Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Sabak sighed. “I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it. Let’s have something to eat in my office and discuss things there.” He turned to Kendrick and studied him with a worried expression. “To be honest, Mr Gallmon, if we took you into one of the mess rooms I think we’d have a staff riot on our hands.”

  Sabak took a seat behind a mahogany desk in his office. Fresh food and coffee arrived moments later, and the aroma made Kendrick feel giddy. He wolfed down a steak and salad while listening to the other two and nodding at appropriate intervals. By the time he’d finished, fatigue was tugging at his senses again. He felt as though he could sleep for a thousand years.

  Buddy had been telling Sabak about their trip to the Maze. “Look” – Sabak turned now to Kendrick – “what you undertook is . . . remarkable. But I don’t understand why you did it. What did you expect to find down there in the Maze?”

  Buddy glanced at him as if he was ready to speak in his stead. But Kendrick wanted to explain for himself.

  “I’ve been looking for proof that will link Draeger, absolutely and incontrovertibly, to the Labrat experiments.”

  “And you found such proof? Down there?”

  Kendrick rubbed at his face. “Not exactly. I . . . what I found down there tells me that the proof exists on the Archimedes. I don’t really want to go into the details now, but I needed to go to the Maze in order to learn where to look for that information once I get up there.”

  Sabak shot Buddy a look that bordered on the incredulous. “What makes you think that any such information would even be up there?”

  “Look, neither Max Draeger nor anyone else can access, not even remotely, any records of his activities, physical or otherwise, that still exist on the Archimedes, and I have information that suggests they do still exist. If I can find real evidence against him it would finally bring him down. Completely.”

  “So you’re going to track down this stuff, then join us when we go with the Bright?”

  “I’m not sure about that part, no.”

  Sabak’s expression became stony. “I know about you. I remember all the work you did during the Trials. All the shit you dug up. I was impressed. There are one or two people think you’re a hero for that. You were in Ward Seventeen, though, so haven’t you been seeing the same things as the rest of us?”

  “I did see something,” Kendrick admitted. “But not necessarily the same thing that the rest of you apparently experienced. Not enough to convince me personally of what you and the rest of them believe.”

  “I guess not,” Sabak replied after an uncomfortable pause. “Otherwise you’d know already.”

  He leant forward, his voice lowering as if inviting Kendrick into a conspiracy. “Are you aware that there are only just over a hundred of us left from Ward Seventeen?”

  Kendrick went numb with shock. “A hundred?” He felt his skin flush. “I didn’t realize—”

  “There were considerably more who escaped the Maze, yes. But it’s been a while since then. The ones who didn’t survive – well, not many of them died through anything you’d call natural causes. Whether or not you feel we’re right in this venture, just remember, Kendrick, there’s nowhere else now for any of them to go.”

  Caroline’s eyes glittered, and for one terrible moment Kendrick thought that she might turn and look at him. Instead she stared, unseeing, at the ceiling of the containment unit. Her clothes had been replaced by a blue paper smock that reminded him with a chill of the clothes they had been forced to wear in the Maze. A woman stood at a respectful distance behind him, lips pursed in the centre of a round face. A tag on her jacket identified her as Doctor Maria Numark.

  Something had distorted Caroline’s skull. The bone around her right ear appeared to be puffed out, thick, rigid lines contorting the flesh there. Her lips were parted slightly, as if she had been about to speak before she died.

  Nothing. Kendrick could feel nothing. It was as if his emotions had been sucked out of him, leaving only a shell of semi-organic augmentation that had mistaken itself for a human being.

  “I’d like to see her, for real.” He turned to Doctor Numark. “Let me in there.”

  Maria Numark shook her head and gestured at the elaborate precautions set up around where Caroline lay on the other side of the glass. Kendrick wondered if eyebrows had been raised among the non-Labrat crew when Sabak and his colleagues had installed a secure biological containment room. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

  Kendrick licked his lips. “When?” he asked. “I mean, when did she . . .” He gestured towards Caroline.

