A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) (47 page)

With a deep breath, he let it all in. Euphoria staggered him. He wobbled, lightheaded, as if he’d stood up too fast. Sephora’s hand on his shoulder steadied him until, a few breaths later, he regained himself and stood above it like a ship on the ocean.

He opened his eyes again to find Sephora’s blue ones glowing at him. “Okay,” he said, just this side of bursting, “what’s next?”

*  *  *

Felix opened the stairwell door a crack and peeped into the lab beyond. The place was dark and free of motion, at least in the sliver of a view he had. Felix fervently wished for some way to get a better view without opening the door any farther. Immediately, a pencil-thin tendril snaked out of his forearm and a window in his vision displayed a view that he realized came from a camera in the tendril’s tip. Silencing a laugh, he discovered he could control the tendril with a thought, and soon extended it through the crack in the door to get a better look around.

Computerized lab tables, fume cupboards, and assorted expensive-looking apparatuses filled the place. Yet he could see no goo, and nothing that looked—

A flicker through a window just twenty feet to his right snagged his eye. Something had caught the lab’s meager light for just a moment. Felix focused to zoom the view and enhance the lighting. The window belonged to a miniscule isolation room, judging from what he could see of the interior—and, he belatedly realized, the door beside it marked “Isolation Room B.”

From just above the base of the waist-high window of the darkened room peered a man.

“I found someone,” Felix whispered to the others behind him. “Room looks clear otherwise.” He retracted the tendril and crept into the lab toward the man, who ducked away before Felix got more than two steps.

With the others following, Felix reached the window and knocked. There was no answer, and no sign of the man. He had to be hiding in the concealed space behind the room’s narrow cylindrical airlock chamber door.

Doctor Seung touched an intercom between the window and the door, just below an indicator that read “Sealed.” “Is anyone in there? We’re here to help.”

One side of a haggard face edged out along the window. “Who are you?”

“We’re here about Project Quicksilver,” said Seung. “Do you know what that is?”

The man gaped in response, as if the doctor had just asked him if he knew what water was. “I’m not opening the door. It’s not safe!”

“You’re telling us,” Sheridan muttered.

“That’s fine,” Felix said, glancing at the still empty lab behind them for good measure. “I’m Felix. What’s your name?”

“Lance.”

“Hi, Lance,” said Felix. “What happened?”

“Can you tell us where they worked on it?” added Seung.

“I tried to get out. We’re all trapped in the auditorium by that stuff. It was letting some of us out to get food. Supply runs to the cafeteria for people. Only a few at a time, through the Quicksilver.”

Felix guessed the “it” in question was Suuthrien’s New Eden presence. “Why’s it keeping everyone alive at all?”

“In case it needs scientists to tweak the formula.” Lance swallowed. “I think. Or—to make more out of . . . ” He shuddered.

“Are they helping it willingly?” asked Sheridan.

Lance shook his head. “It hasn’t needed them to do anything yet, but— No one wants to be here.”

Felix shuddered inwardly himself. “How many people are in the auditorium?”

“About fifty or sixty. I didn’t count.”

“How did you get through the Quicksilver?” asked Seung.

Lance slapped his wrist to the window. Around it was strapped a thick, blue bracelet with a square device in the center. “This. We had a few of them. It sends out a signal. Keeps the stuff back.”

“How does it work?” Felix asked.

“It doesn’t!” Lance yelled. “Not anymore. It sent me for food, but I went for the exits. I thought I could get out of the building. Go for help. Just . . . get out. But it saw me.” He banged his wrist device against the window again. “It turned it off! I barely got in here, sealed myself up. It won’t get me in here.”

“We can get you out,” Felix told him.

“I’m not expendable!” Lance yelled. “ . . . I’m
not
.”

“I know you’re not,” Felix said. “We all do. We’re here to stop that stuff, and we’re going to get everyone out. We just need to know how to get to the lab where it’s made. Can you take us there?”

“I know where it is.” Lance swallowed. “But I’m not going out there. It eats you alive . . . ”

Felix glanced to the others. Seung met his gaze, but Uxil and Sheridan were keeping watch on the lab as they listened. “Okay,” Felix said. “Have you got a phone? I’ll give you my number. You can guide us.”

