The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (22 page)

Chapter
37:

A
part of the machine

The chieftain walked slowly through a
long corridor—a vein in the mothership of the fleet—down dark, fibrous walls
lit from within by a naturally occurring, pale red glow. For some reason the
weight of the parasite on his chest felt heavier today. Perhaps his body was
finally breaking down, the end was in sight and this farce of a life was almost
over.

      That parasite connected him to the
fleet and so he felt the movement of the other ships around them. The fighter
craft, like wasps, almost able to think for themselves, acted as living drones
to guard the mind-ship. The silent seed-ships moved at the behest and command
of the mothership, where the Council of Thought resided. The chieftain had seen
the council a few times, withered bodies halfway between tree trunk and corpse,
stood suspended in the dark, manipulating the fleet from afar. He'd never
witnessed one of the council move, though he'd watched others of their kind. The
final stage of the species' evolution constituted a life cycle that took them
from immobile plant thing to mummified telepathic god, shuffling around in the
dark, commandeering their vessels of war.

      The chieftain used to wonder how
these creatures functioned, how they progressed from birth to death. They didn't
seem to die, he noted. Just remained part of the machine, part of the monster,
always hungry, consistently moving forward. He used to care. Not anymore. The
hum of the ship's heartbeat numbed and hypnotized him—if not literally at least
figuratively—and made the passage of time rhythmic and droning, on and on as
the catapulted into the endless black.

      The strange creatures also saddled
with the multi-legged parasites once made him anxious. They made no sense,
their alien biology illogical and endlessly weird. The creatures with two
faces, the asymmetrical ones who seemed to go in three directions at once, the
winged beasts who had, when first brought onboard, seemed so constricted, so
panicked to be without an open sky.

      Such was life here on the
brain-ship, the central nervous system of the fleet. The fleet itself loomed as
one beast. The brain-ship its head, the seed-ships its hands that would reach
down and tear open this new world with hungry fingers, the warships acting as
mighty legs thundering forward toward their next victim, and the buzzing
outriders like little sharp teeth and claws for gutting their enemies.

      He could almost respect it, if not
for what it did to him, to his people, to the world he never appreciated until
it was gone. His world was for conquering, the chieftain thought. Fighting
petty wars—stupid mortal barbarians killing each other—over a rock in space.
But it was all we knew, and everything we had, and we were too selfish and violent
to realize we were wasting what little time remained. There was no defeating
this fleet. Seed-ships plunged into the soil of his home world like a knife into
sand, changing and tormenting everything they touched, dark sorcery about to
bring the apocalypse. He could not regret losing that war. There is always
someone stronger than you are, faster, willing to commit atrocities you are
not.

      But not taking advantage of the
time we had, the chieftain thought, that is what I regret. Because we believed
we had all the time in the world. Until our world disappeared.

      He continued to walk aimlessly
through the veins of the brain-ship, restless and lonely. He dreamed of home,
of the dead, of everything he loved and would never see again.

Chapter
38:

A
chamber full of the dead

This feels terribly familiar,"
Titus said softly over Kate's shoulder. They looked at the low-slung building in
front of them, surrounded by electrified fences and barbed wire. The structure
itself wasn't enormous, but they knew from past experience that any one they
needed to break into had a decent chance of being bigger on the inside.

      It didn't appear well-guarded. Armed
men patrolled, but compared to super-powered symbiotic aliens, humans with guns
didn't seem like quite as much of a barrier.

      "Do we knock on the front
door?" Bedlam said.

      Hunkered down in a wooded area just
beyond the fence, a twenty-five foot clearing stood between the trio and the
fence itself. The one gate they'd spotted had the most security: four guards
and too much light for stealth.

      "I can make that jump,"
Titus said.

      "That's a fifteen foot fence,"
Kate said. "You sure?"

      Titus grinned. It pained Kate to
realize that the best adjective for his smile at that moment was, in fact,
wolfish. Emily would gloat about that.

      "We've cleared higher,"
he said. "I can do it with you on my back."

      Bedlam raised an eyebrow.

      Kate shot her a dirty look.

      "Not saying a thing,"
Bedlam said. "I can clear that height too, though. I just need a running
start."

      "We'll go over first and
knock out the patrol coming around," Kate said. "Then you follow."

      Bedlam nodded and shimmied to the
edge of the clearing. Titus exhaled and smoothly transformed from human to
werewolf, his silvery fur luminous in the dark. He looked at Kate with those
strange yellow eyes. She always wondered how close to the surface he was when
he transformed, and how much the monster was in control. Titus crouched down so
Kate could hop onto his back. Gripping his torso with her legs, she threw one
arm over his shoulder, leaving her other hand free in case she needed it.

