Dragon: Bridge & Sword: The Final War (Bridge & Sword Series Book 9)

by JC Andrijeski

  The sheer feat of engineering alone brought awe to his light.

  He focused on the contents of the room itself, taking in the enormous, pale gold and green vats that stretched in over a dozen perspective-altering rows in front of him and to each side.

  The ones nearest to him appeared to scrape the ceiling; they shimmered with so much organic power they pulsed in steady but non-synchronistic bursts, making it difficult for his eyes to focus on them. Tapered at the bottom, they stood on end like squat tops, nearly touching at their widest points above the aisles.

  The room smelled faintly of sulfur, although he could tell most of that smell was being scrubbed by the air vents situated in long lines above the vats.

  Who the fuck had built this?

  How had they built it?

  Despite not liking the perspective of the hanging vats, or the smell, he forced himself to move, to begin walking down the nearest of those tall rows.

  His heart pounded, but it no longer felt like claustrophobia. He almost wondered if he was having a physical reaction to the vats themselves.

  He suspected he knew what was in them, but he didn’t scan to find out.

  That would take more of his light than a snapshot or a shield, so he didn’t want to risk it until he had a damned good reason. He’d already more than halfway decided to wait until he was well and truly caught to begin conducting scans for real.

  Until then, he would focus on getting as far in as he could.

  Even so, the similarities with other organic cooking and storage facilities didn’t escape him. In particular, he remembered sharing memories with his wife after the Registry op in Brazil. He remembered the vats filled with organic machine composites Allie described to him, what they’d looked like inside that warehouse-like building she and Wreg breached under the Black Arrow main offices.

  That those vats stood right outside the mainframe storage for the official Seer Registry angered all of them––Wreg especially.

  Allie hadn’t been angry though.

  Anger wasn’t the word for what Revik felt on her, the one time they talked about it.

  She’d been sickened by it.

  The whole thing made her light-sick… depressed.

  She almost hadn’t been able to talk about it at all. She finally shared her memories with him, in lieu of having to voice her impressions aloud. She answered all of his follow-up questions during the debrief, but didn’t offer anything additional.

  It hurt him, that pain on her.

  It also moved him past what he could express to her.

  Fighting the memory out of his light when it wanted to combine with what he’d felt off her that morning, he took snapshots of the vats with his light, if only to distract himself.

  Scanning the rows with his eyes, he tried to decide if anything else worth looking at lived in the warehouse-like room, or if he should just push ahead.

  In the end, he decided to push ahead.

  He walked for what must have been twenty minutes before he could see the other end of the aisle. Marking the location of a door up ahead, about twenty feet past the last two vats in his aisle, Revik decided to continue forward again. The more distance as he could put between himself and that entrance by the horse barns, the better.

  As he reached the next door, he pulled the majority of his aleimi back behind a second layer of shielding. Stretching out his hand, he grabbed hold of the door handle.

  It wasn’t locked.

  His mind immediately dismissed the room’s contents.

  Even so, he pushed the handle down and walked through, igniting floor lights once he’d stepped inside the secondary chamber.

  Closing the door behind him, he glanced up, realizing at once that the new room had a much lower ceiling than the cavern he’d just left. Low enough that his breath clenched, bringing his eyes up to the mirrored sheen of organics.

  Dark green in color, they were so filled with living material they rippled, reacting to his eyes and light as he took in their length.

  No wonder they hadn’t bothered to lock the door.

  The damned machine might have even let him in.

  He hesitated, wondering if the organic might try to kill him if he crossed the room without authorization.

  Regardless, he knew he’d need his light soon. He had no idea where to even begin looking in a place this size without his light, not without physical specs, or at least a place to start. He knew roughly what he was looking for, but that was more or less useless without knowing a damned thing about where he was.

  Either way, he’d be caught; he knew that, so that was no longer his primary concern.

  Given what he’d left upstairs, and how long he’d been down here now, being caught was a given. Being strategic about when and how he used his light had more to do with extending the amount of time he had down here.

  Taking a breath, he pushed off the wall.

  He began to walk, cautiously at first, then with more purpose when the sentient wall only followed him, rippling along behind him like a curious puppy. It didn’t try to do anything to him, or even scan him really, although Revik had been bracing for both.

  He found the lack of any active protocol curious.

  From proximity touches with his aleimi, meaning what he could feel without actively scanning the intelligence there, it felt like the wall had yet to be programmed with a specific purpose.

  Which meant this part of the complex might still be under construction.

  Or else no one had flipped the “on” switch yet.

  Apart from the organic, the room was featureless and relatively shallow. He could feel storage bins along the walls from contact with the organic and noticed protective suits hanging inside a semi-transparent case lining one wall.

  Those could be for workers or techs on the vats he’d just left behind. But why have such a high-grade organic guarding over what amounted to a storage room?

  He reached the next wall, which was also featureless.

