The Plague Forge (Dire Earth Cycle #3)

Skyler poked his head inside and glanced around. There were bodies floating about. A few, black-clad, sent his heart hammering, but on closer inspection he saw them for what they were: Chinese paramilitary, dead for years.

He let his vision relax and took in the entire space. Inside he found a maze of semitransparent columns not present before. The vast circular room now looked like a storage area for black cylinders that stretched floor to ceiling, not unlike the room above where Blackfield lay. Many of the mummified corpses had vanished as a result of the appearance of the pillars. Impaled or subsumed into the floor, never to be seen again. A burial of sorts, and perhaps that was where their armored foes had gone. The rest had drifted off the floor in the lack of gravity, settling in corners or simply adrift.

A soft pulsing glow came from the interior of the columns, the only light in the room now. Ana right behind him, Skyler drifted slowly between the columns until he came to the center of the chamber. The platform where the oval object had been was gone. Collapsed or perhaps simply retracted. The deep silo beneath it remained, however, and he could still see a bright glow coming from the very bottom, nearly a kilometer distant. He wondered if the platform had fallen down there when the building rose, and shuddered. If he and Ana had waited here instead of fleeing, they’d be down there now, too.

“There,” Ana called out.

He glanced where she pointed and saw the body of a long-dead soldier. Choosing his angle carefully, Skyler pushed off from a column and floated over to it. The dead man wore the same black Special Forces outfit as the one Skyler had searched earlier. If he’d carried a rifle it had floated away already, but he might have ammo that would fit the empty one Skyler carried. Skyler rifled through the corpse’s pockets, found nothing in that regard. But there was a Sonton pistol holstered at the belt. Skyler took it, as well as two clips of ammunition from an adjacent leather container. He let his own empty rifle drift away in the process. A walking stick wouldn’t do much good in zero-g.

On a whim he took the man’s jacket as well, a surprisingly frustrating task in zero-g. By the time he’d wrestled the garment away he was spinning wildly, and drifting toward the open maw of the silo. “A little help?”

Ana pushed toward him and her momentum carried them both off toward the room’s sidewall. When they were at rest, Skyler handed her the jacket and the pistol. “If we’re in space, it may start to get cold in here,” he said.

The jacket had bits of Kevlar sewn into it, but on the whole it wouldn’t provide much warmth. Ana shrugged it on anyway, not questioning his motivation. She checked the pistol like a seasoned expert and placed the two extra clips in a zippered pocket on her pants. Then she took a long breath. “Skyler …”

“Hmm?”

“We might be in here a long, long time, right?”

“It’s possible.”

She left her next thought unsaid, but Skyler could see it in her expression. No food, no water. “We’ll figure something out,” he said.

Ana looked away. He could see the gleam of tears in her eyes even in the darkness.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The Key Ship

2.APR.2285

She stared up at the strange room, using every mental trick she could think of to ignore the large crack that spidered across her visor. There was numbness in her right calf, too, and a lingering pain in her right wrist where she’d broken the fall.

The room, which she’d mentally thought of as a tall cylinder, lay on its side now. Tania lay flat on a dark surface that had been one of the ten walls before. The three lit walls—red, emerald, purple—were above her, forming an almost cathedral-like curved ceiling that ran a hundred meters end to end.

Next to her, Vanessa sat up. She raised her arms over her head and, before Tania could caution her against it, the immune removed her helmet and tossed it aside.

Vanessa inhaled, a full breath as if she’d just entered a busy kitchen on a special occasion. Tania could only lay still and watch out the corner of her eye as the woman stood and shrugged out of the rest of her bulky suit. The process took some time, and Tania, despite knowing she should help, did not lift a finger.

By the time Vanessa freed herself from the legs of the bulky suit, Tania’s pains had mostly faded, as had her mortal fear of the hairline crack across her vision. She’d come close to suffocation twice in recent weeks, and thought if that fate approached her again she’d find some quicker, more palatable way to die.

The immune stood and stretched her arms, wincing briefly from some injury. Then she hopped up and down from her toes, testing the gravity. What she found pleased her, from the grin she flashed down at Tania. Standing there, wearing only an athletic bra and tight exercise shorts, and illuminated by the green, purple, and red glows coming from the soaring walls of the room, she looked like a goddess.

