Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Draeger didn’t speak but his expression was getting angry. “Thing is,” Kendrick continued, “I could never be sure before where Hardenbrooke got the stuff he was using on me. But now I know: he got it from you.”

  “This is nonsense—”

  “No, it’s the truth, isn’t it?” Kendrick snapped. “The one thing I do know is that Hardenbrooke is scared of you. The treatments he gave me came from your research. Everything makes sense if he and Vasilevich were both working for you. But they double-crossed you, didn’t they? They supplied the same information that they obtained to Los Muertos.”

  It fitted perfectly. Draeger knew that Hardenbrooke had cheated him, so he’d taken matters directly in hand by inviting Kendrick to Cambodia. Kendrick met Draeger’s eye and knew he was right.

  A silence ensued. Kendrick saw Draeger glance past him and realized they were no longer alone. The breath caught in his throat as he turned to see that Smeby had silently re-entered the room. Nobody could sneak up on a Labrat like that without them hearing. Unless, of course, he reminded himself, they too were augmented.

  Smeby caught his gaze for a moment and Kendrick turned away, suddenly less sure of himself.

  “All right,” said Draeger. “I can see you’re not interested in anything I have to say. However, I would nevertheless like to send a message.”

  “Who to?” Kendrick laughed. “I’m not your messenger boy.”

  “If you don’t want me to help you, then perhaps you’d care to tell your friends from Ward Seventeen that if they want to get to the Archimedes they’re going to need my help. Or else they’re going to die, for all their efforts. Tell them that.”

  “Why don’t you tell them yourself?”

  “I am telling them – through you.”

  “To be frank with you, Mr Draeger, I don’t see why I should do any such thing. Even if I knew where to find them.”

  Draeger’s smile was thin, humourless. “Maybe you’ll change your mind in time. Mr Smeby, would you escort our guest to his homeward flight?”

  Kendrick watched as Draeger turned and headed back behind his desk, ignoring him now.

  Don’t let him win this one by losing your temper.

  Draeger clearly didn’t believe that Kendrick had no special inside knowledge of anyone’s plans concerning the Archimedes. Now it was up to Kendrick to find a way to capitalize on that mistake – and if Draeger wasn’t prepared to illuminate things any further, then Kendrick would have to figure out what was going on by himself.

  “What is it that keeps you here, Smeby?”

  They were back outside now, descending the steep stone steps to where the little electric car still waited. Kendrick had suffered a brief terror that Draeger had no intention of letting him go, that he was caught in a trap. But nothing threatening had happened.

  Then again, he realized, if Draeger kept him here Kendrick would never be able to deliver his message.

  “He offered to make you better,” Smeby replied. “Perhaps you should have taken that offer up.”

  “On principle, I don’t accept anything where I don’t know what I’ll find myself paying in return.”

  They got into the car and Smeby sat behind the controls. “Either what you did back there was very brave or very stupid, or maybe both,” Smeby said. “I haven’t yet quite decided which.”

  “You’re augmented,” said Kendrick. It was a statement, not a question.

  “But I’m not a Labrat, no.”

  “Why, Smeby? You must have known the risks.”

  “I used to be a mercenary. Some advantages are worth the risks.”

  “So has it been? Worth it, I mean?”

  Smeby pursed his lips, and waggled a free hand in the air between them. So-so. Then he returned his attention to steering the car.

  A few minutes later Smeby spoke again. “Here’s something else. What if I suggested to you that President Wilber was right in what he did?”

  “Then I’d suggest back to you that you were crazy, or deluded, or both,” Kendrick replied. “Is that really what you think?”

  “Let’s just say that I think America’s downfall was for reasons other than those that you may think brought it down. I’d suggest that weakness brought it down, and I respected Wilber for his strength and commitment. He believed in values like honour and duty, and things like that don’t go away.”

  Kendrick peered ahead, spotting the tower where he’d landed earlier. The VTOL still stood there, waiting high above the trees.

  Smeby continued: “The next time we meet, Mr Gallmon, it might not be on such friendly terms. You should remember that.” As the car jerked to a halt Kendrick noticed Candice waiting for them at the base of the tower.

