by Mike Wild
“Ian …”
“Hush, now. Hush, it’s okay.”
“Ian?”
“No, honey, not Ian.”
“Ian!”
“Shh, shh, shh. It’s not Ian, it’s me. I told you I’m right here. Now, lie still.”
Trix didn’t lie still. She sat bolt upright in bed.
“Easy. You’ve had a hell of a time.”
“No,” she said, grabbing a wrist, “I need—”
What? Trix didn’t know what she needed. She didn’t know where she was. She barely knew who she was. It took her a few seconds to take things in. Then she realised that the world was bright again. And she hurt like hell. She was in a medlev bed, covered in dressings with tubes leading into holes in her she hadn’t had before.
“Hey, doc, get in here; she’s awake!”
Trix’s gaze snapped around. The wrist she was holding was Elly’s. Elly was in a chair beside the bed. The floor around it was scattered with empty sandwich packs and magazines. She looked as if she were about to call for the doc again.
“No,” Trix told her. “Not yet.”
“You sure?”
Trix nodded. Then swallowed. Or tried. She was dry as a bone. She gestured, and Elly poured her a cup of water. Trix said nothing while she emptied it sip by sip. She needed to pull the threads together.
“God, look at you. Trix, I thought I’d lost you.”
“How did I … get here?”
“They found you on level two. One breath short of dead.”
“The nursery?”
“Nope. Corridor 2G. Someone got you to an up-line. Called you in.”
“One of the boffins?”
Elly shook her head. “No. Sorry, Trix. The boffins are all MIA.”
Trix groaned and thumped the mattress. “They ran, Elly. They ignored me, and they ran.”
“They could still be alive. Garrison’s had search teams dipping their toes into some of the lower levels.” Elly bit her lip. “Though after …”
Elly trailed off, and Trix stared at her. “After what? This long? Elly, how long have I been here?”
“Eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks?” Trix fell back onto her pillows. “Jesus. Jesus Christ.”
“Four weeks in and out of surgery. Four weeks nursing womb. You had a real number done on you.”
Yeah, Trix thought. Inside and out. Thanks to the ring. She’d thought it was over, but the damned thing had even hijacked her dream. Almost hijacked her. If it hadn’t been for Ian, she’d—Trix stopped herself. What was she thinking? Ian was dead. Dead. He’d helped her, yes, but he was nothing more than a phantasm. A crutch plucked from her subconscious in her hour of need. The rest—as for the rest, well, she couldn’t be sure whether what she’d seen—what she’d heard—was real or not. All she knew was what had felt real. And what had felt real was the maelstrom trying to take her. And the ring had acted as a conduit to it.
“Trix, what is it?”
“I think there’s something down there, Elly. Deep down. Something evil.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“No, I mean something specific. Something very old, very powerful.”
“What do you mean?”
Trix saw again the ever-expanding corridors. The explosion. Tried to make sense of it. Tried to decide how much of it made sense and hadn’t just been the product of short-circuiting neurons in her overloaded brain.
“Not sure yet. I met something in the Grimrock this morn—er, the last time I saw you. I think I met it again, down there. I think—shit, I don’t know—I think it might be affecting the levels somehow. I need to get it reported.”
Elly stared. Said nothing. Began to fluff the pillows behind Trix’s head.
“Elly, did you hear me? I need to tell DragonCorp about this. Get back down. Find out what’s going on.”
“I heard you, Trix. And I know that’s what you want to do. It’s just that … it might be a little difficult right now.”
“There a problem?”
Trix followed Elly’s gaze as it flicked to the door of her medlev room. She saw the backs of two ’trols positioned right outside. They didn’t look as if they were there to receive flowers, cards, and chocolates for the hitherto comatose patient.
“’Trols, Elly? What’s going on?”
“They’re not my people. They’re in from Beijing. This is out of my hands.”
“What is? What’s out of your hands?”
