by M. R. Forbes
“What do you mean?”
Nathan carried Hayden from the room, out into the corridor. Hayden’s eye burned from the sudden increase in light as Stacker carried him at a run, down the long hallway, and into an adjacent passage.
“James and I retrieved a computer system from a former Space Force military base called Area Fifty-one.”
“Tinker mentioned it to me. Something about an artifact that can bring the Others.”
The corridor ended in a metal door with a security panel beside it. Nathan pushed his hand against the panel, and the door slid open, revealing a much different space behind. It was clean and sterile, and much more modern than the dark and dingy dungeon. There were standing desks with terminals resting on them, and one of them was active, a woman standing behind it, her eyes fixed on the display as she worked the system.
“Pyro?” Hayden said.
Chandra glanced over at him, freezing when she saw the state he was in. Tears immediately sprang to her eyes, her already pale skin going white.
“What the fuck did they do to you, Sheriff?” She looked at Nathan. “What the fuck?”
“Did you find anything?” Nathan asked, ignoring the question.
Her eyes returned to the display. “A few of them look promising. Now I understand why you wanted it. I guess I should have made the connection before this. Don’t worry, Sheriff. We’ll get you fixed up.”
Nathan carried him across the room and through a door on the side. They went down another spotless corridor and into an adjacent room. It contained a glass-partitioned enclosure with an entrance on either side. One of the doors was in this room, but the other led to a different area.
“The artifact is a door,” Nathan said. “Alien technology that allows what appears to be instant travel from one part of the universe to another. It came with the trife. The Space Force opened the door once, and then closed it seconds later, but it’s possible something came through. And now that something may be in Edenrise.”
“You brought it back with you?”
“Not intentionally.” Nathan carried him to the door on the left side of the enclosure. Pulling it open. “I need to set you down in here. You have to try to stand as long as you can. I know it’ll hurt, but if you want to see your wife again, you need to stay upright. Got it, Sheriff?”
“Pozz,” Hayden replied.
Nathan lowered him to the ground. It was made of what looked like concrete and reminded him of the porous surface of Metro’s floor. It was probably the same stuff.
“What is this?” Hayden asked.
“It’s a sterilization chamber,” Nathan replied. “It’ll remove all of the dirt and grime and bacteria.” He stepped out of it and closed the door. He shouted through the glass. “Chandra will start the process. When it’s done, that door will open and lead you out into another chamber. Just try to stay calm and trust me.”
“Trust you?” Hayden said, unsure if he could get his voice loud enough for Stacker to hear him.
“You said I needed to earn your trust, Sheriff. This is how I’m going to do it.”
Nathan left the room. Hayden stood naked in the center of the chamber. His body was so weak. It was taking all of his willpower to stand. His feet were sore and throbbing. Everything was sore and throbbing. His broken toes made it harder to balance, and every time he put too much pressure on them the pain rocketed up his spine.
He started to lean, and he gritted his teeth and pushed himself upright. He hoped this didn’t take too long.
A buzzing tone sounded in the chamber, followed by a clank like something locked or disengaging. Water began to pour through the ceiling above him, a sudden torrent that washed over his body. It wasn’t only water. It had something in it. Something that made every cut and scrape on his body burn at once. He opened his mouth to cry out, thinking better of it as it filled with the flowing liquid.
Within seconds, he was up to his knees. A dozen seconds later, it had risen to his chest. The liquid showed no signs of abating. His body was in agony, every part of it on fire, the water reaching every part of him. It continued to rise, and he drew a deep breath right before it overtook his face.
He held his breath, realizing that he wasn’t floating in the liquid but rather stayed fixed to the floor. It covered his head, the chamber filling completely. He counted off the seconds. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
He heard a muffled thunk, and then the liquid started to drain, flowing out of the bottom of the chamber as quickly as it had flowed in. The room was dry within twenty seconds, leaving him clean.
He thought that would be the end of it, but a second buzz sounded, and then lights turned on above and below him. They were heated and red, and they felt like they pierced all the way through him. They burned his wounds in a different way than the liquid, the heat almost soothing as it quickly dried him off.
Again, he thought that would be the end of the process. He hoped so because his knees were beginning to buckle, his body nearly refusing to hold him up. A third buzz, and then he felt a tickle along his skin and a slight hum in the air. That lasted a dozen seconds, and then a fourth buzz sounded and the second door slid aside.
Hayden stumbled forward, using the walls to support himself as he pushed his body through the door and into the adjacent chamber. It was a similar size to the sterilization room, with a similar glass partition separating him from the other side. A third door sat on the far end of the space.
Nathan was waiting for him on the other side of the glass, watching as Hayden pulled himself to the middle of the room.
“You don’t need to stand in there,” Nathan said, still shouting to be heard past the barrier.
Hayden dropped himself to the ground, leaning against the back wall. “Where am I?”
“Chandra picked out the most promising solution,” Nathan said.
“Where am I?” Hayden repeated.
