Trapped

by James Alan Gardner

  Finally, the acid, its spray traveling slower than bullets, sound, and fire. Acid splashing onto the flames. I couldn’t tell whether the acid would burn off harmlessly, or if the heat would make it work that much faster: disintegrating what was left of Annah’s corpse.

  Annah’s corpse.

  Then it was all over. The Keeper toppled forward across the furniture barricade, smoke pouring off his body. The gun clattered from his hands. Impervia leapt to the floor as if there was something she could do for Annah, but I remained frozen where I was.

  The Caryatid slumped beside me. Her face was damp; not tears, but perspiration. “Ugh,” she said. “Let’s not do that again.”

  I stared at her, shocked at her lack of feeling for Annah. Before I could speak, something fluttered down in the room: Impervia had just kicked Annah’s cloak and a few more pieces of clothing halfway across the floor. “Get down here, Phil!” Impervia snapped. “We need your first aid kit.”

  We?

  I leaned over the edge of the hole. Lying tight against the wall was Annah, stripped to her underwear and blood drenching her left arm, but still very much alive.

  She looked at me and smiled. “Keepers might be good with electrical things, but they sure are lousy shots.”

  I held her in my arms as Impervia bandaged Annah’s only wound: a bullet had passed in and out of her left biceps muscle, missing the bone and all major blood vessels. As she’d said, the Keeper had been a lousy shot—not too surprising for a man who’d lost one eye and was dazed from being battered unconscious. All but one of the bullets had gone wild, and the hypersonic stun-wave was off target too.

  Annah would still have been cremated by the flamethrower if not for quick work by the Caryatid—our mistress of fire had redirected the blaze back at the shooter before Annah was hit. (Good-bye, poor misguided Keeper.) That left only the acid, also badly aimed; Annah’s thick winter outfit protected her from the caustic splash, and she’d managed to peel off her clothes before the corrosive fluids ate through to her flesh. (Smoke still rose from the discarded bundle of cloth. Her long parka was pocked through with holes, as if chewed by huge moths. The black cloak that let her vanish in the dark had vanished itself—totally consumed by the ravaging chemicals.)

  But Annah was safe. Shot, yes, and trying not to wince as Impervia wrapped bright white bandages around her dark arm; but when I considered the alternative...

  I held her tightly and lowered my face against the top of her head. I didn’t cry; I just breathed in the warm fragrance of her hair.

  “Phil...Phil!” The Caryatid was shaking my shoulder. “We have to get going right now.”

  “Can’t we let Annah rest—”

  “No,” the Caryatid interrupted. “I heard voices up the elevator shaft. They’re whispering, but the shaft carries echoes a long way.”

  “Probably the Ring of Knives,” Impervia said. “No doubt, Mother Tzekich has been running around Niagara Falls, asking at every hotel if they’ve seen Sebastian and her daughter. She must have found someone who saw the two heading this way.”

  Either that, I thought, or Tzekich noticed the Falls had stopped flowing and came to investigate. She’d have seen Pelinor’s body in the roadway, immediately in front of the power plant. After that, it was just a matter of following our tracks.

  Annah put her hand on my cheek. She was bandaged now—looking painfully vulnerable in nothing but underwear, and probably weds: from blood loss—but her smile was genuine. “We have to go before they get here. I’m strong enough. Really.”

  I helped her to her feet. As I did, Impervia slipped off her own winter coat and draped it around Annah’s shoulders. “No,” I said, “I’ll give her my coat.”

  “She’s already got mine,” Impervia said. “I don’t need it—this place is heated. Anyway, a coat will only slow me down if the time comes for...punishing the wicked.”

  Impervia smacked her right fist into her left palm. I stifled a laugh. In the past twenty-four hours, Impervia had been kicked by fishermen, gut-punched by Hump, kicked by Zunctweed, tossed around by Sebastian...and still she was looking for a fight.

  Annah whispered softly in my ear, “That’s what happens to some people when they take a vow of celibacy.”

  When I stifled the laugh this time, I nearly hurt myself.

