Unsure what to do, or even what he could do, Tim watched until the hulking mass lifted from the ground finally arrived. The thing looked like a ziggurat, reeled in by a thousand massive cables. The pyramid tucked perfectly into the tail section of the Key Ship, cutting off his hopes of entering there, too.
He found himself wondering what Skyler would do.
“Damn it to hell,” he whispered.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Plague Forge
2.APR.2285
They sat in silence together for a long time, drifting in the mild air within the alien chamber.
Waiting seemed to be the only thing to do, and in that lull Ana withdrew deeper and deeper in to a place within herself that Skyler could not reach. She was thinking of Davi, he knew, and the childhood they’d lost together.
With each passing moment her words pulsed through his mind, an echo that grew instead of waned. I wish I could have said goodbye.
Despite all the Builders had done, this possibility, this robbery of closure, seemed the final twist of the dagger. Pulled into space and taken who-knows-where, never to see his friends again, never to know what happened, what it all meant.
He almost chuckled at the thought. Almost, but Ana’s stark expression killed the ironic mirth before it could spill out.
Skyler placed his hand on her chin and ran the tip of his thumb across the soft place below her eye where a tear might have been. Only there were no tears to wipe away. Her skin felt warm, smooth as a newborn babe’s, defiantly unaffected by the harsh life she’d found herself in after the collapse. In that sense her skin matched the absolute determination in her eyes. “Hey. We have each other, at least.”
Ana fixed a gaze on him that could have started a fire in the rain. “Just like that? You can put it all behind you so easily?”
“No. It’s just not in my nature to lament the past.”
Her brow furrowed. “On to the next adventure, then? ‘Oh well, no big deal’?”
Skyler grimaced. “Not quite that callous, I hope.”
“No, not quite.” She tried to smile, failed, and sighed.
The tear he’d been waiting for welled in the corner of her eye and slid languidly down her cheek, pooling against the end of his thumb. Skyler let the droplet rest there. On the verge of wiping it aside he realized it had fallen. Down her cheek. Gravity.
“We’re slowing down,” he said. He’d been so focused on her he hadn’t paid any attention to their position. They’d been drifting toward the ceiling’s center, a gradual migration unnoticed in the darkness. Skyler could do nothing, adrift as they were, until the new floor came within reach. When his fingers could brush the surface he pushed to the right, rotating them so their legs pointed to the new down. Ana had remained wrapped about him until that instant, and now she released him and came to stand. The press of gravity increased rapidly.
“We’re stopping?” she asked, whispering despite the empty room.
Skyler nodded. “When we do we’ll be back to floating. Get ready.”
He’d barely spoken the words when he suddenly felt as if he were floating in a pool, only the floor hadn’t moved.
“This is giving me a headache,” Ana said, her feet coming off the floor.
“Maybe the constant shifts make the subs more docile,” Skyler said, belatedly realizing he only half meant it as a joke.
As if the room had heard them, Skyler’s internal compass shifted once again. The pull came on rapidly; the recently christened floor began to slide away and tilted sickly.
The roughly circular perimeter wall of the room became the floor, and Skyler understood. They weren’t falling—they were being thrown outward. The pyramid had started to spin.
Skyler’s feet hit the new floor with a thud and he tucked into a roll. Somewhere behind him, too far behind him, Ana grunted. A bad landing.
He pushed himself to a kneel, ignoring the stabs of pain in his shins. Viewed from this perspective, the room took on a different feel entirely. Skyler stood on a narrow floor that curved rapidly upward ahead and behind. To his right, a solid wall shot straight upward all the way to where the circular floor reached its apex directly above, broken only in the center where the segmented shell ship still sat suspended in the middle of a gaping hole. Only now the ship appeared to be floating in midair, on its side. What before had been an abyssal pit now stretched sideways into darkness, out of view.
What before had been a high conical ceiling now served as the strangest wall Skyler had ever seen. Compared to the broad, flat disk to his left, the wall on his right was a dark, deep cone studded with huge pipes that shot out from seemingly random positions and extended across his view to the meet the left wall.
