Then a voice spoke to him, and Rigel opened his eyes to another reality.
You have come, Light Shaper. I am sorry you did. The corruption is too strong….
Prepare to be destroyed.
BARROW SAW
the big machine close around Rigel with a finality he did not like.
“Let me know the second anything goes wrong,” he told him. But Rigel did not seem to hear.
Barrow watched as what he guessed was the preparation procedure started, pinning Rigel to the seat and covering his head with an operator helmet. Barrow felt another twinge of anxiety as the readouts flickered on the command console. They indicated that Rigel was making the transition.
Barrow wondered if they were doing the right thing, coming all this way on a mission neither of them understood very well. At the beginning it had all been about survival for Barrow, keeping his job, then sticking with Rigel because he owed him. Things had changed, though. Now he stayed with Rigel because he wanted to, because he enjoyed his company and also because he had started to feel something real for him. It was something he had honestly never thought he would experience. It had only been a few short days, but Barrow knew from experience that the quickest way to get to know a person’s real self was to go together through hardship. Like this crisis. Sure, he had no idea what Rigel’s favorite book was or whether he hated cats, but he had seen things that meant more than superficial details: Rigel’s bravery, his resourcefulness, his honesty. He was a good man who liked Barrow back, and Barrow had been around long enough to know that such a thing was incredibly difficult to find and even harder to keep.
He intended to keep it. It was frustrating that he was locked out here, unable to help Rigel in what he was doing, but Barrow knew that even if he had been able to connect alongside him, there would have been very little he could have done. He had extremely limited experience with virtual reality of any sort, and in there it was not the size of your muscles that mattered but the power of your brain.
“Good luck, Rigel,” he said quietly. “Whatever it is you are doing in there, give them hell.”
He stepped back and looked around the room. Maybe he could not help him in the virtual world, but there was plenty he could do to make sure things would be safe when Rigel woke up again. Like performing a thorough recon to find out whether they were truly alone.
He walked around the dimly lit room, mildly bothered by the hundreds of little blinking lights that belonged to electronics he didn’t understand. He was looking for some kind of security console, something that could give him access to the building surveillance systems that he knew had to exist in a military compound like this. He was trusting his luck that he would be able to access them without identification of any sort now that Rigel was hooked up to what he supposed was the nerve center of the computer system.
He made two full circuits around the room. Nothing.
The virtual screen Rigel had used to call up the operator chair was not accessible anymore, and there were no other interface surfaces of any kind that Barrow could find. There had to be something, though. If Barrow had been in charge of designing security for this most important room in the entire compound, then….
He would have set the panel outside. In the buffer zone between the two big doors.
It was the perfect spot if the goal was to keep the servers in isolation. Barrow walked over to the first of the heavy doors, which remained wide open. He crossed the threshold carefully, vaguely afraid of setting off something that would seal the room off and trap Rigel inside. Barrow did not have the magic quantum drive Rigel had used to unlock every door they had come across, and if the doors closed on Barrow, they would both be trapped. Probably for good.
The security panel was right there, set against the wall, just as Barrow had expected. It was dusty, and something above it had cracked open, but when Barrow touched the input surface, the screen came to life immediately. He was relieved to see it was both unlocked and understandable, and he immediately called up the main menu.
He was amazed by what he saw. The first thing on display was a fully interactive two-dimensional map of the entire compound, listing underground levels as well as those on top of the mesa. The place was large, larger than Barrow had ever imagined. Whoever had built it had tunneled deep into the rock of the desert and created a maze of interconnected levels that spread far beyond any of the textbook images he had seen in history class. There were underground vaults big enough to contain the server room dozens of times over, judging by the scale. Their contents were a mystery, but Barrow wondered what kind of things could be kept in those gigantic spaces. The more he browsed the map, the more he doubted that even the university had knowledge of every single room there was to find, and he belatedly wondered if he was the first person to see this map since its builders had all perished. Or maybe CradleCorp had kept the information secret, although that didn’t make any sense. Barrow knew enough about CradleCorp now to be certain that if they’d had the level of access into the ancient systems he had right now, the entire place would have long since been cannibalized for its technology.
He reluctantly left the map alone and tried to find more useful information by minimizing the image. Many of the links could not be accessed, particularly those that related to system diagnostic functions and environmental regulation, but under the security section, he found directories dedicated to everything from an extensive dossier of building artillery-class armament that Barrow doubted still worked, to a comprehensive surveillance and monitoring suite that was, thankfully, completely accessible. Barrow spent a good ten to fifteen minutes simply tapping everywhere, getting lost and having to restart, looking for something that could help him determine what he wanted to know.
He had just found and clicked on the perimeter radar system when he felt a breeze, a faint chill that was scarcely perceptible but which carried with it an echo of something Barrow had felt once before. It was stealthy but pervasive, and when Barrow looked away from the panel, he was forced to admit he had been feeling it for some time now. Getting stronger, or getting closer.
He had a good idea of what it was, and he hesitantly pushed the outer door fully open so he could have a look into the luminescent cave from which they had come.
There was nothing there, of course. Only darkness mixed with that unnerving faint glow. It was stupid, really, to get so worked up about something that reminded him of that night in his room. He could have been dreaming about that shadow, or hallucinating. It didn’t mean this stealthy cold was the same—
Click click
.
From above. And then, the faintest rustle. Where the spiral staircase would have been.
Barrow listened hard and willed his eyes to pierce the darkness. He had taken his gun out by reflex, but he had nothing to aim at.
Then a siren started blaring.
