by Gary Gibson
‘You’re saying they had something to do with it?’ Dutch demanded, curious now despite herself. ‘Strugatsky and Wu?’
‘Sure,’ said Elektron, his voice stiff with pain. ‘The two of them were partners once, everybody knows that. They had the contract to run the experimental program back when they were still partners. I saw it all, along with the data about the map.’ He stared wild-eyed at Nat. ‘He’ll confirm it all. Just ask him!’
‘You said something about a door,’ said Dutch.
‘Not like a regular door,’ said Elektron. ‘The Rift is more like a…a singularity, a point where different parallel realities merge. Like a crossroads, except it doesn’t have four paths—it has millions.’ The crazed gleam in his eyes intensified. ‘The Kaiju come through that door from some other place. But we can go through the other way, Dutch. And not just to where the Kaiju come from—to anywhere we want.’
She shook her head, feeling something almost akin to admiration. ‘You must be one crazy motherfucker to come up with a story like that, Elektron.’
‘Listen to me!’ Elektron rasped. ‘Ask Nat. He knows!’
‘Sounds like the d-field fried his brain,’ suggested Nat.
‘Why would Nat want to keep all this back from me, even assuming one dumbass word of it isn’t some random shit you made up?’ she asked Elektron.
‘Because the d-field is getting bigger. The blockade’s been measuring its fluctuations for years, and before long it’ll spread beyond the island. Ten, twenty, a hundred years from now it could end up swallowing the whole damn world.’
‘Let’s pretend I believe one word of this,’ said Dutch. ‘Then how could anyone know there’s a way through the Rift without actually going through it?’
‘Some of those scientists Strugatsky sent survived long enough to do exactly that—crossed over, according to that one guy who didn’t go with them.’
‘The one who got rescued but died?’
Elektron nodded.
‘He knows the more you let him talk, the longer he lives,’ said Nat. ‘We’re wasting time.’
‘Take me with you,’ Elektron pleaded, all but ignoring Nat now. ‘You’ll see it’s true. I’ll go through the Rift and never come back, I swear. That’s been my plan all along—I could give a rat’s ass about Muto or the money!’
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said Dutch, slugging Elektron in the head with the butt of the gun. He slumped back against the crash-barrier, his eyes rolling up in his skull. Dutch crumpled up the death notice and threw it down beside him.
‘We should check the Coupé,’ said Nat. ‘See if she still runs.’
Dutch pointed the Beretta at him. ‘You can stay where the hell you are until I decide whether you get to ride with me or not.’
He had the good sense not to say anything more as she stalked back over to the Coupé. The right rear panel was crushed, and the window on that same side cracked and starred. The tyres still looked good, though. She raised the hood and looked inside.
* * *
It didn’t take long for Dutch to work out that a coolant hose had cracked. Given how much worse things could have been, they’d been lucky—very, very lucky.
At first she thought she could trim off the cracked part of the hose and stretch what remained to fit the gasket. It soon became clear that wasn’t going to work. She went hunting through some of the nearby wrecks until she found one that fit. Before long she had everything back in place and checked the engine by letting it run for a while. The Coupé looked like she’d been through a war, but as long as the engine ran, little else mattered.
‘We’re going,’ she announced over her shoulder, closing the hood.
Nat came over and stood by the passenger door as if waiting for permission. ‘So are we…?’
‘Get in,’ she said. ‘But don’t expect me to trust you.’
‘Right.’ He glanced at Elektron, now stirring back to life. ‘What about him?’
Dutch thought for a minute, took a single bullet and a pistol from one of the racks, and carried them over to Elektron’s Peterbilt semi.
First, she stripped Elektron’s ride of its used film canisters, carrying them over to the Coupé and dumping them in the boot with all the rest. Then she climbed inside the semi-truck’s cabin, selecting a snub-nosed rifle from Elektron’s weapons racks that turned out to be just about the right length to wedge the gas pedal flat against the floor. She turned on the ignition and jumped back down onto the road just as the truck started to roll forward.
