Not if, when. Good attitude. So far, this guy seemed hard to fluster. She wondered whether that was a requirement for Wraith training, or whether they beat it into him.
What kind of training did they get, anyway? Probably nothing he could talk about, or wanted to. Her walks down memory lane didn’t usually include all the time spent having various skills pummeled into her by Tito and others.
The hallway abruptly opened into a long, narrow room that extended to the right and left, with a system of tracks running the length of it and posts at regular intervals on either side of them. An assembly line, maybe, but there was no indication of what had been assembled or for whom. Nothing, she supposed, if it had been a temple. Maybe the religious leaders held processions along the tracks, or their victims were carted in and then led off to slaughter, or this was some elaborate buffet where people grabbed one plate at a time from passing tables.
She resisted the urge to shout “Hello!” to hear her own voice call back. As it was, their footsteps echoed enough to turn into creepy shambling noises.
Her sensors told her it smelled dry, dusty, but with a lingering undertone of something warm. Something alive.
“They must have passed through here,” she said.
Tim didn’t respond, busy scanning the length of the tracks. She wandered to the right, toward where he’d said the signal was coming from. She didn’t get far before finding a tall, thin wall made of metal. It had some kind of platform a few meters up—controls?
Farther down, a smaller version of the same wall was nestled underneath, and it did indeed look like a control panel. Runes like the ones on the outside door were inscribed on the surface. She leaned in to get a closer look, wondering what it said.
The panel lit up, projections of the pictographs hovering in the air above the console. Somewhere off to the left, a strange clunky sound turned into grinding, then a brisk whir. Lights in the ceiling slowly came to life, casting a blue-white glow on the huge room. The ground shook.
Faster than she thought possible, Tim was at her side. “What did you do?”
“Looked at it.”
“You did not touch anything?”
“No, because I didn’t want to end up like Pandora out there.”
The posts on either side of the tracks began to glow, and shimmering walls of force sprang up between them. Tim examined one, apparently taking readings with whatever sensors his own suit had; hers were more geared toward environmental data, and informed her that a cool breeze emanated from somewhere to the left.
Without warning, a strange glowing pink cube appeared at the far-right end of the room, hovering in the air above the tracks. It moved deliberately toward them, then past them, then through one of two openings in the far-left wall. It receded into the distance and was gone.
“What was that?” Eva asked.
“An energy storage device,” Tim replied. “Incredibly densely compacted. Likely very volatile.” Another pink cube traveled toward them as he spoke.
“Volatile as in explosive?”
“Yes. We should determine where they are coming from, and where they are being taken.”
“After we find the missing crew,” she said, turning her attention back to the console. “Help me turn this thing off, if that stuff is so dangerous.”
He stepped closer to examine the controls. Above them, the larger version of the console was also active. Interesting. Had there been two different-sized groups here at the same time?
Her suit’s sensors showed a slight temperature increase to the left, where the cool air had been coming from a moment earlier. She stared at the doorway and the gap where the tracks went, wondering which of those was the culprit. There were lights beyond, probably turned on when the console was activated, but she couldn’t see very far. Strange that it should be so dark. Almost like something was smothering . . . With a thought, she switched on her helmet’s infrared display.
The passage beyond lit up like a Christmas tree, almost literally; a mass of twinkling lights moving in their direction. The ground shook again.
“We need to go,” she said.
“One moment. I have almost deciphered the controls.”
“Very impressive. Look to the left.”
“What do you— Ah. I see.”
They ran. Eva turned off her infrared because the quennian was blowing it out at the sensitivity required to see the things piling into the room. Without infrared, there was only a mass of feathery blackness, like ink with a purpose.
Like that quennian in the tank back on the ship.
At the end of the room was a giant door, closed. Eva banged on it, which yielded no results.
“Tim!” she shouted.
“I have it,” he replied, doing whatever he had done with the door outside.
Nothing happened. “Hmm,” he said.
“Don’t ‘hmm’ me, make it work.” Eva turned to the roiling smear of creatures, drawing a flash bomb from her belt. She threw it and hid her eyes, counting to three. When she looked back, the morass had paused briefly, swirling around the area where she assumed the grenade had landed. More of the things clustered around as if drawn to it. Then, like a river encountering a rock, they surged around it and continued.
“Tim?”
“I am working on it.”
The things eddied and swirled, as if they were flying instead of walking or crawling. They seemed to be attracted to the lights, lingering as they reached each of them. She squinted and drew her gun, firing off a shot at one of the farther lights.
Whatever it was made of, it burst when struck, and that section of the room and ceiling fell into darkness. The mass of things behind the shadow stopped as if they had hit a dam, then streamed down the sides of the wall toward a spot where the next light overlapped with the previous one. What happened to the ones that had been inside the cone that was now dark?
“Turn off your light,” Eva said, flicking off the red one on her neck.
“I turned it off when the ceiling lights were activated,” Tim said.
“Good.” She shot at the next light, which also burst. Some of the things had already passed beyond it and were still coming, so she shot the light after that as well.
“What are you doing?” Tim asked.
