by David Finn
‘Move now!’ she shouted.
Smile started running across the grassy Park. The connection cut out.
Wolf was looking at her, then back at the blinking airlock door. ‘Who was that?’
‘You know it’s my brother, don’t play coy. He’s under attack but there’s not much I can do from here. Let’s finish the job. Where the hell is Josephine?’
Wolf checked the door locks. ‘Maybe she’s gone through and left us here.’
‘Weren’t you just sleeping together? How the hell could you miss her?’
Wolf actually laughed. ‘We had an argument. She left while I was in the shower.’
Demorn shook her head, checked her watch. The times lined up, they were in full twin eclipse. They had roughly thirty minutes if this mission was going to have an exit point. The Toxis attack had been seemingly random. Even with the undead power of the Skeleton King, getting the huntress into a God Fort would be well nigh impossible. Unless somebody had loosened the locks and let her in.
‘Screw this. We know the mission goal, if we’re synched and the door is a go. Josie has played her role as far as I’m concerned. We move now.’
He banged against the door. ‘I don’t have the access code. She kept that to herself.’
Demorn pulled out the master key and placed it over the door controls. The locks clicked and turned. The lights stopped blinking and turned green.
She grinned. ‘Lucky I brought a cheat sheet.’
‘Do you trust me?’ he said.
Demorn gave him a gentle tap on the face. ‘A little bit. That’s why you go through the door first, soldier.’
9
* * *
Demorn checked the locks and gave him a thumbs up. Wolf kicked the door in, and went through, his gun shouldered.
‘Dead AND clear,’ he shouted, sounding too loud, too robotic.
He’s sweating this. He belongs to Josie, not Iverson, certainly not me.
Demorn followed in his wake, her pistol out. They were in a well-lit boardroom, an incredibly bright sun blazing through wide open glass windows. Closed wall and door leading to the rest of the complex. Dead bodies clustered at the desks, blood pooled on the table. A Powerpoint presentation was on the screen. Triton logos everywhere, on the screen, on the windows, on the papers in front of the dead figures. She counted seven. Three female, four male, head shots. Her mind ran through possibilities even as she fanned out, looking for a live shooter. It reeked of self-inflicted or voluntary but she’d seen enough bad shit to know the bad guys could make all sorts of things look voluntary that weren’t. They weren’t here to play detective, time to keep rolling.
The smell of over-ripe decay hit her over the air conditioning. She grimaced, but didn’t choke. Wolf looked back at her, nose plugs had slid into his nostrils on auto. Such an Army boy.
She said, ‘Fancy-pants, I left mine back in the Bay. Ok, they’ve been dead about 48 hours.’
He nodded. She checked her watch, looking for a signal. Nada. Location unknown. She glanced outside the window. What she had assumed was the sun wasn’t that at all. She was reminded of a huge football stadium, towering above and around them, filled with glowing lights, giving the appearance of true daylight. It was certainly bizarre. A glowing purple circle burnt on the wall, the same airlock clearly visible. A red circle burnt within the purple, playing mix and match.
The watch said 29 minutes.
‘Any idea what that is?’ she asked Wolf who was busy rifling through papers.
He looked up from the papers, into the many lights. ‘We’ve made it to the Source Core. Josie said this is the heart of everything.’
She positioned herself against the office door. ‘Kind of hilarious it’s a boardroom. I was expecting a lava pit or something.’
He moved beside her, pointed his rifle so the barrel was almost touching the door. ‘Might be through there for all we know.’
She looked at the presentation. A flowchart of numbers and earning results that meant little without context. The Triton logo stamped across it all. She would kill these fucks if it was the last thing she lived to do.
‘You know what I don’t see? The body of the presenter.’
‘Maybe they were sitting down, doing a point and click.’
Wolf imitated the motion.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t spend a lot of time in meetings, Wolf. Maybe you’re right.’
Demorn noticed some of the papers were gone. Wolf had taken some, attempted to cover it up as well. Wolf was a typical double agent who’d stayed in the field too long. His trust was as low as his view of his life expectancy. She trusted Wolf about as far as she could throw him but suddenly she felt they’d really hit the bottom of that trust barrel.
