by Gary Gibson
Corso took one look at the level of activity flowing through the walls around them and felt his heart skip a beat.
He bent down to pick up the toolkit he’d left lying next to the interface chair. Just as he was about to lay his hand on it, it slid away from him, slowly at first, then faster. Dumbfounded, he watched it slither across the pale, marble-like floor, and almost lost his balance when the floor unexpectedly seesawed under his feet.
He saw Kieran staring back at him from across the room, mute with surprise. The floor regained its former stability, but only for a moment. Now it was beginning to tilt.
Corso’s immediate thought was that the derelict was about to slide into the abyss. His terror of the abyssal depths far below them hit hard, and he moaned in terror. He grabbed on to one leg of the interface chair for purchase.
The ship continued to tilt. Kieran dropped to his knees and slid helplessly into a corner of the room, along with several random pieces of equipment Corso had kept scattered around him while he worked on the interface. Fortunately the technical team who had installed the chair had bolted it to the floor. Corso scrambled to get purchase on one of the chair legs, but lost it, tumbling down hard next to Kieran.
Then he realized the tilting was limited to the room they were in. They both gaped in stunned amazement towards the entrance.
They had both ditched their gel suits in the corridor outside. These, along with a stack of hardcopy data left behind by the surface base’s technical staff, resolutely refused to slide away or otherwise become affected by the tilting effect.
That seemed bad enough—but then monsters started coming out of the walls.
—
An alert via the Hyperion’s ground link manifested as a tickling sensation in the back of Dakota’s throat.
She’d been floating in the silence and dark of her own ship for the better part of an hour, the Piri Reis’s effigy-form having since disappeared once more back into its wall-niche. Her mind at first had been full of thoughts of revenge, but these had given way in the end to icy determination.
Their treatment of her, she realized, was partly because they were afraid of her. It was good that they were afraid of her.
After a while, she sank into a kind of Ghost-induced machine meditation, a near-vegetative state, her consciousness set adrift and only peripherally aware of the constant flow of maintenance routines keeping the Hyperion running.
As she half-dreamed, images slipped by her mind’s eye, mostly incomprehensible. She recalled the brief moment of connection she’d felt with whatever lived deep inside the derelict’s stacks. Even her Ghost was struggling to assimilate or make sense of that intense, overwhelming flood of sensory data. But understanding was nevertheless coming, albeit slowly.
She came to full awareness as the alert signal became more urgent, demanding her attention. She kept her conscious mind at one remove while her Ghost handled the situation, working at machine-speed in a familiar, occasionally disturbing anticipation of her own thoughts and actions.
Something significant was happening on board the derelict: the energy output from its systems was growing exponentially. It was, Dakota realized with awe, channelling through its hull bursts of energy so vast they might more typically be associated with solar flares.
It became rapidly clear that any contact with the personnel on the derelict had been lost. Dakota hesitated for long seconds. Arbenz was likely already aware of the situation developing, but if he wasn’t, he would punish her for failing to pass on what her machine-senses were now telling her.
What, exactly, to do?
A moment later that decision was out of her hands. Automated systems were already spreading the alert to the surface base, as well as to the Agartha.
She next became aware that orbit-to-ground drop-ships were being powered up on board the Agartha, for the Hyperion’s sister ship had a full complement of crew. Dakota pulled up a live feed displaying the subsurface ridge on which the derelict rested. Nothing there appeared out of the ordinary. It looked as peaceful, as quiet, and as dead as it had when she had first set eyes on it.
But something was in there. She didn’t know if it was something alive, but it was certainly aware of her. Even from orbit, she could sense it, like some ancient beast padding just beyond the reach of a campfire’s light.
Even from this far, she knew it wanted something from her. Just what, precisely, she couldn’t yet begin to guess.
Please, Piri.
—
The wall framing the entrance had now become a ceiling, putting any chance of escape far out of their reach. The interface chair stuck out from what had been the floor, but had now become a wall. Kieran and Corso stood next to each other, panting heavily: only a few seconds had passed since the gravity had flipped.
Corso could feel it beginning to shift again. His stomach churned with nausea as his senses grappled to cope with these sudden shifts. Now, the surface under them—until very recently itself a wall—slowly tilted towards the far corner.
Corso scrabbled at the wall underfoot, but it was hopeless. The material from which the derelict was constructed offered little purchase.
Random pieces of equipment began to slide at first slowly, then faster, into a far corner. The entrance still remained resolutely out of reach far above.
Corso became aware of a low hum, slowly building in pitch and volume, which rapidly became a bone-rattling vibration. A tiny part of his mind that remained calm speculated that they’d set off some kind of alarm.
The second flip, when it came, was as sudden and unexpected as the first. The wall on which they crouched suddenly became the top of a hollow cube, with the entrance to their right, but still far out of reach.
They fell, dropping like stones from one side of the room to the other.
Corso hit hard enough to stun him, but Kieran had less luck. He collided heavily with the interface chair, before tumbling on down to land next to Corso like a broken doll.
