Light Shaper, page 39
Then he recognized one of the figures standing there, as if in answer to his thought, one of the few not wearing a uniform, and a cry died in his throat.
“Misha?” he asked, but his voice was not even a whisper.
She did not react, but Rigel knew it was her. An emaciated, corpse-like version of his friend and flatmate was staring up at him with the same cold and swirling eyes as the rest of the people below. Something brushed against Rigel’s consciousness then, the faintest hint of an idea, and crushing certainty confirmed the fact that Misha was already dead.
All of them had grouped around the fallen woman in a perfectly neat semicircle, and none of them looked down or exhibited surprise when what Rigel supposed was already a corpse began to stir. And stand up.
It took her a while, but it didn’t matter. Rigel was rooted to the spot. When she finally looked up at Rigel, she had the same empty eyes as the rest of them. The air around her shimmered, and suddenly she was wearing skintight black clothes that Rigel recognized. He had seen her before, only he had not known her without them.
“Diana Herrera?”
The assassin gave no hint of having heard, simply stared up at him along with all the others, devoid of expression and yet somehow still conveying more than just that terrible cold. Their eyes were hatred. Emptiness. Hunger. And they were all of them dead.
There were now wet dragging noises coming from the awful room on Rigel’s right where Herrera had been trapped. Rigel could not look, but it sounded as if those two corpses were struggling to stand up.
He tried to move his lips. He couldn’t. And now those below and those in the house with him were moving closer. Rigel started to feel his mind fog up, growing numb like a naked hand holding snow for too long. He started to have trouble thinking. There was only the fear, the terrible cold. He could not hold on to a single thought, and if this meant he would be trapped in here unable to get out, then Steve would never know what had happened, and he—
Steve. A memory of a gruff smile, the touch of a hand over his.
Rigel held on to the thought like a sinking man clutching a lifeline.
“Let me…,” he croaked. Struggling. “Let me….”
Something brushed tentatively against Rigel’s leg. Something that had not managed to stand up all the way.
“Let—me—go!”
He gestured upward with his right hand, and the orange glow from it was like a beacon of long-forgotten warmth. On his third spoken word, something broke, and Rigel stumbled forward, suddenly able to move.
He looked to his right and saw the two inhuman things reaching up with dead fingers, trying to grab his leg.
He bolted away from that awful house, that trap that had nearly killed his mind.
He stumbled down the stairs and was nearly frozen in place by the sight of more of the things shuffling into the open doorway. Rigel raced away from them and managed to find a back door in the kitchen. He crashed through it and fled out into the sea of waving grass.
He ran until his legs gave out under him. Then he fell down onto the grass, looked back apprehensively, and saw that the house had disappeared.
Help me, Rigel.
Rigel started violently, but there was nobody around. And the voice was different this time, a child’s voice, impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl.
Rigel stood up shakily and looked at the flawless blue sky.
“Who are you? What do you want from me?” he asked loudly.
I have waited for so very long, the child said, with just a hint of a sob. Help me, please.
“What is going on? What am I supposed to do?”
It has grown stronger with so many killings, so much death. Soon it will be able to interact with the world outside, permanently.
“You mean… that thing? That shadow?”
Please hurry, Rigel. I can’t…. It’s too strong…. It’s going to—
And suddenly the world was torn asunder.
A gigantic crack spread with explosive force across the plains, rushing in a jagged line at the place where Rigel was lying. He bolted upright. Boulders flew everywhere as if they weighed nothing. Grass died on a wide swath on either side of the crack as if a terrible blight were spreading with impossible speed. The sound was so deep and so loud that Rigel felt it in his bones. It looked almost like a cartoon, the quickly approaching fault spiderwebbing out in smaller branches that radiated from the main chasm as if somebody had taken a gigantic mallet and struck the brittle surface of the grassy plains. It was deadly, though. Rigel could feel it. The echo of mindless violence that rushed forth to batter Rigel’s mind even as the earth trembled was unmistakable.
Rigel threw himself to the right just as the crack reached him. The earth under his feet bucked like a wild beast, and he was thrown up in the air, arms and legs flailing in useless reflex. He fell back to the ground with the awful crunch of something breaking, and the pain that spiked up his left knee was so sharp he cried out, wondering how a virtual injury could hurt so much.
He tried to stand up, and the pain was unbelievable. He dropped back down and nearly passed out.
The ground trembled and shattered all around him, the chaos only growing in intensity, and it kept on going for so long Rigel began to think it would never stop. He could feel the earth giving way nearby, plummeting into the abyss in the depths of the crack.
You have to move.
“I can’t! My leg is broken!”
If you stay there, you will die.
Rigel stole a look to his left and saw that the gaping maw of the broken earth was less than a meter away and growing. He tried to crawl away, but his knee would not take any weight, and the agony that shot up his leg felt all too real.
“It’s broken!”
You are a Light Shaper. Bend the electron flow inside this virtual realm. Give your thought form.
Half blind and deafened by the sounds of the earthquake, Rigel reached for his wounded knee with both hands. He had no idea what he was supposed to do, but he had no doubt that if he fell into that abyss, his mind would be lost forever. So he touched the broken knee and spoke.
