by JM Guillen
The dampener grenades.
Frantically, I scoured through my pockets. I had no way of knowing if baseline Rationality would slow the Vyriim, but I knew both times they had altered Rationality before they struck. They were fast, perhaps even too fast for the Adept, but if I could just tilt things, even just a little—
My hand came to rest on the cool disk of the Tabula Rasa.
A last ditch device, the Tabula would utterly obliterate all matter within its radius. For a moment I hesitated, uncertain. After all, it could kill us just as easily.
Then, I heard Anya’s cry cut off. The Vyriim had her in the air, carrying her toward the pool. It was suffocating her, forcing one of its tentacles down her throat. She gagged around its filth, tears streaming down her face.
Fuck this. I’d rather us all be dead than this.
I grasped the small disk and pulled it out, twisting dials as I did. I knew that some of the settings weren’t exact, but I didn’t have time for exact.
As it began to heat in my hand, I leapt toward the main body of the monstrosity. When I was close enough, I plunged the device into its center mass, trying not to retch.
The scent, combined with the sensation of dozens of tentacles slithering against me, rent at my mind. I pushed as deeply as I could, screaming with horror. I buried my arm to my shoulder before triggering the Rasa.
Then, with revulsion burning in my blood, I yanked to free my arm.
For a terrifying moment, I thought I was stuck.
The second I had touched the strands, of course, they had felt my presence. Some began wrapping themselves around my arm, tiny barbs sinking into my jacket. Still, I had the strength of a man gripped by horror, and I tore free, shredding portions of my inner arm as I did.
Frantically, I stumbled and hurled myself away from the creature. I could hear Wyatt, screaming in my mind, but Anya had gone silent.
I didn’t even know what radius the device had been set for, as I couldn’t exactly make out the dials in the misty gloom. It could take the entire room, for all I knew, but that would be better, far better than—
Thunder pounded my bones, accompanied by a writhing screaming then silence. I glanced over my shoulder. The abomination hung in the air, but all I could see was brilliance, burning magnesium white, as the Tabula Rasa obliterated everything in a sphere around it.
Too large. The thought was maddening, frantic. I set it too large. It will swallow us—
Then, the field collapsed.
In an instant, the air in the room crashed into the center of what was now a vacuum, and I was tossed forward, head over heels. The collapse caused a loud pealing rumble that I could feel in my skull, and I hit my head against the stone floor, pain blossoming sharply in my skull.
I slumped forward, feeling the dark curtain of unconsciousness slip around me, soft and inviting.
“No…” I tried pushing myself up, tried biting my tongue hoping that the pain would keep me awake.
Now initiating type III emergency resuscitation protocols. I could hear the prompt in my Crown, but it seemed impossibly far away. Rerouting viral mecha operating parameters.
My heart seemed to explode as the adrenaline poured through my system. I pushed myself up, gasping, eyes wide.
I could hear Anya, gagging and retching. When I opened my eyes, I saw her on all fours, sicking up a good two feet of writhing tentacle. It was severed from the whole, and the ground was covered with similar, still writhing appendages, dying strands that had been left, sliced neatly in two when the body of the aberration had ceased to exist.
Then I felt Wyatt over the link.
He was broadcasting, not words but a panicky mix of pain and terror, laced with horrified bewilderment. He frantically pried one of the severed tentacles off his face. The tendrils were twitching reflexively, pulling at the barbs embedded in his flesh.
The left side of his face was a ruin.
Wyatt! Horrified, I sprinted to him. He cautiously peeled the tendril from his head, and I felt my heart fall to somewhere around my knees.
Wyatt’s left eye was completely sliced from his face.
Hoss. I could feel his searing pain and knew his heart hammered furiously in his chest. He struggled to steady himself as he threw the tendril in disgust and cold fury. Glad to see you.
Fuck. I gaped at him, completely lost for words. Wyatt, I—
I’m sending calibrations for your viral mecha. Anya’s link felt… weary, exhausted in a way I had never heard from her. These are suggestions for tissue regeneration and pain management.
I heard the whirring as the packet hit my Crown. A brief perusal showed almost half of my mecha being geared for pain management.
Anya. Wyatt groaned in agony as he sat up. His shredded face was macabre. These settings—
Will not restore your loss, Wyatt. She retched again, bringing up a small, writhing tendril.
No. He shook his head. You’re suggesting that we recalibrate using viral mecha that we need for survival. We still need oxygen, basic biological requirements.
“Yes.” She sat up, wiping her mouth. Her voice sounded positively dainty in the cavernous room. “These settings will reduce us from having three hours twenty-three operational minutes to fifty-three operational minutes. However, we will be pain free and capable of almost full operational standards.” She gave the tiniest of smiles. “We will conserve energy further by not using the comm. It’s the best we can do. If we must, we can use the dampener grenades and the tangler to create save havens for ourselves as we traverse the topia.”
It still sounded dire, but we had little choice. We were all about to topple over, and Wyatt was probably in shock, even though he still had the strength to snark.
If we didn’t make these calibrations, we could barely leave this room.
“We can go back.” I let the words hang in the air for a long moment before speaking again. “We were closer to Rationality on the other side of that hatch.”
