Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  “We don’t have time for this shit. What the fuck is it?”

  Buddy’s eyes were full of pain as he opened them again. “It’s a nuke. Those fucking idiots brought nukes on board.” He stared down again at the oblong device and shook his head. At first Kendrick thought he might even be weeping. “I hadn’t expected this,” Buddy whispered.

  Kendrick almost didn’t catch these hushed words. But he sure felt the urge to say something – like So what exactly did you expect?

  Instead he stepped on past the corpse towards the chamber airlock.

  According to Kendrick’s map, the other side of the airlock was pressurized. Ashen-faced and silent, Buddy followed his comrade into the pressure chamber.

  Kendrick asked himself just why Los Muertos would have brought a nuke on board, the obvious conclusion being that they intended to destroy the station. Which led to the next question: why?

  But even if that were the case, could just one nuke do the job? Kendrick couldn’t begin to guess. Buddy muttered quietly from somewhere behind him, conferring with Sabak over his suit comm, telling him about the nuke.

  “Buddy, tell him that the guy carrying the nuke died before he could set a detonation time. The bomb isn’t going to go off.”

  “Yeah,” said Buddy, “I already told them that. They’re going to come and take a look at it.”

  He caught Kendrick’s expression and shook his head. “Listen, they’re not too wild about us heading off on our own like this, but right now they’re more concerned about the nuke. We should get moving.”

  They passed through the far exit of the pressure chamber and into another series of interconnected corridors. They soon found themselves at a second airlock complex, which in turn opened into the second cavern. Buddy said little as they cycled through, for which Kendrick was grateful since he needed to organize his thoughts. The closer they came to the second chamber – the one he’d seen in his visions – the more prevalent the silver threads became.

  They found themselves next in a building identical in construction to the one that had led into the first chamber. They moved with extreme caution, but after a few minutes it became clear that Los Muertos had not had a chance – or the desire – to plant gun turrets or rig booby traps.

  This was, indeed, recognizably the chamber that Kendrick had seen in his visions – but it had been transformed into something simultaneously wonderful and terrible.

  It looked as if the whole interior had been liberally coated with silver fairy dust so that it twinkled like a vast bejewelled grotto. Kendrick stepped forward to see the same wide plain he had found himself standing on during those strange dream-like but utterly convincing episodes. Great ragged-edged columns of compacted silver threads stretched right across the circumference of the chamber, looking as if a million spiders had spent a thousand years spinning them. Every surface was coated in thick layers of glistening silver.

  “Oh, my God,” Buddy breathed, staring around them as they passed through into the chamber proper. “Oh, my God.”

  Kendrick looked at these innumerable multitudes of threads and felt as if he were passing through the living, beating heart of some enormous beast. They didn’t now need to search for the Bright – they were already in the Bright.

  “Buddy, this isn’t anything like my visions.”

  “Mine neither.” Buddy grinned like a child who’d just stumbled into Wonderland. “But it’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

  Kendrick remembered his recent ordeal in the Maze and said nothing. He consulted the wand again, trying to ignore how badly his hands were shaking.

  Had he . . .? No. He closed his eyes and felt a surge of relief. For a moment he thought he’d left behind the glove that he’d removed to release McCowan into the body of the station. He dug out both gloves from a thigh pocket and pulled them back on, wincing as he pulled them over his injured flesh. They looked odd, oversized without the spacesuit they usually went with.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” He glanced over at Buddy.

  “Nope.”

  “If this is nothing like what we had visions of before we even got here, then there’s no way to be sure that anything else the Bright have shown us is true.”

  Buddy laughed nervously and shook his head. “C’mon, Ken, that’s bullshit reasoning.”

  “Why is it? All that’s happened till now is that we’ve seen pictures in our heads. There’s no reason to assume what we see in our mind’s eye might be anything like the reality—”

  “Kendrick.” Buddy stepped in front of him. “Listen to me. What you saw clearly isn’t the same as what the rest of us saw. We’ve been over all that already.”

  “I saw the whole thing, the . . . the history of the universe, and I felt every second of it. Peter warned me—”

  “No. McCowan was never part of it. Robert—”

  “Robert is insane. He lost his mind long before we even got ourselves out of the Maze.”

  “No, Kendrick, shut up and listen to me. I touched God – do you understand what I’m saying? Whatever you saw, whether it had McCowan’s face or whatever, it was standing between you and . . . and the things that I experienced, and that the rest of those people back there experienced.

  “Look. If you’ve never seen before, or . . . no, if you’ve spent your entire life locked in a box, where you can’t see anything, hear anything, do anything, and then one day someone opens the box and you’re in the middle of the Rio Carnival, then maybe you’d have some idea of what it was like for the rest of us – maybe just an inkling. And if you can’t understand that, then try to accept that that’s how the rest of us see it. You’re in the minority here. You can’t understand.”

  Kendrick found that he couldn’t think of anything else to say. As he glanced to one side he noticed the gold had already made its way to this part of the Archimedes, too. He could see faint yellow flecks where there had been none only seconds before.

  They came to a small clearing and discovered two more bodies as badly mauled as the first. They too wore the remnants of Los Muertos uniforms. Their jaws, stripped of their flesh, gaped upwards.

