Against Gravity

Kendrick nodded. "You know what I don't understand?"

Buddy tilted his head. "What?"

"Why did the Bright do this to us? All our augments turned rogue at the same time, but the question is: why?"

"I don't claim to understand that." Buddy looked exasperated. "Perhaps the Bright triggered something in us, just by the simple act of communication."

"Did you ask the Bright that?"

Buddy looked pained. "You may have noticed their communication tends to be solely one-way."

"It certainly makes it hard for anyone to refuse them if staying down here means we'll all die a lot sooner."

"You're implying that they turned our augments rogue deliberately. But that's ridiculous."

"Sure of that, are you?" Kendrick snapped. "Can you just look at what's happening to Caroline and tell me you believe this is all for the best?"

"I…" Buddy's face coloured. He turned away without another word and headed back to the helicopter.

25 October 2096 New Mexico

Kendrick woke to a sky streaked with red. His face numb with cold, he sneezed in the chill morning air. The rest of him was wrapped in a thermal sleeping bag, and the helicopter loomed as a dark shape above him.

"Time to be going." Buddy hovered over him and handed him a plastic thermos lid filled with hot instant coffee. Kendrick sipped at it, blinking himself awake and longing for just another twelve hours of sleep.

Against his better judgement, he let his mind roam back to the day when he'd killed Robert. The shame and horror of it were never far away from his thoughts. The incident – every word, every action – was etched eternally in his mind. Sometimes he felt as though he'd died that day too: as though he'd become someone else, someone with the same body, even the same thoughts but, on a level that he couldn't quite define, not the same person.

Caroline was still sleeping but he sensed that this was normal sleep now, rather than chemically induced. He stepped over to inspect her, brushing a strand of hair back from her face. She twitched, then a corner of her mouth crept upwards in an unconscious half-smile. Kendrick studied the myriad lines criss-crossing the once flawless skin of her face.

Buddy stepped over beside him. "I think she's going to be okay," he whispered.

Kendrick nodded down at her. "You call that okay?"

"I call it a lot more okay than if she'd been stowed on one of those shuttles. You did good, Kendrick – real hero stuff."

Kendrick gestured for them to move away, then began, "Where are we right now?"

"New Mexico, heading west," Buddy replied.

"And we're headed for this offshore launch base?"

"Yeah, hundred klicks or so out from the Californian coast. But we're going to have to stop off in LA on the way. There's a place – a safe house, if you like – and some people will be waiting there. They're Labrats, and I need to make sure everything's ru

Kendrick digested this. "How far are we from the Maze?"

"Not nearly as far as I'd like to be."

"Could we get there from here?"

Buddy studied Kendrick for several seconds. "If that's a joke, it's in bad taste."

"I'm serious. I want to go there."

"No comprende, senor."

"I know this is hard to understand, but I really do want to go to the Maze."

"Kendrick, why the fuck would you want to go there? Why would anyone who had to be there in the first place ever, ever want to go back?"

Because when Peter McCowan spoke to me about the Maze, he asked me to go there. That meant that, somewhere down there, in the darkness, part of McCowan still lived.

"I found something out. I… a source told me that if I can only get down there, I can find what I need to prove Draeger's absolute complicity in what happened to us. That's important, Buddy, you know how important. We'd have Draeger by the balls."

Buddy fell silent, staring angrily off into the distance. Kendrick waited, listening to the wind blowing across the desert. It made a high, eerie sound.

"Look, I understand what you're saying," Buddy replied at length. "But right now, where we're going is more important than anything else. You know why."

"If you help me, I promise I'll do whatever I can to help you get to the Archimedes."

Buddy glanced at him sharply. "You're saying you've changed your mind? You're going up with us?"

"Yes."

"There's something you're not telling me."

"Buddy, what's going to happen if you fail? If the wormhole never appears, and you stay right where you are?"

"Ken-"

"Either it's Draeger, or it's Los Muertos, or maybe it's even someone else. If the Archimedes stays put and any of them find a way on board, maybe they will find the secret of zero-point energy that the Bright have supposedly harnessed. And then, as far as I'm concerned, you really do have the end of the world, just like Wilber predicted. The Archimedes can't be allowed to fail into any of their hands."

"It won't," Buddy said quietly. "Once we're there, in a couple of days' time, we'll be gone for ever, no trace left. We'll be somewhere better."

For all your sakes, I hope so. "I know you will," Kendrick replied, trying to sound reassuring. "But I remember a time when you wanted to nail Draeger just as much as I did. Are you telling me that's no longer true?"

Buddy looked distressed. He seemed about to say something a couple of times but changed his mind each time.

"Christ, fine," he said at length. "How long will this take? It's not like we aren't in a hurry, and there's Caroline to take care of. So how long?"

"I don't know. A day, maybe?"

Buddy groaned and covered his head with his hands. "Shit, shit, shit," he muttered. "Right, listen – a day, and that's it. Any longer and I'm out of there, do you understand me?"

"I'm not asking any more than that. But, yeah, we do have to take care of Caroline first."

"It doesn't need a cryptkey. Just plug and go."

Kendrick held Buddy's wand next to the node set in the dashboard and waited until the wand had established a co

In the meantime, Buddy rummaged around until he pulled out a crumpled eepsheet. Kendrick took it from him, smoothing it out. He aimed the wand at the eepsheet and it beeped quietly, confirming that it had successfully transferred the link from the helicopter to the 'sheet.

In response, the crumpled page of electronic paper lit up, a logo blurring rapidly across it. Images of politicians and actors appeared in rapid superimposition, one fading into the other, before presenting the front page of Buddy's default subscription newsfeed.

"What are you expecting to find there?"

"After we finally got out of the Maze, I found that a lot of records had been deleted or destroyed. But whoever did it wasn't quite thorough enough. The Maze extends for several kilometres under the jungle, and it goes down a hell of a way as well. I've seen a lot of schematics over the years, but they're all different. Most of the original designs were stored in Pentagon databases and they disappeared during the civil war."

"Different how?"

"I need to take a look before I remember." Kendrick tapped an address into the eepsheet's search box. A couple of seconds later he heard the sound of crackling, followed by a graphic of flames burning away the 'sheet's main information display, a widening pixellated inferno that eventually revealed a demonic face. Insane laughter issued from the eepsheet.