Binary Pair

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “We cleaned your gear and moved it to the armory.”

  “Ahh, thanks. Let’s go do this. Every minute we wait that beam is shooting into space.”

  “Yes, it troubles me as well.” She stood from my bed with a graceful movement, and we both left my suite. “The light feels evil, but perhaps that is merely the impression I received from your dream.”

  “Hopefully we can turn it off from inside the temple,” I said as we walked down the hallway toward the bridge.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Our friends are preparing in the hold.”

  “Great,” I said, and I pushed the button to summon the elevator.

  Eve walked with me to the armory, and we helped each other put on our armor. I strapped my twin heavy pistols and my chrome revolver to my body. The weight of the weapons and harness were comforting, and I double checked that they were loaded.

  I’d used the GKS multi-caliber assault rifle for the last few sorties. The weapon had performed well, but I reached for the double magazine auto shotgun Juliette gave me. I didn’t know exactly what we were going to find in this black temple, but a short stream of buckshot or slugs would probably kill it.

  “Ready to go?” I asked Eve after I finished pushing a sixth shotgun magazine into my ammo pouch.

  “Yes,” she said, but I could still see the fear in her eyes. She was brave, all of my friends were, and I felt a twinge of fear when I thought about the unknown power that awaited us in the temple.

  “Maybe I should do this alone,” I said, but the vampire shook her head.

  We left the armory and walked into the hold. Zea, Paula, and Kasta were sitting at the feet of the two knight-robots we had taken from Lith Dae. The three women were wearing their armor, and they had rifles slung over their shoulders.

  Yegor was also there with eight of his soldiers. They each wore bits and pieces of the Lith Dae Marine’s armor, and they carried the Lith Dae carbine weapons.

  “Hey everyone,” I said, and the women stood.

  “Hey, Captain,” Zea said. She was wearing one of the knight-drone control rigs, but the visor was tilted up so she could make eye contact with me.

  “I’m happy to see you all,” I said as I turned to the twins. Paula was also wearing one of the knight-drone control rigs, but Kasta wasn’t.

  “I’m going to control the flying drones, so we figured that Zea could use Kay.” The android patted the leg of the robot she stood next to. It was the one with the melted shield.

  “Good idea,” I said as I looked over the humanoid robots. It looked like they cleaned both of them up and someone had painted “Kay” and “Arthur” on the shoulders in neat red letters.

  I glanced over at Yegor and gave the burly man a nod. He returned the movement and then gave me a salute.

  “I told him he didn’t need to come with us inside the temple, but he insisted. They are good people.”

  “Hopefully we won’t need his help.” I nodded again to the man. He was flanked by Varya and Svetlana, and they both bowed their heads to me with obvious reverence.

  “When are the bird-drones landing?” I asked Kasta.

  “Most are arriving,” Kasta said. “We set the booster tower on top of one of the cars so I can control them a bit easier.”

  “All of them?” I asked as I peered out the open door of the hatch. The dark temple was a few hundred meters away, but the ground between was covered with hundreds of thousands of the bird-drones. The sight made my stomach drop a bit, and I had to remind myself they were harmless now that we changed the code.

  “Kind of. I can send a command, and the ones nearest me and the booster will respond. The directive will spread through the other drones until they are all doing it. It’s a bit hard to wield, but I’d rather use them than not.” As Kasta spoke, I saw another storm cloud of the silvery drones approaching. The sun glittered off their wings, and they landed off in the distance past the temple.

  “You still have the dragonfly looking recon drones?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said as she pointed to the APC, I turned and saw three of the flying camera drones perched on top of the carrier.

  “Are you all ready?” I asked my friends, and the four beautiful women nodded. “I don’t know what we are going to find in there, but I doubt it will be friendly. Watch each other’s backs, let the recon drones lead, hide behind Arthur and Kay, and don’t do anything brave.” The plan sounded completely stupid as it left my mouth, but it was a similar strategy I would have used with a team of marines.

  I turned, and the team followed me down the ramp and through the sea of now docile bird-drones.