  “I’d have to say that sounds a lot like a threat,” Kendrick replied.

  “Money is power, Mr Gallmon. It wouldn’t require much effort to get you taken in by the appropriate authorities.” Smeby studied him now with cold, hard eyes. “You’re already living under a false identity. The fact that your augmentations have turned against you means that you should have registered for voluntary medical quarantine. If someone knows enough about you, that puts you potentially in a very bad place.”

  Kendrick said nothing, knowing it was true. He suddenly felt cold despite the intense heat. It would be a simple matter for Draeger or Smeby to turn him in.

  He began to wonder exactly what he was going home to.

  17 July 2088

  Experimental Ward Seventeen, The Maze

  Someone was screaming, a high banshee ululation that went on for ever.

  Kendrick remembered an operating theatre, men and women in antiseptic blue smocks. Then a metal coffin, its smooth walls surrounding him, his heart beating wildly as he was plunged into darkness, his arms and legs shackled together while a thick, viscous liquid filled his nose and lungs. He remembered wires and tubes sprouting from his flesh. He remembered desperately trying to beg for mercy even as they closed the lid on him, leaving him to wonder if they would ever let him out again.

  The liquid had an antiseptic taste that turned his lips and tongue numb before he lost consciousness.

  Now Kendrick woke and found himself back in the same narrow cot, in the same Ward that had been his home for these past several weeks. He was still in the Maze, somewhere in its deep subterranean levels that riddled the earth with echoing steel and concrete chambers and corridors, filled with the tortured cries and screams of other human beings.

  His eyes opened to see bare and unpainted walls, the ceiling crowded with rust-coloured iron conduits. He felt a scratchy numbness in his chest as if his heart had become filled with dried flowers. He tried to part his lips, but they were so dry that they stuck together.

  Kendrick lifted up his head and found he had been tied down with restraints. Nonetheless, he caught sight of the fresh, livid scars that criss-crossed his chest, and he moaned with terror.

  Down here in the wards all the guards wore contam suits. He could see one standing near the entrance to the Ward with a rifle half lifted to his shoulder, his mouth a round gaping “O” of astonishment, visible through his plastic visor.

  At first, Kendrick thought that the guard was staring at him. Though his arms were tied down just below the elbows, he managed to raise his hands high enough so that he could see them by craning his head around the right way. He saw strange patterns in his flesh, unfamiliar ridges like maps of the surfaces of alien moons.

  Kendrick turned his head the other way and saw another prisoner strapped to the adjoining cot. The man’s mouth gaped, his face red and sweat-slick from the effort of screaming.

  A name floated to the top of Kendrick’s thoughts: Torrance – that was the other man’s name. Like Kendrick, Torrance wore a one-piece disposable uniform. Both their heads were kept shaved. They even shared similar scars where the surgeons had cut into their bodies.

  Something was pushing its way out of Torrance’s flesh, something shiny, black and metallic-looking, sliding out throu
gh his skin like thorny spines, appearing through his neck or sliding out between his ribs. As if caught in a dream, Kendrick perceived, as though from a great distance, that the spines were rough-surfaced, formed of tight fibrous bundles apparently glued or bound together. They glistened wetly, slick with their host’s blood.

  Torrance began to shake inside his restraints, his body seized by a fit. His screaming choked off suddenly, a wet and bubbling noise emerging from his lungs instead. With surprising vigour, Torrance jerked and rattled in his cot until it began to slip away from the wall. Kendrick continued to watch with horrified fascination as the spines weaved around in the air, the husk of Torrance’s body splitting and tearing as if something had become trapped inside it and was trying desperately to escape.

  Then a strange, high-pitched laugh sounded. It was the kid, still only in his teens. Robert something? Kendrick turned his attention to him. Robert, in turn, studied Torrance’s dying agonies with a horrible fascination. Sudden anger swelled in Kendrick’s chest. He knew that the boy was insane, not responsible for his actions, but nonetheless he ached to hurt Robert for seeming to take such delight in Torrance’s agony.

