Suddenly, thankfully, it stopped. Rigel shuffled to a halt, gasping for breath. He glanced back, and he saw a completely different sight.
The grass was gone. The ground was a broken-up jigsaw of gray dirt, like the cracked mud at the bottom of a dried-up puddle that has been exposed too long to the blistering sun. Rigel stared in shocked wonder. The devastation spread quickly in every direction, and snaking through it all like a horrible wound on the face of reality was the crack no straining tectonic plates could ever hope to imitate. The sky overhead had changed too, going from bright blue to a steely murk that reminded Rigel of the horrible shifting gray in the dead people’s eyes.
A cutting wind started blowing. Ice-cold and irresistible, it forced Rigel to turn his side to it so he wouldn’t be blown off.
Hurry, Rigel. There isn’t much time.
“Hurry where?” Rigel shouted even though the wind snatched his words away. “Where can I find you? Which way am I supposed to go?”
A new booming sound reached Rigel then. It was a faint echo, then silence. There was a flash of bright white light in the direction the wind was blowing, and a few seconds later, the sound reached Rigel again. He recognized it now. It was a sound he had heard often in movies, but which he had never experienced firsthand. He turned his face straight into the wind in wonder, blinking away tears that blurred his vision. The flash of light repeated itself in the distance, slowly followed by an even louder boom that seemed to rattle the very air.
Thunder.
Find me
, the child urged him,
in the eye of the storm….
Something fell on Rigel’s face then. A drop of water. The gale began to die down, and as the rain began falling tentatively, Rigel saw that the sky where the lightning flashes were striking had grown very dark. A solid-looking cloud front, anvil shaped and threatening, approached swiftly, borne on the wings of the wind.
The rain fell in earnest then, soaking Rigel to the bone.
Rigel turned to face the wind and ran straight at the approaching storm.
A SINGLE
eye, blacker than night.
Barrow’s ragged breath caught in his throat. Something was there, on the dark catwalk with him. Something that reached with tendrils of freezing shadow.
Barrow tried to move but couldn’t. He felt his sweat freeze on his skin and felt the metal railing near his hand frost over, groaning as it became brittle. His mind felt slow, like it was shutting down.
The thing on the railing hopped once, and the gentle sway of the catwalk when it landed drove a needle of fear straight through Barrow’s heart. He started shaking uncontrollably and felt his knees about to give way. There was no escaping this. Nothing to do but die.
From far off, a memory. Rigel, smiling.
The warmth of what could be love.
It was enough to snap him out of it. Barrow whirled around and ran away from the thing as fast as his legs could carry him, unmindful of the darkness or the danger of falling over the railing like Herrera. He trailed the frozen rail with both hands, and when he hit the beginning of the spiral staircase, he threw himself down it, stumbling all the way and taking as many steps at a time as he dared, all but flying on his way to the ground. He did not stop or allow himself time to rest until he was finally sprinting across the field of mutant fungi, when his energy rush finally died out and he was forced to slow down to a walk.
He was hurt, probably badly, his entire body racked by pain. And yet the only thought in Barrow’s mind was to get to Rigel quickly so he could wake him up and they could leave this place forever. No mission was worth having to face that thing again. They had to leave and get as far away as possible, out in the light where it could not hurt them, maybe….
The ground rumbled. At first Barrow thought it was in his mind, but then it happened again. Harder.
Barrow was less than halfway to the set of double doors that protected the entrance to the server room. He thought about sprinting again, getting away from whatever was causing those tremors and making that horrible drilling noise, but there was a painfully loud sound of rock cracking open and then an impact so sudden and so hard that it felt like an earthquake that threw Barrow to the ground and shook the entire facility.
There was a moment of silence as Barrow felt small rocks falling all around him, probably from the ceiling starting to cave in.
Then a second impact shook the place, as violent and sudden as the last. The rock wall more than fifty meters away on Barrow’s left was blasted open with incredible force.
Light. Rocks flying everywhere. And a dark shape behind the hole, something large.
Barrow curled up into a ball to protect himself from the deadly shower of rocks and only struggled to his knees when he thought it was over, coughing from the dust. He blinked away tears from half-blinded eyes that would not stay fully open in the painful sunlight streaming in from the hole.