He asked, ‘Want me to take point?’
She shook her head. ‘This door’s mine, soldier. Don’t plug me in the head, I’ll only haunt your nightmares.’
With a sharp nod, Demorn kicked through the door.
The alarm hit her straight away, loud and insistent. Sometimes she felt like that alarm was always going, had been ringing all her life. Demorn followed her momentum and rushed into the half dark, gun drawn. A flight of metal stairs ran downward from the boardroom. Forget about an office building. The alarm was echoing through a giant warehouse or factory. Packing containers and machinery below them, cranes through the air. The network of pipes and cables made her feel like the enclosed room was a hub of information.
A rattle of gunfire nearby. Demorn pressed herself against a metal girder. It was a long drop to the ground. Nobody was shooting at them. She heard random shouting in the distance. Wolf was behind her, barely a rustle. That strange existential feeling of not trusting your comrade still filled her. She couldn’t help but wonder if Iverson and the Order were hustling her. Iverson said there was no remote implant in Wolf, but Investigators said a lot of things. They liked to keep themselves at just enough distance that they never caught the full impact of their petty manoeuvring when it fell apart. Sitting back on the Moth on the safer side of the portal while the peons made the big play was a fairly typical Investigator play. She wondered if she was being too cynical.
Wolf brushed her shoulder. ‘I’ve got a read on her. She did abandon us.’
He moved down the stairs, slick and fast, making less noise than she would make on his fast way down. Screw the doubts. They had bigger fish to fry and traitors could pay. Demorn saw a figure move below, looking upward, pumping a shot at Wolf. He flung himself behind the scant protection of the metal stairwell.
Gripping the locket she plunged from the top of the metal stairs in a barely controlled glide. Demorn landed boots first on the soldier’s neck, hearing something snap as they smashed together onto the floor. He was human, skinny, carrying a gun that was too big for him. Wolf came double-time down the steps.
‘Careful, don’t kill him! We might need him.’
‘Oh he’s already gone, hon. Don’t worry, I’ve got a whole other five-second rule.’
Demorn pushed the sunglasses onto her hair. Her eyes burnt with green fire. She dragged the soldier’s head up, the neck weirdly distended. He was younger than she was comfortable knowing. The locket had just fed her a fresh blast of death power. The skeleton dimension was still dancing across her brain. His sightless blank eyes stared into her. Greedy for data, she sucked his mind dry, before it fast faded into oblivion. Son of somebody halfway important. Dad was a general. Kid wasn’t completely useless. An ex-girlfriend he’d just broken up with. Arguments about politics and the Prussian situation. An impulse to serve. First day on the rock, first day on the rock, it was his first day. He was gone, the mind dead.
Demorn withdrew her hand. Her head ached.
‘Well, we know what’s around the corner.’
Wolf looked nervous and eager. ‘What?’
‘I’ll give you a clue. She wears a green dress and has nice boobs for a lizard.’
She watched him closely and he nodded, eyes grim. The
lips didn’t move. Sometimes, it was just hard to believe in love.
Demorn put a hand on his chest.
‘Don’t forget, Wolf, we’re trying to stop those Triton symbols from hatching back on Parallel 37, not get into a lover’s quarrel.’
He went to slap her hand away but she caught him in her steel grip. So much for hard man. He looked like a lost puppy.
‘You haven’t made the decision yet, kid. You haven’t thrown your life away for her. You could still have a happy ending. Remember that.’
Wolf nodded, went to say something. She saw the green pin-prick dots appear across his body.
One, three, six, more.
She tumbled away, pushing him hard with brute force. The lasers erupted from multiple angles half a second later. She smelt burning, felt it. Figures rushing them, her position on the platform too exposed, too open.
