Bedlam (35 page)

The ship may have been modelled on the
Liberator
, but the spawn pods were pure
USS Enterprise
. Ross looked up from the platform where he had materialised and saw three men in differently coloured but similarly designed
uniforms, vaguely reminiscent of
Next Generation
era
Star Trek
but with a flavour of
Space 1999
flowing through it like raspberry ripple. The one at the front wore light blue and stood with his hands clasped behind his
back, a non-threatening posture he could afford because he was flanked a few feet back by two men in dark green, each bearing
what Ross recognised as electro-driver rifles from
Painkiller
. The guns weren’t being levelled, just held at arms, but the distinction hardly mattered. If he and Juno harboured any bad
intentions, they’d have about a quarter of a second to act upon them before being insta-gibbed by a messily devastating combination
of shurikens and lightning.

‘Hello,’ said the man in front, a cheery soul sporting the unique combination of a pink goatee beard and blue spiky hair.
‘My name is Reverend Scapegoat. Welcome aboard the
Manta-Ray
. And you are?’

‘Eh, Bedlam,’ Ross replied, still a little dazed from both the teleportation and the rush of having just escaped total catastrophe.
Something about the ship’s name rang familiar, but he couldn’t think why.

‘I’m Iris. Thanks for saving our asses out there.’

‘Our pleasure. By the way, this is Kill-Streak and Roid-Rage. We think of them as our guest services team. If you’ve got your
sea-legs back, we’ll take you to meet The Captain.’

They followed Reverend Scapegoat up through two levels of decks, his guards at their backs always a few paces behind. Ross
noticed security cameras peering down from the walls, and guessed they were being monitored as they made their way to the
bridge. The place was like a compendium of sci-fi design, every doorway revealing glimpses of décor or equipment paying its
dues to different classics:
Predator
,
Alien
,
BSG
,
Firefly
,
Star Trek
and even Gerry Anderson.

‘Who is the captain?’ Iris asked.

‘That’s her name: she’s just The Captain. She’s in charge: her ball, her rules.’

‘Those laser weapons,’ said Ross. ‘How can …?’

‘The Captain,’ Reverend Scapegoat answered. ‘She’s not just in charge of the ship. She’s one of the Originals; kind of the
secret Original, in fact. A secret very few people know about back on the gameworlds, because this is her domain out here.’

‘So the weapons, the speed … She controls the protocols?’

‘Her ball, her rules.’

‘And she designed this ship?’

‘No, that’s more of a group effort. We all have our little assigned areas so us geeks don’t fall out. Nothing worse than a
Next Generation
zealot and an original series evangelist going fifteen rounds over how the engineering deck should look. The Captain doesn’t
worry so much about the ship’s aesthetics; she’s more concerned with its attributes.’

‘Her ball …’ Ross suggested.

‘You got it. Mostly the ship obeys the same protocols as everybody else. The Captain doesn’t bend the rules unless it’s in
a good cause. Or just really funny.’

Reverend Scapegoat pushed a button and stood aside as two doors swished apart with a sound familiar to anyone who has boldly
gone. Ross was half expecting to see William Shatner or Patrick Stewart awaiting him on the bridge. Instead he was greeted
by the sight of someone he recognised instantly and who belonged at the tiller even more than either of those.

That was when he worked out why the ship’s name was familiar. It had been the name she’d intended for that boat she had always
remained so optimistic that she would own when she retired. And Ray had been her husband’s name.

‘Agnes?’

She looked twenty years younger than the last time Ross had
seen her, but the brightness in her expression was unchanged. She gave Ross a devilish smile and spread her arms to indicate
the majesty of her surroundings.

‘Dr B. You’ll see I managed to get myself that boat after all. Now, you want to tell me what you two eejits were doing all
the way out here in a glorified pedallo?’

Ross could see their destination on the bridge’s huge view-screen, small compared to all the other worlds he’d observed from
outside. It was a compact and nondescript tablet of blackness, the only contours visible on the topside being mere ripples
at this distance. Maybe it was the sci-fi overload of the
Manta-Ray
’s interior, but it kind of reminded him of the carbonite slab imprisoning the frozen Han Solo. This was due to the uniform
depth of its four sheer vertical planes. On other worlds, where there were subterranean levels, from beneath it was often
possible to see through the walls, tunnels and lift shafts, or at least see the reverse sides described in negative like the
outside of a huge mould. On this place, there was no way of knowing whether there were chambers immediately on the other side
of the outer walls or just hundreds of feet of solid rock.

