The faces all wore slack expressions, eyes closed. Hands hung open at their sides, locked in place by thin organic loops that held their limbs in exactly the same place for each body. They all wore identical bracelets with different numbers on them.
ID tags, most likely. Iteration or version IDs, or maybe it meant more than that.
Revik began walking faster.
The construct alarm had been turned off he noticed, but he had no illusions that his presence hadn’t been discovered by now. He couldn’t feel anyone coming yet, but he knew they would be. Realizing the gig really was up, that they would know where and who he was by now, he went into the Barrier long enough to scan the room for real.
Immediately, he got a ping for the opposite wall.
Clicking out, he switched directions with his feet.
He began walking rapidly, reaching a near-jog by the time he’d gone more than a few steps. He’d felt movement in the construct as soon as he’d opened his light.
They were definitely coming for him.
He also felt some debate about whether they could knock him out from here.
Reaching the organic wall, he didn’t wait but put his palms on the rippling dark-green surface. Feeling the organic with his light, directly that time, he immediately sensed the security protocols that had kicked in. He didn’t wait but slid further into the Barrier, talking to the organic directly.
Let me in… he told it. There has been a mistake. Chasing subject. Time limited…
…no mistake dehgoies revik security clearance denied…
I’m with security, he sent, pushing harder on the decision-making protocol as he worked to run a real hack with his light. Not Dehgoies Revik. You have made a mistake. Identity wrong…
…no mistake identity confirmed dehgoies revik aka sword not authorized for entry activate gas in fourteen seconds if subject does not maintain security mandated distance and wait for removal by arriving team…
Telekinesis will override, Revik sent, more to see what it would say.
…telekinesis will activate construct protocol six-seven-nine-ought-four…
Disable, Revik sent. You are ordered to disable at once. He’d entered the coding sequence, although the fucking thing kept morphing as soon as he’d broken down the structure. Wrapping his light around the different entry points, he pushed harder.
Disable protocol, or security breach is imminent…
Cannot disable only father disable security clearance six-seven-nine-ought-four…
Hearing the “father” reference, Revik grimaced.
What is inside? he sent then, trying to push a different lever as he continued to manipulate the wall’s aleimic structure. Describe contents of room…
…cannot authorize information dissemination dehgoies revik aka sword not authorized for description of contents activate gas in seven seconds if subject does not retreat to security mandated distance…
Taking his hands off the wall, Revik backed off.
He continued to back off until he felt the security protocol switch off.
Standing a few yards from the sentient wall, he slid into the Barrier again, trying to see or feel what lived on the other side of the wall.
A Barrier field protected it, which wasn’t surprising but the density of that field was.
The elevator brought him here. The AI seemed to think the compound’s biggest secrets lived here, somewhere on this level. Somehow Revik doubted the bodies in fish tanks really qualified. Then again, he was banking on a lot, trusting that elevator at all.
He could feel the pull to go in there, though.
Something beyond that door tugged at his light like a fucking magnet.
Urgency tightened his chest as he felt the construct activity increase. That urgency hurt him somehow, flaring his nearly nonstop separation pain even as it sharpened the more tactical areas of his mind and light.
Whatever he’d come here to find, some part of it lived beyond that fucking door. Without having any logical way to be sure of that, Revik was sure of it anyway.
He could feel that higher part of his light agreeing. More than that, he imagined he felt memory there, some resonance he couldn’t explain. Maybe like missing limb syndrome, he felt some part of himself that Allie had separated from the Dreng’s construct, reminding him.
Secrets. He’d known secrets.
He might not have even consciously known a lot of them.
They would knock him out if he went in there.
More to the point, he knew Menlim might use it as an excuse to negate their agreement, hook him to wires, throw him in a Barrier prison, start hacking his light for real. Then he’d be on a real countdown. Not only for being here, but for his life. For Allie’s and his daughter’s lives. Once they hacked him for real, he had few doubts who his first target would be…assuming they really had figured out a way to keep him alive without his wife.
They’d have him go after Cass once Allie was dead.
They’d have him hunt his daughter…and Maygar, too.
He knew all that…he knew…
But he and Allie talked about that. They had no good choices.
They also didn’t have the luxury to be careful right now.
He and Allie talked about that, too.
Clenching his jaw, he checked his wristwatch. Even being conservative, they would be down here in minutes. That was assuming they could get here in less than half the time it took him.
Revik stepped closer to the wall.
Immediately the alarms re-ignited. Feeling a charge of electricity shiver through his aleimi, he closed the gap between himself and the sentient organic in two more strides, once more laying his palms on the wall.
That time, he didn’t wait.
He jacked into the Barrier at once…far enough that time to see the sentient machine’s entire aleimic structure. Once he had, he snapshotted it…rotated it once, twice…his mind catalogued every detail of shape and form.
He unfurled his light.