She came up firing, caught one in the throat with the Athena gun. Felt a chunk of her shoulder go as she plugged another. Vaguely aware that Wolf was down, blood everywhere, maybe cut in half. There was no time to glance, she kept shooting at live targets. She could hear shouting. She took another one of them. He had a crown of thorns for a face. Two body shots, they were screeching, she felt something big hit her heart, a laser that hurt the ruby, choking her up. Three more, hitting her, two of them monsters, one in a stupid mask, they were hitting her with electro clubs, the Athena gun smashed out of her grasp, she swung with her fists, hit another thorn-head off the network of platforms, into the infernal engine pulsing with heat far below. But the clubs smashed into her face and her body and she went down in a mass of electric pain, cursing them all to hell, pinned, her mouth filled with blood, their screaming a nightmare ambient dream track as she went under.
10
* * *
The chamber was hot almost to boiling point. Steam filled the air like a sauna, soaking her body. Josephine shut the door on the suspicious guard, his expression caught between malevolence and primal fear as he let her in, unsure if he had made the right decision, too scared to question her again.
Carefully she dead-bolted the reality locks, aware that she may only have seconds to work, the conclusion was approaching fast now. Escape was no longer an option, it was succeed in her wild ambition or die.
A black scarf hung around her neck which she hurriedly tossed away, uncovering a burning red jewel around her throat. She undid the clasp and threw it to the floor. She massaged the small burns marks left around her throat on her reptilian skin.
YOU HAVE COME AFTER SO LONG.
The loud female voice reverberated around the chamber, and Josephine willed herself not to close her eyes in fear.
‘Yes, I have.’
She looked up to a row of crystal chambers, a virtual hive that extended from a few feet in front of her, all the way up the wall, hundreds if not thousands. The heat burnt into her, luxurious on her face, warming bones so long cold and spent in the camouflage of the human worlds. The nearest chambers were only a few feet from her, withered remnants of her race, most dead, some hanging by a thread, their limbs distended and features skeletal with hunger. Closest to her and looking as if she perched on the verge of extinction was a gigantic lizard skeleton, curled into an enormous crystal chamber, a thorny tail pressed against the frosted surface, moving by tiny increments.
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Her voice was robotic and artificial. The skeletal lizard twisted slightly in her chamber.
‘The road is long and dangerous back to here. It is most dangerous to traverse the Parallels.’
HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN IMPRISONED?
I’m not sure this is imprisonment but instead a living death, Josephine thought as she accessed the hub controls, entering the shaky interface which had been antiquated when her people had been entombed. Only the Queen, the primary, was even slightly conscious. The rest were in deep to light hiber-sleep. Josie couldn’t help but wonder just how vital they were.
She said, ‘The Fracture Event happened roughly 52 years ago. You were brought here as it occurred. As each of the Parallels collapsed, remnants came back to the Source Core.’
IS THE GRAND EXPERIMENT STILL ACTIVE?
Josephine shook her head at the ridiculously antiquated term. The Grand Experiment. It was difficult to imagine the arrogance of complexity which made the Queen even refer to it. Still, she was near death.
‘The Grand Experiment is over, my Queen. It failed. We failed. You failed.’
THEY KILLED OUR PEOPLE, JOSEPHINE. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE ABOUT IT?
Anger stirred in her heart as she worked the controls. The robotic voice wasn’t a trigger to anything but anger.
Josephine spun around. ‘I have done much. They call me a witch for what I have done! They seek to execute me for what I have done.’
The skeletal lizard was incapable of an emotional response. Its deadweight immensity was a statement in itself, a living fossil. Once, she had been the mother of their species, sacrosanct and unquestioned. But now she was a museum piece and Josephine was filled with a sad pity that was turning into contempt.
‘We are a withered, dying species to them, Queen. I have been back since the Event, many times at first, less so recently. Each time with less than the time before, and nothing for years.’
WE NUMBER IN MILLIONS, THE EGGS SPAWNED THRU SO MANY PARALLELS—MY GUARDS ARE ON THE DOORS.
Josephine shook her head at the arrogance, an adhering to a dead knowledge, a fixed opinion. She saw some of the chambers steaming up. The healthier, younger members of the species were waking from sleep.
