The Core

by Jack Robuck

  *

  They saddled the animal in silence, in the grim darkness between the walls. The light from the nearby desert glowed in vertical slats through the paddock fence and landed on the small brown and purple iguana that turned its head and looked at her with its huge dark eyes.

  She reached out a hand slowly, afraid. The lizard made no movement, but she could feel a breathing calm in its eyes, and she stroked its bubbly skin above its left nostril. It rose for her, and walked out to the old man holding the harness and gear, two water skins and a saddlebag.

  At the gates, she mounted, and the old man reached out and put a hand on her knee. "Where you headed?"

  She pulled her knee up and away from him, squeezing the iguana with her thighs. "The ocean. Gate City."

  The old man shook his head. "You'll never make it. That's a two week ride, and you've supplies for a couple days. Even if you did, the sun's come back. You'll bake to a crisp long before Gate City."

  Ella looked down at the spikey comb of her mount. "I have all I'm ever gonna have."

  The man said, "You'll both die out there in the sand."

  She nodded, keeping her eyes on the straw strewn cobblestones, and pulled the reigns, turning out into the great orange wide open. Holding on with one hand, she clutched her big pendant and closed her eyes. She could feel his gaze on her back, swaying high astride her mount until she passed over a hill and out of sight.

  Chapter 13

  Ear splitting silence in the greasy, cramped dark. Matthew grimaced at how he had forgotten it in only a few short weeks. Looking at the black grime under his fingernails, he saw his life before the planet as the test-tube that it really was. Reality wasn't pretty, but it was fact, not theory.

  The refinery barge they’d commandeered drifted toward the sprawling tanker. Built as an afterthought from scraps, it was an ugly weld-job of cylinders and airlocks. But that wasn't their destination. In the narrow, sloped control deck they waited, pressed sweating against each other as Jimmy punched the final override command and reprogrammed their course. The clunky barge rolled heavily until through the tiny, grimy circular window they could see it, glowing, bristling: the Admiral's flagship.

  A city in the sky; a hellish monument of fear and control. A blinking electric labyrinth where thousands struggled and died. They could see Troopers running in corridors through thick glass ports as they approached.

  *

  The pitted grey-blue hull still glowed with a bright orange scar as Jimmy lowered the cutting torch and turned to them, flipping up his goggles. “We're in.”

  Natalie was still limping from her injury. She, Sydney and Winston all headed aft. Matthew, Jimmy, Glazier and Charlie stalked toward the front of the ship. All around them the octagonal corridors were coming to life: long light strips popped on; reflections sliced bluish white along faceted walls leading them forward.

  The flagship was a late-generation Behemoth; a mile-long hulk riddled with barracks and gun batteries. They passed a brightly lit cargo deck, where a grid of planetary assault ships sat, waiting to be manned. A bow-legged crane structure was squatting over a space in the grid, slowly printing another ship in place.

  Corridor after corridor, searching, until they reached a large double door labeled 'Control.' The doors slid open into a blinking nightmare. They all stopped mid-step in the doorway, as if waiting for their eyes to reassess the scene before them.

  Numbers, data, videos projected in the oil slicked planes that cascaded, forming columns from the cable-tressed ceiling. Cables cut through the planes, some planes blinked and sputtered, and cut cables lay scattering sparks on railings and grating. All the content was numbing, insane: a ballerina twirled in a music box on the third column down the catwalk on the left, and on the second/right a cat rotted in fast-forward as the camera zoomed in to study maggot spread. Zoomed in to DNA, zoomed in, zoomed in, zoomed in...The cat played on grass with a red ball as a man walked toward it with a gun.

  Fractal studies, formulas, two men in ancient looking suits played chess, a tree growing. Matthew took the lead, by-passing sparking cables, electrified puddles of unknown liquids, weaving through the grid of catwalks and projected columns.

