Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine

by Andrijeski, JC

  Sliding into the telekinetic structures, he activated them the instant his light coiled into the mechanism of the door.

  Like with the guards, he cracked it crudely, retracting his light in the same millisecond. He’d done it faster than with the guards…but still found his heart beating loudly in his chest by the time his vision cleared and his hand fell on the outer door.

  The panel had already separated from the frame.

  The crack emitted a brighter sliver of that gold-tinged light. Revik noticed only then that the gold light appeared to come from the very walls and floor of the staircase. So something organic lived here after all…just so low-level in aleimic structure that Revik’s light couldn’t pick it up as a living being without reaching out.

  Taking a deep breath, he shoved the panel inward with his fingers.

  He followed with his body immediately when no alarms went off…and when no secondary security measures shot at him or tried to sever his arm.

  Pushing the panel closed behind him, he remained by the door once he got inside.

  He found himself coming to a dead stop in fact, staring up at a much higher ceiling than he’d expected, despite the height of the stair flights between landings. From what his eyes told him, the cavernous room had to encompass close to two of those flights.

  Revik’s eyes scaled up, taking in the height of the enormous, pale gold and green vats that stretched in over a dozen perspective-altering rows in front of him and to each side.

  The ones nearest to him appeared to scrape the ceiling, and shimmered with so much organic power they pulsed in steady but non-synchronistic bursts, making it difficult for his eyes to focus on them. Tapered at the bottom, so that they appeared to be standing on end like squat tops, they nearly touched between the aisles, too.

  The room smelled faintly of sulfur although he could tell some of that smell was being scrubbed by air vents situated in long lines above the vats themselves.

  Despite not liking the perspective of the hanging vats, or the smell, Revik found himself walking down the first of those rows. His heart pounded again, but it didn’t feel like claustrophobia that time. He almost wondered if he was having a physical reaction to the vats themselves.

  He suspected he knew what was in them, although he didn’t scan to find out for certain. That would take more of his light than a snapshot or a shield, so he didn’t want to risk it until he had a damned good reason. He’d already more than halfway decided to wait until he was well and truly caught to begin conducting scans for real.

  Until then, he would focus on getting as far in as he could.

  Even so, the similarities with other organic storage and cooking facilities didn’t escape him. In particular, Revik remembered sharing memories with his wife after the op against the Registry in São Paulo, Brazil. He remembered the vats filled with organic machine composites that Allie described to him, and what they’d looked like inside that warehouse-like building she and Wreg infiltrated under the Black Arrow main offices.

  That those vats stood right outside the room housing mainframe storage for the official Seer Registry angered all of them…Wreg especially.

  Allie hadn’t been angry though.

  Anger wasn’t the word for what Revik felt on her light the one time they’d talked about it. She’d been sickened by it, light-sick…depressed. She almost hadn’t been able to talk about it at all. She finally shared her memories with him, in lieu of having to voice her impressions aloud. She answered all of his follow-up questions during the debrief, but didn’t offer anything additional.

  It had hurt him, that pain on her.

  At the same time, it moved him past where he could express. Fighting the memory out of his light when it wanted to combine with what he’d felt off her that morning, Revik took snapshots of the vats with his light, if only to distract himself.

  Scanning the rows with his eyes, he tried to decide if anything else lived in the warehouse-like room or if he would have to go back the way he came.

  In the end, he decided to risk continuing forward.

  He walked for what must have been twenty minutes before he could see the other end of the narrow aisle. Marking the location of a door up ahead, about twenty feet past the last two vats in his aisle, Revik decided to continue forward again. As much distance as he could put between himself and that entrance by the horse barns, the better.

  As he reached the door, he pulled the majority of his aleimi back behind a second layer of shielding. Stretching out his hand, he grabbed hold of the door handle.

  It wasn’t locked.

  His mind immediately dismissed the room’s contents.

  Even so, he pushed the handle down and walked through, igniting floor lights once he’d stepped inside the secondary chamber. Closing the door behind him, he glanced up, realizing at once that the new room had a much lower ceiling than the cavern he’d just left. Low enough that his breath clenched, bringing his eyes up to the mirrored sheen of organics.

  Dark green in color, they were so filled with living material they rippled, reacting to his eyes and light as he took in their length.

  No wonder they hadn’t bothered to lock the door.

  The damned machine might have even let him in.

  Even so, he hesitated, wondering if the organic might try to kill him if he crossed the room without authorization of some kind. He knew he’d need his light soon, either way. He had no idea where to even begin looking in a place this size without his light…not without physical specs, some kind of map or place to start.

  He was running out of time.

  Either way, he’d be caught; he knew that, so that wasn’t his primary concern. Given what he’d left upstairs, being caught was a given. Being strategic about when and how he used his light had more to do with extending the amount of time he had down here.

  Taking a breath, he pushed off the wall.

  He began to walk, cautiously at first, then with more purpose when the sentient wall only followed him, rippling along behind him like a curious puppy. It didn’t try to do anything to him, or even scan him really, although Revik had been bracing for both.