“Garrison ordered an enquiry into your conduct. DragonCorp ratified it.”
“What?”
“Dereliction of duty.”
“Dereliction of duty? I almost got myself minced trying to save them.”
“I know. The boffins are gone because they didn’t listen. But try telling that to Garrison.”
“Oh, I will. And there’s no time like the present.”
Trix popped her tubes and slid off the side of the bed before Elly could do a thing to stop her. And instantly regretted it. Surgery and the nursing womb might have healed the wounds the minotaur had inflicted, but the results of being eight weeks prone and comatose were more insidious. She dropped like a baby who had not yet learned to walk.
“Well,” Elly said, “that was stupid.”
“I want to know what that bastard Garrison’s up to.”
“And you will. The ’trols out there have instructions to escort you to Citadel as soon as you’re fit and able. But let’s make sure you are first, eh?”
This time Trix begrudgingly allowed Elly to call in the doc, and he to check her over. With a caution—and a couple of restorative shots—he signed her off. Trix suspected this was partly because he wanted rid of the goons clogging up medlev. Groaning, stiff, she retrieved her gear from a cabinet. Clothes and personal effects, that was, as her armour and weapons would have been returned to her locker. But something else was missing. The ring. Trix gazed idly at the small band of reddened skin on her finger where the artefact had sat. The memory of it being there was stronger than it should have been, susurrating in her mind, and she swore she could still hear faint laughter. A question nagged. It was probably nothing. “Elly, who got me to the up-line? Who called me in?”
“We don’t know. They cranked the line but left the phone dangling.”
“Uh-huh.”
Trix gave it no more thought for now. Couldn’t afford to. Garrison beckoned. The Dungeonmaster and she had always been less than bosom-buddies, but in the past year he seemed to have developed a personal grudge against her, typified in his response to her latest request for promotion to master team. Just one word: unpredictable. Okeydokey. She’d show him just how fucking unpredictable she could be.
They rode the elevator to Citadel. Like the exonexus, it was powered not by electricity but hydraulics, and as it ascended with an audible escape of air, Elly turned to the DragonCorp ’trols lurking mutely behind them and said, “Oops.” It was a juvenile joke, but Trix smiled, knowing it was a sign Elly resented their presence, didn’t recognise their authority, found it an affront to her own. Elly’s loyalty to Trix aside, Garrison had made more than one enemy today.
“How’s Puff?” Trix said.
“Puff is fine. Since they locked down your quarters, the old man’s taken him in.”
“They locked down my quarters?”
“Sorry, Trix. Thought I’d mentioned. He wants to see you, by the way—the old man.”
“He does?”
“Didn’t say why.”
The elevator hissed into place in Citadel. The ring of labs, offices, and boardroom circling the inside of DOME some hundred feet above the mezz was the true heart of the Dungeon Operations and Management Environment. Trix, Elly, and the ’trols waited while biometric sensors, flickering as always, scanned them, then strode forth into a curving corridor. As they walked the ring, Trix glanced through the glass doors of the various labs and control rooms, and through one spied Shen. He spied her, too, mouthed “What’s going on?” and, in response
to Trix’s quizzical shrug, “Come see me later.” She nodded. Guessed she had eight weeks of shit to catch up on. But the way she felt at the moment, she was tempted to kick one of the emergency release clamps positioned every twenty paces or so and let the drones fly Citadel off into the wild blue yonder.
They reached the boardroom to find the door sealed. It looked like they were going to make her wait. Of course they were; they, Garrison in particular, liked such games. Trix cooled her heels by wandering over to the door of a hazard lab—warning off the ’trols who tried to hold her back—to peer inside. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The chest she’d seen Garrison’s men lugging out of the rift that morning—eight weeks ago—sat at its centre. She recognised it from its gnarls and scars. The stupid bastards still hadn’t managed to open it when she could have done so before lunch. As she watched, a figure emerged from a far door, pulling on a transparent hood to complete the hazmat suit he already wore, and knelt before the chest’s ornate, skull-shaped lock. He looked young, green, and a knot of trepidation formed in Trix’s stomach as she realised he was being tested for a master team position. Jesus—a trapped chest from god knew which level and they were using it as a test? She could only hope they’d briefed the lad on what had failed so far.
