by J M Guillen
The last man had disappeared. He, too, had run out the back door.
God dammit.
Michael, I am sending Asset Guthrie in. There are some peculiar readings out here. I will remain and try to make sense of them.
Be careful, Preceptor. I disengaged the Wraith.
“Clear?” Wyatt stepped into the room.
“They ran out on us.” I pointed at the far door.
“I bet they have friends.”
“I don’t want to meet their friends.”
“Let’s get a handle on that.” He walked over and shut the door. Then he placed a spike on our side of it.
WHUF.
“Just in case?” I raised an eyebrow at him.
“Well.” Wyatt’s lips quirked deviously. “It’s ’nother handy use for stasis spikes. Some ’Rat walks in and suddenly the doorway’s blocked. No one will come this way for a bit.”
“Huh.” I raised an eyebrow in appreciation. “As long as you remain within five hundred meters?”
“Yup.” He shrugged his equipment higher on his back. “If we’re more than half a klick away, it won’t matter much.”
“And this definitely isn’t you just experimenting while Anya’s in the other room, right?”
“Never, Hoss.” He gave me a sideward grin.
I prodded at my shoulder, wincing a bit at the jab of pain. Fumbling with my untasked mecha, I made adjustments to them as best I could.
Moments later, a thrum of soothing painkillers flushed into my veins. I blinked, a bit overwhelmed at the instantaneous change in sensation.
We have a target down, I linked, somewhat dreamily.
Down? Wyatt turned.
Injured but not dead. I jerked my chin toward the man who lay groaning on the floor.
Wyatt nodded once and walked toward the sprawled man. He kicked the machine gun, sending it clattering out of reach, and pulled the mask up, away from the man’s face.
Unlike us, the figure had to actually breathe this awful atmosphere. He didn’t have miraculous viral mecha to pick up the slack when trapped in a hostile topia.
“Mornin’ buddy.” Wyatt glanced over at the window and the sickening sky beyond. “Or evening. What-the-hell-ever.”
“Who—?” Flecks of blood spattered the man’s lips. He gasped a bit, as if having a hard time pulling breath.
“You don’t know who we are?” Wyatt chuckled as he stared down at the man. “You certain ’bout that?”
“I…” His panicked eyes went ever wider as his gaze flicked between Wyatt and me. He gasped again. “You’re… them. Oh. Oh, God!” His voice broke as if he might start to cry.
“Here you go.” Wyatt gave the man his friendliest smile and set the mask back over his mouth.
The Irrat gulped air, his eyes frantically passing between us.
“Now, we ain’t that bad. Just searching for some answers is all.” He glanced about. “Seems like there’s only one poor sap left who can give us any.”
“I… can’t.” The man’s voice dropped to a reedy whisper. “No. No answers for you. They’ll—” The man shut his mouth, as if he realized something.
“Well.” I gave the man a dark glare. “You assume we won’t do worse?” I glanced over my shoulder at the man whose throat I’d opened. “That is a dangerous assumption.”
“I…” The man tried to get a grasp on himself. “You don’t understand. They get inside people. If they find out I talked, I’ll never be safe. My family—”
“You’re working to harm a lot of other families here, I’ll bet.” I popped one of my knuckles. “We’ve gotta look at all sides here, friend.”
“Yes.” He shivered, then a scowl settled into his brow. “I know you’ll do whatever you feel is necessary, Michael Bishop.”
A chill ran down my back at the needles of ice in the man’s voice. I blinked and staggered.
The world bent, warbled. The room smelled like rancid meat.
Hoss?
You have a small spike in ambient Irrationality within that room, Anya stated to us both. You are currently at negative one Rationality.
“Hey!” Wyatt knocked the man in the side of the head. “Knock that shit off. You’re not doing anything we haven’t seen a thousand times before.”
“Ignorant,” the man spat. “You don’t know what you dally with.”
Yet the room settled down around me.
“Maybe not.” I smiled, all charm. “But we can get along better than that.”
