Dark Light

by Randy Wayne White

  “Touch of vertigo,” she admitted, closing her eyes. She was trembling, and they weren’t even inside the catacombs. Dear heaven, how was she going to get through this?

  The answer was simple. She was going to get through whatever came next because there was no other option.

  “Take a couple of deep breaths,” Fontana said. “Don’t pass out on me.”

  It was an order, given with all the icy assurance of a man who expected to be obeyed. Well, he was a Guild boss, she reminded herself. They weren’t known for their compassion and consideration.

  Oddly enough, although she resented the brusque command, it had a bracing effect. Like a splash of cold water, she thought. She took some slow, deep breaths. Her head seemed to clear a little.

  “I told you, I’m okay,” she said.

  If he suspected that she was lying through her teeth again, he did not let on.

  “Stay here while I de-rez the door into the tunnels,” he said instead.

  She felt him move away from her. When she opened her eyes, she saw that the beam of his flashlight was shining on a massive plate of solid mag-steel. It looked like the door of a bank vault. She watched him enter a code.

  “Who installed that?” she asked.

  “The former owner.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. “I suppose the good news is that, if the house is going up in flames, the Riders aren’t going to be coming down that staircase behind us.”

  “That’s it, think positive.” He reached for the steel door handle. “If it makes you feel any better, there’s no way they can know about this hole-in-the-wall. But even if they did, I doubt that they would follow us into the tunnels.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they have to know that once we’re in the catacombs, they’ll be on my turf. Everything’s different underground.”

  Chapter 22

  THE HEAVY DOOR OPENED WITH PONDEROUS SLOWNESS, revealing a jagged tear in the tunnel wall. Fontana felt the familiar rush of psi first. It flowed out of the catacombs, an invisible wave that stirred his already rezzed senses. Next came the acid-green light. He turned off the flashlight. There was no longer any need for it. Down here everything was made of quartz, and the stone glowed the same psi green night and day.

  No one knew when the aliens had left Harmony. Some experts believed they had been gone for at least a thousand years. Others put the date much further back, maybe five or even ten thousand years. There were a few archaeologists who were convinced they had never left at all, just died out. Whatever the case, they had left the lights on.

  He looked into the large rotunda that lay on the other side of the tear in the quartz. Half a dozen vaulted corridors branched off the circular space. He knew that there were an endless number of intersections leading off each of the branches and so on throughout the vast maze.

  Here and there vaulted doorways opened onto strangely shaped chambers. No one knew what purpose the rooms had once served. Some were empty. Others contained the mysterious artifacts and relics that fueled the thriving antiquities trade.

  The architecture of the catacombs was slightly disorienting to the human eye. The proportions never seemed quite right. Compounding the problem was the fact that the energy that emanated from the quartz had a subtle effect on the normal as well as the paranormal senses. His hunter para-rez talents gave him an advantage over people like Sierra, who lacked the ability to resonate with alien psi, but that didn’t mean things ever felt normal down here. That, of course, was one of the big attractions for him.

  Sierra followed him through the doorway. She looked around, her eyes a little haunted. He hated having to put her through this, but there was no alternative.

  Elvis showed no qualms at all. He leaned forward eagerly, fully fluffed again.

  The thick, mag-steel door closed with an ominous, reverberating clang. Sierra jumped a little and looked back over her shoulder.

  “This way,” Fontana said. He moved through the hole-in-the-wall into the tunnel. “I keep a utility sled down here. We’ll use it to get to the nearest exit.”

  “Sounds like a good plan.”

  Something in her voice made him look back at her. She was clearly very tense, but she didn’t look like she was going to faint. Still, he did not like the dread in her eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, trying to project a little reassurance. “I’ve spent a lot of time down here. I know my way around, and I’ve got plenty of amber and a compass. We won’t get lost.”

  “Glad to hear that.”

  He realized now what was wrong with her voice. It was flat, almost a monotone. It was as if she was fighting to keep all emotion out of it. She was hanging on to her self-control with willpower alone, he thought. Good thing she had a lot of it. Dealing with her unusual talent all these years had probably gone a long way toward developing that core of inner strength.

  The sled was right where he had left it. He got behind the wheel. Sierra climbed quickly up onto the bench seat beside him. He rezzed the simple, amber-based motor, one of the few kinds of low-tech mechanical devices that worked underground.

  Sierra gripped the edge of the bench seat very tightly on either side of her thighs and stared straight ahead. Elvis muttered into her ear, as though he, too, was trying to assure her that everything would be okay.

  “How far is the next exit?” she asked in that too-even tone.

  “The nearest official gate operated by the Guild is only about a mile away from the mansion aboveground, but down here it would take us a couple of hours. These sleds are slow. Top speed is just a little faster than the average person can run. The real problem is that there are no direct routes between any of the entrances.”

  “We’re going to be down here for the next two hours?”

  “Take it easy,” he said. “I know another hole-in-the-wall. It’s only about twenty minutes away. It opens under an old, unused warehouse.”

  She nodded once, but she did not relax her grip on the edge of the seat.

