“Oh, that’s just wonderful.” Her voice sounded raspy, squelched within the narrow, wet confines of the tendril’s insides, and she instantly regretted speaking as she inhaled more of the crappy air into her lungs.
Emily began moving faster, shuffling as quickly as she could, acutely aware of the rising level of the fluid. By the time she had travelled another ten meters, the goo was almost at her elbow. The tube was filling up again . . . fast. It made sense that the damage she had done to gain access to this tendril would not simply be ignored; it would be repaired, of course. Apparently, those repairs had now been made, and the tube was replacing the goo and gas she had let out when she had cut her way inside. There was no way to know how full the tube would become. It could be just a couple of inches or it could fill completely; either way, it was going to force her to do something about her predicament.
Emily shined the flashlight back down the way she had come; it was too far for her to go back, and, besides, if her entrance had already been sealed and repaired, retreating would be pointless. The light illuminated nothing but the red walls of the tube ahead of her. Looked like she was screwed whichever way she chose to go.
That left only one other way out, then. She unsheathed her knife again. Blade facing down, she plunged it into the flesh of the tendril in front of her and began slicing. She wasn’t interested in making it neat this time; she just needed a way out, something she could squeeze her ass through.
It was a much easier job to cut this incision without having to work at such an odd angle. She simply grasped the handle of the knife with both hands and pulled backward, sawing as she went, tearing a slit in the floor of the tube that was beginning to feel more and more like a sarcophagus with every passing second. As if it were aware of her butchery, the tube began to fill with the goo even faster. Emily stopped for a second as she noticed the first few centimeters of the slit she was cutting begin to seal over.
“Oh, come onnnnn.” Emily pushed hard onto the hilt of the knife and pulled with all of her rapidly waning strength, tearing the blade through the floor.
It was probably her weight that did it, she decided, in that last split second as a sound like a T-shirt being torn apart filled the tube. The next instant she was falling, hands flailing for purchase but finding none on the wet lips of the split as she slipped through the tear, carried out in a waterfall of stinking liquid. She landed ass first with a teeth-crunching “Ugh!” of expelled air, swallowed a mouthful of the goo that clogged her throat, bounced, slid, and rolled to a stop against what could only be another wall.
Coughing and spluttering, Emily rolled onto all fours, and promptly puked up the crap she had swallowed during her fall. She knelt there, panting for twenty long seconds.
Open your eyes, she commanded herself.
She couldn’t see a damn thing. Both eyes were thick with the gunk from the tube and still watering from the noxious air she had had to breathe. There was still more of the crap in her mouth; she spat it out in a long dribble, wiping her lips with her equally disgusting goo-encrusted jacket.
Damn, her eyes burned. She used her fingers to try to scoop the ooze from them, but all that did was smear it across her eyelids. Blindly, she pulled her undershirt from beneath her jacket and used that to clean the remainder away.
When her eyes finally began to stop burning she opened them again and looked around her new surroundings.
She was in a corridor with fleshy-looking gray walls, ribbed like a corrugated pipe, the ribs set at three-meter intervals, which only added to the illusion of being inside a living, breathing body. The majority of the corridor was curved like a tube too, but a flat walkway ran along the base.
The tendril she had used to get inside the ship ran along the ceiling. The cut she had fallen through still dripped the occasional teardrop of goo, but the wound was already knitting itself back together.
The flashlight had spun from her fingers when she fell the meter and a half to the corridor floor. It lay nearby, its light shining up the wall.
God, her butt hurt, and the wound on her head had started to throb again.
But she was finally inside. She had made it.
Emily picked up her flashlight from where it had fallen and realized she did not actually need it. The corridor was filled with a dim light, although she could not say from where exactly the light emanated. As the black external skin of the Caretaker ship had seemed to suck in the sunlight, so the very air within this corridor seemed to emit it.
This place smelled . . . off. Sweet, sickly, biological. She was surprised she could actually still smell anything at all after the stench she had endured in the tendril; this might just as well have been honey. Of course, the smell could actually be her. She hadn’t had a change of clothes in how many days? And after crawling through that disgusting crap . . . She shuddered at the thought.
There was no sign of the Caretakers, not yet, anyway, but the same distant thrum of power she had heard outside the ship now reverberated up through the soles of her boots. If there was power then where were the Caretakers? Someone had to be taking care of her son, after all. Still, there wasn’t much about any of this that made sense to her. She had just cut her way into this ship. Effectively, she was an invader, so whatever systems ran the ship must have notified whomever was in control about the damage she had caused getting in. That meant there was no way the Caretakers would be unaware of her presence. Where was her welcoming committee?
“Hello, you bastards. I’m here,” she yelled. “Now take me to my Goddamn son.”
She looked around in anticipation of one of the gangly Caretakers appearing, but she remained alone in the corridor. What kind of a game were they playing with her? Did they expect her to find them herself?
