Chasing Solace Page 7

  “Damn,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Athene. “I did not expect that. The walls are exactly as they were.”

  “So did they really move, or was it in my mind?”

  “In this place, I do not know. And perhaps either cause could be fatal here.”

  “Yeah.” Opal stood, holstered the grapple gun, and drew the energy rifle again, turning slowly to take in the new location. “No more shortcuts if we can avoid it.”

  Ghosting

  < 39 >

  THIS IRREGULARLY-SHAPED (and reassuringly spacious) room was crossed by conveyor belts similar to the one she’d ascended. Some disappeared into mouth-like chutes at her level, others rose on skeletal frameworks to areas and platforms higher up, almost out of sight in the shadowy murk at the top of the chamber. Wide doorways led into other cavernous rooms: luckily they stood open, but you could see the corrugated teeth at the top that would slot into gaps at the bottom to impenetrably lock the steel doors into place if they were lowered.

  As she walked carefully across the warehouse-like area, energy rifle at the ready, she noticed criss-crossing mechanical tracks at various heights, from which hung sets of metal pincers, each as tall as a man, with hooks at the end. They could catch into and lift massive weights for transportation elsewhere.

  She knew what they moved. Some were stained. From down here it wasn’t possible to tell if the brown stains were rust or something else. Unidentified liquids dripped from far above, beyond the range of the silverlight, occasionally forming reddish pools. She avoided those.

  The direction indicator guided her to a rickety metal staircase ascending to one of the platforms. She made her way up, trying to move quietly. Noises up here would echo across the whole cavernous room.

  “There’s fascinating stuff going on with gravity,” said Athene. “I’ve been analysing data since your first Lost Ship. I noted it wasn’t using the standard false gravity system of Differential Inertial Pressure, which took over from primitive rotational systems.”

  “Is it significant?” As Opal rose, the floor below faded into swirling greenish shadow.

  “Could be. You see, DIP is easy to recognise because humans near the centre of a small ship will feel heavier than when they lie against the floor. But I’ve been monitoring the pull, and that doesn’t apply here, even when you ascend. I suspect Lost Ships are using a theoretical system that hasn’t been successfully proved as viable – not in human technology, anyway – called Organic Attraction Diamagnetism. It would explain a few anomalies, such as the movement of the shark-like beings you encountered on the first Lost Ship. If some of the creatures can manipulate the system then I’d love to know how it works. There’s so much I could do with it, way beyond the mundane task of keeping humans in their place.”

  “Keep analysing. I don’t care about theories, but if it leads to suit modifications that give me an edge, then I’m all for it.”

  The last few steps took her to another floor, partly suspended over the one below. Safety barriers at the edges stopped you falling into the abyss, while this level extended further into the ship. Troughs ran across the ground in channels, with discoloured residues glistening at the bottom.

  The ceiling was lower here. More tracks with dangling (but thankfully unmoving) hooks ran across this area, and above some of the troughs were heavy-duty mechanised carving and slicing tools. They were mostly the automated kind, though a few of the serrated circular saws had handles for manual control. Because of all the items hanging down, angular shadows stretched and shifted as Opal moved. Lots of area to cover. Lots of darkness in which to hide.

  “I hate these places,” she muttered.

  “Is this related to the wet ops training you underwent? I read all your files and saw you’d been sent for desensitisation at Gutchen Cynta.”

  “Yes. I had no interest in that career path but they tried to force me. The first test was going into a place like this and slaughtering the beings they brought in. It’s something the main army does too, though on a smaller scale – they usually get the soldier to bond with an individual creature and then kill and eat it. Wet ops obviously requires a much stronger stomach and an ability to follow any orders, however extreme. They refer to it as Carnivorous Aggression Training. When it came time to slaughter the things, I couldn’t face it. The blood, the guts, the creatures braying and screaming, the stink of insides and shit – I hadn’t realised how bad it would be. It’s not something they show on edu-vids.”

  “Your records indicate a failure.”

  “I refused to pick up any of the saws or machetes or knives that had been laid out. The trainers beat the snot out of me and put me in the brig. The sounds stayed with me all the time I was in solitary, but you know what else was on my mind?”

  “Wanting to strike your officers?”

  Opal moved around one of the larger circular saws, keeping a wide distance in case it moved. “No, that was another time. The thing that bothered me was the ones that took to killing straight away, started sawing and stabbing without any pause. Some of the recruits had blank faces. Others were grinning. And I’m not sure which was worse.” Opal ducked under a low beam. “At least I got demoted back to my previous role, which is what I wanted anyway.”

  “CAT is a strange form of attitude adjustment. According to my categories, there is no such thing as a carnivore. It is a category error where an old definition was never updated to match changing world knowledge.”

  “Some creatures need meat, though.” The shadows from the dangling machinery moved in the torch-like silverlight beams, and it created unwelcome impressions of the robotic arms themselves twitching just at the edge of her sight.

  “I disagree. Some creatures require certain nutrients for optimal health, which in the past may have come from flesh of other creatures, but nowadays all nutrients can be easily synthesised. So a being requires a nutrient, not a particular source of it.”

