by Zen, Raeden
A shift of stone startled her. She dropped the scroll and aimed her pulse gun toward the fog.
She gasped, then lowered and holstered her weapon.
An arctic fox crept forward, splashed with brown and white fur. Its eyes, curious and scared, were fixed to hers. She projected her mind the way Pasha did with the birds and beasts during their development, establishing a whisper with the fox.
The fox approached her cautiously, its nose dabbing to and fro, sniffing as it went, its eyes never leaving hers. It wagged its tail. She ruffled the fur near its throat, then offered it a sucrose slab, her backup sustenance. The fox devoured it and pushed its body against hers.
Oriana transferred scents and imagery of transhumans to the fox via the ZPF. She made it sense danger, which would, she hoped, encourage it to gather its pack. Now she transferred the taste of sucrose slabs. The fox yapped and scurried through the hissing stream. It disappeared over the ridge.
Oriana picked up the Granville scroll and stretched it along the stone. She activated it and used it to access the Western Hegemony’s scientific network. She adjusted Dr. Kole Shrader-of-the-past’s itinerary, indicated he’d be visiting Hengill Laboratory via airdrop, and requested visuals from the power plant.
An image was rendered: soldiers patrolled here and there, machine pulse guns and flashlights in hand. The holograms disappeared. Oriana reactivated the Granville and requested an external view of the plant.
DENIED.
She sent a new request.
DENIED.
She summoned diagnostics.
The scroll reported unauthorized access, by what, it didn’t know. Damn. She rolled her Granville scroll and inserted it back into her synsuit. She would have to show up as Shrader and hope for the best. She made for the ridge and the entrance.
When Oriana neared the outer checkpoint, a white spotlight descended over her.
“Hands in the air!”
A soldier darted through the fog, machine pulse gun and laser pointer upon Oriana’s skull. His face was painted green and gray.
She obeyed and declared her name and credentials: “Dr. Kole Shrader, Western Hegemony League of Scientists.”
“Receiver,” the soldier said.
Oriana unlocked the panel on her forearm and slid it open. She held out her arm, and the soldier scanned it. On the soldier’s digital screen, a rendition of Shrader’s photo popped up with the words:
DR. KOLE SHRADER CONFIRMED
“I wasn’t told about your arrival,” the soldier said. “I’ll have to confirm. Follow me.”
The massive spiked gates that shielded the power plant emitted bright light. Two watchtowers loomed upon either side. A spotlight fixed over Oriana, who shielded her eyes. The soldier directed Oriana to another group of men, one of whom viewed an illuminated flat screen and spoke in a language unfamiliar to Oriana over his headset.
“Where’s your convoy?” the soldier said.
“The Autocrat’s concerned about the Eastern spies, so she ordered an airdrop from a chopper. Viper Class 90-91A. Confirm it if you must.”
The soldier spoke again in a foreign language. Then to Oriana, he said, “Dr. Marshall is here.”
Dr. Marshall? Oriana couldn’t recall a Dr. Marshall, either from her training or from Shrader’s splintered memories in sessions with Antosha. Marshall, she repeated to herself, but no recollection emerged.
The gates to the primary entrance screeched opened.
Oriana entered Hengill Power Plant. A soldier led her through a courtyard of carbyne. A row of gray silos as tall as mountains hissed steam. Geothermal power was one of the last accessible energy sources that remained on Earth, Before Reassortment. It was a legitimate, though not unobvious, front for the lab.
A dark-skinned man wearing a biomat trotted through the fog. His nametag read DR. ISAAC MARSHALL.
“Dr. Shrader, this is a most welcome, most necessary surprise,” he said. “Come, we have big, big plans to review.”
They entered an elevator, and Marshall pressed his transparent biomat helmet to a retina scanner. A digital readout glowed green: APPROVED.
