The Primary Protocol: A Cyberpunk Espionage Tale of Eldritch Horror (The Dossiers of Asset 108 Book 2)

by JM Guillen

  He spun then, laying down three spikes between us and the aberration. Every bit as terrifying as the vulture-winged nightmare was the wide-eyed gaze of Wyatt Guthrie and the tremble of his fingers.

  My friend quietly flipped the fuck out.

  “That and that and …” His fingers tapped madly at his keys.

  I didn’t know what he was whipping up, but I hoped it was enough.

  I didn’t have any magma on hand.

  The creature crouched and sprang, all horrifying grace, emaciated limbs and wicked talons.

  “Wyatt!” I scrambled backward and slipped.

  WHOMP!

  I fell flat on my back. My head exploded into starbursts, and all the wind left my lungs in one great gust.

  Silvery brilliance burst into life as Wyatt’s stasis field caught the edge of one of the horror’s reptilian feet mid-leap. Its mental cries echoed with fury as it flailed. Wings and claws battered mercilessly, flailing against the writhing knot of mucus-coated Vyriim that hung thick on the ceiling.

  As I stared straight up, dazed, the wounded Vyriim recoiled and spasmed, excreting what must have been liters of the thick, syrupy ichor, which rained down on Wyatt and me.

  It reeked like animal placenta and the vomit after a drunken night— but laced heavily with brine. It was that wet, oceanic rot that encompassed the basal smell of the Vyriim. The experience was sickening, nauseating in a primal way.

  But that was nothing compared to the sheer repugnant awfulness of the taste.

  “AACK!” I rolled onto all fours, spitting and trying not to retch. A large blob of the greasy secretion had fallen squarely into my mouth, where it burned like Kentucky moonshine and gasoline. I spat and swore, frantically trying to wipe it from my mouth, as the burning sensation intensified.

  “Hoss, stay back!” Wyatt ignited another of his spikes, and I could feel an intense flash of heat, even from where I crouched, gagging.

  I crawled back, my head swimming as I continued to spit out the fetid serum. It clung stubbornly, as if it wanted to clot in my mouth, like some curdled lifeblood.

  A wave of dizziness washed through me, and I almost collapsed. I felt like my blood was boiling. My eyes wrenched open far too wide.

  Unlike the sweet, narcotic warmth that had shimmered on my skin where the ichor touched it, swallowing the substance was like ingesting a putrid, psychedelic fire.

  I felt my mind blossom, like a rose of burning metal.

  “Wyatt…” My words trailed off as I looked around. Where exactly was I?

  Then the visions slammed into my mind, like sledgehammers of dream-wrought horror.

  I was in a wild and lonely wood with other children. They were nothing like me, I knew that. They always laughed behind my back, called me weird.

  But I had a secret. I could push any one of them, make them do what I wanted. Sometimes, I felt like the only real person in the world, while they were all shadows.

  Darkness fell as we wound our way back to where we slept.

  “Michael.” The man stood in the woods, gesturing to me. Was it Gideon? I thought it was very strange that he should be wearing such nice clothes this far out. Who wore a suit to go hiking?

  “Yes?” I frowned.

  He shook, nervous. Some kind of silver device wrapped around the side of his head. A gun hung from his hip, but it looked like something out of Star Trek.

  He looked like no man I had ever seen.

  “I need you to come with me, son. We’re leaving.”

  “Anya!” Did I see her limping past the hanging Drażeri in the blood red mists? I pushed myself up, trying to hold myself steady.

  Wyatt stood next to me, but he was focused on his gear.

  “Fuck you.” He spat the words, glowering at something beyond my range of sight. “Not this time, you aberrant piece of shit.”

  The tidal wave of phantasm crashed over me again.

  An odd whispering sound echoed in the trees, a sound like something that the mad might whisper in the dark of night. I could see eyes, furious eyes that burned with a feral hatred, as wisps of darkness coursed along on the wind.

  For a moment, they looked squarely at me. I could hear the whispers more clearly then, words of hatred and sharpness. I reeled backward from the force of it, dropping one of my guns.

