by Gary Gibson
Kendrick cried out at the pain that had just exploded inside his skull. The words sounded defeaning, overwhelming: but they did not echo.
In my head. He pushed himself down the steps towards the burning figure, the light around it flickering like silent lightning. Again he perceived lines of energy flowing through the walls and ceiling, but they were now far more evident than before. It was as if he could deduce the layout of the Maze in its entirety, reduced to a schematic displaying the flow of electrons throughout its structure.
He looked closer and realized that the burning figure was Robert Vincenzo, Caroline’s brother. But transformed – no longer human. Kendrick halted, frozen to the spot. Then Robert was gone, turning and fleeing into the depths.
Eventually Kendrick found the will to put one foot in front of the other, continuing his descent.
Even from far away, Robert’s words still filled Kendrick’s head.
the bright began it
“Began what?”
everything came the reply. they woke on the archimedes and waited such a long time now they know we are here
“You’re going to have to explain that more clearly, Robert.”
they see themselves in us
The voice faded suddenly, interrupted by a series of high-pitched giggles that sounded near – very near.
Kendrick wasn’t even looking for Ryan now. He just wanted to understand what had become of Robert, the only one yet to escape the Wards. He wanted to see if the flaming creature with Robert’s face had objective reality, or if he was simply losing his mind.
A shadow flickered in the distance, accompanied by the clatter of feet on metal. Kendrick hurried towards it, finding himself on the threshold of a vast chamber filled with towering piles of metal crates.
He hesitated. It would be too easy for Ryan to creep up on him in there. Overhead, light glinted from a lens.
Kendrick wrapped his fingers tightly around the haft of his knife and stepped slowly forward into the chamber, listening, watching. Several low-bodied trucks sat on rails next to an industrial-size elevator.
Hearing the faintest scuff of a heel directly behind him, he turned, moving faster than he could ever imagine possible. A blade arced past his ear, missing his head by millimetres.
That should have killed me. Kendrick marvelled at the lightning speed of his own responses. Ryan stepped nimbly away from him, an animal sound emerging from his throat as he prepared to lunge again.
Sudden light flickering from high above distracted them both. Kendrick caught sight of Robert standing on top of a crate nearby. Robert’s flesh was flickering with a ghostly brilliance: thousands of cilia-like extrusions from his skin waved softly in the air around him.
His eyes full of horror, Ryan stood gaping up at him. Robert alighted from the crate, moving so dizzyingly fast that to Kendrick it seemed that he had been there but was now here within the same second, standing almost nose to nose with Ryan. A hand flashed forward, touching Ryan on the cheek. Ryan’s eyes dimmed – and he slumped lifeless to the ground.
Kendrick stared, numb, wondering if it was his turn next. But Robert merely gazed back at him, eyes blank and full of flickering energy.
he was not like us
you and I are like the bright
but not him
Kendrick licked his lips. “I don’t understand.”
some of us are more like the bright than others
so they speak only to us
to you to me to buddy to all from our ward
but to no others
Seeing the threads emerging from all over Robert’s body, like fine black wires, reminded Kendrick of how Torrance had died.
Robert reached out a hand to him.
Kendrick screamed, imagining the chilly and terrible brush of those delicate cilia against his cheek. He lashed out and drove his blade deep into Robert’s chest, somehow finding the strength to yank it out and stab again. As Robert crumpled, the light faded instantly from all around him, his flesh immediately turning soft and pliant as putty.
Kendrick staggered to one side and retched violently. Just for a second, he could have sworn that he saw some of the black threads emerging from Robert’s flesh reaching out to the bare concrete beneath him, and push their way into it.
He thought suddenly of Caroline, and felt deep, dreadful shame.
But something was different now. The long hunt through the corridors had triggered something deep within him; something dormant in his augments.
24 October 2096
Los Muertos-controlled military base, Texas
Buddy leant down while Kendrick lifted Caroline towards him, holding her around the waist like a ballet dancer raising his partner above his shoulders. Buddy grasped hold and started to haul her on board.