…and hooked into every point of contact or structure he could find.
To see and access all of it, he had to trigger a number of those higher structures in his light. Even so, he took care to avoid any combination he normally used for the telekinesis, knowing that would likely be enough to activate the security protocol and knock him on his ass right here. He also worked fast.
Maybe faster than he ever had for something like this.
He connected his aleimi to those structures before he’d taken a complete breath.
Then he ignited that harder light.
…crushing a few dozen of those structures at once.
He didn’t wait.
Exploding the next handful even faster than the first, his light spread, moving like liquid fire, not hurrying but not hesitating. His mind remained tightly focused, methodical as he explored every fragment of that semi-dimensional field. He broke every piece of structured aleimi he could find, snapping and exploding individual nodules like bits of glass. Most of the big ones he broke in simultaneous bursts…then gradually he began hunting stragglers one by one as they fought to morph and recombine in front of him.
A few of those morphed fast enough to elude him, so he had to find them again.
He broke them faster the second time.
It seemed to take a long time…too long…
But eventually, he ran out of the things to break.
The space grew quiet. Dark.
Well, not dark precisely, although it felt that way to Revik’s aleimi in comparison to the living mass of before. Now the light field around the wall seethed in slow motion patterns like a pond faintly stirred by wind.
No intent lived there…no mind…no thoughts.
None of those mathematically precise geometric patterns remained either.
When his vision cleared, the wall had gone dark in the physical, too.
He scanned it, a surface scan that time. From the outside, it appeared dead. Or maybe blank, like an amo
eba instead of a well-trained guard dog. Entering those surface layers cautiously with his light, Revik activated the manual switch for the door.
At once, the mechanism ignited, moving the panel smoothly into the wall.
Dehgoies… a voice said in his head.
It was so loud Revik looked up, sure it was a loudspeaker.
Dehgoies…you are breaking our agreement…
Realizing it was a Barrier communication, via the construct, Revik felt his jaw harden.
He glanced back at the door. It was most of the way open now. He checked the timepiece on his wrist, realized less than a minute had gone by. Then he peered through the still-widening gap in the wall, wondering if it would be enough to stand here, to look into that other space.
The room on the other side remained totally dark however, shielded somehow from the light of the room in which Revik stood.
He would have to go inside to see.
Dehgoies, the voice repeated. Our agreement. You are breaking it…
Am I? he muttered in his own mind.
Yes, the voice answered at once. You are.
Revik could almost hear the clicking purr of the aged seer. He could almost see the frown of disapproval, him folding his hands at the base of his back, yellow eyes staring down at him from that skull-like face. He was likely wearing one of those fucking suits, his gray goatee precisely trimmed, feet tucked into expensive leather boots.
The shtick of a Dreng living in a seer’s corpse.
It hit Revik only then that he hadn’t seen any of Menlim’s bodies down here.
He must keep them elsewhere. Somewhere even deeper than this fucking cave.
The voice grew colder, even less compromising.
We agreed that your access to sensitive information would of necessity be limited as per the terms of our agreement, Menlim reminded him. We agreed, both of us, that this would be necessary for this tenuous partnership of ours to work, given your role here…and the stipulations about your own light…and the fact that you made it clear you would never let yourself feel any loyalty to me, nephew, no matter what transpired…
I also remember you agreeing not to call me nephew… Revik’s mind muttered.
He didn’t expect any response to that.
He didn’t get one.
He felt some part of his light gearing up, a near defense reflex.
The construct’s motion over his head brought aspects of his higher structures online almost without him willing it, making his light flare brighter in the immediate Barrier space. He looked at the open doorway and into that darkness, fighting back and forth in his mind.
They’d knock him out.
He knew they would.
Menlim’s voice grew even colder, stripped of any pretense of politeness.
If you cross that threshold, nephew, our agreement with one another is void. Be aware of that. And be aware that I warned you before you did what you are about to do. Menlim’s voice grew sharper, louder in Revik’s mind. I did not trick you or try to hide my intentions…I told you outright, which is significantly more courtesy than you have afforded me…
Revik felt a prickle of warning grip somewhere in his spine.
But he’d already made up his mind.
He had to, he told himself.
He had to do this, or it was all for nothing.
He’d risked his family for nothing.
Even as he thought it, his legs propelled him towards the opening in that organic wall.
25
METAL
Light ignited around him the second Revik stepped through that opening. His foot landed on another green-tinted floor, darker than the one he’d just left.
Looking up, he realized only then how high the opening in the wall stretched, forming a strangely organic-looking rectangle at least twenty feet in height.
He looked up at it as he passed through, feeling his muscles tense as his light reacted to the new construct he entered.
Not construct.
This wasn’t a construct.
He came to a dead stop.
Feeling alarm bells going off all over his light, Revik tensed just inside that door, holding his breath as his heart thudded in his chest. It crossed his mind that his life was in danger.