“Man, we ain’t even tried to kill you yet.” Wyatt adjusted his hat. “We just have some questions.”
“The answers are vast.” The man’s eyes drew to thin slits. “A monumental undertaking is at hand.”
“You know, this is probably your last day on that task unless we give you a hand.” I nudged at the man’s side with my shoe. His clothing had turned dark and sticky with blood. “So whoever you’re protecting won’t be able to do much for you.”
“The Unity wields power beyond any you can understand,” the man sneered.
I glanced at Wyatt, long enough to see his brows knot up.
Unity? he linked, worriedly.
“But the Unity isn’t here.” I shrugged. “A Facility hospital might be better than dead.”
The man laughed, a winding, meandering sound made all the stranger by the gas mask. It stretched on too long, a thin, reedy thing that heralded a broken mind.
Wyatt glanced sideward at me.
“I’ve known men who got reeducated. They came back all hollow. Dead inside. Broken.” He coughed then, wet and raspy.
“But alive, right?’ Wyatt queried.
“If you call that life.” The man shook his head. “After you motherfuckers steal everything from them.”
“Sounds like you have a choice.” I responded. “Make it. You’re boring me.”
“Right.” He turned toward me. “I’m dead here on the floor, or I go with a couple of black suits and get gentled. Then my gift is dead inside me, and I’m just another blind idiot.” He coughed again and shook his head. “No. I’m a believer, asshole. I won’t die. I’ll return to the Unity.”
Watch it up here, Bishop. We have a zealot. He won’t give us shit.
Agreed.
I found this to be the case fairly often. Sometimes, it felt like all Irrats were the same. Give some hillbilly reality-shaping powers, and it became a religious experience. I could only try to convince this one he wasn’t among God’s chosen.
“Oookay.” I sighed. “Last chance, friend. We detected dangerously irregular readings in the Mojave Desert executed with extreme precision. They led us here. Do you have any information for us?”
Even though I couldn’t see his face, I heard the smile in his voice. “Eat shit. You’ll know soon enough. I’ll die a free man, Michael Bishop.”
Again, splinters of ice prickled along my flesh, a cold that burned. The room swam around me and dove straight down, as if I fell into a pit.
Hoss? Wyatt stepped closer, as if to grab me as I fell.
I groaned, vertigo making me retch. Shadowed infinities swirled around me, a darkness I couldn’t name. I turned my head to shake the engulfing void away but stumbled.
Ambient Rationality has shifted downward four points, Assets. Anya’s casual link might as well have related the time of day.
“Be still, Wyatt Guthrie,” the masked man snarled.
My friend staggered, then fell. From his knees, the bear of a man lurched forward onto the Irrat, grunting as he landed.
Immediately, the masked man squirmed, trying to escape. The two grappled.
“Fucking horseshit!” Wyatt pulled the mask from the man’s face and hurled it across the room. The glass goggles shattered against the wall.
Immediately upon breathing the air, the Irrat began to gasp.
“No!” he cried in rage. “You can’t just—!”
The room stopped its maddening whirl. I shook my head and pushed myself up.
“Can’
t what, shithead?” Wyatt growled. “Can’t defend myself from your bullshit?”
“I…” The man gasped, and I saw the whites of his eyes blossom red with blood. He trembled and collapsed into fits.
“You made the call, man.” I nodded at the Irrat as he sank, twitching, to the ground. For a moment, I considered pulling my blade, ending his pain.
But a second glance told me his pain had already ended.
We’re headed back, Anya. I glanced at my system time. Three hours forty-eight minutes remained.
Copy that, Michael.
I wrinkled my nose. I hated the way the secondary comm made her link feel so heavy and slow.
I can feel your irritation, she informed me. Please hurry. I have some new data.
Copy that.
When Wyatt and I stepped back into the hallway, Anya’s blue eyes gazed into distant nothingness. She stood in front of the oil-slick door, a vibrant cobalt now that I could see it without the Wraith. Her left arm stretched toward it, two fingers pinched closed.
