The Infinity Mainframe (Tombs Rising Book 3)

by Robert Scott-Norton

  “You’ve misunderstood. I’m not giving you the choice. It gets shut down now, or I’m shutting it down for you.”

  Milford grinned. It unsettled Ruby, and she gave her attention to Devan instead. “I mean it, Devan.”

  Milford turned his back to her and continued adjusting controls, spinning dials, and sliding levers into new positions.

  “What are you doing?” Ruby asked as the scientist continued to work the machine. The lights in the chamber were dimming, then the blue glows came back to cast all their features in the unearthly light.

  “I’m sending the activation signal now,” Milford said with a slight swagger. “We’re going live ahead of schedule.”

  Devan looked surprised and turned to face his partner. “You can’t. OsMiTech isn’t ready.”

  The ridiculousness of that statement made Ruby want to laugh out loud, but she calmed herself and focused on the gun in her hand. She had to be able to do something. Then a spark came to her. The nodes in the pool were crucial to this plan working; if she could damage them she could slow down Milford’s progress.

  “What on earth are you blathering on about? This is more important than OsMiTech.”

  Ruby stepped over to the railings, aimed her gun at the closest node tower, at this range she couldn’t miss. The blast from the gun jerked her arm back and reverberated around the chamber, echoing loudly in her ears. The effect was immediate. An alarm sounded, red light flooded the chamber. Milford and Devan spun around to take in the scene.

  “You idiot!” Devan shouted, the alarms bringing him out of his stupor. Milford hurried to the edge to take in the sight of the node tower. Ruby’s aim had been excellent and one of the silver globes on the top of the tower had shattered. Exposed wires sparked.

  The room shook. The eyes in the pool were agitated. Ruby had got her result. “I’ve got plenty more bullets left. I reckon I could take a fair few of these out.”

  Milford shook his head. “Think of the millions with HALO devices. If you destroy any more of these nodes you risk killing them.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  Devan scowled. “Milford doesn’t bluff.”

  Ruby hesitated. She didn’t know what to do. She could kill these two and try to turn off the machine herself. No. Of course she couldn’t kill them. She only hoped that they weren’t astute enough to realise that. Devan’s hands twitched.

  “We’re done talking. Shut it down.”

  Milford laughed. The parrot noise echoed around the chamber, for a moment dwarfing out the other noise. The other noise? Yes, there was something else. A vibration that hadn’t been there before, but was even now making its presence felt through the plating of the gantry and rising up through her legs.

  Devan’s eyebrows knitted together. He glanced at his partner. “What is that? Another problem with the pool?”

  Milford looked at the instruments. A new waveform was passing across the largest screen on his display. A snaking red line that reached the upper limits of the vertical axis. “It’s not anything I understand. This is something different.”

  Ruby felt the pressure of the trigger under her finger and wanted to squeeze. Dad wouldn’t have hesitated like she was. It was in his blood to make split moment decisions and if he were here, he’d be telling her to end this. But then there was Candice to think about. If they hadn’t been so foolhardy and come down here with no support, she might still be alive.

  “I can’t stop it. The machine isn’t accepting any new inputs.” Milford sounded agitated. He’d lost his calm, sarcastic demeanour.

  “Limit the power to the central hub.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Turn back the waveform.”

  “Have you been listening? I told you, it isn’t responding. It’s like it’s—”

  A crash from somewhere outside the room. A quake and a large chunk of plastisteel fell from the roof into the remnant pool. Devan hurried to the railing and put his hands to his head, grabbing a handful of hair and screaming at Milford. “Do something you idiot!”

  “We should get out of here.” He forgot about the controls and looked to his partner. Ruby guessed if it came to the crunch, Milford was the sort of man who’d leave everyone behind to save his own skin.

  Ruby sensed something behind her. That feeling she was being watched. The room shook again and something else detached from the ceiling. She grabbed the handrail and twisted around, looking to see if anyone was there. Perhaps Milford had called for security to come and help them out. But, there was no one. The gantry was empty. She took a step to her left, rotating around the space and now she was directly between the men and the exit. They’d have to go through her to get out of here.

  “What happens to the machine, if you just let it do whatever it’s doing? What happens to all the connected devices?” Ruby asked.

  Milford looked doubtful. He hadn’t a clue what he was doing. Whatever inspiration had guided them to this point, it had well and truly left him now.

  “I need to enter the final activation code, then it will activate.” Devan made a start towards the machine, but Ruby couldn’t let him do this. She had to stop him.

  Derelict. Lost.

  The room shook and Ruby angled to the railing on her left, grabbing it to stop herself falling. She wouldn’t want to lose her footing now.

  Milford saw his chance. With Ruby no longer blocking the way, he saw no reason to stay behind amongst the failing machine. His footsteps echoed across the gantry and the door opened to let him out. She ignored him and focused on Devan.

  He saw her coming and straightened to brace himself for the impact. A devilish smile grew on his face. It would soon be wiped out. In the back of her mind, hidden in her senses, she heard the agitated remnant pool beneath them. Without Milford to sooth the troubled organs, and regulate the settings, the pool was disturbed.