  “I guess. You look at the world differently. That’s not a bad thing.” Opal turned quickly, hoping to catch one of the saw blades in the act of twisting when she wasn’t looking. One of the shadows was sliding over the floor in a motion that made her heart jump, but when she stopped, it stopped.

  “I look at how concepts interconnect,” Athene continued. “It requires breaking notions and words down to meanings and what is signified, rather than vague schema created by the shifting emotional context of particular connections of lines, dots and curves, or sound modulations. By which I mean words on a screen, and words spoken aloud. I imagine a lot of human disagreements throughout your history were not really disagreements, but misapplications of concepts and differing definitions of common words, without realising that was the cause.”

  There: something definitely shifted. Opal faced the tool, which had extendible drills and a kind of scooped blade. It swung slowly on its heavy cables, rattling as it swayed back and forth not far from her position.

  “That wasn’t me,” said Opal.

  Athene overlaid a moving image, recorded from one of the rear cameras. Something seemed to sweep past the killing implement and set it rocking. She repeated, then froze and enhanced, but whatever knocked the blade was still an indistinct blur.

  And then Opal remembered how distractions worked. She raised the rifle and knelt as she turned to face the other way, targeting a different swinging blade. No sign of the culprit.

  “I get the feeling I’m being toyed with,” she said.

  “I am monitoring every direction. Whatever did that is staying mostly out of view, or is inherently invisible. Or incredibly fast. That would explain the indistinct image.”

  “You don’t give me confidence.”

  Opal was up and moving quickly but efficiently, aiming at any area of shadow, every jagged death tool. Now one of the four-clawed hooks spun slowly in its bracket. She veered around it, far beyond where it could reach if the claws stretched out for her, but she tried not to deviate from the exit Athene guided her t
owards.

  “I have prepared a flash stun grenade, with a high output across many wavelengths,” said Athene. “The suit is shielded against them. I suggest we drop the grenade and you –”

  “– run like hell,” Opal finished.

  The grenade was fired down from the side of the suit and detonated with a deafening roar and blinding flash, though muted by the suit’s speakers and visor to safe levels. Opal was already running for the exit. The doorway was open. A small one this time. As she expected, hitting the close control did nothing, so she grabbed the handle and pulled the heavy door sideways until it thunked shut on the killing floor room.

  “Any other doorways from that room to this?” she asked.

  “None direct.”

  Opal snatched the welding tool from her belt and ignited a furiously bright beam of plasma. She touched it to two points around the door frame, fusing the door to it in glowing orange puddles, then switched to freeze mode to harden the metal. She could undo it if necessary by re-heating the two points and dragging it open while molten. But anything that couldn’t pass through walls, and wasn’t carrying tools, would be slowed down or forced to detour. She holstered the welding tool.

  “Always worth repeating what worked last time,” she said.

  “And that flash welder is a lot more efficient than using an energy pistol,” replied Athene. “You had the door sealed ten point eight seconds faster with that.”

  Every second could count.

  Disturbing

  < 38 >

  ANOTHER HUGE ROOM. None of the streamlined features and curves of the luxury liner here: just factory caverns, functional-but-ugly warehouses, things scaled up to suit mass movement of items, mass processing, never-ending output. Except now everything was in silence and darkness, and each rattle of a loose floor panel echoed off into the distant black recesses, potentially waking or attracting something that was best left asleep and alone.

  This room had even deeper channels of varying widths running across it. She looked down into one. It was many metres deep. Residues and stains revealed that they were part of the meat processing.

  “I think the creatures are forced through here in different channels on the way to slaughter,” said Athene. “Too deep for them to climb out, but not too deep for the crew to goad them along with electro-staves.”

  “Different sized channels for different creatures?”

  “Correct.”

  Opal needed to cross the room, transecting the channels. The first one was two metres wide. She took a few running steps and leaped, landing effortlessly on the other side, though the impact still echoed around. Always keep moving. She jogged along, leaping the next sets of narrow channels easily without looking down, partly to avoid being distracted, and partly because she feared seeing something down in the shadows of the channel that was better unseen. For the wider ones she had to put more effort into it, but the leaps barely broke her stride. The exertion felt good. She was doing something, getting her heart pumping, feeling alert and ready for anything.

  Until the channel that was almost twelve metres wide.

  “That doesn’t match the size for anything a Gigatoir would normally process,” said Athene.

  “Not comforting. At all.” Opal glanced down into the darkness of the chasm.

  “You could climb down and up the other side with the grapple gun.”

  “It looks like there’s stuff at the bottom. I’d rather not.”

  “If we follow the channel we should reach wall before long. You could use the grapple gun there to swing across.”

  “The size of this room, that will take longer, since your arrow says the exit I need is just ahead of me. I’d have to backtrack.” She squatted down for a different view. “It looks jumpable in this suit, this gravity.”

  “The suit will enhance your natural movements and power. I could take over the suit for maximum accuracy, but it will reduce power, especially if your body is fighting it.”

