by J M Guillen
“I’ve never seen the Designates hand over so much control.” He shrugged. “I kinda figgered you’d go all ninja on me, so I took the upgrade. If I snagged a gun, I’d be shootin’ offa skill alone, no fancy tech.”
“Probably not worth the weight.”
“Didn’t seem like it, not when Rosie here can just as easily take someone out—even without any special mojo.” He patted the ‘rivet gun’ end of the apparatus.
Ten centimeter titanium spikes could make anyone’s day rough.
“That makes sense,” I agreed.
We walked in silence back to the Legacy, both in our own thoughts.
Anya popped the trunk for Wyatt’s gear. I set the katana in the back as well.
“I thought Michael might drive.” Anya stared off into space, a touch distracted. “I’ve perused the initial readings, and I’d like to continue as we approach.”
“Fine by me.” Wyatt gave a cat’s grin. “As long as I can nap on the way, I don’t care.”
“If you’re asleep, I won’t have to listen to your rambling.” I teased. “Seems perfect all around.”
Phage
I drove into the desert, and time began to drift. As promised Wyatt lay in the back and snored, hat drawn over his face. Anya stared off into space, reading holographic telemetry only she saw. As the sun rose higher into the sky and the day grew hotter, I periodically rolled down my window.
I didn’t want to disturb them as I smoked.
We passed into the Mojave along Nipton Road sometime around ten a.m. We cut south on Ivanpah and drove straight for the New York mountain range.
‘Desolate’ didn’t begin to describe this place. The wind skipped across the barren landscape, soughing through the emptiness. As far as the eye could see, only rock, sand, and empty sky lay around us, broken only by the occasional Joshua tree.
Anya sat in silence at my side. Occasionally, her head would twitch, accompanied by that marionette-like finger motion all Preceptors did while they viewed telemetry, as if she played a harp that wasn’t there.
I drove, enjoyed my second cigarette, and looked amazingly cool beneath that brilliant sky.
I’d just put out my smoke when Anya sat straight up and stared wildly off to our left. I peered in that direction myself, not realizing that she gazed at something on her visual array.
“Michael,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “Adjust by 42 degrees.”
“The temperature?” I reached for the AC. “I don’t think it can go that—”
She screamed.
Her left hand clawed into my pantleg, and she whipped her head to the side. Her right hand went positively mad, plucking and picking at her holographic controls.
“NO!” Anya screamed, panic reedy in her voice. “Michael, it’s too—!”
Bishop! Wyatt’s link held all the confusion of a man jerked from sleep. Where are—?
“Anya, what?” I stared at her, stunned.
She whirled back to me, her eyes gone wild. Her link slammed into me, the sensation like a patch too large to be accepted into memory.
It didn’t even feel like her. The link felt more like something sent by the Adjunct.
—elemetric relay 345-t offline! Telemetric Relay 345-u offline! Situation critical! Rationality spiking at R45, R46. Facility 17 Terminal Prime OFFLINE. AXIOMATIC STRAND 542-8 uncalibrated. Resonation state critical—
“What the hell?” Wyatt bellowed as he shoved at his hat and pulled himself upright on my seatback. He pointed ahead. “Bishop, what in the name of—?”
I turned from Anya, back to the road.
A shimmering plasm of color burned and trembled, hovering about three meters in front of the Legacy. It exploded all around us in a whirlwind of unnatural tints.
“Oh, shit!” I gaped at the brilliant hues, rapt in the oddness of them, the wrongness.
“Michael!” Anya stared at me, horror stark in her eyes. A ringing cacophony punctuated her cry, and it felt as if my skull split open. For a moment, the desert wavered around us, trembling like a leaf caught in a thunderstorm.
I jerked and spun the car to the side. We careened off the road. The world whirled around us. It felt as if I’d plunged underwater, as if embers burned at the center of my bones.
Everything slowed, and my mind felt full of mud.
“Sub-Rational.” Anya sounded forlorn, infinitely far away.
“Bishop,” Wyatt warned.