“I wager my right eye that the intel we need is on this side of the hatch.” Wyatt’s tone was flat. “I think Anya needs to get all the readings that she can.”
“Our life expectancy,” Anya’s eyes were distant, but then she looked at me, “will not increase by a great deal on the far side of that hatch.”
We were all silent for a moment, and I knew that the choice was made. I made the appropriate alterations to my viral mecha, and the burning pain where I had been struck with the tentacles faded into numbness.
We would survive, at least for another fifty-three minutes.
I stood first. The room remained dim.
The screaming from the cylinders had stopped. Peering through the darkened glass, I could see that the young woman inside was dead, surrounded by tiny filaments of blackness, floating lifelessly in the water.
In fact, every strand in the room seemed to be dead or dying.
The Tabula Rasa had worked just as intended—the parts of the creature caught in the blast radius had simple ceased to be, as the device obliterated everything within range. In the floor was a hemispheric-shaped bowl where part of the room had been carved into nonexistence.
“The room looks clear.” My voice echoed oddly in the gloom. I let my vision drift through the various spectra of light but couldn’t see anything moving except for us.
“I’ll take your word for it.” Wyatt tied a Confederate flag handkerchief around his head, covering his eye and stanching the bleeding.
Then, he stood, shouldering the tangler again. He stepped to the edge of the pool, and I heard his gear start to whine. “Let’s make certain that no more squigglies can have their happy birthday in here.” He fired one spike, then a second into the pool, his fingers gleefully keying in some destructive spite.
“There will be dozens of these rooms, Wyatt.” Anya’s voice sounded so… tired. “The intel we have on the creatures is that when they invade a topia, they come in swarms of thousands. This one pool isn’t remotely enough.”
&n
bsp; “Invade?” I turned toward her. “Is that the assumption now? That the Vyriim are invading Rationality?”
She faced me; the tiniest bit of a patient smile teased the edge of her lips.
“It’s not an assumption, Michael.” She stood. “Every piece of tactical data we have on the creatures state that colonization is their primary goal. They’ve never been encountered in these numbers so close to Rationality.” She shrugged. “I think it’s apparent.”
I hated that she was correct. Still, all logic pointed in the same direction. There had been hundreds of the creatures in just one of the cylinders. Positioned this close to Rationality, this wasn’t just a simple incursion.
It was an invasion, the first volley in all-out war.
“Well, they can’t use this one.” Wyatt pressed one final key. “We should move though. I bet this stuff smells even worse while boiling.”
“Roger that.” I picked up one of my katanas from where I had apparently dropped it. “There’s another door on the far side of the room. I glimpsed it while saving everyone from a horrific fate.”
Faster next time, yeah? I could feel Wyatt’s playful grin over the link, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.
He amazed me. I knew his viral mecha were cloaking his pain, but the fact that he could still tease, even in the face of having his eye ripped out…
Wyatt wasn’t defeated. Even in the face of physical disfigurement, another hour left to live, and the invasion of our world, he was still himself, still refused to stay down.
That was who we were.
We weren’t out of this yet, but we were a long way from beaten.
20
We wandered through several small rooms after that. Most of them seemed dedicated to equipment of various types, Anya believed they were used to power the machinery in the spawning room. Regardless, we saw no one as we went, and Anya took readings the entire time.
Still, the building reminded me far more of an old office building than a hideout for Irrational terrorists or a breeding ground for human-incubated aberrations.
About three minutes later we came across the first of the massive doors. It reminded me of the bank vault-style door that we had dropped through to come here. Above it, shining as if it had been installed yesterday, there was a brass plaque that read:
Dhire Lith
“What language is that, Anya?” I remembered then that I had forgotten to tell her about the Russian I had overheard.
She peered at the letters. “None that I know. We can analyze it if we contact the Lattice again, but otherwise, I cannot say.”
“When.” I put my hand on her slight shoulder. “When we contact the Lattice.”
She smiled up at me sweetly. “Of course.”
We decided to ignore the large, round door for the moment and continued down the hallway, passing another window. Like before, it looked out onto a night sky.
“Not home, that’s for sure.” Wyatt peered through the glass. The sky was more bruised violet than black, and there was only a blurry smear of visible stars. The land around us was a desolate waste, and the moon hung low, shining an orange and sickly light.
It gave me nausea just looking at it. The sky seemed to writhe and bleed. It was bent.
It was wrong.
At the end of the hallway was another set of double doors, still looking like any doors one might encounter in an office.
Anya was already taking readings. “Still at ambient zero.”
I nodded at Wyatt and cracked open the door. His fingers were tense on his keys.
No one.
Inside was a laboratory. It looked quite sterile with several metallic surfaces. There were worktables with unfamiliar gear and a shelf with binders of notes on lined, yellow paper.
Anya’s fingers were twitching rapidly. “Zero. But…” She tilted her head, as if listening to echoes that only she could hear. “I have traces of Irrational activity. I can’t do a weave analysis without the Lattice. If I could, however, I believe that it would show that Rationality is often altered in this room.”
