Against Gravity

Touching the skin on his face, Kendrick realized that the ridges left there from his visit to the Maze had now mostly faded. But the skin itself felt hard and smooth in a way that it never had before.

How long could he survive like this? Was there a limit? Or would he be able to survive like this indefinitely? Son of a bitch, I'm still alive.

Where did the energy come from, he wondered, to keep him going without the constant replenishment of oxygen in his bloodstream? Had some kind of internal reservoir of energy, perhaps some new organ that hadn't been there before, appeared inside him? He had a sudden mental image of his stomach muscles peeled back to reveal large copper-coloured batteries where his heart, liver, kidneys and lungs should have been.

Buddy was still staring at him, his mouth working uselessly behind his visor, as if Kendrick could somehow hear the transmissions through his comms cha

Surrounded by this vacuum, Kendrick experienced a silence more absolute than he could ever have imagined. He pushed his way past Buddy, the glow that filled the cavern now patterning the walls around him with a pale gold light.

Kendrick wrestled himself out of his spacesuit. If he didn't need it he could move a lot quicker without it. He looked down at his wand, checking which way he had to go.

He stepped into a side room to find what he was looking for. Wrenching open a floor hatch, he hurriedly pushed himself down the ladder bolted inside the narrow shaft below. A few minutes later he came to a passageway with a ceiling so low that he was forced to crouch. He moved like a ghost past walls bearing rack after rack of semi-organic circuitry prominently labelled with warnings about contamination.

A sign informed him that he was now in the central AI core. He saw a door ahead and quickly stepped up to it. He'd found his way inside the internal transport system. Stepping through, he found a narrow tu

The door that Draeger had disappeared through earlier led directly here, so he had to have come this way.

Kendrick's wand informed him that the tu

A minute and a half later Kendrick arrived at the terminus and found himself facing yet another airlock door. He hit the "open" button and, to his surprise and great relief, the barrier swung wide open without further effort.

He looked inside to see fine golden threads everywhere, pulsing gently with ethereal light. As he sensed something moving behind him he turned and saw the rail car automatically returning to its point of departure.

Kendrick's bare hand still rested on the keypad, also coated in golden threads. He felt a faint sting as-

Cool blades of grass touched his skin, his fingers digging unexpectedly into damp soil. He was back in Scotland, back in the Tay Hills. He clung to the soil desperately, initially unable to comprehend the sudden transition from the Archimedes. The shock of it had dropped him to his knees.

A few moments later he managed to raise himself onto unsteady feet. Beyond the familiar damp hills, covered with gorse and rough grass, the land stretched on quite literally for ever, broken by unfamiliar rivers and forests. Distant mountain ranges became hazy with sheer distance, rather than disappearing out of sight beyond the curve of the horizon.

Kendrick turned and saw Peter McCowan waiting there beside him.

"Kendrick, I want to thank you for getting me here." There was a slight smile on McCowan's lips. "Buddy and the rest of them might not appreciate it, but I'm the only reason the Bright will be able to successfully negotiate the opening of the wormhole." A familiar grin spread over his face. "It's been bad enough as it is with that mad little shit ru

"I'm glad for you, Peter, I really am. But Draeger's already detonated a nuke, and if I don't go after him right now he's going to get away from us."

McCowan nodded slowly as if this were old, old news. "You don't really imagine that Draeger would blow the station up out of mere spite, do you?"

"For Christ's sake, he already has!"

McCowan smiled, then shook his head. "Ken, you clearly don't get it. That wasn't Draeger. That was Robert Vincenzo."

Kendrick shook his head, appalled. "Robert?"

"He's dying. The nuke was on board one of the Los Muertos shuttles. Detonating it was a tactic born of his desperation. My biggest worry right now, however, is you."

"I don't understand."

"You figured out that Draeger had got his hands on one of the remote detonators, didn't you?"

"We found three nukes, but no detonators. The only possible reason for that is that Draeger picked up at least one of them."

"So what are you going to do – assuming you ever catch Draeger? What do you reckon is going to happen next?"

"I'll find a way to contact the shuttle. Then I can get home."

McCowan cackled, shaking his head. "I can see, even better than you can, how you're thinking. You're like an open book, you know that? With all those things you won't even tell yourself laid bare."

"Okay, then, just tell me whatever it is you're trying to say, then let me find Draeger." Kendrick bunched his hands into fists in frustration. Whatever McCowan now told him, in whatever cybernetic realm he currently inhabited, it still felt to him like they were wasting valuable time.

"You're going to try and destroy the Archimedes," McCowan stated flatly. "You can't even admit to yourself that you never intended anything else."

"That's ridiculous."

"All these years, you've let your hatred for Draeger carry you along. Now here you are, with the chance to destroy the focus of everything he's been working towards. Are you telling me that if you now had such a chance to hurt him, you wouldn't take it?"

"This is me you're talking about!" Kendrick shouted. "I'm not a murderer like he is! This is bullshit!"

"But do you really understand what's happening here? You've doubted everything you've seen all along, regardless of how many others shared those same experiences. But now you think that you have the opportunity to destroy everything dear to the man you hold responsible for the death of your family. It's not like I blame you for that, but that doesn't mean what you're intending to do is right."

Kendrick ran towards him. McCowan stood only a few metres away but somehow that tiny distance became an uncrossable chasm. Kendrick threw himself towards McCowan but landed in exactly the same spot where he'd already been standing. He shrieked with pure rage and began beating at the ground with his fists.

"Ken, stop that."

"Let me go!" Kendrick tore at the stony soil beneath his fingers till shards of pain ran up his wrists. But it still wasn't enough, and he drove his fists harder into the earth, to feel the spike of shock and pain that he knew he should be sensing, to see if he could somehow pry himself away from this hallucinatory place and back to the station, back to Draeger.

"People who've suffered unjustly don't automatically go out into the world to do good deeds," McCowan continued. "They go and do to others what was done unto them, and the whole shitty carnival rolls back to the begi