  Through the darkness, lit only by a carnival of scientific horror, to find in the far corner a mass of glowing tube runs. Like an anemone suctioned to the wall, an orange-red glowing mass with tubes, and tubes with red flecks that squirted toward and away from the naked, shriveled Asian man half-buried in the mass. His torso was slicked with sweat, his gristly abdomen covered in a layer of silicone goo. The tide of it cut across his hip bones in a wavy, jagged line as if it had grown there.

  The man looked up at them, his shaved head browless, lashless. His skull was pierced with black screw valves where tubes sucked flecks, squirted flecks, his body pierced in many places with cords and hoses large and small. The skin of his wrists was flayed back and thick bundles of cables and tubes ran out of them, and up, up into the ceiling, into the throbbing mass, into the floor, some around the corners of the walls and out of sight.

  The man opened his thin, sticky mouth, saliva trailing vertical between long closed lips, and he whispered, “Please.”

  Jimmy stepped forward, “What the fuck did they do to this guy? We're gonna get you out of here.”

  The man smiled a tiny, flinching spasm. “No. Impossible. Please, just tell me. How did she do it?”

  Jimmy and Matthew shared a questioning look. Matthew stepped slowly toward the tubed man. “Who?”

  The man gestured a bundled wrist at the nearest slick-screen, where a spinning, whirling mass of colored dots formed a throbbing organic tree structure at the heart of a snow-globe universe. As they watched, the tiny dots were blown away and the camera zoomed out on a pair of chapped pink lips, zoomed out on Rachel, zoomed out on all of them standing at the elevator door to the Core.

  “How did she beat the Engineer? The old man...the hologram? How? I tried for years. I don't know how long the Admiral had me here, after he found me. I was a scientist, I think, oh...I can't remember, I can't. I tried, I tried for decades.” The man began to weep.

  “I couldn't do it. I could never beat the old man. I could never crack the lock, and all he cared about was the Core, the Core, the Core!” the man screamed at them, wrestling against his neon bonds, tubes whipping around his body, pulling taut, stretching from their pin-points on the walls, on the ceiling. His wrists straining to pull his head and torso toward the team on taut cable bundles, valves snapped, flecked liquids squirted, oozed onto the man, from the ceiling down through the catwalk, onto their vests, and his face grotesqued. Lips ripping open, browless eyes open wide, shrunken-gummed teeth huge and white reflecting the colors. The carousel of images on the slick-screens behind them shuffled across his face.

  Matthew drew his revolver and placed it to the man's thrusting forehead, all his sweat-soaked skin taut and green in the blink of light, and the smell of him, of sweat and limp humanity, rotting against the wall.

  Matthew leaned in. “Where were the refugees from The Waverly sent?”

  The man's mouth drew into a deep impossible grin and he silently shook his head. Back and forth he shook his head and his mouth opened, his globous tongue stuck out from between his teeth, and probed the barrel of the pistol around the cold edge. He whispered. “I hope you know what you're doing.”

  His neck stretched, his lips opened, reaching, wrapped themselves around the revolver. Still grinning, the man raised bare brows and slowly shook his head back and forth.

  The bullet hit the wall after passing through his brain, the barrel, after the hammer fell, after Matthew, shocked, turned his head slightly in disgust, twisted the barrel up, and squeezed the trigger. The pasty corpse collapsed against its restraints.

  They looked at each other in silence. The machinery thrummed. The flickering screens projected blurry onto their faces, all blank. They looked down and away from each other.

  Jimmy walked over to a console, pulled
away some cables covering a terminal, and wiped the screen clear of goo. He began to tap-tap on the screen, reading. “This is definitely where they were trying to access the Core...” He looked uneasily at the corpse of the tubed man.

  Matthew stepped forward to look over his shoulder. “But the game stopped them?”

  Jimmy tapped silently for a few more moments. “Yes. After the old man put the Core into record-skip mode from downstairs, they were locked out up here. The Chalice being removed was a hardware error. Nothing they could do. The Admiral must have hacked this guy into the mainframe with all this fucking biotech just to try to beat the game so they could go down there and put it back."