The dark shape was a machine standing on two legs and with two gigantic arms. It made its way inside, pushing boulders out of the way as if they were props made of cardboard. Barrow’s watering eyes barely made out the shape of a flat canopy where the machine’s pilot would be.
It was a new threat, it had to be, and yet the first thought in Barrow’s mind was that the bright sunlight coming in through the hole would keep the shadow upstairs at bay. He felt relief such as he had never felt and actually approached the machine to get closer to the light.
It was the wrong move to make.
The battle armor swiveled around smoothly to face him. It brought both of its arms to bear, and as Barrow’s eyes adjusted more to the sunlight, he could see that the thing was almost three times as big as he was. Sitting inside it was a man, but Barrow could not see his face clearly yet.
“Steve Barrow,” the man in there said, his voice amplified to be perfectly audible even through the canopy that protected him. Barrow could hear rage in it, and pain. “You simply refuse to die. Tell me, did you enjoy it? Doing that to Diana?”
One of the machine’s arms turned to point to the left. The arm was shaped like a segmented drill, but it was easy to follow the direction it was pointing and see the corpse of Diana Herrera lying broken on top of a rock.
“That wasn’t me,” Barrow panted. He recognized the voice in the machine now. Richard Tanner.
“Liar. I followed her transponder here. I had a live audio feed to everything she recorded, and I know what happened. You murdered her!”
Barrow flinched from the amplified cry of rage, and even more when Tanner brought the machine’s other arm down and hit the ground savagely with it. The entire floor trembled, and more rocks were dislodged from the ceiling. The powerful armor itself was unharmed.
Barrow backed away as Tanner advanced with heavy mechanical footsteps. The fungi were squashed underneath.
“It’s over, Barrow,” he said. Barrow could see his face now, inside his machine. Tanner looked insane. “I will kill you, of course. But if you take me to where Aaron Blake is hiding, I will kill you quickly.”
Involuntarily, Barrow glanced behind him at the vault-like doors.
“Ah. Inside the cradle room. Well, thank you, Barrow. Stand aside so I can kill your lover in front of you. It will pay you back for what you did to me, in a way. Then you will die.”
Barrow risked a look back. If he could reach the control panel and slam shut the heavy doors that protected the cradle room, he might stand a chance.
Tanner was too smart, though. He read his intention right away.
“Go ahead, try it,” he said to Barrow. “Let’s see who is faster. This machine can clear ten meters in a single jump. You look like you can barely stand up.”
Barrow hated to admit Tanner was right. He would have to distract Tanner with something if he wanted to have a shot at closing those doors.
“Why don’t you leave us alone?” he said loudly. “Stop chasing Rigel. Walk away.”
Tanner laughed. “After losing so much? After my entire company is in shambles, the secret to my fortune a blasted ruin? It’s too late for that, Steve Barrow. Even a lowly security guard like yourself can surely see that I need the AI that sleeps in the cradle. With it, I will have something even the Primes wish to possess. Such an ancient machine will give me the means to secure my control over the city and eventually look beyond its borders to others.”
Something was moving in the darkness near Herrera’s corpse. Something that hopped stealthily, almost shyly.
“Wait,” Barrow warned him, pointing there.
“Already begging for your life?” Tanner asked him. “I thought you would be braver than that.”
“There’s something there,” Barrow said.
“Please. If you want to think of a distraction to buy you the precious seconds you need to get to the control panel, think of something better. It may be a struggle for your steroid-addled brain, but surely you can do better than that.”
The dark thing hopped right next to Herrera’s corpse. It cast no shadow, but it didn’t need to. Looking at it, Barrow felt as if it were swallowing the light in the entire cave.
He backed away from the thing, ignoring Tanner, eyes wide with fear.
“I will never know how you managed to overpower an entire platoon of my best soldiers,” Tanner was saying. His battle armor advanced again with a loud swirl of servos. “How did you do it? Tell me, and I might let you live a little bit longer. You seem desperate to stall anyway.”
