But Candice took a deep breath and voiced the answer Ruby had already suspected. “It’s the tombs. We’ve found it.”
Devan revealed a gun. At this range, there was no chance he’d miss.
“Perhaps you should step inside. It’s a little chilly out here.”
Ruby sought Candice’s hand and took it in her own, no longer concerned what Candice might sneak out from her thoughts. All she wanted to do was reassure the girl that everything would be alright.
Together, they crossed the threshold. It felt like stepping down into something although the floor level remained the same. It seemed like her limbs were heavier like someone had messed with the gravity.
“How did you do that? Make the door appear?” Ruby asked.
“The tombs reveal itself when necessary. Or when prompted.”
“You made the door appear?”
“Perhaps that was you.” Devan gestured that the two women should begin along the corridor and they complied. Ruby stared at the redbrick walls, wondering how this complex could even be here. Doors led off this main corridor. Big, heavy steel doors with rivets and rust. The place was old. The lights above seemed to be unnerved by the new arrivals, flickering as they passed, as if the wiring was on the blink.
Is this what Nikoli had found?
Ruby asked, “How long have you been hiding your secrets down here?”
In the dancing light, Devan’s face seemed unreal, a computer glitch. The light animated his features like a dozen facial tics dancing along his muscles. “You did well to find me—how did you find me?” then without giving her a chance to respond. “Nikoli. I wished he’d kept his mouth shut at the reception. He drew a lot of unnecessary attention my way.”
“I saw the argument you had. Why did you do it, Devan? Why did you have Nikoli killed?”
Devan paused behind them. Ruby turned to look at him, and he shook his head slowly, a frown torn across his face. “I had nothing to do with Nikoli’s death.”
“I saw the footage. You were blackmailing him. You knew he was a telepath, and you were forcing him out of his job and the district.”
“I’m not denying that,” he said. “Nikoli had become a problem that needed addressing, but I had addressed it. I had no reason to kill him and risk drawing attention.”
“What do you mean? Nikoli wasn’t a telepath.” Candice looked confused.
“I’m sorry, Candice. I thought you’d have known,” Ruby said.
“You knew?”
“I found out recently.”
“But you said nothing.”
“I was investigating his murder,” Ruby said, looking away.
“Jesus, you thought I might have something to do with it?” Candice’s voice was raised.
“I didn’t know what to think. You were having an affair with a married man. You work for OsMiTech.”
Candice snorted. “That doesn’t make me a bad person.”
“I’m sorry,” Ruby countered. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I think you did.” Candice rounded on Devan. “You knew.”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“The man had no idea how to protect himself.” Devan’s smiled revealed his line of perfectly white teeth.
Candice launched herself at Devan, hands reaching for his neck. In the moment, Devan almost dropped his gun, but he recovered quickly and knocked her back easily. She fell to the floor and Ruby hurried to help her to her feet.
Candice was half sobbing as she spat her vitriol at Devan. “You killed him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I had no reason for him dead.”
Ruby’s mind was whirling. This made no sense to her. Devan had Nikoli killed, it was the only thing that made sense.
Ruby spoke up, “But he found out about this place. He would reveal it.”
“And if you’ve seen our conversation that night, you’d know that we’d reached an agreement.” He was calm as he spoke and that bothered Ruby as much as the gun pointed at her. The way he brushed aside talk of murder with ease. Not like it was something he couldn’t do, but something he chose not to do.
Candice was shaking her head in disbelief. “You bastard. Treating him like he was something you’d stepped in that needed wiping away.”
“And you’re taking the moral high-ground? The mistress. I’m not sure you’ve got the right to question me on my morals. You were destroying his marriage. In effect, I would save it by sending him away from you.”
Candice took a step closer. The gun rose to cover her. She wouldn’t stand a chance. Ruby touched the girl’s shoulder and pulled her back. “Don’t, Candice. Not now. What would be the point?”
“It would wipe the smile from his face.”
Devan shook his head. “I’m not smiling. I wanted none of this. Nikoli was smart. Too smart to work for the DRT. I’d already offered him a permanent position at OsMiTech but he turned me down. I’d have been happy to work with him.”
“He wouldn’t have left the DRT.”
“He almost did.” Devan tried to stifle a laugh but didn’t quite succeed. “He was always worried about taking the next step, though. You know, when the war comes, you’ll have to choose sides. Nikoli wasn’t ready to commit.”
Ruby stiffened and held her tongue. “Who are the enemy Devan? Last I checked there wasn’t any war going on.”
“Give it time, give it time.”
At the end of the corridor, they crossed through a doorway and found themselves at the top of a dilapidated staircase. The metal railings that spiralled down looked to be held together with rust. As they stepped onto the first step and proceeded down, the treads creaked against the wall brackets. A handful of gravel fell from the tread into the darkness below.
“Is this safe?”
Devan nudged her forwards. “Perfectly. These were built to last.”
“How did you come across this place? It can’t be a coincidence you built OsMiTech headquarters on top of it.”
Derelict
Ruby looked at Candice but she didn’t react like she’d heard anything at all.
