by JM Guillen
“Bishop!” a new voice called from across the tracks, grumbling with a deep Alabama drawl. “You useless tit! Get yer ass over here, and we’ll go home!”
That voice sounded just as familiar. I started to puzzle it together; however, doors slammed open on our side of the station. I turned slowly, as if drunk, and saw four strangers run up behind us as they took cover behind one of the columns in the subway.
“Caprice!” I pointed at the men, and she nodded before turning back to the first group. Were these her new friends?
Each of the newcomers dressed in dark colors. Heavily armed, they held their guns as if they knew how to use them. They aimed at Gideon and his allies. One of them barked a word in a tongue I didn’t know, and they hammered Gideon and company with a cascade of gunfire.
Ok. The two groups are enemies. Got it.
“Breathe, Michael.” Caprice placed one hand on my chest and held me against the column as she peered around it. “Remember, you aren’t seeing straight.”
“So you’ve said.” I gestured wildly at the men firing behind us. “Am I seeing that? Or did the magic loudspeaker hypnotize me into that too?”
“Those are our friends! You agreed to trust me!” She seemed hurt.
“I know.” I blinked my eyes, shaking my head. My headache was absolute murder.
Caprice pointed to a small, sheltering alcove in the far wall. “Over there. I can explain once we’re not being shot at.”
No one’s shooting at us right here. The buzzing in my head made it hard to think; still none of this seemed right. I didn’t think Caprice would lie to me, but things just weren’t adding up.
“Copy that.” I nodded. I had to admit, anything she might say would make more sense if I wasn’t surrounded by bullets while I struggled to listen. I scooted forward, took her hand, and tried to gauge the best time to run for safety.
The gunfire made that impossible. At any given moment, the men behind us would poke around the edge of the pillar they were using for cover and spray bullets. As if they didn’t aim at Gideon’s squad, they instead periodically fired in Gideon’s direction, hitting only the subway tracks.
Suppressive fire. The thought seemed distant. They aren’t trying to hit Gideon’s crew, just keep them pinned down. I furrowed my brow in thought. It’s like they want them stuck there, but they aren’t advancing.
In the distance, I could hear the rumbling sound growing louder. I craned my head, trying to single it out amidst the barking gunfire.
Was it… the subway train?
I had no idea what the trams required to run, but this place certainly didn’t have it. Hell, they couldn’t even keep the lights on.
Yet, Caprice had said that her friends knew a way out. Maybe they had jury-rigged something on the tracks? If that were the case, then all we had to do was keep our captors on the other side of the tracks until the car came.
Hell, it made as much sense as hypnosis and waking up in tubs of bile.
“Michael! Come on!” I hadn’t noticed the pause in the gunfire, but Caprice had.
We ran.
The alcove was only about five meters away. If the men with guns knew their business, and it seemed as if they might, then they could keep the other squad busy while we got away. I had no idea what their motivations were—on either side, if I were honest—but Caprice said she would explain.
No matter how odd things were, I would at least listen.
Gunfire barked again, but the bullets hit nowhere near us.
As we closed on the alcove, I felt a wild grin pull at the edges of my mouth.
We were going to make it.
The moment I threw myself against the wall and pulled her to me, my head exploded with the loud buzzing sound. For a moment everything tasted like blood and bitter steel.
“What—?” Caprice sounded distant, as if her voice warbled through water.
She smells wonderful. My mind drifted. Like lavender.
With a brilliant flash of light, the subway station bent, as if space itself were a malleable thing. A crimson flame exploded into existence in front of us, burning on nothingness and slowly growing wider.
I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the light. Stunned, I saw a man standing behind the flame as if the fire was some kind of impossible doorway. It allowed me to still view Gideon and his men on the other side of it.
“Bishop!” The man spoke my name with familiarity. He was wore an odd device that hung on the back of his head, like a half-halo that shone with a brilliant, blue light. He stepped through the fire and extended a hand to me.
