Lair

by Carl Stubblefield

  This had always sparked Gus’ rebellious streak and resistance. It made him want to stay just as he was. “They accept me for who I am, not who you want me to be,” Gus shouted to the empty air. Somehow Nick had motivated Gus without the shame and cajoling. He was tough at times too, but he managed to do it in a way that Gus could totally relate with, and realize and accept his faults.

  Not wanting to be away from Nick when the process finally finished, Gus began working on his bag of holding again. He detached his chest plate from his armor and made a serviceable cushion on the hard metal. With his mind fresh, the process of ether weaving was easier this time around. He managed to complete the same weave that had taken him two hours in only about fifteen minutes. A chime sounded, but he barely noticed as time sank away. Gus got into a rhythm and became engrossed in the task. The pressure and worry from the siege faded as he became single-minded in his task.

  There was definitely a pattern involved, and it was becoming more intuitive where he had to place his fingers to thread the ether, when to hold and tighten. The tightening step would pull the tiny knots together like beads on a string before the ether threads pulled tight together and interlocked the individual knots. This also condensed the weave incredibly, drastically reducing the finished length of the rim.

  The cycle would continue again, forming another length of looser ties and knots, only tightening after reaching the fifth securing knot.

  Was that another chime? No matter.

  After reaching a length of three feet, he turned his attention to combining the ends together. Fortunately, the end of the weave contained a similar set of picots, or loops, and Gus threaded the last ends of ether through these. Before securing the edges of the rim, Gus pushed to enlarge the internal size of the bag until he felt a strong pushback. Maintaining pressure to keep the bag inflated, he pulled the knots tight.

  Looking at the finished product, it resembled a thin loop of black shoelace. Usually, he could not visualize ether at all without the aid of his display, but perhaps due to its condensed nature it was brought into the visible spectrum.

  Gus could see that the fifth knots had formed a tiny loop in the chain where the pocket dimension could be attached to a standard bag with a tiny ether knot. It appeared that he made a circle a foot in diameter. Not super large, but it could fit things like the sensors and turrets inside.

  Gus reached inside and could put his arm inside up to the shoulder and he pressed against a rubbery stretchy wall on the interior. It was unsettling to see him ‘missing’ his arm as if he were an amputee. Waving it in front of him and even trying to touch his face, he sensed nothing as the hand failed to contact him as he moved it in the other dimension. He thought it would feel cold inside, but it felt the same as the ambient temperature. Remembering Nick’s warning about how living tissues behaved in the pocket dimension, he quickly pulled his arm out and inspected it, but it appeared to be no worse for the wear.

  Gus got to his feet and he was achy all over.

  How long have I been doing this? His knees popped and he shook his legs to get the circulation back. He did a couple more stretches to loosen up his upper body; he must have been hunched over for a really long time. He looked and saw no changes to the sphere of hybrid Nth on the conveyor belt. Looking at his watch, it was… 1:23 AM?! He had been working at it for hours, and did not notice at all. He didn’t know how he hadn’t run out of MP during the process, but he must have improved to the point that MP expenditure was less than his natural regeneration rate. And he didn’t feel tired at all, besides being sore and super hungry. He felt uneasy without the ability to ask Nick for instant status updates on what the zombies were doing. His minimap appeared to be the same, and he couldn’t keep running to main control to check the monitors constantly.

  Gus wandered into the cafeteria, and the waiter robot saw him and waved him to his usual table.

  “Can the chef make food that alters certain stats that I would like boosted?” The robot nodded in the affirmative. Gus considered that he would try to make another bag while he waited and wondered if it would be more beneficial to boost agility to make the weaving a bit easier or intelligence for more skill stamina. He settled on boosting agility.

  This meal was some small grilled meat that tasted vaguely like pork. It was delicious and Gus told himself not to think too much about where the meat came from. This meal gave a three point bonus to agility. As he ate, he pondered why he could still get stat increases, if the meal was engineered to react with his Nth. He still had access to his abilities and skills. The only explanation seemed to be that his Nth must be functional, but the NIC aspect was offline.

  As he headed back to the Foundry, Gus reviewed his stats and logs. Ether Weaving had leveled to five, dropping MP costs by sixty percent, and Ether Warping to two, which reduced its MP cost fifteen percent. That netted him 700 XP and 1400 FP.

  Gus felt even more awake after the meal, so he headed back to the Foundry again to make another bag. He was soon in the zone and worked continuously until movement caught his attention from the corner of his eye. Gus was surprised at his progress; the agility boosts had really made a difference! He once again expanded the inside of the bag as much as he could and tied off the ends. An idea began to form in his mind as he looked at the completed rim, a different size than he had initially been intending, but it might just work. He’d have to check out the Foundry controls and queue up some more items.

  The Nth-ball that had started at the size of a Bocce ball, began to expand to the size of a volleyball. Gus sat in anticipation of something else happening, but the ball sat there again for five minutes. It felt like at least a half an hour, but checking his watch, Gus noticed that time had barely passed at all. There was no sound or sign that anything was happening, which made the wait that much worse.