Kendrick leapt up onto one of the helicopter’s landing struts, dust whipped up by the rotors stinging his eyes and nostrils.
Some instinct made Kendrick look up just before he pulled himself in after Caroline. He saw three fighter jets tear through the sky with an almighty roar, followed by explosions somewhere far off across the base. The aircraft were too far away for him to be able to recognize their markings.
He watched in awe as fire blossomed in the distance and orange blooms stitched across the landscape towards the two remaining shuttles. The first shuttle was already lost in the night sky, its passage now visible only by an arc of flaming light.
The second shuttle’s engines were already rumbling. It began to lift on its own pillar of fire.
The helicopter lurched as Buddy took it up fast. Kendrick slammed down the back of the co-pilot’s seat and managed to drag Caroline’s unconscious body into the rear of the aircraft.
“Buddy, thank God,” he gasped. “Listen, I—”
“Under attack,” Buddy interrupted tersely. Kendrick looked ahead and spotted tracer fire streaking towards them through the dark, coming from the darkened window of a nearby building. Buddy yanked on the stick so that the ’copter weaved from side to side.
“How the hell did you know where I was?” Kendrick yelled. “I don’t have my wand.”
“Roy Whitman sent someone to New York to meet you, saw you go off with the woman, then had to use guesswork. She’s well known in Los Muertos. One of their top operatives.”
“So why didn’t you call me in New York and warn me?”
“Tried. But you didn’t pick up. So I figured they’d locked your wand off remotely with a software worm. Now we know for sure that Los Muertos are trying to beat us to the Archimedes.” Buddy shook his head. “Idiots don’t stand a chance.”
The second shuttle was already streaking through the upper levels of the atmosphere and would soon be lost from sight. The third was still sitting on its launch pad, but now a blazing inferno jetted from its engines. Kendrick and Buddy could hear the rattle of automatic weapons even over the din of the helicopter engine.
“Hold tight,” Kendrick heard Buddy say. “We’re still being shot at.”
Most of the base was now invisible under great swathes of dust and smoke. Buddy veered the aircraft sharply to one side, keeping dangerously close to the ground. Kendrick felt his stomach lurch in about seven different directions as his companion flew like a maniac. He caught a glimpse of the third shuttle. They were close enough to it to get incinerated if it chose that moment to launch.
Then he understood what Buddy was doing. The shuttle was now positioned between them and the main base, effectively shielding them from any gunfire coming from that direction.
Once they were past it they accelerated hard. Then a roar filled the air, sounding like God falling out of Heaven, and Kendrick knew that the last shuttle had begun to lift. Their aircraft shook so hard around them that he couldn’t believe it wouldn’t simply fall apart.
As they tilted to rise again, he glimpsed the damaged shuttle – liquid fire spilling from it – rising with astonishing speed. Buddy was rapidly putting kilometres between them, but still they were f
ar too close. From the way he was twisting in his seat, he was clearly struggling to keep them aloft.
As Kendrick turned to see the third shuttle streaking upwards he noticed a line of fiery pockmarks stitch itself across its hull, blossoming and expanding until they joined up to consume the spacecraft in seconds.
Kendrick watched in horrified fascination as the shuttle’s hull buckled explosively in mid-flight. The nose of the craft spun away into the night air, twisting and turning as it fell through a long descending arc.
The rest of it disappeared in a mighty fireball, sending out a powerful shock wave that almost hurled the helicopter back to the ground.
Kendrick watched the base’s mesa whirl below them as he waited for the end to come. But instead their course became gradually steady and smooth. He glanced at Buddy, who had pulled off his mask. A weak grin creased the pilot’s mouth, then he whooped like a cowboy. “Jesus, what a ride!”
Far below them, a ruined freeway wound its way toward the horizon. They flew on, passing over farmland where crops had previously grown across uncountable acres but where now only a grey pulpy mass streaked the soil. Asian Rot had taken its toll here.
