by James Axler
Clem looked uncomfortable at the idea, for he was clearly unhappy with the actions they were now taking. “If you’ll excuse an old diving term,” he said as he began working his knife into a seam in the shell-like plating, “I feel a little out of my depth, Miss Baptiste. Theory is all well and good, but have you considered how exactly you intend to hook this thing up to yourself?”
Brigid fixed him with a no-nonsense stare. “Once we get it started, Clem, I think it will find its own way into me.”
Clem visibly swallowed, repulsed by the thought, but he continued working at the shell-like plates while Brigid dashed off to observe Ullikummis on the far side of the monstrous hub.
Over at the far wall of the colossal chamber, Brigid could make out the flashes of gunfire as Kane and Grant warred with the guard creatures they had found. The whole room was so gloomy, ill-lit by the phosphorescent creatures burrowed into its walls and floor, that Brigid had to strain to make out much. She watched for a few seconds as Kane leaped backward, kicking out at a dull green creature that seemed almost to swim through the air. Brigid was loathe to disturb Kane or Grant while they dealt with the interruption, but she knew that Kane would want a progress report, so she engaged her Commtact.
“We think we’ve found an access point, guys,” Brigid explained. “Just investigating now.”
Kane’s voice snapped back, sounding irritated and breathless. “Investigate faster,” he urged.
Brigid turned back to the towering hub, looking at the dark skin of the beastlike structure where patches of it showed from beneath its skeletal covering. Ullikummis remained unmoving in his thronelike seat, the weird crown like a series of umbilical cords reaching into his skull at the back of his head. Brigid examined the links for a moment, carefully observing how they connected to the massive bulk of the hub.
Other parts of the hub seemed to have grown, wrapping themselves around Ullikummis’s still form as he sat there. They looked as if they had been there for a thousand years. This thing, Brigid realized, whatever it was, was so far beyond their field of comprehension as to be almost indecipherable. What they were about to do was tap into a construct so alien as to be nonsensical. That realization did nothing to fill her with confidence.
As blasterfire echoed through the chamber from behind her, Brigid sprinted back to join Clem on the far side of the room’s centerpiece, the sense of foreboding growing heavy in her mind.
KANE CUT THE COMMTACT link to Brigid, his attention fixed on the twin attackers as they reappeared before his eyes, as if walking through a door that he simply could not see. Only now was he beginning to comprehend what it was that they were facing.
Kane blasted another stream of 9 mm bullets at the approaching creature as its wide back feet slapped against the solid floor, slamming into it with gusto as it propelled itself at its quarry.
It was a fish, Kane saw now. A weird, evolved or genetically modified fish, but a fish all the same. The scaled hide, the dead eyes, even the strange double jaw all pointed to attributes he would associate with breeds of fish.
The first of them—the one with just one eye remaining—leaped then and Kane stood his ground, pumping the trigger of the Sin Eater and blasting a stream of shining bullets into the thing’s gaping maw as it opened its mouth in utter, baffling silence. He saw, in the split second he had, his bullets ripping chunks from the inside of the creature’s cheek, ripping pink shreds from the side of its tongueless mouth, disappearing down its gullet.
Then it was upon the ex-Mag and Kane’s extended right arm disappeared in the double jaw grip of that hideous mouth.
Behind him, Grant was shouting something, but Kane’s mind was too focused on the task at hand to care.
With all his might, Kane shoved himself forward, kicking off the ground and ramming himself sideways at the monster as if to shoulder-barge it out of his way, despite it now being a part of him. He felt the slimy interior of the thing’s mouth, his hand pushing farther onward and down into its throat. At the top of Kane’s arm, the creature’s jaws endeavored to clamp shut, strong teethlike prongs pushing against the corded muscles at his shoulder. Lower in his arm, he knew, the fish creature could have bitten through; that was almost certainly true of his fingers or wrist. But the solid deltoid muscle at his shoulder, shrouded in the shadow suit, was tough enough to stave off this beast’s attack for the few seconds it would take to finish it.