  Then Kendrick relaxed, because it was, after all, just a dream. He let his head drop back onto the cot’s rubber surface and closed his eyes.

  As soon as he shut his eyes, bright white light exploded deep within his mind . . . and for a moment he was Torrance, screaming piteously because his body was being torn apart . . . and then he was Erik Whitsett, sleeping his endless sleep on the other side of the Ward, near where the guard still stood in uncertain shock while doctors and technicians, dressed in similar bulky contam suits, rushed past him into the Ward.

  Whitsett was dreaming of his family, who were waving to him from a great distance . . . Something else, then: Kendrick had the sensation of being watched, as if some powerful, godlike mind had suddenly entered the expanded realm of his consciousness. Memories and emotions that weren’t his own assailed him.

  He forced his eyes open again and heard a spasmodic banging sound. He twisted his head to one side to see a huddle of men in contam suits standing near – but not too near – the cot where Torrance now lay dead.

  He followed their gaze, to the far end of the Ward.

  There was an entrance there that some of the other prisoners had nicknamed the Dissection Door. It was made of steel, designed to slide into a recess in the wall. But now the door was slamming open and shut, over and over again. Opening, shutting, opening, shutting.

  I’m doing it, Kendrick thought. No . . . it wasn’t just him. It was Peter McCowan and Buddy, both of whom had already been confined in the Ward when Kendrick had arrived. Robert was part of it too. It was . . .

  It was all of them.

  The door stopped its hideous slamming. The ensuing silence was immediate, shocking.

  Kendrick recognized the new arrivals as members of the Maze’s medical staff. Or perhaps they were merely technicians – their exact role was never quite clear, although they spent much of their time taking blood samples or X-rays of every prisoner in the Ward, always well disguised behind plastic visors. Two of the men who had arrived during Torrance’s death throes now kicked down the wheels on the dead man’s cot.

  They wheeled Torrance out through the Dissection Door. Nobody ever came back from there. The guard followed them, his eyes still wide behind his transparent visor.

  Kendrick realized that they had been left unguarded.

  McCowan pulled himself up from his narrow cot and hobbled over to Kendrick. “Jesus, did you see that?”

  Sieracki had a policy of keeping prisoners in restraints for up to forty-eight hours after they emerged from the operating theatre. But Torrance had been strapped to his cot for over four days, while Robert had been under restraint since almost the beginning. Ever since he’d woken up he’d lain there shivering and sweating, nonsense syllables spilling out of his mouth at irregular intervals.

  Out of the sixty-odd men kept in Ward Seventeen since Kendrick’s arrival, perhaps thirty-five had so far survived the ordeal of surgery.

  Kendrick licked his lips. “That depends what you’re talking about.”

  McCowan studied him carefully. “I saw that,” he replied, nodding towards the vacant space where Torrance had been. “I’m talking about . . .” He looked as though he was searching for the right words but couldn’t find them. In the end he reached up and tapped the side of his head, a furtive look on his face.

  Kendrick nodded in understanding. So he hadn’t been the only one to see what he’d seen. “I saw something, too,” he said carefully. “But I’m not sure what.”

  “In your head?”

  Kendrick nodded. “In my head, yeah.”

  Peter McCowan’s journey over to Kendrick’s side of the Ward had been precarious. His sense of balance seemed to have disappeared since his most recent surgery. Sieracki’s augmentations had grown long roots into the fertile flesh of McCowan’s nervous system and, as a result, he lurched like a drunkard every time he took a step and he fell over frequently.

  McCowan moved his hands along the side of Kendrick’s cot for support, until he could sit himself carefully on the edge. “I knew we’d all seen it. I knew.” He glanced over at Whitsett, whose eyes darted around frantically under closed eyelids.

  Kendrick looked over at Buddy Juarez: the surgery had reduced him to a shambling wreck, his head constantly tipped over to one side, his eyes rheumy and distant. He shook uncontrollably, and for a long time – several days now – had lost the power of speech. He appeared to be recovering slowly, however, which had saved him so far from being wheeled through the Dissection Door. Unlike Torrance, Juarez still had a chance.

