Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (79 page)

This room mostly appeared to be waiting, too. Dormant, maybe.

He was starting to wonder why it was so easy to get in here.

He also wondered if he was being given a tour, versus conducting an infiltration.

He walked cautiously around the catwalk to the other side of the room. Opening the door there, he found himself in another machine room. The door beyond that one led into another of those longer, warehouse-sized caverns, only this one appeared to be set up to grow crops in stacked, glass-enclosed planters that rose up to the ceiling, most of them accessible only via moving platforms on organics and hydraulics.

He walked to the end of that cavernous space and came across another organic room.

That time, he didn’t just cross over to the other side.

He stood in the middle of it instead, thinking.

Still toying with the idea of the moving platform in his head, he decided to experiment. Opening his light the barest amount, he sent out a pulse of intention.

Kindly direct me to the nearest high security areas,
he sent politely to the organic.
What is the best hidden secret down here, friend? Can you show me?

The room pulsed with an agreeable light.

Again Revik found himself thinking of a dog, or some other good-natured animal who wanted to please him.

He didn’t feel the room move.

Even so, when the lights flickered a second time, he glanced around him and saw one of the walls glowing faintly. More of the organic pooled on that side as he watched, rippling in that direction like a lit arrow on the floor.

Clicking under his breath and smiling in spite of himself, Revik began to walk.

Once he reached the wall, he didn’t need to touch it…it opened on its own.

That brought another shiver of nerves, but also a flicker of excitement.

Sending a pulse of thanks to the wall, he felt a ripple of pleasure off the organic as he walked through the narrow opening. Once he’d reached the other side, he felt the shift behind him and turned in time to see the opening in the wall evaporate.

He stared at that blank space, feeling his elation falter.

Well, he was officially at the point where he had no idea how to get back.

Not without help, either via his light or something else.

The train of thought died as soon as his eyes began to scan the walls and floors of the new room. Remembering his words to the sentient elevator, he looked around at where the being had brought him. For a few seconds, his mind couldn’t make much sense of what he was seeing.

Low-ceilinged, most of the room was dark, and outside of his visual range.

In front of him stood a round, raised platform, dimly lit and with a panel on a stand, what looked like a handprint scanner. Revik had no reason to think it would let him in…or even that it wouldn’t ID and then kill him if he put his hand there.

He felt a pull to place his fingers and palm there anyway.

Feeling that pull strengthen, some part of him balked.

It crossed his mind again to wonder just how much he was being manipulated right now…by whatever construct or organics might live down here, by the construct they’d built over the City above…by Menlim himself. He’d known for awhile he was being affected by the Dreng’s constructs, despite Menlim adhering to at least the bare letter of the law in terms of their agreement. Simply working and living here was affecting him.

Lately, he’d felt that more in small ways than large ones.

His moods. His desire to drink. His desire to fuck…even to be hit.

The aggression that rose in his light, the anger that didn’t entirely feel like his. The ease with which he slid into negative head spaces. The ease with which he grew paranoid…and cynical…and contemptuous of humans. The part of his mind that wanted to paint his light as different, to make his loneliness…even his pain…into something exceptional, noble even.

His fucking ego. Ego mixed with that damned savior complex that still dogged him from his childhood…the same one Allie got on him about constantly.

Worse than any of that was feeling cut off. Feeling
alone.
Feeling so fucking alone here, to the point of near-constant separation pain.

He fought to push that out of his light, too.

He hadn’t stopped walking as all of that drifted in and out of his light.

Now he stepped up on that platform, looking down over the darkened space, feeling too close to the ceiling. As soon as he stood on the platform, the floor illumination in that larger space rose. Not a lot, but enough to get a better sense of the dimensions, which stretched about five times as long as Revik’s mind had been imagining…enough that Revik saw that floor as another green organic, but not as dark in color as the sentient elevator.

Unlike the others, this room evoked the feel of a lab.

It had more of that “science” and “research” stamp on it than either the cavern with the vats or that massive underground greenhouse, although nothing in the physical details either refuted that impression or supported it.

The room itself appeared to be entirely empty.

What looked like giant-sized manhole covers covered that organic floor, buried in the living metal, nearly flush with it at the edges. Unlike the shimmering green of the organic, those round discs shone a lighter silver-gray like burnished metal. They pushed out of the floor’s surface from being convex, maybe as much as half a foot, so they might be difficult to walk on.

They reminded Revik vaguely of covered missile silos he’d seen in Siberia. So of course his mind immediately went to bombs, or some kind of air defense system.

