I heard a faint hum, like generators running in the distance, and the floor began to vibrate. The vibration grew, not in volume but in intensity, until it made my teeth ache.
I was about to ask Couttis what we were waiting for when a seam formed in the stainless steel wall. It started from the bottom and progressed upward in a line so thin it was as if someone had cut into the metal with a razor. When it reached the top, a brighter light began to shine from somewhere behind it.
The sides of the wall slid aside, revealing a small room made of the same metal as the door. A thick rubber pad covered the floor.
"An elevator?" I asked Couttis.
Couttis ignored my question and stepped inside. The light made his skin look sallow. He gestured for me to enter. I hesitated.
"You wanted answers,” he said. “This is the only way you'll get them.”
"I'm supposed to trust you?"
"Trust is irrelevant. You want answers. I'm willing to give them. This is your Pandora's Box, and I represent the lid. Look if you want, leave if you don't." His expression hardened. "What I won't do is beg. I've already lowered myself as far as I'm willing to go. Make your choice, because I'm running out of patience."
Pandora's Box. A "gift" filled with the evils of the world, terrors that would plague men until the end of time, and the only thing left trapped inside?
Hope.
I brought my galloping heart under control. "Frank's down there, isn't he?"
Couttis nodded.
A thought occurred to me. Despite everything I knew, everything I'd been told was impossible, all the signs pointed to one thing. "What's your name?" I asked the man standing before me.
"I'm in no mood for games," Couttis said.
"Neither am I. Tell me your name."
The officer gave an exasperated sigh. "Kent Couttis."
"Yes, but what's your other name." Before she shot herself, Jacaruso had said someone named Thyll was inside her, controlling her. "What's the name of the entity sharing Couttis's body? Tell me its name?"
Couttis's eyes narrowed. For a moment, I saw danger in them. Then his mood changed, and he chuckled. There was little humor in it.
"You've got some balls, Doctor." He straightened. "My name is too hard for you to pronounce, so Systh will do. Now, will you please get in?"
* * *
There were no buttons in the elevator. Light shone diffusely from the metal, as if the material were irradiated or hot enough to glow. The doors slid shut.
My stomach lurched as the elevator descended. I disliked the weightless feeling you get from elevators and carnival rides. It always made me feel like my guts were about to come spilling out of my mouth.
The sensation changed. The elevator seemed to not quite lurch as shift. Not in direction—we were still falling—but in aspect, as if we were traveling slightly off center. It caused more unpleasant fluttering in my stomach.
The sensation persisted. I glanced at my watch. We had been descending for almost a minute.
The elevator slowed to a halt and the doors opened. Cool air rushed in to greet me.
We stepped into a hallway made of the same weird, light-emitting metal as the elevator. The same rubber matting covered the floor. The hallway went on for perhaps fifty feet and branched to the right.
Behind us, the doors slid shut and the seam disappeared.
I looked at Couttis. "Where are we?"
"Don't you mean, 'how far down are we?'"
"I felt the shift. We didn't go straight down. We might be near the coffee shop, but we're not directly beneath it."
"Interesting." Couttis started down the hallway. "You're right. We’re not beneath the Black and Brewed."
I rushed to keep up. "Okay, where are we?"
Couttis turned at the intersection. "We're several hundred feet beneath the lake where you and your wife spent most of last night."
I stopped in my tracks, not simply because of what he had said, but also because of what I saw.
The hallway was short, perhaps a dozen feet, and ended in a cavern so expansive I couldn't see the walls or ceiling. What light there was came from giant, cylindrical pillars of metal positioned around the central space. Beneath them, clustered together like prisoners, were people, hundreds of them, each laying on a cot and bound to it with heavy leather straps. Their eyes were shut, their mouths closed. Not one struggled against his restraints.
In fact, they all appeared to be asleep.