She said something, but without the intersuit comm system Tania heard only a muffled voice. Then Vanessa held out a hand and Tania, growing less wary by the second, took it.

In a matter of minutes Tania had her spacesuit off and breathed fresh, oddly fragrant air. It held none of the rich, bright smells that Colorado had, nor even the pungent, slightly moldy aromas of Belem. Yet it had no sterility to it, either. Tania was used to processed air to the point that setting foot on Earth had been like a slap across the face in its intensity. This air was somewhere between the two.

She took a few tentative steps and found she agreed with Vanessa’s expression of delight. The gravity felt like Earth normal. Either the ship had begun to spin or the Builders had some means of generating their own gravitational force. Before Skyler’s visit to the time-compressed dome in Ireland she would have discounted that possibility, but not now.

The third option, acceleration, she pushed out of her mind.

She walked gingerly to the room’s former floor, now an endcap wall, where the door had irised open upon their arrival. She feared it would not open as it had before, in order to keep the room’s newly earned atmosphere from escaping. Worse, what if it opened and she was sucked out into space before she had a chance to curse her own curiosity?

Instead the iris door simply pulsed open, right in the center of the wall. With atmosphere present the mechanism made a sound like two planes of glass sliding against each other.

Tania stared at the opening for a long time. Even if the passage represented a way out, she couldn’t go. The web of cracks across the glass of her helmet would prevent that. “We have to contact Tim,” she said, her eyes never leaving the portal in the middle of the wall. “He’ll have to try to get the ERV to the exterior door and.…” She left the rest unsaid. She would have to risk vacuum exposure in order to board the vessel, and hope they could seal it in time. Thirty seconds at most.

Vanessa brushed Tania’s elbow with her fingertip, drawing Tania back to the moment. “He said something was coming up from the ground, Tania. What if it blocks our way out?”

The thought left Tania Sharma numb. “We’d better hurry, then.” She picked up her broken helmet and moved to stand below the exit.

“I’ll boost you up,” Vanessa offered. She cupped her hands together and, when Tania stepped in, hoisted her until she could reach the rim of the door. Tania tossed her helmet inside before gripping the edge with both hands.

Grunting with effort, she hauled herself up and straddled the edge. The spherical Lobby on the other side had not changed, though the faint glow from its spongy interior surface could not be seen, overwhelmed by the brilliant colors coursing through the surfaces within the key room.

“Maybe I should stay with the suits,” Vanessa said from below.

Tania thought about it, then shook her head. “I’d rather we stay together. Besides, odd as these doors are they do seem to be reliable.” She gripped the edge of the portal with one hand and reached down with the other.

Vanessa jumped, grasped, and together they pulled until the immune’s fingers found the edge. She hoisted herself the rest of the way with ease.

Tania slid down the inside of the sphere until she could get her feet under herself. The slide turned into a running fall before she found herself at the base of the Lobby room. Vanessa joined her a second later.

Above, the portal to the key room remained oddly open. Cut off from much of its light, Tania’s eyes began to adjust until once again she could see the glow emitted by the spongy white material of the Lobby sphere. It took Tania a moment to realize the light no longer had a uniform brightness. The intensity now coalesced at her feet, leaving the portion directly above her head in almost total darkness.

The two metallic bands came to life. With a deep, faint grinding sound they began to rotate on their axis and then, gradually, tilt as they sought new positions. The portal to the key room, Tania noted, remained open, as if the ship somehow knew they’d left their suits in there and would need to return.

With gravity, Tania couldn’t simply drift and watch. She had to leap over one of the bands as it slid across the surface of the sphere. The band slapped her broken helmet and sent it tumbling like a piece of clothing in a dryer.

After one revolution the bands began to slow down in flawless unison, and then they stopped. Each band had a patch that, before, had aligned with the other before forming a portal. This time the patches were in mirror positions, low in the room and separated by perhaps three meters. One ahead, one behind.

They both opened simultaneously, and Tania found herself dropping into a combat stance on pure instinct. Vanessa did as well, she saw, and they were both facing a different door.

