by Gary Gibson
“Kendrick!”
He gazed down at the wand, his thumb hovering over the button that would break the connection. “Goodbye, Buddy,” he shouted into it.
If the air was venting he needed to find a spacesuit helmet soon or he’d suffocate before he could track down Draeger – unless survival without breathing was a real possibility for him now. But how long could he manage? Five minutes? Ten? An hour? Better to get himself a suit and take no chances. Still gripping the wand in his gloved hand, Kendrick stumbled back the way he had come. The winged creatures had vanished, at least for the moment.
“Wait, listen!” Buddy yelled to him.
“I’ve heard enough.”
“No, just listen! There’s a satellite array fixed on the outside of the station. If Draeger intends to upload any information to Earthside, he’d need to access that array directly – since the power for half the facility is shorted out. Do you follow me?”
No wonder, then, that Draeger had opted to find his way to the station’s exterior. Kendrick suddenly realized that he was starting to hyperventilate, his lungs attempting to suck in air that was no longer there.
“How do you know he has anything he wants to send?” With that computer terminal deep down inside the facility Draeger could have already downloaded everything he needed.
“I don’t know. But if he’s heading for the array that kind of answers the question.”
“I’m still sorry for the way things worked out, Buddy.”
“So am I, believe me.”
Static began overwhelming the wand, making it nearly useless.
“Can’t you hear it?” said Buddy’s voice, but it was hard to be sure he was actually addressing Kendrick and not someone else.
“Hear what?” Kendrick yelled over the static.
And there it was. He heard the singing – was that the right word? – which he’d heard while standing on a hill and talking to Peter McCowan somewhere in the far distant future. It sounded as though everything that ever was or ever could be had been condensed and refined into a simple cadence of unearthly beauty.
Part of Kendrick wanted simply to stand and listen to it. Instead, he finally cut the connection and ran along the corridor to find a door that led back into the cavern.
He pushed through to find that the cavern itself had become filled with a commingling of dust, leaves, grass and filaments. Many of the threads were now distinctly golden. He bent himself into the howling wind that had arisen out of nowhere and looked up to try to locate the breach in the hull.
Amid so much chaos it was almost impossible to see far ahead. More people, Kendrick was now certain, were going to die. He wondered how much abuse the Archimedes itself could take before it lost its structural integrity and simply fell apart.
Heavy vibrations rolled through the hull beneath his feet.
Something about the light in the chamber had changed. It was getting brighter.
Everything was getting brighter.
Kendrick saw that this light came from the filaments, which had by now lost most of their silver lustre. They were glowing with a kind of internal radiation. The light had a pale, translucent quality to it.
A golden light.
He ran through the door by which he’d first entered the facility. Something flew past his head, carried in a swirling maelstrom of air that lifted him off his feet before slamming him into the ground again. He watched as a twisted rope of filaments, as thick as a giant redwood tree, tore loose from the soil outside and smashed itself against the foyer windows, sending the glass exploding inwards.
All this happened in an eerie half-silence as Kendrick’s ears popped painfully and his lungs laboured to draw in what little air remained.
He scrambled up and ran into the foyer, past some of Sabak’s men who had suited up and were now trying to help one of their number whose helmet had been smashed open. They barely glanced Kendrick’s way.
He pounded through the far doors of the foyer, heading for the canteen where earlier he’d seen two of Draeger’s men slaughter themselves.
He reached frantically for their blood-slicked suit helmets, pulling each one in turn over his head before discarding it. Neither would fit onto his suit. He ran back to the room where Leigh’s corpse lay slumped. But her suit was torn, her helmet lying nearby with its visor shattered.
Despair and hopelessness finally settling over him like a great black cloud, Kendrick ran back into the corridor, almost colliding with Buddy who stared back at him. He’d never be able to find a usable helmet in time.
But then, as he reminded himself, perhaps he no longer really needed to breathe. The idea that breathing might be something he could switch off or on at will had simply never occurred to him.
