Planet Hate, page 22
Balam dipped his head like an upturned bulb, checking the street again for signs of Brigid and the girl, but they weren’t there. He was certain he had arrived in time. Even with their slight head start Little Quav would slow the woman down and, besides, Balam would have seen them if they had made it to the rising slope before him; it was too open an area to miss their retreating forms.
No, there had to be another way. Either Brigid was hiding with the child somewhere in the city itself or—
It struck Balam like a lightning bolt. She would use Agartha’s parallax point, escaping via interphaser. In a second Balam waddled out of his hiding place, scurrying along the street on his ungainly legs.
HER BLACK leather-clad legs moving like pistons, Brigid dragged the tousle-haired girl along as she made her way to the parallax point via Agartha’s empty back alleys. The interphaser was in its carry case, strapped across her back. The parallax point was located right in the center of the underground city. Brigid couldn’t help but feel disappointed at the obviousness of it all. Agartha’s street design all but pointed to the location of the gateway, as if the settlement itself had actually grown up around it. That was probably true, she realized—as early human settlements frequently grew up close to rivers and other water courses because of their use in crop irrigation and transport, so, too, would this Archon city have grown up around its own primary means of transport.
Like the rest of the ghost city, the towering structure waited in front of her in silence, dust and dirt marking its black basalt sides. Brigid slammed aside the door with an angry sweep of her hand, dragging Little Quav inside and peering around her. A long corridor stretched through the interior of the building, dark walls made dull by the absolute lack of interior light. There had been a stone here once, Brigid remembered—had it been here or somewhere else? A black-hued stone with a surface like glass that, when you looked into it, would show you possible futures, different worlds. The stone had gone by many names—Lucifer’s Stone, the kala, the Kaa’ba, the Chintamani Stone, the Shining Trapezohedron—as different human cultures had convinced themselves its visions unlocked enlightenment or madness. But it had been shattered, its shards lost across the planet’s surface. The broken stone had shown a lot of things, but it had never shown Brigid this truth, that she would emerge from her own unsuspected chrysalis state into what she was now, a creature of the Annunaki, a being driven solely by contempt.
Little Quav looked at the woman who dragged her along. After spending so much time with Balam, the woman seemed to tower in Quav’s presence. The little girl liked her, though she couldn’t really comprehend why. To Quav, Brigid was the closest thing she had ever had to a mother. She had met the woman a grand total of twice, and the first of those times had been at her own birth, which Quav could not possibly remember. Little Quav’s mother had died in childbirth, and the daughter had been whisked away by Balam shortly thereafter. Not yet three years old, Quav was beginning to recognize her own body and to appreciate how it differed from that of her foster parent. Balam was strange, alien, his six-fingered hands long and gangly, his head shaped like a hot-air balloon. He was not like Quav, not of her kind, and yet the girl had no one else to turn to.
Balam had become aware of this shortcoming, and he had covered the mirrors within the house, hiding Little Quav from herself. But there were other places, glass and polished wood where Quav would see her reflection, the metal implements she would use to eat with sometimes. Quav was a child and, like all children, she was curious.
After they had visited the Cerberus redoubt eight weeks ago, Quav had begun asking Balam questions. She had seen people in the redoubt, people like her or at least more like her than he was. For all intents and purposes she looked like a human child after all, perhaps more graceful, more ethereal, but still her hybrid qualities only added to her human nature. So she had understood the people at Cerberus as her people, different from Balam, who was the other.
It was inevitable really, that the girl would be attracted to humans, that she would trust them over Balam despite all of his kindness and selflessness in raising her.
Balam had told her about the humans but he had been evasive, refusing to answer the girl’s half-formed questions, promising to explain more when she was older, when she was better equipped to understand. That had only made it worse. Little Quav loved Balam, but she wanted to be with humans now, now that she had seen them.