  He found the lack of any active protocol curious.

  From proximity touches with his aleimi, meaning what he could feel without actively scanning it, it felt almost like the wall had yet to be programmed with a specific purpose.

  Which meant this part of the complex might still be under construction.

  Or else no one had flipped the “on” switch yet.

  Apart from the organic, the room was featureless and relatively shallow. He could feel storage bins along the walls from contact with the organic and noticed protective suits lived inside a semi-transparent case lining one wall.

  Those could be for workers or techs on the vats he’d just left behind. But why have such a high-grade organic guarding over what amounted to a storage room?

  He reached the next wall, which was also featureless.

  He could feel from the organic that something lived on the other side.

  After the barest hesitation, he reached out with his bare hands, touching the living material to see if he could find a way through without going into the Barrier. After feeling over the strangely soft, mirrored green surface for a few seconds––politely, or as politely as he could be without engaging the sentient directly––he found an access panel.

  That one seemed to have its security protocols disengaged, too.

  His nerves rose slightly as the next door slid into the organic wall, giving him a view of a multi-leveled room covered in metal catwalks. Unlike the room he stood in now, most of the new room appeared to be dead metal.

  He could see four visible levels and the ceiling seemed to be even higher than what he’d seen in the vat room, although it was broken into multiple floors. His mind tried to wrap around the architecture of that, but he let that go after a few seconds, too. He was starting to think there were active constructs down here, though. He even wondered if the org
anic room had turned him around without him noticing, spitting him out on another level.

  He’s seen design specs for that kind of thing before.

  Well, he’d talked about them…specifically when he worked for Salinse. They’d thrown around ideas regarding design parameters for a new base, including added security features with complex constructs. Revik also remembered a brief discussion of a platform-type elevator with enough organics to confuse the motion as it rose and fell.

  It might even have been his idea.

  Stepping fully into the next room, he caught hold of the guard rail as he balanced on the catwalk, looking down. Some kind of generator room.

  He could feel hydro power, some solar, gas…

  And what felt like a full-sized fusion generator.

  So this facility had some serious fucking power capabilities––more than what lived aboveground in the City, for sure––which had to be another indirect indication of its size. He heard a few machines humming, but still saw no people. Most of the smaller, solar, gas and hydro generators didn’t appear to be switched on either.

  This room mostly appeared to be waiting, too. Dormant, maybe.

  He was starting to wonder why it was so easy to get in here.

  He also wondered if he was being given a tour, versus conducting an infiltration.

  He walked cautiously around the catwalk to the other side of the room. Opening the door there, he found himself in another machine room. The door beyond that one led into another of those longer, warehouse-sized caverns, only this one appeared to be set up to grow crops in stacked, glass-enclosed planters that rose up to the ceiling, most of them accessible only via moving platforms on organics and hydraulics.

  He walked to the end of that cavernous space and came across another organic room.

  That time, he didn’t just cross over to the other side.

  He stood in the middle of it instead, thinking.

  Still toying with the idea of the moving platform in his head, he decided to experiment. Opening his light the barest amount, he sent out a pulse of intention.

  Kindly direct me to the nearest high security areas, he sent politely to the organic. What is the best hidden secret down here, friend? Can you show me?

  The room pulsed with an agreeable light.

  Again Revik found himself thinking of a dog, or some other good-natured animal who wanted to please him.

  He didn’t feel the room move.

  Even so, when the lights flickered a second time, he glanced around him and saw one of the walls glowing faintly. More of the organic pooled on that side as he watched, rippling in that direction like a lit arrow on the floor.

  Clicking under his breath and smiling in spite of himself, Revik began to walk.

  Once he reached the wall, he didn’t need to touch it…it opened on its own.

  That brought another shiver of nerves, but also a flicker of excitement.

  Sending a pulse of thanks to the wall, he felt a ripple of pleasure off the organic as he walked through the narrow opening. Once he’d reached the other side, he felt the shift behind him and turned in time to see the opening in the wall evaporate.

  He stared at that blank space, feeling his elation falter.

  Well, he was officially at the point where he had no idea how to get back.

  Not without help, either via his light or something else.

  The train of thought died as soon as his eyes began to scan the walls and floors of the new room. Remembering his words to the sentient elevator, he looked around at where the being had brought him. For a few seconds, his mind couldn’t make much sense of what he was seeing.

  Low-ceilinged, most of the room was dark, and outside of his visual range.

  In front of him stood a round, raised platform, dimly lit and with a panel on a stand, what looked like a handprint scanner. Revik had no reason to think it would let him in…or even that it wouldn’t ID and then kill him if he put his hand there.

  He felt a pull to place his fingers and palm there anyway.

  Feeling that pull strengthen, some part of him balked.

