by John Shirley
The Kid stared. Had to shout over the noise of the chopper. “Fuck is he doing, man?”
Portman chuckled. “Mission log. Goat used to collect human scalps. But he’s all straightened out now, aintcha, Goat?”
Goat’s dark eyes flickered over Portman, then drilled the Kid. The Kid swallowed and paled.
The chopper’s engine roared; the blades beat a drumroll against the sky.
Sarge glanced out the window. They were far enough away from base to get into the classified briefing. “Look in!” he shouted.
He slapped a disc into the briefing console on the bulkhead. “This is what we got from Simcom,” Sarge told them. He turned the volume all the way up so they could hear over the racket of the chopper.
The VDU screen flashed, and they watched as a fuzzy image of Dr. Carmack appeared.
There was Carmack’s terrified face, looking down at the minicam node on the comm-sole he’d used for that transmission. The image fluttered, resolved. Carmack’s voice came across only a little less fuzzy than the picture.
“…is Dr. Carmack at Classified Research, Olduvai! ID6627. We’ve had a level-five breach, implement quarantine procedures now!” The sound of a distant pounding. “I repeat, implement level-five breach quarantine procedures now!”
You’d think that a face couldn’t show any more terror than his did. But as he looked up at something off camera, his face contorted into something more primeval than mere terror. Like something a small animal’s feeling as it’s about to be torn apart by a hawk.
And then the image dissolved into snowy static.
The men in the chopper looked at one another.
“We got a quarantine situation on Olduvai,” Sarge said. “They sent that message before the research team stopped responding to communications.”
“Olduvai…?” Portman said.
Sarge nodded. “Three-and-a-half hours ago. UAC has shut down the lab. We go up there, locate the team, eliminate the threat, and secure the facility.”
“What threat?” the Kid asked.
“Goes like this, see,” Duke said. “If it’s trying to kill you, it’s a threat.”
They hung in their harnesses, absorbing the briefing—and each one came to a stop on the name Olduvai. They were going to that mysterious region on the planet Mars. And that meant…
The Kid leaned over to whisper to Duke. “We’re going through the Ark?”
“Don’t worry, Kid,” Duke said. “You’re gonna love it.”
The ironic smiles on the faces of the other men, at that, didn’t make the Kid feel any better. The Ark was some kind of wormhole to another world—and maybe the scariest thing was, it was an alien technology. The compound’s end of the Ark had been retroengineered from something found in the digs on Olduvai, Mars. An alien doorway to an alien world.
A long trip, mostly through darkness. They were flying over the sprawling, intricate city: all that remained between them and their first destination; they flew between shimmering towers, past gracefully sweeping buildings of synthetic steel and intelligent glass glimmering with the soft light impregnated into their very girders; over interlacing freeways, chains of glowing computer-guided vehicles. There were no brake lights, no headlights, just interior lights because the cars drove themselves. They never jammed, never crashed.
It was coming up to dawn, and the chopper was almost to the Nevada teleport facility when Sarge unbuckled himself from his harness, went over to sit by Reaper.
“How long’s it been?” Sarge asked, leaning close to Reaper.
Reaper reluctantly answered, “Ten years.”
“You sure she’s even still there?” Sarge persisted.
Reaper looked at him coldly. “You gotta face your demons sometime.”
Sarge wasn’t ready to drop it. Sarge had no comprehension of small talk at all. He never spoke unnecessarily—but when he did speak, he dropped a subject exactly when he was done with it, not a second before. “This better not spoil my day.”
He slapped Reaper on the shoulder, stood, and moved carefully to the front—sometimes, when the chopper shifted in the sky, he looked like a man walking a tightrope. He turned to address the whole team.
