In a friendlier universe machines would have cruised the boulevard, sending perfect images in crystal resolution. Szpindel and the Gang would be sipping coffee back in the drum, telling the grunts to take a sample of this or get a close-up of that. In a friendlier universe, I wouldn’t even be here.
Bates appeared in the next postcard, emerging from the fistula. In the next her back was to the camera, apparently panning the perimeter.
In the one after that she was looking right at us.
“Oh…okay,” she said. “Come on… down…”
“Not so fast,” Szpindel said. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine. A bit—odd, but…”
“Odd how?” Radiation sickness announced itself with nausea, but unless we’d seriously erred in our calculations that wouldn’t happen for another hour or two. Not until well after we’d all been lethally cooked.
“Mild disorientation,” Bates reported. “It’s a bit spooky in here, but—must be Grey Syndrome. It’s tolerable.”
I looked at the Gang. The Gang looked at Szpindel. Szpindel shrugged.
“It’s not gonna get any better,” Bates said from afar. “The clock is… clock is ticking, people. Get down here.”
We got.
Not living, not by a long shot.
Haunted.
Even when the walls didn’t move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds—Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.
You tell yourself it’s mostly in your head. You remind yourself it’s well-documented, an inevitable consequence of meat and magnetism brought too close together. High-energy fields release the ghosts and the grays from your temporal lobe, dredge up paralyzing dread from the midbrain to saturate the conscious mind. They fuck with your motor nerves and make even dormant inlays sing like fine fragile crystal.
Energy artefacts. That’s all they are. You repeat that to yourself, you repeat it so often it loses any pretense of rationality and devolves into rote incantation, a spell to ward off evil spirits. They’re not real, these whispering voices just outside your helmet, those half-seen creatures flickering at the edge of vision. They’re tricks of the mind, the same neurological smoke-and-mirrors that convinced people throughout the ages that they were being haunted by ghosts, abducted by aliens, hunted by—
—vampires—
—and you wonder whether Sarasti really stayed behind or if he was here all along, waiting for you…
“Another spike,” Bates warned as Tesla and Seiverts surged on my HUD. “Hang on.”
I was installing the Faraday bell. Trying to. It should have been simple enough; I’d already run the main anchor line down from the vestibule to the flaccid sack floating in the middle of the passageway. I was—that’s right, something about a spring line. To, to keep the bell centered. The wall glistened in my headlamp like wet clay. Satanic runes sparkled in my imagination.
I jammed the spring line’s pad against the wall. I could have sworn the substrate flinched. I fired my thrust pistol, retreated back to the center of the passage.
“They’re here,” James whispered.
Something was. I could feel it always behind me, no matter where I turned. I could feel some great roaring darkness swirling just out of sight, a ravenous mouth as wide as the tunnel itself. Any moment now it would lunge forward at impossible speed and engulf us all.
“They’re beautiful…” James said. There was no fear in her voice at all. She sounded awestruck.
“What? Where?” Bates never stopped turning, kept trying to keep the whole three-sixty in sight at once. The drones under her command wobbled restlessly to either side, armored parentheses pointing down the passageway in opposite directions. “What do you see?”
“Not out there. In here. Everywhere. Can’t you see it?”
“I can’t see anything,” Szpindel said, his voice shaking.
“It’s in the EM fields,” James said. “That’s how they communicate. The whole structure is full of language, it’s—”
“I can’t see anything,” Szpindel repeated. His breath echoed loud and fast over the link. “I’m blind.”
“Shit.” Bates swung on Szpindel. “How can that—the radiation—”
“I d-don’t think that’s it..”
Nine Tesla, and the ghosts were everywhere. I smelled asphalt and honeysuckle.
“Keeton!” Bates called. “You with us?”
“Y-yeah.” Barely. I was back at the bell, my hand on the ripcord. Trying to ignore whatever kept tapping me on the shoulder.
“Leave that! Get him outside!”
“No!” Szpindel floated helplessly in the passage, his pistol bouncing against its wrist tether. “No, throw me something.”
“What?”
It’s all in your head. It’s all in your—
“Throw something! Anything!”
Bates hesitated. “You said you were bli—”
“Just do it!”
Bates pulled a spare suit battery off her belt and lobbed it. Szpindel reached, fumbled. The battery slipped from his grasp and bounced off the wall.
“I’ll be okay,” he gasped. “Just get me into the tent.”
I yanked the cord. The bell inflated like a great gunmetal marshmallow.
“Everyone inside!” Bates ran her pistol with one hand, grabbed Szpindel with the other. She handed him off to me and slapped a sensor pod onto the skin of the tent. I pulled back the shielded entrance flap as though pulling a scab from a wound. The single molecule beneath, infinitely long, endlessly folded against itself, swirled and glistened like a soap bubble.
“Get him in. James! Get down here!”
I pushed Szpindel through the membrane. It split around him with airtight intimacy, hugged each tiny crack and contour as he passed through.
“James! Are you—”
“Get it off me!” Harsh voice, raw and scared and scary, as male as female could sound. Cruncher in control. “Get it off!”
I looked back. Susan James’ body tumbled slowly in the tunnel, grasping its right leg with both hands.
“James!” Bates sailed over to the other woman. “Keeton! Help out!” She took the Gang by the arm. “Cruncher? What’s the problem?”
“That! You blind?” He wasn’t just grasping at the limb, I realized as I joined them. He was tugging at it. He was trying to pull it off.
Something laughed hysterically, right inside my helmet.
“Take his arm,” Bates told me, taking his right one, trying to pry the fingers from their death grip on the Gang’s leg. “Cruncher, let go. Now.”