  “Yeah,” said Kendrick. “But was it real? It felt like I was . . . inside—”

  “Inside Torrance’s head, yes,” McCowan finished. He looked as if he was about to cry.

  Despite his restraints, Kendrick managed to touch the other man’s hand, laying his own gently on McCowan’s scarred fist. That seemed to calm him, and after a little while the man’s expression smoothed again. But he still could not look Kendrick in the eye.

  “Dear Christ, what I would give. What I would give to . . .”

  Get out of here, Kendrick finished in his head. “I know, I know.” It remained an obsessive desire for all of them, even as they became resigned to the knowledge that it was an impossible hope.

  “I saw them! I saw them!” This time it was Robert, struggling against his restraints. He writhed pathetically on his cot, his expression flickering between terror and delight. “I saw them.”

  McCowan pushed himself around in his half-kneeling position to stare over at the boy. There was still no sign of the guard. “Saw what, Robert?” he asked.

  “The Bright,” Robert whined. “I saw them.”

  McCowan shook his head and looked back at Kendrick. “What d’you make of that?” he asked softly.

  “He doesn’t talk about anything else.” Kendrick glanced along the ward. Another prisoner stood up and stared angrily at Robert, his fists clenching spasmodically, one side of his face hanging slack. He tried to take a step forward, then started to slump to the ground, catching hold of the edge of someone else’s cot. Other men – wherever the women prisoners in the Maze were, Kendrick had no idea – conferred in low murmurs. They too were aware that their guard was suddenly absent.

  “Robert,” Kendrick called out. The boy took no notice of him. He tried again, a little louder. “Robert, are you okay?”

  Robert twisted his head up to stare at him. “I saw you. I saw you from the inside. Did you see them?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of things, Robert. Take it easy. You’re making people frightened.” The man who had been clenching his fists sat now on the edge of his own cot, staring at his hands with an expression of utter despair on his face.

  “I’m going to escape,” the boy shouted excitedly.

  “We’re all going to escape,” Kendrick promised him.
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  “You mean we’re all going to die. I want to go with the Bright. They showed me the way!”

  “The what?” asked McCowan.

  Kendrick let his head drop back down. “He’s been muttering about that for the past couple of nights.” Robert still muttered and moaned and twisted on his cot.

  “They’ll show me the way,” the boy continued. “The Bright. Only us.”

  Kendrick looked away from him, settling his gaze on the ceiling above. He could sympathize with Robert’s desire for freedom. They all could.

  “You were studying your fingers.”

  There was a screen mounted on the wall behind Sieracki’s shoulder. He had cropped his hair close to the skull since Kendrick had first encountered him in the garage. His thin lips barely moved as he addressed his prisoner. On the screen Kendrick could see an overhead shot of himself, from an angle, sitting on the edge of his cot and, indeed, studying his fingertips.

  Sieracki’s office was located off a long corridor linking Ward Seventeen with all the other Wards. Kendrick had never been inside any of those other rooms, but sometimes Sieracki gave away more during his interrogations than he perhaps intended. By this means, Kendrick had discovered that the experiments carried out in Wards One through Twenty-three were relatively benign, in that the death rate rarely rose above two or three in five.

  Through whispered conversations with other prisoners Kendrick had heard stories that the entire population of some Wards had been known to die in a single twenty-four-hour period, keeping the dissection rooms busy through the night.

  After a while, Kendrick began to suspect that Sieracki himself was disseminating much of this information deliberately as part of his ploy to get the most accurate information from his experimental subjects during their interrogations. Sieracki was careful to make sure that they all understood that failure to cooperate almost certainly meant transferral to a Ward where the survival rate was approximately zero.

  What Kendrick knew about Sieracki’s past was minimal. Still, some basic facts had emerged over the long weeks of Kendrick’s confinement. There was no way to substantiate any of these rumours, but nonetheless he held on to such brief snatches of information as though they were precious jewels.