  “Draeger’s been through here,” said Buddy, sniffing at the air.

  Kendrick was incredulous. “You can smell him? Over this carnage?” The stink of putrefaction wasn’t any better the second time around.

  Buddy grinned and tapped the side of his nose. “The augments whacked my olfactory sense up a couple of notches a year or two ago. Now I can pick up certain scents.” He shrugged. “Well, from time to time, anyway. It’s a facility that has a bad habit of coming and going. Sort of useful, though.”

  “That’s why that first corpse affected you so badly when we found it? The stench of it must have been overwhelming.”

  “Yeah, but I can barely smell these guys now. Guess my augments are already filtering it out.”

  They had been following a narrow path winding its way through silver-draped trees, aware of the sound of thickly layered filaments crunching underfoot. Kendrick kept a close eye on Buddy, but whatever had affected him during their trip inside the Maze seemed not to be affecting him here.

  Kendrick kneeled to peer more closely at the corpses, still managing to keep his distance. “Look – they had backpacks like the last guy, except these are empty.”

  He stood again and looked around him, then up at the land surface curving away above him, wondering if Draeger and his men might be up there looking down on them.

  In the soil just ahead stood a wide concrete cap with a circular door set into its upper surface. Kendrick consulted his wand map again and waved Buddy over to look at it.

  “See this?” He pointed to a group of coloured lines.

  Buddy nodded. “Yeah, that’s where we came on board.”

  Kendrick tapped the minuscule screen with one finger. “And this is where Draeger and his men split off. There’s more than one way to get from there to here. I think they took another route, probably bypassing the first c
avern altogether.” He gestured at the concrete cap, clearly an access point to the tunnels and corridors riddling the station’s hull. “They’d have seen these bodies once they emerged.”

  “What makes you so sure they didn’t go the same way as us?”

  “A distinct lack of dead thugs around those gun turrets we ran into.”

  Buddy looked embarrassed. “Yeah, good point.” He nodded towards the two corpses. “So . . . do you think these two were hauling nukes around as well?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Probably best to assume the worst, though.”

  “And if they were, and then Draeger and his men came out and found them lying here . . .”

  They looked at each other. Suddenly things were taking a much worse turn than any of them could have anticipated.

  They moved on, spotting another group of buildings up ahead: the research facility. Buddy tapped Kendrick on the arm and pointed to the ground.

  “Something’s happening,” he muttered.

  The silver fibres beneath their feet rippled as if a sudden wind had whipped swiftly through the chamber. Except, of course, there was no discernible movement of air beyond a barely perceptible breeze produced by the natural circulation of atmosphere through the huge chamber.

  “Forget about it. We need to get moving.” Kendrick was trying not to let his fear show. They started forward again. As the facility moved slowly down the giant curving wall to meet them, a great twisting column of threads rose high above them, rooted in the soil nearby. It stretched across the width of the cavern, joining itself to the opposite side of the hull.

  Their gaze picked out glistening bulbous shapes on the silver column’s surface as they approached. Kendrick didn’t want to wait around and see what might emerge from them.

  As they came closer they heard a high-pitched scream from the direction of the facility itself.

  “Ken, that sounded like—” Gunshots now: several noisy detonations, one after the other, in rapid succession.

  Something rumbled through the hull under their feet. Cold sweat sprang out on Kendrick’s skin as he imagined someone detonating a nuclear device – perhaps in the previous chamber, perhaps somewhere outside the station. It was far too easy to speculate on the hull ripping apart beneath them, sending them both spinning out into the endless cold vacuum of space.

  But the rumbling faded a few moments later. Kendrick glanced down at the read-out on his arm and found a message icon blinking up at him.

  He lowered his arm and headed rapidly towards one of the buildings directly ahead. A sign mounted in front identified it as the primary section of the research facility. Draeger was in there somewhere. He had to be.

  “Kendrick, wait. Before we go further we should check back with the others and see if they have any idea what just happened.”

  “Bad idea. Whatever they say won’t make any difference, so let’s just get this over with.”

  The low-roofed buildings making up the facility had been tastefully designed from glass and wood. A wide balcony overlooked a pool fringed with pebbles, the water overgrown now with pond scum and silver filaments. It looked like something from an eerily deserted university campus.

  Kendrick slowed, wary of running straight into Draeger’s men. But there were no more screams and no more gunshots. Buddy kept pace with him, reluctantly.

  “Listen, Kendrick, I’ve got an idea. We’re heavily outnumbered, right? We can’t just walk right in there among them.”

  “I know that, but there isn’t time left to try anything else. We’ll just have to work it out as we go along.” He carried on towards the entrance.

  “If you march in and they see you they’ll have no compunction about killing you. Look, let me talk to Draeger.”

  Kendrick stopped and faced Buddy. “Talking to him isn’t on the agenda. He used us to get here and the instant we looked like showing him any resistance he ran – but only because he couldn’t kill all of us.”

  “Those men in there with him are professional soldiers, maybe Augments. You don’t stand a chance against them. Negotiation is the only way.”

