The Plague Forge [ARC] (42 page)

So Tania put her back against the combined mass of Vanessa and the case, and pulsed her thruster just enough to push them all into the strange forest of Elevator threads at the pace of a slow walk.

The individual cords, illuminated by sunlight reflected off the blue and white marble below, looked like strands of spider silk. With each thread so impossibly thin, this gave the illusion of each being equidistant if she looked directly toward her destination. So Tania looked down instead. Nearer the planet the hundreds of cords blurred together into something like a single, dark column. From this perspective, individual strands closer to her would separate from that mass as she approached or passed by, making it possible—only just—to spot them in time to avoid an impact. The lamps mounted to either side of her helmet provided the second line of defense, drawing those portions of thread very close by with a different sheen than the rest.

Above her, a scant fifty meters away, loomed the underside of the Builder ship. Where before there had been hundreds of long “spikes,” as Skyler had called them, now there were shallow indents with irislike centers from which the Elevator cords emerged. Somewhere, a few hundred meters ahead, lay the hexagon door. Or so she hoped.

Despite this being her third visit, the size of the vessel still left her breathless. She could not imagine what purpose a ship of this size might serve, though she could venture a guess at the reason for such dimensions: storage. Storage for what, she had no idea, but Tania thought it a reasonable assumption that no space-faring species would bother to accelerate such mass between the stars unless they had a damn good reason.

A thread loomed directly ahead. Tania quickly, carefully, shifted herself to the right side of her combined cargo. She aimed the thruster, pulsed it for one second, then again when she felt the shift in trajectory might not be enough. Mentally she started counting seconds. The package now moving both forward and to the left, Tania gingerly climbed over to the opposite side, going underneath so as not to paw at poor Vanessa. Once the thread passed harmlessly on the right, Tania pulsed twice more to straighten their path. She stopped counting; eleven seconds. She pulsed twice again to send them back toward the original course, moved once more to the right, and after eleven seconds pulsed two final times. She felt the tingle of sweat along her spine when the maneuver finally ended.

“I felt that,” Vanessa said, her voice surprisingly even and calm in Tania’s ear.

“It’s a lot of work for one simple course correction.”

“I can only imagine.”

Tania found herself smiling. “Do you want me to talk you through it? Would that make it easier?”

“No. It’s hard not to look, and that would make me want to even more.”

“Okay.” Tania was about to say more, to try to strike up some trivial conversation, but another thread loomed. This one was off to one side but still appeared to be in their path. Tania moved to the left side again, then, at the last second, ducked underneath the case. The thread passed by harmlessly on the left, less than a meter away. She exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and forced herself to look down and forward again.

Six more corrections were needed, one of which left her stuck in a pocket of three cords that required a careful retreat. But finally, after an hour, she saw the hexagon door. At almost the same moment, the cords began to thin out, clearing the rest of her path.

“We’re here,” Tania said.

Around the hexagon door were five sigils, one each for the objects scattered across earth and their matching receptacles inside. Only three of the symbols were illuminated now, however: the oval with its wavy side, the cube with a notch on one edge, and the triangle with the missing tip that matched the object within the case Tania now pushed. Just like on her previous visits, as soon as the case was within range all but the matching symbol faded. With only the triangle lit, the door opened, revealing the long tunnel within.

“Tim? We’re going inside.”

“Copy that. Keep talking. I’m on pins and needles out here.”

“Will do,” Tania said. She turned the case so that Vanessa’s back pointed toward the door, which now looked like a gaping black pit. Then she tapped Vanessa’s shoulder. “You can open your eyes now. I need some help.”

Vanessa relaxed her grip and drifted a few centimeters off the surface of the case. Unlike Tania, she had a belt tying her to the object. “What do I do?”

“Turn yourself around. Nice slow movements, remember? Face the opening and once I start moving, just be ready to adjust our path if we veer toward one of the walls.”

“Just use my hands and feet?”

“Exactly. Nice slow movements. Keep repeating that to yourself.” The immune had struggled with keeping herself oriented in the lack of gravity on their first visit together, and Tania thought she had enough report with the woman now to offer some simple, if condescending, pointers.