Kane’s wrist went left and right as he pumped shots down the creature’s throat, feeling the kick of the Sin Eater in his hand as he peppered the beast’s insides with bullets. From within, the creature started to disintegrate, wet chunks of flesh bursting from its torso and sailing across the room before slapping against the walls and floor with wet-sounding plops.
Without realizing it, Kane was slammed against the ground, his legs stumbling over each other as he absorbed the momentum generated by the fish-thing’s struggle. Grant was at his side then, using the Copperhead to drill shots into the beast’s side, taking huge chunks out of its flesh as they finally found a way through its armoured skin.
The teethlike spikes were pressing against Kane’s shoulder now, and he growled in pain and frustration as he pumped more shots into the thing’s guts. He could feel the creature struggling, finding its would-be prey a whole hell of a lot more feisty than it had bargained with. Sin Eater still blasting, Kane reached out with his free hand and plucked at his attacker’s remaining eye socket, tearing its eyeball from the hole there in a loud squelch.
Finally, as its eyeball went sailing across the floor in a gummy mass, the fish creature relented, opening its jaw wide enough to allow Kane to get his arm free. He pulled his arm back swiftly, until just the end of the gun was still within the creature’s nightmarish mouth. Then, aiming the Sin Eater’s muzzle high, he pumped two shots into the roof of its mouth. With a loud squelch, the top of the beast’s head exploded, and it lost all of its drive in a second, flopping lifelessly to the floor. Nose wrinkling in disgust, Kane removed his hand from the wreckage that had been a living thing just a moment before.
Standing over Kane, Grant looked at the squelchy mess of flesh and gunk that lay splattered across the floor like so much roadkill, even as the remaining creatures circled the two human intruders.
“Did I hear right?” Grant asked as Kane swept goo and innards from the length of his right arm. “Did you say that these things are fish?”
“Mutated,” Kane said, rising to his feet, “but basically—yeah, they’re fish.”
“Care to elaborate?”
Instead of answering immediately, Kane whipped up the Sin Eater and blasted a stream of shots at one of the remaining creatures as it began charging at the two ex-Mags. “In a minute,” he shouted. “For now, just follow my lead.”
Seeing the monster barrel toward him, its jaws wide, Grant didn’t need telling twice.
BRIGID TOOK A STEADYING BREATH as she sat on the jutting section at the side of the great hub. Using his short knife, Clem had uncovered enough of the inner workings of the creature that they could now see the main trunk of the second branchial vein.
“Are you absolutely certain that you want to do this?” Clem asked in a low, conspiratorial voice.
Brigid smiled tentatively. “Is anyone ever absolutely certain they want to do anything?” she asked in reply.
Clem nodded, realizing that Brigid’s flippant words allowed her to draw strength as she prepared to leap into the unknown. He knew that the woman who now sat perfectly upright before him was just as terrified as he was. With a mixture of excitement and fear vying for attention in his racing mind, Clem leaned forward, reaching to a point just over Brigid’s head, and he ran the sharp edge of the blade across the thick vein that pulsed there. “Stand by,” he said.
Swiftly and deliberately, Clem made a small incision into the pulsing vein, pushing the knife firmly against the surface until a line of liquid oozed forth. Lacking the power of an artery, the wound did not spurt as one might have expected
; it simply oozed in a line like sweat, colored white as milk, reminding Clem of pus oozing from a burst boil.
“Have you done it?” Brigid asked, trying to remain still as Clem worked the knife immediately above her.
“I’ve made an incision,” Clem replied, “and the wound’s weeping. But it doesn’t seem to—” He stopped midsentence, watching in fascination as the oozing pus ran slowly down the exterior of the vein, gathering speed with its descent.
“What is it?” Brigid asked, her voice a whisper.
The milky line of liquid split, and where one drop had existed now there were three, and they hurried down behind the bright cloud of Brigid’s wavy, flamered hair. But as Clem watched he saw that the liquid wasn’t simply pouring, following the path of least resistance in the way that liquid should act. No, instead it seemed to be reaching, probing, feeling at the air.
“Clem?” Brigid encouraged again, unsure of what was going on immediately behind her head.
