Imperator Page 20

  They camped in the well for three days. Rehydrating and allowing Casper’s skin to recover from the almost first-degree burns it had received from the glare of the sun. And as he rested, the nightmare of the Moirai continued to unfold, like some grim trial testimony being read out for a jury to listen to, to judge him by. The skeleton that lay beside him was just as tantalizing now as the injection and what came next in the surgery amphitheater was all those years ago. But somehow the skeleton was another quest. A different story. Not this one. And so he let it go… because there was only the temple for him. All other mysteries paled in comparison.

  They continued on across the desert by night. Moving forward. Following the course THK-133 was either keeping, or wasn’t keeping.

  “It’s in,” Reina announced as she stepped away from the gleaming stainless steel operating table. She moved to a rolling tray and dropped the hypo with a clatter. “Thirty seconds to take effect. Then we can start phase six.”

  It was a long thirty seconds. And when it was over, Reina leaned in and checked the girl’s pupils with a small flashlight.

  “We have a reaction. Shall I continue?”

  Over the ether, the voice answered. “You may, Doctor.”

  Reina stepped back and laid her tablet on the surgery tray. “Moonsong,” she said softly.

  Then waited.

  “Are the girl’s lips moving?” asked Casper. “Barr. Close-up on the girl.”

  The camera shifted and moved abruptly.

  The lips were moving.

  “Good,” said Reina. “Don’t worry, you won’t be afraid much longer. Start your mantra and let go.”

  The girl’s lips moved again. And as before, Casper had a pretty good idea what the girl was saying.

  “Let go, Moonsong,” cooed Reina softly. “Try to visualize yourself hanging from a rope bridge that has snapped on just one side. You’re hanging there and you have no hope of rescue. You can only let go.”

  Moonsong continued to move her lips, repeating that phrase over and over as though it were some final rite, some savored prayer, some ward against all things that consume and destroy. The operating theater was so still and quiet they could hear everything clearly, including the small papery smack of the girl’s lips. Or at least, so they imagined.

  Barr must be using his sound detection mic to focus in, thought Casper. That’s why they were hearing it all so clearly.

  “Good,” replied Reina. And then, “You’re holding on as tight as you can, but you know it’s futile. You know you can’t hold on much longer, Moonsong. You know, eventually, you’re going to fall, little girl.”

  Over the speakers, a new voice, the voice of a girl, spoke. Just one word, or maybe it was a syllable. It was so sudden, they barely registered it. Maybe it had been an “a” or something like it.

  Impossible, thought Casper. Impossible because the threads were coming together as he watched. He knew what was happening, and at the same time he didn’t want to know.

  Advanced cognition.

  I am the Quantum and the Quantum is me.

  “You’ve done so well, Moonsong.” Reina spoke like she was addressing a small child that was trying hard to learn some basic task. Her voice expressed encouragement and admiration all at the same time. Hopefulness, too. “But wouldn’t it be so good to let go of the rope?” she continued. “Y’know… the bridge is gone now. You can never come back to this side. You must let go now. You must fall. Let go, and embrace the Quantum to its fullest.”

  “… SEE THE FOG …” erupted the girl’s panicked voice across the speakers. “I don’t want to. There’re things down there in it. Monsters…” She was whimpering now. Frightened. Scared. On the verge of hysteria.

  “You don’t have to worry about those things anymore,” cooed Reina. “They won’t hurt you down there. You’ll float… once you’re down there. Trust me. You’ll float.”

  Casper felt a shiver run up his spine, like the cold claws of rat’s feet scurrying in the dark. The galaxy, even at that time, was a scary place, and there were a lot of weird things from one end to the other—but he’d never seen anything as creepy as this. The girl’s head was clearly detached from her body. She was communicating without voice or detectable instrument. And she was… some place, seeing some thing that frightened her.

  In that moment there was a part of Casper’s mind that said, Back away from this. There are things that aren’t meant to be known, and this is one of them. Here be monsters.

  “I don’t want to fall down there!” the girl screamed. The speakers popped with feedback, and the overhead lighting flickered. Went off and came back just as suddenly. But somehow the quality of the light wasn’t the same. It was colder somehow. Like a ghost from the darkness trying to imagine what light must be like.

  “Trust me,” whispered Reina in the deafening silence that followed. “You’ll float. Just let go now, Moonsong. You are the Quantum. The Quantum is in you. Embrace it.”

  That’s what they thought it was, Casper whispered in his own mind from the future. Watching the memory play out once more. Standing in a garden of strange stones. They’d passed from the endless dunes, and here the desert floor was littered with these oddly shaped rocks that were definitely volcanic.

  There was only one moon visible overhead, oblong and swollen. Wrong, somehow. He wondered how much water was left. In the distance, far ahead, he could see mountains. Another low, jagged range. And then what? he asked himself. More desert? More endless desert?

  What if this is the shape of the rest of my very long days? What if I wander this desert forever?

  Which was a kind of horror the mind instinctively reeled away from.

  He drew back to the operating theater aboard the Moirai. So long ago. Watched the dead girl speak from between the knowns.

