Against Gravity (46 page)

Kendrick sighed and looked away. “I need to find Draeger. Are you going to help me?”

Buddy glanced back into the building where they could see Sabak in heated conference with several of the Labrat survivors. Things were not going nearly as well as most of them had hoped.

“I’m not sure,” Buddy admitted. “We need to take care of things here. Sabak—”

“You heard what he said! This is as far as the rest of them are going. But this isn’t the time to discuss or negotiate. We go
now
, and we find him. I need whatever help I can
get.”

Buddy rubbed at his face with both hands, gazing off into the middle distance. Meanwhile Kendrick studied his suit’s read-out. Nearly an hour and a half had passed since they had
disembarked from the shuttle, so his time was running out if he was to have any hope of escaping from the
Archimedes
.

But did you ever really believe you were going to be coming back home from this?

“See things from my point of view,” Buddy pleaded. “There are injured people back there. I’m needed.”

Kendrick shook his head in disgust and began to walk further away from the building and from Buddy. “You know why I’m here,” he called over his shoulder. “You know
what’s at stake.”

“Ken—”

Kendrick stopped and turned. “Doesn’t what we went through matter to you any more? Or do you really want to stand by while Draeger gets away with everything?”

A few moments passed but Buddy still didn’t answer. Kendrick turned and resumed walking.

“Wait!” Kendrick slowed his pace and Buddy fell into step beside him. “Okay. Look, we’ve come this far together, so fine. I’ll come with you. Everyone’s badly
shaken, is all. Nobody was expecting to have to deal with any of this.”

Kendrick merely nodded and glanced back over his shoulder. He could see the building behind them rising above their heads now as they moved further up the curve of the cylindrical chamber. He
quickened his pace to a trot, and Buddy moved to keep up with him.

There were other buildings hanging above their heads now, open-air offices among gardens that had grown wild. None of it looked as though it had been really designed for people to live in. These
vast chambers, with their artificial forests and machine-controlled environments, were really little more than a showcase not just for Draeger’s technological achievements but for the sheer
amount of money President Wilber had been happy to pump into constructing them.

Kendrick dug out his wand and studied the station map. It would have been a lot easier if they’d been able to use whatever the station’s erstwhile occupants had used to move
themselves around its interior. According to the map there was a transport system buried in the hull, but its nearest entrance was next to the place they were heading for anyway.

“Here.” He jabbed his finger at the map display and turned to Buddy. “This is the research facility that’s in the next chamber. It’s where Draeger’s heading
because he can access the central AI memory core from there. We keep moving this way, we should reach an airlock leading to a connecting corridor pretty soon. You got any more of those grenade
things?”

“Just a couple,” Buddy replied.

Kendrick had the illusion that, even as he walked, he was in fact staying rooted to the spot while the ground rotated under him. The building where Sabak and the others were still sheltering now
hung way down behind them. He looked back and saw small figures milling around outside it, perhaps looking for them. All they needed to do was look up.

They found their first corpse by the airlock complex that led into the second chamber. The male victim appeared to have been flayed alive. The stink reached them long before they even set eyes
on the ghastly remains. There were enough scraps of clothing left to identify him as one of Los Muertos.

Equipment lay scattered around the grass near the body and Kendrick stepped forward to find weapons or anything else they could use. He tried hard to ignore the overwhelming stench of death in
his nostrils but failed completely.

“Jesus,” Buddy muttered as he went to help him. Then he turned away, his hand clamped over his nose. Kendrick suddenly remembered the vision he’d had of Los Muertos soldiers
torn apart by the creatures with Robert’s face.

“He was in the middle of doing something when he died,” Kendrick suggested, noticing a heavy backpack nearby that had some oblong metal object sticking half out of it. Fingers
half-stripped of their meat reached towards a rifle that lay a few metres away. Buddy pulled the oblong thing free of the backpack before retreating out of range of the reek of putrefaction.

“What is it?”