As if responding to this thought, something heavy, wet and translucent slid down over Kendrick’s pupils from under his eyelids. He jerked his hands up to his face and touched the membrane, probing gently with his fingers.
What’s happening to me?
Now he felt as if he were viewing everything through a very faintly tinted screen.
Touching the skin on his face, Kendrick realized that the ridges left there from his visit to the Maze had now mostly faded. But the skin itself felt hard and smooth in a way that it never had before.
How long could he survive like this? Was there a limit? Or would he be able to survive like this indefinitely? Son of a bitch, I’m still alive.
Where did the energy come from, he wondered, to keep him going without the constant replenishment of oxygen in his bloodstream? Had some kind of internal reservoir of energy, perhaps some new organ that hadn’t been there before, appeared inside him? He had a sudden mental image of his stomach muscles peeled back to reveal large copper-coloured batteries where his heart, liver, kidneys and lungs should have been.
Buddy was still staring at him, his mouth working uselessly behind his visor, as if Kendrick could somehow hear the transmissions through his comms channel.
Surrounded by this vacuum, Kendrick experienced a silence more absolute than he could ever have imagined. He pushed his way past Buddy, the glow that filled the cavern now patterning the walls around him with a pale gold light.
Kendrick wrestled himself out of his spacesuit. If he didn’t need it he could move a lot quicker without it. He looked down at his wand, checking which way he had to go.
He stepped into a side room to find what he was looking for. Wrenching open a floor hatch, he hurriedly pushed himself down the ladder bolted inside the narrow shaft below. A few minutes later he came to a passageway with a ceiling so low that he was forced to crouch. He moved like a ghost past walls bearing rack after rack of semi-organic circuitry prominently labelled with warnings about contamination.
A sign informed him that he was now in the central AI core. He saw a door ahead and quickly stepped up to it. He’d found his way inside the internal transport system. Stepping through, he found a narrow tunnel and a rail-mounted platform like an old-style railway handcar.
The door that Draeger had disappeared through earlier led directly here, so he had to have come this way.
Kendrick’s wand informed him that the tunnel connected to the external endcap of this chamber. He climbed on board the car and found several handholds, mounted with safety buckles, but no seats – passengers were obviously required to stand. He tinkered with the small control panel mounted on a short pillar and after a few moments the car moved off.
A minute and a half later Kendrick arrived at the terminus and found himself facing yet another airlock door. He hit the “open” button and, to his surprise and great relief, the barrier swung wide open without further effort.
He looked inside to see fine golden threads everywhere, pulsing gently with ethereal light. As he sensed something moving behind him he turned and saw the rail car automatically returning to its point of departure.
Kendrick’s bare hand still rested on the keypad, also coated in golden threads. He felt a faint sting as—
Cool blades of grass touched his skin, his fingers digging unexpectedly into damp soil. He was back in Scotland, back in the Tay Hills. He clung to the soil desperately, initially unable to comprehend the sudden transition from the Archimedes. The shock of it had dropped him to his knees.
A few moments later he managed to raise himself onto unsteady feet. Beyond the familiar damp hills, covered with gorse and rough grass, the land stretched on quite literally for ever, broken by unfamiliar rivers and forests. Distant mountain ranges became hazy with sheer distance, rather than disappearing out of sight beyond the curve of the horizon.
Kendrick turned and saw Peter McCowan waiting there beside him.
“Kendrick, I want to thank you for getting me here.” There was a slight smile on McCowan’s lips. “Buddy and the rest of them might not appreciate it, but I’m the only reason the Bright will be able to successfully negotiate the opening of the wormhole.” A familiar grin spread over his face. “It’s been bad enough as it is with that mad little shit running fucking riot with hobnailed boots over the Bright’s collective intelligence.”
“I’m glad for you, Peter, I really am. But Draeger’s already detonated a nuke, and if I don’t go after him right now he’s going to get away from us.”