The elevator dropped so fast Oriana’s stomach rose, which did not improve her nerves. The doors opened. They moved around a crescent that held six sets of the accordion ramps Oriana remembered from her briefings, though they were larger than she had imagined. She peered down the half-meter crease between the third and fourth accordion. She counted fifty ramps while Marshall explained how the latest iterations of the Reassortment Strain should provide the Western Hegemony the advantage in the war.
“With the Reassortment Strain,” Marshall said, “where we previously required six hundred million soldiers, we’ll instead use one hundred thousand for the invasion.” He gave Oriana a relieved smile. “We’ll be saving billions of lives in the process.”
“Yes,” Oriana agreed, though she prodded, “tell me about the latest on your work with the strain.”
“Oh,” he said loudly and unexpectedly, “you’ll be very pleased with us. The advances on the quantum level have been remarkable. The targeting capabilities of Reassortment are unlike anything we’ve ever created. The Eastern Hegemony won’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late—”
“I thought the goal was to bring peace?”
Marshall guffawed, and his mustache twitched. “‘Peace isn’t possible without the East’s demolition,’ isn’t that what you told me last time we met?”
“Surely.” Oriana swallowed and nodded. Shrader told us he wanted to end the war with the strain. Did he lie to us? Or did I misunderstand what that meant?
She extended her consciousness and studied the ramps. The bases were rectangular tubs made of copper. The upper portions were made of quartzite. Chains hung from the quartzite sections, shackled to the walls at each end. The ramps sagged a bit in the middle. Heywood had mentioned that bags of supplies sometimes hung from the chains, but she saw none presently. The tub’s floor included grooves that Oriana assumed provided traction. A copper wall with a built-in ladder enclosed the first ramp.
Oriana moved uneasily onto it.
“Dr. Shrader?” Marshall said.
Oriana ignored him and examined the copper wall and the accordion.
“Doctor, we don’t have time to dally.” Marshall opened a panel in the wall and typed on it. The panel glowed. “Don’t forget to hold on to the chain.” Marshall shook his head. “Dr. Shrader, I’ve missed you and your absentmindedness! Operations have been way too tense down here since you left!”
Oriana clutched the chain. She almost fell over when the pulley system activated.
The ramp moved right and down, then left, and when it stopped they were in a new crescent, but with only one path labeled.
SEQUENTIAL ALLEY
“You look disoriented,” Marshall said. “You’re sure your biomat is sealed?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Oriana said. “The light caught me the wrong way.”
Oriana and Marshall treaded down Sequential Alley.
“You’re so quiet,” Marshall said, halfway along the alley. “Are the lights still getting to you?”
“No, no,” Oriana said, “my apologies, I was sent here to assess the Reassortment Strain’s progress, but I thought that the closer we came to the end, the higher the probability we could resolve the war—”
“War is in our blood. It’s what makes us human as much as gills make fish, fish, and wings make birds, birds.” Marshall activated a panel and punched in a code unknown to Oriana. The panel turned blue.
PRIMARY RESEARCH FACILITY
Oriana’s heart fluttered.
This is it, she thought, the Hexagon, where Reassortment research was conducted—the place where transhumankind designed and perfected its doom.
Marshall put his eyes near another scanner, and the glass doors slid open. They stepped into an alloyed hallway. Oriana counted one, two, three, four turns, and in the fifth corridor, the guard station. They both checked in,
and the doors opened.
Red phosphorescent light spilled over Oriana’s helmet. When her vision adjusted, she saw countless scientists in oxblood biomats operating digital screens upon thousands of desks. Hundreds of thousands of tubes ran from an octagonal containment unit in the center of the facility to endless rows of silos filled with bubbling liquids and gases. It looked much like an archaic version of Beimeni’s Research & Development Department.
Oriana extended her consciousness and requested her synsuit to connect to the mainframe.
Her synsuit searched the digital labyrinth, and when it indicated a match, Oriana requested it download all information regarding the Reassortment Strain.
“Dr. Shrader,” Marshall said with a twitch to his mustache, “what are you doing?”
Oriana’s eyes blinked rapidly.