Barrow jumped, startled, but he caught himself in time to avoid firing the gun by mistake. He turned around and looked at the panel he had been using. A warning message was prominently displayed on it, the letters flashing red in time with the siren. It read:
UNAUTHORIZED APPROACH DETECTED
Barrow tapped the message, and the sirens stopped. The words vanished, and in their place the map from before appeared, only this time there were three glowing dots displayed on it in different places scattered across the compound. Two of the dots were reasonably close together, shown on one of the underground levels that had to correspond to Rigel and Barrow himself. He touched one of the dots to make sure, and a small display appeared superimposed over the map, showing him a live video feed of the server room and Rigel sitting immobile inside his operator terminal. Barrow tapped the second dot and saw himself from behind. The image was very dark, but it was obviously him.
The third dot was moving. He touched it, but all he got was a message that said “visual identification unavailable.” Barrow could tell from the map that the intruder was moving quickly over the ground-level buildings. He was at the moment inside the easternmost one, and he soon would be seeing the dismembered corpses if he hadn’t already.
He watched the little blinking light make its way across that building, through the next, and into the final one, the command center where those moving robots had attacked Barrow and Rigel. As soon as the dot entered the perimeter, a little bleep on the screen started flashing until Barrow touched it. It opened a video display with a murky and partially distorted image, as though the camera recording the images were underwater or covered by something. It didn’t matter, though. Barrow recognized the intruder now. He watched her as she moved quickly but carefully across the rows of consoles that stood between her and the door that led to the underground levels.
Diana Herrera, the CradleCorp assassin. Barrow was not surprised to find out she was not dead after the big fire in the slums. He had seen little of her but enough to know that she was a professional killer, cunning and very hard to take down.
And she was coming for them.
The video of Herrera cut off after she disappeared from the visual field of the camera that had been tracking her. Barrow quickly navigated through the menus on the security panel to see if there was any way he could seal the doors against her, but although he had access to many of the options, he had been locked out from the crucial commands. There was nothing he could do remotely, and her dot was already moving deeper into the compound. He would have to go out and meet her. He couldn’t afford to have her come here and find Rigel defenseless.
Barrow made his way as quickly as he could across the faintly glowing field of debris. He took out his flashlight, gave it a couple of hard shakes, and tried to turn it on, and he was pleasantly surprised to find out it was working just fine again. By its light he was able to find the narrow spiral staircase that rose up into the higher levels. He hurried to it, vaguely wondering why such a structure still remained standing when everything else around it had collapsed, or whether it was a new construct, perhaps built by CradleCorp or the university.
He reached the staircase and started going up. He had the upper hand on Herrera this time, and he planned to use his advantage to its fullest extent. He already knew the layout of the place, something she didn’t in all likelihood. If Barrow could surprise her just as she was coming into that room with the many doors and she wasn’t expecting it….
His flashlight started flickering when he was halfway up. Then suddenly it went out.
Barrow felt it again, the chill that had been creeping closer to him before. It seemed to be coming from above now, as if there were something on the staircase with him. Which made no sense. He had seen nothing. And yet Barrow found himself slowing down his ascent, listening in the dark, and wishing his heavy footsteps did not make quite so much noise. He gripped the metal railing with one hand and in the other he still had his flashlight. He stuck it back into his belt and took out the gun instead. He could not get distracted by stupid imaginings now. There was a killer coming to meet him, and she would not hesitate to take him down if she had half a chance.
Barrow made himself keep climbing, and very soon he was sweating, his legs protesting at the continued effort. He did not remember the staircase to have been quite this long or to have had these many steps, and he started to fear Herrera would catch up to him before he was ready. If she caught him on the staircase, he would be a sitting duck, asking to be shot and with nowhere to go. If only he could see! Then again, it was probably a good thing his flashlight had gone out. The light would have given him away instantaneously, and this way at least he wasn’t visible. It would allow him the element of surprise if he managed to get all the way up on time.
He found his way to the upper catwalk by touch, gratefully stepping away from the never-ending staircase. He took a moment to catch his breath and then started walking quickly across. The catwalk swayed as he went through, ever so gently, but the effect was disturbing now that Barrow knew exactly how high a fall it would be if he went over the railing. He started walking faster and then all-out sprinting, partly because he knew he was running out of time but also because some part of him was urging him away, to put as much distance as he could between himself and that cavern with its unnatural darkness. He forced himself to ignore those little sounds behind him that had broken out almost as soon as he had begun to run, as if something were hopping on the thin metal of the catwalk trying to catch up to him. He had bigger problems at the moment and barely enough time to—
A sudden beam of light pierced the blackness up ahead and only barely missed Barrow in its initial sweep. There was the sound of a door being shut violently, and then the light flashed again. Barrow tried to duck, but on the walkway, there was no room to dodge, and the white beam blinded him painfully. His eyes were watering as Herrera spoke, her echoing voice triumphant.
“Got you.”
She opened fire.
Barrow threw himself to the ground, unseeing, knowing he could not get away. There was a burst of gunfire that became a deafening explosive howl as she fired round after round into the darkness where Barrow was hiding. He covered his head with his arms and gripped his gun very tightly, hoping against hope and—Yes! She missed the first sweep, but Barrow was just getting up when he saw the light being trained on him again. He could not see her face, but he could hear the smile in her voice.
“Nowhere to go, Steve Barrow.”
Her light suddenly went out.
Barrow did not hesitate. In the split second of surprise while Herrera registered the fact that she was now completely in the dark as well, Barrow rushed forward toward where he had last seen her light with every ounce of speed he could muster. He pumped his legs like crazy and ran faster than he had ever run before, blind again, knowing his life depended on him getting close enough to fight her.