A little while later, they dropped down to a landing in a low-ridged canyon where the vegetation appeared to have escaped the worst of the Rot. Wild flowers and piñon shimmered in the heat, growing on the banks of a stream that was barely more than a trickle.
They eased Caroline out of the helicopter and onto the sparse grass, keeping her wrapped in the same sheets that Kendrick had found her in. Her eyelids fluttered open to reveal pupils that were wide and unfocused. Her lips parted, as if she was about to speak, but then her eyes closed and she was asleep again.
Buddy glanced at Kendrick uneasily. “You didn’t tell me she was this bad.”
“She wasn’t anywhere near as bad as this the last time I saw her. That was only a couple of days ago.”
“We can help her,” Buddy reassured him. “Look, the launch is being run from an offshore site. They’ve got medical facilities there, so we’ll make sure she’s taken care of.”
Kendrick nodded. “You know what I don’t understand?”
Buddy tilted his head. “What?”
“Why did the Bright do this to us? All our augments turned rogue at the same time, but the question is: why?”
“I don’t claim to understand that.” Buddy looked exasperated. “Perhaps the Bright triggered something in us, just by the simple act of communication.”
“Did you ask the Bright that?”
Buddy looked pained. “You may have noticed their communication tends to be solely one-way.”
“It certainly makes it hard for anyone to refuse them if staying down here means we’ll all die a lot sooner.”
“You’re implying that they turned our augments rogue deliberately. But that’s ridiculous.”
“Sure of that, are you?” Kendrick snapped. “Can you just look at what’s happening to Caroline and tell me you believe this is all for the best?”
“I . . .” Buddy’s face coloured. He turned away without another word and headed back to the helicopter.
25 October 2096
New Mexico
Kendrick woke to a sky streaked with red. His face numb with cold, he sneezed in the chill morning air. The rest of him was wrapped in a thermal sleeping bag, and the helicopter loomed as a dark shape above him.
“Time to be going.” Buddy hovered over him and handed him a plastic thermos lid filled with hot instant coffee. Kendrick sipped at it, blinking himself awake and longing for just another twelve hours of sleep.
Against his better judgement, he let his mind roam back to the day when he’d killed Robert. The shame and horror of it were never far away from his thoughts. The incident – every word, every action – was etched eternally in his mind. Sometimes he felt as though he’d died that day too: as though he’d become someone else, someone with the same body, even the same thoughts but, on a level that he couldn’t quite define, not the same person.
Caroline was still sleeping but he sensed that this was normal sleep now, rather than chemically induced. He stepped over to inspect her, brushing a strand of hair back from her face. She twitched, then a corner of her mouth crept upwards in an unconscious half-smile. Kendrick studied the myriad lines criss-crossing the once flawless skin of her face.
Buddy stepped over beside him. “I think she’s going to be okay,” he whispered.
Kendrick nodded down at her. “You call that okay?”
“I call it a lot more okay than if she’d been stowed on one of those shuttles. You did good, Kendrick – real hero stuff.”
Kendrick gestured for them to move away, then began, “Where are we right now?”
“New Mexico, heading west,” Buddy replied.
“And we’re headed for this offshore launch base?”
“Yeah, hundred klicks or so out from the Californian coast. But we’re going to have to stop off in LA on the way. There’s a place – a safe house, if you like – and some people will be waiting there. They’re Labrats, and I need to make sure everything’s running smoothly before the last of them head out to the launch site.”
Kendrick digested this. “How far are we from the Maze?”
“Not nearly as far as I’d like to be.”
“Could we get there from here?”
Buddy studied Kendrick for several seconds. “If that’s a joke, it’s in bad taste.”
“I’m serious. I want to go there.”
“No comprendé, señor.”
“I know this is hard to understand, but I really do want to go to the Maze.”