  “Just before you arrived on board. We did everything we could.” He could see where some of the augments had broken through her flesh, vague shapes that pushed up her paper smock here and there. He looked away, sickened, then stepped back.

  “We’ll need to arrange for a funeral service,” he mumbled.

  The doctor glanced at a wall clock. “To be honest, I’m not sure there’s time for that, Mr Gallmon. I’m sorry.”

  “She looked as though she was getting better the last time I saw her.”

  Doctor Numark nodded sympathetically. “According to the literature, that’s often the case. Outward appearances, however, when it comes to this kind of thing, can be extremely deceptive.” She stepped forward. “Perhaps . . . I could leave you alone out here for a few minutes, if you wish.”

  Kendrick pressed his forehead against the glass, feeling numbing waves of exhaustion wash over him. Did he imagine those faint flecks of light where her hands touched the metal pallet on which she lay? As if something metallic extended downwards, from her fingertips. Something threadlike.

  He heard Maria Numark step up behind him, gently placing fingers on his arm. He began to turn and almost lost his balance. He reached out and caught himself on the edge of a table.

  “You need some rest now,” the doctor told him, her voice firm. “You’ll do yourself an injury if you don’t get some sleep.”

  “No—”

  “Rest.”

  Kendrick dreamed.

  He opened his eyes. He was back on the Archimedes.

  A great silver cloud filled the air far above his head. Moments later it broke up into a rippling mist of winged shapes that spiralled down towards him.

  The last thing he remembered was Buddy helping him to a spare cabin after being called to the surgery by Doctor Numark. Buddy had looked ashen-faced, having only just found out himself about Caroline’s death. If Buddy had said anything of consequence to him, he didn’t remember it.

  Kendrick had put his head down on the pillow, his mind and emotions still full of the memory of Caroline lying still and lifeless, and now he was here again.

  Like he’d always been here, waiting.

  The creatures came closer, flitting through the turgid air, their tiny faces ugly and distorted. No wonder it had taken him so long to recognize their origin.

  “Robert,” Kendrick said at last as a thousand winged shapes hovered in the air around him.

  One of them spoke, its voice clear and full, unexpected from something so small.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” the tiny Robert-homunculus said. “We don’t want you here.”

  “I’m coming anyway,” said Kendrick. “I’m bringing Peter McCowan with me.”

  The creature’s companions beat chaotic patterns in the air as Kendrick spoke.

  “Peter told me you wouldn’t let him get free from the Maze,” he continued. “You kept him down there, blind and deaf.”

  The rapid motion of the tiny creatures became even more frenzied as they swirled and dived with renewed vigour. He thought again of shoals of fish darting through deep ocean waters.

  “Peter is an abomination,” squealed the same creature as before, hovering momentarily in front of Kendrick’s face. “You must not bring him here!”

  “I need to find something that’s on board the Archimedes. I can—”

  “You must not bring him here! You must not
bring him here!” another of the creatures buzzed angrily – or was it the same one? It was impossible to tell as they darted around him. “I can see him hiding inside you!”

  Kendrick’s mouth felt dry. What did Buddy or Sabak or any of them see and hear in their visions, to think that this thing was sane?

  The creatures all around reminded him of nothing so much as locusts preparing to swarm. He ducked and shielded his face as they buzzed around him in uncountable legions. Their sheer weight of numbers forced him to kneel on the ground, shielding himself with his arms. He spoke again, raising his voice to a yell. “It’s you that the Bright use to communicate with us, right? You were the first. You became a part of them. Something went wrong.”

  They scattered away from him in an instant in a great storm of flapping. The thick, honeyed air felt full of a palpable menace.

  They circled him still, their massed voices roaring as one. Kendrick’s head filled with so many alien images and thoughts that he crumpled completely to the ground, unable to absorb even a fraction of the information besieging his skull.

  But behind the images and sensations he detected something else, something deeper: regular, rhythmic. Almost . . . like singing.

