Trapped (42 page)

Impervia turned to the rest of us and mouthed,
Wait; listen.
Annah and I obeyed. The Caryatid didn't. She gave her flames a moment to finish charring the last of the curds (filling the air with the smell of meat as the Keeper's face roasted), then she and her fireball moved forward. We hurried after her, fanning out so we weren't easy fodder for a single burst from an Element gun. Even Annah moved off on her own, wearing Impervia's too-big coat and cradling the Element gun in her arms. When I tried to tag along behind her, she waved me off: all her concentration was focused on the room before us, eyes and ears straining for any sign of trouble.

So we moved forward—like a platoon in enemy territory, walking silently in a line between trees. In our case, the "trees" were giant steel generators, two stories tall, their cooling fans motionless. The sparse lighting proved the station still had power, but it must have been coming from batteries; the turbines had all run dry.

With so many individual turbines and so many pillars holding up the roof, the Keepers would have had plenty of places to hide for an ambush; but apart from the single corpse, there was no one left in the room. After a while, I realized the Keepers must want to avoid a firelight in the midst of their machinery: Element guns could damage the generators, or even bring down the ceiling. That would be disastrous, especially since this equipment was virtually irreplaceable—the turbines were OldTech originals, bearing the names of defunct manufacturers, covered with a hundred coats of paint, jury-rigged with patch-wires, emergency welds, and other obvious repairs to squeeze a few more years from antique rust-heaps. A battle in this room might put the final nail in the coffin of machines that were ready to be junked anyway.

How long before this whole place ground to a halt from its own obsolescence? A few years, no more. If Jode had possessed any patience, the blasted Lucifer could have sat back and waited for this plant to stop on its own.

But that wasn't Jode's way. A passive approach wouldn't produce nearly enough death and suffering.

I tightened my grip on the Element gun and continued forward.

The far end of the chamber held another doorway... or rather a hole knocked into the room's original wall. This wasn't the work of Sebastian—this hole had clean edges painted the same green as the rest of the place. I suspected the hole had been dug when the Sparks took over the power plant, whenever that was.

The opening was three paces wide and the same distance high, hidden from other parts of the room by nearby turbines. I appreciated the concealment. The Ring of Knives were somewhere to our rear; by now, they must have picked up Element guns of their own, plucked from the hands of dead Keepers. Our only protection was staying out of sight: scuttling into the hole in front of us before Elizabeth Tzekich could catch up. I had the strong suspicion we were retreating down a dead-end passage... but staying put was certain suicide.

Jode and Sebastian were somewhere ahead. No doubt Dreamsinger was too—since she hadn't joined the ambush at the elevator or taken a stand to prevent Jode from reaching the generator room, she must be farther on, protecting something even more important. An electric cage full of Lucifers? I didn't know... but I'd soon find out.

The hole in the wall led to a tunnel dug into Niagara bedrock—limestone, cold and gray. Rubber-coated cables as thick as my arm had been strung down the tunnel: dozens of them lined the walls, spaced a hand's breadth apart and fastened to the rock on ceramic insulator mounts. They obviously fed power from the turbines to whatever lay ahead... and when the electricity was actually flowing, this tunnel must have been saturated with an awesome magnetic field induced by the inevitable fluctuations in so much current. I didn't want to think what would happen to a living creature who wandered into the corridor while most of the energy of Niagara Falls coursed through such a small area. Is there such a thing as death by magnetism?

Now, however, the power was dead. Not just because the Falls were shut off: each of the electric cables had been severed cleanly near the mouth of the tunnel... thick strands of copper sliced as easily as if they were melted cheese. It had to be Sebastian's work—even if the Falls resumed their flow, the power lines wouldn't be repaired any time soon.

The tunnel had no built-in lights, so we were forced to depend on the Caryatid's fireball—like Moses and the children of Israel guided by flame through the desert night. The fireball's blaze would give us away to anyone watching from farther up the tunnel... but I was willing to take that risk. My nerves were too frayed to creep through pitch blackness into the mouth of heaven-knows-what.

Anyway, the people watching from farther up the tunnel turned out to be dead.

