Between one breath and the next, fragments of memories flooded Mel’s consciousness. Starvation, disease, torture, and more flickered through her mind’s eye as Lily shared everything she had witnessed in her short years of service before her untimely death. In the corridors, shadows gave way to dozens of Thulians, armed and prepared for intercept. Mel held on to the imagery for a half second longer, fighting down her gorge.
And then, she looked up. Eye contact with as many as possible, from left to right, Mel shared everything that Lily had given her. For each of the Thulians around them, the intersection became an unforgiving frozen wasteland, the floor covered with frostbitten corpses gaunt from starvation. The smell of burning bodies filled the small space, the sounds of their dying comrades in their ears. The imagery shifted, and the bodies bore Thulian armor and insignias. Mel ground her teeth, maintaining the horrific illusion while pushing Penny toward the corridor where Jeanne flickered impatiently.
“Just a few more steps, cherie. I got you, just a few more steps and we’ll be out,” Mel hissed, working to maintain the facade. Pressure built between her eyes with each second. How many of the Thulians were in the room? A dozen? Twenty? The longer she held onto the illusion, the figures blurred and doubled in her vision. She wavered, took another step, and misjudged the distance to the wall.
Mel stumbled to avoid the waving bits of the living creature and pulled herself from the Russian spirit’s influence. Penny lifted her head, coming face to face with dozens of Thulians no longer affected by the illusion. She gripped Mel’s arm with both hands, and screamed.
This close to Penny, such a scream would have made Mel’s ears bleed. Instead, the air between them crystallized to ice, frosting their nanoweave. A perfect circle of ice surrounded them, but the odor of earth and decay filled the space. In the seconds where Penny continued to scream, Mel swore she felt something pulse outward from the teenager and pass through her. All of the emotions she had built from Lily’s memories, the combination of them had no comparison to the wave of despair and death that shot through her and filled the compartment.
Some of the Thulians tried to scream, but only the ones on the outer edges. Those closest to Penny and Mel collapsed in a manner not unlike those in Lily’s memories, but without the snow. Even the parts of the living wall wilted, vibrant colors now gray and tendrils already crumbling to dust.
The subsequent silence made the act even more horrifying. Penny stood in the center of the perfect ring of Thulian corpses, no longer crying. Mel stood just off to the side, a hand to her bloody nose as she surveyed the carnage. Only her training allowed her to keep a neutral expression as she glanced to her charge. Penny chewed her lip, but no more tears ran down her cheeks. She stared at something just beyond Mel’s shoulder and scowled.
“No, I’m not sorry for it. I told ’em that they weren’t gonna hurt me an’ Miz Mel ever again. An’ now, they won’t ever hurt anybody else, either.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve, then turned toward the corridor where Jeanne had stood.
“Miz Jeanne had said this was the way out.” Penny picked her way through the bodies, not looking back at Mel. “Just down this hallway.”
Mel didn’t know what to do or say, but she knew that it was time to go. So, she followed Penny and tried to figure out what she would tell the others, if any of them got out alive.
* * *
“Sweet Baby Jesus.” Bella stared, dumbfounded, at a room the size of a football stadium.
Bulwark nodded in agreement. He scanned his surroundings, and shook his head in defeat. Every three feet or so, there was a transparent column coming down from the ceiling. These columns all fed into a vast complex machine that covered the entire top half of the room. Each of these columns held a half…built…Thulian.
“Built” because, contrary to what they had thought, this was not some sort of a cloning chamber.
“Are they…being printed?” Bella gasped, still staring, as another layer of muscle was laid down over the skeletons. Hundreds of skeletons. Hundreds of columns. The layer finished printing, and a new layer started.
“So it would seem,” Bulwark growled. “I don’t see a main control station, or a central power source. We may need to take out the printers, one at a time.”
“We don’t have the time,” Bella muttered. “There has to be a control station here somewhere. You run left, I’ll run right. Meet you at the back of the room.” She didn’t wait for his answer, but took off sprinting. Over her frequency, he heard, “Eight? A little help here?”