“Trust me, Sheriff,” Nathan said. “I didn’t take you out of there to hurt you.”
“Where the fuck am I?” Hayden shouted angrily.
He just wanted a straight answer. Everything was happening so fast. He wasn’t sure any of this was real. Was he still in the small place in his mind, imagining he had been rescued?
He heard another buzz and looked up as a mist started dropping from the ceiling. The last time he had been in the middle of something like that, an entire community had died.
“Where the…” His voice trailed as the gas reached him, sinking into him. His eyes suddenly felt heavy, his body heavier. His head lolled forward.
It all went away. For a while, at least.
Chapter 14
The first thing Hayden noticed when he woke up was that he wasn’t in pain. It was a weird feeling, one that felt almost more alien to him than the agony he had endured since James Stacker had brought him to Edenrise. Being comfortable, awake, and alert felt strange.
It almost seemed wrong.
He blinked a few times, but the vision in his left eye didn’t clear. Still, he could see better out of his right eye. The swelling on his face appeared to have subsided.
“How do you feel?” Nathan asked.
Hayden found him, still standing on the other side of the glass. He was still in the chamber, then. He pushed himself to his feet, using the wall to brace himself until he could balance. He looked down at his feet. His toes didn’t hurt. The broken bones seemed to have mended.
“What did you do?” Hayden asked.
“This was a USSF bio-engineering lab,” Nathan said. “And then it was one of Tinker’s labs. They both used it to test different compounds. Gene-altering compounds.”
“What did you do?” Hayden asked again.
“We didn’t have a lot of time, but Chandra scanned the medical reports and reviewed some of the related research streams for the ones that seemed the most promising.”
“You used one of the compounds on me.”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Sheriff, but I need your help, and I had to do som
ething. We don’t have weeks for you to heal naturally.”
“What did you give me?”
“It pushes your system into overdrive. It speeds up, well, everything. We chose it because it has a low mortality rate, at least compared to most of the other compounds.”
“What’s low?”
“Forty percent after seventy-two hours.”
Hayden leaned his head back against the wall. Stacker had saved him and healed him so he could burn up from the alterations the chemical compounds in the gas were making to his genes?
“I thought you were going to help me,” he said.
“I did help you. Assuming you survive the initial alteration, you’ll only lose ten to twenty years off your lifespan.”
“Only? That’s easy for you to say, aren’t you a hundred years old?”
“Not quite. I know it’s not what you want, Hayden, but it’s the best option we have. Whatever got into the city, the last thing it did was attack the guards outside the entrance to the shield spire.”
“It’s going after the shields?”
“We think so, yes.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. We don’t have a lot of time. You were out for thirty minutes, and we still have to get you back to full strength.”
Hayden sighed. What was done was done. It wasn’t as though he could have resisted it, even if he had wanted to.
And it wasn’t as if he would have wanted to. Nathan was right. He had brought him back to life, repairing the worst of the damage in minutes instead of days and weeks. Still, he knew a fair amount about the Space Force’s experiments with gene-altering drugs. There was a reason they had never settled on a final compound, and it was usually because their experiments ended in death for the subjects.
There was a reason this compound had remained locked away down here instead of being put to use. Hayden wasn’t sure a forty percent mortality rate was high enough to dissuade a man like Tinker, which meant there was probably another reason not to use it, another outcome even worse than dying within three days.
“How do I get out of here?” Hayden asked.
Nathan pointed to the door to Hayden’s left. “Through there. I’ll come around to let you out.”
Hayden walked over to the door, thankful that he could walk again. He went through it, and it slammed closed behind him, locking audibly when it did. He found himself in a cell, surrounded by thick metal bars. A quick glance showed him at least two or three more of the prisons nearby, and a second door at the front with a security panel on the wall beside it.
That door clanked and slid open, and Nathan walked in clutching something under his arm. He turned to the security panel and activated it, finding Hayden’s cell and unlocking it.
Hayden stepped out. He was clean and healed, but still naked. Nathan held up the bundle he was carrying. A Spacer jumpsuit.
“I’ll have to help you into it,” Nathan said.
Hayden nodded, letting Nathan dress him in the jumpsuit. Then they headed out into the hallway, moving back toward the entrance.
“I hate this place,” Hayden said.
“Me too,” Nathan agreed. “There’s another block of cells after this one. I found bodies of women in them. The last ones who didn’t survive Tinker’s efforts to create the virus. I thought before that their pain was worth it to save the world, but now I’m not so sure.”
“It was never worth it.”
“Come on, Sheriff. We have to hurry. Doc doesn’t know I left Tinker’s workshop yet, but she’s got General Neill ready to deploy Liberators all over Edenrise. They’re waiting on Chandra and me to tell them what we’re hunting before they create a panic in the city.”
“What about the shield spire?”
“Three platoons went to the spire, but they haven’t found anything out of the ordinary.”
“Any new bodies turn up?”
“Not so far.”
“It might be testing you to see how you react. Getting to know its enemy.”
“That makes sense.”
“How does it fight?”