By the time she’d picked herself back up, the truck had burst through the road-side crash barrier, sailing off down the side of the cliff. It made a lot of noise on the way down.
She turned to see Elektron had managed to drag himself upright, one hand holding onto the crash barrier. He stared at the space where his vehicle had been, his eyes full of hatred. ‘You…’ he seemed to be unable to find the right words. ‘You…fucking…’
‘Sorry, Doc,’ she said, stepping closer to him and pushing the single bullet into his hand. ‘Couldn’t take a chance on you coming after us again.’
He stared down at the bullet. ‘What the fuck is this for?’
Dutch threw the pistol she’d selected back the way she’d come, and it slid to a halt a few metres short of the crash-barrier. ‘One bullet, one gun,’ she said, turning back to Elektron. ‘If you’re lucky, you’ll get to the next rendezvous on foot and be able to fire off a distress beacon. If you’re not lucky, something’ll eat you first.’
Elektron’s face flushed white to red to white again. ‘What the hell do I do with one bullet?’
‘Better than none.’ She shrugged. ‘Or you could shoot yourself. Either way, I don’t care.’
She got back inside the Coupé and motioned for Nat to join her. She glanced back at Elektron and saw him stumbling towards the pistol, then falling to the tarmac, his face stricken with horror. The last thing she saw before they turned the next corner was Elektron crawling towards the pistol.
‘Dutch—’ Nat started to say.
‘Shut up,’ she said, her voice thick with fury. ‘I’ve met some of the worst people in the world in jail, and right now I’d rather have their company than yours. So keep the fuck quiet and be glad you’re not fighting over that bullet with that asshole.’
He pointed up. ‘I only meant to say that Kaiju is on the way back.’
Dutch pulled the Coupé over to one side, keeping them hidden beneath some overhanging trees. The Kaiju’s shadow swept over them and kept on going, headed back to where they’d been seconds before. Dutch heard a single shot, followed by a terrified shriek, and then silence.
To The Rift
They didn’t talk for a while after that.
They reached the outskirts of Shinchiku, a medium-sized metropolis on Teijouan’s north-west coast as empty and ruined as any other on the island. Nat kept himself busy with the maps, not looking up until they coasted to a halt midway down a broad avenue.
He glanced sideways at her with a frown. ‘Why’d you stop?’
‘Up there.’ Dutch pointed at the flat roof of a building that, according to a faded sign in English and Chinese, had been a bank. A car was balanced precariously on the roof, its front wheels sticking out over the street as if something had picked it up and discarded it there. Which, she suspected, was precisely what had occurred.
‘Looks familiar,’ said Nat. ‘Hard to be sure, without seeing more than the undercarriage…’
Dutch reached into the back and searched around until her hand closed around a pair of binoculars. She raised them to her eyes and peered upwards, feeling a thrill of recognition when she saw the armoured wheels attached to the vehicle.
She dropped the binoculars back down. ‘That’s Lucifer Black’s car.’
‘Holy…’ Nat cracked his door open and leaned out, shading his eyes and peering upwards. ‘You’re right.’
Dutch snagged the Polaroid camera from under the dashboard and got out of
the car. She took a quick snap of the wreck, from below and waited for the picture to develop. ‘We should go up there,’ she said.
Nat, who had stepped closer to the building, turned to look at her. ‘Both of us?’
‘This is the same asshole got you nearly trampled by Long Tall Sally,’ she reminded him. Not to mention there’s no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight. ‘Wouldn’t you rather make sure the son of a bitch is dead?’
He stared back up at the wreck. ‘Now that you put it that way…’
She smiled to herself as she followed him over.
* * *
The building had been knocked about hard enough that at first Dutch was far from sure they’d ever find a way up to the roof, but they struck lucky, finding a stairwell in the rear that was still intact. At the top they found a door held shut by an ancient and badly rusted padlock that shattered after Nat gave it three hard kicks, coming apart in a cloud of orange dust. They made their way outside onto the roof and saw Lucifer Black’s vehicle sitting next to a concrete ventilation shaft, its rear wheels hanging out over the street below.