  But that would have to be for later. She could only deal with one problem at a time.

  Ruby shoulder-charged Devan and the impact struck him right in the centre of the chest. It was enough to topple him over the railings and for a fraction of a second he seemed to hang there, well aware of the fate that would befall him in another few fractions of a second. And then, his instinct kicked in, a desperate hand grasped behind him as he fell and caught a handful of Ruby’s hair. She couldn’t stop, her momentum too great to brace against the sudden pull over the top of the railing.

  Ruby’s lithe frame tumbled into the air after Devan. Her view filled with the inky blackness of the remnant pool as she hurtled down towards it.

  12:40 PM

  The impact bludgeoned her side, but before she could scream the Nanosalve filled her mouth and she sank into the pool, Devan’s body helping to weigh her down. She tried to spit out the bitter liquid, but panic made her yell even more, and then she knew she was drowning.

  The weight shifted from her, and Ruby could move once again. The pool was only a metre deep and she found her footing and pushed herself upright, breaking the surface and gulping for air, unintentionally swallowing the Nanosalve she’d had in her mouth. The liquid soothed the pain in her airways as she coughed and struggled to clear them of the viscous fluid.

  She blinked against the lights from the cavern’s structure above, then she blinked and she thought for a moment she’d gone blind. But, colours hit her senses. Greens, every shade and hue. Shapes built up over her imagination. Smells came next, hitting her olfactory receptors as if she’d experienced them himself. Digging into her brain were thoughts that were not her own.

  Help.

  Help me.

  Can anyone hear me?

  Lights out.

  Nausea hit her but as quickly as the images had forced themselves onto her, they went. Surprised that she was still alive, Ruby turned and tried to take in everything around her.

  Eyes.

  She yelled in horror as she realised the objects her hands were brushing against were the connected eyeballs she’d seen floating around th
e pool earlier. Horrifying enough from a distance, terrifying beyond measure once you were this close. She tried to shove them away but her hands caught in tendrils as she lifted them. Thin fibres were attached to the optic nerves of every eye, trailing to the spiked node pods that Devan had pointed out to them earlier. She was close to a node pod now and had landed on a mesh of the cables, that in turn had pulled more eyes towards her, and around her chest were dozens of the lifeless organs bobbing around him.

  Where the hell was Devan?

  Her answer came when a punch landed on the side of her head. Something went loose in her mouth. Turning as quickly as the fluid allowed she brought her hands up to defend herself against Devan’s next attack. Scrambling with her legs to right herself again only got her limbs more entangled in the cables.

  Devan’s face was animalistic. Snarls were all he seemed able to manage, his rage so complete. Eyes wide and red, the Nanosalve clinging to his features like skin lesions.

  A cable snagged around her foot and suddenly she found herself too close to her attacker. She thrashed away as best she could to evade Devan. Hands reached for her throat and she grabbed them with her own, trying to drag them away from her skin. But Devan was a man consumed with hatred and his weight pressed down on her. Ruby lost her footing and was once again under the surface. Her mouth once again filled with the viscous fluid. Screaming impossible, she continued to thrash against Devan but with the weight bearing on top of her, there was no chance of reaching the surface.

  Bubbles escaped her mouth. The crushing pressure of her lungs made her want to draw a breath, but there was no air to be had.

  Join us.

  The lights are missing.

  He killed me. That son of a bitch actually did it.

  Where are the police? They should be here by now.

  Julia. Chris. I should have called them. Too late.

  Images came with the thoughts. Flashes of life extinguished in pain and suffering and fear. The remnants were loud. Their proximity. The connections.

  YOU NEED TO BE SHELVED. YOUR INTERFERENCE RISKS EVERYTHING.

  Images she couldn’t describe. Shapes and senses she couldn’t interpret. Distance. Isolation. Abandonment.

  She tore at Devan’s skin with her nails. The light was fading. No amount of effort was making any difference.

  He stabbed me.

  Jesus, look at the blood. I can’t live without this blood.

  What’s that? A knife. Oh, my god, he’s going to stab me with a knife.

  Remnants. Fresh images. Sharp objects. Stabbings.

  There’s always a way out. You’ve just sometimes got to fight for it.

  Ruby stopped trying to pull his hands away from her throat and instead reached for his face. Finding his eyes, she dove her thumbs into the soft organs. The pressure around her throat ceased and Devan let out a terrible scream. The weight on her body vanished, and she lunged upwards, gulping hungry mouthfuls of air. Blood seeped from the man’s eye sockets and the rage on his face terrified her. She had to end this.

  No time for debate, she acted, throwing all her weight at Devan, driving him backwards. Devan’s face turned from surprise to panic. He barely had a chance to let out a shriek of alarm, as the node spike entered his body from behind and forced its way through his rib cage, before bursting through his chest wall. Blood splattered.

  Ruby fell back and stared aghast at her handiwork.

  Devan slumped onto the spike, his features calm. Rivulets of blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. The Nanosalve might be enough to save him if only someone would pull him from the spike. Ruby stood still.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done. You’ve damned us all,” Devan whispered, a knowing smirk appearing on his face. And then he died.