  He could feel from the organic that something lived on the other side.

  It felt almost like it was prodding him, telling him he was in the right place.

  After the barest hesitation, he reached out with his bare hands, touching the living material to see if he could find a way through without going into the Barrier. After feeling over the strangely soft, mirrored green surface for a few seconds––politely, or as politely as he could without engaging the sentient directly––he found an access panel.

  That one seemed to have its security protocols disengaged, too.

  His nerves rose slightly as the door slid into the organic wall.

  The thought flickered through his mind that he was being led.

  He had no reason to think so, but the feeling strengthened, the longer he turned it over. He wondered if he’d even been led to this particular floor. Had doors existed on all the other floors, but remained invisible in the stone? If so, why had this one decided to show itself?

  The thought was absurd––yet, somehow, it felt true.

  Which raised the question: if he was being led, who was leading him?

  For some reason, Revik highly doubted it was Menlim.

  He stared around the room the organic led him to, which was multi-leveled and covered in metal catwalks. Unlike the one he’d just left, most of the new room appeared to be dead metal. Four levels were visible from where he stood by the organic door, and the ceiling seemed to be even higher than what he’d seen in the vat room, although it was broken into multiple floors.

  His mind tried to wrap around the architecture of that, how it related to the original stone staircase, but he let it go after a few more seconds. He was starting to think there were active constructs down here, though. He even wondered if the organic room had turned him around without him noticing, spitting him out on another level.

  When he’d worked for Salinse, they’d thrown around design parameters for a new base, including security features with complex constructs in t
he event of a breach. Revik even remembered discussing a platform-type elevator disguised as a storage room, with enough organics to confuse the motion as it rose and fell.

  It might even have been his idea.

  Stepping fully into the new room, he caught hold of the guard rail as he balanced on the catwalk, looking down. After reaching out tentatively with his light, he decided to do a quick scan when he felt no reaction to his presence there.

  To his aleimi, it felt like some kind of generator room.

  He could feel hydro power, some solar storage, gas…

  His light stopped on what felt like a full-sized fusion generator.

  Even if this was the only such room in the whole underground complex, this facility had some serious fucking power capabilities––a lot more than what lived aboveground in the City, that was for sure.

  He stared down from the catwalk, still scanning, and felt no people whatsoever, despite the audible sound of live machinery. He could tell less than half of the machines were switched on, however; it was almost like the whole complex was in a kind of standby mode, where the lights were on only enough for basic maintenance.

  Like the sentient organic, this room mostly appeared to be waiting.

  Dormant, maybe.

  He wondered again why it was so easy to get in here.

  He also wondered if he was being given a tour, versus conducting an infiltration.

  He walked cautiously down the catwalk to the other side of the room. Opening the door there, he found himself in another machine room. The door beyond that one led into another of those longer, warehouse-sized caverns, only this one appeared to be set up to grow crops in stacked, glass-enclosed planters that rose up to the ceiling, most of them accessible via moving platforms on hydraulics.

  He walked to the end of that cavernous space and came across another organic room.

  That time, he didn’t just cross over to the other side.

  He stood in the middle of it, thinking.

  Still toying with the idea of the moving platform, he decided to experiment. Opening his light the barest amount, he sent out a pulse of intention.

  Kindly direct me to the nearest high security areas, he sent politely to the organic. What is the best hidden secret down here, friend? Can you show me?

  The room pulsed with an agreeable light.

  Again Revik found himself thinking of a dog, or some other good-natured animal.

  He didn’t feel the room move.

  Even so, when the lights flickered a second time, he glanced around him and saw one of the walls glowing faintly. More of the organic pooled on that side as he watched, rippling in that direction like a lit arrow on the floor.

  Clicking under his breath and smiling in spite of himself, Revik began to walk.

  Once he reached the wall, he didn’t even need to touch it. It opened on its own.

  That brought another shiver of nerves, but also a flicker of excitement.

  Sending a pulse of thanks to the wall, he felt a ripple of pleasure off the organic as he walked through the narrow opening. Once he’d reached the other side, he felt the shift behind him and turned in time to see the opening in the wall evaporate.

  He stared at that blank space, feeling his nerves return.

  It hit him that he had no idea how to get back.

  The train of thought died as soon as his eyes began to scan the walls and floors of the new room. Remembering his words to the sentient elevator, he looked around at where the being had brought him. For a few seconds, his mind couldn’t make much sense of what he was seeing.

  Low-ceilinged, most of the room was dark, and outside of his visual range.

  In front of him stood a round, raised platform, dimly lit and with a panel on a stand, what looked like a handprint scanner. Revik had no reason to think it would let him in––or even that it wouldn’t ID and then kill him if he put his hand there.

  He felt a pull to place his fingers and palm on the scanner anyway.

  Feeling that pull strengthen, some part of him balked.