“Unless the control is in another room altogether, it does not match Thulian technology to fail to have a control system in place.”
“Can you scan the energy flow in this room, Eight?” Bull asked. “Is there a central hub?”
“Would either of you have one of the flying eyes on your person? If so, can you deploy it? I am limited right now by your sensors.” Murdock was—had been—the one who usually carried those.
“Negative,” Bull replied. “Proceeding on foot.” He darted left, taking in the grotesque display of half-built soldiers passing by. “You will have to triangulate and construct a map as our positions and scans update.”
“Updating,” Eight confirmed. “Energy signatures in flux, but seem to originate from the direct center of the room. The control center you seek is likely there.”
“En route,” Bull said, and noticed on his HUD that Bella was already sprinting towards the heart of the chamber. He altered his course, knowing she’d beat him there, and hoping she wouldn’t try something like smashing it. Instead, he found her studying it. “Eight,” she said aloud, as he caught up with her, “I see something that looks like one of those Thulian USB slots. Vix gave me one of those things to plug in there. Want me to do that so you can read this thing?”
“I do not believe we have a choice, Bella,” Eight replied. Bella pulled something out of a small belt pouch and plugged it into the side of the board. Eight replied almost immediately with, “There is an organic module that—I surmise—contains the basic personality to be downloaded into the waiting constructs when they are complete. I surmise, because I myself cannot read this.”
“Where is it?” Bella demanded.
“Look for an opaque black tube on the right side of the console. It appears from my end that these can be changed out for other organic modules, perhaps to serve other purposes.”
“They can’t always be building soldiers. Sooner or later the toilets back up,” she muttered. “Bull, do you see what he’s talking about?”
“Here,” Bull said, and gripped one of a series of cylinders than lined the side of the console. “Data sticks. What are you suggesting, Eight? We just yank them all out?”
“I cannot read them. Bella might be able to. They are organic…pattern brains, for lack of a better comparison. While she reads them, I will try to find a shutdown. The one actively being used as the master model should be…more awake…than the others.”
“It’s worth a try,” Bella said, and ran her hands over the series of cylinders before stopping at one. She closed her eyes in concentration, sticking a little bit of her tongue out of the left corner of her mouth.
“My readings show several potential energy junctions that may be compromised. Overloading several at once should initiate a chain reaction that will result in an effective self-destruct,” Eight said after a moment. “The difficulty will be in getting to them to overload them, simultaneously. This will require some disassembly of the console. I would suggest—”
Bella gasped.
“No, wait!” she exclaimed. “Wait…I’ve got a better idea…”
“I know that look,” Bulwark said. “You’re being brilliant, aren’t you?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Bella chuckled, and gripped one of the cylinders. “Take notes, Tall, Dark, and Waterproof. If we live through this, I’m going to use this as leverage to win every argument we have for years…”
* * *
“V
ix, get up. Vix, seriously, we need to go…”
Vickie would have loved to be able to scrub the tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand, but the back of her hand was covered by a chainmail glove. She settled for closing her eyes hard and shaking her head like a wet dog while simultaneously rolling over onto her hands and knees and shoving herself up. And cursing in Hungarian, Romani, and Russian. As she managed to get to her feet, she lost her balance and staggered into Red. My life is a tragicomedy. “Sorry,” she mumbled, looking up at him. “Yeah. Got to go. Bella and Bull are making their play, and we should back them.”
“We’ve got another problem,” Red said, shaking his head. Vickie reached up and touched his face. His real face, unblemished and perfect, marveling how it looked just as she always imagined it would. Red paused and smiled at her, his words forgotten.
She snatched her hand back and cursed. “Sorry,” she said again. “Problem?”
Red grimaced, growled something about the goddamn universe and its timing, and finally exhaled.
“Right,” he said, nodding. “Problem. Just the usual. End of world stuff, in just about”—he glanced behind him at the monitors, and back again—“ten minutes.”