“Ana,” he said, scanning the ground for her. “Ana!”
“Here,” she called out. She’d landed surprisingly far away, almost a quarter of the curved floor’s circumference. He spied her between two of the pipe pillars and his heart lurched. She stood at a perpendicular angle to him. His mind wanted, demanded, that she fall on her face and tumble down the floor, but she just stood there. He closed his eyes and forced himself to accept the geometry of the room, the physics at work. She was being thrown outward, same as him, due to spin.
Skyler opened his eyes and saw the room fresh. It was no different than the ring of Black Level, other than the lack of a ceiling. Okay, he thought, okay. He moved toward Ana, a jog at first that quickly became an awkward, bounding sprint. The force wasn’t quite Earth normal, at least not here.
She sat on the ground now, back propped against the flat wall.
“Are you all right?”
Her hands gripped her left ankle. “It’s just twisted, I think.” She tried to stand and winced. Skyler stepped in beside her and slipped an arm under hers, felt her weight shift onto him instantly. “Could they make up their mind on which way is down?”
“I think they have.”
She glanced at him with more hope than he expected to see.
“We’re under spin,” he said, “and if I’m right, the gravity, or illusion of it—whatever the hell—at the outermost point is just like being on Earth.”
“Why?”
“Let’s go find out. Lean on me until you can walk on it.”
There were two ways to leave that he could detect. The original entrance, which Ana had warped with four grenades, had become a slightly askew pit in the gravity shift, dropping ten meters off into a faint yellow glow. Skyler decided to try the other option, first.
“Come on,” he said, giving the girl a little tug to compel her into motion. “Let’s try to find out why we’re spinning.”
Ana took her weight completely off the bad ankle and hopped along next to him as he took a lap around the curved floor. The dim light in the room was something of a blessing, he decided. Otherwise the place would have resembled a carnival merry-go-round turned upright, all the merry riders thrown outward to their deaths. The mummified bodies of the original explorers of this place littered the floor. Some were draped over the large tubes that spanned the room. It took willful imagination to erase the morbid display from his mind and focus on the geometry of the room itself. Skyler walked at a pace Ana could handle; he felt her hopping next to him.
He kept his attention to the left, toward the conical wall. When it had been the ceiling, a squad of armored subhumans had dropped in through iris portals spaced evenly around the perimeter. He looked for these first, as they would be hallways now instead of chutes. The irises remained firmly closed, though, no matter how hard he tried to pry his fingers into the hair-thin grooves where the plates met. Whatever triggered their opening, it had happened once and that was likely that. Skyler sighed and looked to the middle of the huge conical wall instead. There had been a hole in the very center high above, impossible to reach. But now, the world flipped ninety degrees, it would be a simple hike up the slope of the cone.
Two-thirds of the way around the curved room he spotted a clear path. “Think you can climb this?”
Ana frowned.
“We’ll be weightless by the time we reach the top, getting lighter the whole way.”
Her expression brightened. “Sure, then.”
Five steps into the climb, Skyler’s knees howled at him. If anything Ana had to feel worse, but she made no complaints. Her mouth became a tight thin line, almost suppressing the grunts she made with each difficult hop up the steep incline. A quarter of the way up Skyler paused and let her rest, sitting her atop one of the huge pipes that crossed the room. With a few minutes’ rest, they went on, and soon the drop in centrifugal force became noticeable. Before long, Ana extracted herself from Skyler’s helping arm and they were both doing a spider crawl toward their goal. Near the end, Skyler could propel himself with just his fingertips.
The hole in the wall spanned five meters across at the mouth. Skyler glanced in the opposite direction, following the clear path the shell ship had followed upon entry. A perfect shot, dead center, with a bullet that had crossed perhaps light-years of space.
“What could a race with this kind of ability possibly need with us?” he mused aloud.