The entrance was still out of reach above their heads. Corso tried desperately to think of some way to get to it. . .
Things were emerging out of the walls, floor and ceiling, whose pale surfaces had begun to swirl. It was as if they had become transparent enough to reveal a liquid in different shades of cream flowing and ebbing beneath.
Then the surface of the wall furthest above them began to warp, extruding long, curving spines that began to weave like time-lapse films of plants growing. These and other, unidentifiable, shapes, that Corso couldn’t help but interpret as malevolent.
Kieran coughed and shifted groggily, and then his eyes flickered open. He put a hand to his chest and winced.
‘The next time the room starts shifting,’ Corso told him, ‘do exactly what I say.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kieran stared at him.
‘The first time the room flipped, it dropped us into that corner,’ Corso said, pointing upwards. ‘Then into this corner. It’s too early to really guess if there’s a pattern to the way it flips, but there’s a chance, if it happens again, it’ll land us this time on the same wall as the entrance.’
They didn’t have to wait long to find out.
The intervening seconds passed in silence amid an awful, growing tension. The surface on which they lay then began to ripple gently, and Corso choked back his urge to scream when he felt something tendril-like brush against the inside of his thigh.
Then their tools and equipment once again began to slip away...
The world tipped again, but in the direction Corso had hoped. As they tumbled downwards, Corso aimed himself towards the entrance, knowing the opening would remain out of reach, a few metres above
them, if he didn’t make it —
He landed hard, the impact knocking the wind out of him. But he had managed to get a grip on the jamb of the doorway, and clung on for all his life. After a few moments he managed to pull himself up and hook an arm fully over the edge, reaching down into the corridor beyond. The gel suits looked like they’d been glued into place, an affront to his already shattered sense of gravity.
A moment later an awful, lurching weight began to pull him back into the room, and he realized Kieran was hauling himself over his body to reach the entrance.
‘Stay right where you are, Corso, and hold on tight,’ Kieran grunted.
The pain Corso felt was indescribable, and he felt his hold beginning to slip.
He glanced back down into the room and saw the walls, floor and ceiling had transformed into a mass of waving spines that made him think of sea anemones. He moaned, which became a grunt of pain as Kieran pulled himself right over him before falling back out into the corridor.
For a sickening moment Corso wondered if the other man was going to leave him there. But a moment later Kieran, now standing firmly upright in the corridor, grabbed his shoulders and heaved him out.
Corso felt his own weight shift as he fell into a normal-looking corridor that, until a moment ago, his senses had insisted was a vertical shaft. He gasped from the intense pain racking in his shoulders and chest, and Kieran didn’t look much better.
‘We need to get out of here,’ Kieran gasped, ‘or we’re dead for sure.’
‘What about Lunden and—?’
‘What about them?’ Kieran snarled. ‘They’re soldiers. They know how to take care of themselves.’
Low vibrations had begun to roll along the corridor. Corso glanced hastily back into the room and saw his tools in the grip of tendril-like spines. The room now resembled the digestive organs of some sea-going invertebrate, and his stomach somersaulted at the thought of being left in there even a few seconds more . . .
Kieran began to head off, clumsily treading on hard-copy data with his boots. Images of crystal arrays and interface algorithms flickered and spasmed on the hard-copies as they scattered underfoot.
Moving slowly, they made their way back to the original entrance. Behind them, the vibrations transformed into a deep, guttural roar, as if some creature older than human civilization had begun stalking them through the passageways.
—
The derelict had finally given up its silence.
At first, it appeared to Dakota to be loudly radiating its presence to anyone or anything that cared to listen. But then it became rapidly clear that the signal was manifesting on an extremely obscure frequency not used by any of the known interstellar tachyon transceiver relays. She would never even have noticed it if her Ghost hadn’t been engaged in the process of monitoring the derelict across every conceivable transmission spectrum.
Even so, what was emerging was presumably highly encrypted, since it appeared to her Ghost as untranslatable gibberish. The resulting signal was of such low power and limited range it was hard to guess what it might be trying to communicate with.
Is there any way we can figure out what it’s saying, and who to? she asked of Piri Alpha.
Directional? You mean it’s deliberately aiming at something?
The ship replied by displaying maps of the Nova Arctis system. Lines stabbed out from Theona and Dymas towards one of the inner planets: not Newfall but the system’s innermost world, a tiny ball of rock barely outside the corona of the sun it orbited. This planet was called Ikaria.
What the hell was to be found there?
—
Two six-man squads were scrambled from the Agartha in response to the sudden breakdown in communications with the derelict, dropping down on tails of chemical fire to Theona’s icy surface in combat pods that spilled the pressure-suited figures inside on to the ice immediately adjacent to the surface base.
By now less then twenty minutes had passed since the loss of communications with the derelict.