  “How’s the claustrophobia?” he asked.

  “Is my face the same color as the tunnel wall?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Take that as a good sign. I should be okay as long as we’re in motion.”

  “I’m not planning to hang around down here for any length of time, believe me.”

  She seemed to relax a little. “I trust you won’t tell any of your Guild pals about my little problem. It’s embarrassing to be married to the boss and not be able to go underground without having a panic attack.”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry. It’ll be our little secret.”

  He punched the coordinates of the hole-in-the-wall into the amber-rez locater. Out of long habit, he also checked his compass. You couldn’t be too careful underground.

  He steered the sled down one of the hallways. The locater flashed. He made another turn.

  “Good heavens, this place really is a maze, isn’t it?” Sierra whispered. “I wonder how the aliens navigated it.”

  “We’ll probably never know, but it must have had something to do with their paranormal natures. They obviously needed a psi-heavy environment in which to live, so they must have had a lot of ways to manipulate that kind of energy.”

  “Compared to them, we humans barely dabble our toes in psychic waters,” she said softly. “We live mostly through our normal senses, not our para-senses.”

  “On the other hand, we’re still here, and they aren’t.”

  “Good point. We must be doing something right.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the explanation,” he said. “The thing humans have going for them is that they are just flat-out stubborn when it comes to stuff like surviving.”

  That got a tiny smile from her. “I believe the experts refer to it as an ability to adapt to changing conditions.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Stubborn. Like I said.”

  The heavy push of raw dissonance energy struck hard an instant later. He eased his f
oot off the sled’s accelerator.

  Sierra reacted immediately, stiffening.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked tightly. “Why are we slowing down?”

  “Ghost coming up. Big one.”

  She gave him an anxious glance. You can de-rez it, I assume?”

  “Let’s review. What do I do for a living?”

  “Oh, right.” She drew a breath. “Sorry. I’m a little tense.”

  The tunnel curved sharply to the left. He slowed the sled to a crawl. The last thing he wanted to do was blunder into a ball of ghost fire.

  But it wasn’t the familiar acid-green of normal ghost light that confronted them. Instead, a hot barrier of tightly seething ultraviolet energy blocked the corridor.

  Two shadowy figures with bulbous heads were just barely visible on the other side of the wide beam.

  “They found us,” Sierra said without inflection.

  He brought the sled to a halt and studied the rippling, pulsing barrier of ultraviolet light. “How the hell can they keep dissonance energy so symmetrical? The stuff is inherently unstable.”

  “It’s so strong that even I can feel it,” Sierra whispered, amazed. “It’s like a psychic storm.”

  He glanced at her and saw that her hair was lifting and stirring in response to the energy in the atmosphere. Elvis’s fur was sticking straight out in a spiky halo. The dust bunny gazed straight ahead at the wall of light, watchful and cautious, just as they were.

  “Oh, jeez,” Sierra whispered. “The beam is moving. They’re coming toward us.”

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said.

  “You can deal with that thing, right?”

  “Maybe. Assuming it responds to dark light the way regular ghost light does.”

  “That is not reassuring, Fontana.”

  “The problem is that even if I can de-rez it, I’d have to pull a hell of a lot of psi to do it.”

  “So?”

  “So, I won’t have much in the way of reserves left afterward to deal with whoever they’ll have waiting for us in the warehouse.”

  “How did they know that we would come this way?” she whispered.

  “Good question. But this isn’t the time to answer it.” He turned the sled around and started back the way they had come. “Sorry, but there’s no choice now. We’re going to have to head for the official Guild gate. It’s a two-hour run. Can you handle it?”

  She reached up to touch Elvis. “I’m a Guild boss’s wife. I can handle anything.”

  “Right answer.”

  She twisted in the seat to look back the way they had come. “The energy beam is picking up speed. The two Riders just climbed into a sled.”

  “Can you tell how many of them there are?”

  “Just the two of them, I think, but I can’t be absolutely certain. It’s like trying to look through a waterfall.”

  He glanced back and saw that she was right. The beam of ultraviolet psi was pursuing them down the corridor at sled speed.

  “We’ve got a lead on them,” he said. “We should be able to maintain it. With luck, we may even be able to lose them in the catacombs.”

  “Can’t they track us with one of those new amber-rez locaters?”

  “Yes, but I know a few tricks that can fool a locater.”

  “I thought those things were supposed to be foolproof.”

  “The Guilds like to keep a few secrets.”

  “Remind me to ask you about that later,” she said.

  “A Guild boss is always happy to grant interviews to members of the press.”

  He was halfway around the curve in the tunnel when his over-rezzed senses picked up another blast of alien psi. The low growl to his right told him that Elvis had sensed it, too.

  “I think we’ve got another ultraviolet ghost coming up ahead,” he said.

  She gripped the edge of the seat. “Ambush.”

  “I take back everything I said about how no one else could possibly know about my private escape route.” He did a quick survey of the curving tunnel in front of them. “A million intersecting hallways down here, but never one nearby when you need one. Probably why they chose this section. Okay, we’ve run out of options. I’m going to have to de-rez one of these monsters.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one up ahead. No point going back the way we just came, because even if we make it through, there’s still the problem of dealing with whoever will be guarding the warehouse exit. By the time we get there, I’ll be only half conscious.”