  Matthew looked back at the still blinking mass. “So what's the problem now? Why couldn't this guy control the Core from here once we reset it?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “He could, he just didn't give a shit. The planet started doing its own thing, rebuilding itself, but I think this guy lost it a long, long time ago. But we can access the Core from here. And it doesn't look like the Fleet has figured that out yet, or they'd be here fucking up our night.”

  Matthew turned to go. “So destroying this ship is even more important now. Come on, let's go.”

  The booming rattle of assault rifle fire. The plink and skitter of ceramic rounds stopped them in their tracks. Glazier and Charlie set up covering the door they'd entered through and were about to fire when Matthew saw Natalie, Sydney and Winston come racing around the corner, bouncing off the corridor and firing behind.

  “Don't fire! Let them through.” Matthew pushed away Glazier's rifle as the doctor fired.

  Like fireworks, the shots crackled off from a dozen weapons as the Fleet Troopers poured around the corner behind Natalie. Matthew winced as the sharp rapport in the narrow steel confines reflected right into his ears.

  “Gah!”

  A white blur, a razor sharp ceramic round ripped across his left cheek, shredding his ear lobe and exploding in the wall behind him near the forward door. Holding a sleeved shoulder up to try to staunch the bleeding, he beckoned to his team and to Natalie's, who had crossed the threshold.

  “Come on! We've gotta make it to the bridge. We can still do this!”

  Firing erupted in the forward corridor as well. A half-dozen Fleet Troopers in heavy assault gear were coming from the bridge. They all opened fire, and the rebels took up what cover they could, firing both directions down a long corridor.

  Natalie yelled. “This isn't working!” She slapped the door panel button, and it slid closed.

  Jimmy looked up from the terminal where he was still working. “That ain't gonna hold 'em!”

  Matthew slapped the other door panel button. The sudden silence rang in their ears. “You can lock these doors!” He tapped the prompts on the door panel, and quickly repeated the process on the forward door.

  Natalie grabbed him by the shoulder. “Is that the only way outta here?”

  Matthew put in a new clip and started sliding extra rounds into the half-spent one. “Everybody reload!” He turned to face Natalie. “We're gonna have to fight our way to the bridge, and hold it until Jimmy can open fire on the Fleet. We'll do what we said—we should be able to destroy the Behemoths before they know we're here. And then...we'll ram the biggest, closest ship we can't take down.” A hitch in his voice, he caught his breath, and paused. “The planetsiders will have to do the rest.”

  Jimmy yelled from the far corner. “Hold on a second. We might have other options. We can definitely turn off the power supply to the ships—”

  “It doesn't matter! They've powered up!”

  Jimmy waved a hand at him in frustration. “Yeah, but if we can do that, I wonder what else we can do.”

  Matthew frowned, and Jimmy went on. “You're forgetting it again. The impossible planet. Every single function of that big giant bitch is programmed. Programs have variables. We can reverse the terraforming, we can crack the fucker wide open if we want to, we can turn off the gravity and send everyone on it tumbling into space.”

  Matthew was still frowning, but his upper lip twitched in thought. “Not very good for us. That's probably what they would do, actually. We can't let them in this room. But wait a second. What exactly are the variable parameters of the gravity field?”

  Jimmy tapped away. “Uhm, intensity, distance below surface penetration, distance above surface, uh...lots of orbital functions, functions for the weird little fucking moons...”

  “Wait. Distance above surface.” Matthew squinted his eyes at Jimmy, and Jimmy picked up on his thought process.

  “Holy shit.”

  The Troopers were banging on the doors now, trying to get in.

  Matthew smiled. “We're above the surface. The Fleet is.”

  Jimmy turned back to the panel, hurriedly typing. “We're pretty fucking far above it.”

  Matthew jogged over to the terminal. He pointed to a diagram on the screen. “Yeah, but look. Intensity and distance are two different parameters. We can crank up the gravity to barely within tolerable levels for life on the planet, and if we do that, and extend its reach to the maximum altitude—”

  Jimmy broke in, “You'd basically be setting the gravity to what it would be if this planet were solid...real.”

  Matthew nodded. “Maybe they built in this feature to disguise the planet's true nature if they ever had to. Whatever. But the Fleet is orbiting at Earth-gravity altitude. We can end this.”