Like, really in danger.
Unmoving apart from his eyes, he held his breath, staring around at the perfect square of the room. His mind catalogued dimensions, scanning every centimeter of space he could see without turning his head. He looked for security systems and found none. He looked harder, using more areas of his light, trying to discern the specific nature of the threat.
The room was entirely empty.
For a long moment, he couldn’t make sense of what he felt, what he was even reacting to. He could feel that sense of danger increasing rather than lessening, sending more and more urgent warnings to some baser, more animal-like part of his mind and light.
Then he realized what it was.
It wasn’t a construct.
It was the room itself.
The room pulsed with life. Not guard-dog life, like what he’d felt in that sentient elevator…something else.
The longer he tried to discern the nature of what he felt, the less adequate the term “life” felt to describe it. Life didn’t really encompass what he felt. Awareness lived here. More than awareness…more than sentience even…
Revik couldn’t find the words in his mind for what he felt inside that space.
Something…something really fucking different lived here.
Pain filled him, more fear as he thought of Allie…of how he might have just fucked things permanently for both of him. Whatever this thing was, it was really fucking dangerous. Lethal dangerous, but more than that…more than just his body’s death.
This thing felt like the end of the world.
A real end, maybe for the seers as well as the humans. He couldn’t explain why he thought so, or even any kind of images of the exact scenario he had in mind. He just knew what he felt. Which was that this thing might just have the ability to end things for Earth…for this entire fucking life wave.
Even as he thought it, it felt like the truth.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t live yet. It wasn’t operational or online, but it would be. Once this thing went active for real, the Dreng might not need any of them anymore. At least, not in any kind of living, sentient state.
This thing might negate everything…render humanity and seers obsolete.
He sucked in a breath.
The thing was fucking scanning him.
Even that was too simple a word for what it did.
He felt the touches like skin on skin, like it caressed the unclothed parts of him as it circled his light and body in that open space. Light and air shimmered; he caught flickers of images, like it was presenting different aspects or projections to him to see how he might react.
Fingers, hands, eyes, a tail coiled around his leg…a cock rubbing against his ass, making him flinch violently.
He lurched forward, unable to help himself.
The feeling of being touched there withdrew with the rest.
Revik felt his bowels tighten. He looked around, glimpsed more of those flickers and shapes even as that sickness coiled deeper in his gut.
It writhed closer…suffocatingly close.
It circled Revik’s light a second time. Pulling on him again, this time on his actual light instead of his body. He felt the separation pain highlighted, images of Lily flickered behind his eyes…Allie…Maygar…his mother.
Allie with that other guy…Allie opening her light. Allie feeling pain for him, for whoever that motherfucker was…pushing Revik out…
His pain grew excruciating.
Making another pass, it enveloped all of him that time.
Not bothering with flickers, it invaded his light totally, absorbing him inside a physical-feeling wave of presence and energy. The sensation made Revik freeze, losing his breath again. The fear grew indes
cribable, more than he could think past…worse than any case of claustrophobia or trauma he could remember in his light. It raised the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck, the reaction intense enough that he stopped breathing. He knew he might have voided his bladder if it hadn’t been clenching him up there, too.
He couldn’t move.
Or maybe he just knew not to move.
Maybe he knew if he moved, this thing might decide to snap his fucking spine.
Presence. Life and mind and presence. Intent. Knowing.
None of those words encompassed the myriad of meanings for which Revik’s light continued to search. He felt so much coming off the thing and through it, he couldn’t capture most of that with any part of his mind or light.
He caught snippets instead…impressions.
The thing’s curiosity, its annoyance with what Revik had done to its pet AI left guarding that outside wall…layers of emotionless indifference…calculation, assessment…what might have been contempt, or perhaps simply dismissal of him, now that it could see him for what he was. Revik felt it assessing something around his being here at all, some connection to outside events, some wave of intricate threads and timelines that he couldn’t glimpse.
Those weren’t simply about the City or the Dreng or his wife or the world.
They expanded outward, encompassing a timeline so intricate Revik couldn’t make sense of it even in the highest parts of his light. Threads weaving in and out and into one another, clicking across tracks. The thing manipulated levers, strands, nodes, pieces, moving them in concert or one by one simply to see the effect on the rest.
Revik only felt most of that as a bare whisper in the highest parts of his light. Those same parts of his light could see more than just about any seer on Earth––more than Balidor or Tarsi or even Vash––more than anyone apart from his wife.
All it told him now was that he was outclassed by whatever this was.
It was too different. It had too many moving parts, too many structured pieces…too many different ways of thinking and analyzing and understanding. Revik saw no way of even accessing most of it, no matter what he did with his light. So much structure and awareness lived there. More than he could think around. More than he could categorize or name.
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 51