The beings casting shadows were in groups. They reminded her of the saw-toothed shark-like creatures on the Lost Ships. Maybe it was them. No time to hang around. She opened a fracture below her feet, fell through.
She was encased in rock. Well, some substance that held her. Maybe it was an error; or maybe it was what this whole world consisted of, every space packed full of dense material. If it wasn’t for the suit she’d be dead a hundred times over. The substance blocked all external sight until she focussed on flickering static that let her see through objects with her X-ray vision.
She told Aegis where she was, what she sensed in nearby spheres, allowing the suit to update its strange globular chart. The map was holding up as a navigation tool. Then Opal opened and entered another fracture.
She was speeding along, stretched across a light beam, other beams racing alongside. Her teeth ached. She could not breathe. And yet it was beautiful, this incredible velocity. There were even colours visible here. She seemed to be riding one of the faster blue light beams, but behind her were yellows, oranges, reds. Perhaps some worlds had more colour than others. Or perhaps she was getting used to this. She could focus on her local environment and it both increased the colour vibrancy, and tuned out the static flickering of the other areas beyond the fractures. And she could reverse it and make her current area less real, the ones beyond more visible. She could control the abstraction.
She also appreciated the control of her navigation, which was more intuitive each time. She no longer needed to move in order to open a fracture, she could do it at almost any point by focussing, seemingly pulling the exit towards herself.
No, that wasn’t right. It was more like the shape of her personal sphere, the one with the unlockable fracture patterns that appeared when she focussed on the correct distance, changed. Instead of being a sphere it would stretch as she unlocked a traversal route and become a long thin pipe which kind of suckered onto the perimeter of the huge world bubble, with the other end connecting to the one she was trying to travel to. A stretchy tube tunnel interconnecting two of these strange worlds, seeming to pull them even closer together (if that was possible, when they already overlapped in a brain-melting juxtaposition) before she seemed to slide along the pipe incredibly fast, reached the new location, then the tube shrank back to a small gelatinous sphere around her own body. Almost like a personal vehicle which folded locations so she could travel without moving, to any world bubble that overlapped the one she currently occupied.
Shame it was so painful.
She did it again. The air unlocked next to her and she was sliced apart as she fell through the temporary pipe.
And her new location surprised her. Not because of its totally alien nature, but the opposite.
She stood in a locker room. Military. Something from her memories, maybe, or formed from them. The room didn’t echo with life and mindless chatter and bravado, though – it had the forlorn stillness of abandonment. Opal ran a finger around a row of communal sinks. Her power suit’s gauntlet came up with a coating of grime. She patted a bunk and a cloud of dust puffed up, that would have made her choke if she hadn’t been breathing her own (increasingly stale) air supply.
She opened a locker. The door creaked. It contained exactly what she’d expect. Personal possessions, clothes, laser depilator, an old-fashioned boot polishing kit. Old photos of people she didn’t recognise were taped to the inside of the door. One of them fluttered down to the floor. She snatched it up. The faded faces of strangers.
This room had no windows, so she opened its only door, which led into a corridor. There were windows here, huge ones lining the far side of the corridor, giving a panoramic view onto a bleak landscape of orange rocks which erupted from the earth bone-like, resembling open femur fractures. On the horizon a storm was coming, deep blackness looming like an approaching wall of battering rain.
The room Opal had left was just one of many doorways on the inner wall facing the windows. It gave the impression of being the edge of an expansive military command centre. And yet, no-one walked these corridors. They felt haunted, but only by silence and memories. The loneliness of emptiness, and function removed. Only her own voice broke the creepy hush, as she described the local environment to Aegis.
“Could it be a real base?” the suit asked. “The military somehow having a way to travel into areas of this Null zone and establish a secret outpost?”
“I don’t think so. I can only go off my sensitivity, but this feels staged, like on Lost Ships. Imperfect copies. It’s as if it’s been set up, to show me something.”
“Or make you feel at home?”
“Can’t rule that out, either. As long as it isn’t a cage built for me.”
“I am not sure any cage could hold you.”
The black wall of rain was getting closer. She watched it, curious, skin feeling sweaty within the suit. Some planets’ geographical systems had amazing storms, whether the world was rocky or liquid or gaseous in nature. Presumably the base could withstand whatever was coming.
It held her attention, though. It was the only self-animated thing she’d seen on this world. The way it spanned the whole horizon and grew as it approached piqued her curiosity. She stepped forward and tried to float smoothly towards it, as she was able to in the other spheres, but this place – even if a fictional construct – obeyed laws she was used to. She clunked off the window, a physical barrier.
“Feel kinda daft now,” she said, explaining her humbling impact to the suit.
“Another of our little secrets,” said Aegis.
Opal didn’t give up, though. Obstacles could often be traversed. Defences got around. You just had to be a little bit tricksy.
