An aura. A fucking trap just like in Darwin, only here he had no one but a bunch of subs and maybe, just maybe, Skyler and Ana. Of course, they’d leave at the first possible opportunity and had zero incentive now to cart him along. He wanted to laugh and scream all at once. How the hell had he traded the cushy, power-laden confines of Nightcliff and Darwin for this sorry lot?
He closed his eyes to the world, tilted his head back, and howled out this pathetic frustration. Mid-cry he opened his eyes to see the heavens. Might as well include the man upstairs in this curse, too, he figured.
His roar cut off, trapped in his throat as his breath caught in wonder.
A moon hung above him. Not the moon he knew, no. This was something new. Something artificial. Roughly circular in shape and … no, no, it was square. Rounded, yes, but no circle.
It grew larger with each passing moment, and so did Russell’s awe. The surface grew and grew, as big as the sun and then larger still. Not a moon at all, he realized, but something much closer. And not a single object, either. It was some time before he noticed this detail, but gradually it became clear. He was seeing dozens, maybe hundreds of objects, all floating down toward him like …
Yes, like climbers. He’d lain on his rooftop in Nightcliff and watched the mechanical spiders often enough to know that pace, that lazy drift.
But these numbered in the hundreds, and there was no Elevator here, much less a multitude of such devices.
Russell stared, studied, and ignored the growing knot in his gut. The objects continued to fall. They blotted a quarter of the sky now, and he could make out individual details. They were like spikes, some as much as a kilometer tall. All were hexagonal and were made of material identical to the Builder’s shell ship he’d seen while aboard Anchor Station, though each of these dwarfed that object and there were hundreds.
Beside him the subhumans continued to fall helplessly into the pit. Russell, enveloped in a sudden and overwhelming desire for self-preservation, stepped backward. The spikes weren’t falling at all. They were being lowered. Each had its own Elevator cord, exactly like the one in Nightcliff, only multiplied. An array. Blackfield reeled, imagining the lift capability they must have when used together. Darwin’s capacity multiplied by ten and then ten again. But why? There was nothing here but sand. The whole thing would be wasted. They couldn’t even anchor to the ground because …
He glanced down, and understood.
The columns matched the pattern of holes on the alien pyramid’s surface. As this realization crept into Russell’s mind, a cracking sound seemed to tear the very sky apart. He fell, ignoring the spike of pain in each elbow as he landed, and glanced up. The columns glowed with dazzling yellow energy. They rocketed toward the ground with a sudden ferocity, sizzling through the air in a concert of sonic booms. The noise overloaded his ears, shut them down, crippling his mind with a ringing unlike anything he’d ever heard before.
The mass of projectiles hit the pyramid. A strike of overwhelming force had destruction been their purpose. Russell threw an arm over his face and cowered low to the ground, expecting a massive explosion. None came. Hardly anything happened at all, in fact.
Russell sat up and crawled back to the edge of the pit.
Below, as he’d guessed, the columns had impaled themselves perfectly into their matching holes, which dotted the pyramid’s surface. From the tip of each, elevator cords stretched upward until they disappeared against the azure sky.
A fractured noise vibrated through the ground, like a mountain shattering into a thousand pieces. Russell knew then. He knew what the columns were for, what so many Elevator cords were needed to lift.
They weren’t here to lift climbers full of sand. They were here to lift the entire fucking building.
The subs tumbling mindlessly into the abyss, he suddenly realized, were just trying to make the last bus home, or something. Skyler and Ana were probably inside, too, doing God-knows-what. Trapped maybe, or dead.
If Russell didn’t move he’d be left behind, alone in this polluted moonscape of a place, as his last chance at survival, and perhaps redemption, was hauled away.
Fuck that.
He did as the subhumans, then, and dove into the pit, rolling in a choking cloud toward the pyramid below.
Skyler lay on his stomach at the end of a trail of bodies. The dead subhumans covered every centimeter of the long, upward-sloping hallway.
His throat felt dry as the sand outside. In the lull of battle his stomach growled and twisted as if in a death throe of its own.
