by James Axler
Grant’s attacker, meanwhile, was hurtling at the powerfully built ex-Mag like a torpedo, its body rushing through the air like some runaway train. Grant kept the Copperhead trained on the creature as he darted left and right to avoid its mind-boggling attacks, blasting 4.85 mm bullets in its direction with every opportunity.
The air-breathing fish pounced across the room like some kind of spring, bounding off the hard surfaces of coral floor and walls as it renewed its attack on the Cerberus warrior. As it rushed at him again, Grant held his ground and snapped off a single shot from the Copperhead before the trigger clicked on empty. Incredibly, the ex-Mag was out of ammunition; he had had no time to reload during the furiously rapid battle.
The fish creature lunged at Grant’s torso, even as the gun jammed on empty, and with quick thinking he brought up the solid barrel of the gun like a staff, using its abbreviated length to fend off his attacker.
With a decisive thrust, Grant rammed the Copperhead into the monster’s gaping mouth, shoving it in between its jaws at a near-vertical angle. Even as the creature continued at him, Grant jabbed his left elbow into the side of its face, knocking it with incredible force.
The creature reared backward, toppling to the floor as it struggled with the subgun in its mouth.
Grant did not hesitate. He brought up his right arm, tensing his wrist tendons as he did so to bring his hidden Sin Eater into play. Grant’s finger was already crooked when the guardless trigger slapped against it, and a spray of bullets spit from the Sin Eater, driving through the air and drilling into the open mouth of the fish creature as it struggled on the floor.
The monster seemed to rock in place as the shots hurtled down its throat and into its gullet, ripping into its innards with gruesome finality. As Grant watched, his pistol’s trigger still depressed, the shimmering green scales at the creature’s side and back began to burst apart as the relentless bullets drilled through the body of the monster fish.
As his enemy flopped on its side, its body still shaking, Grant took a moment to look across to Kane. His partner was turning and walking away from a messy spray of flesh that covered the floor, all that remained of his own attacker.
Kane peered up and, seeing Grant watching him amid the wreckage of his own foe, he smiled and brushed a finger to his nose.
They had survived.
CLEM JOINED THE TWO ex-Mags over the wreckage of the strange air breathers a couple of minutes after the battle was over, checking warily to ensure that there was no chance of the creatures could renew their attack.
Grant was kneeling before the green-skinned animal he had drilled with bullets, working to free his Copperhead from the beast’s now-locked jaws. “Dammit, Fido,” he growled, “playtime’s over.”
With one final yank, Grant pulled the Copperhead free, falling on his butt as he tumbled backward. The weapon was slick with drool, and Grant bit back a curse as he wiped it down with the insides of his coat. The coat could be washed—having the weapon in working order was his more pressing concern just now.
“Well,” Clem said as he peered on the floor at the three carcasses that lay in various states of disintegration, “you gentlemen certainly know how to make your presence felt.”
Self-consciously, Kane ran a hand through his dark hair before asking the oceanographer about Brigid.
“Miss Baptiste appears to be sleeping,” Clem explained, “much like the stone man there. She’s hooked into the library structure now, and I’ve crossed the two branchial veins as she proposed. By her own suggestion, we’re best off not disturbing her.”
Kane nodded, accepting the situation even if he did not particularly approve of it. He had been with Brigid on a recent reconnaissance mission in the Louisiana bayou. It was there that they had been introduced to what had been inaccurately described as a “voodoo chair,” and was in fact a surviving navigator’s seat from the Annunaki mother ship, Tiamat. The navigator’s seat had some hidden mechanism that had ensnared Brigid when she sat in it, tendrils snaking from its arms to smother her bare flesh. In so doing, the navigator’s chair had bonded with the woman, projecting highly detailed, interactive star maps directly to her frontal lobe. However, the flesh-piercing price had been disconcerting and potentially lethal. Facing an enemy who specialized in organic technology, Kane considered, was proving to be rather more involved than their initial clashes with the Annunaki had led them to expect.
“So,” Clem asked, gesturing around at the scaly carcasses, “what were these things?”
“Fish,” Kane said. “At least, that’s what I think they are. You’re the expert, Clem. Want to weigh in?”
Clem peered at the creature that Grant had killed, for it seemed the most intact of the gruesome corpses. “There are certainly instances of fish that can exist out of water for extended periods, so-called ambulatory or walking fish. The mudskipper and the African catfish eel can both snap prey from the land, and have shown the ability to live there for limited periods, in much the way of amphibians like frogs and toads. There are even reports of fish that have been seen to climb trees.”
Grant looked up as he reloaded his Copperhead subgun, raising a quizzical eyebrow at Clem’s words. “Must make fishing trips an experience.”
“These things almost seemed to fly through the air,” Kane explained. “Is that normal?”
Clem produced his little two-inch blade from his pocket and prodded gently at the lifeless corpse sprawled before him. “Haven’t you ever heard of flying fish?” he asked as he scored a line along the edge of the glistening green scales.
Kane watched patiently as Clem poked at the skin of the creature before moving across to the open wreckage of the one Kane had latterly dealt with.