“Heal!”
His hands burned hot, almost painfully so, the glow coming from the metal that encased them brighter than a flashlight. Rigel felt something crack in his leg, but amazingly it felt right. Warmth surged around his knee, spread, and the glow in his hands appeared to weaken and die off.
He was not in pain anymore.
Run.
He did, stumbling up, racing frantically away from the growing chasm behind him. The earthquake went on and on, and still Rigel ran, fearing he would run out of breath and he would trip and fall into the darkness below. It seemed impossible that such a thing could last so long, and soon Rigel’s muscles were burning, struggling to keep going. He began to think it would never end, that it would continue until every bit of the world had been consumed by the disturbance.
Suddenly, thankfully, it stopped. Rigel shuffled to a halt, gasping for breath. He glanced back, and he saw a completely different sight.
The grass was gone. The ground was a broken-up jigsaw of gray dirt, like the cracked mud at the bottom of a dried-up puddle that has been exposed too long to the blistering sun. Rigel stared in shocked wonder. The devastation spread quickly in every direction, and snaking through it all like a horrible wound on the face of reality was the crack no straining tectonic plates could ever hope to imitate. The sky overhead had changed too, going from bright blue to a steely murk that reminded Rigel of the horrible shifting gray in the dead people’s eyes.
A cutting wind started blowing. Ice-cold and irresistible, it forced Rigel to turn his side to it so he wouldn’t be blown off.
Hurry, Rigel. There isn’t much time.
“Hurry where?” Rigel shouted even though the wind snatched his words away. “Where can I find you? Which way am I supposed to go?”
A new booming sound reached Rigel then. It was a faint echo, then silence. There was a flash of bright white light in the direction the wind was blowing, and a few seconds later, the sound reached Rigel again. He recognized it now. It was a sound he had heard often in movies, but which he had never experienced firsthand. He turned his face straight into the wind in wonder, blinking away tears that blurred his vision. The flash of light repeated itself in the distance, slowly followed by an even louder boom that seemed to rattle the very air.
Thunder.
Find me, the child urged him, in the eye of the storm….
Something fell on Rigel’s face then. A drop of water. The gale began to die down, and as the rain began falling tentatively, Rigel saw that the sky where the lightning flashes were striking had grown very dark. A solid-looking cloud front, anvil shaped and threatening, approached swiftly, borne on the wings of the wind.
The rain fell in earnest then, soaking Rigel to the bone.
Rigel turned to face the wind and ran straight at the approaching storm.
Chapter Thirty
A SINGLE eye, blacker than night.
Barrow’s ragged breath caught in his throat. Something was there, on the dark catwalk with him. Something that reached with tendrils of freezing shadow.
Barrow tried to move but couldn’t. He felt his sweat freeze on his skin and felt the metal railing near his hand frost over, groaning as it became brittle. His mind felt slow, like it was shutting down.
The thing on the railing hopped once, and the gentle sway of the catwalk when it landed drove a needle of fear straight through Barrow’s heart. He started shaking uncontrollably and felt his knees about to give way. There was no escaping this. Nothing to do but die.
From far off, a memory. Rigel, smiling.
The warmth of what could be love.
It was enough to snap him out of it. Barrow whirled around and ran away from the thing as fast as his legs could carry him, unmindful of the darkness or the danger of falling over the railing like Herrera. He trailed the frozen rail with both hands, and when he hit the beginning of the spiral staircase, he threw himself down it, stumbling all the way and taking as many steps at a time as he dared, all but flying on his way to the ground. He did not stop or allow himself time to rest until he was finally sprinting across the field of mutant fungi, when his energy rush finally died out and he was forced to slow down to a walk.
He was hurt, probably badly, his entire body racked by pain. And yet the only thought in Barrow’s mind was to get to Rigel quickly so he could wake him up and they could leave this place forever. No mission was worth having to face that thing again. They had to leave and get as far away as possible, out in the light where it could not hurt them, maybe….
The ground rumbled. At first Barrow thought it was in his mind, but then it happened again. Harder.
Barrow was less than halfway to the set of double doors that protected the entrance to the server room. He thought about sprinting again, getting away from whatever was causing those tremors and making that horrible drilling noise, but there was a painfully loud sound of rock cracking open and then an impact so sudden and so hard that it felt like an earthquake that threw Barrow to the ground and shook the entire facility.
There was a moment of silence as Barrow felt small rocks falling all around him, probably from the ceiling starting to cave in.
Then a second impact shook the place, as violent and sudden as the last. The rock wall more than fifty meters away on Barrow’s left was blasted open with incredible force.
Light. Rocks flying everywhere. And a dark shape behind the hole, something large.
Barrow curled up into a ball to protect himself from the deadly shower of rocks and only struggled to his knees when he thought it was over, coughing from the dust. He blinked away tears from half-blinded eyes that would not stay fully open in the painful sunlight streaming in from the hole.