Tania did not see a long tunnel leading out to the ship’s hull. Instead what lay before her was a curved hallway, with a glowing floor, leading gently upward and out of sight. Other than the material, it reminded her of Anchor Station. Clean lines and soft light along that graceful upward curve of the floor.

Curved floor. We’re under spin, then. But why?

Somehow the use of spin to generate a gravity-like force made the Builders a little less impressive, a little less intimidating, and Tania felt the tension within her unwind if only slightly.

She turned then to look out the other portal, the one Vanessa silently faced. Years of life aboard space stations gave Tania the automatic expectation that the curved hall would simply continue in an unbroken ring. Instead she saw a perpendicular corridor, leading off into darkness on both the left and right.

“What the hell’s going on?” Vanessa asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“It seems the Builders have done some remodeling.”

“Why?”

“I wish I knew. More important, why did they provide us with gravity and air? And how did they get it so perfectly matched to our needs?”

Vanessa frowned, then shrugged. “Maybe it’s just proper etiquette.”

Tania snorted a laugh, despite herself. “Right. Sorry we killed nine billion of you. Please, come in, make yourselves at home.”

“You sound like Skyler,” the woman said, laughing herself. The moment passed. “Perhaps it’s just some automated process then.”

At that much more plausible answer Tania nodded. Still, she couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t happened on the previous two visits. She knelt and glanced in both directions. “I wonder if the ship looks the same from outside,” she said. “Shit! Tim!”

While Vanessa looked on, Tania picked up her cracked helmet and tried the comm. “Tim, are you reading this? Are you there?”

Silence.

“Tim? Come in, please.”

No response came. Not even static. She swallowed. Perhaps the curved hallway was an architectural feature after all, and they were under acceleration. For all she knew Tim was already a million kilometers behind them and fading by the second. Tim, Skyler, Earth … Everything.

Tania felt suddenly buried under the arrogance and the lack of scientific rigor that marked their forays into this place. In urgency real or imagined they’d acted no better than the explorers who’d entered so many sacred tombs in Egypt hundreds of years earlier, tracking in sand and grime, grabbing at every shiny object with their bare, sweaty hands. We’re fumbling about here, proving ourselves idiots. She recalled Skyler’s sarcastic remark that the Builders were playing some kind of elaborate hoax out of sheer intergalactic boredom, and suddenly she could imagine it, too. Imagine them snickering somewhere behind these walls.

“Is he gone?” Vanessa asked.

The words snapped Tania back to the present. The sounds of alien laughter in her mind faded. “We need to get closer to the hull. But which way?”

“I’ve no idea,” Vanessa admitted.

Tania considered the choices. “The curved hall would keep us at this position on the length of the ship,” she said. “But it might get us away from whatever is causing the interference. Closer to the hull, away from the key room. I say we try that first, then come back.”

At Vanessa’s emphatic nod, Tania tucked her damaged helmet under one arm and stepped into the curved tunnel.

The walls and ceiling resembled what Tania considered “classic” Builder material: dark gray, nonreflective in the extreme, and laced with a fine pattern of geometric grooves. The floor differed only because its grooves shimmered with a dim white light. Tania recalled her theory that the lit floors marked the direction of apparent gravity, and started to like the idea more and more. Given that this direction would change often in a mobile starship as it accelerated, decelerated, or cruised, she could see how such an indicator would be useful.

The illusion of gravity via spin became evident when the curved hallway always seemed to be curving upward at the same gentle pace. Had they been under acceleration, the hall would have quickly become a slope impossible to climb. For this at least Tania felt grateful. She mentally rendered the image of Earth floating off to one side, just where it would have been if she were aboard Anchor Station, and found surprising comfort there. “So we’ve spun up,” she said, ostensibly for Vanessa’s benefit but mostly because she found it easier to think if she talked aloud. “We’re at Earth-normal gravity it seems, breathing air that approximates our planet’s atmosphere. Even dressed as we are, the temperature is comfortable. The odds are astronomical that the Builders live by the exact same parameters we do, so I think we can assume they’re doing this for us.”