      With surprising grace, Titus ran forward,
his loping gait covered the distance of the clearing in a two or three strides.
She felt his entire core tighten as he leapt into the air, easily soaring over
the electrified fence. They landed without a sound on the other side, just the
soft crush of claws through dirt and a feint 'huff' as the werewolf exhaled.
Like a flawless machine, Kate and Titus went to work, Kate slid from his back
and ran into the dark so she could sneak up behind the patrol they knew would
soon pass by. Titus jumped again, this time batting at a tall light, bathing
the area in shadows when the bulb softly broke.

      Kate rushed up behind the two
guards on patrol as they came around the edge of the building, both of them
tensed when they saw the light had been extinguished. Kate punched him with one
of her taser-knuckle devices and the first man had no idea what hit him. She
pounced on the second man and wrapped an arm around his neck before pulling him
to the ground until he passed out. Both men subdued, Titus appeared beside her
and together they dragged the guards along the ground and further into the
shadows.

      A less graceful thump trembled
though the dirt.

      Kate saw Bedlam on one knee,
looking over at her sheepishly. Sparks flew from the section of the fence she
jumped over.

      "I tripped," she said,
her eyes full of wild energy.

      Kate shook her head and pointed
toward the main building inside the compound. All three ran toward it. Titus
and Bedlam made clear moves to kick in the closest door, but Kate waved them
off, and quickly examined the digital lock on the door. She produced a security
key card she'd taken from the guard she'd knocked out.

      "Kicking it in would've been
more fun," Bedlam said.

      Kate shrugged and zipped the card
through the scanner. The door unlocked with a metallic clunk. Bedlam pushed it
open.

      Inside, the building consisted of
a wide-open space, bathed in soft blue-green light. Large crates obscured their
view of the main area. Titus leapt up on top of the crates, as always moving
with deceptive grace. Kate walked left into the dark, Bedlam right. Kate slid
along the crates until she found a spot where she could slip between them easily
to see what might be waiting.

      What she found nearly made her
heart stop.

      Two long horizontal rows of glass
tubes, each large enough to hold an adult human, were lined up down the center
of the building. Each was hooked up to dozens of monitors. The machines
presented no immediate indication what purpose they served. Lights blinked in
red, green, and blue. Lit from within by ghostly blue light, the tubes
themselves were filled with dense fluid, thicker than water. A human body
floated still and unmoving in each. Most had been modified in some way, limbs
or eyes or hands, some sort of robotic addition or, in even stranger cases,
inhuman parts seemingly surgically attached where ordinary limbs or organs once
resided.

      Kate stepped out from behind the
crates and walked up to the nearest tube. A young man, eyes open, stared
blankly ahead. She watched his chest and saw no movement, no hint of breathing.

      "I'm going to kill them,"
Bedlam said softly as she, too, emerged from the shadows.

      Kate glanced up at the rafters and
looked for Titus in the dark, but she couldn't see him. "You know what
this is?" she said.

      "I should," Bedlam said.
"I was in one for six months."

      Kate locked eyes with Bedlam.

      The cyborg turned away and walked
up to one of the glass chambers in the other row, this one containing a teen-aged
girl.

      "This is how they stored me,
while they were grafting on all these parts," Bedlam said. "It felt
like a dream."

      She looked back over her shoulder
at Kate.

      "I didn't know if it was a
hallucination or a nightmare," she said. "The light, the cold… it's
so cold inside there."

      "Does this mean these kids
are alive?" Kate said. She examined the machinery attached to the
cylinders, trying to find any indication of vital signs or status.

      "They're not breathing,"
Bedlam said. She placed one cyborg hand against the glass, her metal fingers
clinking as they touched it. "I remember breathing. It's like… breathing
Jell-O. Too thick, slow moving, it fills up your lungs. I remember…"

      "And I remember you," a
voice said from the darkness.

      Kate stepped back, took shelter
behind one of the tubes, hoping to find the source of the voice.

      A man emerged from the darkness,
well-kept, dressed in a dark suit, his collar loosened. He stood standing on a
landing at the top of a flight of stairs. Too far way for Kate to reach, out of
range of her throwing weapons. He looked tired, feverish. "You were the
one who survived. Our great success."

      "Who the hell are you?"
Bedlam said, standing her ground in the middle of the warehouse-like chamber.

      The man shot them a pristine white
smile.

      "I am… Well, I suppose I was
one of the Children of the Elder Star," the man said. He was leaning on
something, Kate saw. A cane? She couldn't make it out in the shadows.

      "Past-tense?" Kate
yelled from her hiding spot. "We heard about some dissention in the ranks."