“I want this spit and polish, no bullshit!” he told them. He spotted Portman listening to something on headphones. Might be music, might be soundporn. “Portman, get that crap out of your ears. LZ approaching…” Sarge braced himself, looking at the altitude indicator as the chopper eased down to a landing. “T-minus fifteen. Fourteen…”
The Kid looked out the window—they were approaching a great swatch of shadow on the far side of the town they’d just passed. The sky was graying with first light, but the ground down there was still dark. It looked like they were going to crash into that bleak opacity—but then lights flicked on, outlining the landing pad, and the chopper settled onto it.
The doors opened. Cold air gushed in; their breath steamed as they grabbed their gear and jumped out into the icy prop wash.
Nothing out there but the landing lights, and the distant sparkle of the city’s skyline.
“Double-time!” Sarge shouted. “We’re on the move!”
They ran across grass now, jogging over the otherwise-empty field in formation, leaving the landing pad and the chopper behind.
Where, the Kid wondered, are we double-timing to? There’s nothing out here. We’re just running into the goddamned darkness…
Suddenly the ground began to elevate itself, in front of them: an illuminated block of stainless steel rose up, humming, out of a subterranean shaft, in the midst of what a moment ago had been an empty, grassy field. The Kid lost his double-time rhythm in his surprise, slowing to stare, blurting, “Holy shit…”
Passing the Kid, Portman slammed a shoulder into him—theoretically a reminder to stay in formation but really it was about Portman getting off on slamming the Kid.
The Kid was the last one to hustle onto the elevator that would take them down—down, only to be projected upward into the sky, when the moment came.
Seeing the Kid come into the elevator at the last possible second, Sarge told him: “You hesitate, people die.”
The doors irised shut…and the elevator dropped like stone released into a mining shaft.
Fourteen levels down…
Like so many other nightmares, it really started with a slick, corporate lobby. They could’ve been waiting to audition for a viddy commercial, Reaper thought, as they stepped out of the elevator and looked around.
United Aerospace Corporation logos were arranged symmetrically with wall-mounted plasma screens; the screens played UAC infomercials maundering on about the company’s globe-spanning services.
A slender man dresssed as slick as the lobby was striding toward them, extending his hand. His face was frozen in a public-relations mask of friendliness, only his eyes showing how intimidated he was by the big, heavily armed men in the strike squadron.
Here comes the suit, Reaper thought.
“Sandford Crosby, UAC public relations,” said the suit. “On behalf of UAC, welcome to the facility. If you could follow me, please.”
He turned on his heel, almost spinning in place, and led the way, in a hurry. The squadron exchanged glances, shrugged, and followed.
“Has anyone passed through the Ark since the emergency?” Sarge asked.
Sandford glanced back at Sarge. “Oh, no no, Sergeant.” He indulged in a carefully measured laugh. “This isn’t an emergency. I believe what we have on Olduvai is officially a situation.”
Sarge snorted but said nothing.
“Should the ‘situation’ deteriorate,” Reaper asked, as they almost trotted down a corridor, “has a plan been drawn up to evacuate the civilians?”
He was as concerned about getting them out of his hair as much as getting them to safety. Civilians pretty much just got in the way of getting a job done. And then there was that certain civilian…
Sandford seemed to pick up speed, gesturing for them to hurr
y along close behind him. “The guys at corporate feel that won’t be necessary. What you’re doing for us here is really a ‘fact-finding mission.’”
“Through here, please,” Sandford added, gesturing toward the door with a limp hand.
“How many people up there?” Reaper asked.
“UAC employs eighty-five permanent research staff on Olduvai,” Sandford replied, crisply.
They passed through the door into the Ark Chamber Prep Room. Sandford frowned, noticing that Duke, as usual, was smoking. “Please extinguish the cigarette. The Ark is an ultrahigh-frequency fusion reactor. One spark and—”
“Gettin’ so you can’t smoke anywhere anymore.” Duke stubbed it out in the callused, blackened palm of his hand—making Sandford blanch.
Sandford guided the squadron to the base of a mirrored cylinder protected by armed UAC Security Personnel. The armed guards here were more than security guards, but less than the level of soldier represented by the squadron, and they knew it. They gave Sarge and his men flat looks that seemed to say, I could take you. Only, they couldn’t, and they knew that, too.