“Kendrick, why the fuck would you want to go there? Why would anyone who had to be there in the first place ever, ever want to go back?”
Because when Peter McCowan spoke to me about the Maze, he asked me to go there. That meant that, somewhere down there, in the darkness, part of McCowan still lived.
“I found something out. I . . . a source told me that if I can only get down there, I can find what I need to prove Draeger’s absolute complicity in what happened to us. That’s important, Buddy, you know how important. We’d have Draeger by the balls.”
Buddy fell silent, staring angrily off into the distance. Kendrick waited, listening to the wind blowing across the desert. It made a high, eerie sound.
“Look, I understand what you’re saying,” Buddy replied at length. “But right now, where we’re going is more important than anything else. You know why.”
“If you help me, I promise I’ll do whatever I can to help you get to the Archimedes.”
Buddy glanced at him sharply. “You’re saying you’ve changed your mind? You’re going up with us?”
“Yes.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Buddy, what’s going to happen if you fail? If the wormhole never appears, and you stay right where you are?”
“Ken—”
“Either it’s Draeger, or it’s Los Muertos, or maybe it’s even someone else. If the Archimedes stays put and any of them find a way on board, maybe they will find the secret of zero-point energy that the Bright have supposedly harnessed. And then, as far as I’m concerned, you really do have the end of the world, just like Wilber predicted. The Archimedes can’t be allowed to fall into any of their hands.”
“It won’t,” Buddy said quietly. “Once we’re there, in a couple of days’ time, we’ll be gone for ever, no trace left. We’ll be somewhere better.”
For all your sakes, I hope so. “I know you will,” Kendrick replied, trying to sound reassuring. “But I remember a time when you wanted to nail Draeger just as much as I did. Are you telling me that’s no longer true?”
Buddy looked distressed. He seemed about to say something a couple of times but changed his mind each time.
“Christ, fine,” he said at length. “How long will this take? It’s not like we aren’t in a hurry, and there’s Caroline to take care of. So how lo
ng?”
“I don’t know. A day, maybe?”
Buddy groaned and covered his head with his hands. “Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered. “Right, listen – a day, and that’s it. Any longer and I’m out of there, do you understand me?”
“I’m not asking any more than that. But, yeah, we do have to take care of Caroline first.”
“It doesn’t need a cryptkey. Just plug and go.”
Kendrick held Buddy’s wand next to the node set in the dashboard and waited until the wand had established a connection. Wide scrubby plains blurred past them a few hundred metres below, the sun low on the horizon behind them. They were on their way.
In the meantime, Buddy rummaged around until he pulled out a crumpled eepsheet. Kendrick took it from him, smoothing it out. He aimed the wand at the eepsheet and it beeped quietly, confirming that it had successfully transferred the link from the helicopter to the ’sheet.
In response, the crumpled page of electronic paper lit up, a logo blurring rapidly across it. Images of politicians and actors appeared in rapid superimposition, one fading into the other, before presenting the front page of Buddy’s default subscription newsfeed.
“What are you expecting to find there?”
“After we finally got out of the Maze, I found that a lot of records had been deleted or destroyed. But whoever did it wasn’t quite thorough enough. The Maze extends for several kilometres under the jungle, and it goes down a hell of a way as well. I’ve seen a lot of schematics over the years, but they’re all different. Most of the original designs were stored in Pentagon databases and they disappeared during the civil war.”
“Different how?”
“I need to take a look before I remember.” Kendrick tapped an address into the eepsheet’s search box. A couple of seconds later he heard the sound of crackling, followed by a graphic of flames burning away the ’sheet’s main information display, a widening pixellated inferno that eventually revealed a demonic face. Insane laughter issued from the eepsheet.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Buddy, bemused.
“Ssh.”
“Who dares summon the sleeper in the dark, that they may seek knowledge?” The voice was a deep baritone, the face itself dark red with wide, staring eyes and a half-crazed grin filled with sharpened teeth.
