by Gary Gibson
“Right, take a leak if you need it. Don’t take for ever.”
Kendrick tipped himself a little further over onto his side, and urinated onto the desert soil, only partially managing to avoid wetting himself in the process. He gritted his teeth and twisted away from the puddle of urine.
“D’you need to shit?” Helen asked him.
Kendrick twisted his head from side to side in the negative, staring into the middle distance while she yanked his trousers back up around his hips.
“Well, thank Christ for that,” she muttered. A few minutes later she lifted him up and rolled him back into the boot of the car. Kendrick watched the daylight disappear again as the boot-lid came down with a solid thunk, leaving him with only his own thoughts and the petroleum stink of a pile of greasy rags – which was the nearest thing he had to a pillow.
Summer 2088 (exact date unknown)
The Maze
Kendrick shivered, wrapping his arms around his ribs. His thin paper uniform provided absolutely no defence against the freezing cold of the darkened corridors. He’d given up trying to count the hours and days since their abandonment.
Someone had died recently just a few metres from where he now crouched. The death had occurred in a sudden outburst of violence that’d had nothing to do with Sieracki’s instructions. It might already have been a few hours ago, but time was getting harder to judge.
The man’s dying screams had gone on for far, far too long. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, or who was responsible for the killing. Kendrick had been the first to stumble across the body, while it was still cooling. The weapon used to slay him – a piece of metal twisted from one of the trolley frames – still lay nearby in a pool of gore.
And that’s how it happens, Kendrick thought, alone now in the darkness. Fear and desperation were driving them all apart.
He’d known from the start that he would answer Sieracki’s call when the time came.
Sieracki’s voice had boomed out again, some indeterminate number of hours before. Three names had been called; nobody Kendrick knew, but all of them men. A crowd had followed them to one of the great shield doors beyond which lay the lowest levels, but Kendrick hadn’t had the stomach to witness it.
As always when the names were called, the door lay open.
The first time this had happened, several men and women had rushed eagerly towards the suddenly open shield door, not seeing what the rest had noticed – automated gun turrets positioned just beyond. Those who ran forward were cut down instantly; as the rest fell back, the turrets powered down with a whine like a jet plane approaching a runway. Kendrick witnessed it all.
When those first two names were called out again, a woman had stepped hesitantly forward from the crowd, her expression unreadable. Kendrick realized with horror that she could see nothing in the darkness; she made her way hesitantly, by touch.
She was joined by another, a man this time, and it was clear from his movements that he could see better than the woman. He had glanced at her uncertainly as, her face pale and drawn, she had found her way to the edge of the shield door, guiding herself past the gun turret by sliding her hands along the corridor wall.
Kendrick remembered how someone had reached out to try to stop her, only to be slapped away. There were shouts and heated debate, a cacophony of voices.
He remembered the woman screaming, then running forward, stumbling blindly away from the corpses of the recently fallen. Her selected combatant had stared after her for at least a minute, before himself stepping forward with the stiff gait of someone deliberately walking over a cliff edge.
Kendrick could still smell the blood and scorched flesh of the bodies that had been torn apart by the guns earlier, and he despised himself when that memory made his mouth water. Wherever the innards of the dead were exposed he could see fine filaments, like silvery wires, threading through their flesh.
He kept telling himself that when his own time came he could refuse. Others had done so, and lay slowly dying of thirst and hunger in the corridors and the echoing spaces all around.
Kendrick knew that he could refuse, but deep inside he already knew he wouldn’t.
24 October 2096
En route to Texas
Kendrick could hear the sound of jet planes outside. He was lost in oil-scented darkness, the air so thick and stifling that it was almost like drowning. His lungs heaved and his skin felt on fire. Even if it wasn’t Helen’s actual intention to kill him he was pretty sure that he’d suffocate if he remained trapped in the tiny space for much longer.