“I see it, man, I do.” I peered out the windshield in disbelief.
We weren’t exactly in Kansas anymore. We’d driven through to somewhere else entirely. The world flickered around us, shifting us between the California desert and—somewhere empty. Somewhere wrought with shadows and stone. Somewhere dark with furious fires in the distance.
“Rationality negative thirteen!” As if in pain, Anya grunted the statistic rather than spoke it. “Negative twenty-one! Negative thirty-four!” She shook her head wildly, like a horse trying to tear loose from its traces.
“Understood, Anya.” I put my right hand on her shoulder, leaving the other holding the wheel.
“Hurts,” she whimpered. “Michael, it hurts.”
That hit me, square in the chest.
Hearing Anya scream statistics didn’t matter; I couldn’t decipher their meaning. If I’d given it a moment’s thought, I would have realized her panic did as much to throw me off center as anything else.
I’d never seen Anya truly afraid. Truly hurt. That pain in her voice…
“Bishop!” Wyatt pointed at a gully that loomed in front of the Legacy. The air boiled and the way ahead writhed, swirling while the sky shifted through a sickening violet-red into a smothering darkness.
For an instant, we faced the Rational world again. The Mojave Desert flickered around us, immediately followed by that lost, unearthly place.
The flickering stopped, as suddenly as it began. We no longer drove through the Mojave. Emptiness lurked around us in a sky with no stars. Colossal, limbless trees reached for the forlorn heavens.
Abruptly, hungry, oppressive night shrouded us. I flicked on the car’s headlights, but it took my eyes a moment to adjust.
No, not night. We drove through a cavern, the Mojave left behind.
The trees I’d seen weren’t trees at all, but thick, black, stone columns that stretched to a ceiling far out of sight. From a gargantuan chasm off in the distance, a hungry, orange glow danced, the only light. I heard the loud grind of machinery but didn’t see it anywhere.
A column loomed in front of us.
I slammed on the brakes, trying to skid away from it. I spun the wheel as hard as I could.
“Bishop!” Wyatt grasped my shoulder from behind, but I didn’t have time to act.
The front of our car crumpled into the column, and we jerked catastrophically short on impact. Anya and I had been buckled in, but Wyatt launched forward and hit the seat with a hard thump.
Groaning, I sat up and glanced around.
“Who let you drive, Hoss?” Wyatt griped.
“Facility car pinged me and Anya as operators,” I replied. “Blame Ling.”
“The Designates are a bunch of reptilians,” he muttered.
In the darkness beyond, gleaming, furious eyes shone with hatred like stark, burning coals. I shook my head and peered through the windshield again to get my bearings.
Darkness loomed, darker now that one of the headlights had smashed. I couldn’t see the walls of the cavern, although I did see a deep chasm, burning with a hungry fire. The sounds of hidden machinery grew louder.
My focus centered on the creatures appearing from the gloom around us. One of them peered at us with a fiery, hateful glare. The horrifying, gorilla-shaped beast lumbered toward the car.
Its eyes appeared empty, hollow, mad.
“I do not like that,” I informed my cadre.
“Agreed,” Wyatt said.
It stood at least four meters high. Gray skin covered thick, knotted muscle; it must have weighe
d five or six hundred kilograms. Twisting, tattooed lines of script, unlike any writing I’d ever seen, had been inked into the tough skin. It wore a long loincloth, tattered and dirty, and brandished a vaguely hammer-shaped object the size of a small tree.
The elegant lines of writing caught at my gaze.
He doesn’t look friendly, I linked, experimentally. As expected, the link felt clunky in my mind, more like a walkie-talkie. That meant we weren’t connected to the Lattice, that we had only our available tech and Crown-links.
Bad news.
We are adrift in an unclassified sub-topia, Anya sent. I felt her exhaustion, even through the clunky link. We are back to negative R thirty-two… thirty one—!
“Do we have a beacon, Preceptor?” I didn’t hold out any hope for that. The number of alternate realms the Facility had tagged with locater beacons remained relatively small.