There were others in the room, people who wandered among the bound, checking on the straps and taking pulses. One sleeper became restless and was rewarded with an injection of a clear fluid into her vein. She immediately fell back into somnolent bliss.
Couttis stepped into the cavern and gestured with his hand. The metal pillars flared, revealing hundreds of additional cots, each one inhabited by a sleeping, presumably drugged body.
My mouth went dry. "What are you doing to these people?"
"This way," Couttis said, and headed toward a large, canopied area much like a tent. Bulky machines ringed the area beneath the canopy. Couttis led me to a narrow gap between what looked like a government supercomputer and an oversized fax machine.
Inside we found a handful of cots. All but two were empty. Annabelle St. Crux occupied one. The proprietress of Lost Desires rested on her side, a blanket drawn to her chin. Her eyes were open, but they had a glassy, unfocused look. One pupil appeared larger than the other.
My gaze drifted to the other cot.
It was Frank. His good eye was closed. A greenish mass like a diseased jellyfish covered his empty socket; tendrils of its slimy flesh pierced his skin. Careful to avoid the intravenous line dripping clear fluid into his arm, I laid a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, buddy."
"He won't answer." Couttis stepped over to a machine and peered at the strange symbols scrolling across the display. "We have him sedated. It'll be safer that way."
"Safer?"
Couttis, seemingly satisfied with what he saw, turned to face me. "The healing process is delicate. If disrupted, things could go south quickly, often with horrible results. It could possibly kill him. Best he remains motionless for a while longer."
I pointed to the jellyfish. "What's that?"
"Have you heard of three-dimensional printing?" Couttis asked. "It's fairly new here."
Already on edge, his words unnerved me further. It's fairly new here.
When I didn't answer, Couttis said, "It's an organic 3-D printer. Those tendrils are taking tissue samples and analyzing your friend's genetic sequence. It will use the information to fashion an eye from undifferentiated stem cells. The process is relatively quick but requires the patient remain still. By tomorrow morning, Mr. Swinicki will have a new, fully functioning eye."
"Mother of God," I whispered.
Couttis snorted. "There are no gods, only nature. The laws of physics rule the universe, not unseen, all-powerful beings."
A shadow passed between us. Cyrus Kline walked in carrying a tray of food. He handed me a sandwich and a bottle of water and set the tray on a narrow table. The hipster, his long hair now free of the knit cap, checked on Annabelle St. Crux. He clicked on a penlight and flashed it at her pupils.
"What's the word?" Couttis asked him.
"Not good." Kline sighed. "One pupil is fixed and dilated. Respirations are even but shallow. Her pulse is strong, but she's been unresponsive for days. The damage is too severe."
I set the food and water back on the tray. "It's not a brain tumor, is it?"
Kline fixed attention on me. Gone was the vague hipster attitude, the nonchalant defiance he had shown to Toni and me. They had been wiped away like chalk on a blackboard and replaced with the hard lines of resentment.
"Stroke," Kline said. "It had progressed for hours before we got to her. Now the damage is beyond our ability to heal." His hands curled into fists. "We’re too limited here. The technology isn't sufficient."
Wandering over to the tray, Couttis picked u
p an apple and began eating. "She knew the risks coming into this," he told Kline around a mouthful of fruit. "Pretending otherwise is a waste of our time. You know what we have to do next."
Kline paled. "Don't ask me to do it. It would hurt too much."
"I'm not asking anything." Couttis finished the apple and dropped the core. It bounced off the dirt floor and rolled under a machine. "The decision's not up to me."
"We could set her up for another host," Kline said, his eyes suddenly full of hope. "Maybe a younger one who’s—"
"Enough!" Couttis took a step toward Kline, but the other man stopped him with a hand to the chest.
"Don't yell at me," Kline said flatly. "You're the one risking everything. And for what? Him?"
There was no mistaking who Kline meant.
