Against Gravity (30 page)

He glanced back over towards the door and saw the first soldier reappear, armed with a pistol and taking aim.

Moving with augmented speed, Kendrick dodged to one side. When the soldier took a step back, alarm written across his face, Kendrick threw his rifle at him like a club. It slammed into the
man’s head and sent him sprawling.

Kendrick ran over, retrieved the rifle, and smashed it down on the soldier’s head, gripping the barrel with both hands. The soldier jerked and twisted spasmodically for a moment, then lay
still.

Kendrick felt as if he were watching all this from a distance, alternately appalled and exhilarated by what he was doing. Did the rage he felt come from himself, or was he now being manipulated
by his augmentations?

Maybe a little of both.

He looked quickly around, then ran up to the front of the truck. No more soldiers, not close at any rate. That didn’t mean he had much time, though. He stuck his head through the door of
the building but saw nobody there.

When Kendrick climbed into the back of the troop carrier he found, to his amazement, that he’d guessed right.

It was Caroline who was strapped down onto the pallet. She was swathed in thick blankets. He wondered where they’d intended to take her. She looked as though she was drugged but he managed
to undo the straps and lower her from the troop carrier. Lines of rogue augment growth now marred her once-beautiful face. Since the last time he’d seen her, her condition had become
dramatically worse.

Kendrick ignored the rattle of nearby gunfire and bundled Caroline into the back of the jeep. At first he didn’t realize that the shots were coming from somewhere outside the fence, but
then he watched as bullets kicked up a trail of dust leading towards another jeep, filled with soldiers, that was driving towards the perimeter. He jumped back into his own vehicle and screeched
off, not wanting to wait around.

He glanced over his shoulder to see that the other jeep had jarred to a halt, soldiers spilling out and putting as much distance as possible between the incoming fusillade and themselves. The
bullets slammed into the vehicle. An instant later it spun into the air, seemingly supported briefly by a column of fire and smoke that then slammed it flaming onto its side. Driving a jeep
suddenly didn’t seem like such a good idea.

Kendrick scanned the perimeter and saw that the entrance nearest the building seemed unguarded. He drove the jeep into the shadow of a hangar and pulled Caroline out, heaving her onto his
shoulders. She felt curiously light.

From somewhere overhead came the sound of rotors and a blast of air as an enormous black shape hovered low above him.

A searchlight on the helicopter’s undercarriage pinned and tracked Kendrick as he ran. The machine moved a little ahead of him, dropping even lower so as to block his path. He was forced
to a halt, searching wildly for some way of escape.

There was a door at one side of the hangar itself, almost hidden behind a stack of metal crates. Kendrick ran towards it and pulled at the handle. Realizing that it was securely locked, he
waited for a hail of bullets to thud into his back.

When none came, he started to kick at the door. Agony shot through his leg but the metal began to buckle under further severe impacts, the hinges starting to warp and bend.

And still no bullets. He wondered what they were waiting for.

At the instant when the door began to give way, Kendrick heard a familiar voice, electronically distorted. He flattened himself against the ruined door and crouched, partly hidden by the crates,
and looking wildly around him.

As he studied the ’copter, he had a flash of recognition and immediately knew that they were safe. With its black, bulbous nose and scarred paintwork the aircraft looked almost as if it
had been rescued from a junkyard. A shadowy figure was just visible through the canopy.

“Kendrick! Get the fuck in here!”

This time the voice was unmistakable.

Kendrick glanced past the helipcopter, and in the far distance saw one of the three shuttles rapidly gaining height on a pillar of flame. A roar like nothing he could ever have imagined filled
the air. Already flame was licking out from the engines of the remaining two spacecraft.

Just then the pilot’s door of the ’copter swung open and a figure leant out, its face obscured by insectile headgear. Kendrick grinned and ran forward, hardly daring to believe that
he’d been rescued.

Buddy.

Summer 2088 (exact date unknown)
The Maze

His stomach roiling painfully from lack of food and water, Kendrick stared down the long, empty corridor and called out, listening to his voice echoing into the lightless
distance.