Ruby considered how they’d entered the base and wondered for a moment whether they were beneath the main OsMiTech building at all. They’d been walking for ages and she didn’t think the main OsMiTech building was this big. And there was that nagging sensation at the back of her mind. Like someone probing. None of this felt real.
“You know where you are, though?” Devan replied calmly. “This is an old military operations centre. Nicknamed the tombs for its unpleasantly warm environment—apparently after a prison in America. Details of what happened to the place are very sketchy. There’s nothing to suggest it was still being used by the military, but then again, nothing that suggests it wasn’t.”
“And you came across it, how exactly?”
Devan hesitated. Ruby threw a glance behind her as they stepped down the stairs and caught a look of confusion on the man’s face.
“It found me,” he said at last as they reached the bottom of the stairwell. “I don’t know why, but this place sought me out and summoned me.”
Summoned him. What the hell did that mean? A shiver ran across Ruby’s shoulders. She was in the middle of something incredibly dangerous. When he spoke about this place, his voice changed subtly, like a proud parent might talk about their child.
Or a disciple about their god.
*
At the bottom of the staircase, a doorway led them into another corridor. It branched off to the left and the right but Ruby’s eyes were focused solely on the doorway in front of them.
The corridor had sloping walls meeting the ceiling at awkward angles. In stark contrast to the corridor above, this area reminded Ruby of the design aesthetics of the building above ground. The material wasn’t brick or tile like the upper level, but of a blue composite material she’d seen used in wall construction upstairs. The lighting was an improvement on the rest of the place as well; blue strip lighting ran along the joints where
walls met ceiling, and likewise where the floor met walls. It turned them all into strange blue creatures.
In front of Ruby, an imposing double door built of metal and sealed with locks and bolts. A key card was embedded in the wall with a number pad fixed below it. Cables ran along the outside of the panels like it had been installed in a hurry.
“Inside—” Devan scratched the side of his nose with his gun, then started again. “Inside is precious. It’s the reason you’re still alive and the reason no one will ever forget OsMiTech. I’ll take you inside, but before I do, I want you to consider what I said earlier, about a war coming. No one can predict what shape that war will take but you’d be a fool to pretend there won’t be one. The threat to our survival is real, and I will make sure that when it starts, we will be ready.”
Ruby frowned. Shivers ran across her shoulders as Devan inserted a key card and held his palm up to the security pad. A light flashed, a click as Ruby heard the biometric needle jab at Devan’s palm, and then a flickering of the lights as the doors rumbled open.
What lay beyond took Ruby’s breath away.
A familiar smell stung her nostrils. She stepped onto a metal walkway that led across the spherical room, following Devan, hearing his footsteps echo around the space. How it had been constructed down here, Ruby couldn’t imagine, but it was breathtaking in scale and she had to close her eyes against the sight for a moment to allow the first impressions to sink in.
The walls of the room were smooth and dimpled like they were on the inside of a golf ball, only this ball was huge. Across from where she stood to the far side of the cavern she guessed must have been about five hundred metres. The walkway they stood on now, led them from the door they’d entered, directly through the middle of this cavern to a point opposite.
Around the walls, beams of light crisscrossed and pulsed in a steady hypnotic rhythm. Blue, then green, then blue. A light show that reflected and lit up their faces in an unpleasant fashion. Ruby was reminded of veins and immediately wished she didn’t have such a strong imagination, but now she was standing here, the thought of being inside something that was alive wouldn’t leave her.
A faint humming met her ears and there was another distinct noise overlaid: a steady double-beat. The same noise she’d heard in the tunnels above.
Ever since she’d stepped through the doorway in the tunnels, there’d been that feeling of being close to something powerful. Hard to put her finger on what had caused her to think like that earlier, but now she was in this room, it was difficult to imagine the source of her discomfort being anything other than this room.
“It’s alive,” Ruby whispered.
“Don’t be silly,” Candice said. But her voice sounded unsure.
Devan smiled.
“What is it?” Ruby asked.
The women followed Devan across the walkway, Ruby holding on tight to the railing, trying to ignore the sensation that they were walking into the belly of the whale, trying to hold onto the contents of her stomach.
She peered over the edge and looked down and at the bottom of the cavern, a black lake reflected the venous patterns pulsating around them. The lake broke the symmetry.
As she walked, she kept glancing down at the blackness. She didn’t know why, but instinct told her that beneath their feet was something more important than everything else going on around them. And then, she heard it, or rather she didn’t quite hear it, a sense that something had been left unsaid.
Unity
“Did you—” Candice whispered.
Ruby nodded, that sensation that someone was poking around in her head again.
Devan had pocketed his weapon and was strolling purposefully across the bridge, not seeming to care that his party was dropping behind him. The door they’d come through had already sealed and Ruby doubted they’d get back out there without Devan’s help.
As they followed Devan across the room, Ruby put her finger on the smell. Nanosalve. Nikoli had discovered the shipments. Ruby glanced over the railing again and stared at the black lake. Could the lake be formed from Nanosalve? But there had to be hundreds of gallons of the stuff down there.
“What is this room? What have you built Devan?” Ruby asked.