“It wasn’t us,” Barrow said. He pointed again. “It was that.”
The creature touched the corpse, and the darkness seemed to grow thicker for an instant. Even Tanner must have felt it, because his machine swiveled ninety degrees to where Barrow was pointing.
“What the hell?” Tanner said.
The creature jumped at his machine.
Barrow was ready. He sprinted back to the control room, slammed his hand on the access panel, and desperately looked for the door controls. He found them and pressed the Close option so hard that he feared he had broken his finger. But the doors immediately responded and closed with a heavy clang of metal on metal.
There was silence. Barrow was panting, feeling pain from a dozen places at once. Blood still trickled from his nose and refused to stop. Behind him, the heavy door to the cradle room was closed. In front of him, another one just as sturdy was all that protected him from Tanner’s machine.
“Barrow!” Tanner’s impossibly loud voice shrieked.
Something slammed against the outer door on the other side, where the cave was. The deafening impact shook the entire facility, forcing Barrow to cover his ears. The sudden shock made him lose his footing, and he stumbled onto one knee. He was just getting up when the second impact threw him on the floor. The noise was unbelievably loud and painful, but even worse than that was the other noise, the groan of metal giving way, being torn apart by something. The vault door wasn’t holding.
Barrow managed to back away as far as he could before the third impact shook everything. He saw the door in front of him bulge inward and heard more ripping. Then there was the sound of a drill on stone and a sudden gap of light between the door and its frame. The drill arm of Tanner’s machine poked through the gap and pushed. The opening widened.
The door didn’t last long. It took two more impacts and some frantic drilling for Tanner’s battle armor to get enough leverage on the door to rip it apart from its frame. Barrow watched, eyes wide in shock, as the machine tossed the entire door away like it weighed nothing. It landed far back in the cave, echoing madly with metallic clangs.
“Out of the way!” Tanner ordered, the bulk of his machine nearly blocking the entire entrance. “I’m done playing around, Steve Barrow. Get out of my way.”
Barrow looked behind him, at the door to the cradle room. Rigel was still in there, helpless. Tanner would just storm through the room with his machine, destroying everything. A single swipe of the mechanical arm, and Rigel would….
Barrow spread his arms wide. “No.”
Tanner laughed again. “You think you can stop me?”
Barrow grinned. “Of course not. But I can’t let you go in there, not while I’m still here.”
He heard the truth in his own words. He could not, would not stand by and abandon Rigel.
“Have it your way,” Tanner said. He stepped forward again, the movement of his machine clumsy in the narrow hallway. It barely fit.
Barrow had an idea.
“Hey, Tanner! You want to know what the last thing Diana said was? After I had ripped her communicator from her chest?”
“Shut up!”
“She didn’t call your name, if that’s what you were wondering. In fact, she died cursing you for sending her here.”
“Liar!”
Barrow made his move. He sprinted straight ahead, right at the machine, and just as Tanner swung his drill arm, Barrow threw himself forward between the armor’s big legs. The drill missed him, and Barrow rolled as soon as he hit the ground, escaping beneath the machine through to the wider cave behind it. Tanner moved back with a scream of fury, but he was unable to turn fast enough in the small space. It took him a few seconds to back away and face Barrow. By then Barrow had made it almost clear to the other side of the cave.
“You can’t escape!” Tanner shouted. “I’m going to crush you!”
Barrow looked everywhere, but there was no way out now. He was trapped in a corner.
“I’m sorry, Rigel,” he whispered as the machine approached to finish him off. “I bought you as much time as I could.”
The gigantic armor was two steps away when it froze in midstride.
And it started changing.
“What the devil is happening?” Tanner said from inside it.
The machine’s exoskeleton began to glow with bright streaks of red. The drill arm changed shape, parts shifting, sliding and merging until it became a cannon. Fire began burning in the cannon’s depths even as it aimed itself at Barrow.
“I can’t control it!” Tanner yelled.
The armor suit started moving again, but Barrow could see Tanner frantically hitting switches inside it, looking everywhere and trying to regain control. The closer the machine got, the stronger its aura of deep, biting cold enveloped Barrow’s skin.