The Kid stared at the Ark Containment Cylinder. From there, they would be individually projected through a wormhole, across space, and onto the surface of the region of Mars known as Olduvai.
A translucent plaque hung in the air above them, containing twenty names etched into a scroll graphic.
Maybe stalling, the Kid asked Sandford, “What’re all those names?”
Sandford glanced up. Clearly not liking the subject. “Oh that. That’s a UAC-funded memorial to the early pioneers of the Ark, who in the pursuit of perfecting this groundbreaking and unique technology, made the ultimate sacrifice…”
Reaper looked at Sandford, wondering if he were serious, coming out with this PR palaver. “This groundbreaking and unique technology?”
A different part of the speech stuck with Portman. “Ultimate sacrifice?”
Sandford went on, reassuringly. “This was long, long ago, before they perfected the crystalline structure.”
The Kid looked at the shiny cylinder awaiting him. Then at Goat and Destroyer, close beside him. He swallowed. “You…done this before?”
Goat surprised him by answering a direct question. “Once. Training mission.” Three words. It was something.
Reaper had gone through it as a kid—but he’d been sedated. Not this time…
Duke slapped the kid on the back, making him stagger, and grinned. “Hope you had a big dinner!”
Sandford took a remote controller from his pocket, tapped a code, and the cylinder slid open.
They stepped through, and the curved wall closed behind them, leaving them inside a shiny metal vertical tube, with just enough room for them and a drop of mercurial liquid floating, weightless, in the center of the chamber. The light seemed to warp across its surface; the rippling interior of the drop seemed to enfold infinity. If you looked at the edge of the drop, it became the center; and the center became the edge, around and around…
“That’s it?” the Kid said, blinking. “I thought the Ark was, like—a spaceship. Not…”
“…A metaphor?” Reaper said.
The squad stared at the hovering droplet.
Reaper found himself wondering: How big is it? One moment the floating quicksilver droplet at the heart of the Ark seemed like something you could fit into your hand. The next moment it was bushelsized, and getting bigger. It seemed all of those sizes. Then it seemed, impossibly, as big as a whale though it was in a room a whale couldn’t fit into. A manifestation of the quantum-uncertainty realm, it was constantly shifting within itself. Interesting…
He smiled at himself. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Reaper came from a family of scientists—he was clearly a black sheep, but the interest simmered in him nonetheless, and he followed science when he wasn’t on assignment. He didn’t let the rest of the squadron know it though…as far as they knew he was a stone-cold jarhead and nothing more.
Sarge gave Sandford an order then, just as if he were a new recruit. “Soon as we’re through, lock down the surface elevator here for a six-hour standard quarantine.”
Sandford hesitated half a second, as if not sure he should be taking direction from Sarge, then nodded. He turned to the others. “Please form two lines. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, there are exits behind me here, here—” He pointed. “And here.” He paused, glanced at them—and Reaper could see Sandford wanted to get out of there. “Any questions?”
Duke held up his big-assed weapon. Asked straight-faced, “Does this classify as ‘carry-on’?”
Sandford managed a thin smile at that.
Sarge cocked his weapon and walked over to the Ark. He stepped within its range of sensitivity…
It expanded to envelop his body in a glistening, faintly wobbling globular shell.
Until, in a flash of blue light, it condensed backed to its original size—as if it had swallowed Sarge and digested him.
Sarge was gone.
Shaken, the Kid took a step back, sucking in his breath. Reaper grabbed his elbow. Locked eyes with him. The look said it all. The Kid swallowed, and nodded, held his ground.
