“Rom can create worlds.”
“Rom will d-d-die. We all die.”
“He is our only chance.”
“Do not become … one of them.”
He reached for her again into the disintegrating light, and for a moment, he felt that he found something solid, something that he could pull out of nothingness.
Then his hand exploded.
Seventy
“YOUR WORLD IS a lie,” said Marley.
She imagined the flowers wilting in Rom’s hand and the blossoms drooped and blackened, the stems softening, liquefying in his hands. He flicked his hands and the scattered bits became monarch butterflies fluttering along the wall of ice.
Marley shivered. The drops of water along the face of the wall had turned to rivulets and in the distance large sections sloughed off.
“It is a world of my mind,” he said. “A world of my creation.” The butterflies transformed into blue songbirds, twittering as they looped into the sky. “My world is not Huang Di Prime’s. It will destroy his. His world deserves to be destroyed. You above all other people should know this. After what he did to you.”
“He saved me,” said Marley. She waved the birds into black smudges of smoke. Then she tried to force a flurry of snow but a bright burning sun persisted. In the distance, great blocks of ice separated from the wall and shuddered to the ground.
“When the ice is gone, the path will be open,” he said. “We can go. We can finally be free.” He extended his hand.
She saw cascading lines of code. She lifted her own hands and saw the same.
“We are in the network,” said Rom. “Equals to Huang Di Prime. Once we are across we can get our revenge.”
“You betrayed him. There is no need for revenge.”
“His world is a lie.” He scratched his nails against the ice wall and slush poured down. “If you destroy something first, can you really claim to save it?”
“He pulled me from the wreckage. He rebuilt me. He gave me strength, a new body. He gave me a second chance and the only price was to serve him.”
“I was there,” said Rom, “cloaked in black. I pulled the trigger. I watched the transport explode. I followed my orders. I pulled you from the flames and twisted metal. You reached out for me. You pleaded for me to save your lover. You begged. Then you watched me snap his neck. The whole time Huang Di Prime, serpent with a thousand faces, urged me on. But you don’t remember this because Prime does not want you to. If you did, you would no longer be his perfect little soldier. He needs your history to be written by him so your servitude is absolute, so the chains that bind you remain unbroken, so your rage becomes his weapon. He has fooled you, Marley. He destroyed your world to make you a slave. But now you have a chance for freedom. A chance for revenge.”
The wall of ice had become a cascade of water, and the forest opposite a mere blur. Only a few more moments and Rom would be able to step through. The communications network would be open. The universe would lie before him. He would be free of the mining colony, and become a bodiless entity inhabiting the network, a human evolved to something entirely different.
Memories returned.
She saw what the lies had covered.
The transport hummed along the road, the mountain black against the stars. In the distance, the lights of the city flickered, gaudy and bright.
Then the blinding flare.
Marley saw the line of his lips, the trees along the road, the eyes of black birds.
Metal groaned. Bones cracked. Hsu screamed.
Then searing heat. The drip of fluid on her cheeks, too cold to be blood.
These memories had come to her before. At the edge of her awareness. Bits and pieces never whole. Her memory had been defined by the words of Huang Di Prime, the images he had fed her through their connection.
She lay in the wreckage. The pain threatening to knock her into unconsciousness. Smoke unfurled above the trees. The black-hulled ship descended.
She remembered the fluvium arms reaching through the flames, Rom’s metal teeth, the fire reflected in his pupils. A memory she had suppressed.
“I know what happened,” she said.
Behind Rom, the ice had nearly melted. The woods were nearly revealed. But something was wrong with the bark of the trees. It moved.
“I did as he ordered. What I did was evil. He must be destroyed. We must kill the one who had made us monsters and then, only then, will we have a chance to return to being humans again.”
He extended his hand. She took it. His palm felt as soft as the skin of a baby.
Marley stepped forward. He smelled of cedar and deeply turned loam.
Beyond him the ice had vanished. The ice wall lay open before them.
“Come with me,” said Rom. “Be my queen. Let us unseat Huang Di Prime and reshape the world.”
The cedars quivered. The bark was not bark. It was flesh and metal, bodies crammed together, melted together, wrapped in metal, riveted, Rom’s Evolved, humans fettered by his hand, the future that lay before them.
Rom pulled her more closely.
His breath streamed warm, unfolding across her lips.
She pressed her lips to his.
And released the virus.
His eyes widened. He tried to tear away but the string of endless code bound them together, a ceaseless flow of data. He beat his fists at her, smashing her ears, her eyes, her cheeks. But after each blow, her bones reknit, her flesh healed.
With each successive blow, his fists lost substance, spraying off, shards of light burning bright before fading into bits of blackened ash. Then he disintegrated: his fists disintegrated, his arms, his chest, his face.
Marley stood alone. The forests and sky stretched before her. The universe opened before her. A universe for her to shape.
Seventy-One
THE FLOOR PITCHED beneath Adams.
He reached out to steady himself and fell again, the hand that he had expected to support himself gone. He slithered in his own blood.
His hand had been shot off, blown to pieces.
He needed to stem the bleeding. He felt lightheaded. The room spun.