  Opal stepped back to the edge of the previous channel. Ability often stemmed from attitude. “I can make it.”

  She lowered to a running-race starting posture. Head up, focussing on the jump before her. She could do it. She could.

  Her body uncoiled, muscles pushing her to sprinting speed, arms pumping at her sides. Long strides, one, two ... she was at the edge, just before that deep darkness, can’t risk falling, and the jump now seemed so far, change her mind – no, continue – jump – “Shit, I’m not gonna –” and she fell short, slamming into the side of the channel and just getting her hands onto the edge in time. From this lower position she could see the canal’s floor more clearly as she dangled above it. A different residue spread down there, something fuzzy and greyish, resembling bulbous mould filaments. Lots of them.

  She heaved herself up and lay gratefully on her back on the higher flat ground. Then she sat up and ... no, there was resistance. The floor had a fine grey coating of something that adhered to her suit. She had to pull hard until it gave way, allowing her to kneel and touch it with her fingertips. Incredibly sticky and rubbery, it stretched before finally snapping. It looked like the cloudy stuff in the channel, but less diffuse. It surrounded her.

  “Palm scans show viscous entangled polymers, chemically cross-linked,” said Athene. “It’s a web-like substance.”

  “That makes me think of traps.”

  Opal took a few steps towards the exit which, thanks to Athene’s augmented reality overlay, showed as a neon-glowing green rectangle superimposed on the gloom. The stickiness pulled at her feet. She could see that it thickened ahead and to the right, extended threads that stretched like tripwires up to the wall and a mammoth irregularly-piled stack of reinforced storage canisters, the water-tight kind that could take liquid content too. The web-like strands spread up their sides in ever-thicker patches, up into the murk above where shadowy lines that might be suspended walkways overlooked the area.

  “Not good,” said Opal.

  She’d have to cross a deep patch of the stuff to reach the exit.

  “And I think I saw something like this on the last ship,” she added. “When I tried to open a door that was stuck in place by this kind of substance on the other side.”

  “My cameras recorded movements amongst those web strands before you closed the door.”

  “Which is exactly what I’m worried about this time.”

  Opal took another step. Highly-stretched cord snapped with an echoing twang. A few moments later, one of the storage canisters began to shake.

  “This is so not good,” she said.

  Opal tugged at the sticky mess underfoot, having to add her own strength to the suit’s. More strands broke. More canisters shook, with increasing violence. The lid of the nearest one started splitting. Something spindly scrabbled frantically from the narrow black tear.

  Reaching the exit would involve crossing even thicker patches of this grey stuff, criss-crossed by lines as thick as steel cables. Instead she ran left, parallel to the wide chasm she’d jumped, and the going became easier as the web’s thickness reduced.

  A popping sound caused her to glance back in time to see a stream of spiky legs flow towards her as one of the containers split apart like it was made of damp paper, with rips appearing in the others – not acting like the reinforced canisters they had resembled. That made Opal think of stage dressing. So many items on Lost Ships were more like props than their appearance suggested.

  She focussed forward, on her sprinting. Athene overlaid a rear-view camera on Opal’s HUD. It wasn’t reassuring. Following her was a stream of what looked like random insect and spider and crustacean parts, rather than separate creatures: pincers, pointed legs, hairy carapaces, and black eyes like nodules. It reminded her of when she’d seen some species of spindly black fly mating, and they seemed to get stuck together and become one uncoordinated creature. That, but millions of times bigger, and viewed while on psychotropic substances. Even worse, this thing was coordinated. Further back i
t flowed out thicker than the leading jumble, a river of body parts, with a mass much greater than could have fitted into a few containers of that size.

  Rifle unslung and set on low power, she turned, aimed, and began firing even as she retreated. She increased the power slider, but it was pointless, only blasting small parts of a whole, like taking out single cells of a complex organism. Beam mode would probably be little better, and this chaotic gigantic mixed-up centipede was getting too close to mess around.

  She approached the corner of the room, hoping for another doorway, but instead she came upon a second huge pile of boxes and canisters (mercifully free of web-like coating this time) with only the wide channel to her left. She definitely didn’t want to drop into that, so she scrambled up the canister stack, leaping to grab the edges of the largest containers which formed the base and dwarfed her. As she climbed the levels the boxes became smaller, easier to scale, yet also more hazardous as the poorly-balanced piles wobbled, and some crates began to fall, but she didn’t stop. The creature, or creatures – whatever it was still streaming from the nest – had also begun to climb.

  “Shall I drop an incendiary grenade to slow it?” asked Athene. Each small explosive could be modified before launch for different effects.

  “Yes. Anything that gives me time to get to the top.”

  Athene ejected one of the grenades and it ignited behind Opal. In the low-gravity environment the fire spread chaotically and beautifully, jetting out and upwards and creating a wide area that would burn for at least a few seconds before using up its combustible charge. A line of glowing flames licked Opal’s suit but had no effect thanks to the armour’s heat shielding. The flash fire temporarily lit up the room, increasing her visibility, and as she looked up she saw that she was doing the right thing and climbing towards the possible escape she’d hoped for.