“Won’t work. It cut off cell coverage. None of us can call out anywhere.”

“I can patch your phone through our comms,” offered Sheridan, stepping in front of Felix. “It’ll keep us in touch with you, okay?”

Lance swallowed again and lowered his wrist from the window before finally nodding. Sheridan edged out of Lance’s field of view and lowered her voice. “Might be better to let him wait in there anyway until we’re sure we can trust him.”

“You really think that’s a risk?” Seung whispered back, incredulous. Sheridan shrugged.

“Hey, Lance?” Felix asked. “How long have you been in there?”

“Not long. Three, four hours.”

“With luck—and I’ve had some really unusual luck lately,” Felix said with a glance at the others, “it won’t be five.”

NOW THAT YOU FEEL
the natural world around you, beneath you, feel your own connection to it. The natural things share a kindred essence. It runs through all, linking them, linking you, in a great net. Like spider silk, it is both faint and strong. For you, and for the other creatures, the connection is tenuous. But for those things rooted, silent—trees, moss, grasses, the natural flora—there is strength. Can you sense it?

Though her words rung true in Michael’s spirit in a way he could not quantify, he couldn’t actually sense it. Not at first. He closed his eyes again and found himself picturing the forest around him. The image grew stronger, solidifying until he could feel the pull of instinct. Something was there.

“I think so,” he said finally.

Feel your way into it. Take hold, but gently. You are not an intruder, but a welcomed tender. Reach for that which is more distant. Open your awareness, and feel your way to the grandest tree on your planet.

He tried to think where that might even be. “Like, a redwood? I think they have those in California.” Would Sephora even know?

The word you put to it does not matter, nor its location. Long ago the syr attuned this planet. All are connected, yourself now especially. Find it, and when you have, take hold. Focus on it like . . .
She paused, and Michael sensed she was searching for a term.
Like a beacon, on the horizon, in the dark.

As Michael concentrated, echoes of sensation seemed to flow in toward him from elsewhere. Deciding to take Sephora’s mention of spider silk as more than just a metaphor, he imagined a web of green stretching out from him in all directions. The sensation became vibration, and, relaxing into it, he began to follow the strongest vibration back along the line. It was slow going at first. Still, his mind seemed to gain momentum every moment until he could at last sense a towering giant. Its highest boughs danced along a breeze. Its roots grasped deep into the soil below. It stretched out to all around it.

For a moment, Michael’s senses stumbled, and the giant tree almost faded into just another node in the web among a vast panoply. But with breath and instinct, his awareness renewed to focus him on the tree as if it were, as Sephora had said, a beacon in the dark.

“Okay,” he breathed. “I have it. Now what?”

I do not know.

What? “I thought—”

I have never done this before, Michael. The syr’s vestige within you grants you a different kind of power than is mine to wield. You must find the method yourself, knowing your goal: to open a path from yourself into that network of life.

Michael thought back to their discussion aboard
Paragon
when the AoA and the Thuur had formed their plan. “Become a conduit.”

Yes.

Michael swallowed. His senses held fast to the tree through that network of natural things. It held a sound all its own, and he tried to listen along it. Just as Alyshur had mentioned at Falson’s Lake, and as Sephora had later explained aboard
Paragon
, it was a natural sort of Internet. A “bio-net”? Yet now, Michael felt more beyond a mere network across which impulses could travel. Power lurked within it—a vast accumulation of minute sparks building into a potent whole.

But he wasn’t trying to tap that power, Michael reminded himself. He only needed the network through which it roamed. Trusting his now augmented instincts, Michael focused on the distant tree and the millions of branching pathways linking him to it. He felt the way the tree’s node connected to them all, felt the sound of it, the shape, and the quality of the music within it, just as he had with the black material on
Paragon
. Then, taking it into himself, he tried to make himself over to match, echoing, mimicking. It was as if he could himself resonate as another node, the great tree’s equal, sending and gathering signals inward, outward, in all directions.

For just a moment, he lost himself. There was no air on his face, no ground beneath his feet, no thought beyond the network. He had to dig his fingernails into his palms until the pain broke through his senses. He seized upon that pain as an anchor to the rest of the world, steadying himself. And then, as if easing into a steaming bath to which his skin had finally grown accustomed, Michael immersed himself into the network, opened his eyes to see Sephora and Marc in the outer world again, and existed in both.

