The readings on the autosurgeon instantly changed, going haywire for a moment, then settling down into a new pattern. Roche shuddered; her mouth opened, gasping for air; her one good hand clutched at nothing
Then she relaxed. The readings changed again, returning to how they had been previously, as though nothing at all had happened.
De Bruyn watched in amazement, her jaw hanging.
“It’s inside her!” The clone warrior’s hands gripped the edge of the operating table, knuckles slowly whitening. “There’s no other way to explain it! The Box’s shutdown code affected her physically, and that could only happen if it was interfering with her in some way. And given there are no signals passing between her and any part of this ship—”
“That’s why she didn’t die,” De Bruyn muttered incredulously. “It’s been keeping her alive!”
“Perhaps. But did you note how her readings returned to normal so quickly? Something or someone must have countered the shutdown code, and the only person that could have done that is Roche herself. She must be aware, on some level at least, of what is happening around her.” His gaze was fixed on Roche’s face, as though daring her to wake and contradict him.
“But...” De Bruyn shook her head. Another realization had come to her while he talked. How could he have known about the shutdown code?
The reave answered her from the far side of the ship.
Cane’s twin had glanced up, and was looking at her closely. “Something is troubling you?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She shook her head.
She didn’t have time to answer. The clone warrior had returned his attention to Roche and the autosurgeon.
“I will be returning to my ship immediately,” he said. “I will, of course, be taking Roche with me.”
“No, wait—you can’t!”
“Do not defy us, De Bruyn,” he said, gesturing for Wamel to disconnect Roche from the autosurgeon. The pilot moved obediently forward to help his master.
De Bruyn backed away a step. She had to decide, and fast. Roche had theorized about some sort of connection between the clone warriors; that would have explained how Jelena Heidik had known when she was arriving in the system. Perhaps it explained now how this clone warrior had known about the shutdown code for the Box—codes known only by a handful in the COE, but which Cane had heard used before the Box had taken over Intelligence HQ. Maybe she was overreacting.
Or maybe there was some deeper treachery at work
The clone warrior watched as Wamel disconnected Roche from the autosurgeon. As the last of the contacts fell away, he indicated that the pilot should swing her around so the two of them could lift her. They seemed to have forgotten all about De Bruyn, or perhaps their ignorance was deliberate. She had played her role. She was no longer important. She had become irrelevant.
She sent a command to Kindling, instructing it to prepare for launch, and drew a pistol from her suit’s thigh compartment.
“Put her down,” she said, aiming the pistol at the clone warrior.
Wamel stopped, looking to his master for guidance. Cane’s twin simply stared at De Bruyn, totally expressionless.
“Put her down,” she repeated, lowering her aim. “Or I’ll shoot her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, De Bruyn,” said the clone warrior. “Think what you’ll be throwing away. Think of how hard you’ve worked for this.”
“I am thinking of how hard I’ve worked for this,” she spat vehemently. “That’s why I can’t let you take her.”
“But to kill her would mean never learning the truth,” he said.
“I’ve learned nothing anyway!”
He shook his head. “But you would have found out eventually,” he said. “This way, you’ll never know.”
“Just put her back on the table!” De Bruyn waved the gun nervously toward the bloodied tabletop.
Wamel let go of Roche’s legs and went for his weapon. De Bruyn had a split second to think that he would have been on her side—if only she’d had time to explain—before she shot him. He fell back onto the operating table, smoke sizzling from the hole in his chest, and slid to the floor.
An alarm rang. De Bruyn guessed that Wamel must have sent a warning through the command network before he died. Already she could feel Lemmas batting at her mind, trying to find out what was going on. Once the Disciples learned that she had threatened their leader and killed one of their own, it would be as good as over.
“I want to know the truth,” she hissed. “Or I’ll kill her now!”
The clone warrior raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me!”
His eyes shone from his dark complexion. “If my people do not receive the justice we deserve, we will eliminate every Human in the galaxy.”
De Bruyn was taken aback for a moment. Although she had considered the possibility before, stated so boldly it sounded almost ridiculous.
“That’s—”
“Inhuman?” he offered.
“Insane,” she said.
Something moved in the doorway behind him—the other Disciples had arrived—and De Bruyn was out of time. She had nothing else to bargain with.
“Let me go,” she said, trying anyway.
The clone warrior shook his head. “No,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly allow that.”
She fired: the shot took Roche in the hip and spun her off the table.
Then, moving impossibly fast, the clone warrior was upon De Bruyn, pushing her off balance onto the floor with her arms pinned beneath her suit. His face was close to hers; she could feel his breath as she vainly attempted to break free. A hand in her hair twisted her backward, making her gasp. The air was full of the sound of footsteps as Disciples rushed into the room—but all she had ears for were the words he spoke to her as her neck twisted—
“You would have been right the first time,” he whispered. “And that’s the truth.”
With her last strength, she instructed Kindling to blow its antimatter fuel reserves.
She never felt the explosion.
17
JW111101000
955.2.14
1380
Morgan Roche was dreaming.
She had never considered herself a terribly imaginative person. Through most of her life, her dreams had consisted of everyday things and simple imagery, easily interpreted. They reflected the logical and rational person she was, and demonstrated a lack of creativity—something COE Intelligence appreciated in their agents. They wanted them to be reliable and thorough, not innovative.
