The Kid stared at the Ark Containment Cylinder. From there, they would be individually projected through a wormhole, across space, and onto the surface of the region of Mars known as Olduvai.
A translucent plaque hung in the air above them, containing twenty names etched into a scroll graphic.
Maybe stalling, the Kid asked Sandford, “What’re all those names?”
Sandford glanced up. Clearly not liking the subject. “Oh that. That’s a UAC-funded memorial to the early pioneers of the Ark, who in the pursuit of perfecting this groundbreaking and unique technology, made the ultimate sacrifice…”
Reaper looked at Sandford, wondering if he were serious, coming out with this PR palaver. “This groundbreaking and unique technology?”
A different part of the speech stuck with Portman. “Ultimate sacrifice?”
Sandford went on, reassuringly. “This was long, long ago, before they perfected the crystalline structure.”
The Kid looked at the shiny cylinder awaiting him. Then at Goat and Destroyer, close beside him. He swallowed. “You…done this before?”
Goat surprised him by answering a direct question. “Once. Training mission.” Three words. It was something.
Reaper had gone through it as a kid — but he’d been sedated. Not this time…
Duke slapped the kid on the back, making him stagger, and grinned. “Hope you had a big dinner!”
Sandford took a remote controller from his pocket, tapped a code, and the cylinder slid open.
They stepped through, and the curved wall closed behind them, leaving them inside a shiny metal vertical tube, with just enough room for them and a drop of mercurial liquid floating, weightless, in the center of the chamber. The light seemed to warp across its surface; the rippling interior of the drop seemed to enfold infinity. If you looked at the edge of the drop, it became the center; and the center became the edge, around and around…
“That’s it?” the Kid said, blinking. “I thought the Ark was, like — a spaceship. Not…”
“…A metaphor?” Reaper said.
The squad stared at the hovering droplet.
Reaper found himself wondering: How big is it? One moment the floating quicksilver droplet at the heart of the Ark seemed like something you could fit into your hand. The next moment it was bushelsized, and getting bigger. It seemed all of those sizes. Then it seemed, impossibly, as big as a whale though it was in a room a whale couldn’t fit into. A manifestation of the quantum-uncertainty realm, it was constantly shifting within itself. Interesting…
He smiled at himself. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Reaper came from a family of scientists — he was clearly a black sheep, but the interest simmered in him nonetheless, and he followed science when he wasn’t on assignment. He didn’t let the rest of the squadron know it though…as far as they knew he was a stone-cold jarhead and nothing more.
Sarge gave Sandford an order then, just as if he were a new recruit. “Soon as we’re through, lock down the surface elevator here for a six-hour standard quarantine.”
Sandford hesitated half a second, as if not sure he should be taking direction from Sarge, then nodded. He turned to the others. “Please form two lines. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, there are exits behind me here, here —” He pointed. “And here.” He paused, glanced at them — and Reaper could see Sandford wanted to get out of there. “Any questions?”
Duke held up his big-assed weapon. Asked straight-faced, “Does this classify as ‘carry-on’?”
Sandford managed a thin smile at that.
Sarge cocked his weapon and walked over to the Ark. He stepped within its range of sensitivity…
It expanded to envelop his body in a glistening, faintly wobbling globular shell.
Until, in a flash of blue light, it condensed backed to its original size — as if it had swallowed Sarge and digested him.
Sarge was gone.
Shaken, the Kid took a step back, sucking in his breath. Reaper grabbed his elbow. Locked eyes with him. The look said it all. The Kid swallowed, and nodded, held his ground.
Reaper clapped the kid on the shoulder, then turned and walked to the quicksilver droplet…
He felt himself enter its field of sensitivity — it felt like immersing himself in cold water that was instantly warm water, then icy again…
Suddenly the quivering droplet seemed to leap at his eyes — and there was a wall of living silver, all around him. A series of anomolous smells. The smell of a campfire; the smell of ozone; the smell of roses; the smell of death. A flash of light…blue — then shifting to blue-white, incandescent white…
Reaper felt himself dissolving, his body turning to liquid, his flesh like sugar diffused in living water, bones becoming a skeleton of ice melting down in a second — splash — then a riot of sounds: roaring and singing and piercing screams and gibbered words and thundering bits of half-forgotten symphonies; his consciousness spun in a vortex of sickening black light, striated by colors that were all wrong, just wrong; those colors don’t exist anywhere. Reaper thought he saw his father fly past him, translucent and ghostly, mouthing something, trying to warn him; then the light and color shrank away, replaced by blackness rich with feeling, tactile sensations from some forgotten corner of his brain: a woman’s soft hair brushing against his naked shoulder, a spiderweb breaking on his cheek, moss under bare boyhood feet, the surprisingly soft flesh of his enemy’s throat that time in the desert when his gun had jammed and he’d had to leap on the guy and strangle him, the feeling of blood running across his wrists, a jawbone cracking against his fist, a bullet crashing into his shoulder, shattering pain —
The cryptic opacity was split by shimmering light, and he could feel himself solid and whole again — but he was falling, falling up; no, falling down; no, he was being pulled sideways, he was nauseatingly spinning, he was falling through a flash of frozen blue light…
Into the wormhole chamber on Olduvai, Mars.
Four
REAPER MANAGED TO stay on his feet as he emerged from the Ark at the UAC Research Facility on Olduvai, Mars, though the room was shifting, his head throbbed and his stomach was trying to crawl out of his body.
He turned as Destroyer came through — staggering. Destroyer gave him a sickly grin.
That shit is fucked up, the grin said.
The others were coming through, gulping, pale, looking like they badly wanted to throw up.
But only the Kid actually did: he took three steps, bent over, and puked. Then it was Portman’s turn.
Reaper smiled at that — though his gut still convulsed inside him — because Portman was always coming on like he was so much tougher than the Kid.
Portman straightened, wiping his mouth. “Why we gotta come all this way? Why can’t the UAC rent-a-cops fix this bullshit?”
The metal cylinder whirred open, and they were all stepping unsteadily down off the platform.
“Jesus,” the Kid muttered, holding his middle. “Is it always that rough?”
“Believe me,” someone coming into the room said, “it used to be rougher…”
Reaper turned to see a man who’d been grafted into a kind of sleek wheelchair — a cyberchair, a module that enclosed everything below his sternum. The cyberchair seemed to merge seamlessly with his upper half. He drifted effortlessly forward, the wheelchair apparently responding to his nervous system, and extended a hand. The wheelchair graft seemed to call for an older man, but this guy had a boyish face, curly hair, an impish glitter in his eye. “Time was,” he went on, “Ark travel was susceptible to patches of, let’s say, major turbulence.”