  I kept my arm around Annah as we moved forward; I don’t know if she really needed my support, but she didn’t push me away.

  As we passed the fallen Keepers, Annah suddenly stopped. I thought she just needed to rest—but she bent down and pried an Element gun from its dead owner’s grip.

  “You want one too?” she asked.

  Thinking of Pelinor and Myoko, I nodded. This was not just a quest; this was war.

  22

  HALF A LEAGUE, HALF A LEAGUE,

  HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD

  A single door led forward. It had once been equipped with a fancy electronic lock connected to a keypad. Half the keypad was missing now, along with a chunk of the door frame. Sebastian hadn’t wasted time on delicacy.

  Beyond lay a short corridor with a door in each side wall and another at the far end. All three doors had been blown off their hinges.

  The side doorways opened into locker rooms where the plant’s OldTech personnel had changed from street clothes into whatever work-suits they wore on the job. The lockers had been knocked helter-skelter, some tossed against the walls, others cracked open like eggs. I wondered if Sebastian had smashed around the lockers just to show he could...or because he’d begun to like pointless mayhem.

  Our Mend Caryatid had also developed a liking for displays of mystical force. Before this business started, I’d never seen her juggle flames any larger than a big candle—but now she’d built a blaze the size of a cow’s head, floating in front of us at chest height and pouring out heat like a furnace. No one dared step within five paces of it...no one except the Caryatid, whose face glistened with heat-sweat. She barely seemed to notice; she and her flameball just plowed ahead toward the next smashed-in doorway.

  The entrance to the main machine room.

  The place was as big as the academy’s main building: a single chamber more than four stories high and a hundred meters square, its ceiling supported by dozens of pillars. The walls and floors were painted kelp-green; they tinted the space like a sea-grotto, ripe and weedy. In OldTech times, the place must have been brightly lit—bank upon bank of fluorescent fixtures hung from the roof, with multiple light-tubes in each fixture. But the days were long gone when such tubes could be mass-produced. Three-quarters of the fixtures had no light at all, and the remainder each only held a single long bulb. The result was an oceanic dimness, a full-fathom-five gloom filled with shadows.

  Most of the shadows came from huge turbines held down by massive bolts that passed through the plastic floor and down into firmer footings below...possibly all the way to bedrock. The turbines were great hulking things with monstrous cooling fans, the actual turbine blades unseen under thick metal hoods. Water from the Falls ran through pipes beneath the false floor, rushing through the turbines and out again to the river. I had the impression this place should be deafeningly loud—roaring water, spinning metal, whirling fans—but the room had gone lethally silent. With the Falls dammed up, the tumult was suspended.

  We could see no movement. No one was close to the door we’d just entered, and our view farther in was blocked by the ponderous machinery. A single corpse lay halfway between us and the nearest turbine: a middle-aged woman in brown Keeper’s habit, facedown with a spill of moist white nuggets puddled on the floor beneath her. After choking her, the white goo had dribbled out of her mouth. The Caryatid dispatched a fireball to incinerate the alien curds; they burned with a hissing splutter, the only sound in the whole cavernous space.

  Impervia turned to the rest of us and mouthed, Wait; listen. Annah and I obeyed. The Caryatid didn’t. She gave her flames a moment to finish charring the last of the curds (filling the air with the smel
l of meat as the Keeper’s face roasted), then she and her fireball moved forward. We hurried after her, fanning out so we weren’t easy fodder for a single burst from an Element gun. Even Annah moved off on her own, wearing Impervia’s too-big coat and cradling the Element gun in her arms. When I tried to tag along behind her, she waved me off: all her concentration was focused on the room before us, eyes and ears straining for any sign of trouble.

  So we moved forward—like a platoon in enemy territory, walking silently in a line between trees. In our case, the “trees” were giant steel generators, two stories tall, their cooling fans motionless. The sparse lighting proved the station still had power, but it must have been coming from batteries; the turbines had all run dry.