  Gus decided he had to do something or he would go insane. He went back to the control room and tried to distract himself looking through the different types of traps and configurations. He could see the ball from where he sat, and every time he looked he saw no change.

  There were drones of different types, other classes of turrets, and various traps that could be launched. The higher-grade Tier 2 traps were grayed out. He could read their description though, and these traps seemed to require more extensive installation.

  Since the drones and turrets used none of the available energy, he queued everything he needed. He hoped Nick would just come back online already and be ok. He couldn’t go into the upcoming battle alone. This was taking entirely too long; he itched to put some of his plans into effect, but he needed Nick.

  “Hurry up!” he screamed, his voice echoing impotently among the large machines of the Foundry.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Glitter Freeze

  Day 10 4:22 AM

  0:18:48 remaining

  “Guuuuus…” a voice gasped in his head. It sounded like it came from someone who had crawled through the desert, or a dead man’s last gasp.

  “Nick!” Gus flew out of his seat and made it to the conveyor belt. Grabbing the handrails, he vaulted down the stairways leading to the conveyors where the hybrid Nth were coming to life. The ball fluttered and blinked, winking in and out of activity, each time a different shape. It hurt Gus’ eyes to look directly at it, giving him an instant headache and a sense of wrongness.

  No, that wasn’t the right word, it was just so alien that his mind refused to wrap itself around what it was seeing. Impossible optical illusion shapes formed, but in three dimensions. No! Colors and hues, spatial anomalies bent back on themselves in ways that had not been seen before. No! No! No! His mind recoiled. He couldn’t pull his eyes away though, and slowly, his mind made it past the turbulence like a raft passing the rapids, and everything calmed and smoothed again. The ball dissolved and fell to the tray like grains of sand.

  “Did you miss me?” Nick said, from a bald green head that formed from the sand-like particles pushing itself out of the tray and… w
inking? The tiny head gave a grin and winked. Gus was startled enough he fell flat and barely avoided flipping over the handrails around the gangplank into the machinery below.

  “I guess not…” the little head said.

  “Nick, is that really you?” Gus asked. In response, the iridium-colored dust fluttered out to create an outline of a human form, and the hue changed to the appearance of purple glitter… It looked like the invisible man after a night at the strip club.

  “In the flesh. In the flakes? That’s probably more accurate. To calm your fears, the process was a success! And I have a newfound appreciation of what humans and all the other species experienced when they became Nth-assisted. I am undergoing a similar process. With different tabs and gauges much like you have. None of it really applies to you particularly, but it is strange to be on the other side of the process.”

  “So what can you do?” Gus asked.

  “I’m not really sure yet, there isn’t exactly a manual, and I can communicate with the Kroutonium but it is… odd. I can direct a question toward it, and I get what appears to be an unrelated image, vibration, or shade of color. It will take some time to connect and communicate. This has never been done before, and I get no responses to my queries to the quantum server. I know you were interested in armor, and that seems to be something it is familiar with, having acted in this capacity before. I can almost say it is eager to try out some new things. I can also see that it is talking to your spear. Visible streams of intermittent energy are being sent back and forth, and I know intuitively that they are data packs, but I cannot translate the pulses.”

  “So you’re my new sidekick, huh?”

  “Not so much. This form is too insubstantial to be a true functional homunculus, but there is enough to form a triple-ply armor, so we’ll start with that for now. I vastly underestimated the amount needed to form a functional Nth body, so this will have to do. You’ll need a lot more metal if you want to make that a reality. I’ll have my hands full trying to work out communication for the foreseeable future, especially how they can be influenced to function,” Nick murmured, obviously fascinated by the turn of events.

  “Good, because I don’t think we’re going to have the luxury of time. When you were gone, the volcano started acting up and we are slowly losing power. We have less than a day, so we have to go as soon as we can. I didn’t let the time go to waste though, I did manage to make a large bag of holding,” Gus said, proud of himself.

  “How big…” Nick said hesitantly.

  “Oh, it’s huge, you would be proud of me. It’s all part of my plan to clean up these zombies.”

  “Ok, but you should know what happens if a large enough bag gets turned inside out…”

  Gus gulped, waiting for the bomb to drop.

  “…you create a singularity, Gus. A frelling black hole! Don’t go screwing around without guidance again! And I’m sure you didn’t store it in any particular way to avoid it getting knotted and wound around itself?”

  This reunion wasn’t going exactly how Gus would have liked. “Well, come and see it and we’ll fix it. From what I could tell, nothing bad has happened yet, right?”

  The glittery figure did a facepalm and motioned an arm to indicate ‘lead the way.’

  Chapter Forty

  Below the Surface

  Methiochos was frustrated that his minions could do nothing to access the manor now that they had cleared away the opposition. The observers couldn’t manage any voice commands, having lost significant amounts of coordination in their conversion. He had even tried having the Mantids squeeze them to see if they could force out enough of a command code to open the manor but the result was as intelligible as a whoopee cushion.