‘Guards bar the doorway, my Queen, but they are your guards no longer, they are your jailers. And it is just one human who does not fear you, or me.’
The robotic voice boomed out but Josephine imagined she could detect a note of anxiety underneath the mechanical tone, a glimmer of a paranoia.
IF YOU ARE SO HUNTED HOW DID YOU ACCESS THE SOURCE CORE?
Josephine pointed to the jewel tossed onto the console. It burnt red.
She said, ‘I wore the stone to trick him. It’s not of our heritage in any Parallel. It’s from the body of a Void Monk, dead a thousand years, entombed on my God Fort.’
Josie ran her hand across her neck.
‘The jewel bends the minds of the weak and the fearful. It hurts and burns me, it scars me. But it works. That’s how we survive out there, my Queen, the few of us still left. Hunted like rats, we play tricks on our captors to survive another day longer. I have spent a year in the refuge of a powerful Baron on a close Parallel, building the strength and resource Cores to return.’
YOU WONT FIND ME WEAK OR FEARFUL.
Josie smiled, opening the crystal casket of the Queen. The skeletal lizard shifted within. Her wizened claws held a great glowing egg, the originator, the life bringer of her race through so many Parallels. Josie was filled with a mixture of anticipation and a streak of pride, for having made it back against every odd, hunted by the Order, forced to ally with undesirables like a mercenary whore.
Josie nodded in agreement. ‘You were never weak, never frightened, always willing to do what had to be done for our species to survive. But you are dead, my Queen. I was too late to save you, barred from reentering the Source Core by our enemies and the fracturing of realities around us.’
IF I AM TO DIE WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO OUR PEOPLE?
Josie gestured to the surrounding chambers around the mighty Queen. ‘Our people may still have life, we are not extinct yet.’
The skeletal lizard spoke, in the Old Tongue, cutting through the robotics, a glimmer of something alive inside the shell of bones.
YOU KNOW . . . WHAT MUST BE DONE THEN . . .
Tears stung her eyes. Josie had been loyal for so long through so many worlds that perched on the edge of destruction. She bowed.
‘Yes, my Queen. It’s time for a brand new experiment.’
She reached in and grasped the glowing egg. Pieces of dried skin still clung to it. A sudden hunger f
ed through Josie as she touched the heavy jewelled egg, visions of twin suns hanging in a distant Parallel, long since consumed by Ultimate Fate, a vision of life before everything ended. She watched as the twin suns aligned, heading toward a twin eclipse such as the one which had found Josie here, carried by both magic and science aboard the God Fort. It had all happened before. Everything had happened. She saw the great split in the heart of everything, the Fracture Event that shattered across the Parallels, the cracks in the twin suns, the cracks from which the demon gods would come screaming out of the Void, the hole in space and time from which Ultimate Fate would eat everything. She saw true horror, she saw the Future.
Josephine tore the egg away. The Lizard Queen screamed just once as her heart was ripped apart, her cold bones vibrating in the chamber.
Josie was vaguely aware of banging on the door. She could hear them, voices loud and vivid. It didn’t matter. The reality deadlocks would hold for a time, perhaps long enough. Her people were waking from death, clawing at their chambers, pushing the crystal doors open, slowly becoming reborn.
Power flooded through Josephine and she dropped to the floor screaming, eyes rolling back in her head, consumed with visions of both the end and a terrible awakening in fire.
11
* * *
The thorn-heads hit Demorn in the mouth to wake her again. Blood filled her mouth, sickly sweet over her teeth, mixed with the electric tang from their clubs. Her wrists were bound tightly with leather straps. She dangled in the air, her legs free, swinging back and forth gently to create momentum through her core. Her jacket was torn on the floor. Her bloodied Spidey t-shirt had seen better days.
The thorn-heads circled with their electro clubs. Three of them. They all wore wounds from her boots and fists. They chattered in their own tongue, a strange clicking noise which hurt her brain to listen to. These idiots had been dancing this dance for a couple of hours.