by JM Guillen
In the lower corner of my vision, the soft blue readout said 85:14. Inevitably it counted down, an ever-present reminder that time slipped through my fingers.
I needed to move.
Drawing my disruptors, I stepped away from the terminal orb. The red emergency lights flickered overhead, eerie and haunting.
As I walked down the passage, I deliberately avoided the splatters of crimson gore. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed that the rippling ooze noticed my passing, as if, in its inexorably slow manner, it moved toward me.
“No time to think about that.”
I clenched my weapons tightly and focused on the task at hand.
Cautiously, I moved deeper into the Spire, with only darkness and aberrant horror at my side.
4
The elevator remained stuck, obstinately so.
“Of course.”
I stood outside it. Knowing that nothing would happen, but just to be certain, I pushed the call button again, hoping to catch a break.
No dice.
If I’d had my Crown comm active, I had no doubt that I’d be treated to a system message about the elevator’s current status. Perhaps the system would advise me to await an Asset, who would happily escort me.
“Fine.”
I glowered at the elevator, before stepping down the passage.
Peering carefully into the darkness ahead, I waited for the occasional red flashes, enough light to search for hints of the aberrant carnage.
Nothing.
I moved.
Only three more of the splotches of oozing ichor caught my eye as I meandered the shadowed hallways, and in every instance, my suspicion crept upon me again. The symbiont definitely possessed some kind of awareness. I could almost feel it edging its way toward me as I passed.
Perhaps it detected my body heat.
Each time, I held my disruptors at the ready, but in all honesty, I didn’t know what would happen if I fired. Would I blow the ichor into a fine mist, making it airborne? Was that what had happened to the Artisan Asset? How did the symbiont infect its target?
I just didn’t know.
After a glimpse of the elevator when the Designate showed me the schemata, I presumed it would make my way down easier. Now that I found it non-functional, I felt clueless. There had to be a stairwell somewhere, but I’d be damned if I knew where. It certainly didn’t lie anywhere near the elevator.
I’d checked.
Twice.
After a couple of sealed rooms and some marred walls that hinted at a firefight, I came to a closed door with a silvery plaque next to it. I had to lean in close and wait for the red emergency lights to make out its inscription, though even then it made little sense.
Resonance Enhancement, System IV
“What the fuck is this?”
I tried the door handle and found it stoutly locked. My kinetic disruptors would easily open the door, not to mention the fact that Spectre would let me walk through the walls…
But I had no idea what could be in that room. For all I knew, ‘Resonance Enhancement’ actually meant ‘Asset Termination.’
I didn’t have time to make the situation worse.
I needed to stay on task. After all, the blue indicators still hung in my vision, one showing the location of the nearest conduit and the other continuing its count down: 75:32.
I pressed on, glancing behind me, trying to keep my breath steady. I had a watched, hunted feeling that had followed me through the lurid corridors and lurked on the edges of my awareness since leaving the orb. More than once, I’d stopped and glanced around, feeling followed.
When the broken voice sounded again, I practically leapt out of my skin.
“ALEEEeeERT!” The word rambled down the hallway, slow and shattered. “Theees ees a Status II hot-ot-ot-ot zown.”
“I know.” I glanced at the ceiling, as if the system felt my ire. “You’ve made that quite clear.”
No response.
Several minutes later, I found the clearly marked stairwell. I opened the door and stepped inside, only a little concerned at the pitch blackness within. I found it less unnerving than the blood-red light, at least.
Out of habit, I almost switched on my optics but recalled at the last moment the blinding thunderstorm of system noise that would be patched straight into my optic nerve.
“Right then.” I sighed. “We do this the old-fashioned way.”
Cautiously, my disruptors at the ready, I took a step into the stairwell. The light-blue indicator still glowed softly at my feet.
I held the door open as long as I could and allowed the blood-red light to flicker in as I looked both up and down. If I planned on skulking in the shadows, I could at least do my best to avoid any horrifying Irrational monstrosity lurking in the darkness.
It looked clear. For now.
Holding the rail, I ghosted down the first flight of stairs. As I came to the edge of the next flight, however, I faltered. I hadn’t been able to see this far with my initial glance into the stairwell, and without my optics…
“Blind as a bat.” I muttered to myself.
Animals of the order Chiroptera do in fact possess sight. I grinned like a loon, remembering Anya’s words as she chided Wyatt in a place very far away. Just the thought of my two friends bickering made me chuckle before I returned to the problem at hand.
What if the hallway ran thick with Irrational ichor? What if I couldn’t see the symbiont as it dripped down onto me from the ceiling?
That had happened to me once before. For a moment I almost gagged as I recollected the taste of Vyriim reproductive slime.
No. Not here. Not today.
I engaged the Spectre.
Like much of Facility technology, the Spectre’s incorporeity didn’t come without a steep price. The Facility had documented several endocrine changes that happened every time I engaged it, but that didn’t concern me. A Caduceus could balance that out without much trouble.
No, the true fear involved being buried alive in the floor.
