Light Shaper (45 page)

“The entrance I found is over there, by the place that was roped off,” Steve said suddenly, making Rigel flinch.

“Okay.”

There was a heavy-looking door there, almost like the door to a bank vault. And two more corpses lying in front of it.

Like the one by the entrance, these two had been wearing lab coats over their uniforms. Between them lay a pile of broken electronic equipment that looked expensive.

“They must have been trying to open this,” Steve told him. “It looks like they were using their computers to hack whatever was keeping this door locked.”

“They got it open all right,” Rigel commented, pointing at a narrow but noticeable gap between the heavy door and the wall.

“Want to see what’s behind it?”

Rigel nodded stiffly.

Then the room came alive.

The gigantic monitor on the wall that was still intact began to display graphs, maps, and row after row of incomprehensible numbers. Flashing above it all was a warning message in red letters.

INTRUDER DETECTION.

“What the—” Steve began, but he didn’t finish. His eyes went wide, and Rigel followed his look upward.

Panels were opening all along the ceiling, rectangular segments neatly folding back in on themselves with a clatter of mechanical noise. They exposed parallel rows of what looked like miniature train tracks that ran the entire length of the room. The walls followed suit immediately, and in just a few seconds there was no interior surface that Rigel could see that was not covered by the strange tracks. Rigel stared, completely clueless as to what their purpose was, and only when the first security mech assembled itself on the ceiling did he understand. The tracks were there so those things could ride along them.

More mechs came out of hidden panels on the walls. They were scarcely larger than a dog, but they looked deadly, a collection of razor-sharp blades and weapons protruding from their slender metallic bodies. Several glowing red lights were scattered on swiveling appendages, like eyes on stalks that they waved around briefly before focusing on Rigel and Steve. Many of the wicked blades they sported were stained dirty red, like recent dried-up blood. The robots looked old, and a couple of them appeared to be having trouble assembling themselves. That didn’t stop the others from attacking.

“Look out!” Steve yelled, yanking Rigel down to the floor as something exploded from one of the ceiling mechs and whizzed by their heads. It struck the wall behind them with an incredibly loud clang, and when Rigel looked back, horrified, he saw a blade wider than a butcher’s knife that had lodged itself neatly in the plaster.

There was a whine of gears grinding. Rigel looked up and saw the mechs moving toward them in their tracks slowly, as if they couldn’t or wouldn’t move any faster. The glowing orbs at the ends of their stalks waved to and fro, searching, focusing.

Another explosion. Steve barely got out of the way of the blade that went through the floor like it was butter.

“Let’s go!” Steve yelled, rushing for the heavy vault-like door.

Rigel stood up and followed, moving faster than he had ever moved in his entire life. Another explosion behind him made him cry out, but he didn’t stop. He launched himself at the opening and was immediately followed by Steve, who whirled around and slammed the door shut behind them just as several more impacts hit it on the other side so hard it sounded as if a gong were being struck.

Rigel panted in the dark, feeling himself all over and finding nothing wrong. Thankfully. He turned to where he could hear Steve breathing.

“Are you okay, Steve?”

“Yeah. I think. You?”

“I’m fine. Those things….”

“They almost got us,” Steve said. “If this door hadn’t been open, we would have been trapped.”

“Do you think that’s what happened to the CradleCorp team?” Rigel asked. “Maybe they were attacked and couldn’t get inside in time.”

“Maybe.”

“But why? This place is supposed to be dead. Long ago. People have been in here before, archaeologists, CradleCorp, and I never heard of anything like this happening.”

“It looked like some kind of automated security system,” Steve observed. “You saw the intruder alert. We must have triggered it somehow, and the people before us must have done it too.”

“But how? And why now?”

“No idea. But now we really can’t go back out there.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Want a flashlight?” Steve asked.

“What?”

“I just think maybe we should have a look at where we are. So we can get moving. Here, I salvaged them from the corpses in the other building.”