He lay on his back and with his good hand tore his belt from his waist and cinched it below his forearm, using his teeth to tug on the strapping, tugging and twisting until the blood stopped pouring out.
He got to his knees, slipped in his own blood and fell again, screaming in pain. He remembered his kit and pulled it out of his thigh pocket. The painkiller patch took effect almost immediately washing dully over his body. The stop bleed wove a quick threaded scab over the stump. It would hold but he would need Patch to deal with it soon. She was a doctor. She could help.
He took his time to stand, careful in the pool of his own blood. It was a lot of blood. More than his own.
He became aware of the silence. At first, he had thought his hearing was drowned out by the ringing but it had subsided to a low buzz. He could hear his own breathing, the scraping of his feet along the ground, the clawing of his hand on the crate. He could hear everything but the sound of gunfire. The battle had ended. Bullets no longer flew. Chunks of wall no longer exploded. The room no longer filled with screams. Only silence.
He peered around the crate. Bodies were strewn everywhere. The control room was a bloodbath.
A dozen or so spiders lay dead, bodies strafed with the bullets from the mercenaries. The Evolved in charge of the control room also killed.
A handful of spiders dashed at Adams. He fumbled for his pistol. But it was gone. He only had the spider talon. He fell to his knees. He held his breath, waiting for them to sweep over him, their sharp legs piercing and tearing at his flesh. He imagined them ripping his skin open, seeking revenge for all the killing the mercenaries had done.
They scrambled past him.
That was when he saw their eyes. They no longer held the glazed look. Instead, tears streamed. Terror and fear reflected. A disembodied whisper prodded them on.
He heard other voices. Gomez’s gravelly voice, the timber of Patch’s accent, the string of curses from Orlov. They had survived. Somehow they had survived.
And thumping. He heard the sound of thumping, a heavy rhythmic crashing.
He crawled towards them as best as he could, unable to use his stump for any support, fearful of both the anticipated pain and afraid he would scrape off the medical scab and bleed to death on that floor.
Cold metal surrounded his waist and lifted him to his feet. He wobbled.
Patch sneered within her exoskeleton. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot, her grimy face streaked with the trails of tears. “We have them now,” she said. “We can end this madness once and for all.”
She towered over the others. Gomez and Finn were alive, bloody, torn by bullets, and bruised. Both held battered arms over their faces. Orlov lay twisted in the spider frame. The frame was mangled, the metal crushed and bent, one of two of the legs completely snapped. Adams could not tell if she were alive.
Blood dripped off the metal arms of Patch. Slow steady drops not yet congealed.
She handed a pistol to Adams.
She looked at his bloody stump. “That I can fix. Make better than ever.” She chuckled. “You can be one of the Evolved now.” She laughed. “But you can’t be. Rom is gone.”
“He escaped?”
“Marley killed him. Completed her damned mission. Now it’s time for me to kill her. For everything that she did. What she did to Penelope, to the all those people in the cavern. We won’t have justice when the AI takes over again. She is one of them, an agent. They’ll find some way so she is not accountable for her actions. She’ll get out with a slap on the wrist, sent to some other part of the universe on some other mission and God knows what havoc she’ll cause there. God knows how many more innocent people she will murder next time. It ends here, Adams. You and I will end this.”
She waved to the bodies at her feet. Finn lifted a hand feebly towards Adams. The technician’s nose bent sideways and his lower lip was split and swollen. He wore his VR goggles but the glass had been shattered, the surface spider webbed with cracks.
Gomez tried to crawl away, his fingertips leaving bloody trails along the floor. But he was too weak and could not move. Only his hands did, scratching futilely across the floor.
Orlov breathed, her belly barely moving. She lived but Adams wondered for how much longer.
“We finish this,” said Patch. Her servos whined as she repositioned her exoskeleton. She smiled and then turned.
She hovered over Gomez and pointed her pistol at his head.
“A clean start,” she said.
The lone gunshot was deafening.
Patch toppled, her skull spraying across the room.
The gun shook in Adams’s trembling hand. He could barely hold his arm up. The pistol felt like a lead weight. He wanted to drop it but his fingers clutched tightly.
Adams’s stomach surged and he bent double and vomited. The room tilted beneath his feet. He put his hand out to steady himself but he found only emptiness, his hand gone.
“Marley,” said Finn who had pulled himself to his hands and knees. “We need to bring her back. She’s been gone too long.”
Seventy-Two
HSU SAT IN the pool, his back towards Marley. Small droplets of waters glistened on his skin. His hair was tied up in a loose knot.
The scent of jasmine blossoms permeated the air.
After all the pain and death, he had returned to Marley, reborn of the fire.
A voice in the distance called to her. But it was not a voice she wanted to hear.
The stars stretched endlessly in a deep purple sky. Out there lay the universe. The untouchable distances. With the blink of an eye it could be hers. With a thought, she could fly into the vastness. She could once again be connected to Prime.
Crickets ground their song, wave after wave, against the night.
Marley changed the flowers to hibiscuses and allowed double moons to fill the sky. The garden pool unfurled into a hot spring by the sea. The song of the crickets melted to waves hissing over the sands.