‘I’m amazed it took this long for his luck to run out,’ said Dutch. She thought for a moment. ‘Or hers.’
Nat’s eyes widened. ‘You think there’s a chance he’s still alive in there?’
She gave him a look.
‘Or her,’ he said, rolling his eyes.
‘I guess we’re about to find out,’ she said, handing him the Polaroid and stepping closer.
She cracked a door open and looked inside, careful not to put her weight on the car in case the pressure sent it sliding the rest of the way off the edge of the roof.
At first, Dutch couldn’t make sense of anything inside Black’s car. Instead of Dietrich Sokoloff or anyone else, all she could see was a dense tangle of goofy-looking electronics that filled almost the entirety of the stripped-out interior, most of it wrapped around a central mass about two metres in length and suspended in the centre of the car by dozens of steel cables. Black’s car had no seats, nor could she see a dashboard.
Nat peered inside from just behind her shoulder. ‘Damn—maybe they did run the thing by remote-control.’
Dutch laughed sourly. ‘That’s impossible, and you—’ she stopped mid-sentence, staring at the twisted wires and circuitry.
‘All right,’ said Nat, stepping back again, ‘not by remote-control, maybe. But there’s nothing advanced in there—it’s all tube valves and the like. The kind of primitive electronics that are the least likely to be affected by the d-field.’
She saw that he was right. ‘You’d have to stick close to the periphery, though,’ she noted. The more she looked at the elongated bundle suspended by wires, the more it resolved into something else…
A suit. Now that she could see it, under the dense tangle of wires and tubes, it was obvious. The suit contained a person. Sokoloff?
Or someone else?
She reached in past a tangle of wires and primitive circuitry and touched the suit. Judging by the smell alone, whoever—or whatever—was inside it was very dead. The face lay behind a mask with tubes protruding from the mouth and nose. She gingerly peeled back a layer of dark cloth near the neck and saw mottled, pale flesh with wires embedded into it. A layer of stubble identified Black’s gender, but it was the wrong colour to be Sokoloff.
She stepped back from the car, feeling sick. ‘He’s a cyborg or something.’
‘A what?’
‘Part machine, part human,’ she told Nat. ‘Black isn’t the car’s driver—he is the car. That’s why no one ever saw him, except maybe Sokoloff or whoever…built him.’
Nat shook his head. ‘Damnedest thing.’ He took a step back and started taking pictures with the Polaroid, while Dutch carefully retrieved the shot footage from Black’s rear-mounted camera.
* * *
They left Shinchiku behind and soon reached the first rendezvous point, next to a sewage plant. The other surviving racers had untangled the crates from their parachutes and left them with only slim pickings. Dutch tried not to think how far ahead they must be by now.
They topped up the Coupé’s engine and loaded spare canisters of gas and water into the boot. Then Dutch dug out their flare gun and sent a green star shooting high into the air so the world would know they’d reached the first checkpoint.
Using a flare gun on Teijouan, however, carried its own special risks.
They’d got the engine started when a demented roar rolled across the landscape surrounding the sewage plant. They took off with a shriek and got moving fast before whatever they’d heard came after them.
‘How long before we turn inland?’ asked Dutch.
‘The second turnoff ahead. It leads to a village fifty kilometres inland from here.’
Fifty kilometres: further into the d-field than anyone had ever been before. Or almost anyone, Dutch reminded herself.
They sped past a petrochemical complex and towards a forest spread across sloping terrain. Something huge moved through the trees at about two o’clock.
Moving to intercept them.
A Screecher burst out of the trees and into the middle of the highway, its multiple heads twisting on long, snakelike necks attached to a stumpy four-legged body. Dutch knew from experience that the creatures were half-blind in daylight, but they more than made up for it with their hearing. The Screecher’s heads twisted around as it tried to zero in on their location by the sound of their engine.
