by R. L. King
Nothing happened. The darkness remained absolute.
The dead-earth smell was stronger here: a primal, nearly palpable force rendered more potent by the fact that its source wasn’t visible. From somewhere up ahead came a slow, vast, rumbling double-beat sound—so low-pitched that it was more a physical sensation than a sound. Winterhawk stopped, feeling it resonate through his body as his brain put together what it was:
It was a heartbeat.
“Come in, come in…” whispered the voice. “We should meet before you die.”
“You seem quite sure I’m going to die,” he rasped. He stepped forward, feeling the darkness and the walls and his own amplified fear pressing in on him.
“I am sure,” the voice said. “Come closer, and you’ll be sure too.”
The lights came up, and he clamped his teeth around a scream.
“Hey, look!” Dreja pointed at something on the cage floor. “Was that there before?”
Ocelot followed her gaze to what looked like a small covered switch, dead center in the middle of the floor. He couldn’t be certain whether it had been there before and they just hadn’t noticed it, or if it was new. “You think that’s the way to open it?” He rattled the bars. “’Hawk! If you can hear me at all, try to hit that switch on the floor!”
“He’s not listening,” Dreja said. She didn’t need to say it: it was obvious the mage wasn’t aware of their presence. If anything, he was growing more agitated. He’d dropped to his knees only a short distance away from the switch, but was ignoring it just like he ignored everything else that wasn’t going on inside his own head.
Ocelot flung himself down on the dusty ground and stretched out his arm toward the switch, but the bars were too close together. He was only able to get his forearm through, and even if he’d managed more, it wouldn’t be anywhere near close enough. “Try your rifle,” he told Dreja.
She mirrored his position on the other side of the cage, poking her assault rifle through the bars. She got closer than he had, the long barrel coming up only a few centimeters away from the button. It might as well have been a kilometer.
Ocelot got up and let out a loud sigh. “Give it up,” he said. “I think the metaplanes are tryin’ to tell us that we can’t push that button. I bet even if we could reach it, it wouldn’t work for us. Remember what Thuma said? ’Hawk’s gotta fight this thing himself. Maybe that means he’s gotta push it.”
Dreja looked dubiously at the mage. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen, do you?”
It wasn’t enough to say that Winterhawk’s brain didn’t have words to describe the thing in front of him. In his years as a magical practitioner, he had seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of sights that would drive the average person screaming away to cower beneath their blankets—things that the mundane mind, unaccustomed to what lived out beyond the clean, well-lighted place most people voluntarily confined themselves to, simply could not comprehend.
He’d seen the insides of insect-spirit hives, and the twisted abominations summoned by the most insane of toxic shamans that lived there. Things from the unfathomable depths of the Deep Lacunae that couldn’t adequately be explained to anyone who hadn’t shared the experience, and that had condemned him to months of nightmares and insomnia.
Whatever this was, it didn’t even operate on the same scale.
In front of him was a vast cavern, stretching up so far that he couldn’t see its roof. The walls were made of bare earth, dark and rich, and poking from them were ropy, writhing roots as thick as a man’s arm that reached out like the hands at the doors, blind and probing. Those barely rated notice, however, in the shadow of the monstrous thing suspended from the ceiling.
It hung from chains, dozens of chains, each one made up of links the size of devil rats, stretching up to disappear into the shadows at the top of the cavern. The chains ended in hooks driven into what passed for its skin; at each point where a hook sank in, thick, black liquid oozed and dripped downward to sizzle onto the floor.
Aside from this, Winterhawk couldn’t get a clear enough look to form a proper description. It was like the humans’ nametags or the plate on the door: mortal eyes simply couldn’t gaze upon it for more than a few seconds. He got the impression of eyes, and mouths, and festering red-brown skin slicked with shining slime. The stench was overpowering, overwhelming the earthy odor of the cavern with something that was the essence of unwholesomeness. He was reminded suddenly of a line from Lovecraft: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
If the metaplanes had pulled this thing from somewhere in the deepest corners of his subconscious, he made a mental note to seek out more upbeat reading material in the future.