  Jimmy laughed. “So it’s still a suicide mission.”

  “Looks like it. Now it’s just more of a sure thing.”

  “And a hell of a lot more bang for our buck.”

  Natalie whispered, “It won't be very pleasant downstairs.”

  Jimmy nodded. “Especially for anybody living under the big dark shadow of a falling ship. But I don't think we have a lot of choice. If the Fleet is at full power, this war is over.”

  As Jimmy started punching in the calculations, turning up the gravity intensity slowly, Matthew closed his eyes. He hoped that everyone on the planet would just lie down in bed for what was about to happen.

  They won't have much other choice.

  The trio paused in silence, as they watched the screen light up showing gravity's increase. Natalie whistled. “There's a lot of old folks, lotta livestock probably dying down there right now.”

  Jimmy grimaced. “I know. And my finger's on the trigger.”

  Matthew grabbed Jimmy's arm. “That's it. That's all they can take before they suffocate. Now do the range. Can you punch it?”

  Jimmy nodded, “I can try.” He started sliding his finger up the on-screen gradient bar.

  Matthew looked around over his shoulder at the screens. “Wait, Jimmy, can we get anything on these screens? How the fuck do we know it’s working?”

  Before he finished his sentence, the pull of abnormal gravity began to override the artificial system on the ship. Jimmy twisted to the side, buckled over and threw up, and several of the other rebels did as well. Matthew gripped the terminal and punched in some commands. The room lit up orange, and a big multi-screen view of the entire Fleet, set dark against the planet, appeared across the columns. Every ship was slowly tilting off its axis.

  Natalie pointed. “It’s working!”

  But Jimmy, wiping his mouth, pointed too. “Look!”

  A half-dozen ships, two transports, three destroyers and a behemoth were turning on their center point away from the planet, even as they were slowly sliding toward it.

  Jimmy screamed, “Fuck!” and turned back to the console, raising the gravity range even further. “They gotta be confused, but they've got some fucking serious helm discipline.”

  Matthew shook his head. “No way. They must have been about to maneuver. They must know we're here, maybe they were planning to come blow us to bits before we could attack them.”

  Natalie shook him by the arm. “Doesn't matter. They're gonna make it.”

  Jimmy stared back over his shoulder, hurriedly pok
ing the console screen. Matthew's cheek dripped blood onto the terminal as he leaned over it, looking back as well. Natalie, shaking her head, raised her rifle in an accusatory threat to the screen just as their view began to fall off, and their stomachs took another dive through the floor.

  Matthew grabbed his abdomen and turned to Jimmy, who was locking in the terminal's commands. “Shouldn't the artificial gravity be canceled out by the planet's?”

  Jimmy stood up, his face stretched into a grimace. “You would think we'd be in zero-g right now. But I'm getting the feeling it’s not gonna be that pleasant of a death.”

  In the corner of the far left screen, they could see a handful of ships burning thrusters away from the planet.

  Matthew turned back to the terminal. “It doesn't matter. We just have to stay right here until it’s too late for all of the ships trapped in the gravity well to turn back. Once we're close enough, we'll restore the Core to normal gravity.”

  Natalie laughed, crazy-eyed. “And we'll be dead, and nobody will ever know how we brought a thousand ships crashing to the ground.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “You're nuts.”

  Natalie laughed out loud, her head back. “We'll be gods. Rebel gods in space!”

  Jimmy and Matthew laughed. Matthew thought back to being at the airlock with Rachel. How she had panicked at the thought of death then. “Doesn't do us any good.”

  Jimmy paused. “Did the knocking stop?”

  Matthew listened. “Yeah.”

  Jimmy turned quickly about. “And we're going to turn the gravity back to normal?”

  The giant orange planet filled the screen now and Matthew had a weird feeling of deja-vu. “Yeah, we have to, before we crash, or everyone on the planet will die.”

  Jimmy smiled. “Yeah, but I can just automate that. You remember that big grid of planetary assault crafts we passed?”