Against Gravity

And, almost in the same instant, Kendrick understood why he found it so hard to believe. He was scared, that was all. Now that he'd felt at least a part of what filled Buddy and the rest with such unwavering conviction, he was scared that it might not turn out to be true, that it was in fact a false dream born of technology. So it was easier, then, not to believe.

He studied further the map of the Archimedes displayed on his wand. They'd be reaching the first cavern soon, and the idea terrified him. Would tiny winged shapes come diving down at him, through air as thick as soup with them?

Buddy came up beside him again, jabbing a finger at the read-out screen on his own suit. Kendrick realized he had his own map displayed there.

"Pressurized area up ahead," Buddy informed him over a private cha

"How do you know?"

"Green means pressurized, red is depressurized."

Kendrick glanced at his own map and saw the same colour-coding.

The corridor terminated in another airlock. He could see tiny sparkles of light flitting across the several metres of passageway just in front of it.

Tiny silver fibres? A chill gripped his spine. He looked around and saw that he wasn't the only one to have noticed them. His skin crawled with horror as several others reached out with glove-encased hands to touch them. He imagined those threads finding their way through the material of spacesuits, invading the augment-riddled flesh beneath.

Sabak led the way, surrounded by the half-dozen Labrats he had armed on board the shuttle. From the way they huddled together Kendrick guessed they were communicating over a private conference band.

They stopped at the airlock and Sabak appeared to have a heated discussion with some of them. Then he reached forward and touched a panel. The airlock door swung open, revealing a high-ceilinged room beyond, big enough to hold them all. Kendrick trooped inside with the rest, noting a second pressure door on the opposite wall.

The first door closed, sealing them all inside. After several moments a faint but increasingly audible hiss became evident as the chamber began to pressurize. A light flashed above both doors, and Kendrick watched as Sabak took off his helmet to speak. His voice echoing dully in the chamber, he was urging them all to take off their helmets too.

As Kendrick removed his own, the other chamber door opened to reveal light seeping through.

Beyond it he could see trees, and grass.

They crowded through and found themselves in the rear of a very spacious low-ceilinged gallery, with panoramic glass windows overlooking a wooded area. The trees seemed a little too regularly spaced to be natural. The soil outside had been arranged carefully in little hillocks, again attempting to trick the eye into thinking it saw a natural environment. Further beyond the glass, the ground curved steeply upwards.

By now most of the people who'd entered behind Kendrick had removed their helmets.

Kendrick sucked the air deep into his lungs. It smelled so fresh – he'd more than half-expected to find it as polluted as in the Maze. Although the nanite threads had already made their presence known here, there wasn't yet anywhere near the same degree of infestation. He stepped closer to the glass wall and gazed out at the greenery beyond.

Buddy soon joined him, helmet held loosely in one hand. He was positively glowing, his smile radiant, looking happier and more content than Kendrick recalled seeing him ever before.

A sudden, unexpected sound…

Kendrick glanced sideways along the front of the building where a path was visible, winding its way through the trees. "Did you hear that?"

"No, I-"

Something whirred – a machine sound that stirred up deep memories. Kendrick stepped away from the window and headed along until he was about halfway between the airlock exit and the building's entrance.

Out there, something glinted in among the trees. There was something hauntingly familiar about the noise he'd just heard.

Kendrick moved closer to the far end of the huge room, to look further between the building's exterior and the trees beyond where gardens once carefully maintained had grown wild. He cocked his head, listening hard, and heard a series of rapid staccato thumps. At the same instant he glanced over his left shoulder – in time to witness the main entrance of the building explode inwards in a shower of glass.

Kendrick fell to the marbled floor, covering his head with his hands as the windows nearby shattered almost at the same instant. He half-crawled, half-scuttled towards the relative safety of an expanse of wall that separated one large glass panel from the next. There he pressed himself flat against the floor while bullets whined through the air above him. They made a dull thudding sound as they impacted with the i

Peering down, Kendrick saw a fine tracery of nanite threads rapidly spreading across the marbled tiles under him. The tingling in his hands became urgent, almost unbearable. He longed to scratch his palms, to-

In an instant he understood what was required of him. Rolling slightly onto his side, he started to pull a glove off. Throwing it to one side, he gazed down at the palm of his uncovered left hand, noticing the faintest pattern of gold still etched into his flesh.

Only a few days before, he had witnessed all-out war raging at the molecular level, deep underground. Perhaps this time things would be different.

Kendrick spread his fingers out wide and laid his bared palm flat against the tiles beneath him. He screamed as his flesh united with the cool stone. Searing pain shot into his brain while bullets continued to zip through the air just inches above his head.

He could hear people shouting, and yet more screaming.

Through a haze of agony he became aware of the corpse lying several feet away from him, its head and shoulders reduced to a crimson pulp. He still couldn't prise his hand away from the tiles, so he twisted his head around, trying to see what was happening behind him. Most of the other Labrats, he saw, had retreated to the relative shelter of the pressure chamber.

The walls of the gallery were constructed from alternate panels of glass and columns of concrete: perhaps twenty Labrats had managed to find shelter behind the safety of the concrete. At least a dozen more lay scattered in the stillness of death.

Kendrick gripped his wrist, still trying to pull his hand free. He felt a fresh stab of icy pain as the skin of his palm ripped. While he watched, golden threads crawled out from under the flesh, seeking out the nearest silver filaments. The silver turned to gold within moments.

He finally realized that the firing outside had stopped. "It's me – Kendrick!" he screamed into the sudden silence. "Can anyone hear me?"

"Ken!" It was Buddy. "I thought you were down!"

"Those things are gun turrets," Kendrick yelled. "The same as back in the Maze."

"Stay tight, Ken. We did notice that."

Kendrick twisted his head around enough to catch sight of Buddy crouching low behind a long concrete bench near the centre of the gallery.

He managed to work his hand free at last, leaving a disturbing amount of blood and skin on the tiles. Keeping his injured hand cradled, he worked his way to the edge of a wall column and peeked around it.

He saw a sliver of grassland, then spotted something shiny and man-made visible to one side of a tree ten or twelve metres away, deliberately positioned so that it covered as much of that side of the building as possible. He slowly pulled his head back again.

They had to do something now. Draeger was still somewhere out there.

Moving very slowly again, Kendrick shifted closer to where the window had been, and lifted his head.

"Hey!" a voice yelled. "Hey, stay back!"