Requiem (43 page)

The meagre
defence was ready. Tialus gave Mercer the order to open the
airlock. The grinding and creaking sounds of metal ceased almost
immediately. The defence was poised in silence, awaiting the sounds
of the automated turrets in the hall to herald the inevitable.

Half a minute
passed before they heard the first sound of gunfire on the other
side of the door.

Their guns
remained trained on the door. Therin's gaze continued to shift from
the door to Seline. Sear watched her watching Seline.

There was a
pause, brief and still. Seline could hear ringing in her ears.
Then, before she realised it had been there at all, the silence was
annihilated. The barricade was destroyed in an explosion of fire
and smoke. Bullets discharged, EMP grenades quickly followed.
Barrage after barrage they sparked and died. A shadow formed behind
the wall of dust and smoke. Bullets continued to throw themselves
at the approaching darkness, unable to force it back with their
tiny, wasted sparks.

In some unseen
moment, perhaps in the blinking of her eyes, the drone emerged from
behind its curtain. It floated mute in front of them. The smoke ran
off it in thin wisps and streams. A reflective, glassy eye. Its red
iris stared directly at Seline, deflecting gunfire with replete
indifference.

It moved
through the air like a mote of dust. Seline ducked behind the
locker. Belameir was cowering along with her, his hands clasped
over his head. She thought she could hear him speaking, whispering
to her, but his lips weren't moving. The red eye remained burned
into the centre of her vision. She refused to stand and face it.
The whispering grew louder. She remained in hiding, holding her
hands over her ears to block out the noise but the voice in her
head forced itself upon her.

She didn't know
at what point the gunfire had ceased. She rose from her position
behind the upturned lockers and shelves. She raised her hand as if
to render the glass eye submissive and somehow stop its progress
but it continued to draw closer to her. Belameir was pulling at her
lowered arm, trying to pull her back behind cover. Her stomach had
tightened into a dense thicket of wire – barbed, rusted, and
bloodied from its tearing and mincing of her insides. For every
impulse that told her to run another told her not to. Her
outstretched hand was shaking uncontrollably. She tried to steady
it but...

Screams and
whispers, silent thoughts and distant memories. Within a sea of
words and voices everything was becoming as indistinguishable and
traceless as a drop in an ocean. Thoughts were being pulled from
out of her and cast into the rushing waters, blending and churning
in the gyres of a colossal unknown.

Trillions of
voices speaking in unison and not a single word that could be
agreed upon. This was the mind of the galaxy itself. Then,
something recognisable; something distinguishable in all the
madness.

There was a
gentle breeze through the open window and for the first time the
sun didn't feel quite as hot, like it wasn't trying to bite into
her skin or bake her eyes in their sockets. Today the sun was kind;
all it wanted was to give her a gentle hug and a tender kiss.

At the door,
mother was talking to a man Seline had never seen before. He wore a
dark suit. He had a cruel face. His eyes were wide, almost like
perfect circles and he didn't blink. His mouth was wide and his
lips were thin. The man had given Seline a full, toothy smile as
her mother sent her outside to play while she talked with the man,
it was the smile that made Seline run past the man and down the
steps. When she got to the bottom she looked back up but the pale
green door of the apartment swung shut and she couldn't see
anything.

She walked
through the courtyard and under the archway that led onto the
street. There were bent metal hinges bolted onto the inside of the
of concrete archway where the iron gate used to be. The sun was
nice but she kept looking back up to their window to see if she
could see anything. She wondered what they were doing. They weren't
doing sex or she would've heard them. Seline picked up a small
pebble. It was warm to the touch. She wondered if Miles would come
around today, if he'd want to maybe hold her hand while they looked
for pebbles that were shaped like something else, like a dinosaur
or a gun or maybe even a heart. She blushed at the thought.