It had happened, supposedly. Stories abounded of Assets who had engaged Spectre for too long, and the packet had failed to calibrate the location of such minor things as the ground. This could cause pesky side effects such as an Asset sinking into the floor of a high-rise building and falling until they disengaged their system.
Retrieval was quite difficult in those cases.
The system had built-in failsafes, of course. The packet automatically calibrated my Crown with the Facility’s Lattice, granting it access to a predetermined usage pattern. If I used the Spectre for too long or moved too quickly, depending upon the strength of the signal, I would have to do without the packet until the system could refresh.
My Crown had a warning system, though, that felt like a numbing tingle when I used the Spectre for more than a few moments. It felt like part of my brain going to sleep, complete with pins and needles. I didn’t mind it, surprisingly enough. After all, the alternative involved shifting through the floor and falling a few dozen stories through The Spire.
Once the Spectre engaged, I took long, loping steps down the stairwell. It didn’t take me very long to find the next level, and once I had ascertained the doors’ location, I slipped straight through it.
Perfect. The sensation felt just like the spikes that the Artisan had fired at me; a cool, almost shivering rivulet as I drifted through the door.
I could still see the indicator for the Telemetry Relay Station still beneath my feet. I needed to go down further. I imagined that it would simply be a quick pause to open this door and repeat my trick with the light. That way, I could see what lay ahead.
I hadn’t imagined the three goons waiting on the other side.
What? I stood still, my incorporeal mouth gaping.
These guys definitely weren’t Facility Assets, I could tell that simply by their dress. They had the bearing of soldiers or mercenaries of some type. Two of them had a badge at their belt—something with
a stylized red triangle and a letter S—and thick, black bracers on their left wrists.
These things only raised more questions.
How had they gotten in here? How did they even know about The Spire to get in here in the first place?
Burly fellows, these men moved with confidence. As the red light flickered around them, I made out that, although not exactly dressed for tactical military work, their stances and formation told a different story.
As did the vicious but complex Calico M960’s they wielded.
Automatic weapons often spoke for themselves.
For a moment, I simply stood, stunned.
“We must have missed her.” One of the men in the back spoke, his voice like grinding gravel. “There are even fewer blossoms on this floor.”
“I hate to say it, but I agree with him.” The second man in the back spoke, his words slightly muffled. “Her point of entrance must have been—what, five stories down?” He spat. “Fucking Facility.”
“What makes you think she would remain near the Fringe?” The largest man, the one in front, looked over his shoulder as he spoke. He rubbed his bald head, and even in the flickering red light I could make out three wide scars on the left side of his face.
“I’m just sayin—” The first speaker began.
“The smart money is on our little Facility bird landing and then trying to fly again as soon as possible.” He stopped and looked to the others. “She might have created another weftingway. That’s what I’m looking for.”
“We don’t even know if she can. She’s not one of the mongrels.”
I listened to the three, frozen in place. They hadn’t seen me yet and might not see my blurred outline at all in this dim light. Still, it wouldn’t do to push my luck.
“Do you think,” the first man asked, peering around, “that her Signum is still awake?” He gestured to his head as he spoke. “In this place?”
“I dunno.” The large man in front stopped, stone still, and held up his left hand, clenched in a fist.
The other two stopped at once.
The bald man squinted, peering into the hallway in front of him, looking as if he smelled something foul.
“Got something?” The second man spoke, the one with the muffled voice. Slowly, he took another step forward, scanning the darkness as well.
If I didn’t know better, I would think that the men looked squarely at me.
“Mebbe so.” The scarlet light flickered again, and I could see that now the large, bald man’s weapon pointed straight at me. “Mebbe I found our little bird.”
Of course, this would be the exact moment that the pins-and-needles sensation began to buzz in my Crown.
The warning that my packet had been engaged for too long couldn’t have come at a more dire time. My eyes widened as I stared at them, realizing if I didn’t disengage the Spectre, and quickly, I might find myself hurtling through the floor.
Well, fuck.
5
After less than a moment’s thought, I dove back through the door, resigning myself to the darkness on the other side. I had no idea what might be lurking in those shadows but—
“There!” I couldn’t tell which of the men cried out, but when a couple dozen bullets shredded their way through the stairwell door, I felt suddenly pleased that I hadn’t instantly disengaged the Spectre.
Instead, I rolled to the side and switched the packet off as I bolted to the bottom of the darkened flight of stairs. I held my disruptors out in front of me and edged further down the stairwell.
“Not our little bird.” One of the men had crept quite close to the door.
“No.” The large man paused. “It weren’t.”
As they spoke, I backed down the stairs a little more. I truly didn’t believe these thugs had anything to do with my dossier.
Except…
“You are expected to engage only Assets or Irrationals that have been infected with the symbiont,” I muttered, talking to myself.
But they didn’t seem to be infected, not at all.
That probably ruled these guys right out; they seemed far more aware of themselves than the Artisan had. In all likelihood, they weren’t infected.