Dammit, they hadn’t! He was going straight for the lock without examining the casing first. Trix hammered on the glass as the boy inserted a probe into the chamber, and he looked up briefly but decided to ignore Trix’s rapid shaking of her head. The probe went in and … nothing happened. Trix let out a sigh. Good boy—at least he was treading carefully. She continued to watch, heart in mouth, as the lad delicately manoeuvred the probe, then, with a shake of his own head, removed it from the lock. Okay, Trix tutored mentally, the lock doesn’t work, at least not yet, so think, boy, think! Look for hidden switches, catches, buttons, panels, any damned thing that might release an inner mechanism—but for god’s sake, examine them first! Come on—you can do it … you can do it.
The boy did do it, carefully and meticulously, smiling slightly, perhaps a little cockily, to himself as he tripped a hidden button, then returned to the lock with his probe. He found the chambers again and turned twice to the right, once to the left, jiggling the last into place. Then he moved to raise the lid. “No!” Trix shouted, but through the hazlab door he didn’t hear a thing. Don’t rely on the fact that there’s only one secret—there’s always more than one secret! Trix thumped on the glass, but it was too late. She imagined rather than heard the sound of the chest’s catch click open, the clack of its trap go off, and then the boy vanished in a roiling belch of bright green. Trix was hammering on the glass now, shouting to anyone who might be in earshot to get the damned door open, but of course it didn’t happen—they didn’t dare. All she could do was curse as the acid cloud filled the room. A moment later something slammed into the glass before her. Something—because it was no longer the boy. The hazmat suit had dissolved, the boy all but dissolved, and Trix caught a fleeting glimpse of bubbling flesh before he wheeled away, silently screaming and batting at himself. The hazlab’s extractors kicked in, then, but it was far, far too late. When, after half a minute, the lab became visible once more, it was just in time to see the boy’s liquefied remains being sucked into the floor.
Trix spun, turning her back to the door on which only smears remained.
“Christ, Elly, he was just a kid. What the fuck was Garrison doing?”
Elly said nothing. Didn’t have to. Her set of jaw and pallor of face said it all.
The boy’s death coincided with her finally being granted admission into the boardroom, so Trix was in even less of a mood than before for the three execs waiting for her. Nonetheless, she had to admit to being jarred to see two of them were suits from DragonCorp itself. One she thought she recognised as an actual board member, Oswald Scarret Star, the fracking billionaire, while the other she knew to be Sheila Uong, head of corporate security. The third was one of their own—if you could call the arrogant, career-hungry, backstabbing bastard called Garrison, who no one associated with and most would prefer dead on one of the levels, ‘one of their own’. Trix was wary of the first two, for sure, but it was Dungeonmaster Garrison whom she’d have to watch; he who’d started this farce of an enquiry to begin with. She’d never quite worked out why he disliked her so, but it was likely once disobeying his direct orders not to go back to pull out some of their people under fire. Oh yes, like Elly and she, Garrison and Trix had been in the military together. Back on bad dream day, he’d been one of the first to run.
“Nice job out there, Garrison,” she said, starting to slip into a seat. “You letting kids take the bullets for you now?”
“Don’t sit down.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re here to answer charges, Ms Hunter, not for a debriefing.”
“This isn’t a court.”
Garrison’s eyes narrowed. He dug the tip of a fountain pen with which he’d been toying into the surface of the table. The nib broke clean away. “No?”
Trix ignored him, sat. “I take it,” she said, “that the three of you haven’t been twiddling your thumbs for two months, waiting for me to come round?”
“We have had … considerable other business.”
“Is that so? Look, what the hell is this about?”