“Michael?” Marc asked. “Can you hear me?”

Michael nodded, and had to try thrice to get a sound from his throat. “I think it’s working.”

*  *  *

“We shouldn’t have let him keep the wristband,” Doctor Sheridan whispered behind him.

“It didn’t work anymore,” said Felix as they moved along the hallway toward the Quicksilver lab.

“We could analyze it, just in case.”

“When?” asked Felix. “In our spare time here?”

“It would do you little good, in the present time,” agreed Uxil. “Yet should we fail to find what we search for, we should return and take the man and his bracelet with us.”

“Well that is the plan,” said Seung. “Along with the others in the auditorium, if we can.”

“I know that, Doctor,” said Sheridan.

“It sounded like you might have forgotten.”

“Shh,” said Felix. He paused, listening, if only to feign a need for them to be quiet beyond just ending a pointless, distracting argument. After a heartbeat, he led them on through an empty hallway lit by emergency beacons, and, nearly to the lab, turned a corner.

Felix froze at the sight before him: two piles of clothing lay in the middle of the floor along with a tablet computer, a detached cybernetic hand, some minor jewelry, and four loose optical implants. The implants stared up at them—twin sets of lifeless, chrome orbs, the bodies to which they belonged long since dissolved. Felix had to bite back a tasteless joke about the Rapture that sprang unbidden to his lips from his usual coping skills. Instead he managed a quiet, “Ugh.”

Sheridan slipped past him to kneel beside the remnants. Gingerly, she searched through the folds of the clothing.

“Careful, there might still be some in there.”

“I am,” she answered. “Just make sure nothing sneaks up on us.”

“What are you doing?” Felix asked.

“Looking for . . . Here we go.” She pulled a pair of employee pass cards out of the pile. “I’ll still need to run a bypass on any biometric security we find, but these will help.” Studying the cards as she stood up, she added, “Rest in peace, Cairn Rodrigues and Trevor Bates.”

Felix gave a moment of silence along with the others. Fifty paces ahead, at the end of the hall, loomed a closed elevator. Halfway there, on the right wall, stood a closed door with a window beside it. He opened the connection to Lance.

“Lance, it’s Felix. We’ve got a door ahead marked ‘Biolab D.’ Is this what we’re looking for?”

“
Yes. Yes, I think so.
”

“Thanks. Everything okay there?”

“
So far. One of the transgenics came through here a minute ago, but it didn’t see me.”

“Wait, what?”

“Biological experiments. Creatures, um, made through recombinant DNA to harvest certain aspects of the result. Or something. I dunno, really; it’s not my area.”

Great.
Felix waved the others with him toward the lab door. “Are they dangerous?”

“
I think it depends on what they are. Different ones got out during the whole, um, incident. This thing just looked like a green . . . chicken-lizard thing.
”

“Um, everyone?” Felix reported, “If you see any green chicken-lizards coming at you, don’t be alarmed. But, ya know, probably keep your distance just in case.”

“Transgenic?” asked Seung.

“Er, how did you know?”

“What else would it be?”

“Touché,” said Felix.

They reached the lab door. Beside the door was a transfer bin to pass objects into the lab, and above that, a window. Felix edged to the window and peered inside.

*  *  *

Michael stepped back aboard
Paragon
, the living network still buzzing inside him, through him. “How far away can I get and still keep the connection?”

You are, at this point, the best to judge that
, Sephora answered.
I suspect you should be able to maintain it even at modest distances from the planet’s surface.

“How modest?”

To that Sephora offered only wordless, cautious ambivalence.

They made their way to a circular room near
Paragon
’s gate chamber where four Agents waited along with a dozen Thuur. Along one wall, Holes’s green spinning circles lit a six foot wide section of black material. Flanking it were what looked like two empty workstations jutting out from the wall. Covered in black material, each featured a flat, backless seat made of a cushioned blue alien fabric. At the room’s center loomed a black-covered egg-shaped object with Thuur interface screens glowing around the lower half of its exposed surface. Situated around it, in an oblong pit about three feet deep, were eight more seats where the four Agents sat, each of whom had set up terrestrial computers atop a counter-like surface that ringed the object.