Reaper clapped the kid on the shoulder, then turned and walked to the quicksilver droplet…
He felt himself enter its field of sensitivity—it felt like immersing himself in cold water that was instantly warm water, then icy again…
Suddenly the quivering droplet seemed to leap at his eyes—and there was a wall of living silver, all around him. A series of anomolous smells. The smell of a campfire; the smell of ozone; the smell of roses; the smell of death. A flash of light…blue—then shifting to blue-white, incandescent white…
Reaper felt himself dissolving, his body turning to liquid, his flesh like sugar diffused in living water, bones becoming a skeleton of ice melting down in a second—splash—then a riot of sounds: roaring and singing and piercing screams and gibbered words and thundering bits of half-forgotten symphonies; his consciousness spun in a vortex of sickening black light, striated by colors that were all wrong, just wrong; those colors don’t exist anywhere. Reaper thought he saw his father fly past him, translucent and ghostly, mouthing something, trying to warn him; then the light and color shrank away, replaced by blackness rich with feeling, tactile sensations from some forgotten corner of his brain: a woman’s soft hair brushing against his naked shoulder, a spiderweb breaking on his cheek, moss under bare boyhood feet, the surprisingly soft flesh of his enemy’s throat that time in the desert when his gun had jammed and he’d had to leap on the guy and strangle him, the feeling of blood running across his wrists, a jawbone cracking against his fist, a bullet crashing into his shoulder, shattering pain—
The cryptic opacity was split by shimmering light, and he could feel himself solid and whole again—but he was falling, falling up; no, falling down; no, he was being pulled sideways, he was nauseatingly spinning, he was falling through a flash of frozen blue light…
Into the wormhole chamber on Olduvai, Mars.
Four
REAPER MANAGED TO stay on his feet as he emerged from the Ark at the UAC Research Facility on Olduvai, Mars, though the room was shifting, his head throbbed and his stomach was trying to crawl out of his body.
He turned as Destroyer came through—staggering. Destroyer gave him a sickly grin.
That shit is fucked up, the grin said.
The others were coming through, gulping, pale, looking like they badly wanted to throw up.
But only the Kid actually did: he took three steps, bent over, and puked. Then it was Portman’s turn.
Reaper smiled at that—though his gut still convulsed inside him—because Portman was always coming on like he was so much tougher than the Kid.
Portman straightened, wiping his mouth. “Why we gotta come all this way? Why can’t the UAC rent-a-cops fix this bullshit?”
The metal cylinder whirred open, and they were all stepping
unsteadily down off the platform.
“Jesus,” the Kid muttered, holding his middle. “Is it always that rough?”
“Believe me,” someone coming into the room said, “it used to be rougher…”
Reaper turned to see a man who’d been grafted into a kind of sleek wheelchair—a cyberchair, a module that enclosed everything below his sternum. The cyberchair seemed to merge seamlessly with his upper half. He drifted effortlessly forward, the wheelchair apparently responding to his nervous system, and extended a hand. The wheelchair graft seemed to call for an older man, but this guy had a boyish face, curly hair, an impish glitter in his eye. “Time was,” he went on, “Ark travel was susceptible to patches of, let’s say, major turbulence.”
“What’s he mean?” the Kid whispered to Reaper.
“He means he went to one galaxy and his ass went to another.”
“Call it a scientific miscalculation,” the man in the cyberchair went on. “Unbelievable as it may seem, UAC does make the odd tiny mistake.” There was a moment when they were all blinking at him, obviously thinking, Who the hell are you? He smiled and answered the unasked question. “Marcus Pinzerowski. Call me Pinky.”
A gaunt man in uniform came toward them—some of the gauntness might’ve been the worry etched on his face. Reaper had never seen the uniform before. A lieutenant of some kind.
The lieutenant only glanced at the puke on the floor. “Lieutenant Hunegs, UAC Security Officer. Welcome to Olduvai. Pinky is your acting Comms officer.”
Portman whispered it, but it was loud enough for Pinzerowski to hear: “The sparko’s a gimp?” Pinky pretended not to hear.
Reaper sighed. He wanted to smack Portman—not the first time he’d wanted to do that.
Wiping his mouth, the Kid was gaping around at the wormhole chamber. A little seamier, darker than the one they’d just left. Looked like he was thinking: So this is another world? Doesn’t look like it.