The fall had deposited her just before the elbow of a gently curving corridor. On this side of the corner Emily could see that the passageway ran back toward the exterior wall of the ship. It was pointless going that way. She dipped her head around the corner; the corridor continued inward toward the center of the ship. That seemed like the logical direction to take; the chances of her son being near the outer skin seemed unlikely. She started walking, following the corridor for a few minutes until it terminated at a ramp that curled up into an opening in the ceiling and down to what was, presumably, another level. Obviously a staircase of some kind. She wondered why the Caretakers would need something as simple as stairs to move about their ship when they could teleport at will. Maybe it just used a lot of energy to do something like that? Maybe their teleportation was not accurate enough to move confidently between levels? Who knew? Either way, she had to make a decision on which direction she should take.
Up or down?
Jesus! How was she supposed to figure this out? Guess? The ship was massive, and she was somewhere on the middle level along the outer edge. It could take days, weeks even, wandering around the inside of this place, and she still might not find Adam. It seemed so ridiculously illogical that she could be guided all this distance so accurately, only to spend her time blindly searching for him once she got inside. There had to be another way.
Emily thought back over everything that had happened since Adam had disappeared: the dreams that had not been dreams and that connection to something much, much larger had always seemed to be there, in the back of her mind. There had been the constant, inexorable, magnetic pull of her child’s energy. And then, when she had first started to climb down into the pit she had touched that tendril and her mind had instantly transferred to those other creatures. All of these events added up to something that she had not seen, had not had the time to consider deeply enough—something that involved her child, the firstborn on this alien Earth. In her mind, she saw his red speckled eyes reflecting the red flecks of her own.
And she understood.
Tentatively, Emily reached out and laid the flat of her hand against the corridor wall . . . and gasped.
She was everywhere. Swirling through a red galaxy of connec
tions, instinctively knowing that each dot—some infinitesimally tiny, some massive, the rest every shade in between—represented a life somewhere on her planet. Every dot was connected to the next, an incredible biological weave, the complexity of which should have been overwhelmingly complex, yet it made perfect sense within this context. And with a flat realization devoid of any emotion, Emily understood that she was as much a part of this tapestry as every other life force that glowed within the lines of its warp and weft.
And there was clarity for her, the falling away of boundaries. From the moment she had been abducted and awakened on the alien ship outside Las Vegas all those years ago, she had ceased to be Emily Baxter. The woman who had awoken within that ship was different, irreversibly altered, inextricably connected to this bioweave, and she hadn’t even realized it until this very moment. The red motes in her eyes were a tattoo of her assimilation. Her key to belonging.
Emily slipped from soul to soul, body to body, instantaneously, frictionless, tumbling helplessly from one to the next, her conscious mind removed from each slip, but her soul caught in a dizzying uncontrolled plummet from body to body.
Control, she had to regain control.
Slow, slow down.
Emily willed herself to slow her momentum, and, gradually, she did. The headlong tumble through Earth’s life began to ease. Back, she thought, edging her consciousness away from the perspective of an individual soul until she was once again looking out at the vast collection of life arrayed around her. Back further . . . and there he was, the brightest light, at the center of all of this life, burning so strongly that even in this metaphysical embodiment the heat from her son was overwhelming. Emily tried to follow the red pathways to reach him, but the connections, ever changing, proved too complex for her nascent awareness. There was so much connected to him, he kept receding each time she got close.
But that was okay, because now she knew exactly where he was.
Emily tried to pull her hand away from the wall of the ship, but it felt stuck, as though it were glued. She pulled harder, and this time her hand moved back, dragging with it long black fibers off the wall like melted plastic. In horror she yanked her hand to her chest. The fibers released her with tiny audible pops, snapping away as they melted back into the wall. An imprint of her hand remained on the surface, gradually filling in as she watched, until the wall was again perfectly flat.
Emily’s legs felt weak. She sank to the floor, her hand rising to cover her mouth as the full realization flooded through her. She was not Emily Baxter. At least, not the same Emily Baxter who had been plucked from that clearing in Las Vegas. She understood now that she had been changed, augmented, adapted by the Caretakers. She was an experiment. Jesus Christ! She might not even be the same woman . . . they could have created this body and implanted the real Emily Baxter’s memories in her head like a scene from some bad fifties science-fiction B movie.
No way. No way. No way. Her mind repeated over and over, refusing to accept the possibility.
But does any of it really matter? her inner voice asked. If I feel like Emily, if I love like her, look like her, then surely that means I am her.
The only way she would ever know for certain would be to question one of the Caretakers. If she had to, she would beat the truth from the ones that had done this . . . this abominable thing to her. But they didn’t exactly seem interested in her, judging by their lack of contact since her arrival. And this ship—if that was what it actually was—she wondered if it were connected to everything they had created, acting like some kind of conduit to gather data? Or monitoring the progress of the alien takeover? Maybe the Caretakers weren’t even on board. Emily had had no sense of their presence within that fantastic web of connections she had just been connected to. Maybe this was all just automated.
But all that really mattered to her, right now, was to get to her son. Now more so than ever.
