“Anatiel, I presume,” I said. I didn’t want to get too close to her, fearing that proximity might wake her up. Instead, I looked around the room. “Okay, Gears, can you shut this down? Those tanks look important, maybe start with them?”
“The tanks contain some sort of nutrient solution,” Gears said. “But they… hold on. My scans are showing activity inside them.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“The motion’s nearly sub atomic,” Gears said. “I think they’re nanobots.”
“Why would nanobots need a nutrient solution?” Herb asked. “That makes no sense.”
“Because,” a new voice said. “They are not nanobots.” The voice was hollow and had an unearthly echo to it. The very sound of it made me cringe. “They are cybernetic bacterium.”
Anatiel had awakened.
Chapter 15
Anatiel drew herself up to her full height, just shy of ten feet. Her yellow-skinned body rippled as she stretched, and armor plates seemed to grow out from the silvery patches on her skin. Three glowing violet eyes opened, casting purple spotlights around the room. Her face was vaguely human, with a flat nose and thin lips. She didn’t have hair, but a fine layer of shimmering golden scales covered her head. She flexed massive hands that could easily palm a trashcan lid. “Where is Croatoan?” Anatiel asked.
This wasn’t a question I’d been expecting. I was figuring we’d hear one of the usual big bad evil guy tirades, “Now I am free to unleash my wrath” or “The world will shudder beneath my feet” or my personal favorite, “Nothing can stop me now!” Having Anatiel ask about the sentient bowling ball had come completely out of left field.
“What do you want with Croatoan?” I heard myself asking.
“When Caulborn agents found me here, they planned to destroy me. Croatoan was with them. Their weapons were of no concern to me, yet my ship was imprisoned within the rock and could not be freed. We were at a stalemate. Croatoan contacted me mentally and told me that if I pretended to let the Caulborn win, he would return later to free me and my ship. In return for his aid, I was to prepare a cloning bed for him.”
Son of a bitch. That little bastard had been prepping for this all along. I guess what Nathan told me was right; demons really do play the long game. But how was he going to free the ship from the tunnel? It was trapped beneath tons and tons of solid rock.
I slapped my hand against my face and spun to my companions. “Croatoan’s been after this all along. Between the control over rock elementals he’ll have from Belzatha’s horn and my ability to portal, he’ll be able to free Anatiel and this ship.”
“Then you are not with Croatoan?” Anatiel asked.
“Um…”
“You are not. I can sense your elevated heart rate and the increased adrenaline levels in your body. From what I can see of your brainwave patterns, you are attempting to concoct a lie. That is foolish, little human. I know now that you will fight Croatoan, you will attempt to stop him from granting me my freedom after all this time. That means I must destroy you.”
Dammit….
Billy raced over to one of the computer banks and began ripping out wires from the back panels. In the movies, the techno-genius would hack into an alien computer, upload a virus, and then all the alien’s technology would crash. In the real world, it’s a little different. After Gears, Petra, and I watched Independence Day, Gears had gone off on a rant about how there was no way the network protocols we’d developed on Earth would automatically be able to talk to something an alien civilization was using. “And for crying out loud,” he’d said, “I’ve seen people have trouble getting a network to run when the switches come from two different human vendors. Did they really expect us to believe that Jeff Goldblum could bring a laptop into space that would automatically connect to the alien’s Wi-Fi? If I ever have to destroy an alien computer system, I’m ripping out power cables and breaking circuit boards.”
And that’s exactly what he was doing now. Sparks and smoke trailed in Billy’s wake as the mech charged around the room, tearing hoses and cables from their housings, seemingly at random. To the untrained eye, this would look reckless. Even to my semi-trained eye, it looked reckless, but the truth of the matter was that it was quite clever. Billy’s got all manner of sensors in there, and thanks to those, Gears would be able to discern normal power lines from ones that were connected to some sort of self-destruct mechanism.
That’s what I told myself, anyway.
In the meantime, Anatiel had rushed to try to stop Billy, but Petra had stepped in front of her. The alien had swatted at Petra and was most surprised when Petra caught her hand and held it there. The look of surprise turned to one of astonishment as Petra began forcing Anatiel’s arm back, and then began pushing the giant alien. Anatiel’s feet, though braced against the floor of the ship, slid backward.
A beam of purple light shot out from Anatiel’s central eye and hit Petra in the center of the forehead. Petra’s expression didn’t change, she didn’t seem to suffer any ill effects, just the line of her mouth tightened and she pushed harder, forcing Anatiel back a few more inches. “You are not an organic life form,” Anatiel said, interested. “You are not comprised of the base materials I can readily break down. I will require special tools to adequately process you. That one is not entirely organic, either.” Her purple eyes flicked to Billy. “But he is made of materials easily processed. I will begin with him.”
Another beam of purple light shot from Anatiel’s eye and burned a hole right through Billy’s forehead. Sparks erupted from Billy’s neck as the mech collapsed to its knees. A second later, Billy’s chest cavity burst open as Gearstripper stumbled out, greasy black smoke billowing all around him. Gears barely dodged as Billy crumpled to the floor, still twitching as electric blue sparks flared around him.