She transferred her attention to the different layers of reality she could perceive at will. Some of them were beyond the suit, beyond the window. She tried to keep to that level of perception and move again, or rather, imagine moving at that level.
And it worked.
She floated on the other side of the window, above the amber rocks of this alien planet. The cold wind buffeted through her, and she welcomed it now she was used to it, since it seemed to be connected to locomotion as well as inter-sphere transport. It gusted again, bringing iciness and making the outlines of the different layers of transparency and reality glow.
She turned in the air and looked back at the window, the suit on the other side pressed up against glass, her body trapped within, while she floated free of all prisons. This was a memory to savour.
The physical laws here could obviously be overridden by extending her mind. Time to move. Her consciousness shot out over the orange jumble of igneous formations, which blurred below her. It was like racing towards a wall, knowing you were going to smash into it, feeling that same trepidation of mortality as she took in its sheer size.
Then she realised it wasn’t the calming patter of rain it had looked like from a distance. It wasn’t the natural power of a storm. It was something else. A tsunami of abyssal dark that reached forward and sucked colour and heat out of what it advanced towards, decaying it ready to be swallowed, absorbed. Cracks spread where it came into contact with the ground, earth and rock seeming to fragment and shatter into tiny pieces which crumbled into the void – sucked in, almost – and they were gone. And the wall of fragmenting darkness had already rushed forward another hundred metres, destroying the world at an unbelievable pace.
As it neared, she was overwhelmed by a growing stink of burning rubber, so harsh in the back of her throat that her eyes watered, a chemical invasion like a slickness spreading across her body as well as down her breathing tubes, and it got more terrifyingly pungent as this thing with a size beyond comprehension approached. She was an insignificant speck. And even though she was floating, outside of her body, some mortal instinct warned her that being swallowed would be fatal to her, whether in her body or not.
She changed direction to retreat from this all-consuming behemoth, and rushed to open a fracture wa
rp. But nothing happened. She rotated as she flew, and looked at the body she raced towards: herself, still in its armoured suit, looking out of the window onto the desolate landscape. Opal could see the glow of the small bubble around it, that personal sphere with the fracture-passage pattern that could be unlocked.
She couldn’t escape unless she got back to it.
The disassembling force behind her was catching up, it moved unbelievably fast. There would not be time to open a fracture once she returned to her flesh.
Extension. Everything here was elastic to mind. Even as she flew over the rocky landscape she tried to control her body too, an echo of thoughts here awakening there, like quantum calculation in two places simultaneously.
Ignore the burning rubber stench, the greasy feeling rippling across her skin like a spreading violation, and focus on her escape.
Her body jerked to attention and began to open a fracture in the sphere that surrounded it. Pieces separated, turned, the glass sliding apart to reveal the doorway that would only exist for moments, something between the atoms of the zone, never really there at all, so it would leave no trace when it closed. She flew into her body just as it was pulled through the excruciating fracture, a shockwave of annihilation at her back, and then it closed, the razor edges she’d passed through snapping shut like jaws, and she was gone.
Explaining
< 6 >
THE STINK FADED AS she coughed out the badness, but no blackness erupted from her lungs, just air. Even as she glanced around this new location, her eyes watered as the burning tar-like smell that had stung her nose and throat began to fade. Her skin still rippled with revulsion at the slimy sensations that had spread along the surface.
But she was alive. And she knew danger existed in these places.
After that digression she now felt like she was back on track, near the goal she’d been approaching all along: a purple-tinted world whose shuttered outlines glowed more calmly and revealed geometric landscapes that looked both artificial and aesthetically pleasing.
Once she’d recovered enough she realised that what had seemed like human-sized conical rocks were actually planetoid-sized vast constructions, but seen from far away. Habitats, perhaps, or technology. Beyond the horizon more spherical worlds overlapped, but here they almost looked like huge planets in an overcrowded solar system.
Her head hurt with the dizzying sense of pulling inside her brain. Or that could be the lack of oxygen – the suit kept warning her. It was transferring all remaining resources to life support, maintaining her temperature and oxygen levels.
“The tanks are nearly out, but I can inject oxygenated particles straight into your bloodstream from the emergency first aid supplies, normally used for when airways are damaged or blocked. It will keep you alive for a while longer but you will feel like you are suffocating, because your autonomous reflexes will still be trying to suck oxygen into your lungs. It can be ... unpleasant.”
“Last resort,” said Opal. “And I might need that backup for someone else.”
“Understood. I will do my best. I’m deconstructing any supplies that will release oxygen as a by-product, but it is slow.”
Opal tried to keep herself calm and level. It would decrease her heart rate and therefore reduce oxygen burning. She had to last. And although she felt like she’d reached the point that was calling her, who knew how long this would take, or even if there was any hope of finding Clarissa?