“They’re pretty big,” Clem pointed out, moving a chunk of bloody gut out of the monstrous corpse with the tip of his blade, “and they show a lot of traits one would more normally associate with mammals. This circulatory system is very unusual. It’s almost as though it’s been reverse engineered based on a nonaquatic design, like from a jackal or other canine.”
“Well, they’re dead now,” Grant rumbled as he watched Clem work through the goo smeared on the floor. “The question is—can we expect any more of them?”
“No,” Clem replied.
“Well, that’s a rel—” Kane began, but Clem wasn’t finished.
“The question,” Clem said, “is what were they eating down here?” He peered up to look at Grant and Kane. “Simple rule of survival—everything has to eat something.”
“What about the spiders?” Kane proposed.
Clem nodded. “Which in turn would be eating…?”
Kane shook his head in exasperation. “Where are you going with all this, Bryant?”
“These things,” Clem said, sweeping a hand at the bloody corpse next to him, “have been engineered. They’ve been created to live down here and protect this library construct. They’re not alive. They may have taken on the properties of living creatures, but this is merely technology far in advance of anything we can create.”
“So, what,” Grant asked, “they’re robots?”
“Even a robot needs an oil change,” Clem mused. “This is something that’s far beyond that.”
As Clem spoke, there came a grotesque slurping sound from behind Grant, and all three men turned to see what was causing the commotion. The first creature, the one whose eye Kane had plucked out, seemed to be reconstituting itself before them, its bullet wounds sealing, the lost eyes re-forming like glistening, watery pools.
“What the—?” Kane spit. “We killed that thing.”
“Inherent problem with things that aren’t alive,” Clem pointed out. “They can’t be killed.”
The Cerberus warriors backed away as the now-standing creature began to scent the air in a renewed search for prey.
Chapter 21
Down, down, down.
It wasn’t like accessing knowledge, not in the sense that former archivist Brigid Baptiste unders
tood it, anyway. It was like hearing the voice of something so immeasurably superior to her that it might truly deserve the appellation of god. And not even hearing words, more like being caught in that infinitely superior, omnipotent being’s breath as it sighed.
She was swimming in a sigh.
Brigid let the breath, the sigh, wash over her, lapping at the contours of her brain.
There was a wonderful burning sensation at her temporoparietal junction, the part of the brain that processed visual and touch signals, provided for balance and the spatial information generated by the inner ear. The burning was her disconnecting from her body, at least in the sense that she understood it. One thing that temporoparietal junction was responsible for was processing information from a human’s proprioceptive sensations, the sense of where one’s body ended. Suddenly, as the slow, pleasing warmth filled the back of Brigid’s brain, she felt as though she had disconnected from her body, as if she were floating away from it.
She was being asked something, she realized, though the question was unspecific, unclear and hidden within her own mind, like hints of a forgotten dream. She searched for the question, trying to find it, to decipher it, her sense of self seeming to spin, to invert and re-form all about her. It was like translating a foreign language, putting together the musical structure of the words until she could sense the pattern and from the pattern divine the meaning.
Of what do you seek, Brigid Baptiste?
Was that it? Is that the question resonating in my head? Brigid wondered.
She tried listening again, but it was a different kind of listening to anything that she had ever experienced before, more like working a Chinese puzzle box, sliding all the pieces this way and that until the solution was finally revealed, a listening that required logic and understanding more than any act of simple hearing.
The library was speaking to her, she realized, feeling giddy and quite, quite mad.
Her eyes roved the room, optic nerves sucking at the light around her, framing and reframing shapes to create context for her brain. Her vision, her ability to see, seemed to have altered, too, disconnected from the place where she associated her eyes, like a remote feed from a camera. The coral walls of the vast chamber had gone, and so had the floor and the wonderful, terrible room. The sounds of gunfire had also disappeared. In their place, Brigid heard bell chimes with the texture of tumbling waves on a beach, saw a wonderful, subtle miasma of everything. This was the face of the all.
Brigid blinked, using the action to recenter herself, to lift her mess of thoughts back to something coherent. As she did so, the cloudlike form took shape, and she found herself seeing things she thought that she recognized, but it was like seeing sounds or smells—familiar, yet the input felt wrong, contrary.
The Ontic Library was speaking to her, feeding her simple mammalian brain with a cloud of information. Information as an explosion, as a billion facets with no emphasis, no focus. Information that was unsorted, that had never considered sorting as an important part of the process of gathering information.
The structures that underpinned the world, Brigid realized, were laid bare before her, but she was too ignorant to comprehend what it was that she was seeing. With this information, with this knowledge, she might change the world, might rewrite everything in the world.
It was all emotion. Emotion held it all together. The sense that life had to endure because life should endure, because it was so deserving.
She spun through the cosmos then, seeing everything, and it felt like swimming or like poetry. The world spun around her, beneath her, turning on its axis as it held its place in the Milky Way like some gigantic gyroscope. And what she saw she didn’t see, she felt. It was a new definition of seeing, a thing done with one’s core, one’s being, perhaps something that was only done with that thing one called the soul.