Steve handed Rigel a flashlight, and they both clicked them on. Rigel looked around anxiously, expecting more attackers, but there was nothing out of the ordinary here. It was just a dark corridor, small and nearly cylindrical. With an even stronger smell of mildew.

“This leads almost straight down,” Rigel told Steve, suddenly remembering what he had seen in the vision from Atlas. How that scientist, Troy, had descended level after level as he ran from the shadow. “We have to go to the deepest level we can. There was a room that has lots of computer equipment, servers and that kind of stuff. The cradle room. I think that’s where Atlas wanted me to go.”

“Fine. Let’s get going.”

No automatic lighting was activated by their passage this time, but there were not any killer robots around either, so Rigel did not mind the darkness as much as he normally would have.

“At least we know where we’re going,” Steve said. “You want me to go in front? I got my gun, after all. It looks like you dropped yours.”

“It’s okay. I saw that scientist from the past as he fled in the vision and the way he took. I should go first to retrace his steps, try to find the way to the cradle room.”

A couple more loud noises of metal on metal reached them from the other side of the door behind them. Then there was a loud screeching sound like something tearing. Rigel shuddered but forced himself not to look back.

They started following the corridor, their flashlight beams twin cones of white that were frustratingly insufficient to illuminate everything in front of them. The ceiling was disturbingly close. Rigel saw signs of recent activity in the place. There were more markings and labels in some places, a discarded terminal somewhere else, and once an elaborate workstation that still had the University of Aurora, Department of Archaeology label on it.

The silence was oppressive. They walked for what seemed like way too long before they descended a set of stairs that led into a bigger underground room out of which several doors branched out. Several sections of the room had also been clearly labeled, and out of the six doors that Rigel could see, four of them had little signs above them that read, Unlocked. He explored two of them while Steve explored the other two by tacit agreement. In the two rooms Rigel examined, he only saw more labels, more ropes, and signs of recent occupation. There were also several display cases with carefully tagged ancient equipment but no way farther into the compound. When he got back to the main room and looked at Steve questioningly, he only got a shrug.

“Let’s try the locked doors,” he suggested.

They walked up to the first of the doors, and Rigel looked at it to try to figure out how to get it open. Steve tried pushing it, but it was useless. There was a badly damaged terminal jutting from the wall next to the door that had to be a kind of authentication system to let people in, but it was broken, and aside from that there was no other indication of how to go through. The door itself was perfectly smooth, nearly melded into the wall. There was no handle to grab, no way to get any leverage except by pushing it, and Steve had already shown that it wasn’t going to work.

“The other one?” Steve asked. Rigel nodded, suddenly wishing he hadn’t spoken aloud. It felt wrong to make noise in here, somehow. He glanced back nervously once to look behind him, the beam from his flashlight aimed at the bottom of the stairs they had used to descend. There was nothing there. Just shadows.

The second door was exactly the same except for the fact that the security panel appeared to be working. It was red at the moment, but there was a small indentation next to its main scanner that was obviously meant to be an input port of some kind.

“Let me try the drive,” Rigel said, reaching under his wrist brace and yanking off the quantum drive that was now glowing softly with its inner orange light.

He fumbled with it until he discovered that one of its ends fit perfectly inside the ancient input port. He pushed it in and waited. A couple of very tense heartbeats later, the light on the door scanner switched to blue, and there was a loud click. Rigel took the drive out and pushed the door. It opened easily.

“Nice,” Steve said. “Good thing you didn’t lose that.”

“Yeah.”

The corridor behind the door turned out to be a flimsy metal catwalk that flanked a chasm on one side. The other side was no longer a metal wall but instead naked rock, close enough to touch, the jagged insides of the desert mesa. The catwalk stretched out into the dark distance, and as Rigel followed it, he noticed the temperature in here was significantly lower than in any of the other rooms they had been in before. In fact, the place looked more like a natural cave than anything else.

