The corridor lights had dimmed to a level approximating the Glade itself; the visor clamped across my eyes boosted it back to broad daylight. It wasn’t strictly necessary—the lumens in the Glade, while low, were enough to find your way—but Chimp wasn’t settling for twilit grayscale. It wanted details.
The door slid open. It was way too dark in there. Something squirmed, just out of sight.
“You see that?”
“Yes,” said the bot.
“Don’t suppose you know what it is?”
“No.”
The bot’s muzzle panned back and forth and didn’t lock on.
I hadn’t got a good look: blackness melting away into blackness. Too much damn blackness; this sparse scattering of stars served up nowhere near enough light for a healthy forest.
I took a step forward. Half the stars went out. Others appeared. Impoverished constellations winked in and out of eclipse as I moved.
The lights were still on, then. There was just a lot of undergrowth in the way.
No refuge this time. No clean cool breeze to refresh the lungs. This time the air was heavy as oil. Weeds and brambles lurked in the darkness, strung across the catwalk as if some giant spider had gone on a bender, spun black threads and ropes without any sense of purpose or design.
The visor boosted black to gray: I could see well enough to cut through the finer filaments where they crossed the path, well enough to watch the thicker ones pull away in a sluggish tangled retreat at my approach.
I looked back. A soft white glow limned the edge of the hatch we’d entered through, a rounded rectangle in the rock to guide me out again. This walkway extended from its base, veined with dark creeping tendrils.
I was almost sure they hadn’t been there when I’d crossed.
“Plants don’t move,” I said softly.
“Some do.”
“These ones,” I told it, “aren’t supposed to.”
“I don’t know. They’re not in the catalog.”
The catwalk curved gently to the right. The overbearing gravity smeared faintly across my inner ear. Chimp’s bot floated in my wake like a faithful dog (I remember those, from real life even), its umbilical unspooling behind us in the fetid air: fine as spider silk, ten times stronger. My BUD was flickering by the time I reached a familiar fork in the road.
I hadn’t been here since Lian’s tantrum. The place had really gone downhill.
The forest was still standing. That was something. The bone trees still arced overhead, their bulbs bright as ever, cupped in skeletal hands. But they were being strangled. A profusion of ropey vines twisted around their branches, massed so thickly in places you couldn’t see the trunks underneath. I thought I saw some of those wormy masses clench in the half-light. Maybe it was just lumens and shadows.
Sometime over the past few meters my BUD had gone down. I barely noticed.
Hopefully this was just some kind of epiphyte, some mutant overlay that embraced the trunks but didn’t actually penetrate them. Maybe we could simply strip away the new growth without damaging the old.
I reached for the biopsy kit on my belt and turned to the bot. “I’m going to—”
The bot staggered, lost altitude; regained it an instant later as its rotors booted up. I glanced around, kit in one hand, machete humming in the other. The bot’s carapace sparkled with the bright grainy static of boosted photons.
“What’s the problem?”
“The bot lost ground-effect,” Chimp reported. “The deck plating must be down.”
“Must be? You can’t get a direct read?”
A momentary silence. “No.”
Maybe some kind of bioelectric interference from the overgrowth, or some rogue tendril growing through a vital seam to short out the wiring. The catwalk had pretty much run its course anyway. A few meters farther on it ended in a stairway leading down onto bedrock. Most of the forest was unfurnished by design.
I looked into its depths. Fractured mosaics of dim light in the distance: analuciferin suns peeking through gaps in the foliage.
“Any sign of Kaden or Dao?” I asked.
“No,” Chimp said.
“The bots?” Even offlined, you’d think they’d put out some kind of signature.
“No.”
I took a step down the stairs. The bot dipped forward a few centimeters and jerked to a halt, wobbling in mid-air.
“Tether’s caught.”
I turned. Range and obstruction had reduced the hatch to a couple of bright hyphens in the distance. The umbilical was stretched tight from the little drone, cutting across the curve of the catwalk. Must have tangled on something off the trail.
I retraced my steps, Chimp’s sock puppet keeping station at my side, reeling the tether back into its belly to keep it taut and out of further trouble. The rim of the distant hatch fell in and out of piecemeal eclipse. “Chimp. Any motion between here and the hatch?”
No answer.
“Chimp?” I looked over my shoulder.
The bot was trembling, as if afraid of the dark. Something brushed my right ear. The end of the severed umbilicus flicked past and vanished into the machine’s belly. Something whined faintly in there.
“Chim—”
Whiteout. Static on the visor. A sudden chittering—the bot stuttering towards target lock, I realized in a moment of bright perfect panic before it bounced off my chest and sent us both careening onto the deck. Something grabbed me around the leg, tightened; punctured my flesh and dug in. I screamed and flailed. I was being dragged. I reached out blindly, slapped the downed bot in passing; it fizzed and spat and fell out of reach. I cracked my head against a passing bit of rail, tore the useless visor off my face, plunged from bright static to pitch black.
More cracks against the head. I bumped down the stairs and onto rock, squirmed and reached forward and tried to free myself, grabbed something that pulsed and stabbed me in the palm. I pulled my hand back and saw black blood against gray flesh against a dim glow filtering through the trees. Brightening.
Glowbulbs blazed everywhere now, as blinding as nightlights can be. I was dragged through the heart of a globular cluster, an oasis of light in squirming claustrophobic darkness. I saw what had me now: fibrous, braided, so dark even in light that you’d have to squint to see more than silhouette. Studded with thorns the size of carnosaur teeth. One was hooked deep in my calf. It twitched. I screamed.
It let go.
It didn’t just release me: it sprang free, explosively uncoiled and convulsed off across the forest floor. Its severed stump thrashed into view, chopped free of some upstream command center, smearing sap—clear and viscous as glycerin—across the rock and trunks and stems it slapped in its death throes.
Another dark shape in motion. This one walked on two legs, stepped over the twitching monster-vine, a blade humming softly at its side. Behind that shape lurked others.
They stepped into the light. The machete clattered onto the rocks, just within reach.
“Yours?” Lian said.
She’s alive. She’s alive.
Still dark. The bulbs hung on all sides like silver fruit, washing the forest in twilight, but none seemed to have a direct line-of-sight to her face. Lian stood over me, a collection of angles and shadows haloed in bioluminescence. Four—allies? henchmen?—stood at her side, two steps back. I thought I recognized Dao standing with two strangers to Lian’s left; Kaden, alone, on her right.