He kicked out with his feet, trying to make some noise, draw attention. He felt relief blossom in his chest as someone finally unlocked the car boot.
His reward was a chink of light, a tiny, star-like point, and he felt a rush of ecstatic relief that they were going to let him out. He wasn’t going to die there in the airless dark after all.
The chink of light expanded, rushing towards him. Not sunlight, however – something else altogether.
Kendrick found that he was no longer bound. Instead he was falling, as in a dream, through an ocean of warm air. Finally he came to a soft landing on a very familiar grass plain. Once more he could see insects buzzing through the tall grass while, further away, the land curved upwards, rising to meet itself.
Kendrick looked around him, his aches and bruises suddenly a memory. He stooped down to pluck a blade of grass, twirling it between forefinger and thumb. It felt very slightly damp, the texture of its surface somehow vivid under his fingertips. If this was some kind of augment-generated hallucination, it was entirely indistinguishable from reality.
But really he was trapped, tied up in a car boot somewhere in America, not here. Logic demanded that. Yet it was hard to deny the apparent reality of what he was now experiencing.
Perhaps this is death, he mused. Or maybe the sneak preview? Either way, he felt curiously unconcerned, for the Archimedes provided a curious substitute for Heaven – or for Hell.
A darkness swept across the green, the shadow of something vast. Kendrick looked up.
Far above his head, floating in the centre of the vast cylinder that was the Archimedes, he saw a twisting, amorphous shape that he didn’t recall from his previous visions. At first he thought it was merely a cloud. But this was more like a great ocean of silver droplets that had been suspended in the artificial sky above him, the grasslands around him and his own upturned face captured and reflected in its shifting peaks and troughs.
Watching the cloud become more agitated, Kendrick felt himself gripped by a sudden fear, as if something malevolent lurked unseen just behind his shoulder.
He looked around. The great shell of the Archimedes stretched into the distance on either side of him, capped at each end by striated layers of steel. He knew that the station was divided into two huge caverns. Nearer one of these layers could be seen great scaffold-like structures surrounding transfer facilities that were used for bringing materials into and out of the station.
Above him the mercury-like cloud appeared to be dispersing. Spinning fragments, resembling drops of molten metal, boiled away from it like a swarm of silver locusts.
They began to rush down towards him and Kendrick didn’t wait to see what happened next. He bolted across the grasslands, feeling the tug of his own muscles, the air streaming past him as he moved.
Even so, he could see the shadow of the pursuing cloud-fragments overtaking him, darkening the grass around him in every direction. Light poured down upon him from long, narrow windows extending the length of the chamber, the light itself diffused by complex mirror arrays.
He stopped, dream muscles aching, and stared up again. The individual cloud-fragments were now more discernible, moving with clear intelligence and purpose. Like swarms of tiny fish darting through ocean depths, their movements appeared almost telepathically coordinated.
Kendrick stopped again, wondering what it was that felt so wrong about all this. It was like the time when his
heart had ceased beating, the feeling that part of him had vanished so suddenly that he could not at first work out what was missing.
And then he knew.
He was no longer breathing.
In this dream-place, his lungs, like his heart, were still. He deliberately drew breath then, so that air filled his chest. He actually felt the air flooding into him.
At first, panic surged within him and he felt himself begin to hyperventilate – suffering the delusion that something was blocking his nose and throat. It took a serious effort of will to maintain self-control, to remind himself that none of this was real. His lungs still moved inside the flesh-and-bone cage of his real body regardless of where his mind currently resided.
Kendrick heard the singing long before it properly impinged on his conscious mind. It brought a kind of peace that he had never believed might be possible, as if he had woken up into an angel’s dream. Hardenbrooke’s medication was finally wearing off: there was now little to stand between Kendrick and the message that Buddy and the rest of the Ward Seventeen Labrats had already received.
But there was still that sense of malevolence he’d felt. Where did it come from? He remembered what McCowan’s ghost had told him about Robert.