This could be a dead end in many ways. So be it. If her instincts had been wrong all along then there wasn’t much to go back to anyway. Might as well die on the plain of giant violet monoliths as anywhere else.
She rotated on the spot. As with the weird military base, gravity existed here, so her feet were on the rough and sandy ground. Diffuse lighting spread from above. It could be suns, could be something else. She noted that none of the places she’d visited through the fractures had a clear night or daytime sky which would have definitively proved she was on a planet in a solar system somewhere. The nature of these biomes hadn’t been determined yet.
In each direction the huge monoliths loomed up through the visible layers of atmosphere. The shapes varied, the land altitudes varied, the views varied, but none of the directions told her where to go. It might take hours to reach some of those shapes.
She adjusted her concentration, focussing more on this world than the ones beyond. The static flickering outlines faded away; colour seemed to bloom here in its place, warm reds and purples, like a world at sunset.
Insistent tugging jabbed in her brain again. She tried to follow the source, and it directed her gaze towards a shifting shape in the distance. It was drifting closer, like the shadow of a cloud, except nothing was visible above.
As it got nearer she realised it was not a shadow cast by something, but was actually changing textures in the ground, like a patch of quicksand that accelerated towards her.
Despite the strangeness of this encroaching stain on the land, she felt no fear. Maybe because she’d faced down more threatening appearances than this. Maybe because low oxygen levels were making her light-headed. Either way, she was done with running. She told the suit what she could see, then she faced the shifting amethyst sands, legs apart, hands on armoured hips.
The morphing patch of ground stopped about ten metres away from her. Then it spread, moving laterally in a circular direction, always at the same distance from the point where she stood. The two ends joined up, making a ring in the earth around her, like a moat.
Or as if she was the centre of a bullseye target. She glanced up at the blue-violet sky, in case something was falling from above, but she saw only a flickering haze. When she looked down the circular shape was shifting, taking on other geometric shapes and curves, sometimes sending out offshoots as if for emphasis, then they retracted back in and the ring resumed a calmer appearance.
She knelt and lowered her head, to try and work out what was happening with the ground. It was as if the shape could turn ground to malleable liquid at will, yet when it receded, the ground was exactly as it had appeared before. Not something she wanted to put her hand into as an experiment.
“If you’re trying to communicate with me, I don’t get it,” she said, using the loudspeaker for the first time since the Lost Ship had brought her here. Strangely, she felt better on hearing her voice being broadcast to the world beyond. “And time’s real short, so don’t bother teaching me an alphabet if there’s any way to shortcut it.”
<
The voice appeared mostly in her head, as it had with the Navigot. She wasn’t surprised any more when alien beings understood her language.
As the voice spoke, the ring around her brightened – so much that she couldn’t look at it, though she was vaguely aware of grotesque wiry shapes that seemed to spear out of the earth and jerk in jagged motions as the words formed in her mind. Perhaps the bright light was to hide the shapes beyond. Maybe it was just a side effect. The shapes made her uneasy, leaving an after-impression of insectile limbs, or the organic interface that had punctured the base of her skull within the first Lost Ship.
Sure, the brightness hid something, but maybe that obfuscation was a kindness, too.
Now that the moment had arrived, there were a few ways she could take the confrontation. But as Opal was sorting out her thoughts, Aegis spoke in her ear.
“Opal, this is important: I heard them speak as well! And I have some visual input of the local area. It is the first clear sense data I’ve had since we arrived.”
Opal silently mouthed, “Good, listen in, help me out if you see fit.” The suit’s internal cameras would let it lip-read with no problems. A green thumbs-up symbol flashed on the display.
At least she had decided on a starting point. Out loud she said, “I think you know why I’m here.”
<
“Did you take my sister?” Opal’s voice was steely cold.
<
“Did you take my sister?” Opal repeated.
<
Opal clenched her fist, then unclenched it. Slow, so as not to attract attention. “I’m trying not to get angry here, and believe me, that’s taking some effort. But if you’re the ones that took her, then there are words that need to be had.”
<
“We can get to that. Right now I just want her back. And I’ll do whatever it takes to rescue her.”
<
The mauve sand near Opal’s feet shifted, re-formed, and small geometric shapes rose from it. They didn’t seem threatening. They weren’t words, or images, or ... ah, she saw it now. It was a map of some kind, and the shapes represented the nearest of the giant geometric structures, as seen from above. Opal glanced around, placed herself, and when she looked down at the map she realised she was represented by a small humanoid figure, exactly where she’d expected. Everything was made out of sand, but solidified into compacted shapes, apart from one element that moved, shifted. On the map it was approaching her from one of the purple geometric towers, or whatever they were. Another humanoid shape.
They’d created an updating progress display in the sand.
<
An innocent insistence on motivations? Or bluffing at naivety? The lack of tonality to its speech meant there weren’t many clues Opal could use to take its measure.
Chasing Solace Page 27