“No beacon detected,” Anya replied. “Although I shall leave one, if we have the opportunity.”
“Fuck this.” Wyatt opened the door and started to step from the backseat. I remembered that all his gear had been loaded into the trunk and hit the release.
Unfortunately, one of the lumbering creatures had reached the car. Wyatt hurled himself back inside and pulled the door shut just before a massive fist caved it in.
“Okay,” he admitted as the car slid a meter to the left. “Bad plan.” He stared at me in the rearview mirror. “Yer the only one offensively geared, Hoss. I got the Tangler, but it’s in the back.”
“Right.” I popped the knuckles on my right hand. “Naturally.” I glanced into the mirror, as one of them shoved at the trunk, and we slid a few meters. “I don’t know if my weapons will do much more than tickle something that size.”
The entire world flickered back to the desert for an instant, all sunlit sand and open sky. Then, like changing stations on the radio, we plunged back into darkness.
I felt nauseated.
“We are at negative thirty-one. It’s stabilizing.” Anya’s cool voice sounded calm. “Yet we are not fully immersed in the secondary topia.”
I glanced at Wyatt; things had shifted toward the complex. If we sat thirty-one points below Rationality zero, we were more than a little adrift.
“I’d rather not be fully immersed.”
Outside, more of the muscled brutes arrived, staring at us as if uncertain what we might be.
“How the hell did we get here?” Wyatt leaned forward and raised the Stetson’s brim a bit. “Bishop’s driving isn’t that bad.”
“We drove through another iteration of Irrational spikes, similar to those recorded before,” Anya explained. “We somehow triggered the event.”
“It had to be intentional,” I spat. “A snare.”
“L’shaea,” one of the creatures grunted outside my window. It used the heavy length of wood it carried to lift my side of the car thirty centimeters or so, then dropped it.
“We can’t stay here.” I turned from Anya to Wyatt. “What about the vehicle’s Wraith? Make the car vanish?”
“I’m pretty sure they know it’s here, Hoss.”
“This space is quite unstable,” Anya stated again. “We might be able to force a change and shift ourselves back.”
“That sounds simple,” I muttered.
“If Wyatt can secure his equipment, together we can possibly create an axiomatic mean,” she continued.
“You think?” The bearded barbarian considered her.
“With the appropriate calibration. This is not a natural event. We need to create a static zone where the axioms average to Rationality zero. With enough of an energetic remainder, this place will reject that ratio, and we will drift to Rational space.”
“Huh.” He scratched at his chin. “Maybe.”
The car slid again with a second strike from one of the creatures. We stopped abruptly as the car struck the leg of another, who kicked the quarter panel.
At this rate, the Legacy would be undrivable soon.
“No time for maybe.” I glanced at them. “Will that work?”
“I’m certain she’s right about the instability, Hoss.”
“It is our standard model,” Anya replied. “Think about algorithmic averages.”
“Yeah.” Wyatt nodded, more certain. “If we can create Rationality zero, with energy to spare, we’ll separate like oil and water.”
“Just like that?”
“It’s complex, but we can do it.” He paused. “Probably. I just need my gear.”
“I have dampener grenades,” I replied hopefully. “They create zones of Rationality.”
“Not the same.” I felt Anya’s certainty. “In the airport, you altered Rationality to find your way back through. This topia isn’t stable and is much further from baseline.”
“So I get to go outside.” I peered through the windshield.
“Distract ’em. Just for a moment,” Wyatt wheedled. “Once I get Rosie, it’s all over.”
I pulled a Stiletto and eased the door latch open, not quite disengaging it.
Copy that. I sighed. I toggled the Adept packet on and felt a burst of grace and preternatural speed like warm honey in my veins.
I honked the horn.
In an instant, the gray behemoths leapt back, startled by the cry of our odd steed. For a moment, they completely focused on the front of the car, trying to figure out what this meant.
I opened the door and sprung out. At the last possible second, I remembered the diaphanic emitter. I desperately hoped it would work.