  With so many individual turbines and so many pillars holding up the roof, the Keepers would have had plenty of places to hide for an ambush; but apart from the single corpse, there was no one left in the room. After a while, I realized the Keepers must want to avoid a firefight in the midst of their machinery: Element guns could damage the generators, or even bring down the ceiling. That would be disastrous, especially since this equipment was virtually irreplaceable—the turbines were OldTech originals, bearing the names of defunct manufacturers, covered with a hundred coats of paint, jury-rigged with patch-wires, emergency welds, and other obvious repairs to squeeze a few more years from antique rust-heaps. A battle in this room might put the final nail in the coffin of machines that were ready to be junked anyway.

  How long before this whole place ground to a halt from its own obsolescence? A few years, no more. If Jode had possessed any patience, the blasted Lucifer could have sat back and waited for this plant to stop on its own.

  But that wasn’t Jode’s way. A passive approach wouldn’t produce nearly enough death and suffering.

  I tightened my grip on the Element gun and continued forward.

  The far end of the chamber held another doorway...or rather a hole knocked into the room’s original wail. This wasn’t the work of Sebastian—this hole had clean edges painted the same green as the rest of the place. I suspected the hole had been dug when the Sparks took over the power plant, whenever that was.

  The opening was three paces wide and the same distance high, hidden from other parts of the room by nearby turbines. I appreciated the concealment. The Ring of Knives were somewhere to our rear; by now, they must have picked up Element guns of their own, plucked from the hands of dead Keepers. Our only protection was staying out of sight: scuttling into the hole in front of us before Elizabeth Tzekich could catch up. I had the strong suspicion we were retreating down a dead-end passage...but staying put was certain suicide.

  Jode and Sebastian were somewhere ahead. No doubt Dreamsinger was too—since she hadn’t joined the ambush at the elevator or taken a stand to prevent Jode from reaching the generator room, she must be farther on, protecting something even more important. An electric cage full of Lucifers? I didn’t know...but I’d soon find out.

  The hole in the wall led to a tunnel dug into Niagara bedrock—limestone, cold and gray. Rubber-coated cables as thick as my arm had been strung down the tunnel: dozens of them lined the walls, spaced a hand’s breadth apart and fastened to the rock on ceramic insulator mounts. They obviously fed power from the turbines to whatever lay ahead...and when the electricity was actually flowing, this tunnel must have been saturated with an awesome magnetic field induced by the inevitable fluctuations in so much current. I didn’t want to think what would happen to a living creature who wandered into the corridor while most of the energy of Niagara Falls coursed through such a small area. Is there such a thing as death by magnetism?

  Now, however, the power was dead. Not just because the Falls were shut off: each of the electric cables had been severed cleanly near the mouth of the tunnel...thick strands of copper sliced as easily as if they were melted cheese. It had to be Sebastian’s work—even if the Falls resumed their flow, the power lines wouldn’t be repaired any time soon.

  The tunnel had no built-in lights, so we were forced to depend on the Caryatid’s fireball—like Moses and the children of Israel guided by flame through the desert night. The fireball’s blaze would give us away to anyone watching from farther up the tunnel...but I was willing to take that risk. My nerves were too frayed to creep through pitch blackness into the mouth of heaven-knows-what.

  Anyway, the people watching from farther up the tunnel turned out to be dead.

  The first indication was the barrel of an Element gun dangling limply from a slit in the tunnel wall. A hand was attached to the trigger, but no person attached to the hand. When I peeked through the slit, I saw the remains of the shooter, but couldn’t tell whether the corpse was male or female, young or old.

  The body had been compressed to a bloody mass the size of a roast turkey. Its top still showed dark curly hair; near the bottom was a recognizable toe; but in between lay nothing except a mangle of flesh and robes, with slivers of bone sticking out at sharp angles. I could only conjecture that the air had closed around the gunner like a giant fist, then pressure had been applied down on the head, up on the feet, until the whole body was crushed into a ball.

  Blood had squirted like juice from a squeezed tomato. Death must have been quick and loud. I could almost hear the crunching of bones still echoing through the tunnel.