“Get the door, Rogers.” The large man spoke again. “I’ll keep you covered.”
“Yeah. No problem.” Rogers, apparently the leaner man who sounded as if he had gravel in his larynx, fiddled with the handle.
Sounds scared shitless. I took another step back, holding my guns steady. Maybe that would—
Beneath my foot, something organic went squish.
Fuck! I fought against the urge to immediately jerk away. For all I knew that could be how the symbiont infected something, latching on as it struggled.
I felt it squiggle beneath me, felt it move to encase my boot.
Rogers kicked in the door. In the flickering light, I saw him do a right fine job of sweeping the stairwell with that vicious little Calico. It had a brilliant light on the front, and it did a wonderful job of showing the stairwell behind me.
And the horror within it.
The stairwell held a thick, scarlet layer of the symbiont, floor to ceiling. It rippled as the light passed over it, and I saw pulsing veins and odd, alien organs squirming within it. More than one baleful eye hung from thin pseudopods that dangled like limp stalactites.
“Christ above,” Roger breathed, his eyes wide.
For a long moment, we both looked at the dripping horror. It looked like nothing so much as an orifice on the body of some cosmic abomination, a gore-ridden throat through which the creature could consume us with ease.
Then Roger’s eyes fell on mine.
“Oh. Hey.” I held my disruptors on him, even as he held the Calico on me. The light from his weapon blinded me.
“Asset!” He cried over his shoulder even as he pulled the trigger, spraying dozens of bullets into the hallway.
Fortunately for me, I had reengaged the Spectre.
The bullets tore into the atrocity behind me, and I saw the symbiont rippling up the stairwell, even as I ran in that direction myself.
When I closed on Rogers, I killed the Spectre, shoved one of my disruptors beneath his chin, and fired.
He didn’t have a whisper of a chance. The kinetic blast tore through the soft skin beneath his jaw and exploded out the top of his skull.
As his corpse slumped to the ground, I looked through the door and met the eyes of the bald, scarred man, who looked at me with an eerie intensity, standing far closer than I’d expected.
“Asset,” he said, almost conversationally.
Then, before I knew what happened, he slammed an enormous fist straight into my jaw.
My skull sang with brilliant explosions, and I stumbled back toward the ascending stairs.
To my left, the stairwell quietly echoed with the slurping sound of the symbiont as it slowly oozed its way up to us.
“Fucking ow!” I glared up at the man who raised his Calico. Before he had the opportunity to aim, I engaged the Spectre and rushed past him and his companion into the hallway.
“What?” The other man fired at my blurred form as I raced past.
Trickles of cold cut through my body as his bullets passed. I made the mental nudge that kicked the Adept into action and reveled in the burst of speed and dexterity in my system.
I holstered the disruptors and drew my katanas. Spinning about, I prepared to end this.
Even if the Designate said I didn’t need to.
“Padre…” The man had a reason for sounding muffled and gravelly, I saw. He wore an incongruous rebreather mask over the lower part of his face.
I spun toward him, planning to materialize with both katanas in his chest.
“Already on it,” the man he had called Padre drawled.
Less than a thought later, the world around us trembled, and reality itself shook. Ripples ran through Rationality, as if brute force were straightening the axioms of reality and repairing the temporary damage my gear
did to it.
Midway through my spin, the Adept and the Spectre both powered down. I stumbled with the suddenness of it, and the masked man brought up a blade of his own, easily parrying mine.
“Hey there, pal.” Even if I couldn’t see the smile on his face, I could hear it in his voice.
My eyes widened as the Padre stepped closer, holding something in his hand.
A dampening grenade.
I stared at it for what seemed like an eternal moment, my mind not quite understanding what I saw.
“Surprise, right?” The masked man practically jeered.
“Um,” I reasoned thoughtfully. I looked back to him, still holding my blades upright.
Then the Padre held his Calico less than two feet from my midsection and opened fire.
Chuk-chuk-chuk!
“Fu—!”
The initial burst of shots exploded into a red blossom of pain.
I fell.
I heard the Calico bark again and again, pounding round after round after round into my midsection and chest.
Helpless.
“Pathetic,” the bald man sneered down at me, then turned to his friend.
“Pathetic and arrogant.” The masked man chuckled, sounding a million miles away. “Just like an Asset to assume he has everything under control.”
“Come on.” I faintly saw the bald man gesture. “If there’s one Asset, then there’s more. They’re like roaches.”
“True that.” The masked man nodded, and the two stepped forward, creeping toward the door. Only a moment later, and they had stepped within.
Then the world spun a bit, quite alarmingly, and everything went black.
6
When I woke up, the readout on my Crown said 55:31.
“Good God.” Moaning with pain, I rolled to my side, trying to pretend that I didn’t feel as if I had been run over by a steamroller. Grunting, I sat up, my hands patting my sides gingerly.
I didn’t appear to be bleeding, but I felt as if I had taken a couple dozen hammer-strikes to the ribs. Every touch sent sharp waves of pain through my midsection.