Emily pushed herself to her feet and made a conscious effort to breathe slowly and deeply as she tried to make sense of the jumble of thoughts bouncing around inside her head. The most important thing was to find Adam; that was why she was here. He was an innocent in all of this, and, Goddamn it, she was going to make the Caretakers pay for taking him from her. She was no longer worried about finding him. From the second the wall had released its grip on her, Emily had felt his presence again, and this time the sensation wasn’t a subtle tug. Instead she felt as though someone had grabbed her by the lapels of her jacket and yanked her hard. His position within the jumbled bioconnection had been ever shifting, almost impossible for her to follow within the context of an entire multidimensional metasphere, but back here in the physical reality of this ship, he was fixed in place. And she knew exactly where he was.
Emily began to climb upward.
Emily stepped off the staircase three levels up and straight into a corridor almost identical in appearance to the one she had just left. This one was shorter, though, terminating about twenty meters ahead of where she stood. On the left wall, halfway along, there was some kind of a recess, the rounded edges of a frame defining its clearly visible outline. By the time she reached it Emily saw it was an opening into a room: no door, just a gap in the wall leading into a sharply curving alcove several meters long, filled with shadow. She had stepped into the darkness and had taken a few paces before she stopped dead in her tracks.
Ahead of her, the alcove opened up into a dome-shaped room. At the center of the room, a thick column rose up from the floor and disappeared into the ceiling ten meters above. The column pulsed with vibrant colors, shot through with silent lightning-bolt flashes of energy.
Arranged in a circle around the base of the column was a row of Caretakers. Each of the aliens’ oddly humanoid bodies leaned against a slanted board that protruded from the floor. Tubes extended from the center column, each one radiating a different lambent color, each fleshy tube terminating, no, melding, with the body of an individual Caretaker.
The memory of her first encounter with these aliens in Las Vegas had faded, apparently, because Emily’s breath caught in the back of her throat, frozen there by the sheer strangeness of these creatures. The distilled light from the central column played over their metallic-gray skin, creating the illusion of movement where she knew there was none. Their featureless oval heads faced straight ahead, as if their attention was drawn to some distant point.
From the shadows of the alcove, Emily counted ten of the humanoids, but she knew there must be more on the opposite side of the room, obscured by the central column of light.
Emily slowly backed up into the shadows of the alcove. The ring of Caretakers hadn’t sensed her yet; none of them had so much as lifted a skinny digit in her direction. Carefully she edged a few centimeters closer, scanning the room. On the opposite side to where she stood was an alcove mirroring the one in which she now hid. Each time she looked at it, she felt that same molecular tug toward it, like Ariadne’s thread guiding her through the Minotaur’s maze.
Other than the column at its center and the motionless Caretakers surrounding it, there was nothing else in the room, no furniture or architecture she could use as cover to reach the other side. Emily ducked back the way she had come, double-checking the corridor to make sure she hadn’t missed another door or junction that might give her another way past the room. Apart from the stairs, the alcove was the sole way out of this corridor. If she wanted to get to her son, she was going to have to cross the twenty meters in plain view of the Caretakers.
Emily slid the knife from its scabbard on her ankle, grasping it tightly in her right hand she walked back through the alcove. If any of these alien fucks so much as twitched, she was prepared to cut its Goddamn head from its shoulders. She took a step into the room, then another and another, her back against the wall while keeping her eyes fixed on the still-motionless aliens. She had to pass within a meter of them.
She held the knife at arm’s length. If they tried to come after her, she assumed they were
first going to have to jettison the filaments that stretched between them and the central column. That should give enough warning of their intentions, but their eerily still forms had set her nerves jangling. Each step felt like a moment in a horror movie when the music stops. The watcher knew that at any second something was going to spring out of the shadows with heart-shattering surprise. The unsuspecting never saw it coming. She wasn’t going to end up like one of those fictional victims.
The Caretakers remained motionless, their bodies as still as a frozen pond. Their overly elongated arms rested against the curve of their thighs, each of their three slender fingers raised slightly in an arc.
There was the vague memory of a smell captured within the air of the room . . . a scent of sulfur, like someone had dropped a lit match into a box of matches, or maybe spent gunpowder? Emily had the distinct impression of something having been burned, energy expelled.
She reached the opposite alcove unmolested and was about to step out into the mirror image of the first alcove when the peal of curiosity bells ringing in her head got the better of her. Oh, for God’s sake, this is exactly what the idiots in the movie would do. Her inner voice berated her to just keep on going; she’d gotten by them for whatever reason, so why ruin a good thing? Keep on going, for fuck’s sake.
But it had just been too easy. Something was out of place here. Emily twisted around in one sharp movement, her mind made up, and strode to the Caretaker nearest the alcove.
It gave no indication that it even knew she was there.
Switching the knife to her left hand as she approached, Emily waved her empty hand in front of the alien’s featureless face. “Wake up, dummy!” she said, loud enough that she knew the Caretaker would hear her. She was just waiting for one of those skinny arms to flash up and grab her wrist in its equally skinny digits. That would be all the excuse she would need to plunge the blade into the dome of the fucker’s head. She shifted anxiously from foot to foot, her muscles clenched, ready to explode.
Extinction Point (Book 4): Genesis Page 24