speak System?” she asked.
He dropped into silence, visibly flinching at both her gesture and her speech. His eyes darted up and down, taking in the gun at her hip, then moved to the rest of the cave that sat in darkness.
“How about English?” she tried again, switching between languages. “Do you speak English? Français? Español?”
He frowned at her, his mouth opening, then closing.
Eventually, he shook his head.
Shit, she said to Tia. I’m out of languages.
And I left most of my language core in the god-damned tank, the doctor grumbled.
Charades it is, then.
She lifted her hands, making a gesture toward the gun the man still held. “Give me the gun.”
He eyed her, and didn’t move.
She pointed at it, then herself. “The gun. Give it to me. No one has to get hurt.”
You realize that gesture could imply that you want him to shoot you, or do something else with the gun? Tia asked dryly.
Theater wasn’t my strong suit. I’m hoping he’s smart enough to fill in the context clues.
She gestured again, this time taking a step forward.
He flinched back, his hands jerking the gun up. Dust rose in the air between them, disturbed by the scuff of his feet on the ground. Once again, his eyes darted from her, eyeing the darkness around them.
Gods. This was stupid. Of course he wouldn’t obey her―she’d literally transported them into another dimension. Why the hells should he trust her?
“Come on,” she said, more to herself than him as she took another step closer. “Just hand it over, and we can all go home.”
But, before she could take more than a step, the darkness shifted beside her.
The man yelped as a Shadow stepped out of it, walking toward him. The gun came up, aim drifting toward the Shadow, and adrenaline slammed through her as she watched its muzzle turn. She leapt forward, grabbed its end, and wrenched it down. A bullet cracked off, and a swathe of pressure struck down the inside of her leg. A second later, she smashed an armored elbow into his face and shoved the muzzle down to the ground.
Despite his resistance, the end of the muzzle cracked hard into the ground. With a jerk of her arm, she snapped the strap that attached it to him, forced the firearm from his grip―another bullet cracked off, a brief flute of fire and a spark on the wall some meters behind her―and smashed it terminally into the wall.
He yelled and punched at her. Briefly.
She threw an elbow back. To his credit, he dodged, but he couldn’t evade her next grab. She caught his ankle and pulled, feeling the suit’s mechanisms kick in to aid the strike.
He fell with a hard grunt, then went still.
She breathed hard, a cold thrill going through her body―a bit of fear and shock, knocked away by the combat stims, perhaps. She stared down at his face. By the count of her HUD, he was still alive, just unconscious.
Slowly, she straightened.
“Why did that feel wrong to do?”
For once, Tia didn’t reply, but she could feel her frowning presence in the back of her mind.
She shook her head and steeled herself. There was a gravitational anomaly somewhere in the complex―and a large one, at that. The last one they’d found had ended up being a big, nuclear-based bomb.
She couldn’t let her guard down.
She tossed the gun to the side, and it skittered across the floor a few meters away. Beside them, the Shadow was still standing. She gave it an up and down appraisal, then blew out a sigh and redirected her attention down to the unconscious man.
He hadn’t moved. In her light, his face looked hard and washed out. The sunkenness of his cheekbones and the stress around his eyes told a story, as did the cracked and sore skin on his hands. A bruise was blooming where she’d hit him, a small cut making an inverted arrow where the armor had dug in.
With her new modifications, it was hard to pull punches.
“I’m not crazy, right?” she asked again. “That felt off, didn’t it?”
It did. Tia paused. Something’s not adding up.
She gritted her teeth and looked up at the Shadow again. It watched her without comment, standing in her light like a living piece of the dark part of the universe, its body seeming to shift and shiver.
She blew out a breath, bent down again, and grabbed the man. “I guess we’ll find out later.”
With that, she dragged him back across the barrier and into the
real world.
Chapter Six
Sound came back, and light. After the quiet of the Shadows, it proved jarring―as if there were two or three times as much noise, even though the cave was fairly quiet, and she blinked hard as the comms line chattered in her ear.
“Welcome back, sis.” Nomiki gave her a nod from a few meters away, and switched channels. “All clear here.”
“Acknowledged. Fire team three backing you.”