“The fuck you say.” I gaped, absolutely certain my mind had slipped a gear or seven.
Caprice glared at him, her eyes furious.
The crimson flame sang a strange and impossible song. Dumbfounded, I stared into the fire, confused at seeing Gideon and his men beyond it. Past them, I could see the men shooting, and there to the side, I saw Caprice and I—
I blinked, overwhelmed by vertigo.
“Michael!” Caprice swung her Beretta toward the man, spraying bullets. The man reaching for me dove to one side and fired a weapon of his own, something that looked like an incredibly complex crossbow.
She missed.
He did not.
“Fuck!” Caprice screamed in pain as the projectile caught her in the shoulder, spraying blood. The shot tore through her and knocked her back. One of the pistols, my Glock, clattered to the floor.
I dove for Caprice.
“Michael!” She pumped her legs, trying to back-scrabble away from the man, her eyes wide. “You have to—!”
“Bishop!” The man who had shot her took cover behind one of the pillars. “You are adrift! We are here on recovery! Override code initiating. Clearance level Alpha, code zero, two—”
“No!” The snarl on Caprice’s face turned to pure hatred. She lurched sideways, so that she could have a line on the man calling out the numbers and fired and fired and fired.
The man’s voice cut off with a wet, choking gasp.
Caprice collapsed on the floor, limp and lifeless.
“Caprice!” Seeing her fall felt like taking a hit in the gut with a sledgehammer. I stood there, stunned at this turn of events.
“Bishop.” The speaker was the man with the Alabama drawl.
I turned toward the singing flame, tears of rage running down my face. As I looked through it, I could see Gideon’s face, furious and stricken. Behind him, another man stepped forward into view.
I knew that man.
“That’s some horseshit right there, Hoss.” Wyatt Guthrie’s voice warbled through the odd window of flame. He looked nothing like himself, in the same way that Gideon was alien and strange.
“Wyatt?” The large man was easily my best friend and a complete barbarian. The number of nights we went out trashing bars and chasing women or just getting catastrophically drunk while tinkering with his collector cars were too numerous to count.
“Roger that, asshole.” He gave me a weary smile.
Like Gideon, this was not the Wyatt I knew. My friend had a complex device strapped to his back, something that looked like a cross of a 1940’s rivet gun and a flamethrower, with a sprinkling of science-fiction pulp technology thrown in for good measure. He looked grimly at me, and I noticed that he had an odd blue lens covering his left eye.
He aimed his weapon toward me but not at me. I heard it go off, an odd WHUF sound as he shot something through the flaming window. I looked down dumbly at the place near my feet where a metallic spike buried in the concrete.
The world boiled around me.
Everything false melted away like wax and shadows before the sun. Nanoseconds later, the headachy, buzzing sensation silenced. I felt cool quicksilver wash through my mind as my Crown became active and connected to the Lattice.
One of the most wondrous pieces of technology the Facility possessed was the Solomon’s Crown, the hub of my neuralware. It formed the centerpiece of an Asset’s technologic
al interface. The hard implant was grafted into my skull, linking to both my brain and spinal cord. The Crown was far more than a piece of equipment. It modified and replaced many of my neurological capabilities, as well as physically interfaced with my nervous system. In many ways, my Crown’s systems were as much a part of me as my bones, my heart, or my innermost dreams.
Unlike the usual slow drift to realization, information flooded my memory in an instant, making reality immediately apparent.
“Bishop, Michael,” I muttered, an automatic reflex. “Asset 108. Authorization code 020798361. System green.”
Incoming packet, Michael. Anya’s voice flowed like cool water in my mind. Asset 135, I am countermanding Bishop’s introduction protocols with your permission.
Copy that. Another familiar Asset, a young medic named Rachel, linked. I have his system live on my feed. He’s green.
