Keenan stepped forward, and glanced down. There was no reflection from the silver surface. He frowned. “I don’t feel evil,” he said, breath smoking a little. He shivered at the sudden chill. “Come on. How do we cross?”
“The ledges,” said Emerald and gestured. Around both sides of the Lake of Desecration narrow channels had been hewn from the rock; they were inches wide, and quite obviously treacherous.
“What happens if we fall in?” said Franco. His voice was wary, brow creased into a frown. He knew shit when he saw it, and he was seeing it right now. He flexed his fingers and licked dry lips.
“You are accepted,” said Emerald.
“Meaning?”
“You won’t resurface. You will be... consumed.”
“Great,” snapped Franco. “I suggest we rope ourselves together.”
“A brilliant idea,” said Pippa, “if only we had some rope.”
“You mean you didn’t bring any rope?”
“You’ll be asking me for a jetpack next.”
“You mean you didn’t bring the damn jetpack?” Franco slapped Pippa on the back, making her pitch forward and nearly stagger head-first into the Lake. “Only joking, love.” He chuckled, and Pippa scowled at him, hand on her sword-hilt.
“Come on,” said Keenan. “Let’s get it done.”
“What about him?” Franco gestured back at Betezh. The man’s eyes were open, his breathing ragged.
Keenan shrugged. “There’s nothing much we can do for him. Leave him there. We’ll pick him up on the way back... if we survive, and if he hasn’t died. We certainly can’t carry him where we’re about to go.” Keenan’s eyes tracked along the narrow ridge. It was a treacherous traversal alone, never mind attempting to manoeuvre an unconscious and heavy-set man like Betezh.
“Things might come out and... eat him,” said Franco, eyes wide.
“And you care?” said Pippa.
Franco shrugged. “I’d kinda hoped I’d be the one to put the finishing touches to him. After all, the fucker kept me drugged up at Mount Pleasant for years. I owe him a little suffering.”
“Do it,” said Pippa.
“What?”
Pippa drew her Makarov, cocked the weapon, and reached out, offering the gun to Franco. “Shoot him, between the eyes, right now. Here, take my gun. Finish him.”
Franco hopped from one sandal to the other. “What? Here?”
“Yeah, Franco, here.”
“What, now?”
“Yes!” barked Pippa. “Go on. You said it yourself, you hoped you’d be the one to finish him. Well, I for one don’t want him creeping around on my back trail. So shoot him, between the eyes. Bam! Dead.”
“But... he’s unconscious.”
“Your point is?”
“It’s hardly sportsmanlike.”
“
What?
” Pippa’s eyes were gleaming.
“It’s just... look at him... laid out like that... I just can’t do it. I can’t kill a man when he’s down. It’s just not fair.”
“Life’s not fair,” said Pippa, turning and aiming. Franco cannoned into her, and the gun
cracked,
a bullet whining off to strike sparks from the roof. Pippa gave Franco a cold smile.
“Not like that,” said Franco, voice hard. “Leave him. It’s not the way to die.”
“You’re weak,” said Pippa.
“I’m human,” said Franco. “I ain’t no fucking executioner.”
“Well then,” said Pippa, slipping her Makarov back into its shoulder-holster with a whisper of steel on oiled-leather, “that’s where we differ, isn’t it, little man?”
Emerald led the way to the lake’s edge, her movements still lethargic, but her eyes brighter, as if she sensed an upturn in energy not far ahead. The track started off low and wide, and they stepped onto the rough-hewn path warily, each member of Combat K reaching out to touch the rough wall and casting eyes down at the flat silver liquid perhaps twenty feet below them.
From its narrow headland, the lake quickly widened, stretching off into a long, almost solid expanse of shimmering opaque rigidity. The group eased along the ledge, which soon narrowed to just a few inches, forcing them to turn flat against the rock wall, hands and bodies pressing tight against the rugged, sandy texture, nostrils smelling damp cold rock, unable to look down for a sudden fear of falling.