A moment later, Vanessa had herself in position. Tania turned, again putting the hard, flat surface of her suit’s backpack against the case. She aimed her thruster toward Earth. The Elevator threads, all around her now, formed an ethereal tunnel that converged below in the haze and blur of clouds and atmosphere.

She turned, focused. A good five-second blast from the thruster and they were inside, moving at the equivalent to a brisk walking pace. The interior held a strange comfort to it now, on her third visit. Compared to the missing spikes outside, and the crowd of Elevator cords left in their place, the tunnel beyond the hexagon door looked exactly the same.

Stay sharp,
she said to herself even as she added on another few seconds of thrust. She climbed around to the front of the case now, where Vanessa waited. Together they used their fingertips to push off the ceiling in a slight trajectory correction, and when the time came, they both put their legs and arms forward to take the brunt of the impact with the end of the hallway.

After a brief pause the wall at the end of the tunnel separated into angular sections, divided by bright lines of light. The lines grew into gaps as the sections of wall slid away to reveal the room beyond.

“We’re at the key room,” Tania said for Tim’s benefit.

“That was quick.”

“This place feels like a second home. Perhaps we should furnish it.”

Tim laughed. Vanessa did not. She’d flipped her gold sun visor up and Tania saw her eyes grow wide. “It’s changed,” the immune said.

Her tone ripped Tania’s attention from wrangling the object. She spun, and the room beyond sent a chill down her spine.

The ten-walled “key room” was gone. Instead she looked in upon a nearly spherical space, ten meters in diameter. Uncharacteristic for the Builders, the material was white, and it glowed with a faint luminance that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The light, so dim it would have been hard to perceive had it not covered the entire interior, was alien in its flawlessness. A perfect, unwavering, evenly distributed light that constituted the white material’s only visible feature. Tania found herself wondering what it felt like. From appearance alone she could not tell if it was solid, or if her hand would pass straight through it.

Nestled within the glowing white sphere were two strips of metallic gray, each a meter wide and spanning the circumference of the room. The bands were perpendicular to each other, and met on the far side to form an X, exactly opposite where the door was.

Tim’s voice came through the speaker in her helmet. “Say something.”

“I’m not sure what to say,” Tania replied. “The key room is not here. We’re seeing a sphere. More in a second.”

She glanced at Vanessa and nodded once, a gesture the other woman returned. Tania pushed off gently and drifted toward the opening, wrapping one hand around the edge.

The gray material felt hard as steel through the glove of her suit. She moved her hand farther, then touched the white portion. To her surprise it had a spongy feel, like a firm cushion. Tania moved all the way inside and glanced around. Her first impression proved correct. Other than the two light gray bands, the room was completely featureless.

“What do we do?” Vanessa asked. She still floated in the hallway, next to the bagged object.

Tania continued across the space, then pushed off with her feet to drift back. She turned at the midway point to face Vanessa, and shrugged. “Bring it in, I guess. Let’s see what happens.”

Vanessa urged the bag forward and kept with it, matching the pace perfectly with slow, precise movements. Tania couldn’t help but smile at the immune’s progress. Soon she’d be bouncing about in zero-g like she’d lived in orbit for years.

Tania drifted out to meet them near the center of the room, not wanting to be near the wall if something happened. She’d barely moved a meter when the two bands began to move. They spun like wheels, independently of each other, and in doing so the opening they’d framed vanished. Tania’s breath caught in her throat. The rings, still spinning, began to tilt wildly, spinning on their axis now as well. Their motion revealed the portion of the sphere where the hallway had been just a second before. Tania saw nothing save for the pure, spongy white surface of the sphere where the only exit had been.

“Don’t panic,” she said, realizing a second later she’d said it aloud. “Tim, can you hear me?”

All she received in answer was a faint hissing sound from the speaker inside her helmet.

Vanessa tried. “Tim? Please respond.”

A few garbled words came through in bursts now.

“Some kind of interference,” Tania said.

Vanessa sucked in her lower lip in concentration. “Maybe this room is meant to sever our communication.”