If he even had a future. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t from anywhere he had ever been.
“Truer than you know,” whispered the voice. “Now do you see? You can’t destroy me. You’re not strong enough. Just trying to look at me threatens your sanity.”
Winterhawk took several deep breaths, trying to force himself to remain calm, to think rationally. He glanced around, almost expecting to see his friends imprisoned here, but aside from himself and the tentacles in the walls and the massive thing overhead, the cavern was empty.
“That would be so easy, wouldn’t it, if I imprisoned them? That way you wouldn’t have to accept that they’ve deserted you.”
“I am getting very tired of listening to you,” Winterhawk growled.
“Then die.”
Before he could move, before he could gather his defenses or even prepare for an attack, something struck him hard, throwing him backward and smashing him into the cavern’s wall. Some part of his mind registered that the elevator was gone as bright points of light exploded in his vision and his consciousness wavered.
He fought it, scrambling to his feet, breath coming fast. Without pause or thought he gathered all of his rage, his power, and his skill, formed it into a weapon, and flung it at the thing with a roar.
He knew two things with certainty at that moment: the first was that the bolt of magical energy he threw at the creature represented the best he could muster—the culmination of years of study and practice, the kind of attack that could level a small building. It carried with it all his frustration, his anger, his desire to strike back against the man who had done this to him.
And he knew that it hadn’t even made a dent in the thing’s horrific, viscous hide.
He watched it hit and fizzle away, its energy dissipating with no more effect than a child hitting a wall with a blast of water from a garden hose.
The thing laughed, the inhuman noise scraping across his brain. “If that is your best, then this will be quick. Or perhaps it will be very, very slow. I shall enjoy feeding on your suffering.”
He staggered back against the wall, panting with the effort of throwing the spell. Magical drain didn’t seem to work the same way as it did in the material world; if it did, that spell would have wiped him out. Instead, he merely felt a little winded, as if he’d run a block or two. He looked up at it again, still unable to get a good view—but he could see the chains. Why is it imprisoned? He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about what was strong enough to chain up this thing, or how much worse a threat it would be if it were freed.
He flung another spell, this time trying to aim for one of the larger eyes. It had the same effect: the spell flared up and died, and the creature’s mocking laugh echoed inside his mind.
“You’re pathetic. You’re useless. No wonder your friends left you to die. What good are you to them?”
It struck him again, much harder this time. The blast lit up every pathway of his nervous system with white fire, like he’d experienced back in the restaurant with the Johnson, but a thousand times worse. He hit the wall hard and went down, screaming and clawing at his head.
But in the midst of that, a thought came to him: Why does it keep going on about my friends?
; He remained where he was, curled up into a ball, feigning immobility, and fought to wall his thoughts off from the thing, if only for a moment.
This meant something. The metaplanes never did anything that didn’t mean something.
His teammates weren’t here, but he knew they hadn’t deserted him, despite what the thing was trying to make him believe. If they weren’t here, then they weren’t here for a reason.
Why would the metaplanes separate them from each other, when Thuma had said that having allies could help him defeat the thing inside him?
And it came to him, with sudden clarity: Because I didn’t believe it.
Because I thought I had to do it on my own.
He struggled back to his feet, glaring up at the chained thing. “You think you’re clever, don’t you?” he yelled. “You think you know me, because you’ve got your nasty little hooks into me!”
The thing swayed in the chains, its countless eyes glaring at him. His brain lit up again and he staggered backward, but this time he didn’t fall. Instead, he focused on shoring up his mental defenses, fighting the whispering voice insinuating itself into his thoughts like inky tendrils flowing around a barrier. He felt like his head was going to fly apart any second, and instinctually he knew that his physical body was teetering on the edge of death.