‘It doesn’t look very big,’ Ross observed.

‘It was smaller still the first time I saw it,’ said The Captain. ‘Way, way back when I was charting the system. It was just
a black lump floating in space: shapeless, not all clean lines like it is now. It was an anomaly. There was nothing on it:
it wasn’t a gameworld or a satellite of a gameworld. It had no discernible purpose, so I paid it no heed. Once I knew this
was the only object so far out, I didn’t come back this way for a long time. I remember telling Solderburn about it though,
and he seemed very curious. I don’t know if he ever checked it out. I’d have been keen to hear his findings if he did, but
I didn’t see him again before he disappeared.’

‘When did you find out it was the Integrity’s power-base?’ Iris asked.

‘Not soon enough, would be the answer to that one. Because it’s so isolated, they were able to quietly remodel the place and
build their Citadel before they started rolling out the troops and announcing their presence.’

‘How recently did they find out about space travel?’ Ross asked. ‘Is that why you were in the neighbourhood when we were attacked?’

‘They’ve known from the start, as far as I’m aware. The reason the Diasporadoes think otherwise is that the
Manta-Ray
has been picking them off all along. Oh, they must bloody hate us. Made them rethink their methods because nothing they sent
out ever made it to its destination, never mind home again. For a long time we thought we’d caused them to give up on space
altogether, but they’ve redoubled their efforts of late, and they’ve been getting bolder. Our problem is, this thing might
be fast, but it can’t be in two places at once.’

They could make out the Citadel on the screen now, though it was a magnified image. The
Manta-Ray
was still a few minutes out from its final approach.

‘I thought it would be bigger,’ Ross confessed, in reference to the fortress’s visible footprint, which took up much less
of the surface area than he had imagined.

‘That’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ Iris said. ‘It’s mostly underground.’

‘When we touch the surface, I want you to bail out immediately so that we can dust off right away,’ The Captain ordered. ‘The
Manta-Ray
won’t have the same privileges there as out in the black. The protocols I control cease to apply the second we cross into
their airspace.’

She instructed her first officer to escort them to the ship’s rear cargo bay, where they watched on a monitor as the
Manta-Ray
came in low over the black landscape. Ross felt the pull of deceleration and a gradual lurch as the craft manoeuvred itself
in preparation for landing.

‘Suit up,’ Iris said.

He accessed his HUD and, sure enough, there was a stark selection of Integrity uniforms, including all the varieties he had
seen on his torturer, Cicerus. Like Iris, he opted for the default. Her transformation was more striking, involving as it
did a change of gender.

There was another tug as the ship braked further, then they were thrown to the deck by a violent lurch and a resounding bang.
The sudden loss of forward momentum and stark final
plunge was unnatural, at odds with the basic rules of aeronautics.

Reverend Scapegoat had lost his previously permanent look of unflappable good nature. He picked himself up and slapped a button
beneath the monitor, putting him through to the bridge to find out what had happened.

‘Not a textbook landing, skipper,’ he said, trying to keep the anxiety from his voice.

When The Captain’s face appeared on the screen, it was the first time Ross had ever seen Agnes look genuinely worried.

‘It’s some kind of electromagnetic system,’ she reported.

‘EMP? We’ve still got power.’

‘Not EMP. An attraction force they can switch on or off. One second I’m cruising along, picking my spot, the next we get pulled
to the surface like an iron filing to a magnet. We can’t take off again. We’re stuck to it like a limpet.’

Or like there’s an albatross around your neck, Ross thought.

‘We need to find the controls for this attraction force and switch the thing off,’ Iris declared, a male voice matching her
appearance.

‘Preferably before they roll out one of those tanks with the guns that can erase things,’ said Reverend Scapegoat.

So no pressure, thought Ross.

The landscape was almost as stark as it was flat, barely an undulation between where they had hit the ground running and the
outer walls of the Citadel, which was still some considerable way off in the distance. Underfoot the surface was haphazardly
crenulated, like something that had once been liquid then had cooled just a little too quickly. It looked like plastic yet
felt as though it had properties of both rock and metal.

Ross called up his scope to get a closer view of the fortress. Through the magnifying lens he could make out huge doors opening
in the nearest wall, grinding their way apart. Forces were being despatched.

He ran flat-out to keep up with Iris. She was zigzagging like she was under fire, but he knew it was because she was looking
for something.

