by Mike Wild
“You really are a dinosaur, aren’t you?”
“Maybe so,” Yuri admitted, “but there is a reason I am last of my kind. Oh, come on, English, I am bored of this DOME shit. Escort this fucking thing, fetch that fucking thing, find the other fucking thing. And so—the condition is this—I come with you to do what a soldier should do.”
Yuri wasn’t letting the key go. Trix sighed.
“Jesus Christ, I should have booked a group ticket.”
“It is destined, tovarish. Think what we have! You, me, Professor Arthur and Shen-Li. A rogue, a warrior, a wizard, and … well, somebody clerical.”
“It’s a twist on the classic combo, I’ll give you that.”
Yuri downed the last of his vodka with a sigh, slammed his upended glass on the table. “Then I take it we have deal?”
Trix rolled her eyes, shook her head, then smiled. “Game on.”
VII
Oblivion
The game’s first move came in the middle of the night. Not because DOME was quiet then—DOME never slept—but because it took Shen that long to work his magic, so to speak. Nevertheless, there was a muted feel to the mezzanine—that lull before dawn, where everything was vaguely dreamlike and the rumble of an exonexus pod hurling a keeper home sounded distant and lonely, like the clackety-clack of a four a.m. train carried on the wind.
It made it all the more alarming when all hell broke loose.
Klaxons sounded. Red lights flashed. Bulkheads started rolling down. People ran everywhere, always towards an exit. To the exonexus and helipad, to their jumpbugs and rushcars, to the maglev station. To anything that would get them across the desert fast. And with good reason. The only reason there was for the alarms going off like this.
They called it the Oblivion Protocol.
DragonCorp wasn’t stupid. It might not realise the full implications of what it had taken on, but it knew how to cover its arse. Knew there was a possibility that one day something might come through the rift that the boom guns couldn’t stop. And it had planned for this. DOME was essentially the cork for the genie’s bottle; more accurately, a cap designed to be screwed down if things got out of hand. Not only screwed down but then to sterilise the bottle’s contents—stored in its superstructure were compressed tanks of nerve toxin, fifty thousand litres of flesh-eating virus and, on the off chance whatever came through was challenged in the nerve or flesh department, three fifty-megaton nuclear bombs.
Trix, Ralph, and Yuri, along with Elly, weaved against the tide of the evacuating crowd, ignored by civilians and the ’trols marshalling them. Elly moved amongst the three, still stuffing the last of the supplies she’d helped smuggle into DOME into their backpacks—Shen’s ‘go’ had come a little sooner than expected. She gave Trix a worried glance, and Trix knew exactly why.
“Shen,” she said into the mirror, which she now had mounted on a swivel on the stock of her crossbow, “this is your doing, isn’t it?”
Shen stared back. He was trying to look calm, but this was spoiled somewhat by the fact that he was frantically tapping keys. “Yes, Trix. You wanted a diversion, did you not?”
“A small diversion. This is not a small diversion, Shen.”
“Yes, well, I wanted it to be convincing. Okay, okay, in trying to hack the fire system, I may have hit one wrong key. Can happen to anyone.”
“But you can sort it, right? This fucking thing isn’t actually going to go off, is it?”
Shen snorted and said nothing.
“Shen?”
“Just … leave it … to me.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Ohhh,” Shen said quaveringly, “not really.”
“Shit,” Trix said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
They weaved on. Thankfully, the evacuees were starting to thin, most clients gone. A few ’trols still stumbled up from the pit, and off to the left a worker was thumping the controls of his golem in frustration, trying to power the exoskeleton down. He jumped from its cockpit in the end. Jumped again, and swerved off running as a nearby baffle plate vented a great hydraulic hiss. It wasn’t alone—all around DOME’s exterior, the primary stage of the protocol released foundation clamps in readiness for a clockwise downward spiralling of the superstructure itself. The sound of the first clamp slamming up came from off to the west, as loud as a strike from Thor’s hammer. The first, Trix knew, of twelve. She and the others had to ignore it and everything else—had to trust in Shen—and get down into the pit and anomaly before it was too late.
