by V. M. Law
She only knew that she smelt smoke, and she heard Jakob screaming for everyone to get out. She picked her head up and through her concussed daze, saw the man standing over Jessup’s seat, slapping gently at the pilot’s cheek. “Jessup!” he shouted between slaps. “Jessup we need to leave.”
And he delivered another blow to Jessup’s cheek, harder than the last, and when the man’s head rolled to one side, the bloody mess of his face looked to Kasey like pulverized steak, and she knew instantly that he was dead.
“Jakob!” she shouted, but the man continued trying to rouse Jessup from his unconscious state. She ran to him, grabbed him by the shoulders. “Jakob, he’s dead! We need to leave!”
“No! Not without my partner!” He undid the clasps holding Jessup’s body in place and Jessup slumped to the floor in a lifeless pile.
“Now, Jakob! That is an order! We have a mission!”
Earth, Kasey thought. A fine welcome.
Chapter 41
After the darkness of the cabin, sunlight assaulted Kasey’s eyes despite the goggles’ protection, and she had to raise her hands to the sun and blink until she got her bearings. The trawler smoked in a convoluted pile of metal, like a fossil in the making. She imagined the husk would sit there forever, in some form.
The work crews would come for it, but they would leave something behind. We always do.
Caspar staggered from the wreck and fell to the snow. “They’re all dead!” he shouted to Kasey. She turned to take roll. Jakob—on his knees and pounding the ground—and Anton. And now Caspar. And they didn’t even have time to pick up their weapons before the firefight started, before the troops lined along the walls of the fortress fired at them with astonishing accuracy. Snipers, automatic fire—it peppered the ground around them as cannon fire from the base’s defense towers hit the trawler, though before Kasey registered the cacophony for what it was, another shot hit close by and sent them sprawling.
“We need to find cover!” Caspar shouted.
Kasey spun around. Nothing. They had crashed into a wide, open expanse of waist deep snow and for as far as she could see, nothing that would hide four humans stood out against the whiteness, broken only by the scar of twisted metal and melted snow that was their trawler. She got one look at it before the cannon shot disassembled it with a flash and an explosion, and wondered at how she might have escaped that wreck alive.
“Shoot!” Jakob screamed. “If we’re going to die, we must fight!” He opened fire with his pistol, inadequate against the two transport ships drawing closer with every second passing. His shot fizzled before it reached the ships, but their cannons blasted again and scattered the party.
“Run! To the base, I’ll cover you!” Kasey screamed. How far? Three hundred yards? She didn’t know if she even could.
Caspar looked at her with alarm. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I got this.” She shouldered her rifle to illustrate her point, and Caspar nodded. He tightened his grip on his own rifle and took three deep, sharp breaths as his eyes glazed over. Kasey wondered what he thought. What anybody would think when they faced certain death. He checked the control panel on the wrist of his combat suit and toggled the gravity pack. He was ready.
She stuck her head out for one second before the fire came. Three shots in rapid succession, and she ducked away.
Try again, she thought, running to the other side of the trawler’s flaming wreck. With a swift motion, she shouldered her gun and brought its sight to her right eye.
There. On the parapets. Three soldiers waited for her to poke her head out again, though she beat them to the draw and put a bullet through one of their head’s. The other two dropped to the ground. “Now!” Kasey screamed.
Anton, Caspar and Jakob charged from their own hiding places, screaming with wild abandon as they rushed to the walls. Kasey lined up another shot, took it. The man went down. She lined up another. And another. Before her rifle overheated, she took nine of them, and then dropping the useless husk of metal into the snow and started on her second gun. Two more, and then she made her own way forward, following in the depression left by the soldiers of the New Ascendancy as they ran for their final battle. Every few paces, she dropped to her knee, took aim, and shot down another guard. One body fell forward over the wall, and crumpled into the snow with a cracking sound that reached her ears when he slammed into the frozen, crusted snow.
They were close.