Buddy didn’t answer. He just stared at the box in his hands before lowering it to the grass, his face pale.

The metal casing featured an inset LED display on which a series of numbers appeared. It looked like a countdown, but the display was frozen. Kendrick imagined that the dead soldier had been
configuring it in some way but had died before completing his task.

“What is that thing?” he asked. But Buddy simply closed his eyes and gave no answer.

“We don’t have
time
for this shit. What the fuck
is
it?”

Buddy’s eyes were full of pain as he opened them again. “It’s a nuke. Those fucking idiots brought
nukes
on board.” He stared down again at the oblong device and
shook his head. At first Kendrick thought he might even be weeping. “I hadn’t expected this,” Buddy whispered.

Kendrick almost didn’t catch these hushed words. But he sure felt the urge to say something – like
So what exactly
did
you expect?

Instead he stepped on past the corpse towards the chamber airlock.

According to Kendrick’s map, the other side of the airlock was pressurized. Ashen-faced and silent, Buddy followed his comrade into the pressure chamber.

Kendrick asked himself just why Los Muertos would have brought a nuke on board, the obvious conclusion being that they intended to destroy the station. Which led to the next question: why?

But even if that were the case, could just one nuke do the job? Kendrick couldn’t begin to guess. Buddy muttered quietly from somewhere behind him, conferring with Sabak over his suit
comm, telling him about the nuke.

“Buddy, tell him that the guy carrying the nuke died before he could set a detonation time. The bomb isn’t going to go off.”

“Yeah,” said Buddy, “I already told them that. They’re going to come and take a look at it.”

He caught Kendrick’s expression and shook his head. “Listen, they’re not too wild about us heading off on our own like this, but right now they’re more concerned about
the nuke. We should get moving.”

They passed through the far exit of the pressure chamber and into another series of interconnected corridors. They soon found themselves at a second airlock complex, which in turn opened into
the second cavern. Buddy said little as they cycled through, for which Kendrick was grateful since he needed to organize his thoughts. The closer they came to the second chamber – the one
he’d seen in his visions – the more prevalent the silver threads became.

They found themselves next in a building identical in construction to the one that had led into the first chamber. They moved with extreme caution, but after a few minutes it became clear that
Los Muertos had not had a chance – or the desire – to plant gun turrets or rig booby traps.

This was, indeed, recognizably the chamber that Kendrick had seen in his visions – but it had been transformed into something simultaneously wonderful and terrible.

It looked as if the whole interior had been liberally coated with silver fairy dust so that it twinkled like a vast bejewelled grotto. Kendrick stepped forward to see the same wide plain he had
found himself standing on during those strange dream-like but utterly convincing episodes. Great ragged-edged columns of compacted silver threads stretched right across the circumference of the
chamber, looking as if a million spiders had spent a thousand years spinning them. Every surface was coated in thick layers of glistening silver.

“Oh, my God,” Buddy breathed, staring around them as they passed through into the chamber proper. “Oh, my God.”

Kendrick looked at these innumerable multitudes of threads and felt as if he were passing through the living, beating heart of some enormous beast. They didn’t now need to search for the
Bright – they were already
in
the Bright.

“Buddy, this isn’t anything like my visions.”

“Mine neither.” Buddy grinned like a child who’d just stumbled into Wonderland. “But it’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

Kendrick remembered his recent ordeal in the Maze and said nothing. He consulted the wand again, trying to ignore how badly his hands were shaking.

Had he . . .?
No.
He closed his eyes and felt a surge of relief. For a moment he thought he’d left behind the glove that he’d removed to release McCowan into the body of the
station. He dug out both gloves from a thigh pocket and pulled them back on, wincing as he pulled them over his injured flesh. They looked odd, oversized without the spacesuit they usually went
with.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” He glanced over at Buddy.

“Nope.”

“If this is nothing like what we had visions of before we even got here, then there’s no way to be sure that anything else the Bright have shown us is true.”

Buddy laughed nervously and shook his head. “C’mon, Ken, that’s bullshit reasoning.”

