Against Gravity

She was joined by another, a man this time, and it was clear from his movements that he could see better than the woman. He had glanced at her uncertainly as, her face pale and drawn, she had found her way to the edge of the shield door, guiding herself past the gun turret by sliding her hands along the corridor wall.

Kendrick remembered how someone had reached out to try to stop her, only to be slapped away. There were shouts and heated debate, a cacophony of voices.

He remembered the woman screaming, then ru

Kendrick could still smell the blood and scorched flesh of the bodies that had been torn apart by the guns earlier, and he despised himself when that memory made his mouth water. Wherever the i

He kept telling himself that when his own time came he could refuse. Others had done so, and lay slowly dying of thirst and hunger in the corridors and the echoing spaces all around.

Kendrick knew that he could refuse, but deep inside he already knew he wouldn't.

24 October 2096 En route to Texas

Kendrick could hear the sound of jet planes outside. He was lost in oil-scented darkness, the air so thick and stifling that it was almost like drowning. His lungs heaved and his skin felt on fire. Even if it wasn't Helen's actual intention to kill him he was pretty sure that he'd suffocate if he remained trapped in the tiny space for much longer.

He kicked out with his feet, trying to make some noise, draw attention. He felt relief blossom in his chest as someone finally unlocked the car boot.

His reward was a chink of light, a tiny, star-like point, and he felt a rush of ecstatic relief that they were going to let him out. He wasn't going to die there in the airless dark after all.

The chink of light expanded, rushing towards him. Not sunlight, however – something else altogether.

Kendrick found that he was no longer bound. Instead he was falling, as in a dream, through an ocean of warm air. Finally he came to a soft landing on a very familiar grass plain. Once more he could see insects buzzing through the tall grass while, further away, the land curved upwards, rising to meet itself.

Kendrick looked around him, his aches and bruises suddenly a memory. He stooped down to pluck a blade of grass, twirling it between forefinger and thumb. It felt very slightly damp, the texture of its surface somehow vivid under his fingertips. If this was some kind of augment-generated hallucination, it was entirely indistinguishable from reality.

But really he was trapped, tied up in a car boot somewhere in America, not here. Logic demanded that. Yet it was hard to deny the apparent reality of what he was now experiencing.

Perhaps this is death, he mused. Or maybe the sneak preview? Either way, he felt curiously unconcerned, for the Archimedes provided a curious substitute for Heaven – or for Hell.

A darkness swept across the green, the shadow of something vast. Kendrick looked up.

Far above his head, floating in the centre of the vast cylinder that was the Archimedes, he saw a twisting, amorphous shape that he didn't recall from his previous visions. At first he thought it was merely a cloud. But this was more like a great ocean of silver droplets that had been suspended in the artificial sky above him, the grasslands around him and his own upturned face captured and reflected in its shifting peaks and troughs.

Watching the cloud become more agitated, Kendrick felt himself gripped by a sudden fear, as if something malevolent lurked unseen just behind his shoulder.

He looked around. The great shell of the Archimedes stretched into the distance on either side of him, capped at each end by striated layers of steel. He knew that the station was divided into two huge caverns. Nearer one of these layers could be seen great scaffold-like structures surrounding transfer facilities that were used for bringing materials into and out of the station.

Above him the mercury-like cloud appeared to be dispersing. Spi

They began to rush down towards him and Kendrick didn't wait to see what happened next. He bolted across the grasslands, feeling the tug of his own muscles, the air streaming past him as he moved.

Even so, he could see the shadow of the pursuing cloud-fragments overtaking him, darkening the grass around him in every direction. Light poured down upon him from long, narrow windows extending the length of the chamber, the light itself diffused by complex mirror arrays.

He stopped, dream muscles aching, and stared up again. The individual cloud-fragments were now more discernible, moving with clear intelligence and purpose. Like swarms of tiny fish darting through ocean depths, their movements appeared almost telepathically coordinated.

Kendrick stopped again, wondering what it was that felt so wrong about all this. It was like the time when his heart had ceased beating, the feeling that part of him had vanished so suddenly that he could not at first work out what was missing.

And then he knew.

He was no longer breathing.

In this dream-place, his lungs, like his heart, were still. He deliberately drew breath then, so that air filled his chest. He actually felt the air flooding into him.

At first, panic surged within him and he felt himself begin to hyperventilate – suffering the delusion that something was blocking his nose and throat. It took a serious effort of will to maintain self-control, to remind himself that none of this was real. His lungs still moved inside the flesh-and-bone cage of his real body regardless of where his mind currently resided.

Kendrick heard the singing long before it properly impinged on his conscious mind. It brought a kind of peace that he had never believed might be possible, as if he had woken up into an angel's dream. Hardenbrooke's medication was finally wearing off: there was now little to stand between Kendrick and the message that Buddy and the rest of the Ward Seventeen Labrats had already received.

But there was still that sense of malevolence he'd felt. Where did it come from? He remembered what McCowan's ghost had told him about Robert.

The insect-like motes were close enough now to take on discernible shapes. They rushed around each other as they approached Kendrick, faster and faster until they flowed together again, taking on an outline, vaguely humanoid, fleshing out as the motes blended together into a seamless whole. It took on the size and shape of a man: a flesh-and-blood human being.

At first the shape had the face of Robert Vincenzo, but its expression constantly flowed like liquid, becoming somehow simultaneously imbecilic and dangerously intelligent.

The singing faded and Kendrick struggled to hear it still, wanting to follow that sound for all eternity, to rest in its gentle cadence until the end of time.

For the first time, Kendrick understood what Buddy had been trying to tell him, understood the peace and the safety that Buddy and the others believed they would gain from boarding the Archimedes. Everything Erik had told him, on that chilly shore so far away, suddenly made sense.

The face of Robert Vincenzo stared back at him from the dream-landscape of the Archimedes. Its mouth twisted silently, forming words that Kendrick could hear in his head, as if they were his own thoughts.