  It crossed his mind again to wonder just how much he was being manipulated right now…by whatever construct or organics might live down here, by the construct they’d built over the City above…by Menlim himself. He’d known for awhile he was being affected by the Dreng’s constructs, despite Menlim adhering to at least the bare letter of the law in terms of their agreement. Simply working and living here was affecting him.

  Lately, he’d felt that more in small ways than large ones.

  His moods. His desire to drink. His desire to fuck…even to be hit.

  The aggression that rose in his light, the anger that didn’t entirely feel like his. The ease with which he slid into negative head spaces. The ease with which he grew paranoid…and cynical…and contemptuous of humans. The part of his mind that wanted to paint his light as different, to make his loneliness…even his pain…into something exceptional, noble even.

  His fucking ego. Ego mixed with that damned savior complex that still dogged him from his childhood…the same one Allie got on him about constantly.

  Worse than any of that was feeling cut off. Feeling alone. Feeling so fucking alone here, to the point of near-constant separation pain.

  He fought to push that out of his light, too.

  He hadn’t stopped walking as all of that drifted in and out of his light.

  Now he stepped up on that platform, looking down over the darkened space, feeling too close to the ceiling. As soon as he stood on the platform, the floor illumination in that larger space rose. Not a lot, but enough to get a better sense of the dimensions, which stretched about five times as long as Revik’s mind had been imagining…enough that Revik saw that floor as another green organic, but not as dark in color as the sentient elevator.

  Unlike the others, this room evoked the feel of a lab.

  It had more of that “science” and “research” stamp on it than either the cavern with the vats or that massive underground greenhouse, although nothing in the physical details either refuted that impression or supported it.

  The room itself appeared to be entirely empty.

  What looked like giant-sized manhole covers covered that organic floor, buried in the living metal, nearly flush with it at the edges. Unlike the shimmering green of the organic, those round discs shone a lighter silver-gray like burnished metal. They pushed out of the floor’s surface from being convex, maybe as much as half a foot, so they might be difficult to walk on.

  They reminded Revik vaguely of covered missile silos he’d seen in Siberia. So of course his mind immediately went to bombs, or some kind of air defense system.

  But that made no sense down here, either.

  Taking a breath, he sent up a silent prayer to the Ancestors.

  Then he laid his bare palm and fingers on the scanner.

  An alarm went off at once. He felt it in the higher parts of his light.

  It triggered a denser layer of his shield even before his mind caught up with what he’d felt.

  Movement in front of him drew his eyes.

  Fighting to think past the now-deafening Barrier alarm, he watched as the first of those manhole-type discs rose out of the floor. A green-tinted cylinder of organic glass appeared below the disc as it rose.

  Revik stared, seeing the ring of bodies and faces as it appeared.

  They formed a bizarre circle facing outward, every face identical.

  The body shape of each figure was identical too, beyond that of identical twins. The exactness in height and proportions challenged his mind and sight…and disturbed him, too, maybe due to some element of the Uncanny Valley effect, or maybe because he recognized the face and body of each individual in the rounded row of figures.

  It was Eddard.

  He’d never seen Eddard naked before.

  Even so, the body was unmistakable, even without clothes. He stared from one of those bodies to the next, noting id
entical moles and identical flaccid penises and identical bald spots and even identical operation scars from an appendix he may or may not have ever had.

  He paused on the armbands each of the bodies wore, until movement to his right jerked his gaze and his light that way.

  Another of the manhole covers gently rose.

  Revik found himself staring at another face and body he recognized, although not as well as he knew Eddard’s. He recognized her though, from those fucking towers in New York. He’d pegged her as a seer, with Middle Eastern features if she’d been human.

  She’d screamed at the others to stop him.

  He’d shot her.

  Looking over the rows of her inside another green-tinted glass cylinder, he felt vaguely sick, noting her shaved genital area and navel ring even as his eyes slid up to her long dark hair and the tattoo she wore over one breast. Each body resembled the same woman in her mid to late forties if she were human, maybe even early fifties. If she was seer, she’d be close to Balidor’s age, so roughly in the three hundred to four hundred year range.

  A third manhole cover was rising.

  Revik found himself staring in near-fascination at a row of bodies of the old woman, Novak…well, Xarethe, according to the files Balidor dug up on her. The Adhipan had ID’d her as a seer, too. Looking at the row of wrinkled, lizard-like faces in stasis with their helmet of white-gray hair, Revik wondered if they had any fucking idea what these beings really were.

  Which brought his mind to a host of other questions.

  Were they just clones of the originals…made into new corpses over and over again to be reused? Or were these bodies just an elaborate smokescreen? Did the beings behind them, like Terian, come from a different body altogether?

  The sickness in his gut worsened when he saw the fourth cylinder rise, filled with a ring of bodies that resembled a sixty-something Caucasian human.

  He might be a seer too, of course, but his coloring and features were so unusual for a seer, Revik found himself doubting it, in terms of the body, at least.

  Revik remembered shooting that one in New York, too.

  Jumping down off the platform, he began walking through the cylinders, feeling like he was in some kind of futuristic mausoleum.