The world, the universe, was made up of so many more colors than Brigid had ever seen, so many more shapes than she had thought possible. She could look forever, as she walked there among the stars, and never have a name for everything she could see.
There were angles, too, angles that defied Brigid’s understanding of mathematics. Angles that were hidden in the straightest of edges, angles that no one had ever perceived. She recalled for an instant the way the teenage girl, Pam, had described her hair as a tesseract. “That’s where you hide your memories,” she had told Brigid. Brigid realized now how all those angles could exist, how they were and yet they were not, dual things occupying the same space. The angles were like music, all the notes that made up a song, the song nothing without the notes, the single notes nothing without the song.
Outside this vision, out in the immense room beneath the Pacific Ocean, Brigid’s body was shaking with trauma, her physical form shuddering as it tried to absorb the vast input of the vein feed that poured into her brain. The wealth of input, all of it so unstructured, unordered, was like seeing a million faces in a second and trying to perceive every difference and every similarity, a contradiction of requirements so overwhelming it made the task impossible.
It felt like poetry. Knowledge continued to pour into her temporoparietal junction, running along the inside of her scalp like wriggling, burning fingers.
Brigid was struck by a weird sense of déjà vu, as she felt the thing scampering across her scalp. She sensed that she had been here before, done this very thing before. It was strange, and all the more so since Brigid Baptiste had an eidetic memory and the vague sense of déjà vu was, to say the least, very unusual in her because her powers of recollection were so potent.
She pushed the thought aside, blindly reaching into her hair and placing her fingers around one of the creature’s limbs. In a second, she had tossed the thing to the floor, and she stamped on it as it struggled to right itself, crushing its body beneath the ball of her foot. Gloop oozed out around her boot as the creature was turned to sludgy pulp. Brigid ignored it, turning back down the corridor and shouting for Kane.
“We need a plan here, and quick,” she called.
“I know,” Kane growled. He looked around, playing the bright xenon beam across the corridor that they were in until it hit Brigid in the face, and she blinked so hard it was almost like waking up.
The cloud of knowledge inside her—or perhaps about her, she could no longer be sure—came back into focus and Brigid realized her sense of time had become muddled. She had been somewhere that was earlier than now, been in a place when she was just entering the Ontic Library with Kane and the others. The real was all of the rules, she knew then. The real was everything that ever was and ever could be.
Brigid Baptiste had an eidetic memory and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. These things were at the very core of her being. Suddenly, here she was holding all the knowledge of everything ever, and she didn’t know what to do first, what part to deconstruct, what thing to pick up and hold and examine.
She had been shown time. How did time work? How could time work? And what was time anyway? A line, a slope, a rushing river?
From this viewpoint, with this information, she could…
Time rushed at her. Just the very action of thinking about it had brought the library’s full resources to bear, filling her mind with so much information she could not begin to comprehend any of it. Having all the knowledge in the world created a time machine, Brigid realized, a thing that could be molded and changed. If she could perceive all of time in the same instant, she could pick a spot and examine it, pick a spot and stay there, outside of time’s flow or caught up in the time loop, just like the one she had experienced less than a minute before.
Dammit, Brigid realized. Thinking about the time loop made the Ontic Library show her the time loop; she could effectively trap herself in too much knowledge if she thought about the wrong stuff.
Wicked thoughts, she realized. Wicked thoughts could kill you now; they could make you something wicked.
But by that logic, good thoughts could generate goodness, couldn’t
they?
Almost without really thinking it at all, a face appeared before Brigid’s eyes. A girl’s face of tenderness and such innocent beauty that Brigid felt her heart break in two. It was Abigail, her niece, her surrogate daughter, her munchkin. Abigail, the girl who didn’t exist.
The Ontic Library contained such supreme knowledge that Balam had insisted that its destruction could ultimately threaten reality itself. So, Brigid realized, by the same token could that supreme knowledge not be employed to reshape reality? Could she bring Abigail, her niece from a computer-simulated reality, to life?
Brigid pictured Abi in her mind’s eye, a girl of five years old, with messy honey-blond hair that fell past her shoulders, and eyes the same wonderful shade of emerald as Brigid’s own. She could smell her, hear her laughter, hear Abi’s endless requests for ice cream in her voice that never whined, just sang like a musical instrument given life. Brigid reached for the girl, her arms outstretched to hug her close, to hold her tight. Temptation lurks.
Those words came unbidden to Brigid’s mind then, a raging inferno blasting at the heart of her brain. Perhaps it was her conscience, that one thing that separated man from the beasts, that one trait that seemed to separate humanity from the Annunaki invaders.
The beautiful girl with the honey-blond hair looked at Brigid with wide, clear eyes in her pale face like emeralds in the snow. Brigid felt the mothering instinct welling within her, the desperate urge to hold the fruit of all that she believed in and fought for, all that she dreamed of.
“Stop!”
Brigid reared back at the sound of her own voice, seeing the girl’s body form before her, feeling all those emotions she had felt for the dead thing that was just a computer program tapping into her brain, feeding her what she wanted.