Almost there.
She dropped to her knee one last time as she marked a sniper taking aim at Anton, who led the pack and would soon be close enough to launch himself over the wall. Through her scope, she saw his face bent into a grin, tongue wagging like a dog. She pulled the trigger, holding her breath, but her shot missed. The man ducked, and before Kasey took aim again, he fired his rifle at the three ahead of her.
She watched Caspar fall. He didn’t make a sound.
“Caspar!” she shouted, and picked off the guilty sniper before he fixed his aim on Anton or Jakob.
Or you, she reminded herself. You aren’t invulnerable, remember.
She ran to the fallen man and dropped to the ground beside him. His eyes were distant, milky and grey. His cheeks, pale. From his stomach, a great geyser of blood rushed forth, staining the snow and making her feel as if he would die before uttering a single word.
But when she cradled his head and tried to coax him into consciousness, he demurred, and said, “Go. You will die with me.” His mouth oozed with pink, foamy spit, and a smile broke out on his face. “I am free.”
“Caspar, no. We have supplies. You can live.”
But he stopped her with his fist, grabbed her lapel and shook her with a force that did not seem possible coming from such a weak looking, dying man. “I am a dead man, and I thank the universe for it. But you must go. Corbin is waiting.”
She didn’t wait for him to die, but rested his head on the snow with care and slung her rifle over her shoulder. Jakob and Anton had achieved the wall and taken a guard tower, and when she reached them, they would enter. She ran, full speed, and felt the wind slipping through the gap between her goggles and hood as she depressed the button on her own gravity pack and lifted off from the surface. For a brief moment, she flew through the air and felt nothing but the wind on every side of her, swirling around her and seeming to carry her to the walls and over. When she set foot on the metal grating of the wall’s shooting platform, Jakob and Anton met her. A tower loomed over them, and beneath it, the complex.
They exchanged looks, nods, and entered.
Chapter 42
“Where am I?” he asked, though he didn’t voice the question. The answer lied dormant in his mind already.
You are in Siberia. In an installation of your own design.
“And why am I here?”
Because this is where the new war will begin. This is where humanity’s fate will be sealed.
Eugene Farrow—or the body that belonged once to the man named Eugene Farrow—lumbered in the darkness of the catacombs beneath the complex. He felt wet, sticky, like he crawled out of a sewer. When he questioned himself as to his previous locations and how he ended up in the dark below the Siberian tundra, he found his memories fled him, and he had only the innate drive to find Kasey Lee. She ran around, somewhere in here. He felt her. Strange, he never remembered feeling anyone before. Not like that. But as sure as he knew he would kill the woman when he saw her, he knew that she already arrived, and would be going to one place only.
The detention block.
Thousands of square meters of penitentiary bars and force fields, traps and armed guards, that kept a host of dangerous political prisoners. And one of them was being sprung.
Or so the New Ascendancy thought. He would see.
Go. Find him. And wait.
The words spoke to him in a voice he didn’t recognize, but that he knew was not his own. Every word, as it echoed in his head, pained him greatly and before the directives were finished with, he fell
to his knees and cried out.
You will need a uniform.
I need a uniform, he echoed, unsure of where the thought came from.
And he went, into the maze of the complex, where soldiers tromped about seeking relief from their security breach duties, and found a uniform. The man he took it from wouldn’t miss it, would give it gladly, if he knew what was at stake.
***
“We need to go down,” Jakob whispered and they walked together in tight formation as the other soldiers rushed around them.
If any one asks, Kasey thought, afraid to finish her mental sentence. In the back of her mind, the response came, involuntary. If someone asks, shoot them in the head and run. Don’t miss.
But it wouldn’t come to that. She didn’t know why she felt that way, but she did. She had the undeniable certainty that they would make it to Corbin without interruptions.
“Down? And then what?” Anton sneered. “Just wander the halls asking for the detention center? Asking ‘Where’s Corbin’ until someone points us the fucking way?”
