"What the h.e.l.l is it?" Telisa demanded, on the edge of hysteria.
"Quiet," Magnus said. "I don"t know."
They came to an intersection, and Magnus turned left without hesitating. She was sure they hadn"t been in this section before, but she was glad to be running away from the site of the carnage.
Magnus refused to stop until they had run down another long corridor. He checked one door and saw that it was a janitorial closet. A motionless robota"some kind of cleaning machinea"stood inside. They checked another door, still looking anxiously back the way they had come.
The room beyond the second door was a kitchen. They ran inside and fell to their knees behind three ma.s.sive ovens.
"Have you been hit? Are you bleeding anywhere?" asked Magnus, looking her over.
Telisa didn"t answer but simply stared at Magnus, trying to believe what had happened. One moment Thomas and Jack had been standing next to them, talking and alive, the next they were gone.
Then she saw that his skinsuit had been damaged. A large patch on his left shoulder had changed color, and a small spot looked as if it had begun to blister and melt. The hair on the left side of Magnus"s head was shorter, seared away. The skin on his neck was red and weeping.
"You should have been killed," she whispered, running her hands over Magnus"s shoulders. The skinsuit felt rough under her hands in patches, the rest smooth.
"Thank Momma Veer," Magnus said.
"I knew those Veer suits were tough, but I had no idea," Telisa said. "If I survive to see Earth again, the first thing I"m going to do is buy one of those."
"What"s the second thing?" Magnus asked.
"Take you to a hotel and get you out of yours," she said. As soon as she said it, Telisa regretted it. "I"m sorry," she said. "I don"t know what"s wrong with me. Our friends just died and here I am..." She shook her head.
"Don"t worry, it"s just a reaction to the stress. It gets harder to control your emotions. I"ve seen it in soldiers after combat." He seemed to consider his words. "Besides, nothing wrong with the sentiment. Of course, we should probably be concerned with survival right now."
"Of course, I agree. Let"s just find our way back to the exit and leave. Whatever that was that tried to kill us, we don"t have a chance against it."
"Somehow I got turned around. I thought we went back the way we came, but we haven"t seen these corridors."
"We could link up and get a map," Telisa said. "I know the plan was not to do that, but things could hardly get much worse. If the UNSF finds us, it"d be better than whatever that was."
"Unless that was the UNSF."
Telisa grunted. "How could that be?"
"Maybe this installation is so secret they"re willing to kill to keep it under wraps. They"re allowed to shoot at smugglers, you know."
Telisa considered this possibility in horror. "Okay. Maybe it was a UNSF security robot or something. But what harm can linking up for a map do if they already know we"re here?"
"No harm, unless there"s a security flaw in our chips," Magnus said cynically. "Go ahead."
Telisa called up a floor map from the information port. In her mind she saw the room they were in and a diagram of the surrounding area. Telisa asked for a highlight of the quickest route to the exit. The map disappeared, and her link was broken. Her link chip reported a transport error.
"Argh! It"s not working!"
"Your chip?"
"The information computer," Telisa said. She tried again while Magnus waited. Once again she got an error. When she looked at Magnus, she saw that he had a far-off look indicating he was trying too.
"No good. It"s not going to work," he confirmed. "And there aren"t any exit signs on the ceiling. That doesn"t make any sense, unless this place is under construction. Or... maybe it"s designed to simulate malfunctions caused by an attack? Some kind of a training area maybe."
"Let"s just find a stairwell and go up," Telisa said. Magnus nodded and led the way, holding his weapon level and ready.
Magnus led them through the halls, checking doors at the ends that could be stairwells. They checked two halls and then moved past a bank of elevators.
"Look. The numbers say one through six. This is four. The stairs have to be nearby."
Telisa took great encouragement from the information. "That"s odd. I guess there"s another entrance than the strange tube we come in from."
A heavy door nearby proved to be the stairwell entrance. They clambered up the stairs to the top.
"Something"s wrong," Magnus said.
"What? We"re at the top, let"s get out of here."
"There were four flights of stairs. We were on level four. There should only be three."
"Maybe the elevator doesn"t go to the ground floor," Telisa said, not believing it.
The two smugglers emerged cautiously from the stairwell. They were in a corridor like the others below, although there were no elevator doors visible here. The corridors were clean and bare, with no decorations. Straight across from the door there was a fire extinguisher station in the wall.
"That"s the first one I"ve seen," Telisa said.
Magnus thought for a moment. "I agree."