McCowan nodded slowly as if this were old, old news. “You don’t really imagine that Draeger would blow the station up out of mere spite, do you?”
“For Christ’s sake, he already has!”
McCowan smiled, then shook his head. “Ken, you clearly don’t get it. That wasn’t Draeger. That was Robert Vincenzo.”
Kendrick shook his head, appalled. “Robert?”
“He’s dying. The nuke was on board one of the Los Muertos shuttles. Detonating it was a tactic born of his desperation. My biggest worry right now, however, is you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You figured out that Draeger had got his hands on one of the remote detonators, didn’t you?”
“We found three nukes, but no detonators. The only possible reason for that is that Draeger picked up at least one of them.”
“So what are you going to do – assuming you ever catch Draeger? What do you reckon is going to happen next?”
“I’ll find a way to contact the shuttle. Then I can get home.”
McCowan cackled, shaking his head. “I can see, even better than you can, how you’re thinking. You’re like an open book, you know that? With all those things you won’t even tell yourself laid bare.”
“Okay, then, just tell me whatever it is you’re trying to say, then let me find Draeger.” Kendrick bunched his hands into fists in frustration. Whatever McCowan now told him, in whatever cybernetic realm he currently inhabited, it still felt to him like they were wasting valuable time.
“You’re going to try and destroy the Archimedes,” McCowan stated flatly. “You can’t even admit to yourself that you never intended anything else.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“All these years, you’ve let your hatred for Draeger carry you along. Now here you are, with the chance to destroy the focus of everything he’s been working towards. Are you telling me that if you now had such a chance to hurt him, you wouldn’t take it?”
“This is me you’re talking about!” Kendrick shouted. “I’m not a murderer like he is! This is bullshit!”
“But do you really understand what’s happening here? You’ve doubted everything you’ve seen all along, regardless of how many others shared those same experiences. But now you think that you have the opportunity to destroy everything dear to the man you hold responsible for the death of your family. It’s not like I blame you for that, but that doesn’t mean what you’re intending to do is right.”
Kendrick ran towards him. McCowan stood only a few metres away but somehow that tiny distance became an uncrossable chasm. Kendrick threw himself towards McCowan but landed in exactly the same spot where he’d already been standing. He shrieked with pure rage and began beating at the ground with his fists.
“Ken, stop that.”
“Let me go!” Kendrick tore at the stony soil beneath his fingers till shards of pain ran up his wrists. But it still wasn’t enough, and he drove his fists harder into the earth, to feel the spike of shock and pain that he knew he should be sensing, to see if he could somehow pry himself away from this hallucinatory place and back to the station, back to Draeger.
“People who’ve suffered unjustly don’t automatically go out into the world to do good deeds,” McCowan continued. “They go and do to others what was done unto them, and the whole shitty carnival rolls back to the beginning and starts again. Yes, the worst thing you could do to Draeger is to destroy the Archimedes even before it goes through the wormhole, even with all these people on board, even with me here. But I’m asking you to just think, Ken.”
You’re already dead, Kendrick thought silently. You died a long time ago.
“The station will enter the wormhole in only a few more minutes,” McCowan continued. Now Kendrick tore at his own eyes, feeling blood trickle down his wrists. It wasn’t real, none of this was real, so what did it matter? “There won’t be any technology for Los Muertos to steal, or anyone else either. Stopping Draeger is one thing, but what then?”
“If you thought I was so dangerous, then why did you bring me all the way to the Archimedes?” Kendrick shouted back.
“Unfortunately,” said McCowan, from a thousand miles away, “I did not anticipate that someone would also bring a truckload of nuclear fucking bombs on board.”
Kendrick began to smash his head against a rock, cool icebergs of agony crashing behind his eyes with each impact. There was a hard, unpleasant numbness behind his teeth. But what did it matter? What did it matter? What—?