Kasey wanted to kick him, to step on his toes, or do something to shut the man up. His snide voice verged on too loud in volume, and the words he spoke would prick even an absentminded guard’s ear.
“I know where I’m going. Surface scanners uncovered this place years before the Ides showed up. Was a time when not a single—” he waited for a guard to pass them by with a curt nod before continuing in a low voice, “—Ascendancy man didn’t know the layout of this bunker.”
“What good are disguises if you two are going to blow our cover with reminiscence and anger?” Kasey questioned, and the two fell silent. They walked without speaking for some time, following Jakob through the labyrinthine twisting passages of the complex, which were, in some places, wide enough for treaded vehicles, and in others, barely wide enough for them to stand abreast. She wondered numerous occasions, throughout the journey inward, if Jakob actually did know where he was going, or if he guessed and grasped at straws as he chose one alleyway over another, this crawlspace over that one.
But when he stopped with his feet planted firmly and his head cocked back, Kasey craned her own neck to see what he looked up at, and then saw it. A towering sign, bland and terrifying. It read:
DETENTION WING NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT CLEARANCE
NO QUARTER FOR VIOLATORS
“We are here. Are you ready, Kasey?”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t know herself. Jakob warned her that Corbin would not be in good shape, but the long passages leading this far below ground gave her occasion to meditate on what the Council of MarsForm would do with prisoners held so far below the surface.
She didn’t like any ideas that sprang into her mind, and pressed the button to slide open the door. A long, dark hallway with flickering floros greeted them, and Kasey had the distinct feeling of walking through a dream as they made their way through the dripping, dank passages.
***
His breath rattled in the dark, his only metronome save for the occasional dripping pipe. Shivering and cold, he huddled himself in his tattered blanket and pressed himself closer to the wall, as close as he could, until his bones ached.
Something was out there.
Something was coming.
He felt it.
His senses tuned into the darkness of his deprivation cell, he listened to the monotony of his own thoughts and the beating of his heart, and couldn’t understand the certainty that erupted in his mind, the certainty that something stalked him, like a predator in the shadows.
“Who is there?” he asked, but no sound would escape and he knew that. No sound would enter either. He thought he knew that, but now he swore he heard footsteps approaching. Uneven, shuffling footsteps, like a man with a swollen, busted ankle hobbling along, grasping at anything that would support his weight.
Then the sound passed, and he convinced himself he had dreamed the entire thing. An apparition, brought on by the deprivation chamber itself. They were working into him. How long? How much had he given up?
As he gave up on the phantom footsteps from the other side of his chamber wall, the door flew open and a brilliant light blasted through the dark, cut it to ribbons and left it as tattered as the blanket that he clung to.
“Hello, Corbin.” The black figure, silhouetted by the rectangle of angelic light entering from the hallway beyond his cell door, stepped up to the broken old man and offered a hand. “We need to talk. It’s about time we had our conversation.”
He struggled with the voice. It sounded familiar, but Corbin couldn’t make out where he had heard it before. It sounded clotted up, as if the man’s throat were plugged with phlegm and he didn’t put the nasally quality with the accentuated vowel sounds until the man’s face became illuminated by the light of the doorway.
Eugene Farrow?
Couldn’t be. As he stood up on shaking legs, he regarded the man who had entered his cell and couldn’t reconcile the broken, swollen features of the man with the image known around the world as the father of the New Space Age. Eugene Farrow, the founder and chief executive of MarsForm.
Disbelief flooded Corbin as the man led him with a jerking chain from the cell, down the hall and to the interrogation rooms. Corbin knew the way. He had walked the path too many times for a tally and felt from the bottom of his heart that this would be the last one. Eugene Farrow didn’t do interrogations. He did executions, if the Ascendancy propaganda were to be believed. He did. Believe, that is. He walked with his head high, like a man awaiting execution, atonement.