  “Someone is already dead, thanks to Max Draeger’s negotiating skills. All I’m saying is, if we don’t try and stop it now—”

  “Maybe we can find a way to reason with him.”

  “Reason with him?” Kendrick glared at Buddy. “What exactly is your problem? When he blew that guy’s head off, did that strike you as reasonable?”

  Buddy’s mouth worked silently for a moment. “I suppose what it comes down to is that – I don’t trust you as much as I thought I did.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning maybe I had you wrong. I thought that once you were up here with us you’d understand.”

  “What, you’re worried I might jeopardize things for you?”

  “Look, ever since we found those bombs I’ve been thinking that if Draeger does have one the last thing we want to do is give him any excuse to set it off. Right?”

  “Well,” said Kendrick. “That depends.”

  Buddy looked incredulous. “On what?”

  “On whether or not that means we let him get away.”

  Flinging his hands out in a gesture of despair, Buddy made a strangled sound. “You see? Can’t you hear yourself? How fucking monomaniacal do you have to get? One way or another, if Draeger has one of those nukes, he’s also got us by the balls – or can’t you understand that?”

  Kendrick spoke quietly and carefully. “Buddy, let me explain something. He’s got you by the balls. He’s got Sabak by the balls. But he hasn’t got me, because I don’t care about his threats. I’m going to nail the fucker. I want the world to know what kind of man he is. Otherwise everything that happened to us down there in the Maze isn’t going to mean a damn thing.

  “And it’s not even that which really worries me. I don’t know how he’s going to do it, but I’ll bet every last penny that he’s had a way out of here figured for a long time. And if he does somehow manage to find something on those computers that he can take back down with him, then I don’t believe anyone back home is going to thank us for letting him get away.”

  Buddy’s face looked as though it was carved from stone. “Fuck them,” he said quietly.

  They were standing almost face to face now, and Kendrick started to turn away. From out of the corner of his eye he saw Buddy move towards him, reaching out to grab his arm.

  Kendrick swivelled rapidly, taking hold of Buddy’s wrist and punching him hard in the face as he did so. Buddy reeled back in surprise, then slipped and fell to the ground. Kendrick stepped over and clouted him a second time – unable to halt the sudden terrible anger that threatened to overwhelm him.

  He became distantly aware that the air around him felt chillier than it had only seconds earlier. A sudden wind rippled through his hair, becoming stronger. Something was happening to the atmosphere in the station.

  Buddy still lay flat on the ground, gasping and cursing.

  “Don’t get in my way,” Kendrick yelled at him. “Don’t dare come after me.” He stepped away, panting. “I wish it didn’t have to work out this way.”

  Buddy stared up at him with angry pain-filled eyes. But he didn’t try to move from where he lay.

  Kendrick retreated for a couple of metres, keeping Buddy well in sight. Then he turned and ran for the facility entrance. He turned a corner and stopped to make sure that his pistol was loaded.

  Buddy was right about one thing: just charging in after Draeger would be like committing suicide. Kendrick had felt sure that by now some plan would have come to mind, some way to thwart Draeger without placing himself in such immediate danger. Unfortunately, his mind remained obstinately blank.

  The screaming started again, a ragged and terrible animal sound, drifting from somewhere deeper within the building.

  Kendrick was far from surprised to find more bodies inside, lying next to a pair of wide doors at the far end of a hallway. Kendrick gagged again at the stench of blo
od and viscera until his senses could adjust to filter it out. He noticed that both doors had been partly blown off their hinges.

  Stepping closer to the corpses, he recognized them as some of Draeger’s men. Marlin Smeby was not among them. At first Kendrick assumed they had been blown apart by the force of the explosives after having made a dangerous error in trying to blast their way into the facility interior. But closer inspection revealed that their flesh had been torn and ripped as if by claws. He nudged one body with his foot, trying very hard not to think about what these injuries signified.

  The corpse cradled something in its arms. Another nuke, Kendrick realized, shuddering. It had almost certainly been retrieved from one of the dead Los Muertos whom he and Buddy had come across earlier. Two nukes now located, but still with the possibility of another.

  Kendrick passed through the ruined doors into a wide office space scattered with the mouldering corpses of yet more Los Muertos. One even appeared to have raked his own eyes out of his skull, while another had clearly blown his own brains out with his rifle. The wall against which he had propped himself was still liberally smeared with the resulting gore.

  Kendrick heard another sound, neither screaming nor gunshots this time. More like a bell gently tinkling, as if far away. He stood stock-still, trying to work out what this was, but it faded away to nothing after several seconds.

  As far as he could tell, most of the corpses around him had engaged in what looked like mutually assisted suicide. Some lay twisted together in a deadly embrace, knifes still clutched in their fists. Kendrick could not imagine what demons had driven them to such deaths.

  He moved on, through another door and into a room filled with racks of delicate-looking computer equipment. He halted, tensing up, at first thinking that something living was in there with him. He relaxed again on seeing that it was another body, a woman’s.

  He stepped closer and discovered, shocked, that it was his erstwhile interrogator. Leigh squatted in a corner, her combat rifle propped between her knees, its barrel placed under the shattered remains of her jaw. Kendrick looked away quickly.