by Nick Cole
… own.
He forgets his body. The pain and fatigue. The crying muscles and stiff bones. He listens to the music of water falling on stone. It is like a living thing.
Pictures form in his mind.
He sees the well as though he is looking at something with what his mind poorly describes as a powerful deep-scan sensor. But it is really so much more than the most powerful detecting device the Galactic Republic has ever conceived of.
He sees all the stones.
All the falls.
All the waters.
Every drop.
He sees his place within it all.
He sees it interacting with itself.
And…
He senses the Master, watching him, just in front of his face. Just beyond his reach. His look is neither strained nor beatific.
Just…
Existing within it all.
The Master lashes out suddenly with his staff. He smacks the student in the head with a terrific crack. Bells ring, klaxons erupt, and the student is going over and off the slender beam.
He is blind.
Yet he sees himself departing the narrow walk that crosses the bottomless chasm. And without flailing he twists, knowing exactly where he is within the well and the falls, and everything around him slows, just like that tiny rock that had become a planet orbiting the Master. A rock exploding outward in slow motion.
The student twists as he falls.
He grabs the beam with both hands.
He swings back up into the air above the plank, and for uncounted moments he hangs in the nothingness above the place where he must either land… or fall.
He lands back on the plank.
The Master comes at him with another strike from his staff. Surefooted, the student gives ground, step by step, weaving to avoid each impossibly terrific blow. The radar beyond his blindness shows him every swing in a series of furious attacks.
The pace of the strikes increases, and soon the student is not only weaving and backing up step by step, but also hopping and at times jumping, really flying backward to avoid blows that will send him off and down into the nothing. Yet with each flip and turn he knows where the beam is and where his feet must be.
The student deftly avoids sudden extermination.
The Master whirls the staff and brings it down hard. It will surely crack the student’s skull. There is no question of this.
But the student sees this happen before it happens. As though some tell has telegraphed the move. His cross-handed block comes up, and he catches the staff inches from his own forehead.
The Master holds the staff, forcing down against the block. Forcing his will down onto the student who must yield.
And now the student can sense the Master’s face close to his. The Master’s eyes are closed.
And beyond that, he sees thoughts.
The thoughts of the Master.
Rage.
Darkness.
Destruction.
There are some who want to watch the galaxy burn…
In the student’s blindness, the Master smiles. The student sees the textures form and evolve across the ancient face above his own.
“Listen to the music of it,” says the Master in the deep silence that has enveloped them both, for the noise of the falls has ceased, and perhaps the waters have ceased their fall. “It is me… and I am it.”
Thus ends the lesson.
Chapter Nineteen
The lift was a slow, creaking descent into darkness. The old piece of equipment had obviously not been maintained, which to Casper, as a starship captain, seemed a crime more sinful than dereliction.
Now it was just Rex, Esmail, Duhrowski, Barr, LeRoy, and Bones.
And you, that other voice reminded Casper as he watched all this from his disembodied vantage point on that lost island. No, it was a lost world, not an island. Not an isthmus or a peninsula. It was connected to nothing known.
In that way it was like the things we call “Quantum.” In that the unknown was the only known. And what you knew… wasn’t what it was. At least not anymore.
But it felt like an island. The crash had been a shipwreck, and the planet was an island of madness and riddles. An island with no ocean—just jungle and desert. And mushrooms.
He looked around the ancient lift. Its panels had been knocked out of place, taken away. And used for what? Shields, said that voice. The Savages of this place carried them as shields into battle against the ruined cities on the curving plains. Or have you been ignoring the bones and piles of skulls almost everywhere on this little quantum jaunt into the past? In the cornfields, buried in that strange interstellar dirt. In neat stacks back in the cities. Along the roads. Filling the canals.
Oh—but you’ve been editing out all the bones and skulls.
Haven’t you?
This is what he asked himself as mushrooms grew and sprouted behind Bones’s helmet. He mumbled something about this, and the medic turned. Her eyes were wide and cat-like, as though the fear she’d been hiding was blossoming into wonder.
Piles of skulls as big as a mountain.
The Mongol Khans had laid waste to entire cities back on lost and ancient Earth. Caravans traveling across the windswept wastes would find silent cities on the plain, and not just piles of skulls… but mountains of them.
History, his mind chuckled. It’s been there all along for you, hasn’t it?
“You’ve been ignoring the skulls!” said Esmail as they reached the bottom of the lift. His voice was slow and drippy, like syrup taken from the Murinar tree on Deglastani. It’s one of the most expensive commodities in the galaxy because of its rumored aphrodisiac qualities.
The soldier laughed, the laugh turned hideous, and the lift descended into hell even though it had already jittered to a halt.
You’ve been ignoring the skulls.
Ancient locks snapped into place beyond the skeletal walls where the panels had been parted out to make weapons and armor for the Savages in their unknown wars for mastery of the ship and its crew. The doors opened onto a torch-lit platform where a battered monorail waited.
THK-133 stepped forward with a hypo and med patch.
“Master, the hallucinogenic properties of these fungi are too much for your pitiful system. You are close to having a heart attack. I’m sedating you.”