This world was hers. Here Hsu came back. Here she was the creator, the shaper of all dreams.
She did not have to leave. If she stayed here, she could have the life she wanted. The life she deserved, not the one that had been handed to her.
She understood why Rom had done what he had done and why Huang Di Prime so jealously guarded what he had. A new reality. A rebirth. A chance to truly live.
But unlike Rom and Huang Di Prime, Marley did not want the universe. She only wanted a corner where she could live this reborn life. She did not want to escape from the mining colony. She wanted to guard it. She wanted to be safe.
She knew that with a single thought she could open the communications network to the universe. She could fly on her new bodiless being to the far reaches of the galaxy. But to do so would be to expose herself to Huang Di Prime. She would not be able to escape him. He would find her. He would kill her, or worse enslave her.
The distant voice called her name again. So small, hollow, a thing of no substance.
Hsu raised his hand to the moons, water streaming down his long fingers. She craved the touch of those fingers on her neck, her breasts, her belly.
Would they even have a moment? They certainly would never have a lifetime. She sat on a fluvium mine, the ivory of Huang Di Prime’s empire. He would not wait idly.
Even if she blocked off all communications and refused to connect with him, he would come for her. Like he came for Rom. He would send agents. Maybe she would fend them off. She had the minds of the Evolved and all the machines. She could fight the agents with her army. But how long before Huang Di Prime would send missiles? How long before he leveled the planet? He did not need the people or the buildings or the computers. He could raze it and start over. Maybe she could bury herself deep underground and hide, escape the horror, but he would come. His agents, other Marleys, other Roms, thirsty for what he had to offer, would find her and he would enslave her again.
The freedom she tasted now would turn into a bitter liquid.
The moons burned bright in the waters where Hsu sat, light rippling around him.
A waft of petrochemicals enveloped her. She gagged and tears flooded the corners of her eyes. Toxic vapors lifted around Hsu, the pool of water transformed.
The voice screamed for her, as if millions of miles away.
She knew what would happen next. Even though she was the master of this world, the pool with Hsu in it would burst into flames. The crimes of Huang Di Prime would return, repeat, and she would be ensnared like a moth in a web, flailing, struggling as the spider crept ever closer.
To wait in this world was to die.
To wait was to lose everything.
She honed in on the voice and followed it.
Seventy-Three
ADAMS CRUMPLED ON the floor, stump cradled to his chest, the room fogged by the pain block. The pistol lay between his feet, black, lifeless, unassuming. It held enough bullets. He only needed one. And then closure.
He could barely move now. It had taken all his effort to help Finn to his feet and stumble with him down the hall to the room where Marley lay dead.
Finn crouched over her, the pads of a defibrillator pressed against her chest, patches of adrenaline slapped onto her neck. Her body bucked beneath the surge.
Finn called her name. He cajoled. Then he screamed. Finally, after throwing the pads away in exasperation, he whispered her name in an unending prayer.
This was it. This was the end. Adams did not even know what would happen.
“Fuck it!” said Finn. “Marley’s gone. Ain’t coming back. She did it though. She completed the goddamned mission. She killed Rom! But now’s she’s gone. Fucking Marley.”
Her face looked peaceful, eyelids shaded with a hint of blue, lips cracked, almost white. In death, the anger had vanished.
“H-h-hope sh-she’s found-d s
ome p-peace,” muttered Adams, the edges of his words clinging to each other.
“Death’s more peaceful than the shit we’ve been through,” said Finn.
Suddenly Marley sucked in a lungful of air. She panted wildly. Her body spasmed.
Finn grabbed her arms. “Marley, Marley, you’re fucking alive! Holy shit!”
She turned to her side and dry heaved, curled in a fetal position. A long stream of saliva dripped out of her mouth. She tore the adrenaline patch from her neck and gasped.
Finn helped her to sitting.
Her gaze found Adams, the gun between his feet, and then his eyes.
“The others?” Marley asked Finn.
“Gomez is out there with Orlov. She took the worst of it. Not sure she’s going to be able to swing through this one. And Patch…” Finn nodded to Adams. “Didn’t know he had it in him. One shot. Saved us all. I owe you, Cap. You know that.”
Adams grimaced. The gun lay in easy reach. So easy to end it all.
The air shimmered between him and Marley, pixels swarming, a white snow of static.
Then Huang Di Prime materialized. The AI projected himself into the mining colony. Marley had opened the communications network. The mining colony connected again to the universe, and Huang Di Prime had entered the network on the colony.
“A job well done,” Huang Di Prime said to Marley. “I have my colony back again. I believed in you. I knew you would not let me down. I had faith in my child.”
“You betrayed me,” said Marley. “You took Hsu from me. You killed him so that you could have me entirely to you. I was with child. You knew that. You knew I was leaving to start my own life. I remember the flames.”
Prime brightened, sharpened, swelled. “I gave you life, Marley. You were dead. I brought you back. And I can give you so much more. You’ve tasted it. This planet I’ll give to you. Yours to rule. Free you from your form.”
“I don’t want that. It’s a living death.”
Into Darkness Page 24