They made their way to the end of the hall and tried the door. It opened into a larger room filled with boxes and heavy shelving on the walls.
"Looks like spare parts," Magnus said. "Or raw materials for fabricating spare parts," he corrected, looking over the rows of metal rods and strips. The room smelled like metal and oil.
They moved through a storage room and some kind of machine shop next door. Then they emerged back into a hallway on the far side.
As their search of the level continued, Telisa became more agitated.
"This is the top level, but where"s the exit?" Telisa demanded.
"It should be the top level. We don"t know for sure unless the computer starts working or we"ve searched it all ourselves."
Telisa tried the computer again, but it malfunctioned as before. The glimpse of the map she did get showed that they were at the edge of the complex.
"The map says this is a dead end, but let"s check it," she said.
They found a tiny bar at the end of the hallway, a highly decorated and well-stocked area. Telisa looked it over and sighed. What was this place? What guests came here and needed to be impressed? She didn"t recognize any of the labels on the liquor.
Magnus looked it over with her. "This area is defensible. There"s only one way in, and the bar faces it. We could rest here."
"If that thing comes backa""
"We have to sleep sometime," Magnus said.
Telisa didn"t have the strength to argue. She walked around into the cul-de-sac of the bar. She slipped her pack off and dropped to the floor.
Magnus followed her lead and took up a spot next to her at the opening of the bar. Even though Telisa knew that they were both outmatched by whatever it was out there, she felt safer with him nearby. She thought that it would be hard to find sleep after such a traumatic day, but somehow she dropped into unconsciousness as soon as she closed her eyes.
Chapter Eight.
Joe stared at the anomalous section of the glossy white wall. A meter-wide sphere had been carved out of it, and native plants and rocks filled it like a terrarium. He approached the niche carefully. Something moved in the foliage.
He leveled his pistol and watched. A small orange creature crawled slowly along the edge of the area. It hesitated to leave the small s.p.a.ce, circling around and then finally coming to a halt.
"What in the h.e.l.l is going on here?"
Joe squatted and contemplated the chitinous creature. It had a round sh.e.l.l, with short spines that stuck out at intervals to move it along. Three thick pincer arms came out of the front. In all likelihood it was the same creature that had tagged along on his robot"s leg. Joe could smell the musty plant odors, reminding him of what it smelled like on the surface.
"I recognize you," Joe said to the small creature. "Finally found a spot that reminds you of home, huh?"
The edge of the floor ended abruptly at the perimeter of the sphere. It reminded Joe of the edge where the corridor became a cave. The floor smoothly ended, unscarred, as if it had been constructed to hold the soil and plants. The wall had a depression in it, continuing the shape of a sphere from the depression in the floor, and Joe could see the layers of building material. Each layer had been smoothly cut at an angle, giving way to the next deeper layer. The groove had not been built into the wall, it had been cut or melted in.
Joe rose and walked around the unusual sphere of vegetation. He realized as the odors became imperceptible again that the air in the complex smelled clean like it did in s.p.a.ce ships, rather than like the pollens and molds that laced the air of the surface. He surmised that the complex had an efficient air filtering system. He continued down the corridor. He moved into another hallway, holding his pistol ready. He had decided to sling his rifle over his shoulder since it would be harder to wield in a surprise situation than the sidearm.
He came across the fire control station that the directory had hinted at, a large room with manual and automated firefighting equipment. Two large red robots sat in maintenance bays in the center of the room. They looked vaguely humanoid in the torso, but the bottom halves of their bodies were treaded like tanks. Wires and hoses were attached to the machines as if they were people on heavy life support. Like every place he had encountered in the installation thus far, the walls were immaculatea"free of both dirt and scuff marks. Joe suppressed an urge to mar them in some way. Moving onwards, he glanced briefly at storage rooms and a media lounge before moving on. When he didn"t find any exit in that section of the complex, he turned around and started backtracking.
Joe realized something was wrong. He entered a room that he thought was the fire control station, but somehow he had gotten turned around and found himself in a complex room filled with twisting pipes and air ducts. He turned back to figure out where he had made a wrong turn. He searched for several more minutes until he was sure he had rechecked every door in the area, but he still could not relocate the fire control station.
Joe stopped in a corridor and kicked the wall in frustration. "This is bulls.h.i.t! Where the h.e.l.l am I?"
Somehow the walls around him kept shifting, changing. Whenever he left an area, things moved, including walls and doorways. Most importantly, the exit had moved. Was it waiting for him someplace else, or had it disappeared altogether?