“There we are,” Anatiel said. “So that’s what was piloting the craft. Interesting.” Hoses and cables began snaking down from the ceiling, ensnaring Gears around the arms and legs. Anatiel and Petra were locked together, neither one giving ground. I rushed over and tugged in vain at the cords that were rapidly ensnaring Gears. I tried to Open them, but the apertus energy only made them go limp for a heartbeat, and then they were binding him again. As I brought my switchblade down on the cables, a jolt of electric current surging through them threw me backward, where I knocked Herb out of the way of a set of cables snaking toward him. As we tried to untangle ourselves, there was a yowl of pain from Gearstripper. I pulled away from Herb in time to see a cable burrow into his abdomen, then snake around under his skin. A second one followed, then a third.
I rushed for the gremlin, narrowly dodging around other cables. Petra and Anatiel were still locked in a pushing contest, but surprisingly, the cables ignored Petra as if she wasn’t there. A distant part of my mind wondered if maybe they couldn’t see her because she wasn’t organic. Most of my mind was more concerned with freeing Gears. The cables held him fast, and now they were pulsing, as if they were pumping something into his body. He convulsed and spasmed as cables snaked around my wrists, pulling me back, and now some of the pointy-ended hoses were coming for me, too. I concentrated, and unloaded the biggest burst of apertus energy I’d ever done in my life. The cables holding me fell away, the hoses slithered out of Gears, the lids of a few nearby crates blew off, and several compartments on Billy burst open, scattering weapons and trinkets all over the floor.
I scooped Gears up and hustled away from the cables, running to a spot I hoped they couldn’t reach. As I passed by Billy, I grabbed up the spare stun blaster from the mech’s now-open thigh compartment and fired at a snake of cables that were coming at Herb. For his part, the necromancer was creating a thin line of glowing yellow characters, which began drifting around the room like fireflies. The cables sparked when they came into contact with the characters, and fell to the ground, twitching.
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br /> “You are strong,” Anatiel said to Petra. “But organic life is imperfect. Non-organic life is imperfect. Only augmented life is perfect.” And with that, a series of hoses snaked down from the ceiling and attached themselves to a series of connectors on Anatiel’s back. A moment later, they began pumping something into her body, and the yellow alien’s muscles bulged. Petra’s face showed strain, and Anatiel forced her back a step. In my arms, Gearstripper began twitching violently and crying out in German. Patches of silvery metal bloomed from beneath his skin, and when he opened his eyes, purple static ran through the yellow. He looked at me, his expression offering only the vaguest hint of recognition. Then he was scrambling out of my arms and up my shoulders, where he launched himself into the air.
A thick bundle of cables came down as if summoned, and Gears landed atop it, riding the cables like a surfboard toward Petra and Anatiel. Petra’s face was screwed up in pain and concentration, and I heard the distinct sound of rock cracking. Tears ran down her face as Gearstripper launched himself from the bundle of cables and dropped onto Anatiel’s back.
The gremlin’s eyes were alight with destructive glee as his claws sliced through the hoses connected to Anatiel’s spine and head, spraying the area behind her with blue fluid that smelled of rot. Gears was chattering madly in German as he scrambled around Anatiel’s torso, driving his claws into the metal plates on her body and using them as handholds, and as he passed, he ripped these away from her with wet shlucks. The giant alien howled in pain and swatted at Gears, but he was too fast and scrambled away, jumping onto a cable that had just spiraled down from the ceiling.
“What is this?” Anatiel demanded. More cables snaked down and wove under her arms and around her wrists. Then they pulled her up from the floor, and away from Petra. Petra dropped to the ground, hugging herself. I raced over, got my hands under her armpits, and dragged her away.
“Are you all right?”
She shook her head. Whatever she’d said was lost in a high-pitched squeal that felt like a freight train driving right through the center of my skull. Anatiel thrashed at the cables holding her, and Gears was still perched atop her shoulders, his mouth open in hypersonic shriek. Anatiel’s hands were against the sides of her head, and bright orange liquid flowed from between her fingers.
“Not possible,” she said. “This cannot be.”
“Wrong,” Gears snapped. “You injected cybernetic bacterium into a life form designed to understand, control, and destroy technology. You might as well have given me all your passwords, a schematic of every piece of tech on this ship, and a copy of Wikipedia from whatever planet you’re from. The bacteria running through these hoses work for me now. And I am shutting you down, Anatiel. Permanently.”
As he said this, the giant alien’s thrashing weakened, then she went limp within the cords, which then lowered her to the ground.
“Talk to me, Petra,” I said, cradling her head against my chest. “What’s wrong?” I gently ran my hand over her back and felt the problem immediately. I gingerly pulled at the back of her shirt and looked down her collar, showing me a series of ragged cracks running all along her back and arms. If Anatiel had used much more pressure, Petra would’ve shattered.
“Gears,” I called. “Need you over here, now.”