  “The EquATiOn is NoT cOmPlEtE.” The words held venom that made my ears bleed. I almost stumbled from the weight of them, as they crushed me. “It is BeCauSE of yOur kINd. YoU wiLl rEPeNt, ManLInG. YoU wIlL kNow LAmEnTATiOn.”

  “I think he swallowed some.” Wyatt spoke to someone I couldn’t see.

  “I do not have the Caduceus, but there are Irrational spikes originating in his outer cortex.” The voice was soft, a woman’s. “They are diminishing.”

  “The people of the world must know the truth.” The man stood before a large window, silhouetted by fire. Outside, London’s skyline burned with malevolent, hateful colors.

  It was the boxes. I had been too late. They had been opened, and now all the ills of the world were crashing down upon us.

  “Why?” I was on my knees, my hands bound. “What are they going to do about it? They’re helpless either way.”

  “That’s what we were taught, Michael, but it is not the truth. The truth is that the Facility decided what we believed.” His voice was soft, almost kind. “Be honest with yourself, for once. What is true about your life? How do you know everything isn’t a lie?”

  “Michael.” Concern tinged Anya’s soft voice. “I need you to listen to me.”

  I reached for her face, her beautiful face, and ran my fingers along the side of it. I wanted to speak, wanted to say I understood, but I couldn’t form the words.

  The serum burned in my blood, burned like molten gold.

  “The Equation is unresolved.” The young woman looked at me, running her hand through her hair. She looked ragged, worn.

  I glanced around, trying to understand where I was.

  “What?” I felt thick, dreamy.

  “Are you paying attention? It’s right in front of your face!” She bordered on a wild, stormy anger. “It’s time. The Prime Variable involves time, but I can’t see it. That’s where everything falls apart.”

  “The Prime Variable.” The words seemed of epic importance, like something I should never, ever forget.

  “It can’t just be our world. The math doesn’t work out.” She twitched, looking out the window. “The numbers say it’s infinitely large. It’s rotten at the core.”

  I tried to listen, but her words made no sense. Instead, the eldritch, haunted beauty of her eyes drew my attention. The color of them was more than color; it was like the secret, forgotten name of God.

  Her eyes burned December blue.

  The visions began to fade then, and for the first time in an eternity, I felt my heartbeat. I blinked up at Wyatt, who was speaking. I struggled, trying to track what he was saying.

  “—easier if Rachel was here.” Wyatt sounded frustrated.

  WHUF.

  “Still, if we axiomatically alter the rate of human detoxification—”

  “No.” I pushed myself up blearily as the visions faded. “I’m fine.” I checked my system time, noting it had been less than two minutes since my rendezvous with Wyatt.

  “The Irrational spikes have dwindled.” Anya peered at me curiously. “It looked as if there was a psychoactive agent involved.”

  “There was. It felt like over an hour passed.” A thought struck me. I glimpsed around wildly as I remembered the faceless horror that had been bearing down on us. All that remained was one foot, trapped in silver. The rest of the area looked as if it had been torched with nuclear fire.

  “Wow.” I offered Wyatt an appreciative grin. “Good work.”

  “I do what I can.” Even though he smiled, Wyatt seemed weary.

  “How did the two of you get so far out here?” I blinked, the last vestiges of dreamy hallucination swimming through me.

  “Wyat
t and I went through your aperture, Michael, but we exited through the incorrect egress.”

  “Gideon sent us in while you were staring up at the ceiling, getting slimed.” Wyatt explained.

  “Oh...” It was completely possible. I had been juggling three apertures the moment I first saw the not-dead Drażeri open its eyes. Had I mislinked? Was my cadre scattered across a moist Vyriim hell because I had used the Gatekeeper incorrectly?

  “Once we were in the chamber, I noticed significant shifts in telemetry, which Asset Guthrie and I decided to explore.” She glanced behind me.

  I turned and spotted the small knot of Vyriim that swam toward us.

  Fuck.

  “We found the Broodwell, Hoss.” Wyatt tapped two keys on his keyboard, and the tangler started to hum. “It’s not far. We’ll need maybe two apertures or so.”

