Broben tried again to grab the pistol. The bug rushed to him and the thin, sharp-jointed legs straddled him. He looked up into glassy eyes or cameras above a delicate fringe of waving feelers. He tried to raise a hand against the looming thing, tried to will himself to stand. His body only jerked and flailed.
Something pressed against his neck and he felt a sharp sting. His muscles relaxed and he slumped over into the warm blood on the deck. He sat up immediately and raised his fists to the bug. It turned away and scurried into the radio room.
Broben looked at his hands. He had raised his hands. He had sat up.
He braced himself against the bulkhead and pushed himself up to his feet. The ringing in his ears had lessened. He had to piss so badly it burned.
Another bug unfolded through the main hatch. This one held a folded belt of .50-caliber ammunition and a bundle of flight suits. It picked its way past the mutilated soldiers and immobilized crew, tracking through the thick red curd that now runneled along the center of the deck. It stopped in front of Broben and held the ammo belt out to him.
Broben bent to take it but the belt was heavier than he could carry. The bug set it down beside him in a thickening tapioca of blood and organs, then skittered off toward the bomb bay.
The other crewmen were now struggling to their feet. Broben staggered to Wen. The flight engineer looked like something a mob had worked over with tire irons, but he was still breathing. It was more than Broben had expected.
Wen opened his eyes and blinked away blood.
“Monkey wrench?” Broben said.
The crewmen stared dumbfounded as the bugs speedily returned the ammo belts to their cans and convoluted feeds and expertly reloaded the machine guns.
“Just ignore ’em,” Wen called out from the deck, where Broben tended his injuries as best he could from one of the bomber’s rudimentary first-aid kits. The only pain med in the zippered canvas wallet was morphine, which Wen refused, so Broben couldn’t do much more than mop him up.
A viscous soup of blood and organs and biomechanical body parts had collected down the center of the main compartment like bilgewater, and Sten was using a seatboard to bale the vivid slop out the reopened bomb bay doors. It smacked the ground with a sound like a wet mop slapped against a concrete wall.
“So you just say the secret word and your little pals know to come rescue us?” Broben asked as he taped a Carlisle bandage onto Wen’s nose, which looked like a hammered tomato.
Wen shook his head. It looked like it hurt. “Not exactly,” he said. “It just meant Sic ’em. Like an SOS to every bug in the place.” He chuckled and then winced.
Broben sat straighter. “Wait a second. That’s happening all over this joint?” He waved at the carnage.
Wen nodded. “Them poor sumbitches are probably busier’n a cat burying shit on a marble floor right now,” he said. His grin was ghastly.
THIRTY-FIVE
Yone set his palm against a gray door in the white corridor. “Here,” he said, and shut his eyes. “I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?” His eyeballs moved beneath the lids.
Farley and Wennda traded a look, and each knew that the other was remembering Yone saying I don’t feel entirely rational. To humor him Wennda went to the door and set a hand against it. The moment her fingertips touched it she snatched it back. She stepped back and frowned at her hand.
“Did you get shocked?” Farley asked.
“Not—shocked. It felt alive.” She kept looking at her hand.
“Wennda.”
She looked up as if surprised to see him there.
“You all right?” asked Farley.
“I’m fine, why?”
“You’re breathing hard. Your face is red and you’re sweating like crazy.”
She set the hand against her chest. Her heart was hammering like mad. “I feel like I just ran,” she said. “No. Like I want to run.”
“I think we better get away from here.”
“It’s here,” said Yone.
They turned at his voice. Yone looked and sounded like a man talking in his sleep. “In here,” he said.
“Good,” said Farley. “It can stay there.”
“Maybe you should touch the door,” suggested Wennda.
“And maybe I shouldn’t. Because from where I’m standing I’m the only one of us making any sense.”
Yone slapped the door with a palm. “Here!” he said.
“I don’t think that trick’s going to work this time,” Farley said. “We’re looking for a way out, not a door that gives us the willies.”
“Not the door.” Yone pressed his raw cheek against the door. He looked purely crazy. Like a spurned lover haunting the porch of his obsession. “The locus,” he said. “Can’t you feel it?”
“Why on God’s green earth would I want to do that,” said Farley. But he stood behind Yone and put his hand against the door—
Farley had once donated plasma in the “Blood for Britain” drive. They’d drawn blood and centrifuged it to separate the plasma, then hung a bottle of his whole-blood cells on a stand and slid an IV needle into his arm. But the cells weren’t body temperature anymore, and he could feel them coursing up his arm until they reached his heart. Like a cold wire drawn through the beating life of him. He’d felt a brief fear that his heart would stop, and then the cells warmed and his apprehension passed. But there had been that unexpected moment of mortal dread.
—put his hand against the door and something not electricity coursed up his arm. Some cold surge that vividly recalled those blood cells taken from his body and rendered strange and reintroduced. A snake in his blood sidewinding toward his core, and then a flooding in his heart both foreign and familiar. Pure and powerful and formless and mindless. And yet he sensed intent.
Beside him Yone laughed lightly. It seemed to come from far away. “They made a god,” he said.
Farley’s scalp crawled. He snatched his hand back from the door. The sudden painful silence made him aware that he’d been hearing a sustained ringing.
Wennda was looking at him. Her flushed appearance a bit reduced. Had she said something?
Shake it off, Captain Midnight. Farley turned and pulled Yone from the door. Yone flinched violently and said something unintelligible, then twisted his arm away from Farley and pressed himself back against the door like a frightened boy clinging to his mother’s legs.
“Did you feel it?” Wennda asked.
Farley looked at his hand. “I felt something,” he admitted. “I don’t know that I’d say it was alive, but it was something. I think we’re going to have to drag him with us.” He stopped in the midst of waving at the door. It stood open and Yone was gone.
Curving rows of workstations faced a dull gray screen that occupied most of the front wall. An overturned tumbler at one station, its contents long ago evaporated. Farley would have bet his crush hat it had been coffee. It was the first genuinely human thing he had seen down here.
On the left side of the viewscreen wall was a door with a handle and a square window at head height. Farley tried the handle. The door was unlocked.
Farley looked at Wennda. She shrugged. He opened the door and stepped through.
Immediately he felt the overwhelming sense of invasion he had felt when he had touched the hallway door. A sense of power, of intent. A wash of bright green light, loud ringing in his ears. Urge to run, blind panic breaking through.
He stood on a small railed platform at the top of a narrow treadplate staircase that descended at least two hundred feet along a sheer stone wall. It looked out over a space that would have fit a dozen typhon repair bays. The distant walls were crowded with pipework, beams, ladders, railed walkways, catwalks, stairs.