Gearstripper rode a cable bundle over to us and grimaced as he looked at Petra’s back. A silvery knife grew from his forearm. It was a testament to just how fast Gears learned in that he’d already mastered how to use his newfound powers to grow metal tools from his body. It wouldn’t surprise me if he started growing armor plates like Anatiel had. Once the knife was formed, Gears cut his own palm, letting his golden blood drip onto her back. Petra inhaled sharply as Gears rubbed the blood into the cracks, which then began to seal themselves. Gremlin blood was designed to repair golems, and while I knew Gears had done this before, this was the first time I’d ever actually seen him apply the stuff to Petra. The blood seeped into the cracks, then changed from a golden liquid to a pale gray rubber. This smoothed itself out, then blended to Petra’s skin color.
Petra let out a relieved sigh and leaned into me. “Thanks, Gearstripper,” she said into my shoulder.
“Glad that still worked,” Gears said. “I wasn’t sure if it would.”
“What happened to you?” I asked, looking into Gears’s purple and yellow eyes.
“The cybernetic bacteria that’s in those tanks is how Anatiel’s people reproduce,” Gears said. “They fly to other planets, inject the population, and the bacteria gradually change the inhabitants to look like her. The bacteria also connect the new worlds’ life forms back to the home world’s central computer, where they’re cataloged. From what I’m hearing, Anatiel’s people were on the run from Sakave.”
“I can see why Sakave wouldn’t like this approach to reproduction,” I said. “It would overwrite any efficient laws that were in place. But Gears” — my mouth was suddenly dry — “are they going to turn you into something like Anatiel?” I had visions of Gears suddenly growing to over nine feet tall, hulking out and then us having to fight all over again.
He chuckled. “Well, they were trying to, but they didn’t know quite what to make of my genome. Thing is, they’re cybernetic, so my system knows exactly what to do with them. So I took them over. They could change me if I allowed them to, but why would I want to change this handsome face?” He gave a sharp-toothed grin.
“You said you were hearing things?”
“In a manner of speaking. The bacteria allow communication with the ship’s central computer. They’re downloading gigs and gigs of data into my head right now.”
“Isn’t that overwhelming?” Petra asked, stroking the gremlin’s back.
“You’d think so, but the Mother made us so that we could process tons of raw data. I know what sort of materials something is made of just by touching it. This is sort of the next level of that. But here’s the thing, Vinnie. What Anatiel told you was true. Croatoan made a deal with her a long time ago, and she prepared that cloning pod for him.”
I looked around the wreckage of the room. “Well, I don’t think we need to worry about that now,” I said.
Gears’s ears flapped as he shook his head. “There’s another chamber to the ship, Vinnie,” Gears said, pointing up. “Above the room we came in. It’s behind so much shielding that Billy couldn’t detect it, but I know where it is now.” Purple static danced across his eyes again. “The bacteria are telling me all about it. That’s where Croatoan’s cloning pod is.”
“Can you shut it down?” I asked.
“Well, normally, yeah,” Gears said. “But the thing is, it’s already active.”
“What?”
“Sorry, Vinnie, it’s taken me a few minutes to sort out all the input. Croatoan came in while we were fighting Anatiel.”
“How did he get past the wards?”
“You said he was there when the Caulborn agents imprisoned Anatiel. He probably saw what they did and knew the codes to bypass them.”
I slapped my palm over my face. “And he has a piece of my powers. I was so focused on him using my ability to portal I didn’t even think he might be able to Open things. Dammit. Gears, can you shut down the cloning pod?”
“No, I can’t stop this process once it starts. But I’ll do what I can to slow it down. There are a bunch of wights and other undead upstairs in the main chamber.”
I hoisted the blaster I’d taken from Billy. “Fine, let’s get up there and end this.”
Chapter 16
Gears summoned cables to carry us up the shaft to the main floor, where we found two-dozen wights waiting for us. Herb already had undead-destroying characters ready for them, and the first wave fell before our feet hit the floor. The next wave surged forward, trying to push us back down the shaft, but between my laser blasts and Petra’s fist
s, we held them at bay. More cables shot from the ceiling and the walls, ensnaring the undead and pulling them away from us. Croatoan had left a bunch of fodder here, he knew these wouldn’t be able to stop us, and that wasn’t his intention. He just needed to slow us down while his new body was built.
It was working. And that pissed me off.
Wights fell to electrified cables, to shimmering translucent characters, to laser blasts, to stone-hard fists. And still more came. I started to get the impression that maybe the entire tunnel outside the ship was full of cannon fodder, waiting to come in and attack us, like some bad rendition of the early Double Dragon levels.
“Gears,” I hollered. “Can you shut the door?”
“Been trying, Vinnie,” he said as he directed another bundle of cables. “But the mechanism’s jammed with wight corpses.”
“Figures,” I muttered as I fired off another blast. The gun was getting hot in my hands, and the blasts didn’t seem to pack as much of a punch as they once did. Thanks to Hades’s boon, I didn’t get fatigued, and neither did Petra, but Gears had just been through a significant transformation, and Herb had just come out of a coma. We’d all been pushing our limits, and now it was starting to take its toll.
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