Chapter 43
She knew they approached the interrogation rooms by the smell of lye and bleach that reached her nostrils and made her nose flare, her eyes sting and water. She rubbed them, but found no relief.
“How many people have they killed down here?” Anton asked. “And where are the guards?”
“No time,” Jakob said. “We’re almost there”
And they turned only a few more corners before Jakob’s knowledge of the cellblocks below MarsForm’s Siberian outpost proved correct again. Another sign, equally as foreboding, announced that the nondescript green painted door before them led into the Interrogation Wing.
They waited for a moment, and Kasey felt their eyes on her. She hated it. She hated the way she had been regarded since being woken up, like a fossil in a museum, like a collector’s oddity. “Let’s do it,” she said, lackluster and tired.
“After you. Keep your head about you when you go through. We could be in for a surprise,” Jakob warned.
She stood before the door a moment longer and her gaze locked onto the handle that would swing it open. What waited? Corbin? He could be dead. They could have executed all of the prisoners when the alarms went off, when the trawler went down. She had the horrifying image in her head of Corbin’s mutilated corpse resting against the other side of the door, propping it closed, and she knew that when she pushed against its weight and slumped forward to allow her entrance, she would step over his corpse before realizing what she did.
Banish the thought, she warned herself.
“Are you sure you’re ready, Kasey?” Anton asked.
She answered her question with a swift kicking motion to the door’s handle that sent it flying open. She rolled into the Interrogation Wing and readied her weapon for a gunfight, but met no resistance. The others followed, greeted only by an eerie silence, a dim light.
They pressed forward.
“He will be in one of these chambers,” Jakob said, and started checking the doors. One by one, they cleared the rooms and found no trace of any prisoners. No Corbin. Nothing at all, as if the entire wing were abandoned.
And then a chill ran down Kasey’s spine and she knew before the voice reached her ears that someone waited behind them.
“I have found you, Kasey Lee. I have found you.” The voice, despite its distorted quality, was laden with emotion and jumped through octaves from one syllable to the next. She rounded on the voice a
nd found, when she spun around, a sickening beast of a man, a hideously contorted frame that leaked blood from a thousand crevasses that opened in the skin of Eugene Farrow all over. His nose poured blood and his teeth were stained with it. A ghastly stench rose from his body with every movement he made. “A family reunion, this is.”
She saw him, hiding behind the man who looked like a walking corpse, and wanted to cry out. Her emotions ran into each other and conflicted with her brain, her thoughts, her heightened awareness.
“Corbin.” She said the words so faintly that Eugene Farrow scarcely acknowledged she had spoken at all. He produced a pistol from his waistband and leveled it at Corbin.
“I can kill him now. Or you can come with me.”
“Don’t do it, Kasey. He’s lying,” Jakob said, his rifle leveled. Anton also had his gun raised and trained it toward the thing holding Corbin hostage.
“Let him go,” Kasey said, quiet and angry.
“Or you will?” Eugene Farrow let his statement hang and waited for an answer, the payload of Kasey’s threat. She said nothing. Her fingers worked on her rifle’s pistol grip and she waited for an opening.
“I’ll kill myself.”
She pointed her gun at her own jaw, feeling its cold muzzle press against her chin. He responded, Eugene. Not vocally. Not definitively. But his lips twitched when she leveled the gun on herself and she saw that she had one piece of leverage, one opportunity to save her grandfather, Jakob, Anton. Maybe herself, but she doubted it more with each passing second. After his brief twitching lip, his momentary reveal, Eugene Farrow regained the flippant attitude that caught them off guard as they approached.
“You don’t have it in you, Kasey. I know your species. I know Man. You are vain, fearful of mysteries.”
“I am fearful of nothing.” Her voice trembled as she spoke, but she kept her gaze transfixed on the horrid spectacle of Eugene’s face. His lacerations seemed to be growing by the minute, and she thought that, with the torrent of blood pouring from her nose, he would not be conscious for much longer.