Her synsuit pulled in the data from the Hexagon network and installed it in her neurochip. It was encrypted, as she’d suspected it would be.
“Doctor—” Marshall said.
An alarm blared. Red lights blinked. The scientists scurried to the exits, and explosives ignited all over the Hexagon.
An invisible foe split Dr. Marshall from his head to his hips.
Oriana didn’t have time to scream, or react, for the foe smashed her face harder than a Graka.
When she fell to the ground, she lost her concentration and shifted back into her likeness from Dr. Shrader’s. She shook her head, dizzied by the blow.
Soldiers streamed into the Hexagon past fleeing scientists. Several surrounded her and aimed their guns. She froze. Another group of soldiers bellowed, and balls of glass and flame exploded, launched, it seemed, from the top of the tallest silo, though when Oriana turned, she saw no source.
Heywood had not prepared the team for stealth technology like this.
She shifted her vision to infrared, then organic, then ultraviolet. There: a sheen of light, and the outline took shape—a humanoid, for sure, but was it transhuman? The soldiers fired in its direction, pelting the silos and walls. The blaze spread, the hiss from the fire not unlike a shuttle engine during liftoff. Scientists screamed, reached, cried, and died in the inferno.
Oriana wondered how long her synsuit could hold against this attack.
A crescent of light burst and Oriana dropped.
Soldiers collapsed around her, arms or legs severed, heads split, bodies torn apart.
She crawled through the blood and entrails.
The facility’s sprinkler system sprayed the inferno, to no avail, but it did give the infiltrator a more defined shape in Oriana’s ultraviolet vision. The shape was, in fact, transhuman.
She followed the line of dead scientists toward the exit.
The infiltrator crashed upon the ground in front of her. It seemed taller than before, more terrifying, but she wouldn’t let it stop her, not now, so close to the end. She had the raw Reassortment Strain data, the synthesis that would lead the people back to the surface—and give her leverage with Antosha upon her return.
A row of silos smashed to the ground. The liquids inside spilled out and toppled the infiltrator. Oriana rolled over dead bodies and pieces of desks, silos, pipes, wires, and wood. She scrabbled along the slippery ground. The infiltrator grabbed her ankle and swung her into another silo, engulfed in flame. Oriana countered with a roundhouse kick that sent the infiltrator sliding across the Hexagon.
She ran through the maze of silos. She slid left, then right, right again, and spied the exit. The infiltrator shifted like a shadow, here and gone, as if it were part of the alloy and fire. She slipped between thinner silos separated by smoldering desks. She entered a clearing. The infiltrator reemerged atop the main containment unit and raised its arms. Disks escaped its forearms. Oriana took cover. The disks spun, splintered, and swept across the facility. Explosions rocked the ground, and she rolled into the sludge.
And now all the silos, too many to count, exploded, unleashing a sea of genetic materials and liquids. Oriana floated through it, trying to stay atop the shrapnel and floating bodies.
She swam through the murky mess.
Finding a curved slab, a silo’s massive plating, she pulled her body on board as if it were a Jurinarian raft.
She lost her balance when the infiltrator landed, but she didn’t fall.
The flames were extinguished, but the smoke still swirled.
The infiltrator sprinted to her and, anticipating Oriana’s tactics, swiped, swung, and swiveled around her. She ducked and locked her arm over the infiltrator’s. They grappled and spun on the raft. She kicked its torso, and it splashed into the muck.
Oriana dashed down the slab and dove off it into the murky water, toward the entrance.
She emerged in the hallway and shifted to standard view.
Bits of scientists and soldiers floated among alloyed plates and wires.
Oriana didn’t want to imagine what the place smelled like. She thanked the gods for her synsuit and the purified atmosphere it created.
Orange lights blinked overhead. Alloy dripped down the walls in places. The structure could not withstand the heat.
She extended her consciousness and engaged Hengill Laboratory’s artificial intelligence program.
