The Forgotten City (22 page)

E
li’s expectations of Duskmaveth-Aendor had centered around one word – spooky. He’d envisioned decrepit buildings, gothic gloom, dust and webs and haunted shadows. So when he and Ismail stepped into a suburb of ultra-modern structures, blinding lights and cleanliness almost to the point of sterility, his jaw dropped a little. Being dissipaters, spectral-breeds didn’t need stairs or doors or windows, so all the buildings were architecturally mind-bending, glowing alien structures, alarming and ethereal, twisting high into the black ceiling of the subterranean level. It definitely didn’t feel like a lower-level suburb. It felt as if they were discovering a new and advanced civilization, except for one thing: there was not a soul in sight. The streets were completely empty, eerily so, and the silence was deafening. Eli stood in the middle of a white road and looked around, feeling like the last person left after some kind of apocalyptic happening – or at least the second-last. Ismail stood beside him, Ev’r’s bag on his back. On the way there, to stop himself talking about Ev’r and provoking Ismail into emotional breakdown, Eli had babbled through ten year-cycles’ worth of political history, including the Skreaf uprising, intermixed with his personal life story, all of which Ismail had already siphoned from his thoughts but had sat through again without comment or complaint, his expression barely changing the entire time. Eli glanced at the scullion; with his fatigues and weapon belt, a spare which Eli had stored in the transflyer, he looked every bit the elite soldier he had once been. Really, the scullion cut an impressive figure, so much so it was easy to forget, even so soon, that he was the same person they’d dragged out of the pit. He was making a fast physical recovery, his skin nowhere near as pale and his body bulking up fast. Eli could see why Ev’r had been drawn to him – he felt a slight platonic man-crush himself – maybe because Ismail’s brooding and silently furious presence reminded him a bit of the commander. At that thought, a spike of grief made Eli flinch. They had to keep moving. His front-core signal had dissolved into interference as soon as they had entered the level, the surges of Cos magics proving too much for the experimental system. Fortunately, his external system was still up and running. He checked their navigation against the touch map, which was leading them to where that concentration of Quartermaine’s fingerprints was located.

“It looks like it’s at the end of this street,” Eli said.

Ismail didn’t respond. He just waited until Eli set off, then followed, scanning his electrifier left and right, checking their surrounds in a methodical way. It made Eli wonder about the extent of his skills. “Does your telepathy work from a distance or just close up?” he asked.

Again the scullion said nothing, his dark wolf eyes roving around them.

“Where do you think they all went?” Eli said. “All the spectral-breeds?”

Ismail gave him a dubious look, then he went suddenly for his weapon belt, grabbing the binding band that the military used to stop spectral-breeds from dissipating if they needed to arrest them. Eli blinked: he and Ismail were now standing in the middle of a massive crowd. There were spectral-breeds literally everywhere – in the streets, on the buildings, in the air. Eli gulped. He took a step back and bumped into a Skilsy Wraith. It stared down at him with hostility in its gray eyes. He pulled away, brushing against another, then spun and stumbled, falling straight through the vaporous body of a Phantom. They were all pressing close and no one looked happy to see them.

Eli scrambled to his feet and said, “Hi folks. We don’t mean to disturb.”

When they didn’t respond, he murmured to Ismail, “Maybe put the band away.”

“Disperse!” Ismail shouted out to the crowd, but they just closed in tighter. Eli noticed several Specters among the gathering and gulped again, keeping his arms firmly at his sides.

“It’s not like it was,” he whispered to Ismail. “The military no longer has power in these places …”

“It never really did,” Ismail growled back. He drew his electrifier and armed it. Eli’s skin prickled as Cos magics swelled around them and the ground started to tremble.

“It’s not alright – I mean, it
is
alright,” Eli called, trying to calm the mounting threat.

His com buzzed and he snatched it up. Diamond’s voice came through, amplified.

“Attention, spectral-breeds, this man is Eli Anklebiter, known to have saved many of your kind during the Skreaf witch invasion.”