  No, not singing – talking. But nothing like any language he had ever heard . . . nonetheless, he felt he might be able to understand it if only he listened harder.

  Kendrick summoned the energy to stand again, batting at the tiny shapes now darting towards him, shrieking and flapping. However much he might tell himself none of this was real, instinct said differently.

  He moved as if in a dream. The singing-but-not-singing began to build, drowning out even the chaotic menace of the buzzing creatures.

  The singing became clearer, suddenly perfectly comprehensible. He understood that this was the Bright, rather than Robert, and that they were now speaking to him directly.

  Kendrick found himself floating, caught up in the light now flooding around him. He looked down and saw a grassy plain far below. On it, two men wearing Los Muertos insignia were running for their lives towards the entrance of a low one-storey building.

  One of them stopped to point a nozzled device at a vast swarm of Robert-homunculi bearing down on him: flames belched out of it. Kendrick noticed the fuel tank slung over his shoulders.

  Regardless of his efforts, the soldier was soon engulfed in gossamer wings. They swarmed around both men in great shimmering masses, eventually drowning and crushing them.

  And then, without apparent transition, Kendrick found himself outside the Archimedes itself, the surface of the station slipping past beneath him. He recognized there the two shuttles he’d seen taking off from the desert, their hulls jutting out at right angles from a row of docking bays surrounded by an external gantry threaded with access tubes and pressurized pods.

  And then even the Archimedes vanished. It came to him now that this was what Buddy, and Sabak, and Caroline, and all the rest of them had been seeing.

  Whatever Hardenbrooke had put inside Kendrick, it was no longer blocking the Bright’s signal.

  He floated far above the curve of the Earth, a great half-crescent lit by the twinkling lights of cities still shrouded in night. He saw clouds lit from underneath by flashes of lightning somewhere over the Bay of Biscay.

  He watched as the nightline slid across the face of the Earth, faster and faster, becoming a blue-green blur within what seemed like seconds.

  Faster, and yet faster.

  The stars began to move in their positions. A sensation of utter cold filled Kendrick as he looked towards the broad sparkling band of the Milky Way and saw that it too was in motion.

  The universe aged around him. Thousands upon thousands of stars swept past, time flying by at a rate of tens of millions of years every second. He saw galaxies arranged in patterns too regular to be natural, connected by what appeared to be beacons of light strung between them.

  In his mind, Kendrick felt the strengthening heartbeat of vast empires, and of invasive hive-minds absorbing countless helpless worlds before themselves fading back into obscurity, half-forgotten legends in less time than it took for his eyelids to blink.

  He spun on and on until any sense of his physical body had vanished, reducing him to a tiny mote of awareness racing at ever greater speed through the lifetime of the universe. He saw the final darkness approaching, became aware of a vast intelligence surrounding him. And then he understood: they were going all the way to the end.

  The end of all things.

  The galaxies were crashing together now, and Kendrick imagined that he could hear the cries of worlds dying. He witnessed entire constellations surrounded by vast artificial shells of energy that trapped and retained the light of their stars, banishing them from the visible universe. Throughout the mighty expanse of time and space he could sense what the Bright had found when they had first reached out, a hundred billion years into the future.

  The intelligence that he had sensed earlier surrounded him totally now, vast and omnipotent, and tens of billions of years old. It permeated to the deepest level of reality, residing in the weak, hidden dimensions below the quantum soup that constituted the most fundamental level of existence.

  The cosmos shrank and darkened and Kendrick was hurled ever onward. All around him the universe rushed towards its conclusion, the galaxies colliding in fiery explosions . . . faster and faster . . .

  . . . and then it stopped.

  Kendrick sensed that he was not alone.

  His cheek rested on damp fragrant grass, soft sunlight trickling down from somewhere far above. He raised his head.

  “Sleeping on the job, eh?” Peter McCowan grinned down at him, a cigarette dangling from his stubby fingers.

