The sound of screaming resumed, sounding closer now. Sabak stepped away, listening, his face suddenly pale.
"Keep a hold on him." Sabak nodded towards Kendrick. "And bring him along. Shirl, keep working on that thing and let me know if you can figure anything out. Just… be seriously fucking careful."
"Really? I thought maybe I'd just cut the blue wire and see what happened," she deadpanned.
Kendrick's two guards pushed him along immediately behind Sabak as they made their way towards the source of the screaming. The sound, an unending ululation like nothing he had ever heard, raised the hairs on the back of Kendrick's neck. He wondered how anyone could have the physical ability to scream so consistently, and for so long.
They turned a corner and found two more of Sabak's men waiting by an open doorway, their weapons at the ready. Kendrick couldn't yet see what lay beyond.
"They're in there," said one of the men. Kendrick could see how frightened he was. He felt a sudden tightening in his own chest, and didn't want to see what was in there.
As Sabak stepped forward the screaming stopped, to be replaced by a fit of coughing, then by the sound of someone gasping for breath.
Sabak stood for a long time at the doorway, staring at whatever lay beyond,
"Sabak." No response. "Sabak," Kendrick called to him again.
The man finally turned to look at him. "Bring him forward," he ordered, almost under his breath.
Beyond the doorway lay an area that had clearly once served as a canteen. Plastic chairs and tables had long ago been neatly stacked in a corner.
In the empty centre of the room two of Draeger's men were in the gruesome process of killing themselves. One had torn off his spacesuit and was gouging deep gashes in his bare chest with a knife. His shirt hung around his waist in tatters. He appeared unaware of his audience.
The other, however, untwisted himself from the foetus position he had assumed, staring back at Kendrick and Sabak. Then, as they watched, he crouched down on all fours and proceeded to slam his forehead repeatedly and violently against the gore-sticky tiled floor in an apparent attempt to bash his own brains out.
Kendrick saw the bodies of two other of Draeger's soldiers lying nearby, in the shadows. They looked like they'd been shot at point-blank range.
"Listen to me," Kendrick said. "Robert is doing this, do you understand me?"
Sabak shook his head violently. "No, the Bright are -they're just protecting themselves."
"Protecting themselves? Whatever the Bright may be, in essence they're just machines. And machines don't go out of their way to play sadistic games like that." Kendrick could see the uncertainty in Sabak's eyes. "Your mind's been twisted so that you can't see the truth any more."
The soldier smashing his head against the tiles finally slumped over and lay still. His companion sat exhausted, watching his own blood spread across the canteen floor in a widening pool.
"Look," said Kendrick. "Do you see that?"
Sabak stared, mute, as more of the winged shapes emerged from the shadows. They darted here and there, their tiny mouths opening in a piercing ululation that sent spasms of pain shooting into the back of Kendrick's skull.
Suddenly Sabak's henchmen weren't paying so much attention to their prisoner.
"Is this what you came here for, Sabak? Do you think they're going to lead you into Heaven?"
"Just shut up," Sabak snapped back at him.
The ear-splitting wails emerged again from the creatures' throats. Now it felt as though someone had opened up Kendrick's skull and was tossing burning coals inside. He felt the grip on his arms loosen and instantly took the opportunity to pull himself free and run for the shadows and the outline of a door there. Tiny shapes darted at him as he reached it and something soft brushed against his face, feeling like dry cotton sheets. He heard a faint whispering, the kind of sound young children might make when hiding from a playmate in the dark.
Automatic fire thundered behind Kendrick as he pushed through the door and out into a connecting corridor. Angry voices reverberated behind him as he stumbled down a steep stairwell.
When he'd first entered the facility he'd been at ground level. If he was now descending, then he was penetrating the very hull of the Archimedes. Even so, there might be quite a few floors to negotiate before he reached the hull's exterior.
At the bottom of the steps Kendrick found a vast room filled with row upon row of gleaming metal cabinets. He ran on past them to find a stairwell that took him even deeper. He could hear voices clamouring somewhere behind him. He kept going.
Smeby came howling out of nowhere.
Kendrick yelled in surprise as a blade slashed through the air towards his cheek and Smeby slammed into him with his full weight.
Kendrick almost faltered when he saw the other man's face. Smeby had sliced lines into his cheek and brow, turning his features into a demon's mask.
"It's you!" he screamed into Kendrick's face. Then he backed away, tears running down his cheeks, before folding up, his trembling hands pressed against the sides of his head. A high keening noise poured from his lips.
Kendrick's gaze flicked to the doorway from which Smeby had emerged. Dozens of the winged homunculi fluttered in the shadows beyond it.
Now they came spilling through to surround both men, once more filling the air with their howling. Kendrick screamed too, gripping his head as they surrounded him in a vast, flapping storm. His skull was filled with unimaginable pain as incipient madness bubbled up somewhere deep inside his mind.
He stumbled back into the room filled with cabinets, found another door to stagger through and slammed it shut behind him. He was now in a side office with a window overlooking the room where Smeby still crouched helplessly.
More of the malignant creatures poured in from the stairwell till uncountable thousands muffled Smeby's screams with the sheer density of their numbers.
Kendrick stepped away from the glass, sickened. Not real, he reminded himself. Aural and visual hallucinations that burned the sanity out of their brains. Anyone without augments would see nothing.
Of course, that didn't explain the corpses he'd found. But it was easier not to think about that aspect.
Kendrick watched in horror as some of the creatures swirled in the air like living smoke, then rushed forward to smack into the glass that separated them from Kendrick. As the glass began to star, he gaped numbly, unable to accept the reality of what he was seeing. Then he looked desperately around the office. There were other doors at the far end: a sign on the wall announced that one of them was an airlock leading out to the station's exterior, the other door seemed to be an elevator, leading back up to the interior of the Archimedes.
On a metal desk stood a computer terminal. It was active, with several windows of information displayed on the screen. Kendrick stepped towards it, noticing that the dust covering the table had been disturbed recently.
He glimpsed a shadowy movement and heard the click almost too late. Draeger was crouching behind the desk, a gun gripped in both hands. He yelled when he saw Kendrick and fired at him wildly.
Despite the close quarters, Draeger managed by some miracle to miss. Kendrick stumbled away while Draeger, shrieking like an animal, fired indiscriminately into the air before pulling himself upright and fixing Kendrick firmly in his sights.
"What… what the fuck are those things out there?" Draeger shouted, wild-eyed and shaking. His spacesuit was smeared with blood, but somehow Kendrick didn't think it was the man's own.
It was difficult for him to accept that the homunculi were physically real. But if Draeger could see them, and he had no augmentation biotechnology…