He had almost convinced himself that if he searched hard enough he could find an escape route, some way of hiding from Sieracki’s cameras indefinitely.

He kept a tight grip on the long, wicked-looking knife that he had found lying in an alcove minutes after the shield doors had opened, as he had entered these lower levels for the first
time.

I could just leave the weapon here, go find Ryan, talk to him and refuse to fight.
That was the right, sane and sensible choice to make.

Kendrick knew that there was a cache of food and water, along with medical supplies, in a locked vault somewhere on the very lowest level. There were weapons too – if you could find them.
But the vault unlocked itself only when just one person remained alive.

There were other choices, of course. Some people preferred to just lie down and die. Others walked calmly into the field of fire of a gun turret to end it quickly. One side corridor had soon
been transformed into a graveyard where the corpses were dragged and left to rot. Over a few days the stench of decay, permeating the empty passageways, had become inescapable.

And there were also stories of a demon that haunted the lowest levels of all.

Kendrick glanced back in the direction of the shield door, now firmly closed behind him. Ryan had to be in here somewhere – Ryan who had sworn to his face that he would not be the one to
die. That didn’t make Kendrick any less determined to find some kind of rational compromise. But he’d been down here for over an hour now, without any sign of his selected
adversary.

More time passed, immeasurable in that endless night.

The first few times that Kendrick heard the distant roaring, he felt sure it was some form of auditory hallucination. But then he saw light flickering down in some far corner, the first light he
had seen in . . . for ever.

Perhaps, he mused, the roaring noise came from something burning. At first the flickering seemed painfully bright to him, but his augmented senses rapidly adjusted themselves. He stared along
the corridor, moving closer to the wall.

What is that?
he wondered again. It sounded very much like the roar of flames.

“Explain,” Sieracki’s voice boomed over the tannoy.

Kendrick flung himself to the corridor floor, frightened to the core by the sudden echo of the voice.

“You said something was burning? Explain,” Sieracki repeated, his voice insistent.

Perhaps, Kendrick thought, he himself had spoken without even being aware of it. The light suddenly grew much brighter.

“I don’t
know
what I saw. I—”

“Our instruments show nothing burning,” Sieracki replied in his familiar flat tones. Kendrick had heard answering machines with more emotional depth.

He framed a reply, then stopped when he saw something that he would never, ever forget.

At first Kendrick thought that the figure was burning. But if this was fire, then the flames were of liquid silver. Insane laughter filled the air and the figure ran at him, almost whooping with
joy. Kendrick stood, awestruck, as the creature ran towards him down the long corridor before stopping suddenly at an intersection.

All of a sudden, Kendrick could see something flowing through the conduits that lined the walls and ceiling. No, not seeing; more like a kind of
sensing
, like trying to hold an image
steady in his mind. There for a brief instant, gone the next, always wavering then shifting away.

It was a little like the times when he had become aware of the flow of energy in the electronics systems around him, but on a level of complexity and depth that he could never have previously
imagined. Energy, flowing through the walls, suddenly as clearly visible as the streets of a city on a summer afternoon. Bright pulses flared out everywhere from the walls and the ceiling.

Kendrick shouted out to Sieracki, unable to keep himself from babbling. “What was that? You never told us about this. Is it human? For God’s sake, what is it?”

“Explain.”

“I saw him glowing. I never imagined . . . I thought he was on fire.”

Kendrick stared up at the nearest camera. “Didn’t you see it?”

Sieracki was silent this time.

Kendrick wandered, lost, until he came to yet another of the Maze’s thousand intersections. Here a shaft curved down into murky blackness. Empty offices filled with
shadows beckoned him on either side. He gripped his knife tighter, imagining Ryan lurking in there, waiting.

He climbed down the dark stairwell, the air echoing with his lonely footsteps. Tiny lenses glittered here and there, crudely epoxied to any available surface. He pictured Sieracki watching him from the comfort of his own office.