LOCUST INITIATED
Oriana executed algorithms to determine alternate routes through the laboratory. The program directed her to the region labeled METAMORPHOSIS, but the encryption was unfamiliar, similar to the type that shielded the Reassortment Strain data. Now the water drained beneath her, and she felt the ground beneath her feet. She retracted her consciousness, shifted her viewer to ultraviolet, and searched for movement. None.
Did the infiltrator disappear? Or did it complete its mission?
She reengaged with the Hengill Metamorphosis Program. Her practiced methods to break through the primitive z-wall didn’t work. The facility was transforming, and she couldn’t stop it; and the facility was under attack, though she didn’t know from whom, or what. The Eastern Hegemony attack? Or was this Antosha’s work?
The Hexagon’s walls still melted, like a glacier, and the inferno reignited. The heat must be so extreme as to render the Metamorphosis Program ineffective, something called the Exile Sequence was canceled. What was the Exile Sequence? What substance could melt an impenetrable structure? Why did Heywood do such a poor job in his preparation for the mission? Why would he send the team back to year zero, at the time of the Eastern Hegemony attack, rather than to 2 BR, which was part of the mission protocols? Or was it that Ruiner erred in his calculations with the exotic matter and superluminal matter? Shrader’s attack also might’ve led them to a different time, different place; he could’ve been the infiltrator.
These and more musings rowed through Oriana’s mind until a red hue overtook the three-dimensional readout, and now Oriana understood why she stood alone in the depths of Iceland:
100,000 TERAJOULES
TIME TO DETONATION
29:59 … 29:58 … 29:57 … 29:56 …
The soldiers and scientists knew, or this was part of their protocol. Either way, it represented yet another oversight from Heywood; disarming nuclear bombs wasn’t part of her training.
Oriana dashed down the hallways and grabbed the banisters at the end of every curve until an explosion worse than any so far rocked the Hexagon.
The melting wall exploded, throwing her into darkness.
ZPF Impulse Wave: Cornelius Selendia
Farino City
Farino, Underground North
2,500 meters deep
Connor roused awake, violently.
Sweat drenched his tunic. He’d dreamed of the eels again, rising over the islands, eating the prisoners.
He rolled over, facing Pirro’s island. He still slept, or so it seemed, curled near a row of stalagmites.
Connor exhaled, letting his unease escape. He wondered when they’d take him and Pirro. Both men had been asleep when the Janzers had apprehended Aera and Nero and Charlene and many others. Where they too
k his comrades, he did not know. His last memory of Aera was her sleeping body curled over a stone upon her island, her chest rising and falling. She looked like a starved child, about to die.
Connor closed his eyes. He sensed something different, something … changed. What was it? Was it something in the musty air or on the walls or islands, or was it … the silence? Yes, that was it. The water had stopped flowing along the prison’s perimeter. He looked down. The eels didn’t emit as many pulses. Connor had assumed this was a biological capacity, but perhaps it wasn’t entirely.
“Electricity’s out,” Pirro said softly. He knelt against the stone. The bioluminescence from the glowworms seemed brighter over him.
Connor didn’t realize how much of the prison’s light and movement was generated by electric current. He pressed his hand to his neck and felt the Converse Collar—it was lifeless.
He accessed the ZPF and shielded his mind from Marstone. He heard and saw all in the prison.
The outage wasn’t confined to Farino.
This had to be his father’s doing.
But can they raise the lake without power? Connor wondered. Could he risk the lives of those who remained on the islands?
Thousands and thousands of Janzers circled the islands upon their rocketcycles. Connor put his arms out at his sides and saw through their eyes, heard through their ears—their connection with the chancellor had been severed. By what, he did not know.
“My boy, what’re you doing?” Pirro said.
Connor clasped his hands together and bowed.
A Janzer flew to his island and stepped off his rocketcycle. He unlocked Connor’s collar, and it dropped to the limestone ground.
The remaining Janzers ascended above the islands upon their rocketcycles and raised what looked like pulse rifles. The prisoners screamed.