      "There's always been
dissention. That's what the Children are, con artists pretending to be a
billion-dollar enterprise pretending to be cultists," he said. "Liars.
All of them. Except me and my brothers. We were the true believers."

      "You believed something was
coming from the stars," Kate said.

      "We knew," the man said.
"Do you know how difficult it was to play along with all their petty
earthly scheming when we realized the world was coming to an end? Who cares
about money and influence when your planet's demise is set to an egg timer?"

      "You made us," Bedlam
said.

      "Made you?" the man
said. Kate stole a glance at him. He hadn't moved from his perch, but he also
appeared alone. No backup, and no parasite on his chest. Somehow that made it
worse, Kate thought—the others they'd fought had been enslaved by the parasitic
creatures. This man seemed to be betraying their planet entirely voluntarily.

      "You know, we had nothing to
do with you at first," he said. "One of the others thought building
weapons out of half-dead teenagers posed as a good investment. They thought we'd
get better PR if we had doomsday weapons."

      "But you wanted us to be…"
Bedlam began.

      "Oh, we'd still like you to
be host bodies," the man said. "But beggars can't be choosers. If the
ones who lived couldn't be controlled, well…"

      He made a grand gesture towards
the rows of seemingly dead people in their tubes.

      "After you escaped we
realized that we could enhance cadavers just as easily," he said. "More
so, because they wouldn't think for themselves and escape. So we took our
leftover dead and turned them into a little squadron of hosts for our loving
gods when they arrive."

      "You what?" Bedlam said.

      "Bargaining chips," the
man said. "Do you know what they do to worlds? The only way to survive is
to make yourself useful in anticipation of their arrival. To sell your soul to
them. Otherwise you're just food in the machine."

      "And you think you can
bargain your life with… these poor kids?" Bedlam said.

      "We wanted a place in the
machine," the man said. "They keep the strong ones. The ones they can
use. And everything else is just dust and food. You would have been a great
gift, Bedlam. You and the others. It's so funny to think how small-minded my
colleagues were. You were just a weapon to them. Something to break things. My
brothers and I knew you weren't a sledgehammer. You were a gift."

      Kate mulled her arsenal over in
her mind. Smoke bombs, throwing tasers, the gauntlets. A grappling hook. Little
paralytic darts she could use to take him out if she were able to get close
enough. She glanced around the room again, wondering where Titus went to.

      "You did this to me,"
Bedlam said, fury growing in her voice.

      "Oh come now. You were
practically a corpse," the man said. "I've read your file. Did you
want to live as half a person? Is that the life you wanted? We made you better!"

      "I should have had a choice,"
Bedlam said.

      "So ungrateful," the man
said. "Then again your file did say you were a headcase."

      Bedlam took a step forward.

      "Uh-uh," The man said.
He raised the thing he'd been leaning on—not a cane, Kate realized, a weapon of
some kind—and pointed it at Bedlam. "Trust me. We built you. We know what
it takes to shut you down."

      Kate made a move, but the man
shouted her name.

      "Dancer! We know all about
you too," he said. "You might be ruthless enough to let me kill your
little robot friend in order to get to me. We've always admired that about you.
The cutthroat one in that little group of yours. But I'm willing to take the
shot. It's up to you what happens next."

      "It's up to me," Bedlam
said.

      Kate heard the control in her tone
cracking.

      "I'm tired of other people
deciding if I live or die."

      "Too bad," the man said
playfully. "Don't worry, this machine will only destroy your brain. You'll
be added to the bodies we offer when they arrive."

      The man started to pull the
trigger, but he never got to take the shot. Three hundred pounds of werewolf
dropped from the rafters onto him, a mass of silver brutality, claws flashed
and mouth roared when it tore the weapon from the suited man's grasp.

      "Alive, Titus!" Kate
yelled, running out from behind her hiding place.

      Titus raised the man into the air,
held him by both arms, and growled in his face, fangs as long as knives flashed
in the blue light of the chamber.

      Doors on both sides of the room
slammed open. Guards poured in. Before anyone could say a word, they opened
fire with short, angry machine guns. Kate winced. She saw more than one bullet
hit Titus's body, but knew he'd recover. When she watched the explosion of
blood tear through the mystery man's body though, she knew he was gone. Stray
bullets riddled his frame. Titus roared again, then tossed the limp mystery man
aside. He pounced onto the nearest group of guards. Kate couldn't see what
happened next in the shadows, but the screams of strangers told her Titus was
winning.

      She threw a smoke grenade at the
second set of guards, watching as it burst against an armored chest. She closed
her eyes and threw another device, a flash bang, blinding them. In seconds she
was kicking knees until they bent in the wrong direction, snapping an elbow
over her shoulder, feeling a nose crumple beneath her palm.