  The ground descended toward the temple, and the soil felt soft and spongy under my boots. The drones parted as we approached, but they didn’t seem to be in any sort of hurry to move, and the going was slow.

  My dread increased with every footstep toward our goal. The temple seemed to radiate malevolence, and the air seemed to turn sour as we stepped within fifty meters of the building.

  “Oh look, the door is closed. Let’s just go back to Persephone and call it a day,” Zea said, but no one laughed at her joke.

  “There has to be a way to open it,” I said as we approached within four meters.

  The door was a good six meters tall and some four meters across. It was mostly black stone, but parts of it seemed to be reflective, as if it was actually made out of a strange metal. There were twisted serpent like designs decorating the edges and junctions, but the flat parts were swirling etches of chaos. It made my brain hurt a bit to look at them, and I forced my eyes to focus on the place where a door handle should be. There were two indents on each side, and I turned on my shotgun light so I could see inside.

  “Looks like there are handles,” I said.

  Yegor started speaking, and we waited until Kasta could translate.

  “He said that Lith Dae was excavating this site. The place where the wasps were discovered was a few kilometers from here, in a smaller structure. Before Lith Dae could open this, the drones went insane, and they fled the planet.”

  “Let’s see if it is unlocked,” I said as I reached my gloved hand into the hole on the right. My fingers closed around the ring of the door, and I tugged on it. The door didn’t move, so I pushed on it harder. It didn’t even slightly budge, but then I twisted on the handle, and it swiveled to make an electronic beeping sound.

  Then the door popped open with a hiss of air, a gust of dust, and a groan of ancient gears grinding to life. The inside of the place felt darker than the pits of the bunkers we had explored, so I pressed the switch on my left sleeve to turn on my armor lights.

  “Send the recon-drones in,” I whispered to Kasta, and the three small robots drifted in through the door on silent propellers.

  “It’s all open. Strange columns on the left and right. Looks machine made, the cuts are smooth and perfect,” she said.

  “How about the ceiling?” I asked.

  “The ceiling? Ahhh, There are stone tubes on the top. They are ribbed like a plastic tube should be. Strange.”

  “What else?” Eve asked urgently.

  “It is really damn dark in here. Hold on,” Kasta said, and we waited for a few seconds.

  “The opposite side of the room has a raised platform with a nest of those stone tubes. It is connected to a cylinder that is a few meters wide, and about four tall. I also see a cluster of strange stone looking cubes arranged in the corner. They look like screens, and one of them is pulsing with a red symbol.”

  “Do you see anything moving?” I asked.

  “No. Nothing,” Kasta replied. “Only light is that screen, and it isn’t very bright.”

  “Send Arthur and Kay in,” I told Paula and Zea. My friends nodded, and the hulking shield drones moved in through the door.

  Then we followed into the darkness behind them.

  My friends turned on their armor and rifle lights. Yegor and his crew also had lights on their weapons, but the inside of the strang
e structure still very dark, and the inky blackness seemed to fight against the light like it was an octopus pushing against a glass tank.

  We fell into two lines behind the robots. The crew of Persephone was behind the knight on the right, and Yegor’s crew walked behind the left one. No one spoke as we moved through the oppressive darkness, but the sound of our breathing seemed to fill the place with disturbing echoes.

  “We are almost to the platform,” Kasta whispered, and then my light illuminated the first step leading up to the raised dais.

  I didn’t remember all of my dream, but I did recall a bit of the temple I had entered. This place was similar, but different as well. This place felt ancient, and there were no red lights flashing down through the columns or across the ceiling. I raised my shotgun up to where I thought the cylinder would be, and that too looked a bit different from what I recalled from my dream. This was smaller, and the stone parts looked to be cracking at the seams.

  “The cubes are on our two o’clock. At the top of the platform.” Kasta’s voice was softer than a whisper, and I moved my light over to see them. The cluster of stone boxes did look a bit like a computer terminal station, but I didn’t see any sort of input device.