Little Quav remembered seeing Brigid in the redoubt, as well as another woman, a mothering figure who had taken care of her and placed a cold metal disc to her chest as she listened to Quav’s breathing. Little Quav recalled most clearly Brigid’s bright hair, for Quav had never seen hair on another person before. Balam was hairless; he didn’t even have eyebrows with which to enhance his expressions. The woman with the sunset hair was called Briggly, or that’s how Little Quav remembered it, and she had friends. There had been a giant man who smiled at her a lot like a big friendly monster. That man had dark skin as if he had been dipped in the shadows, but he had played with her a little, and his voice made Quav’s insides rumble when he spoke. That man had been called Grant.
And there had been another, too, a man with dark hair and alert eyes, a man who seemed almost afraid of Quav. He had been called Kane, and Balam had explained that he was Briggly’s best friend. Quav tried to picture him as she ran with Brigid through the towering power plant.
So it was, in one sense, Balam’s own fault that Quav had been so easily abducted by Brigid. In protecting her he had hidden her from the world’s pain, and so she had grown up ignorant of the dangers that world might present.
Standing beside the girl, Brigid turned around and around until she found herself facing the looming corridor again. She noticed a doorway, almost hidden by the dark shadows of the building.
“Briggly?” Little Quav urged. She sounded frightened.
“Quiet, child,” Brigid urged, motioning to the doorway. “Monsters.”
Then Brigid and the girl disappeared into the doorway, finding themselves on a spiraling staircase carved from the rock. The staircase went down and down, disappearing into the gloom. There was no light switch on the wall, no system to light the stairwell that Brigid could see. But even as she stepped onto the first step, a soft glow ebbed into existence along the sides of the steps, turning a warm orange as Brigid urged the little girl down them.
“Where does this go?” Little Quav asked as Brigid hurried her down the stairs.
“Just keep going,” Brigid replied, firmly pushing the girl’s shoulders.
After twenty stairs or so, the staircase changed, becoming narrower and switching to a coiling design made of beautifully tooled metal that shone as the orange glow touched it. The metal clattered as Brigid and the girl hurried down it, each step echoing in the vastness of an unseen room beneath them, reverberating back to them long after they had taken the steps themselves, so that the sound doubled and redoubled, over and over like a round robin chorus.
It took almost two minutes—Brigid could have done it in half that had she been alone—until the two of them reached the bottom rung of the swirling stairs. They stood in a vast chamber that stretched on for as far as Brigid could see in the minimal light. As with the staircase and the main parts of the building itself, the chamber was lit sporadically or not at all, faint specks of green and orange dotted around the walls as Brigid led the child, holding her hand. Perhaps there was a trick to operating the lights, Brigid thought, or maybe the Archons could simply see a wider range of the spectrum and so such concerns had never occurred to them. Whatever it was, it left much of the vast chamber in shadow.
They were in an underground room beneath an underground city, and the ludicrous thought struck Brigid that they must surely be getting close to the center of the Earth. The coldness of the room coupled with its size made it seem more like they were outside, however, up on the surface at nighttime.
Brigid peered around her. The chamber appeared empty, and its high ceiling gave one the impression of a vast open space, as if walking in a park at night. With no frame of reference, Brigid could not begin to guess the true size of the room.
There was machinery in the room, little clumps of it scattered here and there like conversational groups at a party, the spaces between them irregular. Brigid looked around her, singularly failing to recognize any of the alien tech on show in the shadowy gloom.
“Where are we?” Quav asked in her little girl’s voice. “It’s cold. Is Kane here?”
Brigid looked down at the girl, her brow furrowed. Of course, Little Quav had been born at the Cerberus redoubt and she had come to associate Brigid with her old companions, Kane, Grant and the others. Though the girl had only visited Cerberus once since her birth, she was perceptive. Furthermore, there was every chance that Balam had spoken to the girl about the Cerberus people; perhaps Quav had asked about them after her visit, for she had seen so few people in her short and sheltered life.
“Not Kane,” Brigid replied. “Not today.”