Ana lay a few meters away, breathing softly. Her eyes were closed but he could tell she had yet to sleep. Behind her sprawled a massive room that dwarfed the one below.
The dark walls sloped inward, soaring to a point high above that hid in shadow. Throughout the space were hundreds of erratically placed columns, no doubt matching the holes Skyler had seen in the pyramid’s surface from above. Light seeped into the room through narrow zigzag lines that ran about the floor in a pattern as alien as the place itself. These produced so little light Skyler almost missed them at first. It was only when he’d lowered the intensity on his rifle’s barrel light that he noticed the trace glow.
Ana stirred, shifted her weight on the hard surface. “Have they finally stopped?” she asked without opening her eyes.
“Doubt it,” Skyler said. He glanced into the shadowy depths of the room. The columns, thick around as a fully loaded climber and tall as a building, stood in silent audience. Motionless, judgmental. “We should explore this room; there could be another way in. Or out.”
The girl sat up. She coughed into her hand. “Did you bring any rations?”
Skyler shook his head. “Running low on ammo, too.” He tried to sound casual and failed miserably.
Ana stood, rolled her head from side to side, and shook feeling back into her hands. “You go ahead and look around. I’ll hold them here.”
“Are you sure?”
With one hand she gave him a swat on the behind, while simultaneously hefting a pistol she’d taken off one of the corpses that littered the facility. She cocked it and leaned against the wall beside the passage entryway.
“Won’t be a minute,” Skyler said.
He kept to the perimeter of the room as best he could. The columns were placed randomly, as far as he could tell, and often were partially embedded into the wall of the chamber. Some were so close together he could not squeeze through the gap between and had to walk around. Without the landmark of Ana’s flashlight playing against the walls beside her, he might have easily become lost in the eerie, silent forest.
Skyler glanced up toward the blackness of the ceiling. His thoughts drifted back to the first time he’d walked among the aura towers in Belem at night. This place wasn’t so different, save for the scale. If he was right, each of these columns was a hollow tube that dipped down into the once-beating heart of this gigantic place. Exhaust tubes, spewing out the SUBS virus in concentrated blasts year after year, taking advantage of every dust storm and stiff wind to further the reach. Presumably each infected being became another, smaller factory, but for whatever reason the Builders had kept this initial source running all this time.
Until now, it seemed.
He yearned to leave, to find out if his efforts had indeed killed the source of the disease. Quietly, in the silent depths of the enormous room, he chuckled to himself. Would he once again get credit for saving everyone and everything? Below Nightcliff he’d been forced to flee into the deep silo, and only an aggressive subhuman’s tackle had sent him careening into the strange iris at the bottom of that pit. What had happened after that he scarcely understood, much less remembered in any detail. Yet he’d done it. He’d short-circuited whatever malfunction had plagued the aura for the months leading up to that moment, and ended the sporadic incursions of subhumans into Darwin and above.
At least those who knew what had happened had the sense to keep it quiet.
More than all this, though, Skyler found in himself a strange desire to return to Darwin. To see Sam, Skadz, and Prumble again. He should have been away from here hours ago to make the agreed rendezvous.
The room began to tremble.
He felt it through the soles of his feet first, and turned to face Ana. She shouted something, a cry of alarm, as the building began to rumble for the second time. What now? Skyler thought. The vibration grew more intense, producing an unpleasant tingle up his entire body and rattling his clenched teeth together.
Bits of material the size of pebbles began to fall from above, shaken loose from the columns and walls. Somehow this frightened him more than anything that had yet happened. The Builders weren’t sloppy architects. It would take something mammoth indeed to shake their walls to the point of crumbling.
Skyler ran—lurching, awkward steps on unsteady feet—toward Ana. She seemed impossibly far away. A silhouette before the glowing orb of a flashlight that wavered in all directions as she struggled to stay on her feet.
A horrible rending sound built from above, and with it the very ceiling seemed to fall as large quantities of dark material crashed to the floor. Skyler threw an arm over his head, weaved to place himself at the base of a column. He glanced up, casting his light into the torrent of discharge that now fell.