  “We?” I grinned at him. “Just give me the directional coordinates, doofus. I’ll get it done. You two need to meet up with the others.”

  “Not a chance, knucklehead. We’re with you.”

  “The Caduceus will have a fix on our systems, Michael. As long the Alpha remains with her, a rendezvous remains simple.”

  “In and out, Hoss.” Wyatt grinned. “Easy.”

  I looked at the two of them, standing by me in the center of that dripping, crimson hell. They both looked ragged, exhausted by what we had been through.

  But they weren’t beaten. They weren’t done, and neither was I.

  “Fine.” I ignited an aperture next to us, and it sang with scarlet fire. I looked over my shoulder at the approaching Vyriim.

  “Just give me the direction. Let’s get this done.”

  24

  Wyatt was correct; we located the Broodwell in two jumps. Near our insertion zone, it had been hidden within the thick curtains of mist. Using the apertures, we managed to lose the Vyriim that pursued me, so that, by the time we stood before it, we had a moment to prepare.

  The Broodwell itself formed a lesion within the ground, a cancerous pool of bubbling, putrid filth. The ichor within glowed with that hellish red light and burbled as if something rotted deep inside.

  “Telemetry is completely unreliable here.” Anya rapidly plucked at axiomatic strings and her head twitched slightly as she worked. “The only certainty is that the Broodwell itself is the source of the quantum superposition of this area.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Wyatt watched nervously behind us. “We don’t need telemetry to tell us this entire thing is bad news.”

  I tended to agree with Wyatt.

  Thousands of writhing, serpentine Vyriim covered the low ceiling and slid wetly against each other as they dripped their foul excretions into the well below them. Around its edge were mounds of the yellowed, crusty substance, cured where it had gathered on the shore into thick, rock-like formations.

  Tentacles the size of tree trunks guarded the pool on either side, undulating as they stretched forth from the ichor. Dozens and dozens of frail, emaciated Drażeri hung like decorations around them.

  I remembered Caprice’s threats about never finding death and shuddered. How long had these servitors been hanging there?

  Guardian tendrils loomed around the well, absolutely horrific. I couldn’t imagine approaching that putrid well; just one of those gigantic tentacles could crush me easily. I had no doubt that just being near it would trigger a quite violent response.

  Fortunately we never needed to step near the thing.

  “In and out, right?” I terminated my apertures and grinned at Wyatt and Anya as I ignited another next to us, then a second, horizontal one over the Broodwell. Instantly, the two linked up. “Unless you wanted to take a bath?” I asked Wyatt.

  “Not today, Hoss.” He spat, still alert to signs of danger. “Get it done.”

  I peered into the small container and shook my head at the Vyriim larvae, still furiously attempting to attack me. As I watched, its tail shook like a rattlesnake even as it regarded me with one tiny, malformed but baleful eye.

  “I’m afraid this is goodbye, you little shit.” Firmly I grasped the top of the container and gave it a twist, just not enough to completely remove the top—not yet. The last thing I needed was the murderous little monster launching itself at my face when we were this close to success.

  Then, I gazed through the aperture into the well.

  The ichor glistened, translucent. Through its murk, on the bottom an organism unlike anything I had ever seen pulsed with a feverish intensity. My brain sought to compare it to something familiar, like a serpentine brain that had sprouted a horrific garden of pseudopods.

  But that still didn’t do it justice. It was lumpy and organic like a brain, but I couldn’t truly see its shape. When it shifted as I squinted at it; I realized that one of the gargantuan tentacles connected to it.

  No, I concluded. They all were. Like a massive, entangled tarantula, its legs reached from one world into another. This aberration surely must have been dreamed up by some mad, forsaken god.

  Those grotesque tendrils slithered with kind of a horrific unity in my direction, and I realized that even though I couldn’t see any eyes on it, the horror knew very well I was there.

  All along my back and neck, even in my mouth and throat, every centimeter of skin that had contacted the ichor tingled and thrummed.

  “Hoss?” Wyatt’s tone sounded concerned.