The first indication was the barrel of an Element gun dangling limply from a slit in the tunnel wall. A hand was attached to the trigger, but no person attached to the hand. When I peeked through the slit, I saw the remains of the shooter, but couldn't tell whether the corpse was male or female, young or old.

The body had been compressed to a bloody mass the size of a roast turkey. Its top still showed dark curly hair; near the bottom was a recognizable toe; but in between lay nothing except a mangle of flesh and robes, with slivers of bone sticking out at sharp angles. I could only conjecture that the air had closed around the gunner like a giant fist, then pressure had been applied down on the head, up on the feet, until the whole body was crushed into a ball.

Blood had squirted like juice from a squeezed tomato. Death must have been quick and loud. I could almost hear the crunching of bones still echoing through the tunnel.

And the wall had many more slits... with many more balled-up corpses. This was the kill-zone Annah had expected earlier: a shooting gallery where Keepers could massacre anyone coming up the tunnel. Gun-slits ran along both walls, offset from each other so there was little chance of the defenders on the left accidentally shooting the ones on the right. The crossfire would have been devastating. Any conventional invader would be stopped right here, bathed in bullets, fire, and acid.

But the people behind the gun-slits had no protection against psionics. Sebastian talked to his nanite friends... and the Keepers' resistance had literally been crushed.

The tunnel extended another hundred meters. Its smell grew foul: blood and feces from the dead. A few more hours and the unventilated tunnel would be a nightmare of putrid gases; an open flame like the Caryatid's fireball would surely set off an explosion. For the moment, though, the bodies were fresh enough that they didn't constitute a danger—just a cloying stink that made my gorge rise.

I was therefore glad when I saw light ahead—even though it meant we were approaching the final hell. One way or another, this would soon be over. Sebastian, Jode, Dreamsinger, and the Ring had all drawn together... with us in the middle.

End of the line. End of the quest. I was drained enough to be happy it had finally arrived.

The Caryatid gestured for her fireball to stay back so we could approach the tunnel mouth without attracting attention. Deep breaths all around... then we silently padded forward.

The final chamber looked almost as big as the generator room, but lit more dimly: with a faint violet glow like a guttering candle-flame inside tinted glass. The light didn't come from bulbs overhead; it trickled from the middle of the room, barely strong enough to reach the rock-hewn walls.

Hush, hush, moving slowly: the Caryatid and Impervia stuck close to the right hand wall of the tunnel, while Annah and I took the left. We advanced until we could see the source of the light.

The Caryatid's "feeling" had been right. The power plant's secret was a prison: a perfect cube, twenty by twenty by twenty meters, raised slightly off the floor. Its edges were sharp strands of violet light—so straight they had to be OldTech lasers, their beams crisp but with a grainy texture. Where the beams met at each corner, a small box of glass and chrome floated in the air... not suspended on wires or poles, but simply hovering as if supported by the light rays themselves. I suspected those boxes were the source of the lasers, each little machine projecting the light in razor-fine lines to the three adjacent corners. The faces of the cube, framed by violet, looked perfectly transparent—nothing there, as if you could simply step over the nearest edge-beam and into the cube's interior. I knew that couldn't be true. A prison is still a prison, even if you can't see the walls.

Inside that prison cage loomed a shapeless black bulk: a mound as big as a house, its surface like coal dust in the lasers' violet glow. As we watched, a ripple went through the heap, like a shiver in a horse's flank. It made a sandy sound... as if the mass before us was constructed of small dry grains rasping against each other with the motion. One could almost mistake the thing for a dark lifeless dune, and the ripple we'd seen no more than the drifting effect of an errant breeze; but there
was
no breeze so deep underground, and the mound radiated a brooding intelligence that pressed against my skull.

The thing in the cage was a living creature. And it was watching us.

This was what Jode had come to release. An old-style un-mutated Lucifer, of the kind Opal met in the tobacco field: dark and dry "like gunpowder" she'd said. And like gunpowder, this huge mound had dangerous explosive potential. It was a giant of Jode's kind: perhaps a hive mother, a queen that could spawn thousands of shapeshifting young.