“This is fun,” moaned Franco, as they edged along. He tried to peer ahead, past Pippa’s pack, but could only make out a glitter of silver in his peripheral vision.
“It’s not supposed to be fun,” snapped Pippa. “It’s a means to an end.”
They shuffled on, hearts in mouths, sweating, despite the chill that emanated from the Lake of Desecration. Keenan, ahead of both Pippa and Franco, was watching Emerald’s lithe easy movements and envying her her agility, but then he remembered how she was far from human, and his envy evaporated. Back on Ket, when she had changed, there had been pain there, infinite suffering that spoke of eternal torment, agony, torture, a depth of pain no human could ever appreciate. Keenan gave a cold smile to the sheer wall before him.
Just stick to being human,
he thought,
there’s a good lad.
Eventually, the path widened a little, and Keenan called a stop. Emerald stood, arms folded, saying nothing, but her body-language emanated impatience. Her lethargy and apparent weakness had gone, evaporated. She had slowly become infused with electricity. She almost seemed to hum.
Keenan wiped sweat from his face, and settled his pack into a tighter, comfier position. He glanced at Pippa, who smiled at him, but her grey eyes hinted at an inner fear. This whole place was claustrophobic; it stank of death. Franco made no attempt to hide his fear, and yet he knew the fear was quite an irrational response; there were no charging monsters, no army with yammering machine guns, just a cold, chilled, unwavering silver platter, and a narrow channel of rock to negotiate. He told himself a thousand times he had been in a thousand more terrible and treacherous situations, but for some reason, this seemed a distillation of all those previous occurrences, as if every other moment of threat to his life had become condensed, and surrounded him with an aura of utmost chilling fear.
“I don’t want to go on,” said Franco, finally, jiggling from one foot to the other.
“We have to go on,” said Pippa, and Keenan nodded. “There’s no going back.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Franco scowled; he wasthe prophet of doom, and he recognised his insecurity.
“Come on,” said Keenan, turning his back and following Emerald out onto the narrow ledge of off-camber stone. He didn’t admit it out loud, but he shared Franco’s sentiment. He felt that something terrible, bone-seeping, soul-crushing had happened, or was about to happen, in this frightening and sinister place. “Let’s move out.”
“Just damn bloody great,” muttered Franco, and followed like a lamb on a string.
“Wait!” Emerald held up her hand. The ground began to shake, a gentle tremor at first, which they felt as pulses through their hands pressed against rocky walls, but which built and increased in fierceness, in vigour, in pounding rhythmical beats until it seemed the whole wall, the whole cavern was undergoing a serious seismic upheaval. Combat K clung to the wall, like limpets, parasites, unable to move, unable—even—to pray.
“What’s going on?” shouted Keenan over the pounding rumbling of the rock, but Emerald didn’t reply. He glanced back at Pippa’s ashen face, then down at the Lake of Desecration, which was perfectly still. He blinked. The silver platter remained, unmoved, without ripples: solid. Keenan would have pointed, but instead clung to the wall for life, fingers digging into cracks, cheek pressing against the chilled surface.
And then... it was gone.
“Look down,” hissed Franco.
Still, the Lake was calm: not a movement, no murmur, no disturbance whatsoever.
“That’s impossible,” said Pippa, quietly.
Then there was a
crack
from high above in the darkness, and they all looked up, flinching as a huge section of rock wall detached. They didn’t see it at first, just felt a huge vacuum come into creation. A mass of silence moved slowly, but accelerating... and they squeezed tight against the wall as a chunk of rock the size of a house sailed smoothly past, hit the Lake, and was, effortlessly, tugged under. The silver liquid parted, the rock slid from view, then the silver closed neatly behind it: no ripples, no waves, just...
“Silence,” breathed Franco. He was panting. Stones and dust trickled down from above in the wake of the breakage, making him blink and scrabble at his face, rubbing the dust away.
“This is a dangerous place,” intoned Emerald, then continued along the ledge.
Keenan paused, looking back at Franco and Pippa. They both grinned at him with the sort of madness he had come—years earlier—to know and love. He laughed.