My head jerked violently as Anya ported me a gigantic packet, straight to memory. For a nanosecond, I reeled, jackhammered in the frontal cortex by several quantum packets of data at once. Then every bit of confusion over Caprice’s odd explanations fell away. I understood the basic facts in the depths of my core.
Michael, I’m authorizing a system-wide acceleration on your Crown’s processing capabilities for three seconds. Rachel’s tone conveyed her terseness, as if she were focused on something else as she linked. We need you fully briefed as quickly as possible.
Copy that. I felt a mental twitch, the acceleration, when she augmented my Crown’s processing via the Lattice.
Knowledge poured like quicksilver through my mind. The facts flowed through me faster than thought, deeper than memory, as if they were things I had always known. They burned through me, each more alarming than the last.
As the data flickered through my consciousness, my eyes grew wide with disbelief.
The data was stunning.
4
August 1, 1998
Detroit, Michigan
Suffice it to say, I was no longer in the dark about Caprice or her intentions.
I had last touched the Lattice on the twentieth of July, 1998, at 8:01 PM. After that I had vanished from telemetry. Although the Facility monitors our lives while not on duty, an Asset in torpor is not typically their highest priority.
Typically.
Recently, however, odd attacks had begun against small Facility outposts worldwide. Not primary locations, but minor laboratories, research stations, or, in one rare case, a hub for the Lattice. The oddest thing about these attacks was that no one outside the Facility should be aware these structures even existed.
The Facility finally caught a break at Bunker 45, a small telemetry station located in Bangladesh. The unknown aggressors attempted to destroy the bunker, not realizing that Asset training was happening on site. After a brief firefight, the Facility learned that their mysterious foes were far more than they seemed.
They were Aberration 45171R—a phage species known as the Vyriim.
The Vyriim functioned like a parasite, hiding within their host imperceptibly and controlling their every action. The creatures, entirely alien to us as they were, unknowable both in motive and purpose, acted as scavengers of a sort, stealing the bodies of others to conquer their worlds as a part of some grand design.
Only a few months prior, I had been part of the initial team investigating an incursion of these aberrations. We discovered that they were invading our world, bending Rationality to the breaking point. My involvement made me a choice target, hence my disappearance.
Soon the Facility pieced together the nature of my kidnapping.
The Facility, barring the Vyriim’s ingress into Rationality, was the primary target of their invasion strategy. Our enemy had captured some of our precious and unique technology—technology that gave them invaluable intel regarding the Facility and our locations.
Me.
By taking me, the Vyriim had declared war. That fact had become a part of me as soon as Anya had sent her packet.
Thanks to Rachel’s augmentation, I could indulge myself in a leisurely three seconds to peruse Anya’s packets, bringing each fact to the forefront of my mind so I could create my own mental links between them.
Query: What is the theory regarding the Vyriim gaining access to Asset 108?
On June 22, Asset 108 was active on Dossier I63-1998. During that time, he was briefly infected with the Vyriim, a class seven aberration. At this time speculation implies they gained access to data regarding his torpor location and cover identity.
The truth behind that speculation became obvious now that I considered it. Caprice had probably been infected shortly thereafter.
During the acceleration, I became mindful of our current location, the Assets that had been tasked with my retrieval, and our extraction—
My breath caught as I realized the truth.
The man with the half-halo and the crossbow, the one who had stepped through the window of flame, was Asset 306, Liam Hunter. Caprice had slaughtered him, had filled his skull with shots from her Beretta.
Liam had been our Gatekeeper Asset. He was our way home. Without his conduit, we would have to fight our way out of these tunnels.
We were deep beneath the ruins of Detroit, in what the Facility believed to be a Vyriim stronghold. Our backs were against the wall.
Oh. I looked from Wyatt to where Caprice was stirred lethargically on the floor. Her eyes bore into me, black and filled with hatred. Oh fuck.
Yeah. Wyatt nodded. We’re in it deep.
“Fine.” Caprice’s voice was cold, alien. “We’ll do this your way.”