Gathering the last of his strength, Winterhawk flung his head back and screamed up into the unseen shadows: “Ocelot! Dreja! Help me! I need your help!”
Ocelot was pacing again. He couldn’t help it: it was nearly impossible for him to remain still when his mind was this unsettled.
“Sit down,” Dreja snapped. “You’re driving me crazy. He’s bad enough.”
Winterhawk still hadn’t moved, but his agitation was growing. Ocelot was afraid the mage was going to stroke out—if you could even do that on the metaplanes—if something didn’t happen soon. He had turned dead pale, his whole body shaking, veins standing out on his neck and his forehead like he was pushing against some great weight. “You’re gonna have to go crazy, then,” Ocelot snapped. “I’m sure as hell not gonna—”
Suddenly, Winterhawk rose and took a decisive step forward. Without looking down, he flipped the cover off the floor switch with his foot and stomped on it.
The cage door swung open.
And the world changed.
CHAPTER 37
METAPLANES
UNKNOWN LOCATION
Ocelot looked around wildly as his vision cleared. He and Dreja stood inside a tiny, featureless metal cubicle. For a moment he thought it was the cage, but no—it had no bars. From somewhere beyond it came a deep, electronic humming, barely audible through the door on one side, which was slightly ajar.
“Come on!” he snapped, shoving open the door and pulling out his shotgun. “Before it changes its mind again!”
He’d barely gotten out when he skidded to a stop. Dreja nearly barreled into him. “What the frag?” he yelled.
Dreja simply stared.
They were standing in an enormous space, bigger than an aircraft hangar for a jumbo jet. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling—what they could see of it that wasn’t wreathed in shadow—were formed of pattern-stamped steel plates.
Suspended from the ceiling by what looked like kilometers of conduits and plastic tubes and glowing cables was a thing that looked like what technomancers dreamed about after a three-day bender and a full complement of mismatched psychoactive drugs.
Behind him, Ocelot felt Dreja tense. “What…is that?”
“It’s not real,” he said grimly. “Remember that. It’s all symbolic. Whatever it is, that’s not really what it looks like. That’s how it works in the metaplanes.”
It was hard to believe it, though. The thing looked real: halfway between biology and technology, as big as a house, its night-black skin punctuated by blinking circuits and metal plates. The tubes and conduits connected to its skin at puckered, angry-looking entry points, as if some colossal deranged surgeon had grafted them onto it. It shifted back and forth, flashes of energy arcing between the conduits. The hum was much louder now that they were outside the small room, resonating with Ocelot’s own cyberware, and setting his teeth on edge. The air crackled, full of the tang of ozone.
“Look!” Dreja pointed past him to the other side of the room. “Is that—?”
Ocelot followed her line of sight. A tiny figure, so far away it was barely visible, flung a bright ball of electric-blue energy at the thing, yelling something unintelligible. The energy hit some kind of glowing green force field that flared up around the creature and winked out. The figure dropped to its knees.
“’Hawk!” Ocelot was already running, Dreja pounding along behind him. He let off a barrage with his shotgun as he ran, but like the spell, the shot bounced harmlessly off the barrier.
As he got closer, the figure resolved itself into Winterhawk. He was dressed in his usual suit and longcoat, but they were torn and tattered. For a moment, it appeared that he didn’t recognize Ocelot and Dreja. Then he lit up with a fierce grin that transformed his pale face.
“Ha!” he screamed, and Ocelot didn’t think it was aimed at them. “See? You don’t get it! You’re wrong!” He flung another ball of crackling energy, and didn’t even seem disturbed that it failed to have any effect.
Ocelot skidded to a stop and grabbed his shoulders. “’Hawk! What happened? What is that thing?”
“I can’t beat it on my own,” he said between breaths, and again it didn’t sound like he was fully speaking to Ocelot and Dreja. “I can’t beat it alone—but we can beat it together! We can. I know we can!”
“How?” Dreja demanded. She aimed her rifle and let loose a burst, and once again the force field flared. “We can’t even get past its armor!”