“Why is it? All that’s happened till now is that we’ve seen pictures in our heads. There’s no reason to assume what we see in our mind’s eye might be anything like
the reality—”

“Kendrick.” Buddy stepped in front of him. “Listen to me. What
you
saw clearly isn’t the same as what the rest of us saw. We’ve been over all that
already.”

“I saw the whole thing, the . . . the history of the universe, and I felt every second of it. Peter warned me—”

“No. McCowan was never part of it. Robert—”

“
Robert
is insane. He lost his mind long before we even got ourselves out of the Maze.”

“No, Kendrick, shut up and
listen
to me. I
touched
God – do you understand what I’m saying? Whatever you saw, whether it had McCowan’s face or whatever, it
was standing between you and . . . and the things that I experienced, and that the rest of those people back there experienced.

“Look. If you’ve never seen before, or . . . no, if you’ve spent your
entire life
locked in a box, where you can’t see anything, hear anything, do anything, and
then one day someone opens the box and you’re in the middle of the Rio Carnival, then maybe you’d have some idea of what it was like for the rest of us – maybe just an inkling.
And if you can’t understand that, then try to accept that that’s how the rest of us see it. You’re in the minority here. You
can’t
understand.”

Kendrick found that he couldn’t think of anything else to say. As he glanced to one side he noticed the gold had already made its way to this part of the
Archimedes
, too. He could
see faint yellow flecks where there had been none only seconds before.

They came to a small clearing and discovered two more bodies as badly mauled as the first. They too wore the remnants of Los Muertos uniforms. Their jaws, stripped of their
flesh, gaped upwards.

“Draeger’s been through here,” said Buddy, sniffing at the air.

Kendrick was incredulous. “You can
smell
him? Over this carnage?” The stink of putrefaction wasn’t any better the second time around.

Buddy grinned and tapped the side of his nose. “The augments whacked my olfactory sense up a couple of notches a year or two ago. Now I can pick up certain scents.” He shrugged.
“Well, from time to time, anyway. It’s a facility that has a bad habit of coming and going. Sort of useful, though.”

“That’s why that first corpse affected you so badly when we found it? The stench of it must have been overwhelming.”

“Yeah, but I can barely smell these guys now. Guess my augments are already filtering it out.”

They had been following a narrow path winding its way through silver-draped trees, aware of the sound of thickly layered filaments crunching underfoot. Kendrick kept a close eye on Buddy, but
whatever had affected him during their trip inside the Maze seemed not to be affecting him here.

Kendrick kneeled to peer more closely at the corpses, still managing to keep his distance. “Look – they had backpacks like the last guy, except these are empty.”

He stood again and looked around him, then up at the land surface curving away above him, wondering if Draeger and his men might be up there looking down on them.

In the soil just ahead stood a wide concrete cap with a circular door set into its upper surface. Kendrick consulted his wand map again and waved Buddy over to look at it.

“See this?” He pointed to a group of coloured lines.

Buddy nodded. “Yeah, that’s where we came on board.”

Kendrick tapped the minuscule screen with one finger. “And
this
is where Draeger and his men split off. There’s more than one way to get from there to here. I think they took
another route, probably bypassing the first cavern altogether.” He gestured at the concrete cap, clearly an access point to the tunnels and corridors riddling the station’s hull.
“They’d have seen these bodies once they emerged.”

“What makes you so sure they didn’t go the same way as us?”

“A distinct lack of dead thugs around those gun turrets we ran into.”

Buddy looked embarrassed. “Yeah, good point.” He nodded towards the two corpses. “So . . . do you think these two were hauling nukes around as well?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Probably best to assume the worst, though.”

“And if they were, and then Draeger and his men came out and found them lying here . . .”

They looked at each other. Suddenly things were taking a much worse turn than any of them could have anticipated.

They moved on, spotting another group of buildings up ahead: the research facility. Buddy tapped Kendrick on the arm and pointed to the ground.