Tania considered that. She wondered what would have happened had they come in here on some kind of umbilical or guywire. The motion of these two rings, she thought, would have severed it like a piece of string. The thought worried her.

The two metallic rings continued to rotate around the room, silent and ominous.
Decelerating now,
Tania thought. She studied them closely. “They’re slowing down.”

The two rings settled into a new position, forming X’s once again on opposite sides of the room. Different places than before, Tania thought, though she couldn’t be sure in the otherwise featureless bubble of glowing white.

The rings stopped rotating axially but still rolled along their own length. Tania watched, fascinated despite the sense of being trapped, as each ring began to slow to a stop. When they did, a new opening appeared where their surfaces met. In a perfect reversal of the exit hallway’s closure, panels slid apart on each band.

Tania felt the tension within her melt. The key room lay beyond. Only the entrance this time was in the middle of what she had considered the floor. She exhaled slowly as she took in the sight, looking for any other changes since last time, and saw none. Still the ten walls that rose a hundred meters above. Five were empty, just spacers really. Between each of those were the five that had receptacles for the objects, each wall alive with the color that matched its “key.”

“Didn’t we come in from the side last time?” Vanessa asked. “Why would they move the door?”

“A very good question.”

Through silent agreement, Tania pushed off to the new doorway and stopped herself at the opening. She took a quick stock just to be sure nothing here had changed.

“Come up here,” she said.

A moment later Vanessa joined her, the object still expertly placed in front of her for easy guidance. “What do you suppose that new room is for?”

Tania thought about it. “Some kind of junction, maybe? One that can reconfigure itself?”

The immune started to speak, stopped herself, then met Tania’s gaze. “I was going to ask why, or why now, but I’m not sure I want to know.”

“It would only be speculation,” Tania said. “I vote we call it the Lobby for now, and not worry about it. We’re here; let’s do what we came to do.”

Vanessa nodded. Together they turned and took in the alien majesty of the key room. Only the purple and red walls had exposed sections where their keys had been inserted. The objects themselves glowed with hues that matched their respective walls, only much brighter.

“There, look at the green,” Tania said, pointing.

Halfway up on the wall of emerald light patterns, a circle appeared as a section of the flat surface recessed into a half-dome cavity, just as before. Tania didn’t wait for the process to finish this time. Instead she set to work removing the wedge-shaped object from its case.

“This will be trickier than last time with these awful old thrusters,” Tania said.

“What can I do?” Vanessa asked.

Tania propelled the object in front of her with one hand and glided to the base of the green wall. Vanessa joined her a moment later, using Tania’s offered arm to stabilize and orient herself. They looked up in unison. The circular cavity was about fifty meters above, and hard to see from this vantage point.

On a whim Tania glanced back toward the room she’d dubbed the Lobby and saw no sign of it. No hint at all. Where a passage had existed moments before, she now saw only the perfect flat surface of the key room’s floor, and she found strangely enough that she felt completely at ease. It would open again, of this she felt absolutely sure. As alien as the ship may be, as any of the devices or places the Builders had sent, they all had a mechanical quality, a set of rules somewhere that governed how they worked. The idea carried a strange comfort she didn’t quite understand but also could not deny.

“You okay?” Vanessa asked. The immune had noted the lack of an exit, too, Tania saw. She nodded to her. “Just like last time, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Right, then.” With a slow, careful movement, she set the object in Vanessa’s hands. At the same instant a scramble of static came over her headset.

“Are you read— me?”

“Tim? Go ahead. You’re breaking up a bit.”

“Something’s coming up the —vator.”

“A climber, you mean?”

His response came through as a garbled mess. “Repeat,” she said, moving back toward the door. Memory of the spinning of Belém’s Elevator came to her. Once again she saw the mysterious dark “blobs” that had raced down that new cord, demolishing a supply climber as if it were a mere insect. Those shapes had become the aura towers, of which there were numerous examples directly below this ship, theoretically at least. Perhaps they were coming back? Her mouth went dry at the thought of forty of those dark masses hitting this ship with the same ferocity that single one had when it took out the climber.