The dark shape was a machine standing on two legs and with two gigantic arms. It made its way inside, pushing boulders out of the way as if they were props made of cardboard. Barrow’s watering eyes barely made out the shape of a flat canopy where the machine’s pilot would be.
It was a new threat, it had to be, and yet the first thought in Barrow’s mind was that the bright sunlight coming in through the hole would keep the shadow upstairs at bay. He felt relief such as he had never felt and actually approached the machine to get closer to the light.
It was the wrong move to make.
The battle armor swiveled around smoothly to face him. It brought both of its arms to bear, and as Barrow’s eyes adjusted more to the sunlight, he could see that the thing was almost three times as big as he was. Sitting inside it was a man, but Barrow could not see his face clearly yet.
“Steve Barrow,” the man in there said, his voice amplified to be perfectly audible even through the canopy that protected him. Barrow could hear rage in it, and pain. “You simply refuse to die. Tell me, did you enjoy it? Doing that to Diana?”
One of the machine’s arms turned to point to the left. The arm was shaped like a segmented drill, but it was easy to follow the direction it was pointing and see the corpse of Diana Herrera lying broken on top of a rock.
“That wasn’t me,” Barrow panted. He recognized the voice in the machine now. Richard Tanner.
“Liar. I followed her transponder here. I had a live audio feed to everything she recorded, and I know what happened. You murdered her!”
Barrow flinched from the amplified cry of rage, and even more when Tanner brought the machine’s other arm down and hit the ground savagely with it. The entire floor trembled, and more rocks were dislodged from the ceiling. The powerful armor itself was unharmed.
Barrow backed away as Tanner advanced with heavy mechanical footsteps. The fungi were squashed underneath.
“It’s over, Barrow,” he said. Barrow could see his face now, inside his machine. Tanner looked insane. “I will kill you, of course. But if you take me to where Aaron Blake is hiding, I will kill you quickly.”
Involuntarily, Barrow glanced behind him at the vault-like doors.
“Ah. Inside the cradle room. Well, thank you, Barrow. Stand aside so I can kill your lover in front of you. It will pay you back for what you did to me, in a way. Then you will die.”
Barrow risked a look back. If he could reach the control panel and slam shut the heavy doors that protected the cradle room, he might stand a chance.
Tanner was too smart, though. He read his intention right away.
“Go ahead, try it,” he said to Barrow. “Let’s see who is faster. This machine can clear ten meters in a single jump. You look like you can barely stand up.”
Barrow hated to admit Tanner was right. He would have to distract Tanner with something if he wanted to have a shot at closing those doors.
“Why don’t you leave us alone?” he said loudly. “Stop chasing Rigel. Walk away.”
Tanner laughed. “After losing so much? After my entire company is in shambles, the secret to my fortune a blasted ruin? It’s too late for that, Steve Barrow. Even a lowly security guard like yourself can surely see that I need the AI that sleeps in the cradle. With it, I will have something even the Primes wish to possess. Such an ancient machine will give me the means to secure my control over the city and eventually look beyond its borders to others.”
Something was moving in the darkness near Herrera’s corpse. Something that hopped stealthily, almost shyly.
“Wait,” Barrow warned him, pointing there.
“Already begging for your life?” Tanner asked him. “I thought you would be braver than that.”
“There’s something there,” Barrow said.
“Please. If you want to think of a distraction to buy you the precious seconds you need to get to the control panel, think of something better. It may be a struggle for your steroid-addled brain, but surely you can do better than that.”
The dark thing hopped right next to Herrera’s corpse. It cast no shadow, but it didn’t need to. Looking at it, Barrow felt as if it were swallowing the light in the entire cave.
He backed away from the thing, ignoring Tanner, eyes wide with fear.
“I will never know how you managed to overpower an entire platoon of my best soldiers,” Tanner was saying. His battle armor advanced again with a loud swirl of servos. “How did you do it? Tell me, and I might let you live a little bit longer. You seem desperate to stall anyway.”
“It wasn’t us,” Barrow said. He pointed again. “It was that.”
The creature touched the corpse, and the darkness seemed to grow thicker for an instant. Even Tanner must have felt it, because his machine swiveled ninety degrees to where Barrow was pointing.
“What the hell?” Tanner said.
The creature jumped at his machine.
Barrow was ready. He sprinted back to the control room, slammed his hand on the access panel, and desperately looked for the door controls. He found them and pressed the Close option so hard that he feared he had broken his finger. But the doors immediately responded and closed with a heavy clang of metal on metal.
There was silence. Barrow was panting, feeling pain from a dozen places at once. Blood still trickled from his nose and refused to stop. Behind him, the heavy door to the cradle room was closed. In front of him, another one just as sturdy was all that protected him from Tanner’s machine.
“Barrow!” Tanner’s impossibly loud voice shrieked.
Something slammed against the outer door on the other side, where the cave was. The deafening impact shook the entire facility, forcing Barrow to cover his ears. The sudden shock made him lose his footing, and he stumbled onto one knee. He was just getting up when the second impact threw him on the floor. The noise was unbelievably loud and painful, but even worse than that was the other noise, the groan of metal giving way, being torn apart by something. The vault door wasn’t holding.