“Plan B.” Cubes of energy were still appearing regularly along the tracks, and the things were as attracted to those as they were to the lights. “How volatile are the cubes?” she asked.
“Very.”
She shot at the second-to-last light, leaving them standing in a bright rectangle, then pulled out another flash bomb and threw it. This time, she darkened her helmet to see what happened.
Sure enough, the light drew the things like flies. She switched to infrared briefly; the ones within the darkness milled aimlessly, as if stuck in tide pools, gradually gravitating toward the glowing tracks and the now-blindingly bright cubes trundling along on them.
She turned the infrared back off, blinking away the spots that had formed in front of her eyes.
“Door?”
“Almost.”
“Almost” wasn’t good enough. She shot the light above them, plunging the whole room into darkness save for the glowing tracks and the periodically appearing cubes. Tim flicked his light on and she covered it with her hand.
“No, off.”
“I cannot open the door in the dark.”
She flicked her infrared on. Some of the tide pools had slid over to the tracks and were now flowing toward them again. There wasn’t time for him to fumble around anymore.
“Well,” she said. “I guess we need a different key. Get down.” She raised her gun, took a deep breath and held it, aiming at one of the cubes being carried along in its strange invisible way. As soon as it was parallel to the control console, she fired.
As she lay on the floor several long moments later, Eva had to admit she hadn’t expected the cube to be quite so volatile.
She had neglected to dampen the sound in her helmet
, so her ears rang from the explosion, and her head and back hurt from where she’d impacted the door. On top of her already busted ribs and other various bruises, the new injuries left her with a strong desire to stay very still for a long time. Instead, she slowly sat up, taking careful, shallow breaths until she could manage deeper ones with only minimal pain. Her infrared flickered and wouldn’t calibrate properly, rendering the Wraith in front of her as a painfully bright blob of white. If he was saying something, she couldn’t hear it.
“I’m okay,” she shouted. She wasn’t, obviously, but he didn’t need to know that.
He hunkered down right in front of her face, his helmet barely visible in the strange afterglow of the explosion. She wished he would take off the damn mask so she could at least see if he was talking, or smell him.
“I can’t hear you,” she said. “I can’t see much, either.”
In response, he grabbed both her hands to support her as she stood up, then led her toward the tracks. The room smelled like ozone and flame, tiny spurts of electricity shooting up from where the console had been. The entire track was in disarray, deactivated, and no more cubes were coming in.
With the posts off, they could now step onto the tracks. Tim towed her along them into the next room, which wasn’t a room at all but a narrow tunnel, pitch-black except for stray wisps of light. She wondered if any of those strange black things had survived, and if so, what they were up to.
No sense waiting around to find out.
She let Tim pull her farther into the tunnel, stumbling every few steps until he slowed down in what she imagined was exasperation. Her lack of speed was driving her nuts, too, but if those things were attracted to light then they couldn’t afford to risk it. At least he was the one with the sensors to figure out where they were going.
She consulted her map, realizing she had no idea how they would get back out if that room was awash with creepy critters. Too late to worry about it now.
As they went, she began to feel self-conscious about him holding her hand. She briefly considered offering to attach herself to him with her belt cord, but decided that would be too much like someone leading a puppy on a leash. Maybe she could grab him by the arm instead? That was weird, too. Put a hand on his shoulder? Nah, he was too tall, and she didn’t think her ribs would appreciate it.
Why was this bothering her, anyway? It had to be done.
Because you don’t want Vakar to see you holding hands with someone else, a little voice said.
Cállate, comemierda, she told the voice sternly. What were they, teenagers?
She thought back to his message, the one that had led her here. The tone was strange, stiff, almost formal. He said a lot had happened—like what? Scenarios raced through her head, and she didn’t like any of them. If she wanted to go mythological on this, too, she felt like Odysseus coming back to Penelope, and wondered whether Vakar was going to be palp-deep in horny quennians.
There you go again, comparing yourself to heroes, she thought. Don’t give yourself something to live up to.
Still, her vision was recovered enough that she let go of Tim’s hand. He looked back at her and she gave him a thumbs-up, hoping it translated, then continued.
She suddenly wished she’d asked Tim if he knew anything about the crew beyond the bare minimum for the mission. Then she might have known what to expect, at least a little.
Jaw tight with tension, she sent another ping to Vakar. Still no response. Coño carajo.
Tremors came harder and more frequently now, probably a remnant of whatever mechanism had turned on in the other room. And yet, that was broken, so why was this still happening?
A dim pink glow ahead showed her they were finally reaching the end of the line. The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. She hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be a train.
It was worse.
Chapter 22
Take This
The room they entered was a huge cavern, apparently naturally occurring rather than shaped by whoever had crafted the rest of the temple—or whatever it was, because Eva decided it didn’t feel very religious to her after the whole conveyor-belt-energy thing. Maybe a mine, or a factory?
The ground was rock, smooth but uneven in a few places, most notably the giant trench running the length of the area. Jutting out of the trench was a strange machine, made of the same materials as the doors and the consoles, its purpose inscrutable.