  Kendrick stared at him, stunned. He gathered his wits, then remarked: “So if you’re here, I guess this must be Hell?”

  Peter laughed, the sound rumbling from deep in his chest. “Nah, it’s Heaven – that’s why the cigarettes taste like shit.” Again, that deep, rumbling laugh; and it was like all those years since the Maze had never happened.

  “Where are we?” Kendrick rose, looking up and around him. He found it impossible to react to what had just happened to him: it was too much, too quickly, on a scale he couldn’t even imagine. “It looks like—”

  “The Tay Hills is my guess,” said Peter. “Fucking hell, a realm of infinite possibility to choose from, and this is what your mind picks?” He shook his head and took a drag on his cigarette. “No imagination, you. But yeah, this is it.”

  Clouds scudded low on the horizon. It was so real, so normal, that it was surreal.

  “And this . . . this really is the Omega?”

  Peter shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  Peter raised his hands. “It’s not like I’ve got some kind of special knowledge, Kendrick. I was trapped down there for years by that bonkers son of a bitch. You don’t know what it was like: everything I thought, he heard. Everything he thought, I heard.” He grinned. “Or at least that was the case until you sprang me. As long as I’m with you, I can help you.”

  The sky had begun to darken even as they spoke, revealing a great whirlpool of stars that stretched from horizon to horizon. The stars themselves rippled, as if invisible shapes were darting through the atmosphere, distorting and refracting the starlight with their passage.

  A vivid awareness crept into every cell of Kendrick’s being. Everything – the grass, trees, clouds, the stars and even the air – was alive, sentient. It was God, after a fashion, but a God born of science and knowledge.

  During his long journey here, Kendrick had seen flesh and silicon merge into an intelligence woven into the fabric of the cosmos itself. He could sense it all around him. It enervated him, overwhelmed him.

  “The Archimedes,” he managed to say. “What are you going to do when we get there?”

  “You’ll see,” Peter replied. “We won’t be speaking again before we arrive. I need to prepare.” He
paused. “I’m sorry about Caroline.”

  “Yeah,” Kendrick mumbled. “Me too.”

  “You’ve not quite taken it in, have you?”

  “Not really, no.” Kendrick looked back up. “I’ve seen too many people end up dead over the years.”

  “Including me.”

  Kendrick allowed himself a small smile. “Including you. Though it feels really weird to say it with you standing right there.”

  “You mean you’re getting used to it.”

  “Christ, I hope not.” Kendrick let out a bitter chuckle. “Numb to it, more like.” The image of Caroline lying dead in the containment room wouldn’t leave his mind’s eye. He couldn’t stop himself imagining what it must have been like for her in her last moments. “Listen, I need to know something,” he went on quickly, hoping to banish those thoughts. “Where do I go once we’re on board?”

  “The main research facility,” said Peter, his voice fading. “In the second chamber.”

  There was still more that Kendrick wanted to ask. But now he could almost sense the confines of the ship’s cabin around him again, the hillside fading like little more than a particularly vivid dream.

  He woke in the small cabin as klaxons filled the air with a loud whooping that sent dull vibrations through the frame of his bunk.

  He glanced at the clock mounted on the wall, his mind still reeling from revelation and mystery. Only six hours to launch time.

  Twenty minutes later, Kendrick found Sabak up on the ship’s bridge, conferring with Arnheim. Buddy and Veliz were there too. The sirens had finally shut off several minutes before, but Kendrick hadn’t failed to notice the strained expressions on the crew members he’d passed in the narrow corridors or the way some of them glanced away at his approach. He hadn’t had time to check in a mirror, but he reckoned he could assume that he still looked pretty gruesome.

  Buddy glanced over when he arrived. “Looks like we’re under attack.” A look of concern crossed his face. “Look, you’ve just lost someone important to you. Are you sure you—?”

  “I’m fine. I’m not an invalid.” Kendrick glanced over at Sabak. “What sort of attack?”