Before Clem could find the words, one of those strange milk-white strands seemed to leap, like a cobra striking out at its prey, and the tip of the strand disappeared into Brigid’s hair, its other end still connected to the pierced vein above her.
Brigid grunted, feeling something burning hot touch the lowest part of her scalp, just below the crown. It was incredibly hot, like the tip of a soldering iron, and for a moment Brigid’s breath came with staggered rapidity through gritted teeth.
“If it does bond with the user as you’ve theorized,” Clem told her, trying to sound reassuring, “then that’s what it’s doing now.”
“Hurts,” Brigid grunted, the word pinched between her clamped-shut teeth. And then the burning became worse, feeling like the throbbing burn of skin that had been tanned too quickly by the sun, a ceaseless ache of bad-then-worse, bad-then-worse.
Above Brigid’s head, Clem watched as more strands of goo oozed from the thick vein, curling from it now like tendrils, reaching lower and lower as they grasped for Brigid’s skull. A second off-white line probed out and snagged her, pushing through her mass of curling hair and pressing against her skull. As Brigid winced, yet another tendril found its way to her, and then another.
Clem watched, staggered, as twin horns seemed to emerge from the sides of the hub where he had exposed the vein, reaching around Brigid’s forehead like two hands, the jagged projections interlinking like fingers to form that familiar crown around Brigid’s forehead. Its surface was hard and multilayered, an intermingling of sharp briars locking together like a cage. Once again, the abstract thought came to Clem of how it looked like the crown of thorns worn by Jesus Christ in classic religious imagery, imagery long since forgotten in this future world that the twentieth-century oceanographer had woken up to.
Brigid closed her eyes as she felt the hot strings lash against her, worming their way into the back of her skull. It wasn’t a piercing so much as an osmosis, a diffusion of that exceptional heat through the back of her head and on, into the receptacles of her brain. Ahead of her now, too, things were emerging from the crownlike apparatus that had surrounded her head, reaching in with a blast of hot breath against her forehead, the heat playing into her frontal lobes. Her natural instinct was to break away, to run, but she clenched her fists and told herself to endure. This was a crazy chance, the odds so long they were meaningless, and yet the whole process seemed the only possibility they might have to expel Ullikummis and save the Ontic Library from the destruction his very presence was causing.
Ahead, Brigid could see the coral-like walls of the room, the hard, lumpy floor that stretched out before her in the eerie gloom of those little pools of blue-green light. As she looked, she became conscious of something else there now, too, at the very edges of her vision. She looked left and right but it remained frustratingly beyond her ability to view.
Redness.
That was what it was. A redness as of something’s blood.
All around her, across Brigid’s chest and at her ankles and her wrists, things writhed, snaking around her from polyps on the exterior of the organic hub of this exceptional library. Brigid was now only vaguely aware of such things, feeling them moving along her body like a marching army of ants. Instead, her awareness was shifting as she began to see more of the world that surrounded her, the structures that underpinned that world. Above, in the ocean, Brigid could see parts of the library structure breaking off, floating away as Ullikummis’s influence reigned.
I should be afraid, she told herself.
But she wasn’t.
Recently, Brigid had been snared within a navigator’s chair from an Annunaki starship. Organic technology, the chair had come to life in her presence, pulling her to it and clutching her close, sending sharp tendrils to pierce her skin that it might download its maps of the universe directly into her brain. At the time she had been terrified, the whole experience a perverse violation of her very being. Yet at the same time she had marveled at the star chart that played out for her eyes only, her rational mind appreciating the incredible artistry that had been brought to bear to create such a revelatory piece of equipment.
Now, it seemed to Brigid that her experience with the astrogation chair had been merely a dry run for what was happening to her here. She felt her brain begin to switch gear, shifting into a new mind-set as the burning sensation entered her thoughts.
“Here we go again,” Brigid whispered as she felt herself, along with all rational sense, plummet off the precipice of normalcy.
Chapter 20
While Brigid was disappearing into the mental rabbit hole that was the data stream of the Ontic Library, Grant and Kane continued struggling with the savage, dog-size fish that had surrounded them at the far edge of the vast chamber.