“Fuck it, but by God this is a bad gig.”
“Yeah, you’re telling us!” squawked Franco. “If I didn’t think it’d bring the roof down, I’d shoot you now, and go home for a nice cuppa tea and a handful of Dicks. Keenan mate, this is shit.”
“A handful of Dicks?”
“Green pills, used to ‘promote a calm and caring understanding in patients’. Stops them, y’know, going mad.”
“Ahh. Come on.” Keenan laughed, the tension killed. Rubbing dust from his hair, he led his team further across the narrow ledge, and deeper into the jaws of impending desolation.
The Lake of Desolation was huge; an apparently never-ending stretch of placid silver. They crawled along, the narrow ledge their enemy, the lake beneath them a promise of death. Hours rolled by, and still they edged along, muscles burning, sweat stinging eyes, fingertips screaming and red-raw from scraping and clinging to rock, until, finally, with exhaustion claiming all three members of Combat K, Emerald abruptly halted up ahead.
“Everything OK?” Keenan’s voice was a low drawl, weary from the long crawl across the ledge, weary from the never-ending quest for revenge, weary of life.
“We have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“There’s a break in the ledge; it looks recent, may have been caused by the tremor. It would appear a wall of rock has crashed down, disintegrating the ledge, and leaving us no continuation of path.”
“Is the jump big?”
“I would say ten, twelve feet, but the landing is awkward, requiring dexterity; it will be a tough jump. Can you see round me?”
Keenan moved close, pressing against Emerald, leaning around her. The break in the ledge was treacherous, crumbling, dangerous, and definitely would have been difficult to leap, even with a good run. Keenan chewed his lip, scowling.
“We can’t go back.” He glanced at Pippa and Franco, then gave a resigned shrug. “We’ll have to throw our stuff across, and take the jump one at a time. This looks way too dangerous.”
They rested for a few minutes, gathering strength. The cool air chilled them, now their exertions had halted. Keenan removed his pack, and shivered as cold air sent ice down his spine. He glanced down at the Lake of Desecration, and again, shivered, only this time with a sense of foreboding. It was waiting to eat them, waiting to draw them down into some dark and inescapable depth.
“You OK?” said Cam, buzzing by his ear.
“No.”
“This place is interfering with my internals.”
“Have you discovered anything else about this world being a machine?”
“No. I have exhausted the limit of my technical knowledge.”
“What about the power source?”
“Again, Keenan, I am at a loss. The power source of this planet does not make sense; it sucks in energy, and gives very little out. Yet it’s there, held in check like some huge battery, or even more precisely, a capacitor storing electrons... A planet core isn’t like that. This hasn’t happened by accident; it’s a creation. Like I said, I feel this place is one huge machine. But it’s just wrong; even as a machine, it works wrong.”
“Why would it store power?”
“For propulsion? Protection? Attack? Like I said, spin and gravity are incorrect. I’m not seeing something, Keenan, something at work here that is awesomely complex.”
“Think on it.”
“I am. It is torture!”
Keenan grinned, and winked at the little machine. “You’re doing well, Cam. You might even get invited on our next adventure.”
“Next adventure?”
Keenan grunted, and watched Emerald prepare for the jump. She stood, unfolding, and as she approached the edge slowly and leapt, twisting, her body perfectly parallel with the rock wall, Keenan knew instinctively that she would make the jump. He also realised that a human body shouldn’t twist like that. He gave a teeth smile. Shit, he realised, I could die here.
Emerald landed lightly, balanced, and whirled, one hand reaching out to steady herself.
“Throw the packs, and guns. You need to be as unburdened as possible. This will be hard for you people; the wall curves outwards, bulges, so you must try to twist around the curvature mid-jump.”
Keenan nodded, and threw his pack across the chasm. Emerald caught it, and laid it safe; then Keenan passed Pippa and Franco’s packs, then their weapons. When all their kit was safe, Keenan spent several minutes studying the jump. Emerald had been right; the rocky wall was curved, bowed outwards, a bulge of distension: fine if you were an acrobat, but for normal mortals?