“My guess is you found the way home,” Wyatt said confidently. “Through that door, the Facets of Rationality are shining for our lovely, twitchy Preceptor.”
“After a fashion,” Anya replied, “yes. The Facets of Rationality do lie in this direction.”
“Well, hot damn!” Wyatt chuckled. “Let’s ramble home!”
“Those Facets do not lie directly through the door.” She fixed him with one arched eyebrow. “Yet this is the path.”
“That’s good.” I studied the door. “So why aren’t we going through?”
“It is a similar situation to what Asset Guthrie and I uncovered in the missile silo,” she informed me. “Someone has built a new technology. The door is axiomatically bound.”
“It is?” Wyatt frowned. “Iiiinteresting.”
“I’m lost.” Obviously, I’d missed something. “What?”
“The blue door.” She rested her hand against it. “I picked up unusual readings in this spot. I thought they might originate behind the door, but actually, someone altered the way mass and motion function in the space of this doorway.”
“Door no open-y if motion no work-y.” Wyatt made expansive hand gestures.
“Okay, I get it.” I glowered at him. “So it’s some kind of axiomatic… lock?”
“After a fashion.” Anya turned her head, twitching just a bit. “It is the same type of alteration we discovered before.”
“Before?”
“Hoss, we dug deeper into things at the missile silo while you traipsed around here.”
“We could not even see where you passed through at first. Asset Guthrie only made it possible by noticing oddities while using his equipment.”
“You didn’t even need me to help you find it this time, princess,” Wyatt teased. “Next thing you know, you’ll be taking up the katana and the Tangler yourself.”
“No.” She stared at him, a bit incredulous. “I do not have the requisite Crown slots. The Preceptor packet is a permanent installation—”
“Christ, Anya!” He laughed. “This never gets old.”
“So we couldn’t see the trap because some Irrat tampered with the laws of physics.” I stared at each of them, still not following. “Big deal. Irrats alter axioms all the time.”
“And when the little shits move on, Rationality again holds sway. Things shift back to baseline.” Wyatt gave me a wink. “Naw, Bishop. This is differ’nt. Someone tampered with reality, hid the trigger, and it remained that way, even after they vacated.”
“I see.”
“This is the second recorded implementation of that type,” Anya continued. “Only this one does not manipulate light. It alters a subset of the axioms of motion.”
“I get it,” I cut in. “Do you know what’s behind the door?”
“Undefined.” She shook her head. “Fortunately, I can read the statistics Asset 423 needs to alter in order to alleviate the situation.”
“Of course you can.” I smiled at her and then gave Wyatt a glance. “Shall we see what’s important enough to keep this door closed?”
He grinned and powered up Rosie. “Seems reasonable.”
I watched the miniscule head twitch as Anya patched him the required data. Moments later, he found the ideal spot for his spike, fired one into the floor, and began madly mathematicising on his keyboard.
When the spike pulsed a soft, emerald light, Wyatt glanced up at me. “Clear.”
“Copy that.” I reached for the door handle and found it still cool. As it turned I whispered to the others, “Let’s be careful. Our last two doors have led to different topias.”
“It’s like an Irrat travel agency.” Wyatt chuckled. “Maybe we can collect souvenirs.”
“I already have a bullet hole in my shoulder. That’s enough for me.” I pushed at the door. It swung slowly, ominously inward.
I nodded at Wyatt, then Anya, and stepped into the room.
Invasive Species
The room’s overwhelming, horrific scent made me gag and I stumbled backward a step. The place absolutely radiated an earthy, sour aroma reminiscent of low tide.
“Any strange readings, Anya?” The shirt I’d yanked over my face muffled my voice.
“No.” Anya stepped up next to me while her fingers plucked and twitched. “Nothing new. The axioms remain the same.”
“Good to know.”
