He’d been struggling, actually, to remain afraid rather than angry, to maintain the edge of caution and improvisation that fear encouraged so readily. Now, there’d be no need to force it. The third chamber was much like the first and second had been: large, dark, empty of furnishings… It even had a fax in the same exact location, although it, too, appeared to be powered down or broken, its status lights off, its wellstone housing inactivated.
What was different this time was that the room—virtually the entire room—was occupied by an enormous, soft-skinned, pinkish brown spider.
Well, perhaps “spider” was the wrong term, since it had six legs instead of eight, and since each leg terminated in a perfect little human hand, and since its meat-colored body carried a swollen, bulbous caricature of Wenders Rodenbeck’s face in place of a ten-eyed spider head. Its two eyes glowed a malevolent red in the darkness.
Bruno quickly decided he’d never seen anything so horrific in all his years, and he couldn’t help echoing Shiao’s heartfelt scream.
He could be more horrified, though; he discovered this when the spider turned its red eyes upon him, opened its fanged mouth wide, and spoke in a rasping parody of Wenders Rodenbeck’s actual voice.
“Ah, de Towaji. Welcome.”
“My God!” was all Bruno could think to say in return. He hefted his staff like the weapon it was, pointing one end up at that hideous face. “My God, man! My God.”
“He told me you might be coming,” the spider said, around a quite incredible mouthful of dripping fangs. “I’m pleased that you have. I never disliked you, you know, even when He commanded that I should.”
“Wenders,” Bruno said, “what has he done to you?”
“Made a hideous monster of me, obviously,” the spider quipped. Then the eyes narrowed, and the legs and body lurched, and suddenly that swollen face was two meters closer to Bruno’s own. A leg raised; a finger shook, tsk tsk. “Do I finally frighten you, Declarant? Actually, this form was my own idea. Well, His idea, but I agreed to it. Rather than the alternatives, of which I was offered several. Unpleasant. But I’m the man himself inside—playwright, lawyer, defender of planets, same as ever. Same as he made me, anyway. You do realize I’m to murder you?”
“I’ve little doubt of it,” Bruno agreed, afraid to move, afraid to do anything. The sheer size of this creature implied there was nothing Bruno or Shiao could do to stop it. Mortally wounded, it could nonetheless murder them both a dozen times over, simply with its death throes.
“You’ve been grievously mistreated, sir,” Shiao offered up to the thing.
The spider, swiveling its head toward Shiao, looked surprised. “Have I? How, exactly? Do I know you, sir?”
“Actually,” Shiao said, craning his neck to look the thing in the eye, “you and I just spent three weeks together on a derelict platform, about ten million kilometers sunward of here.”
“Really!” The spider was instantly intrigued, its monstrous eyebrows shooting up, its many knees—or perhaps elbows— bending until its leathery bulk plopped heavily onto the floor. “A guy can’t help but be intrigued by that. Where am I now? Not with you any longer?”
“No, sir,” Shiao agreed. “You were killed about twenty minutes ago. By Declarant Sykes.”
“Ah. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m always tying Him up in court and such, without realizing just how badly that upsets Him. I’d probably kill myself, if I met me. Bastard. But how did I die? Was I dramatic? Was I brave?”
“Yes, sir. Very brave. You were on a spaceship blasting for Mercury, on a mission to save the Queendom, and you ran afoul of some stray collapsium.”
“Extraordinary!” the spider said. “I always told people I’d die that way, sooner or later. Not saving the Queendom, I mean—running afoul of collapsium. Nasty stuff, that. Meaning no offense to you, Declarant.”
“Er, none taken,” Bruno said quickly.
“I’m to kill you,” the spider said again. “Have I mentioned? I’m conditioned for it, though obviously I’ve never had the actual opportunity. Any idea what that’s like?”
“Why haven’t you killed Declarant Sykes?” Shiao suggested.
The spider responded with a deep, awful rumbling noise that Bruno eventually identified as laughter. “Kill him? Kill him, what a thought! Oh, I could never do that. My ordeal here has brought the two of us very close together. I’m written into his script, and vice versa. You probably wouldn’t understand that, but take my word: It’s a tangible connection.”
“I do understand it,” Shiao insisted. “You and / became very close, during our time on the platform. I was very sorry to see you die. And I’m very happy, if a bit dumfounded, to discover that a copy of you still exists in… some form.”
“Really.” Again, the spider seemed almost dreamily intrigued.
“You mustn’t do it,” Bruno said, suddenly finding his voice, and with it his anger. “You mustn’t do Marlon’s bidding. He has a way of breaking people, of conscripting their minds as well as their bodies. Perhaps you can’t see what a joke he’s made of you, what a shadow of your former self, but I tell you, the very same thing has happened to me. And do you know where / am? I’m guarding the spaceship that brought us all here. I’m determined to overcome the damage Marlon has done, to me and to everyone else. You must let us pass, sir. We’ll carve a hole in that wall, there, and pass through it into Marlon’s study, and if we survive our business there, we will return to help you!”
Again, the spider laughed. “You need to understand, sir, I’m conditioned to resist those sort of appeals. You’re not dealing with amateur security here; we’ve been optimizing for years and years.”
Bruno’s anger flared. “All right then, you, why haven’t you killed us already? Why talk to us at all?”
Shiao sighed angrily, looking as if he’d just realized something important. “Declarant, perhaps his purpose is simply to delay us. A familiar face, an encouragement to stand around persuading him… We haven’t the time, sir.”
Perhaps the spider had been conditioned to react to that phrase with violence, to delay the fight as long as possible and then commit to it wholeheartedly, with intent to win. Perhaps it was angered for some reason, or had simply heard enough. In any case, it leaped for Shiao with surprising nimbleness, snatching him up in its oversized jaws and driving its dripping, mirror-bright fangs hard against the fabric of his space suit. Over the suit radios, Bruno heard Shiao gasp, heard the breath squeezed out of his body as it had so recently been squeezed out of Rodenbeck’s, inside the Ring Collapsiter fragment.
All thought fled from Bruno’s mind. He had let Rodenbeck die, had carelessly let him slip too close to the collapsium and be crushed to death. He simply would not repeat that mistake.
Throwing down his staff, he dodged between two pink-brown spider legs to retrieve the impervium sword where Shiao had dropped it. At his touch, the thing came alive, its blade vibrating all in a blur, its handle acoustically isolated and quite firm and steady in his grip. Then, with a patience and precision that would have astonished him a minute earlier, he stepped forward and lopped off the spider’s swollen Rodenbeck head.
He fully expected the thing to die badly, messily, and in this he was not disappointed; the spider thrashed violently as its head was parting company with the rest of it, and as a result the head flew across the room—with Shiao still inside it—and crashed hard against the wall. The body’s spasms did not end there. Quite the reverse: its legs, with surprising coordination, carried the body forward to crash hard against another wall, and another, and another one still. The hands flailed madly, grabbing at anything. The body rolled. Bruno was lifted, dashed, trampled, and for one dizzy moment, crushed up hard against the ceiling. The wind was knocked out of him immediately, and his limbs were twisted all the wrong ways, and his skull suffered a number of sharp blows against the dome of his helmet, which should have been too far from his head to make contact, if his neck had been holding onto it properly. Those were the hard parts of the ordeal; he waited patiently through the rest of it, willing himself limp, knowing he had nothing to gain by struggling against this agonizing tumbling and buffeting.