To their right was a door, which was likely the usual entrance instead of the back way they had taken through the tunnels. On the far side of the room was another door, glowing as if it had been recently activated, and a whisper of hope told her that maybe Vakar was on the other side.
Unfortunately, the dim light she had seen before came from stacks of the highly volatile pink energy cubes. Big stacks, all over the room. If they weren’t careful, the whole place would be blown to kingdom come.
And to put the sprinkles on the sundae, they appeared to have found the source of the tremors. On the far side of the trench, milling about in front of the door, was the giant burrowing lizard Tim had mentioned earlier. It was about four meters tall and twice that long, with a single horn jutting backward from its head, and a tail tipped with a blunt weapon.
She had a feeling, however, that it wasn’t supposed to be inky black and blurry at the edges, like that no-longer-quite-quennian thing back on the ship.
“Tim, you need to plug your sound holes,” she said quietly, or so she hoped; her hearing was still shoddy. She muted outside sound anyway, to be safe. “If that thing screams—”
It opened its maw, and a chill ran down her spine, whether from a subsonic effect or just from being creeped out, she didn’t know. Tim must have gotten her memo, because he pulled out his gun and fired a single shot at where the creature’s eyes should have been. Not surprisingly, it bounced off.
And also attracted the thing’s attention. Bad news. With another inaudible roar, it charged at them.
Tim ran left and Eva ran right, turning off her gravboots so she could bounce farther with each step even as she winced from each minor impact on her ribs. She pulled her last flash bomb off her belt; distracting it was one thing, but she also needed to get rid of it or they’d never get to that door, much less whatever was behind it. Part of her coolly suggested that maybe the creature had come from that room, that the crew was already gone and this was a waste of a perfectly good life.
She told that part of her to eat nails and shit blood.
Not that the dying part would take too long, at this rate. She threw the bomb at the creature and darkened her helmet, counting to three. She needn’t have bothered; it reared on its hind legs and caught the bomb in its mouth, swallowing it as if she’d thrown a treat. Which she might have, considering the black things’ attraction to light.
And energy. The cubes were mostly taller than her, but a few here and there had been compressed down into half a meter on a side. Maybe if she could—
The thing charged at her, leaping over the trench as if the gap weren’t at least three meters wide. She dodged to the right as it swiped at her, bouncing awkwardly up to her feet after her shoulder roll because of the low gravity and landing almost at the edge. Her ribs screamed in protest, an involuntary grunt escaping her. A quick glance told her the pit was about five meters deep, but she didn’t have time for a closer look.
She leaped forward, avoiding snapping jaws and the trail of black things that sloughed off the lizard like water off a duck. She loped, and dodged, and kept moving.
Tim fired at the thing from the other side of the room, but it had apparently decided Eva looked more delicious, so it ignored him. Go figure.
Eva ran toward the trench, skidding to a halt and twisting as she dropped over the edge, clinging to it by her fingertips even as her chest erupted in lances of fiery pain from her ribs and other wounds. She prayed the thing would leap over to the other side, or even better, fall in. Instead, it managed to claw its way to a stop and snap
at her hands, forcing her to let go. Down she went, her boots taking the brunt of the impact when she hit bottom and bounced.
Okay, puppy, come on down here, she thought. You stay in here long enough, maybe we can get that door open. C’mere, you rabioso pedazo de—
Mierda. It turned away.
Maybe she should let Tim handle it. He was a Wraith, after all, and she was injured to hell and back. He would have come in here alone if she hadn’t shown up. She could get out of the pit with her gravboots after this was over, find Vakar, save his crew, live happily ever after.
Assuming the critter didn’t eat Tim, or the parasite-whatevers didn’t wear his body like a puppet. Then she’d have to fight her way past two monsters to get out of here.
Eva, she told herself, you are full of terrible ideas, as usual.
She flipped into a handstand and turned on her boots, shooting toward the ceiling. As she passed the edge of the trench, she turned off the boots and let the momentum carry her out, tucking her legs and leaning forward into a roll. She hit the ground with a cry and bounced to her feet, pulling out her gun.
“Over here, comemierda,” she shouted, firing at the creature’s back.
Now it was her turn to be ignored. What was Tim up to?
He stood in the middle of some piles of the glowing pink cubes, which shifted as the creature stomped around. In horror Eva watched one of them slide off its stack and hit the ground. To her surprise, it didn’t explode; instead, it fizzled out, leaving behind only a heat shimmer in the air.
So either they weren’t all volatile, or they needed some kind of catalyst. Eva grinned. She could work with that. She wished she could tell Tim about her developing plan, but they hadn’t synced comms. For all she knew, he had a better idea.
Or great minds thought alike. He picked up one of the smaller cubes and, with a spin for momentum, threw it into the creature’s mouth.
The lizard swallowed the cube whole with one quick snap of its huge, inky jaws. Like the black things in the other room, this slowed it down as it—digested? Absorbed? Processed?
Whatever it was doing, Tim used the opportunity to dart around it and make straight for Eva. She gestured at him to go to the trench instead.
Chilling Effect_A Novel Page 32