  “What are you doing, Michael?” Caprice’s voice wasn’t simply a phantasm in my mind, I would swear it. Nothing, not the clothes on my body nor the ground beneath my feet, had ever seemed so real. “I think you may be confused.”

  “You know full well what I’m doing.” I raised one hand toward Wyatt, cautioning him.

  Anya plucked at her telemetry and gave the tiniest frown.

  “I’m killing you. I’m ending this,” I snarled.

  “No. You have been misled. This is not our death. It is far worse than that.”

  “You deserve worse!” I wrenched at the top of the container, but it seemed stuck.

  “This is worse than rape, than genocide. You don’t know what you have in your hand. You are stealing everything we are!”

  “Good!” The raw vehemence, the bile, thundered through me. “That’s what you do, after all. You stole who I was, who Caprice was!”

  “Caprice is still here, Michael.”

  Oh. She was.

  I could see her, could feel her, in the most intimate ways. Every memory I had ever possessed was crafted from her smiles, from the sultry sweetness of her laughter.

  Wait. Was that right? I mean, we hadn’t actually been in love, had we?

  Some small sliver of my mind watched the emotions bubbling through me, feelings of loss and emptiness. My skin tingled with it as the dark wave of emotion washed over me.

  A deep and powerful melancholy seized me, a sadness I couldn’t place. Some wracking, hopeless loss roiled inside me.

  What had all this been for? Was I really going back to a life without her?

  “Come back, Michael. You can still choose Unity.”

  “What about her choice?” Tears threatened, but I held them back. None of this had been her fault! She had just been someone who got caught in something that she couldn’t understand. “No choice.” Despair wove through my voice. “No choice at all.”

  “She misses you, Michael. You don’t need to live without her.”

  I looked down at the squiggling larvae. When had I gotten the lid off? Hadn’t it been stuck? I blinked, realizing that my mind felt slow, glazed over with a sweet numbness. I turned to Wyatt, a move that took me a mortal age.

  This was wrong. When had things gone wrong?

  He stood to my left, his face wet from the ichor that had drizzled down from the ceiling. His right eye was vacant, unfocused and open wide. Coming up behind him, I observed the Vyriim, easily two dozen of the small clutches, swerving through the air toward us.

  “No.” I turned further, only to see Anya, her pretty face similarly gla
zed with ichor. The idea occurred to me that we had been standing here a very long time.

  “Come home, Michael.” Caprice’s voice seduced. “It’s time.”

  “I have no choice.”

  Through the aperture, the pseudopods writhed in the mire. They seemed eager, somehow, victorious.

  No. Not today.

  I dropped the container in. The psionic cords, which the thing in the Broodwell had wrapped around my mind like bolas, shattered the moment the larvae touched the ichor.

  I slammed the apertures closed.

  As if great gears turned beneath the cavern, a grumbling, grinding sound thundered through the floor, signaling inevitable change.

  The entire world rippled then, as if all existence was a deep pool and I had just tossed in a stone. The ripple passed over and through our bodies, a sensation similar to mad, whispered secrets echoing through my skin.

  Simultaneously, the suspended Drażeri screamed and writhed in some incomprehensible mixture of agony and ecstasy.

  “Hoss, what—?” Wyatt stumbled as he looked around.

  The Broodwell began to steam and then to boil. The tendrils around it whipped about wildly, and Vyriim began to fall from the ceiling, twitching and spasming violently as they splashed into the pool.

  “We’ve got to go.” I turned from him to Anya, who stared at her hand as if fascinated. “Now. We’ve got to go right n—!”

  CRACK!

  I hadn’t even finished speaking before the thunderous crash shuddered through my body. It wasn’t a sound, more a sonic boom that I could only feel at the very edge of my mind. It was as if I stood on a long-frozen floe of ice, floating on some dark and desolate sea, and the thick, surrounding ice fractured.

  When it came again, Wyatt’s expression grew stunned.

  “I felt that in my bones. I think you’re right, Hoss. It’s quittin’ time.”

  I fired an aperture, but as Anya tapped my dislocated shoulder. I winced out of reflex, anticipating pain that never came.

  “If we use the Corona to create our exit, we may not rendezvous with the rest of our cadre.”