But that made no sense down here, either.

Taking a breath, he sent up a silent prayer to the Ancestors.

Then he laid his bare palm and fingers on the scanner.

An alarm went off at once. He felt it in the higher parts of his light.

It triggered a denser layer of his shield even before his mind caught up with what he’d felt.

Movement in front of him drew his eyes.

Fighting to think past the now-deafening Barrier alarm, he watched as the first of those manhole-type discs rose out of the floor. A green-tinted cylinder of organic glass appeared below the disc as it rose.

Revik stared, seeing the ring of bodies and faces as it appeared.

They formed a bizarre circle facing outward, every face identical.

The body shape of each figure was identical too, beyond that of identical twins. The exactness in height and proportions challenged his mind and sight…and disturbed him, too, maybe due to some element of the Uncanny Valley effect, or maybe because he recognized the face and body of each individual in the rounded row of figures.

It was Eddard.

He’d never seen Eddard naked before.

Even so, the body was unmistakable, even without clothes. He stared from one of those bodies to the next, noting identical moles and identical flaccid penises and identical bald spots and even identical operation scars from an appendix he may or may not have ever had.

He paused on the armbands each of the bodies wore, until movement to his right jerked his gaze and his light that way.

Another of the manhole covers gently rose.

Revik found himself staring at another face and body he recognized, although not as well as he knew Eddard’s. He recognized her though, from those fucking towers in New York. He’d pegged her as a seer, with Middle Eastern features if she’d been human.

She’d screamed at the others to stop him.

He’d shot her.

Looking over the rows of her inside another green-tinted glass cylinder, he felt vaguely sick, noting her shaved genital area and navel ring even as his eyes slid up to her long dark hair and the tattoo she wore over one breast. Each body resembled the same woman in her mid to late forties if she were human, maybe even early fifties. If she was seer, she’d be close to Balidor’s age, so roughly in the three hundred to four hundred year range.

A third manhole cover was rising.

Revik found himself staring in near-fascination at a row of bodies of the old woman, Novak…well, Xarethe, according to the files Balidor dug up on her. The Adhipan had ID’d her as a seer, too. Looking at the row of wrinkled, lizard-like faces in stasis with their helmet of white-gray hair, Revik wondered if they had any fucking idea what these beings really were.

Which brought his mind to a host of other questions.

Were they just clones of the originals…made into new corpses over and over again to be reused? Or were these bodies just an elaborate smokescreen? Did the beings behind them, like Terian, come from a different body altogether?

The sickness in his gut worsened when he saw the fourth cylinder rise, filled with a ring of bodies that resembled a sixty-something Caucasian human.

He might be a seer too, of course, but his coloring and features were so unusual for a seer, Revik found himself doubting it, in terms of the body, at least.

Revik remembered shooting that one in New York, too.

Jumping down off the platform, he began walking through the cylinders, feeling like he was in some kind of futuristic mausoleum.

The faces all wore slack expressions, eyes closed. Hands hung open at their sides, locked in place by thin organic loops that held their limbs in exactly the same place for each body. They all wore identical bracelets with different numbers on them.

ID tags, most likely. Iteration or version IDs, or maybe it meant more than that.

Revik began walking faster.

The construct alarm had been turned off he noticed, but he had no illusions that his presence hadn’t been discovered by now. He couldn’t feel anyone coming yet, but he knew they would be. Realizing the gig really was up, that they would know where and who he was by now, he went into the Barrier long enough to scan the room for real.

Immediately, he got a ping for the opposite wall.

Clicking out, he switched directions with his feet.

He began walking rapidly, reaching a near-jog by the time he’d gone more than a few steps. He’d felt movement in the construct as soon as he’d opened his light.

They were definitely coming for him.

He also felt some debate about whether they could knock him out from here.

Reaching the organic wall, he didn’t wait but put his palms on the rippling dark-green surface. Feeling the organic with his light, directly that time, he immediately sensed the security protocols that had kicked in. He didn’t wait but slid further into the Barrier, talking to the organic directly.

Let me in…
he told it.
There has been a mistake. Chasing subject. Time limited…

…no mistake dehgoies revik security clearance denied…

I’m with security,
he sent, pushing harder on the decision-making protocol as he worked to run a real hack with his light.
Not Dehgoies Revik. You have made a mistake. Identity wrong…

…no mistake identity confirmed dehgoies revik aka sword not authorized for entry activate gas in fourteen seconds if subject does not maintain security mandated distance and wait for removal by arriving team…

Telekinesis will override,
Revik sent, more to see what it would say.