“Wait, what? You’re serious?” The words for intercourse in six languages (and three positions) erupted out of her mouth. “Explain. Hurry.”
“Tunneling missile,” Red replied. “Heads to Earth’s core. Boom. Bye-bye Earth. They’re arming it, and probably getting ready to leave once it’s away. We’ve got ten minutes until it’s ready to launch, and I don’t think we’ve got anything that can stop it once it’s going. It’ll take a little while to get to the core, but it’s a world-ender, and you can bet they plan to be long gone before then.”
Vickie stared at him.
“Can we stop the launch?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” Red replied. “Definitely not from here. Any hope we’ve got, it’ll be in the blast room itself.”
“You know where this thing is, you lead,” she said. “I can still hack my way through almost anything that gets between us and it. Tire Iron is still sharp, just not that sharp.”
“It’s far below us; we’ll have to take one of the access tubes, and at a full-speed descent.” Red appraised Vickie’s chainmail. “That’s going to throw up some sparks. You got a way to cut out the friction?”
“Yeah, I can renew the silence on this stuff and make it slippery.” Nostalgia hit her for a moment, as she remembered learning just those spells, things a combat mage had to know, unless you planned to do without armor altogether. She was going to say “give me a sec,” but that wasn’t in the cards.
“Right. We’re moving.” Vickie yelped as Red picked her up before she could react and darted from the room, seemingly taking lefts and rights in the corridors outside at random. He held her like she weighed next to nothing, despite the full suit of armor. He was stronger, that much was obvious. He seemed bigger, too, and if she was not mistaken, faster. His balance and reflexes were off the charts! Even at this incredible speed, Vickie barely felt herself bounce in his arms, and she cast her spells uninterrupted, somehow managing to do so with the monumental distraction of what was—or rather, wasn’t—covering Red at the moment. Clothing, to be precise.
“Not that I’m complaining,” Vickie said cautiously, “But shouldn’t you be wearing, uh, pants for this?”
“Kinda lost them during the split,” Red grunted. “Just as well, they would just get in the way. I’m going to need every bit of exposure for what’s coming.”
“Why, what’s com—”
Vickie yipped as they came to an abrupt stop, and Red set her down gently. He turned to the wall, reared back, and delivered a massive punch at the paneling. Vickie was shocked to see his fist actually seem to grow, to darken just before it hit, and the shock waves from the impact sent her stumbling back. There was a hole where a maintenance portal must have been, revealing what she’d been calling a “Jefferies tube,” and a sharp ringing sound echoed out of it as the hatch he’d punched in fell into the darkness.
“Give me ten seconds, then jump after me,” Red said. “Don’t try to brake. Trust me.”
He turned away, seemed to get taller and slimmer. There was a sudden scent, like you’d smell right at the beach, of the ocean. Vickie gasped as she watched something shiny, glistening, like a film of colorless oil or something similar, start to coat Red’s skin.
“What did she do to you?” Vickie breathed.
Red turned back to her, and shrugged.
“She applied the pressure,” he said. “Turns out, the rest was me. Something…woke up. This is me, fully realized, if you choose to believe her. I think I do. At that point, she really didn’t have any reason to lie.” He glanced back at the opening, turned back, and nodded to her. “Ten seconds. Don’t keep me waiting.”
He leapt into the hole—and she couldn’t hear anything. His descent was eerily silent.
Vickie counted to ten, and leapt after him. The tube was at a steep angle, seventy or eighty degrees, utterly dark inside. She was descending so fast it was almost free fall, sliding on a thin layer of something slick and slimy—had Red left that behind? Atavistic fear of falling clutched her gut, but she couldn’t have slowed down now even if her life had depended on it. There was a light below her, dim and gray, but growing brighter and brighter—
Before she was ready for it, she flew out of the bottom of the tube, and landed with a bounce on—
—an enormous Djinni-shaped pillow. A small head lifted itself out of the spongy flesh and grinned at her.