—cheek pressed against the wall next to the airlock, and he was back, he was back. He tore himself away, pain still coursing through him.
It faded after a moment, like suddenly waking after re-experiencing a terrible accident in a dream. Like so much else, a lie, an illusion.
Breathless, his skin smooth and hard, eyes semi-opaque under their nictitating membranes, Kendrick stepped through the door. He pulled it closed behind him and ran the depressurization routine. There was no air to suck out, but still the outer airlock door wasn’t going to open until the routine had run its course.
Then he pushed the outer airlock door open and stared off into empty space with naked eyes. He was now at the far end of the station, looking out across the exterior of the chamber’s cap. The Earth slid past his view as the station spun on its axis.
Kendrick could see rails on which small platforms were mounted and rungs radiating out from the centre of the endcap. Also at the centre of the endcap was a raised area bristling with communications equipment. The airlock doorway in which he stood was positioned roughly equidistant between the endcap’s centre and its rim. The station’s spin made the endcap appear to his senses like a vertical cliff. He stepped quickly back from the lip of the airlock, feeling the sudden onset of nausea.
A terrible cold had begun to creep over him and he wondered just how much his body would be able to take of what he was about to put it through. Even though he knew he was running out of time, this gave him more than a moment’s hesitation.
Kendrick reached for a handhold positioned just outside the airlock door and pulled himself further out onto the Archimedes’ hull. Then he gazed upwards towards the comms array at the centre of the endcap. In the distance he saw a figure in a spacesuit.
It had to be Draeger.
Kendrick gripped on to the rungs and pulled himself slowly upwards, working against the station’s spin. He imagined himself as a machine, an automaton incapable of feeling fear or any other emotion. All he had to do was hang on to those rungs and not let go.
All the while a painful numbness gnawed at the edge of his thoughts. There were limits to how long he could survive like this. He kept on climbing, concentrating solely on the rhythmic flexing of h
is muscles, ignoring the gathering pain as he pushed himself on. Chunks of metal and concrete became visible around him in the inky blackness, some of them spinning wildly. Pieces of the shattered hull, he presumed.
He glanced towards the comms array and saw that Draeger had almost reached it. Kendrick yelled soundlessly, his lungs empty and useless, then pulled himself along faster. Draeger appeared as yet unaware that he was being pursued.
When a shadow passed over Kendrick he almost lost his grip. He managed to hold on and stared up at the underbelly of a shuttle with unfamiliar markings. The craft moved on, disappearing from sight beyond the curved rim of the endcap as it performed a docking manoeuvre.
He’d been right. A man as cunning as Max Draeger would never have come all this way without a carefully planned strategy of escape.
Draeger finally turned his way, perhaps catching sight of the shuttle as it passed overhead. His face was invisible behind the faceplate of his helmet, but it was clear he could see Kendrick.
Now Kendrick knew that he’d become everything Sieracki had intended for him to be: a man-machine built for killing. He felt a distant, almost inhuman sense of satisfaction as he clambered rapidly up towards the spacesuited figure ahead of him.
On the side of the communications tower Draeger had opened a panel behind which lay a display screen showing status lights. As Kendrick rushed towards him, he tried to scramble out of the way and, in doing so, something slipped from his gloved hand. Draeger reached out for it frantically.
Kendrick caught it easily with his uninjured hand and realized that it was a datachip. He could guess only too well what information was contained in it. Though his numb fingers held it clumsily, he continued squeezing it until the brittle plastic snapped and disintegrated.
Now Draeger was trying to get away from him. As he turned for a handhold, Kendrick let the fragments of the crushed datachip spin away. Then he reached out for his adversary.
When Draeger kicked out frantically with one boot Kendrick lost his grip for a moment before grabbing the other’s leg and hauling himself on top of him. Draeger struggled and twisted beneath him, letting go of the rungs. He floated away for a moment before returning to hit the surface of the station with a thump after his safety cord had reeled out to its full length.