A chart on the wall caught my eye, a series of numbers along one side that spiraled into a symmetrical curve. It seemed as if it were a recording of data analysis.
“Anya.” My voice was quiet, but I was excited. This was something… something familiar. “Look here.”
She stepped to me, her eyes distant. As she looked at the chart, I watched as recognition blossomed in her eyes.
“Fibonacci numbers.”
“What?” Wyatt was confused.
“While you were enjoying yourself at The Booby Trap, our Preceptor noticed something in the packet. Whatever Irrat tech was creating the spikes in Irrationality, it did so in waves of Fibonacci numbers.”
“It was here.” Her voice was soft. “Whatever they were working on, they were doing it here.”
I scowled. “So, whatever Irrationality they were doing reached not only through this topia, but through the one we passed through to get here. Those were the echoes registered by Facility 17.”
She gave me a look. “I think you’re thinking about it wrong, Michael. I don’t think this was a separate topia at the time. Does the architecture of place look anything like the inside of the missile silo, the little of it you saw anyway?”
My eyes were wide. “Some of it does.” I thought of the thick shag carpets and the office décor.
Her voice was quiet. “Look at the blueprints.”
I pulled up the dossier and found the schematics we had on the silo.
Yes. We were in the exact same building. I could see the lab we were in, as well as the hallways and rooms we had passed through.
“That’s impossible.” Wyatt looked at the same schematics. “So ’Rats just plucked a building out of Rationality and left it here?”
“Something like that.” I noticed that the data matched on every point. “The interior is mutated from the schematic, but yeah, architecturally it is identical.”
“This is axiomatic weaving at an unprecedented level.” Anya picked one of the binders and paged through it. “With this technology, the Vyriim could create conduits into any point of Rationality. The desert in Nevada was a test—”
Two men opened the door on the far side of the room.
“Told you to leave.” Even though I couldn’t see Firenzei’s face through the gas mask, I could see his shock of red hair and recognized his clothing. He had bloodstains on his side and held a sawed-off shotgun.
“I told you we couldn’t do that.” I narrowed my eyes at the man.
“Well, you are now thoroughly,” he grinned, “outside your jurisdiction. I’m afraid you need to come with us.”
“You should be afraid.” I gave him a tight smile. “If you’d like to go round up some friends, I’ll allow it.”
The smile fell from his face as he swung the shotgun toward me.
“My friends are already here, Bishop.”
I engaged the Wraith the moment before he opened fire. Then, Firenzei vanished.
The other man ran to the side of the room and flipped up a metal table. He opened fire. His gun barked as Wyatt and Anya hit the ground.
Firenzei appeared right on top of Wyatt. He swung down with the butt of his gun and struck Wyatt in the face. Wyatt grunted in pain, stumbling backward.
Then Firenzei was gone again.
“You won’t do that twice, you little fuck!” WHUF. WHUF. WHUF.
Anya, can I get an overlay on his pattern again?
Acknowledged, Michael. She placed small points of light over my visual input, located in several places throughout the room. He hasn’t leapt as much so far this time. These are only probabil—
“Hello, bitch.” Firenzei brought the gun against Anya’s face, hard. I felt her link suddenly cut off. He wrapped an arm around her, and then they both were gone.
“You did not!” Wyatt was enraged. He fired a spike into the metal table that the other Irrat used for cover. In less than a second, it was w
hite hot and starting to melt. The man screamed. He hurled himself backward, but I could see that his mask had melted against his face.
Firenzei appeared again behind us. In his left hand, he held a fire extinguisher. He threw it toward Wyatt and shot it in midair.
It exploded. White, foamy powder coated everything.
Including me.
Shit.The Wraith ain’t doing you any good now, Hoss.
Acknowledged. I disengaged my gear.
We gotta get out of here. I ran across the room to where the burnt man was wailing. I could see that most of his skin had melted away. Still, he held his weapon, swinging it toward me.
I struck him once, squarely behind the ear. He dropped like a stone.
On the move, Wyatt’s fingers madly scrambled on the keys.
Recalibrating. These three spikes were to be stasis fields, but if we’re moving on... There was a burst of intense heat. We’ll just mimic the last spike we set and move on.
I threw the door open as the room caught fire. She’s got to be close. Surely he couldn’t risk taking her far.
“We’re not done.” Firenzei stood at the end of the hallway. He raised his shotgun.
WHUF. Wyatt’s spike came at the exact same time as the thunder from the gun. Instantly, his stasis field turned silver in front of us.
I glanced to the left. Side door. I sent the link and opened the metallic door. It was dark within.
Michael, Wyatt. Anya’s link was weak. Firenzei is a distraction. There is another axiomatic snare in the hallway ahead, as well as one just inside that side door.
Wyatt chimed in. What are the parameters of the snare, princess?
We can’t exactly go back, Anya. Wyatt started a fire.
Then, Firenzei appeared two steps to my left, behind Wyatt, and raised his gun toward my friend.
He had made the Wraith useless, that was true. But the fire retardant had no effect on the Adept.
In the space of a breath, quicker than I fully realized, I turned. Faster than a serpent’s strike, I raised my blade, the Adept pronouncing judgment before I consciously realized what I was doing.