“This,” he paused, looking around him as if seeing the place for the first time, “is the Infinity Mainframe.” He gestured around him with arms outstretched as if his fingertips might yet reach the walls of the cavernous space.
Ruby stared at him like he was talking nonsense. “What on Earth is an Infinity Mainframe?”
“You’re standing in it.”
“But, what is it for? What does it do?”
The enthusiasm on his face hadn’t waned since he’d entered the room. “It’s taken years to get to this stage. And, a lot of money.” He snorted. “But what good is money? This is the pinnacle of my accomplishments. Oh, I wish you could all have seen the effort that’s gone into building it. But we had to work in secret as much as possible. It was never safe to reveal what we were working on. It still might not be safe.” A shadow passed his face.
Behind them, the doors swished open and the three of them turned and watched as a short figure, stooping, stepped across the threshold, the blue light giving his frame a ghostly appearance. The man wore a crumpled lab coat, too long for him and almost trailing on the floor. But it wasn’t his overall untidy appearance that Ruby was staring at; it was the top-right quarter of his head. It was as if he’d taken that entire section of his head and replaced it with—something. It could have been a mask, but it wasn’t.
Ruby felt uncomfortable as the newcomer approached and could not direct her gaze at anything other than the smooth white plastic taking up so much of the man’s features. A grey disc of metal filled the area where his left eye should have been. The rest of the mask was smooth.
Ruby didn’t recognise the man. His face was unshaven and lines etched across his skin like ravines. He had hair on the right side of his head, the side without the mask, and this was black and oiled back, pressed tight against his scalp.
By the time he’d made it to the central platform, the smell hit them all. Ruby flinched as she caught the stench. It was the smell of forgotten men of the street; an inhuman stench of body odour so vile that Ruby wondered whether the man had ever taken a wash. Just who the hell was he?
In front of them, he studied their faces looking for a sign that he might know them, then when he realised he didn’t he lost interest and went to a bank of instruments without saying a word. With his back to them, Ruby was given the rear view of the mask and saw that it wrapped around the back of his head. But from here, it was hard to tell if the mask was sitting on top of the skin, or beneath it. Ruby shuddered.
Devan coughed.
“You should see someone about that,” the newcomer said, his accent was hard to place.
“Milford Jones, everyone,” Devan gestured to the man who now seemed more interested in a newly plotted graph and waveform he’d made appear on a monitor.
Candice threw a furtive glance in Ruby’s direction. So, she recognised the name as well. Milford Jones was once as well known to the public as Devan Oster. He’d been the face of OsMiTech at one time, before the failed attempt on Devan’s life.
“What do you want, Devan? I was in the middle of something.”
“Something important?”
“It’s all important.” He played with more instruments and flicked switches along the control panel. “I don’t have time to play host to your guests.”
“I thought you’d be interested in meeting some new people.”
“No.”
“Milford.” Devan’s voice was low and measured, reminding Ruby of how you might talk to a disobedient dog.
Milford paused and lifted his head from the consoles. “Nice to meet you. Touch nothing.”
“I thought we might take the Mainframe on a test drive,” said Devan as he wandered around the control dais’s instruments. “Have the latest modification
s taken?”
“I’m still taking readings. It’s a delicate process. I don’t want to risk another overload in the translation matrix.”
“But you could switch it on?”
“Why would you want to without my readings? You’re asking for trouble.”
“Not at all. I just want to show our guests what this machine means for all of us.”
Milford seemed less than impressed with Devan’s rhetoric and rolled his remaining eye before closing it softly, nodding and then turning back to the largest instrument panel on the dais. He flicked switches and moved delicate levers around the board. LEDs flashed, screens glowed and pulsed and Milford’s hands didn’t stop, constantly adjusting and amending controls.
The lights around the interior surface of the globe melted from blue to orange and then a terrible blood red. A bubbling sound caused Ruby to take a step closer to the edge and peer over the side. The noise emanated from the black pool at the foot of the globe. Whatever Milford had done had agitated the contents of that pool. Candice had frozen to the spot, wrapping her arms around her body, tucking her hands under her armpits, the tendons on her neck standing out. Ruby swept a hand across her forehead, wiping away a line of sweat.
And then there was Devan, defying the tension by grinning inanely like a child who’d despite being told ‘no’ a dozen times, had finally got the toys he’d been pestering his parents for.
“Wonderful,” he murmured.
“What does it do?” Ruby asked. She was keeping an eye on Milford as she spoke. There was no chance she’d be able to manipulate the controls the way Milford was, but if this place was controlled by those panels, the right combination could shut this place down. Getting to them would be a problem; Devan still had his gun and was dangerously confident. Maybe there was another way.
“What’s in that pool?” she said, suddenly suspicious of the material beneath her feet.
Ruby stepped over to the railing and stared hard into the depths of the black pool. The bubbling liquid had increased its fervour, bringing objects to the surface. Bile rose in her throat as her vision adjusted to the devilish light and the objects became easier to discern.
“What the hell? Are those—”
The Infinity Mainframe (Tombs Rising Book 3) Page 21