by Tim Lebbon
There was a weak moon-cast shadow that should not be there, because there was no tree or rock to form it. Once again, it moved.
“Melinda?” she said quietly. “What do you see?”
The other woman took another step across the breach floor and lifted her binoculars. No closer! Holly thought, panic prickling her scalp.
“Something coming,” the biologist confirmed. “Can’t see what. But… it’s bigger than anything we’ve seen.” She looked back at Holly and her eyes were alight with excitement.
Holly dashed up the two steps to her desk and initiated another systems check of the eradicator. “Let’s get ready,” she said, louder than she’d intended. She watched the viewing screen, waiting for the shape to arrive. Satpal glanced over, then turned back to his own bank of computers. The four guards stood in their assigned positions, in two pairs. All was well.
Down by the breach, Melinda crouched with her camera.
I wish Vic was here, Holly thought. She should have contacted Jonah then, told him that something unusual was happening. This was no bird or insect. She should have called Vic as well, but there was no guarantee that he had even arrived back at his room. He might have returned to the common room to find another drink from the canteen’s small bar. So she waited instead, ignoring established protocol to give her old boss the sleep he so needed, and to avoid possible conflict with the man she probably still loved.
3
Even a third of a bottle of good Welsh whisky couldn’t grant him sleep.
Jonah lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He hadn’t turned out his light when Vic had left, and the room was bathed in sterile fluorescence. The crystal tumbler was propped against his side, empty, and the bottle on his bedside table taunted him with its liquid gold.
He’d left Wales the year his dear Wendy had passed away, taken from this world by a cruel cancer that none of his love or anger could counter. He had raged and railed against such unfairness when he was alone, maintaining his composure when he read aloud from the newspaper as Wendy drifted in and out of a morphine-fuelled sleep. And when she was gone he had continued to rage on his own, except this time there had been no one to compose himself for. Three months later he was living in the USA, and three months after that he met Bill Coldbrook.
Coldbrook had already received approval for his project by then, and while politicians politicised and funding bodies negotiated funding, Bill was already setting up temporary base in a trailer high in the Appalachians, collecting together his books and documents, planning the project scheme by scheme, and contacting people who he wanted to poach from other projects to help him. Jonah came to meet Bill through a mutual friend of theirs at the Harvard-Smithsonian, and the thought of retiring to the mountains—immersing himself in such radical physics that many regarded it as science fiction—had appealed to a grieving Jonah.
From the day when he and Bill met, their relationship had felt like that of two brothers. They’d bickered and argued, brought out the best in each other, drank and raged, and sometimes Jonah had believed they were two elements of the same mind. Yet, ironically, the catharsis that Jonah had believed he might find in such a project was not forthcoming.
His disbelief in an afterlife had never pained him until he’d met Bill. The American had seen a like mind in Jonah, not only a brilliant scientist but a man with passion in his heart and disaffection simmering just below the surface that he presented as a public front. And Bill’s talk of the multiverse and all it might be—world upon world, a perpetual variation of quantum universes echoing with each and every decision taken or moment passed—had fuelled a frustration in Jonah’s heart. His religious friends were content in their beliefs, and Jonah slowly found himself seeking his own. This was no deity that lured him, or teased him, or subjugated him with promises of pain and pronouncements of sin. It was a faint hope—vain, though he knew; naive, so Bill told him—that, in one of those endless worlds, Wendy might live still.
It’s not like that, Bill would say, and Jonah would nod because he knew his new friend was right. But at night, lying alone in bed in a nearby hotel and nursing the early insomnia that would grow to haunt him, he couldn’t convince himself that possibilities were not endless.
Jonah was no romantic. He was no crazed Ahab, seeking the impossible in an ocean of infinities. But his long-dead wife was still with him in a way that his atheistic heart had never dreamed possible.
He sighed and sat up. If he couldn’t sleep, he might as well have another drink. He picked up the bottle and poured, and it took a few seconds for him to register that the soft chiming came from his bedside phone, not the glass.
“What?” he snapped, snatching up the receiver. He fumbled and dropped it, having to lean over and retrieve it from the floor. His vision swam. Damn it, he was more drunk that he thought. “Yes?” he asked again, holding it to his ear.
“—coming through, and it’s the biggest yet. I wasn’t going to call you, didn’t want to cry wolf, but…”
“Holly?”
“Jonah, did I wake you?”
“Yes,” he said, trying to focus. He placed his tumbler on the table and stood, leaning against his bookcase. “What’s coming through?”
“Sorry. I wanted you to sleep…” Holly trailed off, but in the background Jonah heard activity in Control. Someone shouted something—Melinda, he thought—her voice excited and loud. Someone else spoke in the distance, his voice calmer and more troubled.
“Holly, what’s going on?”
“—eradicator is fine, fully charged,” Holly said, though it wasn’t to him.
“But it should have fried it a couple of seconds ago,” a male voice said. It sounded like Alex, the guards’ captain.
“Holly?” Jonah said.
“It doesn’t fry things,” Holly said, and Jonah smiled because she was so defensive of her work. “Melinda, can you see—?”