Brigid continued scanning the room for a moment, searching for some reference point, a sign of where the parallax point might be hidden. Then there came a voice from above, clattering footsteps as someone stepped onto the metallic stairwell. Brigid glanced over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes as she tried to make out who it was in the darkness. But already she knew; after all, it could only be one person—Balam.
“Come on, Little Quav,” Brigid said, her voice an encouraging whisper. “Don’t look at the monster or he’ll get you and eat you up.”
Scared, Quav hurried beside the flame-haired woman, clutching her doll close to her chest as Brigid led them through the main artery between stacks of waiting tech, searching for the parallax point from which the interphaser could launch. All around the chamber, the echoing clanks of Balam’s footsteps rolled from wall to wall, repeating themselves over and over so as to sound more like an approaching army hidden by the gloom.
Parallax points came in many forms, often disguised as ancient places of worship or even the simplest markings on a wall, Brigid knew. But this parallax point wasn’t some rocky hole, a scratching in a wall or a simple statue. Brigid was left speechless by the sight of the vast metallic disc, stretching fifteen feet across the floor, constructed from concentric circles of silver and gold. Strip lighting winked into life on its surface, curving lines of green and red. As they came to life, Brigid saw the carvings in the metal discs, cuneiform patterns running their complete lengths, cup-and-spiral symbols mixed with the archaic glyphs. The juxtaposition of modern lighting and ancient design took Brigid’s breath away.
Brigid strode across the area to the dark center of the circle, the interphaser unit balanced carefully in her hands. As she walked, the green-and-red strips glistened across the black sheath of her leather armor, painting her in stripes like some strange, insectile camouflage. When she had reached the center of those concentric circles, she bent, spying the square slot that had been inset in the floor there. It was little surprise to find that the interphaser fitted it perfectly, slipping into the space like the final piece of a jigsaw.
Little Quav was still standing at the edge of the broad circular pattern, watching as Brigid engaged the interphaser.
“Come, Quav,” Brigid urged the hybrid girl. “Quickly now.”
AS BALAM REACHED the bottom of the stairwell, Brigid tapped the destination coordinates into the interphaser, even as Little Quav hurried to her side. Balam pushed himself to go faster, hurrying past the moth-balled heaps of ancient tech, old nullifiers, liquidizers, storage batteries.
Balam’s legs ached and his chest burned as he ran across the vast room toward the fiercely lit area of the parallax point. He was unused to chasing people, and his need for medical attention was growing by the minute, the sticky blood of his chest wound congealing with the dark fabric of his robe. The bright markings of the parallax point formed a beacon in the darkness of the underground holding area, and Balam watched as Little Quav waited at Brigid’s side.
“Quav, no,” Balam called, but his voice was soft now, his breathing shallow.
He raised the ASP emitter, lining up his shot carefully, determined to knock Brigid out without harming his hybrid charge. But already the familiar lotus blossom of color was emerging from the interphaser, its swirling pattern dominating the room in a cone shape, lightning flashes playing in its midst. Downward, too, the interphaser’s glow grew, drawing a pattern into the floor.
A single plasma bolt blasted from the ASP emitter on Balam’s wrist. But he was sure he saw Brigid dip her head to him, a sadistic smile on her lips as she disappeared, the bolt itself cutting through the space where she had been with a stench of ozone. They were already gone.
Balam stared at the space where his quarry had been, gazing at it with the sorrowful pools of his dark eyes as the lit circle of the parallax point powered down, returning to darkness.
“No,” he said to that darkness. “I deny this.”
Even as he spoke the words, the pale-skinned humanoid was running to one of the nearby storage blocks, his deft fingers grasping through their seemingly haphazard grouping. In a moment Balam had produced an interphaser unit of his own from the mishmash of stuff, its triangular shape glistening as the last ebbing light of the parallax point played across its metallic surface.