“It has a weapon that uses an electrical charge to screw with the nervous system. First, you hallucinate, and then your wiring gets fried, and then you die. It’s hit me a couple of times already, but my replica stamina saved me. Your alterations should save you too. That’s another reason we chose that solution.”
Hayden wasn’t used to thinking of himself as altered. He didn’t like it. “Do you know what it looks like?”
“No. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it.”
“You’re saying it’s invisible? Cloaked?”
“It could be. I really don’t know. Chandra and I were going through the mainframe we recovered to see if we could learn more about this thing. But then we came to get you instead.”
“I don’t have a lot of reason to help you stop it. Tinker and I aren’t exactly allies.”
“Yes you do, Sheriff. You know if the shields go down everyone in Edenrise will die.”
“Considering Tinker is aiming to kill everyone outside of Edenrise, that seems like justice to me.”
“The people in here are innocent. They answered Tinker’s call to be saved. They came to survive, not to support the Mad Messiah’s war.”
“Mad Messiah?” Hayden said, smiling. “I like that.”
They reached the control room. Chandra beamed when she saw Hayden, coming over to him and embracing him. “Sheriff. I didn’t know what they were doing to you. I’m sorry. I just wanted to be safe, you know? To have a home. I still want that.”
Hayden stepped back from her, looking at her face. She was no different than any of the other people who had made the journey to Edenrise. Nathan was right. They weren’t all there because they believed in Tinker’s plan. Most of them probably didn’t know anything about it.
“I’m going to need some hands if I’m going to help,” he said. “And a new eye.”
“We need to go back to my shop,” Chandra said.
“Stacker, how are we going to do this?” Hayden asked. “I don’t think I can walk around Edenrise freely.”
“Actually, you can. The only other person here who knows what you look like is Doc. Tinker and James are gone, and they took the soldiers who were with us when we captured you with them. As long as we keep you clear of her, you should be fine.”
“Until Shun wakes up.”
“Shun’s locked up down there, and he doesn’t have a key. He won’t be missed for eight hours at least.”
“So what’s our plan?” Hayden asked. “We find this thing, we neutralize it, and then what?”
“We have to stop Tinker from getting the artifact,” Nathan said. “He thinks these Others are going to save us. I think he’s wrong. I think if he lets the Others in, they’re going to finish what the trife started.”
Chapter 15
“Wait here,” Nathan said.
Hayden and Chandra remained at the back of the pod station, while Nathan made his way to the platform. The pod wasn’t there, but it was as simple as tapping a control on a nearby pedestal to signal it that someone was waiting for pickup.
Nathan had been slightly incorrect about how many people had seen Hayden to identify him. The pod driver had brought the sheriff to the lab in the first place, and would definitely be able to recognize him, at least as long as Hayden was still walking around without replacement arms.
Nathan still couldn’t quite believe he was going through with this. The idea had formed almost immediately, but to be putting the plan in action was a level of initiative he had rarely taken; the last time when he had made his escape from Proxima to come to Earth. Sure, he had disobeyed James when he left the horse nomad’s camp to head to Crosston, but that was a minor infraction compared to what amounted to treason against the replica and his master.
They had spared his life, they had taken him in, they had treated him with respect, and this was how he was repaying them?
But it wasn’t about Tin
ker and James as much as it was about doing the right thing for the people of Edenrise. The Liberators would try to protect them. So would the police. They would ultimately fail because they didn’t have the experience of dealing with problems like this.
Sheriff Duke did.
In that sense, he didn’t see himself as being on James’ side or Hayden’s side. He had aligned himself with the third option, and right now that third option put him in partnership with the sheriff. Even once they were successful in neutralizing the threat here and went chasing after the Mad Messiah. He was hoping he would have the chance to talk to them before Hayden killed them. That was going to be a more difficult maneuver, one that might leave him on the bad side of everyone concerned.
He would cross that galaxy when he got to it. He had a simple task right now, and that was to deal with the pod driver.
The pod entered the station within a couple of minutes, gliding to a stop as the doors opened to let him in. Nathan boarded, glancing back at Hayden and Chandra before rushing to the front. The passenger's doors closed and the pod started to accelerate. Nathan used his security clearance to enter the cockpit, drawing a confused look from the driver.
“Is there a problem, sir?” the man asked.
“I forgot something. Can you go back?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nathan grabbed the back of the man’s seat while the pod slowed to a stop and then began to roll backward. The driver watched the incoming track through a feed to his dashboard, expertly bringing the vehicle back to the station. He hit the control to open the passenger doors, glancing back at Nathan.
“Sir? Are you going to get what you left behind?”
Nathan stared at him a moment, narrowing his eyes to express his displeasure at being questioned. The driver looked away, waiting silently. Nathan watched the feed to the passenger section as Hayden and Chandra stepped on board, with Hayden ducking behind one of the seats and out of the view of the camera. Chandra headed forward to the cockpit, knocking on the door.
The sound unnerved the driver, his head snapping back toward the door.