  Methiochos could speak, having retained much more of his humanity. He also remembered the key phrases that would activate higher command functions. Saying them out loud, his gravelly voice echoed off the empty chamber. Lead from the front. He would have to go himself once he knew what he needed. It would take just one more cycle, he could feel that, the answers were close. It would be nice to leave this dark prison.

  Methiochos sunk his tendrils in the magma for what he believed was the last time. He was almost to full strength. The pain that came after absorbing too much energy would be endured. After he was complete, it would be his time to act.

  45 years ago…

  Using his power, Methiochos widened and molded the bone of his left arm into a large plate shield and crawled into the airway, he hardened it into cortical bone, retracting the blood vessels as the hard bone solidified. It wouldn’t do to get a bleeding debuff if something hit the shield. He tried to access the ship’s computer on his communicator but all he received was a buffering icon. Dammit! Without that he couldn’t check on ship status or monitor crew locations. If you want to get anything done, you have to do it yourself!

  His common sense screamed that progressing into the airshaft was the most stupid thing he could do, but he pushed those concerns away, attributing them to watching too many horror movies in his youth. Besides, one must lead from the front.

  Dust and clumps of material that could have been the cousins of dryer lint had built up in the corners of the square ducting. Fortunately, the dust showed a clear path for whatever had crawled through here. Methiochos followed the trail in an army-crawl.

  A hiss of static and feedback hit his ear. “Do you read me?” a voice buzzed.

  “I hear you,” he responded, turning down the sensitivity on his cochlear communicator.

  “It appears that Dara was last logged in to the infirmary before she went back to her room. I am sending a squad to investigate, and will meet them there. Holmes out.”

  After a couple more turns, the access panel had burst outward, the wire mesh forming a flower bloom shape. Methiochos climbed out of the walkway, only having a five-foot drop to the floor of the darkened room. From the scant light available, he could tell that this was the general crew barracks. A flash of shifting shadows caught his attention as someone or something scuttled in front of the band of light leaking under the door. A bunk next to him began to shake as the occupant wriggled and writhed.

  Pulling his multitool off his belt and flicking on the flashlight mode, he saw a pallid face of a crewman with a black scratch across one cheek. His eyes were bloodshot and his body vibrated, back arching while his feet kicked back and forth like he was riding a bicycle. His face looked ashen and devoid of expression despite the turmoil his body was enduring.

  He heard another scratchy-scratching in the distance and tried to illuminate it with his flashlight. All he succeeded in doing was more fully disclosing his own location. Swinging the light around, he saw that others that were resting had similar scratches on their faces and necks, though they were totally inert.

  A screeching noise ripped through the relative quiet of the barrack, as one of the bunks was moved, just the right timbre to give Methiochos a shiver. He backed up toward the lights near the entrance, keeping his own light fanning in a swath in front of him. More sounds and rustling were emanating from the dark. As he reached the bank of switches, he flipped them on with his non-shield forearm.

  The harsh white LED overhead lights came on; Methiochos saw multiple figures moving toward him. Some looked like they were sleepwalking, others poised nimbly on the bedposts of the bunk beds. As he fiddled with the door, one of the crew jumped off a bedpost with his blackened fingernails extended, making scratching and clawing motions.

  Methiochos barely covered himself in time with his bone shield and returned the attack with a shield bash to the face. The man tripped backward, three fingernails ripped out and still embedded in the bone.

  Methiochos retreated out of the barracks doors and hit the control scan pad by the door. “Lock door.” The panel outline shifted to red as people, or things that had been people, began to bang and slap against the locked door. Tilting his arm to look at the fingernails embedded in his forearm, he made his way to the infirmary.

/>   Activating his communicator, Methiochos called his security team and advised them of the situation. To cordon off the barracks and block any air ducts in case more of the affected crew were in there.

  Methiochos dropped to a knee as he was hit by a headache. It felt like part of his consciousness was being shorn away, attempting to pull him out of the memory. He had to get to the bottom of this. Bracing himself, the feeling passed after a tense minute. He shook his head to clear it, then he continued to the infirmary.

  His soldiers were there in full tactical gear, surveying the scene outside the infirmary. Holmes reported on what they had found. There had been no changes since they had arrived. The area appeared abandoned, and they had not seen anyone in the halls or surrounding area, which in and of itself was odd.

  Methiochos peered into the darkened infirmary. A light fixture had been partially ripped off the ceiling and released occasional sparks as it swung above the chaos, flickering intermittently. Beds had been upturned and bedding torn. Equipment had been knocked to the ground, some spilling their electronic guts onto the floor. Besides the flickering light swinging back and forth, there was no other illumination. It must be on backup power; likely a breaker had tripped. The computers were located at the back of the room, and he needed to get there to check the logs. Fortunately, the breaker panel was right next to the computer banks.

  Methiochos stepped into the room, surprised to find the ground wet. Turning on the flashlight of his multitool yet again, he stepped into the room. He lightly kicked an IV stand to move it to the side and shuffled around the debris. It was a shock to see something as clean and austere as the infirmary had devolved to such chaos. He had to highstep over a side-rail to a patient bed that had been bent into an omega shape.