  “So we go forward.”

  “There’s a shovel in the back. Get it.”

  She looked at him, startled. “Why?”

  “It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a weapon besides the jungle knife under the seat. Better dig that out, too. If we make it past that energy barrier, we’re going to have to face whoever rezzed it.”

  Without another word she turned in the seat and reached back. Elvis scrambled off her shoulder and bounded up onto the dashboard where he had an excellent view.

  There was a clang and a couple of thuds from the rear of the sled. A few seconds later, Sierra turned around. She gripped the long handle of the shovel.

  “If you have to use it, think of it as a lance,” he said. “If it gets snagged on the other vehicle or if someone tries to pull it out of your hand, let it go immediately. Otherwise you’ll be yanked out of the sled.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t forget the knife.”

  Obediently she reached under the seat and came up with the jungle knife. She slid the long, heavy blade out of its sheath and placed it on the dashboard next to Elvis.

  She was pale and tense, but he could literally feel the hot force field of determination that blazed invisibly around her. A strange thrill flared deep inside him. He was torn between the need to protect her and a soul-stirring pride in her courage. His woman, his wife.

  The ultraviolet waterfall was waiting for them when they came out of the curve. He slowed the sled a little and started summoning dark light, as much as he could pull.

  A whirlpool of pulsing midnight swirled into existence in the passageway ahead of the sled. He had intended to try to tackle the monster by attacking its tightly whirling core. That was standard practice for dealing with UDEMs, both the kind that floated at random through the tunnels and those that were human-generated.

  But the energy barrier did not have an obvious core. The intricately churning psi looked as strong and tight at the outer edges as it did at the center. He aimed his flaring vortex of dark energy at the side of the waterfall.

  Dark light slammed into ultraviolet near the point where the energy veil met the tunnel wall. There was an explosive sound not unlike a burst of fireworks.

  “Look,” Sierra said. “You sliced off a piece of the ghost.”

  His first salvo had taken a big bite out of the monster. But the gap disappeared almost instantly. Within seconds the veil repaired itself.

  He could punch through it, but the hole would not last long enough for them to slip through the opening.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Move closer to me, as far away from the edge of the sled as possible.”

  She didn’t ask any questions, just slid across the bench seat until she was only a couple of inches away from him. There was so much psi in the atmosphere now that her hair swirled around her face as though she were swimming in a pool of invisible water. Impatiently she pushed a few tendrils out of her eyes and held the shovel at the ready.

  The moving dam of energy behind them was getting close. He didn’t have to look back to know it was there. He could feel the stuff coming toward them like a tsunami. Time had run out.

  “Looks like we do this now,” he said.

  He pulled more midnight energy, more than he had ever summoned in his life. The waves of darkness pulsed and churned. When they were big enough, he threw everything he had through his amber and divided the night ghost at its core. Two whirlpools of highly volatile n
ight fire appeared directly in front of the sled.

  Instead of using the twin ghosts as battering rams, he positioned one on the front of the sled and the other against the passenger side of the vehicle. He had to maintain exquisite control. The slightest brush would sear their psychic senses. He might make it because he had some natural immunity, but with this much energy involved, he would likely be a candidate for a nice quiet parapsych ward afterward. He doubted that Sierra would survive. As for Elvis, who knew? Dust bunny paraphysiology was a mystery.

  He drove toward the ultraviolet waterfall, aiming to get as close to the tunnel wall as possible.

  Light and colors from across the spectrum flashed and flared as the churning night in front of the sled smashed into the ultraviolet beam. An opening just large enough to accommodate the sled appeared.

  He floored the accelerator. Metal screamed when the left fender of the sled scraped against the tunnel wall. Ultraviolet energy surged, seeking to plug the opening, but the whirlpool of darkness that he had stationed on the right-hand side of the sled held the beam at bay for the seconds they needed to get through.

  And then they were on the other side.

  He saw another sled. A man in a motorcycle helmet, visor raised, sat in the front of the vehicle. He held a small device in both hands. There was no way he could swivel the gadget around, because the action would cause the ultraviolet beam to sweep over his two companions who stood beside the sled.

  “They made it,” one of the Riders yelled. “Turn this thing around and follow them.”

  “Shit, here come the others,” the man inside the sled shouted. Panic lanced through his words. “They can’t see us through that beam they’re generating. They’ll run right over us. We’ll be fried.”

  The second man outside the vehicle ignored him. He jerked a long-bladed knife out of a belt sheath and lunged forward. His trajectory took him straight toward Sierra’s side of the sled. He managed to grab the edge of the door opening, clearly intent on vaulting up into the cab.

  Sierra aimed the shovel at his chest and shoved. The attacker screamed, lost his grip, and fell back onto the floor of the tunnel.

  Fontana checked the locater and took a hard left. The shouts and curses of the men faded quickly into the distance behind them.