  They, the Savages of the Moirai, had called it the Quantum. Like monkeys grasping a bone to use as a weapon, they’d given it some ancient monkey-name.

  Ea for earth.

  Fa for friend.

  Da for darkness.

  Quantum for… something far greater.

  But they’d had no idea what they were really messing with. Power. Plain and simple. But unlike anything the galaxy had ever seen before.

  They were like animals seeing fire for the first time, Casper thought all those years later.

  Which raised the question once more…

  Who was their Prometheus?

  Who had brought them the power?

  Is.

  Who is Prometheus?

  The girl screamed over the loudspeakers. A sharp, sudden, soul-tortured shriek. She screamed like she was falling from some great height toward a certain death far below. Or worse.

  What is worse?

  Hell.

  Eternity in hell.

  You’ll float.

  In the past, the girl screamed and fell again and again as he crossed the seemingly endless desert. All those years ago she went to a place he’d come to this lost planet to find.

  A place where intelligence precedes physicality.

  Where the invisible power waits to be taken up.

  In the desert, he continued on toward the mountains in the night. Crossing silent gardens full of lost stones.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  They were in some gentle hills now, late in the night, beyond the desert. There had been an oasis along the way. It had made him uneasy, but they took water there anyway. Farther along there had been plants like spiny palms; Urmo had scrabbled at these furiously, cut them open with his sharp tiny biting teeth, and gulped like a vampire at the thin moisture they provided. With enough of these, there was at least some hydration for the day. And there had been other ancient wells. Some dead and dry. Some with moisture that could be had for the digging.

  The air felt slightly less dry, slightly less hostile
, as they passed through these low hills. The last of the two moons had just gone down behind the foreboding mountains ahead of them, mountains they were heading straight into the teeth of, when they heard the titanic roar far off across the desert wastes. It was a hollow bellow that cast itself along the chalky passages of the narrow draws and made Casper feel small in the hearing of it.

  And then there was nothing but the sound of the wind skirling along these dry places.

  They stood there for a long time, the bot, the tiny creature known as Urmo, and Casper, waiting for the doom that lay behind the monstrous roar that had echoed and faded forever out across the lost canyons in the hills. But nothing came beyond that one mighty titanic bellow.

  That night, curled up in a small niche within the walls of a canyon, Casper dreamt of other monsters he’d once known.

  ***

  “Where are you?” Reina asked the head on the table.

  Barr was still forward, crouched down behind ancient machinery on the platform above all this, panning his helmet slowly back and forth across the scene. Focusing in on the moments for the rest of the team to watch via HUD. The Martian light infantrymen remained stacked in the dark passage behind him.

  Casper and Rechs had just watched an old friend behead a young girl in an act more befitting Frankensteinian sci-fi than science itself.

  “I am in the Quantum,” came the girl’s voice from some other place not this amphitheater, or ship, or even possibly this reality. “I am in the Quantum,” she repeated, then added, “now.”

  There was no horror in the decapitated girl’s voice now. No fright. No fear. No realization that her life—whatever it had been aboard the nightmare generational ship known as the Moirai—was about to come to an end. Even though they’d cut off her head, there was no screaming. No endless torment like the moments before.

  None of that.

  Just an ethereal calm that verged on eerie. A peacefulness, someone might have mislabeled it. Like the moment of horrific realization the victims of accident have just seconds before their ends.

  Barr’s camera captured Dr. Reina Benedetti, making notes on her tablet, and the now twenty strangely armored Savage marines standing guard around the amphitheater. Like iron sentinels from some lost age when heroes wore armor and did battle on mounted steeds with barbed lances against mythic monsters.

  “Good,” said that other voice. The voice that was cold and cruel, yet rich and resonant. Casper had a feeling this was the voice of the Dark Wanderer all the graffiti had warned them of. And in the hearing of it, he wished he’d been warned more urgently—or had heeded those now not-dire-enough warnings. There was something so not human, so not even alien, about the voice. There was something “other” about it. Something that bothered Casper on levels that felt too primal to be addressed. Deep down there in the fight-or-flight reaction of human hardwiring. A place his ancestors might have called the soul.

  And whereas his old friend Rechs would’ve chosen “fight”—he would have fought the devil himself, and Casper could make the argument that Rechs had fought many devils playing at men—there was something about the voice that flipped the “flight” switch on the control panel in Casper’s wiring.

  “Then I think it’s time we test the interaction between both states,” said the cold and imperious voice. It wasn’t a request. It was a command. “Have her kill the guards.”

  Without hesitation, Reina leaned in close to the girl and said, “Kill the guards.”

  The Savages weren’t mindless, even though at times, despite their high-tech augmentation and biogenetic engineering, they seemed more like vicious pack animals than combat personnel. So when the voice instructed Reina to have them killed… they reacted. In disbelief at first. Looking one to another. Some raised their ancient slug-throwing automatic weapons, clearly indicating they weren’t about to just roll over and die. Others did not. Because, after all, what did they have to fear? A headless girl on a table? Some pure-strain inferior they’d captured on a colony raid?