But the stairs were already retracting as they got there, part of the protocol, and they ran on through the Grimrock Café. None of them had expected to use their ropes so soon, but each tied them off on the Grimrock’s balcony. They would need to rappel down. Ralph and Yuri swung over the rail and kicked off, but Elly held Trix’s shoulder as she climbed.
“Don’t die, okay?” She laughed nervously, looking around. “That is, if we don’t all die in the next few minutes.”
“Elly, watch your back. This could mean your job, or worse.”
“So could whatever’s happening down there.”
“It may still be nothing.”
Elly shook her head. “Your instincts are too good for that. It’s something, all right. So go sort it out.” She patted Puff, who was hopping from leg to leg on her shoulder. “And don’t worry, I’ll look after the little fella.”
Trix prepared to kick off.
“Hey. Drinks when you get back?”
“Sure.”
Trix looked up as she kicked off, past Elly and Puff, to the blowing of explosive bolts and release of umbilicals from various points around Citadel. Above that, DOME’s crown was slowly retracting to reveal the exonexus tracks along which the last of the evacuation pods hurtled. The tracks, too, would soon pull back, clearing the way for the emergency separation of Citadel. And when the ring was gone, when DOME closed again, it would begin to turn. Get it together, Shen, she thought, or there ain’t gonna be a DOME to come back to.
Back to, that was, if they ever got into the levels at all.
Trix touched ground between Yuri and Ralph. Both men had retrieved and stowed their ropes, as she did now, and were staring grimly at the boom guns. There was nothing coming through the anomaly, but the guns didn’t know that—tied into the protocol, they’d switched to saturation mode and were pummelling the far end of the pit with everything they had. The clatter of their rapid and constant ingestion of ammo from their underground feeds was almost as loud as the firing of the guns themselves. There was no way the guns were going to run out and no way Trix and her crew would get past them alive.
“What now, English?” Yuri shouted in Trix’s left ear.
“This does appear to present a problem,” Ralph shouted in her right.
Trix, in turn, shoved them both away and shouted into the mirror. “Shen, SHEN, how are you doing?”
“What? I can’t hear a thing.”
“What?”
“You’re going to have to speak up.”
“I wonder why.”
“Is that gunfire? I said, IS THAT GUNFIRE?”
“OF COURSE IT’S FUCKING GUN—oh.”
Trix realised that she could hear herself shouting. Realised the racket of the boom guns had stopped. Realised the klaxons had stopped, too. The only noises left were a hearty sigh from Yuri and an insane ringing in her ears. She stared into the mirror, where Shen, though still sheened with sweat, and a little pale, stared back at her as though nothing had happened at all.
“You did it.”
“You doubted me?”
Trix stared up, out of the pit. DOME’s crown was closing. Baffle plates had ceased venting. Citadel was still there. And while umbilicals still dangled, they would soon be returned to place. All was normal once more with the advantage of there being not a soul in sight. It might have taken a somewhat dramatic, roundabout route, but Shen’s diversion had worked.
And at the same time had all been for nothing.
Trix, Yuri, and Ralph had just passed beneath the boom guns—ticking softly again now that they’d returned to normal sentry mode—when someone from the lip of the pit shouted down. The voice was unmistakable. Garrison. He was standing right above them, and with him, surrounding the pit, were nine men from his master teams, a leering Don Combo among them. Quite the turn out for a small case of theft.
“Going somewhere, Miss Hunter?”
“Off on holiday,” Trix said. “Now that, you know, I don’t have to be at the desk in the morning.”
“You have a strange choice of holiday destination.”
“And you a strange choice of places to be during the Oblivion Protocol.”
“Let’s say I had reasons to suspect it might not be an actual crisis.”
“Oh? And what might they be?”
“That would be telling.”