“Follow my lead,” Kane had instructed, though he had been less sure of himself than he had sounded in that moment of bravado. His plan was a simple one; at least in the sense that it was direct. These monstrous, air-breathing fish-things had a hard armor of near-impenetrable scales that deflected all but the luckiest of shots. But from the inside, as he had proved, they were vulnerable. All they had to do was ensure that their bullets blasted into each creature’s open mouth.
Which was easier said than done, of course, particularly with the ferocity and vigor that were required to make a difference and swing the tide of the battle.
“Drill them in the mouths,” Kane shouted as Grant brought his Copperhead subgun into play once more, peppering the area with a spray of bullets, countless spent shells littering the coral floor at his feet.
Even as Kane spoke, one of the two remaining creatures spun on itself and seemed to wink from existence in that baffling and utterly frustrating manner that Kane and Grant had witnessed during the earliest moments of this terrifying encounter.
“They’re not disappearing,” Kane insisted.
“Run that by me again?” Grant demanded as he stood at Kane’s shoulder, Copperhead blazing as the fish creature he was aiming at seemed to cease to exist.
“That’s what clued me in,” Kane growled. “Fish move like nothing else on earth, doubling back on themselves so swiftly that they appear able to move through 180 degrees on the spot. These things are fast as hell, but they’re still there—our eyes just can’t follow quickly enough.”
As if to reinforce Kane’s observation, Grant saw the green-scaled creature reappear off to his right, turning on the spot there and leaping toward him with its mouth widening to bite.
In a blur of instinct, Grant swung the Copperhead at the monster, his finger depressed on the trigger, sending a volley of bullets wide before he finally found his fast-moving target. Bullets pinged from the creature’s hide, covering it in bright sparks of lightning where they hit and filling the air with dangerous ricochets.
Then the creature was on Grant, its jaws snapping shut as it attempted to bite off his face. Grant turned away, skipping backward on his toes as the thing dived through the air at him. It didn’t dive, Grant corrected—it swam.
>
A few feet away, Kane was facing his own enemy, as the last remaining fish creature prowled the surrounding area, its glassy, black eyes never leaving Kane’s. The ex-Magistrate held his right arm stiff, the Sin Eater like a natural extension of the limb, as he waited for the kill shot.
“Come on, you little flounder,” Kane muttered. “Let’s make fish sticks for dinner.”
Suddenly, the green-scaled creature turned, its taillike back feet flapping against the uneven floor as it barreled forward, widening its vulgar double jaw as it hurried at its human prey.
Kane snapped off shot after shot from his Sin Eater, his aim never wavering as he pumped the 9 mm bullets down the beast’s throat. Chunks of flesh ripped from the monster’s ugly mouth as the bullets drilled past that keylike apparatus that formed its jaw.
At the last second, Kane leaped away, and the creature’s mighty jaws closed shut on empty air with a loud snap.
As both Kane and the monster landed on the floor, Kane rolled away, bringing his pistol back up to bear as the hideous attacker turned to renew its savage attack. Kane blasted off another stream of deadly bullets as the monster charged at him. The green-hued fish turned then, as Kane continued to blast bullets in its direction, flitting out of his field of vision like an arrow in the air. His jaws clamped tightly together, Kane held the trigger of the Sin Eater in place and sprayed left and right in a continuous stream of fire. Incredibly—almost magically—the creature reappeared off to Kane’s left as the bullets struck it, fumbling in its path before rolling over itself and crashing into the floor on its side with a noteworthy lack of grace.
Immediately, Kane leaped up and ran for the monster where it lay on the floor, its muscular, tail-like back legs flapping up and down as it tried to right itself, like a turtle rolled over on its shell. As it turned, Kane rammed his foot against the beast’s side, just below the place where the fearsome double-jaw exterior met with its neckless body, the heel of his boot squelching into the fleshy triple gills that he could see opening and closing there. As the creature struggled in place, Kane brought the barrel of his pistol down and unleashed a stream of shots in the creature’s face, directing bullet after bullet into the monster’s gaping mouth.