The tops of the columns were twisting like trees in a gale. They slid across the surface of the ceiling, reforming and rearranging though for what purpose he couldn’t imagine. He stood frozen, staring in wonder and disbelief as the gigantic pillars, solid as marble a moment ago, thrashed like worms. Their midsections were moving now.
And then Skyler felt his breath catch in his throat as the base next to him slid away. He stumbled, caught himself. Somewhere Ana screamed, and Skyler was running.
He raced through the room, all caution abandoned. All around him the huge columns shifted along the floor as if they weren’t attached at all, like the aura towers did when pushed. Only, he somehow knew they were still perfectly, inexorably stuck to the floor. For a split second he watched one move, saw it drift along the floor and saw, yes, the material that had sluiced down from above seem to absorb itself into the space left behind, repairing instantly whatever damage the moving column left behind.
His lack of attention cost him. A column lurched suddenly in his direction and slammed into him. The surface, hard as stone, clipped his knees and sent him tumbling. The pain of the impact brought tears to his eyes. He gritted his teeth and rolled, came up hobbling to get out of the way as the column barreled onward to whatever destination it sought.
Everything stopped.
The room went silent save for Skyler’s own breathing, and Ana’s frightened sobs from somewhere ahead.
A glow began to build above, like the sun coming out from behind a violent storm. With it came a new sound, a terrible roar that built from nothing to a crushing volume in seconds. The entire ceiling glowed, as if partially translucent.
And then the columns began to fill from the top down with that same yellow-white energy as something poured, or thrust, into them. In the span of half a second every column became a glowing rod, pulsing heat and light. The room became so luminous that Skyler had to throw an arm across his face and squint against the glow. It was no use, though. The light came from everywhere.
Ana was suddenly pressed against him, her arms thrown around him. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we should get out of here, now. I don’t care what it takes, we have to get back to the Magpie and leave.”
She met his gaze and nodded with absolute determination.
Skyler took a step and winced at the fresh blast of pain from his knees. He doubled over and tried to rub the sting away. Then Ana slipped an arm around his waist and urged him on, taking much of his weight.
They were near the center of the room when she froze in place.
Skyler glanced up, swallowing his aches. Twenty meters away, standing at the mouth of the hallway that led from the room, was a subhuman coated in black.
It stood well over two meters tall. Half a head higher than even Samantha, Skyler guessed, and despite its diseased state the being was corded with muscle beneath the black coating. Its eyes blazed yellow, like twin stars, and it stepped forward.
The glow in the room began to abate at the same time, slowly dimming back to near total darkness.
Without thinking, Skyler pushed Ana behind him. He raised his rifle, trying to remember how many rounds were left in the magazine. Four, maybe five? Not enough, not nearly.
Ana knelt beside him and hefted her own pistol. Together they unleashed the last of their ammunition. Their guns sang, spitting plumes of fire as the bullets found their target.
The rounds rattled against the armored subhuman and ricocheted away, bouncing harmlessly on the rapidly dimming floor. If the creature had felt any pain, it didn’t show it. It simply weathered the barrage and then stepped forward again, now just ten meters away.
“Ideas?” Skyler asked out the corner of his mouth.
“Split up. Maybe one of us can get out.”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
“Who says you’re the one who would make it?”
He grunted. “Ana …”
She reached out and took his hand, her eyes never leaving the approaching enemy.
He didn’t want to tell her that he was simply too tired to run. He wouldn’t get ten steps before this augmented mass of muscle and primal instinct fell upon him.
“Plan?” Ana asked out the corner of her mouth.
Her little spark of humor in the face of the approaching monster melted Skyler’s fear away. “You go low, I go high,” he said to her. “Keep its legs tangled up if you can. Okay?”
“Got it.”
“On three.”
He counted down. Ana let go of his hand. At three they lurched forward in almost perfect unison. Skyler caught the briefest hint of surprise and confusion in the subhuman’s body language as it became mentally tangled with the decision of whom to defend against.