  1:14 PM

  Shit. What had she done? Devan’s bleeding lifeless eyes stared at her from his bloodied face. The Nanosalve dripped from his features, even now trying to patch him up. Her own body tingled as the solution worked on nursing her injuries. She stepped back, ignoring the sensation of the dead eyes around her, brushing against her sides.

  The Infinity Mainframe didn’t take well to having one of its central node towers interfered with. The spike through the centre of Devan’s chest sparked as if connections had been broken. Ruby wondered whether she might get electrocuted if she stayed in the pool any longer.

  All the while, the same question came spinning around in her mind. Was this what she was capable of? Had she meant to kill him or was she merely defending herself from his attack? The adrenaline flooding through her system was making it hard to do anything other than demand she escape from the tombs. Let the authorities decide what to do with her.

  If she was able to escape that was. The chamber had become darker even in the last few seconds. The pulsating lights had increased to frenetic levels and that noise in the background, like a drumming heartbeat, had increased its pace to match. She sought the platform, twenty feet above her, and looked around for any way to get back up there. With a pool of biomass and a whole load of equipment down here to maintain, it was reasonable to assume a way down to access it. The ladder was right where she needed it to be, built into one of the supporting legs to the platform. She began her slow ascent to the gantry, Nanosalve weighing her down as it clung to her clothes and dripped from her skin.

  Her hands picked up the vibration in the metal ladder as she climbed. Increased in tandem with the heartbeat, it was another reminder to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

  With a final effort, she clambered up onto the gantry and lay there for a moment, looking up at the curved roof of the chamber, wishing that somebody could come and collect her now. But she needed to keep moving. The machine was still operating and she needed to shut it down.

  Ignoring Candice’s body, she hurried to the controls that had occupied Milford’s attention and tried to decipher what all the waveforms and flashing lights might mean. It would have been too much to expect an instruction manual lying around, or a big red button with the label ‘shut down’ on it. Instead, she stared at the keyboards and terminal screens and looked for anything that might indicate how to regulate the power to this thing. Milford hadn’t sent the activation signal, but could this machine still be dangerous?

  Leave

  The voice in her mind again. She steadied herself against the control, closed her mind and listened. What was this thing talking to her?

  Derelict

  Abandoned

  Survive

  Max

  Tombs

  Was this it then? The tombs? Devan had said the place had been communicating with him. Could it be reasoned with? She closed her eyes, ignoring the sounds of the room around her, focusing on her breathing, she voiced her message.

 

  Nothing. No response. She opened her eyes and pulled up a menu access screen on the main terminal, scanning through the options for anything to do with the power regulation. Nothing in there looked likely. She opened sub-menus, looked on adjacent terminal screens. Pulled up graphs of the waveform strengths, but after a minute of poking around realised this was beyond her. The best thing she could do now was to get to the surface and get some technicians down here. Langer, although hostile to her before, might change his tune once he saw what kind of place his boss had been building under the lake.

  Wearily, she looked at Candice’s body.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered then ran from the chamber as fast as she could.

  7:00 PM

  Much later, after being made to wait in an empty room in the security office for over an hour, there was a knock at the door and it was pushed open gently. Ruby smiled when she saw Glynn, got to her feet and tried to hug the man. With handcuffs it proved difficult, but Glynn put his arms around her anyway and held her for a grateful moment. She closed her eyes and sighed, determined not to burst into tears just because a familiar face had walked in.

  Glynn took her back to her s
eat and pulled another one away from the wall.

  “Are you going to tell me what this is about? What the hell were you doing going back into the building?”

  “I’ve already told security. Have they not been down to the tombs yet?”

  “They went where you directed them, but there was nothing like what you described. No secret door, no machine.” Glynn lifted his chin and straightened his back. “And no sign of Devan Oster.”

  She didn’t reply.

  Glynn pressed. “What did you do, Ruby? You’ve got blood and—hell, I don’t know what this stuff is—all over you.”

  Ruby’s mind raced. She’d had time, more time than she’d wanted, to consider the various plays to this scenario. How much of what she could tell them would further incriminate herself, and how much would do any good? “I was looking for the tombs. Nikoli was obsessed over it. He kept a diary. I found it and with Candice’s help we found the tombs under the lake.” She brought her voice down, low to a whisper. “It’s under the lake, Glynn. But, Devan said that sometimes you can’t get in. But it’s vast and huge and old. I don’t know how long it’s been down there but Nikoli was right to be worried. Devan’s built this machine inside. He plans to turn people into telepaths.”

  Glynn looked old and confused. Eventually, he leant forward and put a hand on Ruby’s knee. “You’ve been through some kind of trauma. You’re still grieving over Nikoli.”

  She smashed his hands aside. “Idiot. I’m not making this up. How on earth could I start to make up something like this?”

  “You’ve been reading Nikoli’s diary. You spent time in the archives. I’m sorry. I should have seen this coming and put a stop to it sooner. It was a mistake you coming to work here. I should never have let you.”

  Ruby’s cheeks were burning, and she hated herself for allowing such a basic reaction advertise her feelings. “Glynn, I’ve been down into the tombs. It’s real. Devan tried to kill me. He… he’s dead.”