Rex and the soldiers stood aside as the bot walked forward and reverently placed the med patch on Casper’s fevered forehead.
He was burning up.
The patch felt cool and calm, and he surrendered to the nano-sedatives, closing his eyes and falling through the bottom of the lift to the jungle dirt below. His last vision of that lost history inside the ghost ship Moirai was one of pulsing iridescent mushrooms sending forth sweet clouds of green tasty cotton candy poison across his fever-drenched mind.
***
There were drums. Tribal drums beating in the distant darkness. Close and all around. He lay on the moist jungle floor.
He could hear a tiny furious animal repeating something. Thumps and grunts were followed by the smash of crushed foliage and the agony of some saurian hissing in pain. One of Casper’s eyes scanned a horizon that reached from ground to night sky at a perpendicular angle. He was lying on his side. He saw a hypodermic injector in the foreground, and beyond that THK-133 firing its heavy blaster into the jungle. Strange shapes wielding sharp-toothed weapons surged out of the darkness.
THK-133 turned between bright flares of the blaster and said, “Don’t worry, master, I’ll kill them all!”
With something like glee.
And was that a smile on the machine’s face?
Casper wondered this as he surrendered once more to the darkness that took him down where there were no more dreams. No visions. No memories. Down there was only nothing. A
nd nothing more.
Not even himself.
Was there such a place? he asked.
And then he arrived there.
Chapter Twenty
Casper found himself in a decrepit and rattling transit car speeding down a dark tunnel. Eight cars made up the once-train-of-the-future—three smashed and gutted passenger cars, five pitch-black freight. Rex chose the forward car, as it was both the easiest to defend and the only car with a working light. It was LeRoy who figured the system out and sent the train moving forward into the dark of the tunnel that ran the length of the massive ship.
They approached a platform that first appeared as a tiny light in the blackness ahead. LeRoy slowed the train, and everyone readied weapons and ducked behind what little cover could be had within the beaten rail car. But all they saw as the train whipped past was a lonely platform. Unused, abandoned for who knew how long. A few sporadic lights managed to effect the opposite of illumination, instead creating more shadows and a mood of forlorn hopelessness that made one glad for the speeding dark of the tunnel.
A few skulls were scattered across the platform. Casper did not ignore them.
“Notice the graffiti,” he said to Rex over the command comm.
It was scrawled everywhere.
Every Stop is the Last Stop.
All Prisoners must be taken to Cog for Dissection. Stop Nine.
The Dark Wanderer is always watching you.
“Yeah,” grunted Rex. “I see it. We’ll try and pick up her trail there, at Stop Nine, if that’s where they take the prisoners.” He looked toward some markings on the wall. “This is Stop Four.”
“We started at Two,” said LeRoy. He was hunkered down below the controls at the front of the car. Everybody was keeping a low profile. No one was taking any chances. “But I didn’t see no Stop Three unless we just missed it in the dark.”
It would’ve been impossible to miss Stop Three. No doubt they’d all been running their low-light imaging systems. And yet here they were at Stop Four. Nothing aboard the Moirai made sense. As though the eradication of meaning had become some sort of state-mandated religion when they’d all lost their minds in the long sublight crawl through the void.
“Take us forward,” said Rex.
“Yes, sir,” replied LeRoy.
It was good to be moving away from the mystery of Stop Three’s screaming absence. A mystery that proclaimed non-existence might also be an option, or a fate, awaiting them just a little farther down the line.
They had traveled only a short way through the darkness past Stop Four when a sound rang out above their heads, like a locking clamp grabbing hold of the car. And then more such titanic and hollow strikes sounded out at points along the rattle-y train, back in the trailing cars.
LeRoy had already added motive power, and the monorail, rickety-racketing its way through the tunnels between stations, surged ahead into the seemingly eternal darkness as more and more of the “locking clamp” sounds resounded out across the ceiling of the car.
Esmail stood and scanned their six. “See something…” he half-muttered.
The low-light imaging in Casper’s SmartEye fritzed out in a wash of electronic distortion. Using the interface on his sleeve, he cycled through night vision and thermal. Both were a snowstorm of static, effectively blinding him. And it quickly became clear that everyone else was having the same problem—even though Martian and Terran tech ran on different operating systems.
Esmail tapped the high-powered searchlight atop his combat helmet and turned it toward the cars behind them. As the bright beam fell upon the dark cars, it illuminated a gruesome sight. Gleaming steel spiders were everywhere, skittering forward for them.
Mechanical spiders.
But with human torsos and gray human horror-show heads.
Bones screamed and fired a burst from the Savage weapon she’d picked up. Bullets danced along the beasts’ horrible metal carapaces and articulating mechanical legs. Subsonic rounds smoked through the pulpy steaming gray flesh of their upper torsos and ricocheted off into the darkness.
As Bones’s weapons fired dry, the rest of the team engaged the closing targets. There were at least a dozen human-spider hybrids climbing forward over their dead biomechanical brethren. Their eyes glowed with insane green circuitry, and their mouths were filled with once-human teeth that had been filed into gleaming needles. Their very nature was a monstrosity the human mind didn’t want to look upon.