  And the wall had many more slits...with many more balled-up corpses. This was the kill-zone Annah had expected earlier: a shooting gallery where Keepers could massacre anyone coming up the tunnel. Gun-slits ran along both walls, offset from each other so there was little chance of the defenders on the left accidentally shooting the ones on the right. The crossfire would have been devastating. Any conventional invader would be stopped right here, bathed in bullets, fire, and acid.

  But the people behind the gun-slits had no protection against psionics. Sebastian talked to his nanite friends...and the Keepers’ resistance had literally been crushed.

  The tunnel extended another hundred meters. Its smell grew foul: blood and feces from the dead. A few more hours and the unventilated tunnel would be a nightmare of putrid gases; an open flame like the Caryatid’s fireball would surely set off an explosion. For the moment, though, the bodies were fresh enough that they didn’t constitute a danger—just a cloying stink that made my gorge rise.

  I was therefore glad when I saw light ahead—even though it meant we were approaching the final hell. One way or another, this would soon be over. Sebastian, Jode, Dreamsinger, and the Ring had all drawn together...with us in the middle.

  End of the line. End of the quest. I was drained enough to be happy it had finally arrived.

  The Caryatid gestured for her fireball to stay back so we could approach the tunnel mouth without attracting attention. Deep breaths all around...then we silently padded forward.

  The final chamber looked almost as big as the generator room, but lit more dimly: with a faint violet glow like a guttering candle-flame inside tinted glass. The light didn’t come from bulbs overhead; it trickled from the middle of the room, barely strong enough to reach the rock-hewn walls.

  Hush, hush, moving slowly: the Caryatid and Impervia stuck close to the right hand wall of the tunnel, while Annah and I took the left. We advanced until we could see the source of the light.

  The Caryatid’s “feeling” had been right. The power plant’s secret was a prison: a perfect cube, twenty by twenty by twenty meters, raised slightly off the floor. Its edges were sharp strands of violet light—so straight they had to be OldTech lasers, their beams crisp but with a grainy texture. Where the beams met at each corner, a small box of glass and chrome floated in the air...not suspended on wires or poles, but simply hovering as if supported by the light rays themselves. I suspected those boxes were the source of the lasers, each little machine projecting the light in razor-fine lines to the three adjacent corners. The faces of the cube, framed by violet, looked perfectly transparent—nothing there, as if you could simply step over the nearest edge-beam
and into the cube’s interior. I knew that couldn’t be true. A prison is still a prison, even if you can’t see the walls.

  Inside that prison cage loomed a shapeless black bulk: a mound as big as a house, its surface like coal dust in the lasers’ violet glow. As we watched, a ripple went through the heap, like a shiver in a horse’s flank. It made a sandy sound...as if the mass before us was constructed of small dry grains rasping against each other with the motion. One could almost mistake the thing for a dark lifeless dune, and the ripple we’d seen no more than the drifting effect of an errant breeze; but there was no breeze so deep underground, and the mound radiated a brooding intelligence that pressed against my skull.

  The thing in the cage was a living creature. And it was watching us.

  This was what Jode had come to release. An old-style unmutated Lucifer, of the kind Opal met in the tobacco field: dark and dry “like gunpowder” she’d said. And like gunpowder, this huge mound had dangerous explosive potential. It was a giant of Jode’s kind: perhaps a hive mother, a queen that could spawn thousands of shapeshifting young.

  But the creature in the cage wasn’t only a pile of dark grains. Dozens of incongruous objects protruded from its surface, like animal bones jutting out of desert sand. I saw long glass tubes; lumps of metal; cards of green plastic with wires embedded; and frosted white pustules that resembled lightbulbs.

  Lightbulbs. Like the five ones in Niagara’s hotels, or the burnt-out rejects in souvenir shops. They bulged profusely from the dusty mass, as if the monster was a garish casino marquee that had just been turned off. Was the caged Lucifer eating the bulbs...or was it extruding them? Producing them.

  Could Jode and its alien kind do more than mimic other people and things? Could they actually create such objects for real?