Her head trembled and jerked with odd, unnatural seizures. I watched her body writhe as tendrils of serpentine darkness roiled beneath her flesh. Whatever she had been, Caprice was no longer human. She had become an astral aberration, a monstrosity from beyond our world that had stolen the body of someone I cared for.
She hosted the Vyriim.
The abomination she’d become screamed, lunging for me. Her mouth widened into a horrifying maw, cracking as bone and tendon broke. Blood and viscera sprayed as the tentacles sliced mercilessly through her skin, exploding outward. They undulated around her, moving with a hypnotic grace. Alien tendrils edged with claws and eager suckers burst from her body and reached for me hungrily. The tentacled monstrosity, which still vaguely resembled a woman I had bedded, bore down on me.
I dove for the Glock on the floor, spun on my back, and took aim.
I fired and fired and fired.
The world became red.
Caprice screamed a bloodthirsty cry of horror and fury.
5
The abomination wailed when one of the bullets caught Caprice’s midsection, spinning her slightly and tossing her off balance. One of her tentacles, an inky, wet thing with a wicked piece of curved bone at the end, gurgled from her mouth, reaching for me. It wrapped around my gun arm, pulling it aside, ruining my aim.
Bishop, can you get to Liam’s Temporal Corona? Perhaps we can—?
A hail of gunfire from Caprice’s Vyriim allies cut Gideon’s link short. Apparently they had realized that our Gatekeeper Asset had changed the rules regarding space-time, creating a ready gate that linked me to Gideon’s side of the subway station.
Um. I glanced at the halo-device that had hung on the back of Liam’s head. The moment he had died, it had fallen. I’m a little wrapped up just now. The abomination edged closer to me, cracking Caprice’s face open wider as it did. Her eyes were a dark and terrifying shade of midnight.
Bishop. Rachel linked me again. System alteration imminent—viral mecha, type II.
Roger that, Rachel.
I wasn’t even done linking her when I felt the needle stab into my shoulder. She had shot the device through the flaming scarlet aperture.
“There we go.” I felt the viral mecha augmenting my system, a surge of strength, a tsunami of pure adrenaline. The tiny injectable dart of the Caduceus-class, a primarily medical module, augmented my endocrin
e system.
Rather than pulling against the tentacle wrapped around my arm, I feinted forward, slamming my free fist into the bloody remnants of Caprice’s pretty face.
The wet crunch felt satisfying.
The tentacle around my other arm relaxed just for a moment, long enough to pull my arm away. With my other hand, I reached out for the tentacle, attempting to yank it closer to me and drag Caprice’s body along with it.
Maybe if I could shoot her point blank, I could end this quickly.
However, I missed the grab as the tentacle withdrew into her gaping maw, even as two others reached for me.
“I should have ended you when I had the chance.” Caprice’s words bubbled, a gurgling mess. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
“Says the alien monstrosity.”
I grunted as one of the alien tendrils wrapped around my right arm again. Wincing as the small, hook-like teeth bit into my flesh, I struggled to bring the Glock to bear.
As I fought with her, another tendril caught my left arm.
We are experiencing a wide axiomatic fluctuation, picoseconds long but strong. Anya’s tone sounded distant, which meant she was processing a large amount of data.
Source? Gideon felt tense through his link.
Unknown. I could also feel Anya’s mounting frustration. Will apprise.
As I resisted Caprice, I noticed the Beretta hung loosely in her right hand. That struck me as odd.
My date is specifically not shooting at me. I struggled against the tentacles, even as I focused on linking to my cadre. She could be. Instead, it’s as if she’s just holding me here.
That’s been this whole party. Wyatt seemed frustrated. Jerk-offs weren’t trying to hit us earlier, just pin us in place.
That was true, I had noted it even while offline. What did it mean?
We should form up. We’ll rendezvous at Bishop. Go through the aperture. Gideon’s link interrupted my musing. Wyatt, I’m first, follow me. Place stasis fields for cover, fore and aft.