The insect-like motes were close enough now to take on discernible shapes. They rushed around each other as they approached Kendrick, faster and faster until they flowed together again, taking on an outline, vaguely humanoid, fleshing out as the motes blended together into a seamless whole. It took on the size and shape of a man: a flesh-and-blood human being.
At first the shape had the face of Robert Vincenzo, but its expression constantly flowed like liquid, becoming somehow simultaneously imbecilic and dangerously intelligent.
The singing faded and Kendrick struggled to hear it still, wanting to follow that sound for all eternity, to rest in its gentle cadence until the end of time.
For the first time, Kendrick understood what Buddy had been trying to tell him, understood the peace and the safety that Buddy and the others believed they would gain from boarding the Archimedes. Everything Erik had told him, on that chilly shore so far away, suddenly made sense.
The face of Robert Vincenzo stared back at him from the dream-landscape of the Archimedes. Its mouth twisted silently, forming words that Kendrick could hear in his head, as if they were his own thoughts.
Not you.
Kendrick started to speak and felt his lungs spasm violently as they kicked back into action a second time, sucking in the air necessary to project the words that he was trying to voice.
“I didn’t mean to kill you,” Kendrick stammered. “But you made me do it, damn you.”
The face twisted into the parody of a smile.
Without warning, the ground split apart under Kendrick’s feet and he fell, tumbling into a bottomless well of night filled with stars.
Kendrick lurched up from the motel bed, the sudden motion spinning him off it and sending him sprawling onto a hard wooden floor.
In an instant he was back in the real, in the here and now. He found himself in the narrow space between the side of the bed and the nearby wall, staring up at the underside of a cheap bedside table. A Gridcom box sat on it, its tacky styling designed to resemble an old-fashioned telephone.
From somewhere outside, he could hear the rush and roar of aircraft landing and taking off, just as when he’d been imprisoned in the car boot. He was still tightly bound at his hands and ankles. He struggled and twisted on filthy green linoleum, kicking and pushing until he worked his way round to the wider space between the bed and the room door.
He heard more aeroplane noise from outside. Then the sound of animated voices. The motel-room door crashed open and soldiers entered, wearing camouflage gear overlaid with dark grey armour.
With a sinking feeling, Kendrick realized that they were Los Muertos. Every one of them had a crude crucifix stitched onto the shoulder of their camouflage gear. One also wore a wide and varied collection of religious paraphernalia attached by strings and chains draped around his neck. Among these were pieces of circuit board, strung together.
And something else: something dull and silvery that Kendrick realized must have come from near the Maze. It was the same nano-stuff he had seen infesting the flesh of a dying Los Muertos warrior.
One of the soldiers grinned at the sight of Kendrick lying prostrate and helpless on the floor, and chuckled as he helped his colleagues hoist him off the floor like a sack of potatoes. Kendrick’s gag had worked loose and he tried to speak, but even thinking about it left him feeling listless and drained of energy so he decided to save his strength.
As they carried him outside, Kendrick could see the rest of the motel, which mainly comprised run-down breeze-block huts with dried-out gardens delineated by narrow margins of whitewashed pebbles. Several of the huts lacked glass in their windows, and beyond these buildings and a small park filled with abandoned-looking trailers he could see a vast fenced-off area with the all too familiar features of a military base. Administrative buildings and prefabs stood next to a long runway and a complex of hangars, all dusty and broken-looking, as if it had all been abandoned a long time ago.
The soldiers dumped Kendrick unceremoniously into the back seat of an ancient manual-drive jeep that now looked as if it was composed primarily of rust. He felt his teeth clack together as his head bounced off the side door. One soldier got in the front, another sat next to Kendrick in the back, and they took off in a cloud of dust. After only a few minutes’ journey they arrived at a security gate and were waved straight through.
In the distance Kendrick could see a series of vast hulking shapes at the far end of the base, looking for all the world like sleeping giants hidden under enormous camouflage shrouds. He could not even begin to guess what they might be.