She looked
down the street and saw a car parked on the side of the road. It
must have been the man's car because it was black like his suit and
there were footprints in the sand that led towards her apartment.
Seline liked the look of the car; sleek and shiny like nothing
she'd ever seen before. It looked so new and alien. She walked
towards it.

'Hello, car,'
she said but it gave no reply. She picked up one of the small
stones that littered the street, this one looked kind of like a
flower. She pulled her arm back with the stone firmly in the centre
of her closed palm. She didn't understand why but she was about to
toss it when she heard mother's voice from up in the apartment.
Seline dropped the stone and turned up to the window. The only
thing worse than when mother ignored her was when mother was angry
but Seline couldn't see mother anywhere. Mother yelled again and
Seline realised that mother wasn't yelling at her but must be
yelling at the man.

Seline stared
up at the large window pane of her home, deep-set in the cracked
but otherwise plain concrete facade of the apartment. The yelling
continued for only a moment longer and then she heard the man
talking in a deep, rumbling kind of voice. A moment later she heard
footsteps coming down the metal staircase that led up to her
apartment. The man walked out of the concealed courtyard. When he
saw Seline he gave her the same grin that he'd given her when she
first saw him. He was walking with a briefcase in his hand,
swinging it back and forth.

Seline said
nothing, she didn't want this man to pay her any more attention but
he stopped in the middle of the street and turned directly to her.
His eyes big and blue. He took a couple of steps towards Seline and
placed his free hand on the top of her head. He patted her gently
and ruffled her hair a little.

'Your mother
is going to make me very rich,' he said to her, although Seline
didn't pick up the condescension in his voice. 'Make sure you look
after her,' he said before turning to his car. The door slid
silently open, he lowered his head and got it. The door closed and
a wave of heat blasted from the back of the vehicle as it shot off
down the street. Seline had to hold down the front of her skirt to
keep it from blowing up.

Seline looked
back up to the window expecting to see mother but she wasn't there.
She started to walk back towards the archway that led into the
courtyard but before she could the voices came roaring through the
centre of her head. The galaxy's voice, screeching and screaming in
words and sounds incoherent and impossible to distinguish. The
voices didn't come from one single place. They came from everywhere
at once.

Seline looked
down at herself. She blinked and when she opened her eyes she was
no longer in her favourite white, floral dress, she was naked. She
looked up to see the archway into the off street courtyard and the
concrete face of her and her mother's apartment begin to pull away
from her, as if it were being wheeled away as part of a stage set.
The abandoned and vacant lots that had served as her only
neighbours were doing the same thing. Then the sky, peeling away to
revel nothing but darkness, not even set lights or some
behind-the-scenes workers. The sand dusted road beneath her feet
pulled away. She tried to hold her breath but realised she wasn't
breathing at all. She looked at her naked arms and stomach and legs
and she was no longer eight years old, she was no longer standing
outside her old house. She closed her eyes and when she opened them
her body was gone too, another part of the scenery, stripped away.
She was bodiless, weightless, and now, sightless.

But the voices
persisted and the confusion of what was happening was overwhelming.
She could no longer hear the thoughts inside her own head. Whatever
was happening to her would kill her, she was sure of it.

At that
moment, that seemingly forever moment, the voices muted. Not
completely but almost.

The only thing
that came to her was a single voice. It didn't echo as she would
have expected in this vast empty place. It spoke with longing, and
aching familiarity.

'I found you.
My god, I finally found you.'

There was
light. There was warmth. Seline found her voice.

'Mother?'

Seline sat up
on her side. Her head felt empty, incapable of bringing anything
into focus. Thoughts peeked at her over some distant horizon like
the quivering lines of a mirage afraid to commit itself to reality.
She placed a hand to her forehead attempting to calm the throbbing
pain in her head. Layer by layer her senses came back to her. The
sensation of air drawing into her lungs. The smell and warmth of
her own breath, condensing on the visor of her helmet. The broken
sound of the surrounding voices.