That would be telling. The words chilled Trix. The same words as from her mysterious visitor in the Grimrock. They made her wonder—wonder whether Garrison had ignored the protocol because somehow he knew—knew—nothing was coming out of the levels. How could that be? More than ever she knew the answer lay inside.
“Look, I’d love to stop and chat, but—”
Don Combo and his cronies raised their weapons. The red dots of laser sights wavered on Trix, Ralph, and Yuri’s foreheads. Three on each.
“And I’d love to let you go,” Garrison said. “But as you are taking two of our employees with you, we can’t allow that, I’m afraid.”
“Leave them out of this.”
“Sadly, no.”
“I have always hated this fucking bastard,” Yuri murmured, before stepping forward to block the beads on Trix and Ralph. “My comrades in Suhoputnye voyska Rossiyskoy Federatsii would not take kindly to this action, tovarish.”
“I rather think your superior officers would consider it desertion, Major Dragomiloff, so be a good soldier and return to your post.” Garrison motioned, and chambers were racked. “Or, as is my right, I will be forced to have my men shoot you down.”
Beside Trix, Ralph began muttering something she didn’t catch. Then he, too, stepped forward.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Ralph raised his hands and turned in a circle to take his audience in. He continued muttering before he spoke again. “I would remind you that I am a civilian now—a retired civilian, I might add—and as such one not bound by the same rules and regulations as the rest of you. May I suggest, therefore, that you lower your weapons before I am forced to enter into legal litigation as a consequence of your detaining me against my will?”
“That isn’t going to happen, old man.”
“No?” Ralph said. He muttered a final time, and his upraised palms suddenly pulsed with power. All of the master team’s weapons were yanked from their hands to land in a perfect circle around him. Garrison’s men looked at each other befuddled while Ralph smiled and Trix gaped.
“How the hell?” she said. “What happened to no magic on this side?”
“I gambled that this close to the anomaly a simple disarmament spell might prove successful.”
“Hell of a gamble, old man.”
“Yes, and one that has left me quite drained. There’ll be little I can do when these men try to retrieve their weapons.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”
Trix and Yuri both hooked a weapon onto their foot and flipped it up. They sprayed the lip of the pit with bullets, sending Garrison’s men dancing back. Trix had to give Garrison his due—he didn’t budge an inch. Even smiled.
“What now, Dungeonmaster?”
“Now?” Garrison repeated. “Now, I suppose I’ll have to charge up my other guns. And they haven’t even had a chance to cool down.” He spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Boom guns, full-breach clearance test, ten thousand rounds, in twenty seconds.”
“You fucking bastard.”
“What’s it to be, Ms Hunter? Suicide, or surrender?”
“Ralph, Yuri, head for the anomaly—get going.”
“Patricia, we’ll never make it.”
“We’ll be dead if we don’t try.”
“I fear English is correct, Professor.” Yuri pointed out more master team members assembling around the lip of the pit. “Whatever shit is going down here, we will not come out of this alive.”
“GO, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!”
Yuri and Ralph ran, and as Trix turned to follow, she could already hear the whines of the boom guns’ barrels beginning to spin in readiness to fire. The only advantage she, Yuri, and Ralph had was that, for a breach clearance test, they would start their sweep from a default position far over to the right, but even so it would be cutting things fine. She grabbed onto Ralph’s arm as she caught up with him and hurried him on. Behind, the whines became more and more high-pitched, and then came a clattering of ammo feeding into the breach. They were three-quarters of the way to the anomaly when the boom guns began to fire.
Ralph staggered, not so much from the pace Trix was forcing on him as from the sight of the horizontal rain of death sweeping towards them from their right. The stonework of the anomaly was being blown apart under the impact of all six guns at once, and Ralph actually whimpered as a section containing some symbology he’d been studying ceased to exist. It was their own ceasing to exist that concerned Trix—the old man had always had an odd sense of priorities.