From farther up the cave, the next team began coming in, and her suit belatedly beeped to tell her that all of its comms and link connections were back online. As per the plan, they would secure the areas they had already cleared and set up scanning gear in hopes of triangulating a position on whatever had distorted the shipboard scans. A few rushed in, taking the two other fighters from where Jon and Ganis guarded them. Another set came for the man Karin had disarmed. The woman from earlier stared at her, a deep, ugly look on her face.
Karin narrowed her eyes.
But, if the woman had anything to say, she didn’t let it slip. And in another few seconds, Nomiki was jogging away.
“Settlement’s up ahead,” her sister said over the team comms. “Let’s go.”
They sprinted, the walls flashing by in a whir of gray. Slowly, the cave narrowed, twisting back and forth a couple of times, then rising up again. Parts of it looked more groomed, as if people routinely came up to work on it. Stones had been picked apart, sections of the floor leveled by a burning/laser tool. She recognized the distinct darkening a laser torch made from some of the other caves she’d been in.
Within five minutes, the cave ended in a blank concrete wall. A single closed door sat in the middle of it.
Nomiki opened the door and sent the drone through, its wings buzzing in the quiet. They waited as it vanished inside.
Karin rolled her shoulders, listening. It sounded like a large space inside―likely the reason the people had picked it for waiting out the world’s end. As she waited, her gaze roamed, picking out the murals on the wall. Flowers and grapevines, sunny fields and streams, mountains, a scattering of Chinese characters done in an old, elongated type like the stamp block she had seen Soo-jin use from time to time. Happy, bucolic scenes. A little shrine sat off to the left, a smaller twin to the one they had passed earlier.
A creeping feeling slid under her skin, making it crawl, and the Shadow world brushed her senses for a moment, quiet and dark, like the touch of a ghost.
She narrowed her eyes, her unease growing.
Beside her, Nomiki shifted. “All clear.”
They went inside.
The room opened into a large, arched cavern. Well, cavern wasn’t the correct word for it―caverns didn’t usually come furnished, or with quite so many lights. When she looked a bit closer at the walls, she recognized the shine of prefab foam―a type of density equalizer similar to spray-on drywall. A pre-built kitchen unit opened up on the right, with stores on wire racks close to the wall.
Beyond, the room tapered like the sides of a sea ship, the walls at first bulging, then narrowing to a point. Different stations had been set up along the walls, one a broken-looking comms network connected to a vintage short-wave radio set-up, another a distinct water collection system, same as she’d seen in some of Marc and Soo-jin’s scrounge sites. A few older-model netlinks littered the area, along with several shelves full of books and an ancient digital storage machine lying attached to a netlink hookup on the stained concrete floor.
She turned around, taking in the space.
“You know, for a doomsday cult, there is a distinct lack of doomsday iconography.” She made a gesture to a shrine on the wall. “I’m pretty sure that’s just your average ancestor shrine there.”
“It is,” Ganis grunted. “My mom’s got one quite similar.”
Movement snapped her attention to a door at the right. A man popped out, yelling, pointing a firearm at them. Her HUD painted him just as she registered the crack of the gun. The bullet skimmed her shoulder plate and kicked into the concrete doorframe behind her.
Jon shot him.
Blood burst from the man’s forehead. He fell back, dead before he hit the ground.
So much for Nomiki’s ‘all clear.’
Someone screamed behind him. Karin was already moving when a woman, wide-eyed and panicking, brought her firearm up. By the time her eyes had locked on her and her aim had shifted from offense to defense, Karin was on her.
She slammed into her, wrested the gun down, and smashed it against the wall. Even with the prefab coating, the stone broke it well enough.
When she was finished, she looked around. The room fell quiet. Jon stood by the entrance, his blaster ready at guard.
She looked down at where the woman slumped, confusion pushing a frown as she took in the now-broken firearm she held. It was a long-snouted rifle, as different from their blasters and the assault gear they wore as a nineteenth century musket was to the technology of the Second World War.
For a militarized doomsday cult, they were surprisingly ill-equipped.
Her feeling of unease grew. In her mind, she could feel Tia watching everything, a permanent frown on her metaphorical face.
She eyed the new hallway that had appeared, a tunnel branching off into a separate compartment. Nomiki stepped in behind her. A set of lights illuminated a corridor that was a mix of wood, concrete, and prefab, making it look like the inside of a crude house with stone and concrete floors. The smell of dust and dampness rose through her suit’s filters.