Ana ignored the unanswerable question. Instead she drifted around the perimeter of the hole, studying the ragged edge carved by the ship’s entrance. The hole extended off in a perfect tube, into absolute darkness. But it couldn’t go far, Skyler knew. The room above, where Blackfield lay, where the alien object hopefully still sat waiting for them, couldn’t be more than twenty meters off. Skyler shuddered at the idea of Blackfield’s peaceful body being flung to the outer edge of that room, along with the remains of the fallen enemy.
“Crap,” Ana said.
He glanced at her. She was fishing around in a pocket on her pants. “What’s wrong?”
“I totally forgot,” she said, producing a thin metal tube. She clicked one end of it and a bright white LED bloomed to life. “Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be. I’m just glad you remembered now.”
She aimed the beam into the depths of the tube. Skyler expected it to run straight to the chamber he still thought of as “above,” perhaps ending at a flat wall that would be the underside of that chamber’s floor. What he saw instead was a confluence of tunnels, all channeling together roughly ten meters inside. There were eight, evenly spaced, all coming in at nearly oblique angles forming a needlelike protrusion where they ultimately joined into one.
The layout didn’t match his mental picture of how the shell ship had entered. The tube should extend all the way to the point of entry, not separate out like this. Then he recalled how the structure had repaired itself elsewhere. Perhaps the same thing had happened here. The ship had crashed, or maybe more accurately, had landed, in a straight line through the very center of the building. Later, somehow, the structure altered itself into the configuration Ana’s light now illuminated.
She drifted across the opening to him, grabbing his outstretched hand to stop herself. “What do you think?”
“It’s still better than dropping down that chute back there. But if these tunnels extend outward very far, we’ll be back to walking. Can you handle it?”
“I want to get out of here Skyler, so yes. I’ll make it.”
Together they drifted into the tube.
Skyler selected one of the splinter tunnels at random and led Ana down it. The tube narrowed, curved outward until the illusory gravity felt almost Earth normal, and then curved back again slightly before a yellowish glow ahead became apparent. He tapped Ana to get her attention and pressed a finger to his lips. Then he took her hand, the one that held the flashlight, and thumbed the end to click it off. He hadn’t quite realized until that moment just how quiet the ship had become. The simple tick-tick of the flashlight’s switch cracked like a twig under foot. Skyler winced, waited, heard nothing more.
He crept on, Ana subconsciously allowing him to take the lead.
The glow came from a long oval gap in the tunnel’s floor. Skyler stepped close to the opening, drew his pistol on instinct, and looked down.
A few meters away he saw what had previously been the outer wall of the room where Blackfield had died. This tunnel, apparently, constituted one of the many pillars that had spanned that place. If this opening had been there all along, Skyler hadn’t noticed it.
He lay on his stomach and gripped the edge of the gap, intent to look into the huge room and see how far they were from the original floor, perhaps also to spot Blackfield’s body or the alien artifact.
Just before he peered inside, though, the yellow light danced and shifted.
Skyler froze. He heard voices. Not the animalistic grunts of subhumans, but actual conversation. He glanced back at Ana and saw her wide eyes. When he held up a hand, instructing her to stay back, she quickly nodded.
The voices continued. They were distant, perhaps on the opposite side of the cavernous space. The light, clearly not a glow from a room but from a carried lantern or flashlight, moved about in bursts of activity.
One of the voices erupted into a cackle of a laugh. Skyler held his breath and strained his ears. He moved and poked his head into the oval gap. From this vantage point he couldn’t see anything but a section of wall—or, floor now—and a half dozen of the pillars.
More laughter. Animated conversation, and a single word Skyler recognized plain as day. “Blackfield,” someone said. Blackfield.
Skyler narrowed his eyes. He didn’t recognize the voice, not specifically. There was a familiarity to it, but he couldn’t place it. He needed to hear more, or better yet, to see.
He moved farther, pushing his head fully into the room, and glanced around. The floor was a three-meter drop away. It was sloped, which made sense given that the room had been the inside of a pyramid now turned on its side. But it was also curved. Not smoothly like the space they’d just left, but segmented. He knew the room to be the same one where Blackfield had died, yet the geometry had changed. From four sides to hundreds.
