Resolution (6 page)

Tom lay shivering on the hard ledge, trying to control his breathing. Inside his lungs, the air felt different from the cold gelatinous atmosphere pressing against his skin. Could he somehow be breathing Nulapeiron’s air, though his body was on a distant world? Was Eemur maintaining some kind of connection across the light-years?

It gave Tom the tiniest hope that she was working to drag him back.

Then he twitched as down below, inside the abyss, something dark and massive began to ascend. It was metallic, formed in overlapping armoured sections, bristling with antennae.

A vessel? A creature?

Tom suddenly felt that in this place there was little difference between construct and organism, between machinery and life. Either one could kill him.

It was rising towards his hiding place.

He pulled back close against the metal face, but that was dangerous: too much pressure would bounce him off the ledge and into the void. The vessel-thing continued to rise.

Oh, Chaos.

Tom pulled his legs beneath him, formed a squatting position, and got ready for the only manoeuvre he could think of. If it had eyes upon its back, he was dead.

Still rising.

He shut his eyes, rehearsed the jump. The muscles of his thighs began to quiver with stress and cold.

Now.

Tom launched himself from the ledge.

He seemed to fall slowly.

Slowly...

And then it was very fast, metal surface rising towards him and he struck feet first against the hull, rolled and lashed out, grabbed for an antenna -
missed
- and rolled again, unable to stop with the edge of the carapace in sight, the fatal drop waiting for him and then another antenna -
grab
- and this time he got it.

The vessel/creature was still rising.

Splotched oval patches decorated the dorsal surface. Membranes, amid the metal?

Hurry.

Carefully, knowing it would be easy to slip and slide right off the hull, Tom crawled to the nearest patch, pressed down with his fingertips. They sank into soft, membranous material.

Get inside.

Tom rolled forward, and dropped through.

He crouched on a cold metal deck, scanning the empty corridor, then chose a direction at random and took it.

I’m still breathing.

It was a reminder. If he was breathing his homeworld’s air then Eemur was maintaining a link and there was still some sort of chance.

You don’t know that for sure.

Siganth was an Anomalous world. Just as a human body is formed of trillions of cells whose individual identities are irrelevant to the whole (indeed, to avoid cancer, the body must command many of its cells to commit suicide), so did the Anomaly consist of trillions of once-human and alien beings it had subsumed. To be Absorbed was to become an unthinking component of an unimaginably greater whole: individuality no more relevant than a single cell’s or bacterium’s chemical drives.

Tom’s skin went cold, scraped by electric tension as he crouched in the corridor. It was dread, and there were only two choices: to slink away or face it.
Something
lay ahead. Fate, not chance, had led him to this vessel; he could feel himself being drawn forward.

Nerves wailing, Tom advanced.

There was a diamond arch. Beyond it lay a great chamber in which jagged metal buttresses grew from the walls, stippled with viral crystals. Shards of black glass floated in the air, some spinning, some hanging still.

Tom crept closer.

Oh, sweet Fate.

The air shone like ice, and at the chamber’s centre a figure hung suspended, writhing.

A human figure.

He was unclothed and screaming, though no sound reached Tom’s ears. The man’s face was half-coated with silver scar tissue and his right hand was a claw, but those were old injuries. What happened next was different.

Invisible fingers hooked beneath the captive’s skin and peeled it back, stripping his flesh bare. The skin seemed to twist through an impossible angle, and disappeared from sight. What was left was a writhing, agonized, flensed victim. Even as he struggled, something dragged greyish fat from his body; the globules rotated, then winked out of existence. Arteries broke loose, whipped like cables cut in a storm, pulled themselves into nothingness, were gone.

Still the man lived, and suffered.

The vivisection continued, taking his eyeballs, then plucking out the bones one by one until only this remained: a fine tracery of thread-like nerves in the air, connecting to his floating brain. Everything was gone, save the ability to sense massive, agonizing pain.

No...

Something worse occurred.

As Tom watched, the field reversed the process, pushed bones into place and layered strips of striated muscle over them and popped the eyeballs in, then draped skin across the ensemble until the captive human being was whole, entire again.

Writhing in the energy field.

Until invisible hooks tugged at his skin and the process began all over.

There was an energy field, and an unaided man could not hope to break through, but as Tom watched the captive suffer he knew he had to try. He looked around the chamber for something which he could thrust inside the field, saw nothing. Perhaps if he climbed up to the ceiling - a series of angled flanges would provide holds - he could drop inside the field from above and haul the poor man free.

But even as he thought this, a torture cycle completed and the man’s body was whole once more, for a few seconds. This time he saw Tom approaching ... and then the strangest, bravest thing occurred.

The man raised his hand and shook his head, yelling silent words that could mean only one thing: warning Tom to stay back, not to risk himself. If Tom had been the captive, he would have been screaming for help, unable to comprehend danger to others when his own nerves were racked with agony.

How long have you been here? Days?

Tom crept closer, as the man’s skin began to twist, as invisible hooks inserted themselves. Tom would have to time it right, enter the field when the captive was whole.

Or years?

Then Tom stopped dead. In the overwhelming horror of the sight, there was something he had not noticed. The eyes, the eyeballs which the invisible field was tearing at again ... were totally black, a shining obsidian. This was no ordinary man.

A Pilot!

This was why Tom had been drawn to this chamber. Eemur had talked of a link, and now he felt it. Some part of Tom tasted a distant echo of the tortured pain the Pilot was undergoing; he could not understand how the man survived.

‘Hang on. I’m going to get you out of there.’

Even as his flesh peeled back, the Pilot tried to wave Tom away. Tom reached up to the nearest flange, took hold—

Then the walls seemed to come alive as white light flared - an alarm -and great encrusted metal limbs reached for Tom with talons and blades -
snick -
as doors slid down, shutting off the corridors -
snack -
and there was nowhere to go.

Blue sparks rose in the air - sapphire blue: the hue associated with Oracles and Seers.

Eemur?

A low hum.

Get me out of here!

Something slammed him downwards.

Then he was plunging into a slick electric-blue tunnel that blazed and shone as he fell through nebulae that were atoms with electron clouds greater than worlds, and he yelled as unstoppable forces squeezed and spat him through the gaps of reality, through the holes in a network of vibrating strings of spacetime, flung him down and down—

I’ve got you, Tom.

—until the path curved and he spun upwards, grew, flew in all directions and tumbled out and fell, back to normality once more.

Tom was on his knees and retching on a soft carpet. There was a faint woody scent of boxed fluorofungus upon the air. Lambent orange of a floating glowglobe cast diffuse shadows on the floor.