Joe knew that a virtual environment could feel almost exactly like the real thing. But he hadn"t connected to any equipment that could be feeding his senses a fake complex like this. He wondered if the UNSF scientists had completed a remote projector that could seamlessly put someone into a virtual environment without their consent or knowledge.
"That stupid black disc, maybe..."
What if the black portal had rendered him unconscious? Then he could have been hooked up to a virtual reality system before he awakened. Except that the robot had returned through the portal and reported the corridor beyond.
"Okay, is this some kind of experiment?" he asked loudly. "I"m supposed to figure my way out of here?"
He"d heard rumors of experiments conducted on s.p.a.ce force grunts, unscrupulous biological and sociological trials that had sounded creepy and brutal. But he"d always discounted them as bulls.h.i.t stories, c.r.a.p that soldiers told each other over poker games to see if they could get anyone to believe them. Now he wasn"t so sure. The idea that he had somehow been put into a virtual environment could explain a lot of what he"d seen.
He checked his link"s VR timer. The timer had been designed to track people"s time in virtual environments and notify the authorities if the user spent too much time there. It was meant to be a control to keep cyber junkies from dropping out of society, spending all their time in fantasy worlds. Joe"s timer said he hadn"t spent even a minute in a VR today.
The link interface was supposed to be too closely interlaced with the human brain to be replaced by a virtual imposter, but Joe supposed that the UNSF probably had ways around that. For that matter, even a rich civilian could probably get around the timers. Most people of meager means like Joe believed the VR time limits didn"t apply to the super rich and powerful.
Joe took a deep breath and decided to keep trying to find the exit, real or not. Even if the exit moved around, he couldn"t find it by just remaining stationary. As best as he could tell, he never saw anything changing while he watched.
Up ahead, Joe saw another sphere of plants. He walked up slowly. This time the anomaly dominated the center of the corridor. It was the same size as the previous one. He approached slowly. An orange creature crawled amongst the foliage.
"What the h.e.l.l?" Joe asked himself.
He looked at the creature. It was the same size as the other one. Was it the same thing he saw before?
"Time for a little experiment," he announced to himself.
Joe opened his pack and searched through it. He brought out a tin of food and opened it up. Working carefully, he held the tin over the orange creature as it crawled about. He dumped some of the soup out onto the sh.e.l.l of the small thing. Part of the back of its carapace was dark with the liquid, and a few chunks of vegetables stuck onto its back. Then Joe walked around to the far side of the sphere and set the tin onto the floor.
"If I see you again, I"ll recognize you," Joe said to the creature. It continued to crawl around the edge of the vegetation, looking for shelter. Joe turned back the way he had come, leaving the crab-thing and his tin of soup behind.
He made a point of keeping the wall on his right and followed the corridors carefully, without opening any doors. After moving through three or four connecting hallways, he turned back and retraced his steps. The hallways had remained stable, although he swore that some of the doors had already disappeared.
When he came back to the corridor where the sphere had been, he saw that the room had changed. The little section of plants was gone. He started opening doors and searching around. He didn"t have any luck at first, but he kept trying, swinging back and forth and rapidly checking hallways and rooms.
At last Joe came across a small area of plants again. They were growing out from under a table in the center of what looked like a mess hall adjoining a large kitchen. Joe ran up and moved the table aside to get a better view. Once again he saw a brightly colored creature crawling around in the plants.
Joe kneeled closer and examined the creature. A dark stain and a smashed carrot chunk marked the side of the armor.
"Aha! You are the same one. And somehow your environment follows you around!"
The creature crawled out of the plants and moved towards the wall along the smooth floor. It headed into a corner, turned around, and headed back the other direction.
"It follows you around when I"m not here," Joe corrected himself.
Joe stood up and looked around the dining room. He felt like a bug under a magnifying gla.s.s.
"s.h.i.t. And mine follows me around too."
Chapter Nine.
Telisa opened her eyes. The bar no longer surrounded her. Fear rose in her chest and stirred her heart to a rapid beat. She was lying on a flat spot in an irregular cave with light brown cl.u.s.ters sticking out of the walls. She saw that the cl.u.s.ters were made of reddish blocks with green sticks protruding from them. Some of the blocks glowed as if they were hot, casting weak light on the scene.
Magnus lay just a few feet from her, unmoving. Suddenly an irrational fear, born of a memory from years ago, gripped her.
"Magnus, wake up!" Telisa demanded. "Please, please be alive!"