9

mother

By the time Goss came out to check on their status himself, Cole had the beginnings of a plan.  What she lacked was the courage to carry it out.

“Status?” he asked Black.

“They’re working on it, Sir,” she said.  Cole suppressed a laugh.  What else could she say?  For that matter, how would he know what they were doing?  What he wanted was results, but that was also the problem: without understanding of the technical side of how the surveying process worked, he had no comprehension of the difficulties they faced, and therefore no reason to believe there were any problems.

The sky had brightened considerably, and even the shimmering wall of darkness at their backs had somehow lost its depth and reduced to a dull deep haze, like a wall of frozen smog.  Cole and Lee had both put on sunglasses to fight the eastern sun, which sliced through the low-hanging clouds and lit the swamp water into a field of liquid fire. 

Goss walked over to where they’d erected the pulse field generator at the edge of the island, just a few feet from the shore’s end.  The solid black device resembled a diamond-studded rod in a black cube covered with blinking symbols, and it issued a low hum as it slowly spread an invisible web of quantum energies out from its epicenter.  Cole ignored Goss’ approach and replaced her sunglasses with the scanning goggles, a heavy pair of dark lenses that allowed her to view the world through any filter she chose, which she currently set to view the quantum field.  At first the effect was overwhelming -- quantum instability was the hallmark of a “Zone”, so the entire area lit up like a bonfire to a half-mile radius -- but Cole quickly adjusted the setting to read the specific frequency issued by the generator.  The symmetrical pattern was still growing, like ice creeping over a lake, and was represented in the goggles’ view as a pulsating network of solid red tendrils stretched across the landscape, a network which cut straight through physical objects and blobbed up like wads of hot glue where they’d started to overcome the existing unstable quantum field.

“Well?” he asked from just over her shoulder.

“We’re going to need to clear the lifeforms out to at least 500 feet from the generator,” she heard Lee say from her squatting position nearby.  “Anything living in the area when we match the frequencies will cause an anomaly, and that would be...bad.”

“Define ‘bad’,” he said.

“We’ll all be torn inside out,” Cole said matter-of-factly.  “The organic matter will interfere when we try to adapt the existing quantum fold to the one we’re creating, the one we’re going to harness into the Calabi-Yau Engine and create what we refer to as a Dynamic Manifold.”

She paused for effect, and didn’t need to see Goss’ face to hear the irritation in his tone. 

“And that is what, exactly?”

“It’s a field of unstable temporal matter particularly harmful to living things,” she said.  “If we try to establish it in an area with living organisms, it’ll also cause an explosion that would leave a crater the size of New Texas City right where we’re standing.”

He leaned in close behind her, enough that she felt his breath on the back of her neck.  It gave her an uncomfortable chill.

“Is that what happened at Zone 23?” he asked.

She couldn’t help but cringe away from him.  “If it was, I wouldn’t be standing here.  Fact is, you don’t know what happened at Zone 23.”

“I can read a fucking file,” he said coldly.  “And I know you’re medicated and have been in court-mandated therapy for the last four years, ever since your little ‘incident’.  I just want to make sure you’re clear on what’s at stake here.”

“I am,” she said, and she removed the goggles and looked at him.  “And just so we’re all clear: this is not going to be easy.  In fact, it’s near impossible.  We already told you this Zone isn’t stable enough to build a Bridge, but since you seem to have your heart set on doing it anyway you’re going to have to give us time.”

“We have roughly eight hours until the next storm hits,” he said.  “That’s your window.”

“This can take a lot longer than that...”

To her shock, he reached up and took hold of her by the throat. 

“What the…”  Lee moved to help but suddenly found herself at gunpoint as Black drew her rifle and pointed it at her face.

He didn’t squeeze, but his grip was iron hard, and she felt like a child again, getting her head stuck in the metal rails at the Mall of Jupiter, sitting there as helpless as a man in a pillory with her feet dangling over open air and kicking uselessly as she tried to get her ears past the metal.  If he squeezed, she had no doubt he could crush her throat, even with her hands working inside his grip.  She gulped hard and imagined his thumb pressing in and piercing the flesh of her neck.  A shot of cold streaked down her body like an icy tide.

“Just get it done,” he said quietly.  “The lives of New Texas depend on you, Miss Cole.  I suggest you overcome your fears and hestitation and do your fucking job.”  He released her.  “Check in with me in four hours.  I expect you’ll have made progress.  Once the Engine framework is in place the quantum field frequency takes about three hours, yes?”

Cole hesitated, but nodded. 

“So when you check in with me in four hours, you should be in the final stages of setting up the Engine.”  He smiled.  “I look forward to talking to you again.”

He turned and left the women there on the shore.  Black waited until he was past her and on his way back towards the shadowed ship before she lowered her weapon, her face expressionless.  She watched them a moment, then turned away.

Cole’s chest pounded.  Lee looked at her.

“What the fuck are we going to do?” Lee asked.

Cole just shook her head.  She rubbed her arms with her hands, let the shiver pass, and without a word returned to her work.

***

One hour later, the whispers started.