Such things depended mostly on a matter of axiomatic divergences. The laws of reality could function drastically differently in alternate topias. I had no way to know if light even functioned the same way. What if it didn’t and the emitter couldn’t quite handle it? What if I burned out part of my Crown because light waves were a bit more truculent in this place?
Well, that would mean one of these gargantuan, Lord of the Rings rejects would likely put his fist through my head.
So I leapt, tucked, and rolled. The Adept kicked up more dexterity than plain ol’ non-smoking Michael Bishop could ever dream of.
I engaged the emitter. Instantly a shadow of coolness fell across my skin. As I faded from sight, my own visual array resolved to black and white, as it always did when the Wraith initiated.
Hot damn, I linked, a wolf’s grin on my face. Now it’s a party!
The diaphanic emitter pulsed at the base of my skull, a cool, soothing throb. As per typical protocol, my Crown created a visual representation of ‘me’ that it relayed through my phaneric readouts. In this way, I perceived my own arms and legs, regardless of their current relationship to visible bandwidths of light.
Two of the creatures closing on me stopped, confused.
“Beh leii.” The nearer one stared at his friend, his voice like stones grating together.
“Orris ruut bhaad.” They peered again at the place I’d just been and sniffed at the still, sour air.
For a moment, the eldritch lines of runic script on their skin caught my attention. They seemed so elegant, as if penned by hands much smaller than these.
Anya, do we have any intel on these marks on their skin?
No, Michael. There are over seventeen thousand classifications of aberrations. Without access to the Lattice—
The first one muttered, taking an experimental swing in my direction with its club.
I stepped out of the way of its weapon, still mesmerized by the lines of glyph. I peered closer, trying to see what I could make out, when—
The creature’s hide squirmed.
Um… My eyes widened.
It happened again, and I stared.
Something shifted beneath its skin, slithering between the muscle and the flesh like a thick serpent. I watched in horror as it writhed along the behemoth’s side before disappearing into its abdomen.
The one that sniffed the air turned its flat face toward me, and its eyes searched the darkness.
Oh. Oh
God no.
Hoss? Wyatt glanced out the rear left window. Problem?
We may not fully understand what we’re facing here. I took a few quick steps to the left, dismayed when one of them sniffed the air and slowly turned in my direction.
So rapt was I in the two behemoths near me that I’d lost track of the others, those nearer the car.
When one of them smashed his fist into the top of the sedan, Wyatt cursed loudly, “The hell!” Bishop, a distraction is ’sposed to distract!
Damnit. I turned my attention away from the beasts and the mystery of their wriggling flesh. On it. I aimed my Stiletto at the ground between the two closest to me. As one of the grunts stepped closer, I used my thumb to kick the weapon to its highest setting with the most focused field.
“Hey,” I said conversationally.
Both of them stopped in place to stare about.
I took no chances with my moment. I pulled the trigger and the weapon warbled. An invisible bolt of kinetic force tore into the ground between the two monsters with a low throbbing sound. My shot blew a hole the size of a beachball in the ground.
One of them roared as both leapt back from the hole. A third turned toward me, snarling as it sniffed at the air.
I spun without thought to fire at its chest. The thing flew backward five meters. It lay on the ground and twitched.
The car suddenly became much less interesting to the creatures. They all watched, rapt, as an invisible kinetic explosion murdered one of their own.
One of them cried a hoarse, bellow that echoed through the cavern.
“LURRIK!” The word echoed in my skull. “KNAAG ROZZN!”
The things lost their minds. Two of them on the far side of the car lumbered in our direction, while a third bent over its fallen friend. The lot screamed and wailed, frantically searching for the bad-ass dealer of death who walked among them. One of them tipped his head back and screamed to the sky, beating its chest like a mutant gorilla.
Excellent distraction, Michael, Anya linked, once again maddeningly calm. You likely just liquefied some internal organs.
Your physics lessons are always appreciated, Anya. I modulated the second Stiletto as I unholstered it. This one would hit just as hard, but the focus of the force would be considerably wider, like getting hit with a Volkswagen rather than an explosive blade.