“So it turns out I can morph a lot more than just my skin now,” he said.
“Uhm. Obviously,” Vickie said. The situation was so…weird…it totally distracted her for a moment from the urgent need to get to that missile. This was Red…and it wasn’t. And it was. A Red that was a sort of giant thing like uncooked dough, dense but with the pliancy of soft foam. When she tried to sit up, she just sank. And she felt hyper-aware of where the skin of her cheek was touching his.
Then she was more than hyper-aware, as she felt power—magic energy—flowing from where her skin touched his. And just at that moment, one of the crystals in her belt pouches flared and went pfft. Whatever was going on here, she had to get control of it before he drained reserves they might desperately need later! Remembering her brief experiment with a waterbed, she rolled off him and landed on the floor with her feet tucked under, allowing her to rise quickly.
“You’re leeching magic!” Vickie exclaimed. “Is that where these new abilities are coming from?”
“I don’t think so; it doesn’t feel the same…” he said, before taking a deep breath. He exhaled slowly, and Vickie watched in wonder as he shrank back down to his normal size. Red lay a hand gently on his own chest, which had been cradling Vickie just moments before. “Something’s up though, this spot does feel a little warm.”
She practically stuck her face in his chest. Her eyes crossed a little as she stared at the spot with mage-sight. “Huh. You’re right. It’s more like a side effect. It’s fading now. Jesus, you’re still a magic conduit, though I suppose you’re more of a sponge now. Maybe you always were, just…you didn’t have much in the way of storage capacity.” She looked closer, letting the equations spin out in front of her eyes. “There’s something magical here. There’s a residue of sorts, like you were caught in some eldritch—backlash? Explosion? Not a big one, but big enough to affect you. The dispersion pattern suggests it…triggered something.”
“You mean, like a catalyst?”
She nodded. “Exactly. Maybe she was telling the truth. Just how much can you—”
And then Eight said, politely, in her ear. “Vickie. Bomb?”
“The bomb!” she yelped. “Where?”
“Due north. You seem to have landed in an adjoining hub. Look for the blast doors.”
Vickie scanned her surroundings. They had landed in a vaulted intersection, crisscrossed by eight w
ide and semicircular corridors. Her HUD pointed north, and sure enough, one of the corridors ended on a brightly lit and reinforced portal. She got to her feet and cocked her head towards it.
“Think you can punch your way through that?”
“No need,” Red answered, taking her hand in his as they sprinted towards the blast doors. He rapped lightly on his head with his knuckles. “Still have remnants of…her…in here. I know the bypass codes.”
Vickie started to respond, and bit her lip. There was no reason to get in that sorry topic now. They stopped at the doors; Red flipped up an access panel, and tapped something out on what must have been a keypad, although in keeping with Thulian tech, the “digits” were glowing orange glyphs arranged in a pattern of three-two-two-three. The doors slid open silently.
And whatever he was about to say, he bit off. Because standing between them and what Vickie presumed was their goal—was the most imposing, most terrifying thing she had ever seen, including the Death Spheres and the dragons.
She spat out the name, and heard Red curse under his breath.
“Barron.”
The Master was in her full battle armor. Battle armor that nothing the CCCP had been able to muster had so much as scuffed, save for Chug. Vickie had been there, and had personally helped Overwatch during that fight, and she cringed, remembering how this frighteningly lithe creature had torn Chug’s arm from his body. And destroyed Rusalka as an afterthought. And shrugged off not just one, but all of the special incendiary grenades that CCCP had thrown at them. And had not even noticed the combined punches of Saviour’s energy beams and Old Bear’s plasma cannons. Maybe Sera and JM could have taken Barron on…but Sera and JM were gone.
Vickie froze as Barron slowly tilted her head forward to look down on them. Next to this mountain, Vickie felt very, very small.
“I was promised a challenge,” Barron said, and shook her head in disappointment. “And I was expecting an army. If I let you live, will you bring me an army? I thirst, and I doubt your blood will quench it in the least.”
Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle Page 69