Several minutes later they came to a halt outside a low, whitewashed building that turned out to be a jail. Limbs still bound, Kendrick was locked into a cell.
From the floor of the cell, he could see that there was one tiny barred window, which looked too small for him to even squeeze his head through, set high in what was presumably an exterior wall. Some soldiers were talking, out of sight, further along the corridor, and two appeared a moment later. Like all the rest, they wore crucifix-adorned uniforms.
While one kept his rifle trained on Kendrick’s skull the other jailer pointed a wandlike device through the bars of the cell and Kendrick’s bonds suddenly fell loose. In a matter of seconds he could pull free his aching wrists and feet.
The soldiers left him then and he groaned with relief as blood rushed back into his fingers. He crouched on the tiled floor, seeming to feel every one of the thousand bruises and aches that now patterned his body. Free at last, he thought sourly.
Kendrick stared at the door of his cell and listened. But he heard nothing beyond the occasional whine of aircraft engines starting.
Once he was sure that the soldiers weren’t likely to reappear any time soon, he stepped forward and studied the lock on the door. He’d already noticed that it was electronic.
Kendrick shook his head – were these people idiots? They’d have been better off leaving him locked in the boot of the car. It was almost as if they wanted him to escape. And he was more than happy to oblige them.
Kendrick knelt down next to the lock – a smooth, oblong steel box that did not require a keyhole – and fingered its cool surface, searching for its electron pulse with his eyes closed.
Nothing came to him. His brow furrowed as he pressed both hands against its surface. Still nothing – the cell door remained resolutely locked. A chill rushing up his spine, Kendrick hammered at the lock with the heel of his hand in sudden frustration, then rolled himself into a ball on the floor, cursing and gasping at the pain of it.
Augments or no augments, that had definitely hurt.
They had finally invented the Labrat-proof electronic lock.
A couple more hours passed, which Kendrick spent lying stretc
hed out on a narrow folding bunk fixed to the wall by chains. Then Helen returned, accompanied by Hardenbrooke and some soldiers. Kendrick sat bolt upright when he saw the medic.
This time, Helen too was dressed in combat gear, a crucifix stitched onto her tunic just over the heart. Hardenbrooke avoided Kendrick’s gaze, but she eyed him frankly.
“I don’t see why I need to get involved in this,” Hardenbrooke whined as they halted outside Kendrick’s cell.
“Because I say so,” Helen snapped. “Besides,” she said, studying Kendrick through the bars, “anything he knows about the other Augments, we can use. Isn’t that right, Mr Gallmon?”
Inwardly Kendrick’s soul shrank, wondering what would happen to him when they realized he probably knew less about what was going on than they did.
When he didn’t answer after a moment Helen shrugged, producing some kind of gun which she pushed through the bars and fired. Kendrick felt a sharp pain in his arm and looked down to see a tiny dart embedded in his skin.
The drug rapidly paralysed his muscles, leaving him awake and aware. He slid off the bunk and onto the floor, watching helplessly as they unlocked the cell door.
“What about the zero-point technology?” probed Helen.
“What?”
“The zero-point tech on board the Archimedes,” she repeated impatiently.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Kendrick answered truthfully.
“He genuinely doesn’t know about that,” he heard Hardenbrooke say.
There was a pause. “He doesn’t know about it?” Helen snapped. “Then what the fuck does he know?”
Hardenbrooke replied, sounding almost apologetic. “Look, I’m sure there’s a lot he knows which he’s holding back. That stuff you shot him up with, sometimes you need to think about how you phrase your questions. Context.”
“Peter McCowan told me about all the rest,” Kendrick said. “He told me about the Bright, how they found a way to the end of time.”
Rustling noises, and he looked up from the chair he’d been dropped into, searching his captors’ faces. A soldier lurked in the shadows nearby.