‘It’s between us and that turnoff,’ Dutch shouted.
‘Take the next right,’ said Nat. ‘I think I can plot another detour.’
She swung the wheel, the car skidding and bouncing on the uneven road surface, and they passed between low, rusty shacks that soon gave way to the remains of a small settlement, the road cracked and overgrown with weeds.
The Screecher came lumbering after them, howling its anger. She glanced in a mirror in time to see one side of an apartment block collapse into dust and rubble as the Kaiju crashed straight through it.
‘Second left,’ said Nat. ‘That’ll get us back to where we were going.’
The road opened up, the shacks replaced by tall office and residential buildings; they were back in Shinjuku’s northernmost suburbs. Before Dutch could make the turn, one of the biggest Viper-Tails she’d ever seen in her life came careening around a corner up ahead and straight towards them, probably attracted by all the noise. It reared up on its hind legs, its head level with the roof of a neighbouring office block.
Dutch slammed the Coupé to a halt. ‘Nat, I think we’re—’
Trapped, she’d meant to say: but as she spoke, she caught sight of a shopping mall occupying the ground floor of the building to their immediate left. She could just about make out daylight on the other side of the building through its shattered façade. She twisted the wheel, then drove the Coupé up a set of concrete steps and into the interior of the mall.
The ground shook beneath their wheels as the two Kaiju came thundering towards each other, the car and its human occupants entirely forgotten.
Dutch blasted past display units, steering almost by instinct in the dim half-light of the mall’s interior. ‘There!’ shouted Nat, pointing forward as they passed beneath a tall, glass-roofed atrium. ‘Ten o’clock!’
Dutch steered towards the rectangle of light and the Coupé went thumping down more steps and onto an empty and open road. Behind them, the Kaiju fell to battle, shrieking their fury as the fought for domination.
That’s it, thought Dutch. After this, I’m retiring, whatever the hell else happens.
* * *
They found their way to the turnoff and Dutch drove ten kilometres east before pulling over.
‘Let me see the map,’ she said.
This time, Nat didn’t refuse her. She studied it closely, seeing that the path of the cross-island route matched a narrow highway snaking between high peaks and all the way across the centre of the island.
‘Loo
k,’ she said, nodding at the d-meter. It showed a d-field rating of zero. Yet they were already deeper into the island than Dutch would have believed possible until the last few days, and with no discernible mental side-effects of any kind.
They drove on until the ocean disappeared from view and tall mountains reared high around them. They climbed a mountain road dense with overhanging foliage, slowing from time to time to skirt around boulders that had come tumbling down from on high over the years. It made for slow going, and Dutch felt sure they’d be toast if they encountered any more Kaiju, but even so they got past the worst of it. But within a few years, erosion and rockfall would make the inland roads forever impassable.
Then, at last, they came to a road high above a valley and saw an ethereal glow coming from behind a mountain peak a little further ahead. They got out of the Coupé, walking to the edge of the road and looking towards it.
‘Is that it?’ asked Dutch. ‘The Rift?’
‘Can’t be anything else.’
She shook her head. ‘In all the years I’ve been coming here, this is the first time I ever saw it with my own two eyes.’ It looked like a column of fire, reaching up to the clouds. It shifted and changed, the contrast of shadows and colours somehow suggestive, as if on the cusp of resolving into objects or some kind of landscape.
Dutch’s voice was halting when she spoke. ‘What Elektron said about the Rift—’
‘Elektron was crazy.’
‘Still, you must have sometimes wondered yourself what it is.’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘You can’t be serious. Not even once?’
Even as she asked the question, she could see he was telling the truth.
She had a sudden memory, of being in her Dad’s garage and hearing the first reports coming in over the radio that a nuke had hit Teijouan. No one had ever figured out what really happened, not with the d-field to keep those willing or brave enough to find out far from the island’s centre.
But if Strugatsky’s expedition had made it all the way to the Rift…who could say what they’d found there?