'What the fuck
just happened?' she heard Belameir say.

She raised her
hand, gesturing for everyone to stay back. 'I...'

'What did you
do?' asked Sear.

She looked up
from her hand, over the top of the locker. The blackened, metal eye
lay on the ground in the centre of the armoury. No red iris shone
from its centre. No visible signs of damage. She blinked, half
expecting to wake up when she opened her eyes.

'What
happened?' she asked.

'You killed it,
kid, that's what happened.' Mercer was resting his foot on the
machine as if he were about to roll it away.

'But I... I
didn't do anything,' said Seline.

Sear knelt down
next to Seline and she realised that the Doctor was right there
next to her. Her gaze shifted from Sear to the inert body of the
drone and back again.

'Are you
alright, Seline?' he asked.

'I didn't... I
didn't do anything wrong.' She looked at the lifeless eye. 'That
thing was inside me, inside my head. I think... I think it was
talking to me.'

'We should get
you to the med bay,' said Tialus.

Sear gently
placed Seline's arm around his shoulder and helped her to her feet
and led her to the elevator with the Doctor while Tialus ordered
the others to begin emergency repairs on the broken hull and double
check for any more incoming drones.

Sear led Seline
to one of the raised beds where she sat down on the edge. The
plastic covering crinkled and rubbed beneath her.

'How's your
head?' asked the Doctor.

'I don't know.
It doesn't really hurt. It just feels like everything's off
balance, kind of.'

The Doctor
shone a light into her left eye, then her right. 'Can you talk me
through what happened?'

She sighed. 'I
remembered feeling something just before the drone broke through
the barricade.'

The Doctor
placed two fingers on her neck to feel her pulse. 'What do you
mean, 'something'?'

'It was like
there was something interfering with my thoughts. Like a delay
between what I would think and what my body would do.'

The Doctor
indicated for her to lie down.

'And then
what?'

Seline stared
up at the ceiling as one of the medical bots held a large metallic
arm over her and the bed. It shone a light over her, starting at
her head, worked its way along her body.

'… When the
drone broke through the door, the feeling grew stronger. Everyone
was firing at it, I couldn't really tell what I was thinking until
it froze in front of me. I didn't know what it was supposed to do,
if it was going to vaporise me or eat me or hypnotise me or...
something...'

'Well it did
none of those things, Seline.'

'Yeah...'

'Well?'

'I was hoping
you would've said something at this point,' she said.

'What do you
mean? Said what?'

'You didn't
hear it talking then, I take it?' she said.

'No?' Sear and
the Doctor looked at one another then back to Seline.

'Great. Just me
then.'

'If it was
talking then you were the only one that could hear it. As far as we
could see the drone was frozen in place along with you then dropped
to the ground shortly after.'

The medical
machine kept running its light down the length of the Seline's
body. The Doctor read over the screen, muttering something to
himself.

'It definitely
said something to me,' said Seline. She hesitated.

'If it said
something,' said the Doctor, 'then you must have some idea of what
was being said. The tone, the pitch. There must be some indication
of intent.' He returned to his work on the screen.

Seline closed
her eyes. 'It said: “I found you. I finally found you”.'

The Doctor
looked up from his screen.

'A threat?'
asked Sear.

'I don't know.
Maybe. It wasn't painful. It felt... weird at first, like someone
was inside my head, like they were looking for something. My mind
was playing through... a memory... from when I was a kid. At first
I wasn't sure what I was seeing but some things started coming back
to me. The apartment I used to live in... the green door with the
chipped paint, the snapped metal hinges that used to support a gate
that led into the courtyard...'

'What do you
mean looking for something? What was the memory about?' asked
Sear.

Seline shook
her head. 'The memory was of me back on Earth and a man, I didn't
know it then but I think he was probably working for NeoCorp. He
was talking to my mother. But I don't think the memory was
important – I don't think the memory itself was what this thing was
looking for.'