But in accordance with the dramatic change to her life in recent weeks, her dreams had become much more disturbing and vivid, the symbolism darker and more profound. It had gotten to a point where she almost became reluctant to close her eyes for fear of what images she might meet in her sleep.
More often than not the images fragmented and disappeared soon after she awoke, leaving her with just a vague impression of the emotions that the dream evoked—and even this tended to dissipate as the day progressed. But now and then a dream would be too powerful, too provocative, to ignore and would stay with her long into the waking hours.
Two dreams she’d had in Palasian System alone would stay with her forever: the lizard she had been trying to trap, which had in turn caught her, and the meeting with the twins on the deck of the stone boat. There had been other dreams
that had left impressions, but none like these. These were dreams she would simply never forget.
As with the dream she was having now. It hadn’t even finished yet, but she knew it would be a dream she would not be rid of in a hurry. It felt so real, and the fact that she was unable to wake herself up from it disturbed her terribly.
She was standing inside a hollow sphere barely ten meters wide. Gravity pointed outward from the center of the sphere, with no odd tidal effects arising from the height difference between her head and her feet. No matter where she walked, the sphere was the same: white and featureless. Light seemed to emanate from all around her; there was no obvious source.
But something was wrong. She could feel it. Something terrible was happening outside the sphere. Something wanted to get in to where she was. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see beyond the sphere to make out what was trying to get her, and that just scared her all the more. She didn’t know even vaguely what would happen if it penetrated those walls, if it did get inside, but she knew it would be horrible.
The unspecified threat made her cold, and she wrapped her arms about herself. She didn’t know anything. All she remembered was being shot in the back and falling, calling for the Box, hearing Maii calling her... and the suited figure that had approached her. There had been something about that figure’s voice. Something familiar. She had heard it before. But where?
She couldn’t remember. It was hard to concentrate while trapped in the bubble, cut off from the rest of the universe with no way out, and something terrible lurking just outside wanting to get in.
“Hello?” she called, for what felt like the thousandth time. Her voice echoed dully in the chamber.
She bent down and touched the floor. It was warm and yielded slightly, like rubber. Underneath it, though, was something firm. She reached into the pockets of her shipsuit in the hope of finding tools of some description, something that might have helped her dig her way out. But her pockets were as empty as the sphere itself. Nothing in them but her.
As when she had called their names before, there was no reply.
She resumed pacing. There was nothing else for her to do. Eventually something would happen. The bubble would burst and the thing outside would break in, or she would simply wake up.
She wanted the latter more than anything.
Was it possible to sleep within a dream? Possible or not, she woke with a start. Her entire body spasmed, recalling the shot she had taken in the shoulder. And the face leaning over her, the voice speaking to her...
“This isn’t over yet.”
No. Those weren’t the words—but it was the same voice.
The words rolled around in her thoughts. She reached for her shoulder, feeling for the wound, but there was nothing there now. She was undamaged; there was no blood whatsoever. All she had were the memories of pain, a pain worse than any she had experienced before; a pain too huge to comprehend. And the tide of darkness which had followed, pulling her into its depths.
A shudder passed through her. She had dreamed during her brief sleep, and it came to her now with a viciousness that stung. She had been lying on a slab somewhere, in a dark space, and someone had been looming over her, hurting her. There was pain all through her body—her left arm, hand, and eye; her right shoulder; her face and throat. And in her mind. Someone was cutting into her, slicing her thoughts open, piercing the inner depths of her psyche—and behind that someone, behind that pain, standing in the shadows, was Page De Bruyn....
* * *
A door seemed to close in her thoughts; images faded. She found herself on her side in the sphere, mouth slack, nose running. She sat up and wiped her face. Her hands were trembling.
“This isn’t over yet.” Page De Bruyn, of course: the woman who had betrayed her on Sciacca’s World; the words De Bruyn said to her the last time they’d seen each other...
Outside, the terrible thing was still trying to get in.
She wasn’t so sure she was dreaming anymore.
The sphere seemed to tremble beneath her.
came the reply.
Relief washed through her. Although it was unable to disobey her when she issued a direct order, she’d feared the worst. “Box! I thought you’d abandoned me!”
it said.
Then it was silent again, and she was alone with the echoes. She listened to them uneasily. The Box had sounded weary, strained. She had never heard it like that before.
The sphere was solid as it had ever been. A stab of pain in her left eye reminded her of her dream’s dream, and of De Bruyn....
She wrapped her arms around her legs and waited for the Box to speak again.
* * *
A long time passed before the sphere trembled beneath her again. She woke immediately and looked around.
The light had changed. She had a shadow pooling beneath her now. Above her, in the exact center of the sphere, was a point of light too intense to look at directly. She glanced away, blinking.
She looked around again at the sphere, avoiding the light.
She fought an image of two Klein bottles constantly filling and emptying each other. It wasn’t helping.
she said, sitting up.
The Box paused for a long moment. When it spoke, its voice was softer than before, almost tentative.
it said.
She didn’t know what to say at first.
/>
Roche felt something much like sadness welling in her. But she wasn’t sure who it was for: herself or the Box.
She nodded.
Realization dawned.
Roche remembered her fuzzy self-image in n-space.
The Box had said something very much like this before. She still wasn’t sure she believed it, even in the current circumstances.
The Dark Imbalance Page 30