Should have brought more than one sub, thought Gardner, standing back and watching the rescue operation being mounted from inside the ground base. But everything had been so rushed . . . they’d been working hard and fast, fearful that the Shoal might already be on to them, or if not yet, at least soon. There simply hadn’t been enough time to acquire all the resources they really needed.
Gardner could happily live without Kieran Mansell -a murderous, psychotic son of a bitch, if ever there was one—but Lucas Corso was indispensable. His specialist knowledge was the key to the derelict’s secrets. Leaving him down there with only Kieran to guard him seemed the sheerest blind folly.
Now, they had to wait for the squads to cycle through and get on board the sub. Then the long journey down again—and only then would they begin to glean any idea of what had happened.
This whole operation reeked of disorganized panic.
He glanced over at Senator Arbenz: a strutting, stiff-lipped, pumped-up little man; quite a ridiculous figure if Gardner hadn’t already been aware just how dangerous he could be. A few months ago the Freehold had been a defeated people on the verge of absolute retreat, but now they operated under the delusion they were the children of destiny, forged in war (or some such chauvinistic baloney Arbenz had spouted during one of his frequent rants) and destined to conquer the stars.
If the whole thing weren’t so pathetic, Gardner would have laughed. He needed the Freehold for now . . . but at some point something would have to be done. Leaving the transluminal drive in the hands of the Senator and his cronies was like placing a rocket launcher in the hands of a child. It was just asking for trouble.
Laden beneath their heavy vacuum-equipped combat gear, the troops entered the base, and began trudging through the network of clanging corridors and down to the submersible waiting for them in its pool. Along with the Senator, Gardner followed them.
‘Something must have been triggered by whatever Corso fed into the derelict’s computer systems,’ Gardner muttered. ‘God knows what’s happening down there now. I said all along we didn’t have enough contingency plans in place for unexpected major setbacks.’
Arbenz merely shot him an annoyed look; the tension between them had been growing. It was obvious to Gardner that the Senator simply wasn’t equipped to deal with even the notional concept of failure. For him only victory was possible.
‘God indeed only knows what’s happening down there, Mr Gardner, but remember God is on our side.’
‘Or possibly the Uchidans and Bourdain know too, given the security leaks you’ve been neglecting to tell me about.’
Gardner knew he was walking a dangerous edge, but he was finding it harder and harder to bite his tongue. He had already taken it upon himself to make coded queries to his associates back home, about contracting a fleet to wrest control of the derelict from the Freehold.
But the partners were still too cautious, too scared of drawing attention to what was happening out here, and drawing yet more potential combatants into a risky war over an unpredictable prize. Convincing them otherwise was going to take time Gardner wasn’t sure he had.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Gardner,’ Arbenz snarled, ‘you’ll get your share in the manufacturing and technology rights, once we acquire the drive. And I hope you’ll enjoy spending every last penny of it in hell.’
Gardner nodded, and kept his expression cool.
—
Corso and Kieran had almost reached the passage connecting to the external airlock when the gravity flipped again.
It had happened another four times so far since they had escaped from the room containing the interface chair. At one point the gravity cut off completely, leaving them in freefall for several panicked seconds.
The worst part of it was they were back in the part of the derelict which had until now been deemed safe. Clearly that was a mistake, and whatever countermeasures the derelict w
as currently implementing remained effective throughout its structure.
Sheer luck had saved them from being dashed to pieces when a passageway had flipped. The process was slow enough, they had time to react: unfortunately the passageway was a long one, and had rapidly transformed into a deep vertical shaft even as they raced along it.
Kieran had pushed them both down against the floor so rather than falling straight down, they instead slid down at an increasing rate as the gravity shifted. They still managed to hit the far end of the passageway with considerable force, and Corso blacked out for a couple of seconds. When he came to, Kieran was already hauling him by the shoulders towards the airlock and safety. From the way Kieran held himself and the expression on his face, Corso could see he’d been injured in some way.
After a couple of metres of this, Corso managed to stumble upright. A clanging sound reverberated from just ahead and he realized the submersible must have come back down and docked.
It was well ahead of schedule, so obviously somebody had figured out they were in trouble.
They rounded the last corner, almost collapsing on top of each other as the airlock door swung ponderously open. Several heavily armed Freeholder troops were stamping through it towards them, wearing combat armour too bulky to progress easily through the confined spaces of the tunnel. Corso laughed weakly as the soldiers were forced to shuffle towards them sideways in single file.
‘Get the hell back!’ Kieran yelled, waving at them to retreat.
Their faces were invisible behind their reinforced visors, but after a moment they started to shuffle back into the submersible.
The howling noise manifested itself once more from somewhere far around the curve of the passageway, sounding like it was getting closer. It was impossible not to imagine some terrible, monstrous apparition stalking them through the derelict’s twisting interior spaces.
Corso glanced up at the screen still roughly welded into an excision in the wall and noticed that the interior of the derelict was reshaping itself. Corridors and rooms disappeared from the map even as he watched, while others appeared that he was sure hadn’t previously existed.