"Let's stop playing games," I said. Something had been niggling at the back of my brain since I entered the elevator. I’d finally realized what it was. "You know damn well he doesn't intend to let me leave. I knew too much before, and now I've seen too much. He brought me down here to neutralize me. I'm no longer a threat." I looked at Couttis. "I'll never see the sun again, will I?"
Couttis held my gaze for a few seconds, then looked away.
"No, I don't suppose you will."
* * *
I wanted to run. I wanted to grab the nearest piece of hardware and beat Couttis and Kline senseless. I wanted to rescue Frank and our wives. I wanted to scream. I wanted a lot of things, but in the end, I realized I could do nothing. The only way out of this place required a palm print, and even as furious as I felt, I simply couldn't lop off someone's hand and use it to enact our escape.
"Let's go sit down," Couttis said with unexpected kindness. "Cyrus, go check on the others. The doctor and I have important things to discuss."
Kline looked like he was going to say something, but a gesture from Couttis quieted him. Lips pressed into a thin line, he spun on his heels and left.
"Follow me," Couttis said.
Minutes later, we were sitting at a table near the far end of the cavern. Couttis had brought the food. My sandwich and the water bottle remained untouched. I didn't have an appetite.
I'll never see the sun again, will I?
No, I don't suppose you will.
"You said you needed me," I told Couttis. "That I'm here for a reason. Now you're telling me I can't leave. Did the game suddenly change, or are you so messed up you don't know what you want?"
"This is difficult for me. The choices I've made, the position I've put myself in." Couttis ran a finger over the table's surface. He seemed to be tracing out words, but I couldn't tell for sure. "We're more alike than you think. What you said in the coffee shop, about the difference between victims and aggressors, mirrors my own thinking. My recent thinking," he added, as if correcting himself. "It's a complication I hadn't anticipated or know how to handle. It could mean the end of my life, and the end of my species."
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you've had a change of heart."
Couttis lifted his eyes to meet mine. "It's precisely what I'm saying."
"Does that mean you're ending the invasion?" I said, figuring I might as well call it for what it was.
"Not exactly. I can't reverse what has already happened, but I'm not sure I can allow it to continue as planned. My experiences here," he tapped the side of his head with his finger, "have been compelling. I've changed, and I'm not sure whether I like it or not."
"What the hell are you? How is it you can live inside a human body, a human host, and take over so completely?"
"To understand that," Couttis said, "you need to understand one thing."
"What?"
"I'm both here and not here."
* * *
Couttis led me through a different part of the cavern. As we approached a narrow section, I noticed the walls here were unusually smooth and realized this wasn't a natural excavation. How they had carved such a vast space was another mystery.
As we walked, we passed bodies sleeping on cots. A few had awakened. One of the worker bees (as I had taken to calling them), a woman wearing jeans and a pullover, asked them several questions of the standard "who are you" and "where are you" variety. She followed up with a series of guttural sounds; words, I supposed. If the individuals replied to the sounds, they were escorted out of the cavern. One person, a man of about thirty with thinning hair, panicked and tried to run. He was subdued and restrained, a hypodermic sending him back to sleepy time.
"What's with the Rumpelstiltskin bit?" I asked. "Why do you keep them asleep?"
"It's necessary," Couttis said.
We stepped through an opening and left the cavern. We stood in a hall, much like the other I had seen.
Couttis paused, his expression troubled. "My father, did he say anything before he died?"
"Nothing about you, if that's what you mean."
Couttis gave an angry shake of his head. "I mean about this—the cavern, the people, the invasion."
I remembered the puzzled look on Gordon Couttis's face when he saw the egg. He seemed genuinely confused. "I don't believe so. In fact, I think Sytniak killed your father because he saw the proximity lock, because he would naturally look into it. I think he died because he was close to finding out about your plans."
Couttis's eyes darkened. "My plans? You think too highly of me. I have status—I'm not like Annabelle, too inconsequent to warrant a younger conveyance—but I'm far from what you would call executive personnel."
"What does that mean, conveyance?"