But the creature in the cage wasn't only a pile of dark grains. Dozens of incongruous objects protruded from its surface, like animal bones jutting out of desert sand. I saw long glass tubes; lumps of metal; cards of green plastic with wires embedded; and frosted white pustules that resembled lightbulbs.

Lightbulbs. Like the live ones in Niagara's hotels, or the burnt-out rejects in souvenir shops. They bulged profusely from the dusty mass, as if the monster was a garish casino marquee that had just been turned off. Was the caged Lucifer eating the bulbs... or was it
extruding
them?
Producing
them.

Could Jode and its alien kind do more than mimic other people and things? Could they actually create such objects for real?

In our journey through the generating station, we'd seen no other facilities for high-tech manufacturing: nowhere the Keepers could make bulbs, appliances, or any of the other electrical goods in use throughout the tourist areas. We hadn't searched the whole plant... but looking at the caged alien, I knew we didn't have to. This creature was the source of Niagara's largesse. The Keepers must feed it a diet of metal scraps, hydrocarbons, and whatever other components were needed as raw materials; then the monster's unearthly biochemistry somehow assembled the basic elements into complex electrical devices.

One had to admire Spark Royal's efficiency—why let a prisoner loaf in idleness, when your captive could be put to work?

On the other hand, who'd be crazy enough to enter that cage and retrieve the beast's creations? No one was that desperate for lightbulbs. And at first glance, I couldn't see any way to enter the cube unless you turned off the laser barrier... a terrible idea, even if you only shut down the beams for an instant. What kind of fool would risk freeing a gigantic Lucifer, just so hotels could play bad OldTech music?

I was so distracted staring at the thing in the cage that many long seconds passed before I realized there was no one else visible in the room. No Sebastian, no false Rosalind, no Dreamsinger. I leaned my head out of the tunnel mouth to get a better view. There were open entrances on either side of the tunnel, leading into the two recesses where the Keepers had died at their gun-slits; but those were the only side-rooms and they contained nothing but corpses.

Our quarry had to be on the far side of the cage. Anyone over there would be hidden from us by the great pile of gunpowder dust. I glanced at Impervia and the Caryatid; they were looking at Annah and me with grim expressions on their faces.
Ready?
Impervia mouthed.

Annah and I nodded. Together, we four crept into the room.

The creature in the cage took no notice of our presence... no more than the occasional shiver across its powdery surface. I assumed it could see us, despite its lack of eyes; it could probably hear us and smell us too. But it showed no sign of caring as we entered the room—it just lay silent, watching.

Waiting till the lasers died from lack of power.

The cables coming out of the tunnel fanned out around the rocky walls of the chamber, circling the perimeter of the room and converging again on the other side of the cage. Because of the alien blocking our view, we couldn't see where the cables rejoined; but I assumed they connected to some machine on the far side, thereby feeding power to the lasers. The lasers were now subsisting on battery power... and I dearly hoped the batteries wouldn't fail as we were tiptoeing past the cage.

Impervia led, followed by the Caryatid and her fireball. Annah and I trailed behind; she walked with her finger on her Element gun's trigger, ready to fire at a moment's notice. I had my gun ready too... and I'd set the weapon to shoot all four barrels at once. Bullets, fire, acid, sound: tonight there was no such thing as overkill.

As we moved forward, Impervia drew her knife—not a fighting weapon, but just a jack-knife she carried for cutting tough meat and trimming candlewicks. I wondered what good that would do against Jode... but I decided she'd pulled out the blade more to bolster her spirits than to use in battle.

Unless she intended to slit her own throat if things got too rough. Magdalenes considered unwarranted suicide a mortal sin... but when death was truly inevitable, they approved of flamboyant gestures that robbed their enemies of complete victory.

Better to stab your own heart than allow an infidel to do it.

At last we reached a point where we could see behind the giant Lucifer. The electric cables from the turbines hooked up to a device that had to be the main controller for the laser cage. It was bigger than I expected: a box of black metal and plastic the size of a privy-shack. The box even had doors—one opening out into the cavern and another into the prison cube. Looking at it, I realized the shack was more than just a machine that controlled the lasers; it served as a sort of airlock that would let Keepers enter the cage to retrieve the lightbulbs and other things produced by the captive beast.