“Biped,” Melinda said, her voice high and shrill.
Biped, Jonah thought. Jesus Christ, a human might be coming through, and she’d held back calling him because she wanted him to bastard sleep?
“Holly!” he shouted, and he heard fumbling as she brought the phone to her ear again.
“Jonah, it’s okay, everything’s fine. Can’t make it out yet, it’s dark, moving strangely, some sort of ape, I think, and—”
“That’s no fucking ape!” another guard said.
“—and it’s almost at containment. Melinda’s trying to wave it back, doesn’t want it eradicated because—”
“Trying to wave it back how? Just how close is she to the breach?”
“She’s… it’s all under control, Jonah. But you might want to get here.”
“Apes don’t walk like that!” the same voice shouted.
“Holly, how is it walking?” There was a thud as the phone was placed on a desk, then the unmistakable rattle of a keyboard being worked. “Holly? Do you need to sound the alarm?” But she did not reply.
“Melinda, not so close!” Holly called. And then quieter, to someone standing close by: “Yeah, look, it’s okay, fully charged and operational.”
“Then why hasn’t it fried it?”
“I told you, it doesn’t—”
“Positions!” Alex shouted, and Jonah heard a metallic click. Gun being cocked?
“Holly?”
A rattle, then Holly’s excited breathing. “It’s fine, Jonah. Melinda’s waving it back. I think it sees her! I think it understands!”
“You should have called me! I’m coming to Control now.”
“Okay, but it’s fine, Jonah.”
In the background, running feet and more excited chatter.
“You’ll have to contain it!” Jonah said. There was no answer, because Holly had put the receiver down again. And as he hung up on his end, he wondered why he’d felt the need to say that. The eradicator would kill any living thing that attempted to ford the breach. The robotic sample pods within the containment field would gath
er it. There was nothing to contain.
* * *
Outside, Jonah clicked his door shut and hurried along the corridor, joints aching. He was angry at Holly for not calling him but it was mixed with a flush of excitement. Biped, Melinda had said, and that implied so much. For three days he’d been monitoring the samples collected and classified by Melinda, and most of them had been, if not completely familiar, then at least recognisable. And for those three days he had been wondering, How similar is that Earth to our own? He’d seen the same look in everyone’s eyes at some point, the same question: Is there anything like us? It was an idea both terrifying and thrilling, and it was the one answer he sought before he’d even consider authorising extraction of any of the samples.
After that, of course, would come the preparations to send someone through.
He hurried along the corridor curved around the central core, his footsteps echoing. There were no other sounds. Most staff were sleeping right now, those of them who weren’t were down in Control. He passed the side corridor that housed Vic’s room and paused, wondering if he should wake him. Probably. But he moved past and entered the staircase instead. Holly had probably called Vic already, and Jonah wanted to reach Control as quickly as possible.
At the bottom of the stairwell he accessed a security door, leaning his chin on the eye-scanner rest. The door hissed as it opened and the air quality suddenly felt different.
More loaded.
He paused inside the door and looked along the hallway. It was twenty yards long, and for the final five yards one wall was made of solid glass, offering a panoramic view of Control’s curved, terraced layout and the breach floor below. The light flickering at that window was the dancing electric blue of the eradicator.
As Jonah’s heart skipped a beat, Coldbrook’s main alarm began to sound.
4
Holly felt as if she were being watched. It was probably the phone she hadn’t hung up again, with Jonah on the other end. And even though she knew he’d be on his way by now, still the feeling remained until she hit the alarm button. But by then everything had gone wrong.
The thing stood on their side of the breach, within the containment field and the influence of the eradicator, but still standing as well. Maybe it’s dead and just won’t fall down, Holly thought, but she could see movement in its limbs, and its lank hair swayed as it swung its downturned head a few degrees in either direction. It was naked, its exposed skin dark and cracked. Clumps of hair clung to its body and its genitals, though shrivelled, were obviously a man’s.
When it had first come through, Satpal—standing close to Holly now, eyes wide in wonder—had called it humanoid.
“No,” Melinda had said, “it’s human.”
But there was something so very wrong with that assessment.
As the intermittent wail of the alarm filled Control, Holly’s hand hovered over the manual eradicator controls which she’d already turned to full charge. Enough to kill a rhino five times over. One more time, she thought and she pressed the round red button. The breach flashed as the eradicator discharged. Sparking blue light wormed through the thing’s hair and illuminated the deep dry cracks in its skin, a jigsaw of wounds and fractures. It should be dead, if not from the eradicator then—
Because of those wounds.
“Charge it again!” Alex shouted, gun aimed.
“That was full charge,” Holly said, and Melinda turned to her, wide-eyed. Full? her look said. Holly nodded, then looked back at the intruder. The eradicator was designed to cease brain activity and negate electromagnetic function, halting hearts, freezing muscles, shifting a thing from living to dead in a matter of seconds.
Their intruder had taken three full charges, and still stood.
“It takes one more step, open fire,” Alex commanded the other three guards. Holly knew that they wore throat mics and inner-ear receivers, so their voices would easily carry over the harsh noise of the alarm.