“Now, where would you go, Brigid Baptiste?” Balam mused as he hurried back to the parallax point that Brigid’s interphaser had just vacated less than a minute before. As realization dawned, Balam powered up the interphaser and input the Destination Zero code.
THE RELENTLESS colorburst faded. Chest heaving, Balam found himself standing in the surrounds of a man-made mat-trans unit, its tiled ceiling and armaglass walls all too familiar. Overhead lights winked on automatically as motion sensors detected his presence in the small chamber. There was a faint vibration all around as hidden fans began to ventilate the mat-trans cubicle, clearing any gaseous debris caused by the journey.
Balam took an unsteady step forward. He had quite forgotten how traumatic matter transfer could be and, in his weakened state, he had been ill-prepared for the disorientation it caused. Balam was surprised that no one had come to meet him—normally a detail of guards would be waiting on the far side of the antechamber, guns ready for any intruder.
Balam exited the mat-trans unit, stepped past the brown-tinted armaglass walls and out into the main operations room of the Cerberus redoubt. He had used this interphaser to travel here just eight weeks ago, when he had brought news of the Ontic Library’s destruction. This was where Brigid and her friends were based; Balam congratulated himself on his deft application of logic in following her.
Except, as he stepped out of the mat-trans unit, Balam realized his mistake. The familiar operations room had changed almost beyond recognition. Where Balam expected to see the sleek lines of computer machinery, the smooth walls of the thriving ops center, he instead found rough rock walls and plinths, the oppressive spines of thick stalactites spiking downward from the ceiling, making it lower than he remembered. The room was no longer lit by a system of bright overhead lights and desk lamps; now, thin traces of orange lava glowed within the rock walls, lighting the whole space insouciantly.
But the most significant change of all was that the room was utterly silent, with not even the suggestion that anyone had ever been here. There was certainly no indication that Brigid and the kidnapped child had passed through. But if she hadn’t returned to Cerberus, then where had she gone?
Balam felt the fiery pain increase in his chest. He staggered a step backward, placing a steadying hand on the armaglass wall where strips of rock cobwebbed across its once-smooth surface like the reaching tendrils of a vine.
There, amid the silent halls of the abandoned redoubt that had once been called Bravo, Balam slid down the wall. Then, collapsing to the floor, the pale-skinned figure clutched at the handful of oozing bullet wounds that littered his chest, coughing weakly into his clenched hand, a loose, rib-shaking wheeze as he slumped on the floor.
Chapter 18
Brigid Haight placed her hands on Little Quav’s shoulders, pulling the hybrid girl close to her as the multicolored lotus blossom of her activated interphaser expanded around them, plucking them from the underground city of Agartha even as Balam blasted a single plasma bolt at them from the bottom of the stairwell. Brigid smiled, her eyes locking with Balam’s as the interphase gateway took her and the girl out of the path of his plasma beam.
Travel by interphaser was instantaneous and it was something that Brigid had experienced countless times before. And yet this time it seemed somehow different. The familiar rainbow of light swirled in front of Brigid’s eyes, sparks of witch fire flashing in its depths, but something else appeared there, too. It seemed to be a geometric pattern, made up of concentric golden circles and interlocking squares. Originating from the focal point of Brigid’s vision, the golden shapes appeared to be dancing upon a sky-blue background. Brigid was conscious of other colors at the edges, blurring from her view, regular spots highlighting themselves in different shades of green and red. For a moment the colors seemed to taunt her, swirling in front of her eyes, and Brigid Haight wondered what it all meant.
And then she was back in reality, her hands still resting on the girl’s shoulders. Relief washed over Brigid as she prepared to step out into the hallways of Bensalem Keep.
Except this wasn’t Bensalem, wasn’t the island fortress of her master Ullikummis.
Instead she saw a cavern’s rocky walls, a glistening pit of amber in the cavern’s center surrounded by a metal circle decorated with ancient runes. She recognized the pit immediately, knew it was a Chalice of Rebirth.