One of them, a male, smashed through the glass at the side of the car, hauled Duhrawski out through the shattered glass with four of its hydraulically driven legs and claws, then fell to the tracks. All that was left of Duhrawski was the sound of him firing into the darkness as the motion of the train carried nightmare spider and soldier away, leaving them alone in the dark of the tunnel.
Another spider, its human mouth working savagely, even though it had been hit several times and blood was pumping from arteries where there shouldn’t be arteries, made a grab for Bones. The medic had been struggling to get a new magazine into her scavenged weapon, but now she let go of it and scrambled backwards, her combat boots pistoning to keep her away from the drooling and gore-draped monster.
Emergency horns blared across the car, and some kind of over-speed terminal approach warning sounded. Uncaring, the spider-overrun train shot through a station at high speed.
Casper raced forward to cover Bones, firing point blank at the thing that was trying to drag her back into the darkness of the other cars, where other biomechanical spiders clustered. It wasn’t until the gray human head of the biomech spider disintegrated from three direct hits that the main bulb of its body fell over awkwardly and died.
And still more were coming in through the windows and up along the corridor that ran between the dirty seats. It was like watching the horror of all horrors made suddenly all too real.
Rex ran out of ammo. Barr yelled “Mag out!” and bent to one knee to load a new mag. LeRoy shoved the monorail throttle full forward, and the unseen engine rose to an ethereal demonic hum. The cars began to wobble and shake as though they might just decide to leave the track altogether. Casper continued firing at the looming spiders now moving forward en masse. LeRoy turned away from the controls and swung the barrel of his automatic rifle up with one motion, pulled the sling around his shoulder tight, and fired.
It was then that Rex dropped the savage slug thrower, raced forward, and pulled his plate cutter. He danced forward, dodging the frail once-human arms that reached out to embrace or tear, and lopped off the biological head of one of the spiders. Pivoting on one foot, he and slashed through another spider’s rib cage with the spinning blade of the plate cutter. The beast reared back on its mechanical hind legs, vomited blood and oil, and died screeching. Its voice was like some ancient eight-bit arcade machine gone tilt.
Bones brought her now-loaded weapon up to bear and shot three spiders dead in succession, using most of a mag to do so. Casper followed this up with rapid-fire double taps from his Terran Navy sidearm, making sure all the dead spiders were truly dead.
Rex cut his way down to the linkage that connected the trailing cars to this one. He slashed into a thick rubberized connector, reared back, and severed the connection with a mighty blow that sent sparks flying into the night.
One spider, on the trailing car now falling away, leapt across the new void at Rex, knocking him backward. But the thing impaled itself on the spinning plate cutter and fell onto the tracks, dragging the tool with it into the darkness of the tunnel.
Without the weight of the trailing cars to hold it back, the over-speeding monorail finally left the track as it had long been promising to do. It turned over onto its side and sent them all sprawling across the cabin. Casper slammed face first into the side of the car, which was now the floor, and watched as the smooth concrete of the tunnel slid just beneath his eyes on the other side o
f a cracked window.
A moment later the monorail wedged hard into the tunnel, refusing to go further, and they were all thrown forward, tumbling over one another.
And all was darkness.
***
It was Casper who got his light on first. He was surprised he hadn’t broken any of his bones, though his shoulder was definitely dislocated. He screamed as he forced himself to pull his light off his belt and scan the cabin.
In the bright, unforgiving glare it was impossible to tell the difference between the living and the dead.
“Everyone okay?” he asked. It sounded pitiful, and he knew it.
“Don’t move anything until you’re sure it’s not broken,” Bones shouted. “Especially your necks and heads.”
Someone else groaned.
Then LeRoy spoke up. “All right, guys, sound off,” he said, like they’d just formed up for some work detail. “Who we got?”
Bones.
Barr.
Esmail.
Casper.
That was all.
A quick search also revealed Rex. He’d slammed so hard into the front of the car that his bucket had cracked in half. He was unconscious.
“In addition to the rapid deceleration trauma,” Bones said after inspecting him, “someone shot him. Probably LeRoy.”
“Nah… wasn’t me. My grouping’s always tight, little sister.”
Barr had taken a nasty blow to the head too, although his bucket hadn’t cracked. “Yeah, it was probably you. You got the jitters and all, Leroy. Remember Tankersly?”
Bones patched Rex’s bullet wound with a med patch. The slug had gone right through the meat of one thigh, and there was no artery damage.
Barr loaded his weapon. “We ain’t gettin’ no medals now. Not after shootin’ the major.”
LeRoy grumbled, “I don’t think we’re gettin’ out of this to get any medals, Barr.”
Casper pulled himself out of the crashed train car. The smooth concrete of the tunnel felt gritty and dust-laden under his feet. He peered down the tunnel. A clean white light was just visible in the distance, though it was hard to judge how far. It was brilliantly fluorescent compared to the overwhelming darkness they’d suffered ever since the moment the Lex had set down on the hangar deck.