She pushed open the first door, revealing a storage closet with dry goods and sealed supply tubs. The next held the top of a water filtration and heating system that connected into a series of showers in a tiled room. A ventilation system droned in the background, likely trying to circulate the humidity.
She glanced back at Nomiki, finding a similar serious frown on her sister’s face, but a noise ahead snapped her attention to the front.
She looked just in time to see a small figure vanish at the end of the hall.
“Was that a kid?” Ganis asked over the comms behind them.
“Sure looked like it.” In her helmet, Karin bared her teeth, the tunnel and appearance of the child bringing back more than a few memories to her. “Maybe ease off on the triggers.”
“Agreed,” Nomiki said. “Non-lethal force, please.”
“Cuddles and Hugs Protocol,” Ganis muttered over the comms. “Got it.”
They moved on. A glance up the hallway revealed a small bathroom with a sink and squat toilet―a definite step up from the last doomsday cult they’d investigated. They turned their attention to where the child had gone.
Down a short hallway, they came to a blank threshold. Beyond, the floor dropped out, and a set of wooden stairs snaked down a tunnel.
She and Nomiki peered down.
“Smells like…plants?” her sister said, her tone turning upward at the end in speculation.
Nomiki sent the drone ahead, frowning after it. They watched as it slid down and vanished into the next hallway.
Karin glanced up as her sister shifted, a frown cleaving her eyebrows. She couldn’t see Nomiki’s face through the helmets―they had a heavy tint―but she could read the hesitancy in her sister’s voice.
“Miki?” she said.
The helmet shook, and her sister moved forward. “It’s clear,” she reiterated.
The stairs groaned as her sister stepped down. Karin stared after her, one eyebrow lifting.
Well, if she said it was clear, it was clear. She’d even let her blaster drop.
She moved to follow Nomiki, cringing at the way the stairs shook and shivered under their passage.
The cave ceiling sloped close to them, crowding them on all sides at first. She picked out chip marks in the walls where people had further hollowed the tunnel. Nomiki stayed ahead of her, her shoulders moving as she clipped down the stairs. Jon brought up the rear, making the stairs shake with every step.
For a
second, it was just them, their breath, and the sound of their steps on the wood.
Then, the tunnel opened out.
Hydroponics systems engulfed almost the entire room, rendering it into an organized jungle of floor-to-ceiling greenery with multi-spectrum UV lights filtering down on varying levels. The air held a humidity to it, but there was no mist. Everything was dry and vibrant. She recognized nearly a hundred lettuce plants of different species growing along one wall, their roots in tubes being fed from either a constant stream or―more likely―a misting source. Peas and tomatoes came next, along with vines of grapes, melons, and some sort of berry that trailed along a chain link fence that hung in the middle of the room. Other plants grew out of barrels, most likely root vegetables and bulbs like potatoes, carrots, and garlic. Along one side, a tub of recirculating water held watercress and water chestnuts, though she caught the turn of a gray-colored fish inside. Trout? Tilapia?
They moved through the greenery, taking in everything. Measuring tools and monitors hung from varying setups, a few of them flashing lights or numbers. The room was quiet, with only the sound of whirring pumps and the occasional spurt or hiss of mist. In one corner, the earthy smell of soil marked where barrels of tubers grew. A desk at the far corner held a series of hand-written charts as well as a few tools and an old, well-used netlink.
Beyond, a door lay closed. Behind it came the whimper of hushed breath.
She exchanged a look with Nomiki.
“I’ll go first,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if anyone shoots me.”
She pushed it open, only for it to stop half an inch in, hitting something.
“Barricaded,” she guessed.
She put her shoulder out, felt her strength coil in her body, and slammed through.
The door handle ripped away under her grasp, and a loud splintering sound came from the other side―along with several small, tiny screams. She shoved again, and whatever was holding the door gave way in a crunch of splintered wood and grating metal.
When she pushed her way in, she stopped at what she saw.
Fifteen people cowered in the far corner of the room, with roughly ten of them children. Most of them were crying, their faces streaked and grimy, whimpering as they clutched at the adults with them. One woman stood in front, a baseball bat held awkwardly in her arms. She was middle-aged for system standards, roughly sixty or seventy, with a thin body and wiry arms that had seen hard work. Her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail at the back of her head.