Ocelot studied it for a moment. He had to be missing something. Thuma had also said they had a chance of defeating the thing. If he was right, then they had to be able to do something to breach its armor, and so far nothing they’d done had even come close.
“Wait!” Dreja yelled. “Hit it again! I want to see something!”
Both Winterhawk and Ocelot took aim and fired shots at it. The force field flared, but nothing happened. Nothing except the thing retaliated with what looked like a bolt of greenish lightning that hit Winterhawk and drove him backward into the wall.
Ocelot hauled him back to his feet. “We can’t do it,” he said through his teeth. “We’re not even scratching it.”
“Yeah we can!” Dreja crowed, pointing. “Those cable things are outside the force field!”
Ocelot replayed the hit in his mind, then grinned. “You’re right! The conduits! They’re outside the field, and they’re feeding it.”
“What conduits?” Winterhawk demanded.
“The tubes. The cables. Dreja! ’Hawk! Aim for them! Ignore that thing. Hit the cables up high!”
“What bloody cables?” Winterhawk grabbed his arm. “Do you mean the chains?”
Ocelot ignored him. Whatever the mage wanted to call them, Dreja was right: they were its weak point. They had to be. He adjusted the shotgun’s choke to a narrow pattern and aimed at one of the bigger tubes. His cybereyes’ AR locked in his smartgun’s targeting, and he pulled the trigger.
The tube exploded in a satisfying haze of black fluid, whipping back and forth, spraying more of the thick liquid everywhere. The thing bucked and jerked. “Yes!” Ocelot yelled, pumping his fist.
Winterhawk grabbed his arm and pulled him back with surprising strength. “What are you doing, man?” he yelled, his voice taking on the bright edge of panic.
Dreja lunged forward and locked her hand around his wrist, yanking him away from Ocelot. He struggled to pull loose, but she was too strong.
Ocelot switched targets and blew apart another cable, one that looked like an electrical conduit as big around as his arm. The subsonic humming grew more intense, the cable shooting out sparks the same green as the force field. But there were so many of them. This was too slow!
“Dreja! Help me!”
“No!” Winterhawk screamed, still trying to free himself from the ork’s grip. “Don’t you see? You’re letting it loose! You can’t break the chains, or we’ll never stop it!”
“What are you talking about?” Dreja yelled. “What chains? There aren’t any chains!”
Ocelot shot a quick glance up at the thing; it was humming louder, and he could feel its anger, even though he had no idea how. They had to get this done. Why did Winterhawk keep talking about chains?
And then he got it.
He whirled and gripped Winterhawk’s shoulders. “You see chains, don’t you?”
“Of course I see bloody chains!” He pointed with the arm Dreja didn’t have hold of. “They’ve got it imprisoned! If you let it loose, then—look out!” He flung himself sideways, crashing into Dreja and knocking her off balance. Another bolt of green lightning smashed into the wall where they had stood.
“’Hawk!” Ocelot backed off, keeping his eye on the hanging thing. He was panting with the effort of running over here and trying to convince his friend. “You gotta trust me, man. Trust us. There aren’t any chains. It’s got—cables and tubes. They’re feeding it—powering it—and the force field’s not protecting them.”
“There isn’t any force field.” Winterhawk took advantage of Dreja’s momentary unbalanced position to wrench his arm free. He pointed both hands at the thing and fired off another blast. “What are you seeing? It’s chained!”
Ocelot’s frustration grew. He wanted to grab the mage and slam him into the wall to make him see. Instead, he forced his voice down to a calmer tone, though he still talked fast. “Listen. This thing is inside you. It’s got its hooks into you. You don’t even know what you’re seeing anymore. You aren’t hurting it with what you’re doing. You have to trust us, ’Hawk. Or you’re dead. Maybe all of us are.”
“Thuma said we could help you!” Dreja added. “You heard him. This is where you have to do that! Don’t you see?”