"Soon," Couttis said, and proceeded down the hallway.
I had no choice but to follow.
Chapter Seventeen
The hallway took several turns and finally ended at a door. This one wasn't stainless steel. Rather, it was constructed of a hard, blue substance, as if someone had taken a slab of clear summer sky, turned it to stone, and set it into the wall. It did not have a palm-print scanner. As we approached, I felt a bone-numbing chill, similar to what I would experience if I stood too close to an enormous block of dry ice.
"Why are we here?" I asked.
Couttis used his finger to trace a symbol onto the door's surface, the heat of his flesh apparently searing it into the material. Once completed, the slab grew translucent, then transparent, until nothing remained. Or so I thought. The cold hadn't dissipated.
"It's still there," Couttis said, rapping the now invisible material with his knuckles. "You have to retrace the symbol to open it."
Beyond the transparent door lay another cavern. If I thought the previous one was large, this one was enormous. Light pillars lined either side, going back as far as I could see. There were no cots, no people. Only an enormous machine.
It was constructed of the same light-emitting metal I'd seen used throughout the underground complex. It had grotesque shapes rising at odd angles; some thrust into the air like spikes, others twisted and flowed with uncertain purposes. Thick fleshy cables, dark green with red and yellow stripes, emerged from the base and stretched into the distance like enormous tentacles. Bolts the size of truck tires secured the construct to the floor. Darker, lightless metal formed a scaffolding along the machine's length, encapsulating it. Set into the end nearest the door was an opening like a porthole in a cruise ship but three times larger. Through it I could see light. It sparked and crackled like lightning, so bright at times I had to avert my eyes. Even so, the display left a faint, silvery image dancing on my retinas.
My dream of the dead planet—the light resembled the one I had seen flashing and sparking on an alien mountain top.
"There's your answer, your Pandora's Box," Couttis said, his voice filled with pride. "We call it the Conveyance. It's how we get from our world to yours."
"What is it?" I whispered.
Couttis put his mouth near my ear. "It, Doctor, is a wormhole."
* * *
My mind shrank from what I'd seen, from what Couttis had told me. I needed time to regain my mental equilib
rium. I insisted we check on Frank.
As Couttis walked us back, I stuffed my hands into my pockets so he wouldn’t see them shaking.
"Now that I know your secret," I said, “what do you expect from me? I doubt there's anything I can do that you can't do better."
Couttis kept his head down. "We've been on your planet for nearly a hundred years, building this infrastructure, working on Emersville, gradually developing it as a base of operations. We co-exist with most of the town’s citizens. We—" He hesitated. "We’ve finally completed what we set out to do. Except now we’re out of room. We need more space, which means expanding out into the rest of the world."
"You don't want that?"
"In a way, yes," Couttis said. "Though not to the extent others do."
"Let me guess. The Green Queen?"
Couttis gave me a sharp look. "You're remarkably well informed."
"I also know your queen isn't satisfied with a 'co-existence.' She wants more. She wants our world."
"Conquest was not our initial plan," Couttis said.
“What other reason could you possibly have for coming to another planet? You're not stupid. You knew we wouldn't let another race step in and take over.”
"We have much to offer your people, ways to improve your lives to an extent you cannot imagine. We had hoped to offer an exchange—technological advances for a peaceful co-existence, a chance to integrate ourselves into your civilization with minimal disruption."
I snorted at the thought of "minimal disruptions" but decided to let it go. "What changed?"
Couttis hesitated. "Remember when I said I was both here and not here? It's because of the wormhole. It connects our part of the universe to yours. Travel is almost instantaneous. Except there's a problem—your world is poison to us. The air, the food, the bacteria and viruses, the intensity of your sunlight, they would have killed us."
"War of the Worlds," I said. "H. G. Wells covered this long before you got here. Get to the point."
"We needed an alternative. This is where the proximity locks come into play. They're the means by which we can safely travel to your world."
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