I partially opened the door and took a cautious step. Inside I found twisted shadows and murmurs in the darkness. Reaching behind me, I opened the door completely, letting the light of the hallway splash into the room. Shadows of tall, cylindrical structures loomed, scattered across the large space. Some gave off the faintest bit of light.
“Oh, oh God!” Wyatt waved a hand in the air, as if he could fan the nauseating odor away.
If anyone had been inside, they would have known about our intrusion the moment we cracked the door.
As I hadn’t been greeted by gunfire already, I felt relatively safe.
“I’m switching to optics.” I accessed the infra- and ultra-spectrums through my Crown. As the data synced with my visual cortex, I blinked to get the room in focus.
It appeared we stood inside a gigantic metal dodecahedron. The entire floor comprised a single side of the shape, while the walls and ceiling made up the other eleven.
“Understood.” Wyatt powered the Tangler back up, sending an eerie whine echoing around the chamber.
The three of us crept inside.
After a moment, the shadowed cylinders became far easier to make out. Metallic, dark, and uniform in size, they stretched upward, vanishing in a tangle of wires and cables near the ceiling. Yet, toward the center of the room, several panels shone with a weak inner light.
“Look at these.” I studied the closest column, realizing it had a thick glass door set in one side.
“Look at this.” Wyatt shuffled toward a wall.
He peered intently at a large mechanical structure. A bank of terminals took up much of the space, CRT monitors with green displays, mostly. Several different panels had been fit with traditional keyboards, although another input device had also been installed. A glowing sphere had been affixed to one screen, with several keys gleaming on its surface.
I stared, steadfastly ignoring my headache.
Along the bottom, fastened to the wall with a series of copper brackets, I saw something I didn’t expect. There, several silvery canisters, the same ones that previously had been charged by the Radonic Transmitters, sat nestled in the shadows.
“Pretty fucking interesting,” Wyatt whispered.
“What’s that?” I pointed, still several steps away. Some kind of ideogram had been set into the surface of the panels with a series of differently sized straight lines connecting twenty or so spheres.
“No idea,” Wyatt muttered. “Anya, can you take a quick reading?”
“I already am,” she responded coolly. The Preceptor took a few steps toward the large gunmetal casing
at the edge of the chamber. After less than three seconds, the tiniest frown pulled at her mouth.
“Is it monsters?” I whispered. “I hate it when it’s monsters.”
“It is an interface connected to an engine buried within the wall.” She glanced at Wyatt. “It is not unlike your equipment in several ways.”
“Really?” Wyatt scratched at his beard.
“An educated guess might claim this engine is constructed to traverse axiomatic coordinates.” She tilted her head. “This is my supposition, at any rate. It is designed to weaken realmwalls and alter local ambient emanations.”
“It’s a dimensional… taxi?”
“Not by altering axioms. It is more akin to traveling to localities based upon the axioms of that reality.”
“Using axioms like longitude and latitude?” The idea excited me. We knew the specifications for home quite well, after all.
“I would guess this device capable of creating a rather large field,” she went on. “Perhaps the size of this entire chamber.”
“So you think they regularly move chambers like this one through space-time?” I asked.
“Such a device might make the Vyriim’s goals simpler.”
“Do you know how to operate the thing?”
“No. I do not.” She traced one hand along the device, and a screen lit with soft crimson light. “Although if one discerned the manner…”
“Do you hear that?” Wyatt asked in a sharp whisper. “It sounds like wet breathing.”
I hadn’t heard it, but now that he brought it to my attention, I did. It sounded like the great inhale of some huge creature looming in the darkness.
“It’s like a bellows.” I glanced up.
My optics had a hard time keeping focus, but it sounded like the noise came from in front of us. The more I strained, however, the more my visual readout jumped and glitched.
“Can you see anything?” Wyatt sounded irritated.
“Optics aren’t working well. Maybe another vault door, across the room?” I swore. “Must be some kind of interference. I’m altering my parameters.”
No sooner had I begun cycling through the Crown’s settings than I saw it—a darker, somewhat circular area on the floor, hidden in the gloom.