Jonah and the others will come running, she thought, glancing back at the glass wall beside the main entrance door.
And Jonah was there, pressed flat against the glass like a kid at a sweetshop window. He looked past her and Melinda at the intruder, and in his eyes Holly could make out the sudden terror that they had done something dreadful. By pressing the alarm she had initiated a partial lockdown of Coldbrook, securing Control and the breach floor within it from the rest of the facility. Jonah could look, but he couldn’t touch.
“It’s not human,” she said. “It can’t be.”
“Stay back!” Melinda said, holding up her hands in a warding-off gesture. She was ten steps from the visitor. “Stay away!” And as though taking her words as a signal, it started forward again. A dry rasping sound accompanied its movement. It shambled, feet dragging, head down, hands barely moving, as if at the end of a walk hundreds of miles long. The intruder had not seemed a threat until the eradicator failed to stop it, and even then Holly had frantically checked the settings and levels of the device she had designed and built. But pressing the alarm button had felt like an admission, and from then on Holly’s fear had been building. Charging, like the eradicator. Ready to burst.
Melinda did not move back and, as the man from the other world came within three feet of her, gunfire erupted.
Bullets thudded into the shape, its face still turned down but hands raised, reaching for Melinda as if she had always been his goal. Holly saw the bullets flick at his hair and blast bits of him across the breach floor, shattering him as he moved between this universe and another, and she thought, Have we just declared war?
But then he reached Melinda, and in a surreal gesture she held out her arms as if to prevent him from falling. He bore down, driving her to the floor beneath him. He started to scratch and bite. And when Melinda’s scream came it echoed Holly’s, their own alarm filling Control with a very human fear.
“Oh, God!” Holly said, a plea in her voice because she didn’t know what they had done. The bullets hit him and ripped him, but he’s still—
The shape, previously slow and lethargic, was now frenzied in its movements. It used both hands to bat away Melinda’s arms, which she had raised over her head to protect her face, and darted its head down at her like a bird pecking seed. Even behind the shouting and gunfire, Holly heard the unmistakable sound of teeth clacking together.
“Help her,” she said hopelessly, and the guards were doing their best. Alex and another had advanced and were kneeling, trying to adjust their angle of fire so that they didn’t strike Melinda. The other two were carrying a long table down the steps towards the breach floor.
Melinda screamed as the man bent his face into her chest and starting biting. He shook her like a dog, lank hair flailing, and Holly closed her eyes and looked away as she saw blood flying, spattering down across the floor from his teeth. Why don’t they just shoot?
Gunfire erupted again, several short bursts from two weapons, and when Holly opened her eyes she looked directly up at Jonah. He was still pressed against the window, his face slack. He looked from her to Melinda and back again, and Holly wanted so much to tell him that it wasn’t his fault.
Protocol dictated that Control must now remain sealed for three days. All functions would be transferred to Secondary, a room two floors up on Coldbrook’s top level that had full audio and visual access to Control and the breach, and from where Jonah and the others would be able to monitor what happened. And however appalled and guilty Jonah looked, Holly knew that he would follow protocol.
The gunfire ceased, and for a moment Holly could not turn around because she was terrified of what she would see.
“Ohshitohshitohshit,” Satpal said. She glanced sidelong at him, saw his hands pressed to his face, fingertips trying to massage the truth from his mind. He looked at her and his expression did not change.
She turned around. The man was slumped on top of Melinda, unmoving. Part of his head had been blown away. There was blood splashed across the concrete floor,
and bullet holes pocked the framing around the breach. Did we shoot into there? she thought, and she looked everywhere but at Melinda, because she didn’t want to see. Though the man bore terrible wounds, only his ruptured skull seemed to bleed.
The two guards with the table used it to shove the dead intruder to one side. Holly heard him hit the floor, a sibilant sound like something dry, not wet. His head looked like a ruined coconut.
“What do we do?” one of the guards asked. “Do we…?”
“Not sure there’s much point,” Alex said. “She’s already stopped moving.”
Oh no, Holly thought, and she looked directly at the biologist for the first time. The man had made a mess of her, and from twenty feet away she was glad she could not make out the details. Melinda’s face had vanished in a mess of meat, her throat had been ripped out, and the pool of blood beneath her was spreading.
“Holly!” Jonah’s electronic voice said. He was using the intercom. There was a button on Holly’s desk, but right now she didn’t know what she could say. Melinda was dead. Blood still trickled from her ravaged throat, but it no longer flowed because her heart had stopped.
“Miss Wright,” Alex said, “we need to see if anything else is coming through, check the status of the—”
“Okay!” Holly said, pleased to have something to do. She sat at her station and looked at the large high-definition viewing screen to her left. She used her computer keyboard to run through all eighteen views available to her and, when she was confident there was nothing large moving over there, she set about checking the breach containment. All appeared well. The eradicator was back to full charge, sensors were all online, and the robot pods were fired up to collect anything.
But the man had still come through.
We’ve got to shut it down, she thought. Seal the breach and…