Page 40 (1/2)

An aura A fucking trap just like in Darwin, only here he had no one but a bunch of subs and maybe, just maybe, Skyler and Ana Of course, they’d leave at the first possible opportunity and had zero incentive now to cart hih and scream all at once How the hell had he traded the cushy, power-laden confines of Nightcliff and Darwin for this sorry lot?

He closed his eyes to the world, tilted his head back, and howled out this pathetic frustration Mid-cry he opened his eyes to see the heavens Might as well include the ured

His roar cut off, trapped in his throat as his breath caught in wonder

Aabove hi artificial Roughly circular in shape and … no, no, it was square Rounded, yes, but no circle

It grew larger with each passing rew, as big as the sun and then larger still Not ale object, either It was soradually it beca dozens,doard hihtcliff and watched the h to know that pace, that lazy drift

But these numbered in the hundreds, and there was no Elevator here, much less a nored the growing knot in his gut The objects continued to fall They blotted a quarter of the sky now, and he could make out individual details They were like spikes, soonal and were made of material identical to the Builder’s shell ship he’d seen while aboard Anchor Station, though each of these dwarfed that object and there were hundreds

Beside him the subhumans continued to fall helplessly into the pit Russell, enveloped in a sudden and overwhel desire for self-preservation, stepped backward The spikes weren’t falling at all They were being lowered Each had its own Elevator cord, exactly like the one in Nightcliff, onlythe lift capability they ether Darwin’s capacity ain But why? There was nothing here but sand The whole thing would be wasted They couldn’t even anchor to the ground because …

He glanced down, and understood

The columns matched the pattern of holes on the alien pyramid’s surface As this realization crept into Russell’ssound see the spike of pain in each elbow as he landed, and glanced up The coluy They rocketed toward the ground with a sudden ferocity, sizzling through the air in a concert of sonic boo hishe’d ever heard before

Theforce had destruction been their purpose Russell threw an ar ahappened at all, in fact

Russell sat up and crawled back to the edge of the pit

Below, as he’d guessed, the colu holes, which dotted the pyramid’s surface From the tip of each, elevator cords stretched upward until they disappeared against the azure sky

A fractured noise vibrated through the ground, like ainto a thousand pieces Russell knew then He knehat the columns were for, what so many Elevator cords were needed to lift

They weren’t here to lift cli building

The subs tu mindlessly into the abyss, he suddenly realized, were just trying toSkyler and Ana were probably inside, too, doing God-knohat Trapped maybe, or dead

If Russell didn’t move he’d be left behind, alone in this polluted moonscape of a place, as his last chance at survival, and perhaps redemption, was hauled away

Fuck that

He did as the subhu cloud toward the pyramid below

Skyler lay on his stomach at the end of a trail of bodies The dead subhu hallway

His throat felt dry as the sand outside In the lull of battle his storowled and twisted as if in a death throe of its own

Ana lay a fewsoftly Her eyes were closed but he could tell she had yet to sleep Behind her sprawled a massive room that dwarfed the one below

The dark walls sloped inward, soaring to a point high above that hid in shadow Throughout the space were hundreds of erratically placed colu the holes Skyler had seen in the pyrah narrow zigzag lines that ran about the floor in a pattern as alien as the place itself These produced so little light Skyler almost missed them at first It was only when he’d lowered the intensity on his rifle’s barrel light that he noticed the trace glow

Ana stirred, shifted her weight on the hard surface "Have they finally stopped?" she asked without opening her eyes

"Doubt it," Skyler said He glanced into the shadowy depths of the room The columns, thick around as a fully loaded cli, stood in silent audience Motionless, judgmental "We should explore this rooirl sat up She coughed into her hand "Did you bring any rations?"

Skyler shook his head "Running low on ammo, too" He tried to sound casual and failed miserably

Ana stood, rolled her head froo ahead and look around I’ll hold theave hi a pistol she’d taken off one of the corpses that littered the facility She cocked it and leaned against the wall beside the passage entryway

"Won’t be a minute," Skyler said

He kept to the perimeter of the room as best he could The columns were placed randomly, as far as he could tell, and often were partially eether he could not squeeze through the gap between and had to walk around Without the landainst the walls beside her, he ht have easily becolanced up toward the blackness of the ceiling His thoughts drifted back to the first tiht This place wasn’t so different, save for the scale If he was right, each of these colu heart of this gigantic place Exhaust tubes, spewing out the SUBS virus in concentrated blasts year after year, taking advantage of every dust storm and stiff wind to further the reach Presu became another, smaller factory, but for whatever reason the Builders had kept this initial source running all this time

Until now, it seemed

He yearned to leave, to find out if his efforts had indeed killed the source of the disease Quietly, in the silent depths of the enoret credit for saving everyone and everything? Below Nightcliff he’d been forced to flee into the deep silo, and only an aggressive subhue iris at the bottom of that pit What had happened after that he scarcely understood, much less remembered in any detail Yet he’d done it He’d short-circuited whateverup to that moment, and ended the sporadic incursions of subhumans into Darwin and above

At least those who knehat had happened had the sense to keep it quiet