The destruction was halfway on them when they reached the steps to the anomaly. More accurately, Trix slammed into the wall next to the steps, thrown off by shoving Ralph up them and into Yuri’s waiting arms. Though the Russian had gotten there a few seconds before them, he hadn’t gone through, anticipating the need to give Ralph a helping hand, and this he did by grabbing him by the neck and arse and hurling him into the anomaly like a sack of coal. Trix had to admit—though Ralph might not agree—that it was a pretty good piece of teamwork, and she nodded to Yuri as she swung onto the steps and hurled herself through. She knew Yuri would be right behind her.
It was close. The two of them were still in midair when the boom guns’ sweep reached the opening. Trix cringed, fully expecting an agonising tearing of bullets through flesh, bone, and ultimately brain, and cried out as something struck her. But it wasn’t bullets, it was Yuri. The Russian had grabbed her, enveloped her, and was twisting her around as they began what seemed their very long drop to the floor. Idiot. The bullets would cut right through them both.
But it didn’t happen. Because Yuri had remembered what she had forgotten in her consuming need to get away. That, in hitting the meniscus of the anomaly, the bullets were flung slightly off trajectory, as they themselves had been. The funhouse effect. Still, it was no picnic. The next few seconds passed in a kind of dreadful slow motion, the boom guns’ seed whizzing past them within centimetres, even hairsbreadths, before ricocheting off the walls, the arches, the ceiling, in an insane, deafening barrage that never seemed to end. They clung to each other throughout it all, and then the slow-motion effect ended as they landed on the floor with a thud. The barrage ended, too, and for a second all that could be heard in the corridor was a series of breathless, desperate gasps. And a harumph from Ralph, who stared daggers at Yuri.
“It’s over,” Trix said to Yuri. A ‘group ticket’ seemed to her now not such a bad idea at all. “Thanks.”
“You are very welcome, English.”
“Much as I hate to break up your group hug,” Ralph said, “I would suggest we have little time to rest on our laurels.” He pointed back through the anomaly, where, skewed and blurred, a number of Garrison’s men were making their way forward. They appeared in no particular hurry—they would be presuming the three of them dead—but, still, they were coming.
They had to move. But though they were in the levels, they were not out of the woods. They still had the ’trols Garrison had stationed on this side of the anomaly to deal with. Fortunately, Trix knew her shortcuts, Ralph his little secrets, and Yuri his hidey-holes, and using various secr
et passages, connecting chambers, and stop-off points, they managed to evade and avoid. Trix even managed to snag a packet of fags from the side pocket of a ’trol passing within inches of them, which cheered her up no end.
There was one problem.
“The plug, Patricia. How do we get through the plug?”
“We don’t. We take the rotary to level 3.”
“And get back up to 2 how?”
“We won’t need to get back up. We’re not going to 3. There’s a crawlway halfway down the shaft. Bit of a tight squeeze for Yuri, but he should make it. It’ll bring us out near Demon’s Bend.”
“How did you find this shaft?”
“Running from a demon.”
“Of course.”
They boarded the rotary one at a time, followed Trix’s lead around a stone slab and into the crawlway. It was cramped, as she’d said, but their passage was eased, if that was the word, by the fact it was thoroughly covered in a viscous slime—something had passed through here recently. They wiped themselves clean of the muck as they emerged from the other end, into Demon’s Bend, and from there, it was only five minutes to The Faze and, beyond, the nursery.
The nursery stank. Not fresh stink but old stink—the cloying, sweet-and-sour odour of decomposition that left unventilated clung to the air and never went away. Trix wasn’t really surprised to see the minotaur still lying where she’d brought it down. Little more than bone and gristle, now, the fact it hadn’t been cleaned up was another sign that Garrison’s priorities had changed. She winced with the memory of the pain the minotaur had brought her as she trod through torn, dead vegetation in search of the secret passage, but this was ameliorated some as she found her quarterstaff, which she snatched up with a happy sigh.
The passage, when she found it, was all but blocked. She was about to help Yuri in hefting chunks of stone when she heard a peculiar sawing sound. She turned to see Ralph hunched over the minotaur’s remains, but as he had his back to her couldn’t work out what he was doing.