The voice washed over her like a soiled mist.  Not many of them, as had happened before on that dilapidated world.  Just one.

The voice she knew.

Cole stopped what she was doing and swung round, and found she was no longer ok.

The sun was directly overhead, having leapt from eight to twelve in the blink of an eye, so fast it was as if the world had violently swung.  The sky, which just moments ago had been cloud-filled and gunmetal grey, became suddenly bronze and bright, and the shrouds of fog shifted instantly to become funnels of steam.  She suddenly saw the rot and decay of the swamplands abutting Zone 66 clearly, a revelation for which she was not thankful: festering clouds of flies and wriggling purple-black worms crawled over fuming soil and dung hills, oil-thick waters boiled from subterranean geysers and exploding pockets of organic-smelling gas, and the stench of putrefying meat carried on every minor gust of wind like the soiled breath of a massive and dying beast. 

Cole steadied herself as she backed away from the skeleton of the Engine’s framework.  She stood in the center of a four-foot wide circle of calibrated steel and tachyon tubes like it was the center of some sort of ritualistic circle.  She turned slow and searched for the source of the voice, and saw that not only was she alone, but it was as if the others had never existed: the ship was gone, all of the equipment she and Lee had laid out across the beach was missing, and not a soul was in sight.  Save for her and the engine’s frame, there was no indication the mission had ever even come to Earth.

It wasn’t real, of that there was little doubt, but the hallucination was so utter and complete Cole couldn’t help but stand and gape in awe.  She felt every rivulet of sweat drip down her skin and soak her tank top against her torso, felt stiffness in her neck and back from hours of labor, felt a tightness in her belly from hunger as it evaporated beneath a wave of fear and nausea.

I’m here.

Cole spun around, a maintenance wrench in hand.  Her body was shaking so badly she could barely grip the tool. 

Nothing.  No one.

Had she missed a dose of her haloperidol?  She wouldn’t be surprised, given the circumstances and how she’d lost track of the hours since the GX50 had left the Iliad, but she swore she remembered taking her dose of anti-hallucinatory medication when her wrist alarm notified her halfway through the storm.  Or had she imagined that, too?

“I’m not afraid of what isn’t real,” she said quietly.

Speak up, girl.

The voice might have spoken right into her ear.

“Fuck you!” she shouted, and she turned and swung, but there was nothing there.

Not at first.

The chill wind was so entirely out-of-place in the fetid damp of her imagination it made her jump, and she barely kept hold of the wrench when she was forced to put her hands over her tattooed arms to keep warm.  Air soiled with salt and ice wafted around her like a shroud, snaked its way from her toes to the nape of her neck like a cold embrace and hugged her body with an intimacy bordering on violation.  She gasped as her heart pounded painfully against her chest.

As the cold wind passed, so did her isolation, and when Cole looked again in the direction of the coming wind, she was there. 

Unchanged, a perfect replica of the gnarled creature that had haunted her youth, and just as before Cole couldn’t see her clearly enough to focus on any detail for more than a few seconds, as if a smoking cloak covered the haggard female but shifted what it concealed faster than the eye and mind could process, so while Cole one moment caught sight of the festering blue-black flesh and the next saw curled black talons like rose thorns dripping oil and blood, the rest of the long-limbed and not entirely human figure was only a blur.

“You’re not real,” she said, but her words cracked as the Witch advanced, for Cole found her feet rooted to the spot, like she’d stepped in quicksand.  “You’re just the monster from my childhood nightmares.”

I am more, she said, and Cole’s stomach churned.  Sickness raged in her like a storm.  She would not admit that truth, not now, not ever.

“You’re not real,” she said.

In the space of a breath the Witch crossed the ground between them.  Cole gagged at the soil and grime stench on the oversized hand that reached out and took hold of her around the back of her neck.  Dripping teeth loomed from out of a personal darkness, which parted just long enough to release a forked tongue the consistency of burnt meat.

Won’t you come with me?

Cole screamed as the talons from the other hand came up and pressed against her face.

***

She woke up screaming.  She still stood in the grey field, hunched over the framework of the Calabi-Yau Engine and dripping with sweat in spite of the hidden sun, but screaming nevertheless.

Lee was just a few feet away and appeared at her side in an instant.

“Cole, what happened?!” she asked.  She saw Black shift from her sentry’s position in the distance and approach them.

“Nothing,” she gasped.  Her chest felt like someone had been standing on her, and she was so dizzy with fear she had to sit down right there on the muddy earth.  “Just...I just need a second.”

“No,” Lee said as she leaned in and stared at her with eyes wide.  “What happened to your face?”

Cole stared blankly for a moment, then ran her hand across her face and winced with pain.  Blood trickled down her hand from the touch, and she realized with a cold sense of terror that all of the small cuts the storm had left on her skin had opened up again and freely bled.  The salty taste of her wounds entered her mouth, but she shook so badly she couldn’t even manage to wipe the red away.

What’s happening to me?

I told you.  I will drag you under.  And there you will stay with me, gasping for breath as I slowly tear you apart.

Cole started to cry, and couldn’t stop.

Next Chapter: Trapped