Oswald Scarret Star spoke up for the first time. “Why don’t you tell us, Ms Hunter? Tell us what happened down there.”
Trix shifted uncomfortably. “You know what happened. I lost people.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I’m not happy about that. But these things happen. You know they do.”
“Indeed. And such losses are always a tragedy.” The DragonCorp exec leaned over the table, tone hardening. “But a few insignificant salarymen can be replaced. What you stole from us cannot.”
“Excuse me—what I stole?”
“A ring, Ms Hunter. A potentially valuable ring. Tell me—does that ‘ring’ any bells?”
“This is about the ring? I thought I’d been called for dereliction of duty?”
“Indeed so. What could be more derelict than failing to fulfil your contractual obligation to surrender any and all artefactal property to DragonCorp?”
“Six scientists are missing—very likely dead—and all you’re concerned about is the ring?” She turned to Garrison. “Did you put them up to this?”
Garrison smiled. Trix hated that smile. “This isn’t personal, Keeper 7.”
“Like fuck it isn’t.”
Sheila Uong stepped into the fray. “Address the matter at hand, please.”
Trix sighed. “Okay. Fine. I didn’t steal the ring. I just had no time to bring it in for assessment, is all …”
“Then where is the ring now?”
“I haven’t a clue. I presume medlev removed it when I was brought in.”
“They did not.”
“Then someone else must have taken it.”
“Someone else? Who exactly?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should try asking whoever got me to the up-line.”
Sheila Uong sighed, opened a file before her, turned and studied each of its pages. “I have here eighty-three sworn testimonies of personnel present on the levels at the time of your incapacitation. Not one was the person of whom you speak. Each of these individuals was subject to a full body search following their testimony and not one was in possession of the ring. Do you see where this is leading, Ms Hunter? I—excuse me, that is ‘we’—are disinclined to believe that there was such a person.”
“Meaning?”
“We must consider the possibility that you got yourself to the up-line. And that you secreted the ring somewhere on level 2 whilst you did.”
“I was dying. That ring was the only thing keeping me alive. Why the hell would I kill myself by getting rid of it?”
“A calculated risk.”
“I wasn’t capable of calculating anything,” Trix said. But she was now.
And what she calculated was that there was something seriously wrong with this scenario. She couldn’t work out quite what exactly—they were perfectly within their rights to go after her if they suspected she had stolen the ring—but something nagged at the back of her mind, something that just didn’t sit right at all. Until she was able to work out what it was, she could only hope to steer things back to where they should be.
“Ask yourself this, Ms Uong: What would I want with a cursed ring?”
“I’m sorry—cursed?”
“Cursed,” Trix repeated. “You know, as in Nerdrift’s Noxious Knickers? Or Lord Constantinople’s Copious Cape of Crap?”
“I am not aware of those artefacts.”
“That’s because I just made them up. To make a point. There are artefacts on the levels best not found. That ring you’re so concerned about is one of them. Possibly the worst of them that I’ve ever encountered. Believe me, I experienced it for myself. If it’s missing, let it remain missing, but know this—I didn’t steal it.”
“It’s clear that Keeper 7 is simply attempting to obfuscate the issue.”
Trix scowled at the mere sound of Garrison’s voice, but Oswald Scarret Star silenced him, which changed her scowl to a smile. She might yet be able to turn this farce around. The board member leaned forward once more.
“If we are to believe you, Ms Hunter, would you care to share what form the curse on this ring takes?”
Trix told him everything she’d told Elly. Which admittedly wasn’t much. But Star took it a step further. “You say this ‘evil’ is affecting the levels somehow? What precisely do you mean?”
Trix faltered. Because she couldn’t give ‘precise’. All she could give was the impression she’d gained. The impression from the ever-lengthening, exploding corridors of her visions and, now that she’d had time to think about it, what had happened down in the nursery just before all this began. She’d begun to doubt that it was the plants that had shifted.