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"CODE Delphi. Start here.
"It seems pointless to me even to record these thoughts, since I ca
"It is dark here, the others tell me—some kind of underground nest, filthy to smell and unpleasant to hear. I wish I could limit myself to those two senses, but in my own way I can even see the things moving, eating, coupling. They are horrible. I am ru
"I suppose we are alive only because they feasted on the horse first. The sounds it made dying were. . . . No. What is the point? Is there something we can do? I can think of nothing. There are dozens of the monsters. We should have tried to escape when we were first seized. Now we are in their nest. Any hope that they eat only animals has been destroyed by the human bones that lie everywhere, in careless piles. Those I touched have been picked clean of flesh and broken for marrow.
"Horrible things. T4b, who has spent most of the time praying, called them 'rotten-cow spiders.' I have not had a clear impression of them. What I perceive is the mass of them, the limbs, the voices—almost human, but my God, that word 'almost'. . . !
"Stop, Martine. We have faced situations as bad as this and survived. Why is it that I am so weak, so weary, so miserable? Why have the past days felt like work too hard for me to do?
"It is. . . .
"Good God. One of the things came to sniff at us. Florimel drove it away by kicking at it, but it did not seem frightened. They do smell of rotted meat, but they also have another scent, something strange I ca
"Where is Paul? I ca
"Florimel says he is just a few meters away, on his hands and knees. Poor man. To have gone through so much, only to end here.
"I ca
"I tell myself over and over that they were only Simulaera, not real, only bits of gear. Sometimes I believe it, for hours at a stretch. Maybe it truly is so, but I know that I ca
"I dreamed last night that the great burning light of my own blinding came streaming out of his wound. I dreamed that I fell into a darkness even greater than the one I have known.
"I ca
"I do not want to meet Dread again.
"There. That is perhaps the greatest fear. I admit it! Even should some improbable thing happen, should we drag ourselves out of this stinking pit, away from these ca
"Oh, merciful Heaven, I don't want this.
"It's all too much. I wish could turn off these senses. I want to cover it all over, bury myself in the dark—but not this dark! Escape . . . I don't want this!
"They're coming toward us, a great group of them. Are they . . . singing?
"Paul is gone—Florimel says so. Have they already taken him?
"T4b! They're coming! Get over here with Florimel and me!
"I wish he had his armor. I should . . . if this is the last . . . I should . . . but. . . .
"Oh, God, not this. . . !"
CHAPTER 17
Breathing Problems
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 5.5 (Eu, NAm)—"HOW TO KILL YOUR TEACHER"
(visual: Looshus and Kantee reading the Reality Scroll)
VO: Looshus (Ufour Halloran) and Kantee (Brandywine Garcia) have discovered that Superintendent Skullflesh (Richard Raymond Balthazar) is the reborn prophet of the Stellar Knowledge cult, and is preparing a blood sacrifice of the entire school population to bring on the end of the world. Casting 4 hall monitors, 7 cult members. Flak to: GCN.HOW2KL.CAST
It made a very small pile when she looked at it, all the things she had bought, all the things that she would carry with her into this last and strangest country of a life that had seen many countries and many strange things.
The new telematic jack was small, of course, no larger than the standard variety despite its additional range. It had cost a decent fraction of her bank account, but the salesman had sworn that it would keep her in touch with her fancy Dao-Ming pad at a distance of several miles—"even in the middle of a high-usage telecom area during an electrical storm," he had cheerfully promised. Olga didn't know about storms, although she had spent enough days now near the Gulf of Mexico to know that even on a clear day lightning never seemed more than a breath away, but she guessed that an island with its own army and air force would probably qualify as a "high-usage telecom area."
Beside the jack sat a small but extremely powerful LED flashlight, a piece of high-tech paraphernalia usually sold to businessmen with too much money, and despite its dramatic name—something like "SpyLite" or "SpaceLight," she couldn't remember which—seldom used for anything much more dramatic than finding dropped keys in a parking lot, she guessed. She had also bought something called an Omni-Tool from the same store, then changed her mind and exchanged it for a more familiar Swiss Army knife. She had always meant to buy one, had thought dozens of times what a handy object it would be for a woman living on her own, but for some reason had never done it. The fact that she had finally bought one, a top-of-the-line model with all kinds of clever hidden devices and built-in microcircuitry, helped mark the occasion. Things had changed. She was not the same Olga Pirofsky.
What did one bring on an infiltration of one of the world's largest and best-guarded corporations? She supposed there were many more things she could have bought, guns and cutting torches and surveillance devices, but it all smacked too much of boys playing war games. Besides, she was fairly certain she would be arrested at some point, and a pocketful of plastic explosives or wall-climbing pitons would make it hard to pretend she had wandered away from a tour group.
So her pile of tools to take behind enemy lines was a small one: the new jack, the knife, the flashlight, and the one object of sentiment she had not been able to leave behind in Juniper Bay with the rest of her old life. Thee curl of white plastic was certainly not going to arouse anyone's suspicions. Olga's last name and first initial, as written decades ago by some nurse who might very well be dead, had almost faded away. Olga herself had cut the bracelet to remove it, but had never thrown it away, and through all the years in her top drawer it had retained the curve of her wrist. Many times she had come within inches of tossing it in the trash, but the O. Pirofsky who had worn that hospital bracelet was a different person, and the tiny snake of pale plastic was her only tangible co