They traversed the unnervingly narrow catwalk with only a low railing to prevent them from falling over the side, their footsteps the only sound in the silence of the dark space. The walkway then became a spiral staircase going down, which they followed, and Rigel began to get dizzy after five minutes of descending in circles without any indication of the bottom. From somewhere far off, he could hear the faint sounds of dripping water.

“I wonder how deep this goes,” Steve said from above him. His deep voice echoed off the walls.

“No idea,” Rigel answered, still feeling that he should speak as softly as possible. “I don’t remember seeing this part in the vision at all. I hope we’re going the right way.”

Steve directed the beam of his flashlight to the side, and although at first it got lost in the darkness, it eventually found what looked like the crumbling remains of the underground levels of the building, far off on the opposite end of the cavern. They were in very bad shape. In some parts it looked as if somebody had taken the building and sliced the front off, exposing the inner offices and cubicles to the cave. Curious, Rigel stopped going down and followed Steve’s example, examining the space. Rigel wondered how it was possible for the underground levels to have been so badly damaged when the more exposed aboveground buildings had remained relatively intact even after the Cataclysm.

“Hey, Rigel.”

“What is it?”

“I think I see something glowing over there.”

“Where?”

“Over by that wall. See?”

Rigel brought his own flashlight around to point at the spot Steve had mentioned.

Then both flashlights winked out.

“What the hell?” said Steve.

The darkness was total at first, and all Rigel could perceive was the sound of Steve hitting his flashlight against the railing and clicking it repeatedly. Rigel tried the same thing with his own flashlight but to no avail. He had not seen a low battery warning or anything—they had simply died.

A few seconds later, he noticed the glow. It was right where Steve had pointed it out, a sick-looking indigo light that clung to one of the walls. As his eyes got used to the darkness, Rigel was able to make out more glowing bits. It was brightest where he had first seen it, but it covered a good part of the exposed ruins. He leaned over the railing, looking down. The glow continued for a little bit, bright enough to see but too dim to gauge distance or depth.

“What is that?” Barrow asked.

“Fungi, I sincerely hope.”

“Bioluminescent?”

“Have to be,” Rigel answered. “This being an underground cavern and all.”

“I guess.”

“Well, let’s go. This has to end somewhere,” Rigel said. He didn’t sound convinced, even to himself.

“Hey, Rigel?”

“Yeah?”

When Steve next spoke, there was a note of insecurity in his voice Rigel had never heard before. “The thing is, I…. It feels cold. Flashlights don’t die out like that.”

“I know.”

“It feels just like that time, Rigel, when that thing came into my room at night. Something’s wrong in here. I think… I think there’s something following us.”

“Let’s move, then.”

“Right.”

Rigel started going down again while trying hard to keep the returning panic at bay. He had not felt that thing Steve was talking about, but the normally stoic and fearless man’s nervousness disturbed Rigel a lot more than the sudden darkness.

The blue glow on the far cave walls was more confusing than helpful, and the spiral staircase seemed to go on forever, but eventually the disorienting descent came to an end. Rigel stepped off the ladder gratefully and onto a rough patch of ground carpeted by more of the things giving off the glow. Up close he saw that they were indeed fungi of some kind, small and toadstool shaped but elongated weirdly. They had grown over the wreck of the building as far as their feeble glow let Rigel see.

They walked among the fungi carefully while avoiding most of the random debris that lay on the ground. It was impossible to see anything more than a few centimeters away from the glow, and so they were reduced to walking around almost blindly, occasionally stumbling into objects that blended with the darkness. After a few minutes of this, Rigel began to get more and more anxious. What if there was no way out of this? What if they got lost in the dark? Rigel had no idea how big the compound really was, and he doubted anybody knew for sure. They had no food with them. If they started following a pathway that got them turned around and lost in the dark, there was a good chance they would not get out at all.

Rigel tried to take a deep breath to calm himself down, but instead he shuddered. He felt strange, as if there was an invisible something pressing down on the back of his neck trying to make him keep his head down in the murk of his own fear. Normally Rigel wasn’t this pessimistic, but this darkness….