  “I can try to see if I can figure out the term--” Zea started to say, but her voice caught in her throat when the stone cylinder shifted.

  “Shit!” Paula, Kasta, and Zea hissed together, and we all turned our weapons toward the place where the tubes met at the top of the stairs.

  Red lights began to pulse down the walls like a heartbeat pushing blood through an artery. A sound accompanied the light. It was a dull hum that sounded like a cross between a swarm of bees and a bass drum beating. The tones thumped in time with the light, and it felt as if there were twenty kilograms of pressure on my chest.

  The front of the stone cylinder crumbled away, and dark red liquid flowed out, pooled at the bottom of the pillar, and then oozed down the four steps. An arm reached out from the depths of the interior. The hand was covered with the viscous fluid, but it looked humanoid.

  “Get ready,” I hissed painfully. The pressure on my shoulders was increasing, and it felt like someone was trying to strangle my lungs.

  The beast in my stomach screamed when the rest of the stone broke away. The beast knew this thing was our enemy, even though it hadn’t made any sort of hostile movement. The animal wanted to take control. He wanted to charge up the stairs and rip into the monster emerging from the crumbling container.

  The blood covered creature stepped out and opened its eyes. They glowed red like Eve’s did, and the being stood tall once it saw us. It appeared to be male and stood about two meters tall. It was slender though and looked as if it hadn’t eaten in a long time.

  “Argha cooonnn kaaa,” the thing said. It didn’t have teeth, just the fangs that also looked like Eve.

  “Noooooo!” Eve screamed in agony, and she dropped her rifle as she brought her hands up to her ears.

  The beast in my soul didn’t like the sound of Eve’s scream.

  I didn’t either.

  “Kill it,” I growled as I squeezed the trigger of my shotgun.

  But nothing happened. The trigger wouldn’t move, my gun wouldn’t shoot, and I couldn’t send a slug into the face of the thing that was hurting Eve. Then I realized I wasn’t having a problem with my weapon, I couldn’t actually move. I was paralyzed and couldn’t feel anything besides the growing pressure on my shoulders.

  The droning in my ears grew louder.

  “Coooon kaa yaaa,” the thing said over the sound of Eve screaming and the bees working in my brain. The blood-soaked man took a slow step down toward us, and I tried to squeeze my finger again. My body wouldn’t listen though, and the thing took another step.

  The drumming in my ears grew louder, and so did Eve’s scream. It sounded as if she was tearing her vocal chords, and her agony caused the creature that lived in my DNA to go berserk.

  “Argah. Argah. Gaa.” The blood-soaked man’s voice was dark and deep. He reached the bottom of the stairs, and he walked toward the knight-drone Yegor’s people took cover behind. None of us could move, and the expressions on the Uraniel citizens’ faces were fixed with terror.

  “Noooooo!” Eve screamed again as the monster bit into Yegor’s throat. Blood exploded out of the big man’s neck like a red paint grenade had gone off. It sprayed across the faces of Varya and Svetlana, but the two women couldn’t move. None of us could move. All we could do is watch the blood coated being drain the life out of the big bearded man.

  Yegor’s face turned yellow, then gray, then white as his eyes closed. Eve continued to scream the entire time the thing fed on our friend, but she couldn’t seem to be able to do more than bawl with anguish.

  The creature tossed Yegor’s corpse aside and then stepped toward Varya. Her body was frozen, and I imagined that the terror carved on her face was a fraction of what she actually felt as the monster approached.

  Then a tidal wave of bird drones hit the blood-soaked vampire in the chest, and he was knocked back into the stairs of his dais.

  “Haaaaaaaggggggggggg!” the thing hissed as it tried to peel the drones away, but there were dozens of them swarming him, and more kept piling on.

  But I still couldn’t move.

  I heard a sound behind me, but I couldn’t look to confirm that I thought it was the door closing. There was still a shit-ton of bird-drones attacking the vampire, but the monster continued to shout and hit at them. As I watched, it crushed one of them with its fist, tossed another into the stairs, broke another one with his other arm, and then stomped two that were trying to drill into his blood covered legs. There were still forty more of the bird-drones, and they were all shoving their needles into the vampire, but the blood-soaked asshole just wasn’t going down.