  Certainly not. They’d been born, designed, and modified to rule.

  The first of the twenty armored guards was hauled into the air as though he had repulsor technology in his boots. That Savage was hauled so fast, and so high, that he had no time to react—no time to even realize that his head was about to meet the ceiling of the amphitheater.

  There was a sickening crunch, never mind the heavy-duty armor.

  His lifeless body hit the floor.

  Now there were nineteen.

  To their credit, the rest of the Savages reacted quickly, almost mindlessly dividing into two supportive teams in which to engage the threat.

  The threat being the headless girl on the operating table.

  Team Alpha, as it was tagged by Rechs’s command prompt in everyone’s HUD, was composed of ten Savage marines in heavy armor. All of them were simultaneously swept off their feet and into the wall at their backs. Surgery trays, chairs, and other equipment followed them, and the cacophony of everything colliding was like some postmodern symphony on themes of madness and destruction.

  Team Bravo started firing at the head on the surgery table.

  Nothing hit. Those mercilessly brutal ancient slug-throwing weapons found it impossible to hit their mark. Ricochets rebounded off some unseen shield and spent themselves along the walls in bright impact flashes, throwing explosion of sparks across the theater. Other rounds skipped off down unseen halls and passages, making strange twanging notes as they hit deck, wall, and bulkheads in the ship’s darkness beyond the surgery theater.

  Casper was fascinated by the raw power and the total invulnerability of the head on the table. He watched in awe as a heavy-duty bulkhead was effortlessly torn from its mountings and hurled into one of the firing Savages. The man was crushed beneath its incredible weight and the force of its terrible impact.

  Nothing had actually touched the door. It just tore away from its mounts on its own, as though some invisible force had reached out and tugged it from its mountings.

  Another Savage grabbed at his head as though he was suffering a sudden migraine of apocalyptic proportions. His weapon, a lethal matte-black light machine gun, fell forgotten at his boots. A mere second later he pitched over dead.

  The Martian infantry moved quickly and quietly into position on the balcony above the surgery amphitheater, weapons ready. It was Rechs who moved first, apparently sensing a moment to act, and his action broke the stupor that had infected his men.

  Rechs duck-walked over to Casper, rifle held out at port arms for balance. “Now,” he whispered. “We snatch her and get out of here.”

  Casper felt both confusion and disbelief. As in, How, exactly, in the middle of a supernatural firefight between a heavily armed superior force and… well, the unknown… is that supposed to happen?

  “I’m going down there. You lead the covering fire from the balcony. We’ll link up back at the platform. Roger?”

  Rechs had already rigged himself for fast-roping down to the next level. D-clips and a knotted length of the Martian infantry’s graphene-cord had been attached to the rail that guarded the balcony. The rope was already tied off to a secure mount at the rear of the balcony.

  Casper chanced a quick look down. Amid the chaos of Savages being held in the air, their heavy armor suddenly imploding as though being squeezed by a giant and unseen invisible hand, and the voluminous return fire from the first group that was recovering after having been thrown back into the medical equipment along the far wall, Reina was crouched down and off to one side of the fight. Almost directly below. Almost in the middle of it all.

  Casper nodded. It was the only way. And they owed her whatever it took to get her out of there. Even if he wasn’t actually sure she wanted out.

  It was crazy, but right now it was the only escape from this constantly unfolding nightmare. Like some Escher-scape that neve
r ended and only ever led to some new perspective that changed the whole game.

  Rechs gave the order.

  “Go.”

  Barr, LeRoy, and even the medic popped up and opened fire, spraying the room below with fire from the automatic Savage weapons they’d commandeered, their loud chatter mixing with the confusion below. Rechs popped a grenade off his belt, cooked the spool, and tossed it as he called, “Banger out!”

  Casper knew to turn and look away.

  The grenade went off, but its dull explosion was lost in the merciless hammer of gunfire from all sides. And the screaming. The Savage marines were screaming as the headless girl murdered them one by one.

  When the flashbang went off, it fritzed out everyone’s HUD, leaving a small tinkling of broken-glass static wash in the comm for the few seconds it took the EMP-hardened systems to reboot and come back online. But that didn’t matter to the Martian infantry; they’d switched to iron sights and were raking both groups with fire.

  Casper stood up and drew a bead with his sidearm on one of the Savages. But in the same instant the man lifted one armored gauntlet from his automatic rifle and raised it to his neck. Casper stared in stark disbelief as the man tried to pull at the metal collar below his bucket—as though the collar itself was choking the life out of him. Casper was only secondarily horrified by the fact that the man was standing, impossibly, on the tiptoes of his heavy boots. He was being hauled upward by an invisible strangler who needed that nuance to make the kill complete.

  And then Rechs was pushing past Casper, mounting the barrier that guarded the balcony. He had one hand on the rope at his midsection and the other on his rifle. He leapt out into the open space above the fight, firing at targets as he fast-roped facedown into the midst of battle.

  Below him, two Savages, each standing their ground and sending copious amounts of fire at the severed head, were suddenly slammed into one another.