  It crossed his mind again to wonder just how much he was being manipulated right now––by whatever construct or organics lived down here, by the construct over the City above, by Menlim himself. He’d known for a while he was being affected by the Dreng’s constructs, despite Menlim adhering to at least the bare letter of the law in terms of their agreement.

  Simply working and living here was affecting him.

  Lately, he’d felt that more in small ways than large ones.

  His moods. His desire to drink. His desire to fuck––even to be hit.

  The aggression that rose in his light, the anger that didn’t entirely feel like his. The ease with which he slid into negative head spaces. The ease with which he grew paranoid… and cynical… and contemptuous of humans. The part of his mind that wanted to paint his light as different, to make his loneliness… even his pain… into something exceptional, noble even.

  His fucking ego. Ego mixed with that damned savior complex that still dogged him from his childhood. The same savior complex Allie got on him about constantly.

  Worse than any of that was feeling cut off. Feeling alone. Feeling so desperately fucking alone here, to the point of near-constant separation pain.

  He hadn’t stopped walking as all of that drifted in and out of his light.

  Now he stepped up on that platform, looking down over the darkened space, feeling too close to the ceiling. As soon as he stood on the platform, the floor illumination in that larger space rose. Not a lot, but enough to get a better sense of the dimensions, which stretched about five times as long as Revik’s mind had been imagining––enough that he saw that floor as another green organic, but not as dark in color as the sentient elevator.

  Unlike the others, this room evoked the feel of a lab.

  It had more of a “science” and “research” stamp on it than either the cavern with the vats or that massive underground greenhouse, although nothing in the physical details either refuted that impression or supported it.

  The room itself appeared to be entirely empty.

  What looked like giant-sized manhole covers covered that organic floor, buried in the living metal, nearly flush with it at the edges. Unlike the shimmering green of the organic, those round discs shone a lighter silver-gray like burnished steel. They pushed out of the floor’s surface from being convex, maybe as much as half a foot, so they might be difficult to walk on.

  They reminded him vaguely of covered missile silos he’d seen in Siberia. So of course his mind immediately went to bombs, some kind of air defense system.

  But that made no sense down here.

  Taking a breath, he sent up a silent prayer to the Ancestors.

  Then he laid his bare palm and fingers on the scanner.

  44

  UNCANNY VALLEY

  AN ALARM WENT off at once. He felt it in the higher parts of his light.

  It triggered a denser layer of his shield even before his mind caught up with what he’d felt.

  Movement in front of him drew his eyes.

  Fighting to think past the now-deafening Barrier alarm, he watched as the first of those manhole-type discs rose out of the floor.

  A green-tinted cylinder of organic glass appeared below the disc as it rose.

  Revik stared at the ring of bodies and faces as it appeared.

  They formed a bizarre circle facing outward, every face identical to the one next to it.

  The body shape of each figure was identical too, beyond that of identical twins. The exactness in height and proportions challenged his mind and sight. It disturbed him, evoking an Uncanny Valley effect, like he was looking at living dolls.

  It didn’t help that he recognized the face and body of each individual in the rounded row of figures.

  It was Eddard.

  He’d never seen Eddard naked before.

  The body was unmistakable, even without clothes. He stared from one of those bodies to the next, noting
identical moles and identical flaccid penises and identical bald spots and even identical operation scars from an appendix he may or may not have ever had.

  Revik paused on the armbands each of the bodies wore, until movement to his right jerked his gaze and his light that way.

  Another of the manhole covers gently rose.

  Revik found himself staring at another face and body he recognized, although not as well as he knew Eddard’s. He recognized her though, from Gossett Tower in New York. He’d pegged her as a seer, with Middle Eastern features if she’d been human.

  He’d shot her.

  Looking over the rows of her inside the green-tinted glass cylinder, he felt vaguely sick, noting her shaved genital area and navel ring even as his eyes slid up to her long dark hair and the tattoo she wore over one breast. Each body resembled the same woman in her mid to late forties if she were human. If she was seer, she’d be close to Balidor’s age.

  A third manhole cover was rising.

  Revik found himself staring in near-fascination at a row of bodies of the old woman, Novak––well, Xarethe, according to the files Balidor dug up on her.

  The Adhipan ID’d her as a seer, too.

  Looking at the row of wrinkled, lizard-like faces in stasis with their helmet of white-gray hair, Revik wondered if they had any fucking idea what these beings really were.

  Were they clones of the originals? Or were these bodies just an elaborate smokescreen? Did the beings behind them, like Terian, come from a different body or place altogether?

  The sickness in his gut worsened when he saw the fourth cylinder rise, filled with a ring of bodies that resembled a sixty-something Caucasian human. He might be a seer too, but his coloring and features were so unusual for a seer, Revik found himself doubting it.

  Revik remembered shooting that one in New York, too.

  Jumping down off the platform, he began walking through the cylinders as more began to rise, feeling his sense of unease worsen.

  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.