  If anything, it was starting to win against the swarm of drones.

  It took him a good five minutes, but he crushed the last one to his chest and then turned back toward us. Instead of looking at Yegor’s group of guards, his red eyes fixed on my friends, and he moved toward us.

  He was going to kill my women.

  And there was nothing I could do about it. I was frozen by the vampire’s power. I couldn’t move, or even think over the pulsating of bees in my mind. Part of me wanted it to end. It felt as if my life was being squeezed out of my chest and my brain was being ripped out through my ears. I wanted to fight this thing. I wanted to defend my friends, but I was just a man, and this thing was a god.

  The beast in my soul disagreed, and it surged out of the cage as if it was a nuclear bomb. My body shifted to the tiger-man shape, and the vampire paused his advance to study me.

  “Ahh ya?” he asked as his head tilted. He looked really fucking confused for half a moment.

  Then my shotgun slug took him in the chest, and he flew back against the stairs like a tossed doll.

  He shouted with surprise, but he couldn’t get up in time. I was standing over him, and I had my weapon pointed down at his chest. My body was still shifting over, but my trigger finger was still working, and I fired off another slug into the thing’s bloody chest. The lump of metal ripped through his flesh and punched into the stone of the stairs, but the hole almost instantly began to seal again.

  Shit.

  “Fucking dieeeeee,” I screamed as I pulled the trigger on my shotgun six more times. Each slug tore a massive chunk of his chest, head, or stomach away, but it reformed only a few seconds later, and it almost seemed as if he was healing faster than I could hurt him. He still hadn’t gotten up though, so I switched over to buck shot as soon as I ran out of solid slugs. I yanked on the trigger eight more times, and the shrapnel turned the vampire into a pile of shredded hamburger.

  But then the tiny bits of bloody meat began to coalesce as if they were magnets.

  “Fuckkkkk,” I growled as I reloaded both the magazines of my shotgun. The vampire was halfway back together by the time I reloaded my weapon, and another roun
d of buckshot reduced him to liquid again. I thought that might have done the trick, but the syrupy bits of the vampire began to join together again.

  Uh oh.

  I couldn’t keep this up forever. I would eventually run out of ammo, and the vampire didn’t seem to have a limit on his healing abilities. I wondered if he was getting power from the pod where he emerged, so I blasted the fuck out of it with a full magazine of solid slugs. My shots cut all the stone tubes free from the top and toppled over the cylinder that imprisoned the monster, but he was still healing at a rapid rate. He even managed to stand before I punched another three rounds of buckshot through him.

  I reloaded again and reminded myself that I had one more clip of each type of ammo before I would have to switch to my pistols or revolver.

  “Die asshole!” I shouted as the creature tried to push his arm against the floor so he could stand. I blew his elbow apart with a slug, and he face planted into the stairs. Then I put a pair of slugs through the back of his skull. His head was gone now. It was just a pool of red liquid and brain matter, but those all started to swim toward the neck of his corpse and they began to rebuild themselves.

  I pointed my shotgun at the stone cubes that looked like a computer. Each of my slugs found one of them, and they shattered as if they were made out of porcelain. There was blood inside of those too, and the screen with the red letters went black. This destruction didn’t cause the vampire to stop healing though, and I popped my last two magazines into the shotgun.

  “How many times do I have to kill you?” I tried to ask the vampire, but my words came out like a tiger’s roar, and my shotgun rounds reduced him to another puddle. I glanced over at my friends and saw that they were all still frozen behind the knight-drones. He was still able to use his magic on them, even though I’d just pumped some forty shotgun shells into him.

  “Fuck!” I screamed when my weapon ran out of ammo. I flipped the shotgun around in my hands and beat the monster’s skull in with the stock the weapon. Blood sprayed all over me as I did so, but his face began to reform a few moments after I was done hammering him.