‘Here,’ she announced, guiding him towards a slightly raised rectangle it would have been very easy to miss, a panel distinct
from the ground around it only by its being perfectly flat and smooth. As she crouched before it, part of the black surface
transformed into a control pad and asked for a key. A countdown indicated that there was a deadline for compliance, after
which it was safe to assume an alert would be triggered.

Ross had hoped that the capture of the
Manta-Ray
would provide an element of distraction while they made their incursion, but if this part went wrong, they’d be giving away
their intention and pinpointing their position in one go. Fortunately Iris had come prepared. She produced a keycard and placed
it in the waiting dock. The countdown stopped and the panel slid aside to reveal an access shaft.

‘I generally make it a rule not to engage the Integrity,’ she
said. ‘But if you have to kill one of the bastards, my advice is do it somewhere like
Quakeworld
.’

Ross grinned approvingly. In some games, when you died you lost all the items you were carrying, but in others they didn’t
just disappear: you dropped them where you fell, for the first person along to pick up. That didn’t just include weapons,
but ammo, power-ups and, crucially in this case, keycards.

Iris led him along a short hexagonal corridor, its floor precisely the same width as the other five panels. She slid another
keycard into a slot in the wall and a door opened to reveal an elevator. They stepped inside, an illuminated display on the
wall listing twenty levels, but a swipe of still another key caused it to refresh. The image blanked out for a second then
listed thirty new floors. Iris pushed a button in the sub-section marked Detention Levels, then Ross felt the platform beneath
their feet descend with silent haste.

They emerged into another hexagonal corridor, longer this time, with two Integrity guards patrolling it. Ross kept repeating
to himself Iris’s assurance that everything was geared towards preventing escape rather than repelling intrusion, but he was
glad that the visor masked the emotion on his face.

He wondered for a moment what would constitute a casual, unsuspicious gait, but as Iris began striding with determined pace,
he realised that this was his answer. She marched past the guards with such purpose that it was the guards themselves who
were probably more wary of being suddenly put on the spot.

‘As my mother always told me,’ she said once they were safely past, ‘if people want to judge you by the clothes you’re wearing,
that’s their lookout.’

They came to a T junction and took a left into a short passage, Iris producing yet another keycard when they reached the blank
hexagonal panel at what would otherwise have been a dead end.

‘Took this one off an Integrity unit commander in Black Mesa. Got the stupid ass-wipe to follow me into one of the heat-exchange
pipes, then char-broiled his nuts extra-crispy. It should give me full access to the cell admin systems.’

She swiped the card and Ross watched for the hexagonal
panel at the end to split apart. It stayed shut. Instead, two halves of a door slammed diagonally closed behind them, and
a dull, solid dread formed inside him as he realised they were sealed inside the short section of passage, the proverbial
rats in a trap.

Ross was about to ask whether she had the auto-warp gizmo handy when Iris held up a hand as though to say ‘wait’.

He felt lateral movement beneath his feet and realised that the passage itself was in motion, swinging ninety degrees to connect
with a different hexagonal corridor. He heard the hiss of a seal locking into place, then the panel finally split, revealing
a new corridor with several hexagonal doorways either side.

Iris stepped briskly through the conduit, whereupon a console rose automatically from the floor, presenting a touch-screen
control panel showing a grid layout and a list of symbols that meant nothing to Ross.

‘Keep moving,’ she urged. ‘I’ll find which cell we’re looking for and open the door from here.’

A couple of seconds later he heard a quiet bleep from behind him at the console and a near-simultaneous response chime from
a doorway ahead and to the left, where the hexagonal frame was now picked out in a dully pulsing glow. As he hurried towards
the aperture, Iris hard on his heels, it belatedly occurred to him that he had forgotten to even ask who they were rescuing
first.

He stepped through the opening and was confronted not by Solderburn or the Sandman, but by a faceless figure entirely in black,
seemingly constructed of the same material as the Citadel itself.

He turned to Iris, who had just made it to the doorway, transformed back into female form and sporting a typically punkish
take on Integrity fatigues.

‘Whose cell is this?’ he asked.

Ross felt something erupt from the ground behind him, while several strands of the black rock-metal-liquid-plastic crawled
all about his body, snaking around his neck, his arms, his legs, his waist. They snapped taut simultaneously, binding him
fast to the hexagonal pillar that now ran from floor to ceiling at his back.

‘Yours,’ she answered.