Upon hearing these words, the crowd actually stopped and Eli could see thousands of pale faces looking over and through each other at him, the hostility of their eyes starting to fade. He did his best to look heroic, putting his hands awkwardly on his hips, then dropping them immediately, feeling ridiculous. The spectral-breeds said nothing, but gradually the crowd started to thin as they vanished in groups and pairs, until once more Eli and Ismail were alone. It was only then that Eli felt how fast his heart was racing. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and murmured, “Gone …”

“They’re still here,” Ismail murmured, looking around. “Everywhere.”

Eli squinted and caught a glimpse of fast-flowing ethereal shapes all around them.

“Are they thinking about attacking us?” he said, his anxiety lingering.

“I don’t speak any spec-breed languages,” Ismail said. “But I don’t think so. They’re just watching.”

“Diamond, how did you know what was happening?” Eli asked through his external com.

“I’ve hacked your frontal lobe implant. I can see what you see,” she replied.

“Oh,” Eli said, and then “Oh,” once more because he hadn’t realized the system was hackable – and he was the designer. He was starting to see a slightly disconcerting theme emerging.

“But don’t worry, I can’t read your mind because the actual system has crashed. It’s just an optical portal at this stage,” Diamond continued, sounding a lot more coherent than she had up until this point. “By the way – I love you.”

Just out of reflex Eli almost said it straight back, but managed to stifle the words with a cough, then said, “Carry on,” and disconnected the signal.

He and Ismail continued down the street until the navigator brought them to a grate in the road dropping into darkness. Eli stared down with trepidation. If there was one place that childhood horror stories had completely spoiled for him, it was dark storm drains. Ill-ease squeezed his neck.

“Down here – I think,” he said, restraining a bout of terrified laughter.

Ismail’s iron composure didn’t waver at all. He just bent down, wrenched up the grating and started climbing through. Eli followed, inching down the rungs, his hands slippery and the smell of wet rust heavy in his nose.

He kept moving until his feet found solid ground. Ismail was waiting there, his eyes glowing red in the dark. Eli fumbled his night-vision specs and dropped them to the ground. As he ducked down to grab them, he heard a series of clicking sounds echoing in the enclosed space. A red glow flared all around them, and when Eli stood, he saw the light was projecting from Ismail’s eyes. The scullion continued to make the clicking noises and Eli realized what was happening. The echolocation skill from Ismail’s bat blood was coupling with the nocturnal sight capability of his wolf blood and producing a projection of their surroundings. What Eli was seeing wasn’t just a lit-up space, but Ismail’s mental translation of the space, based on the click echoes, projected through his eyes. It was complex and seriously impressive. “That is truly amazing,” Eli spoke his thoughts in a slightly entranced voice. He’d never known another person who could do that.

Ismail didn’t respond. He just moved to a doorway in one of the walls and stepped through, clearing their path right and left with his electrifier. He gestured to Eli, who gripped his own weapon and followed.

Using the navigator as reference, they descended deep into the underbelly of Duskmaveth, closing in on the place of massed fingerprints. When they had almost reached it, a flash of reflection up ahead made Ismail pause. The red glow of his projection swept across the face of a Midnight Man.

“Luther!” Eli whispered and started to step forward, but Ismail’s hand clasped firmly onto his shoulder. On second look, Eli realized it wasn’t Luther, but an actual full-blood Midnight Man, and he was not alone. There was a cluster of four or five standing there, sleeping together until mid-dark, when they would wake to feed on the near dead. Eli checked his chronograph – a half hour to mid-dark, which meant they had half an hour to get the information and get out. It didn’t sound like enough.

They crept past the sleeping Midnight Men, the navigation finally bringing them to a fortified door. It had a complicated custom-made locking system, designed to keep out intruders of every race, including dissipating spectral-breeds. Eli knew that people didn’t use this level of security unless they had something serious to hide. With a heavy sense of dread, he kneeled down and injected a syringe full of a nanobug virus from his belt into the system. It spread out, distracting and redirecting the inbuilt security, covering Eli as he hacked in and took control. He found the unlocking codes and triggered them. The door shuddered as the locks shunted open.