From somewhere ahead sounded the clattering of feet. Kendrick ducked into an empty office space till the noise began to recede. Something metal gleamed at him in the corner of the room.

He picked it up: a catapult. Not a child’s toy, however, for this one looked deadly. Next to it lay a small box filled with steel balls. He wondered how much damage could be done to a
human body with such a missile.

Nobody who returned from the lower levels had ever reported finding firearms there. Of course, firearms lacked artistry from the point of view of a man like Sieracki. Just aim and fire –
that wouldn’t tell Wilber what a bio-augmented soldier might achieve in hand-to-hand combat. A catapult or a knife was more visceral, more immediate. In the context of Sieracki’s grand
experiment, they made perfect sense.

Disgust and self-loathing filled Kendrick as he threw the catapult down where he had found it. He stepped back out into the corridor, flooded with sudden hatred.

“Can you hear me, Sieracki?” he screamed, his voice echoing down the empty corridors. “Fuck you, I’m not playing your game any more! Do you hear me? Sieracki!”

“But you have to.” The voice sounded close, very close. “Or else he’ll just kill both of us.”

Ryan lunged out of the shadows. Kendrick caught sight of him at the last second. He spun out of the way, crashing into a wall as something hot streaked across the side of his chest. He felt a
stinging warmth traverse his flesh.

Ryan’s forward momentum had sent him crashing into an ancient file trolley and tumbling to the ground amid clouds of dust. Kendrick felt a sudden desire to fight, to win. The knife was
already in his hand, poised for a killing lunge. Instead, he stepped rapidly away from Ryan, keeping the knife pointed towards his adversary, so that at least he could defend himself.

“For Christ’s sake, Ryan, just listen to me. There has to be a way out of here. We could—”

“There isn’t,” Ryan growled, picking himself up from the dust. There was a determination in the words as he met Kendrick’s gaze.

“There has to be,” Kendrick insisted.

He glanced down to see blood soaking through the thin paper of his shirt. Ryan had injured him – but surely it was only a flesh wound? He was still standing, still ready to protect
himself.

“Uh-uh,” said Ryan, shaking his head. He was carrying a knife like Kendrick’s. Dried blood stained the dusty floor between them, and Kendrick tasted bile at the back of his
throat. “Next time, defend yourself,” Ryan warned him, backing away. “I never said I was going to make this easy for you.”

Ryan turned and fled. Kendrick watched him go, dumbfounded. Then he went back to pick up the catapult.

Peering down a stairwell, Kendrick saw flickering light somewhere far below.

“You’re in my head,” he whispered to himself. “You’re not real.”

real am real am real

Kendrick cried out at the pain that had just exploded inside his skull. The words sounded defeaning, overwhelming: but they did not echo.

In my head
. He pushed himself down the steps towards the burning figure, the light around it flickering like silent lightning. Again he perceived lines of energy flowing through the walls
and ceiling, but they were now far more evident than before. It was as if he could deduce the layout of the Maze in its entirety, reduced to a schematic displaying the flow of electrons throughout
its structure.

He looked closer and realized that the burning figure was Robert Vincenzo, Caroline’s brother. But transformed – no longer human. Kendrick halted, frozen to the spot. Then Robert was
gone, turning and fleeing into the depths.

Eventually Kendrick found the will to put one foot in front of the other, continuing his descent.

Even from far away, Robert’s words still filled Kendrick’s head.

the bright began it

“Began what?”

everything
came the reply.
they woke on the archimedes and waited such a long time now they know we are here

“You’re going to have to explain that more clearly, Robert.”

they see themselves in us

The voice faded suddenly, interrupted by a series of high-pitched giggles that sounded near – very near.

Kendrick wasn’t even looking for Ryan now. He just wanted to understand what had become of Robert, the only one yet to escape the Wards. He wanted to see if the flaming creature with
Robert’s face had objective reality, or if he was simply losing his mind.

A shadow flickered in the distance, accompanied by the clatter of feet on metal. Kendrick hurried towards it, finding himself on the threshold of a vast chamber filled with towering piles of
metal crates.