Eli stepped back and Ismail kicked open the door, rushing in first. Blue lights flickered on and Eli heard Ismail call, “Clear.” Keeping his electrifier up, Eli stepped around the doorpost and peered around at a large empty space. The concrete floor was stained with rust where equipment and benches had sat for a long time before being cleared out. Only a smell lingered, a sterile stink that turned Eli’s stomach. He glanced at Ismail, but the scullion seemed unmoved. He strode to the center of the room and stopped there to stand watch, well and truly in military mode. Eli wondered for a moment how much insight Ismail had into his behavior while he was in this changed state of mind, if he remembered why he was doing what he was doing, or if everything was blanked out except the mission objective – which in this case was finding the tracker team. Ismail’s face gave nothing away and again Eli was reminded of the commander. It gave Eli some insight into why Ev’r had gotten involved with Copernicus, albeit briefly, when they were much younger. 

Eli walked further in, looking around for clues as to who this Ezra Quartermaine was and what he’d been doing there. He spotted a tech-port in one wall where a computer system had been plugged in and felt a surge of excitement. He ran to it and hooked up his own system, setting up an extractor to harvest the code remaining in the socket. Most people thought once they’d unplugged their computer and removed it all traces of their work would be gone, but in reality a huge amount of data was permanently stored in the tech-port and could be accessed with the right programs.

As the data started to flow into his system, Eli saw it wasn’t going to be as easy as extract-and-read – everything was double-, even triple-coded, and embedded with several destroyer viruses designed to self-destruct the information if anyone unauthorized tried to open it. This was going to be tricky and delicate. He reached out to begin the unlocking process, but his com buzzed at his hip, startling him. “Yes?” he answered.

“Don’t enter that code!” Diamond said and Eli froze. “You can’t cold-hack the viruses or you’ll whiteout your whole system. They’re advanced cybernetic necrons disguised as simple destroyers. You have to impregnate them with back-up fillers first so when they blow, everything is duplicated.”

“Right,” Eli said, again feeling stunned by her depth of knowledge and ashamed he’d written her off so quickly. “Has anyone ever told you you’re brilliant? Because you’re brilliant.”

Diamond paused. “Just you – now.”

Eli started typing fast, then said with excitement, “The fillers are working – everything is translating over, but the decryption is running really slowly.”

“There’s nothing you can do except decrypt in smaller sections,” Diamond replied.

“Okay – thanks.” Eli disconnected the com to preserve battery life and continued manually decrypting sections of data as quickly as he could, until a good portion was decoded. He let the rest keep running while he accessed the voice search function and said, “The Indemeus X.”

A full-length hologram of corrupted code flared up in front of him and he typed again, rapidly striking the holographic keyboard, throwing repair filters and patches onto the data until at least half was readable. He sped through the words.

“Anything?” Ismail spoke up behind him.

“Nothing on who or what the X is …” He continued reading as he spoke. “But it looks like Ezra Quartermaine is or was a scientist working on a number of theory-based projects directed at combating the X and his underlings, the Arequium Mors.”

“What theories?” Ismail questioned.

“Well, the first theory involves someone named Shah-Jahan RaAhura having, it looks like, ancestral power to defeat the X – but that’s marked ‘untested’. The first tested theory was Project Nÿr-Corum – it was a breeding program between human-breeds and something called Dray. They were trying to breed in resistance to the Arequium Mors mental influence. They must be telepaths of some sort, I’m guessing. The project was a failure, hypothesis disproved.” Eli glanced back at Ismail. “Any of this making sense to you?”

Ismail shook his head, his expression grim.

“This
scientist
then started Project Spectral Defense, trying to mix human-breed and spectral-breed DNA to develop the same resistance … Oh, here he writes that he’s discovered the Arequium Mors are actually a variety of spectral-breed. This project also failed.” A series of disturbing holograms of twisted cross-bred human-spectrals appeared before them, all the test subjects languishing behind glass and bars in conditions of abject misery or hideous death. Eli’s mind jumped immediately to Luther. From the dates of these images, Luther would be the right age to have been a subject. Eli felt nauseated and when he spoke again his voice was shaky.

“The final recorded project is titled ‘Project Vortex Portal’, and it looks like Ezra Quartermaine teamed up with the Omarians to test a theory about creating a vortex between two portals strong enough to contain an entire planet, which is completely impossible and insane. I mean, the physics …” His mind raced around figures and numbers, spiraling into an infinity of impossibilities. “That’s all that’s decoded so far of the projects —” He looked at Ismail and saw the scullion’s eyes were fixated onto something on the holographic screen.