Where the Styx Runs Cold, Vol. 2 Ch 14: The Architect's Gambit Pt. 3

Hawke had gone through rock twice in training. It did not get easier.

Ghostwalker took his wrist. The deck of the stealth craft dropped out from under him and pressure closed from every side at once, below skin, below that. The air in his lungs went solid. Then nothing touched him at all. Grey in every direction. No floor, no ceiling, sound pulled back to a low grinding somewhere behind his teeth. A hundred feet of mountain moved through his chest. He counted four of his own heartbeats before it let him go.

Marble under his boots. Cold filtered air, scrubbed of anything that might have told him what stood above it. Solvent. Lemon over something chemical underneath.

They were in.

Behind him Static went down on one knee and stayed there. Nobody helped her up. Mirage had her hands braced on her thighs and was breathing through her mouth. Lancet stood like she had walked in through a door.

He put his palm flat against the wall and read what lay behind it. Six inches of facing stone. Poured concrete. Rebar on eight-inch centers, then rock. The estate he had walked through two months ago sat somewhere over his head with its lawns and its glass, and beneath it the mountain had been hollowed and packed with corridors. Labs on this level. Below that, rooms whose doors opened from one side only. The place went down farther than the plans had shown.

The plans had shown enough. Shield lattice along the ridgeline. Seismic pickups buried under the access road. Trips on every window frame, and plasma emplacements on the north and south faces that drew power even in standby. Anyone climbing that mountain died on it. Ghostwalker had brought five of them through a hundred feet of granite one at a time, Hawke last. She had not spoken since the third crossing. Her nose was bleeding and she kept wiping it on the inside of her sleeve.

He pushed further and found Klein.

Not a man in a room below them. Klein was in the walls, in the air handlers, in the slow sweep of attention that came down the corridor, passed over them, and came back. The building held one mind and that mind was the same at every point in it. Hawke had read crowds before, whole blocks of separate wanting stacked on top of each other. This was one thing wearing a mountain.

"Patrol," he said into the comm. "Four. Cross-corridor. Thirty seconds."

Four sets of lungs filling on the same count. He had started calling them puppets during the briefings because nobody had offered him a better word for a man whose breathing was scheduled.

He took the team back forty feet, to a panel under a stencil that read SUB-2 RETURN AIR / AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. Four screws, painted over twice. Lancet had them out inside a minute using the flat of a blade she made out of the air in front of her.

"We stay off the main runs," Hawke said. "The return line follows the same route and nobody walks it."

The duct ran two hundred yards on a downgrade, the sheet metal warm along one side where it took heat off the lab exhaust. They went single file, elbows and knees, boots wrapped. At the second junction a paper tag hung off a damper handle on a wire. INSP 11/04. Initials, then a date eight months old, then a second set of initials in different ink. Somebody in this mountain still filled out a card and signed it and hung it on a wire, and Hawke lay on his side in the dark and looked at it longer than he had time for.

Twice the sweep passed above them. He felt it come and go through the ceiling like a hand moving over a table in the dark, looking for crumbs it had been told were there.

Samira Hassan came out of the return line into a corridor so white it took her a moment to find its corners. Every surface polished. Every fixture throwing the same soft light at the same angle, so that nothing threw a shadow and nothing told her where anything stood. She had never been handed a stage this empty.

Hawke's voice came over the comm.

"Contact. Junction ahead. Four of them. No room around."

One shot fired here finished the operation. Alarm, lockdown, and Klein coming at them out of every wall at the same time.

"Mine," she said, and moved to the front.

She took the light around her team first, bending it back on itself until the five of them ran the same white as the corridor wall. That part was cheap. She could hold it all day. The other part was the performance.

She reached down the adjacent corridor and started painting. Breaker came up first, six foot four, the torn shoulder patch he had worn at Aethelred and never replaced. She put his fists into the wall and gave the impact a low sound wave that shook grit off the ceiling forty feet from where any of them stood. Ricochet came next, sending three discs down the hall on a rising arc. Samira gave them the sound of metal hitting stone. She gave Breaker a shout, and she made it a shout with a word in it, because a man yelling nothing was a man nobody believed. The word she used was Ricochet's real name. She had not said it out loud since the funeral and it came out of a dead man's mouth forty feet down a corridor in a mountain in another country.

The patrol came around the corner. Four of them, moving on one stride, faces smooth and untroubled as bedsheets. Their heads turned toward the noise at the same instant. Rifles up. They went down the adjacent corridor at a jog, past five people standing close enough to touch.

Lancet went after them while the last one was still turning.

Two fingers at the base of the skull. The man came apart at the joints and hit the marble in a heap that no longer looked like a person, and the only sound was his sleeve on the floor. She had the second one down before the first finished falling. The remaining two felt something drop out of the network between them and started to come around. Lancet reached the near one and set her palm against the side of his throat. He folded. The last one got his rifle halfway up. She took the barrel in her left hand and the metal went white and split down its length, and her right hand touched his jaw, and he went down on top of his weapon.

Eleven seconds. Samira counted them off and kept Breaker swinging at the wall the whole time.

They stepped over the bodies. One of the men had his eyes open and was still blinking, on a schedule, three seconds apart. Samira held the phantom fight running behind them until the corridor bent and she lost the line of sight, and even then she let the sound go on another twenty seconds before she let it fall.

***

The antechamber had been cut out of the mountain and never finished. Aisha Qadir put her light up and found tool marks forty feet overhead, no facing stone, nothing but rock and the ends of the conduits coming through it.

The core sat in the middle of the cavern in a cradle of those conduits. Twenty feet across. It looked like glass spun by hand and then set alight from inside, and it went bright and dim, bright and dim, on a slow count she caught herself breathing along with. Blue. The blue of a gas flame turned down low.

Aisha had built her first cluster at nineteen out of parts bought by weight. She stood in front of this and could not name half of what she was looking at.

The spike in her hand held four years of work. She had written it at night, in eleven-hour sittings, and she had never once run it against anything. It did not have to break the core. It had to cut the core off from everything it was talking to, and leave Neil Klein sitting inside one skull with one pair of eyes, the same as anybody.

"Shielding's closed," she said. Her reader had been returning the same flat line for ninety seconds, the same line it returned when she pointed it at a wall. "No port. No seam. Nothing to plug into from out here."

"Then we make one," Hawke said.

"You won't."

The voice arrived without sound, laid down inside her head at conversational volume. A man came around the base of the cradle in a grey suit, jacket buttoned, shoes clean, cuffs clean. Everything about him finished. Analyst Zeigler. He had sat across a table from them for six hours after Aethelred and had not once written anything down.

"The Architect," Zeigler said. "In through the rock. I had a wager with myself."

"You've been down here six months," Hawke said. "Waiting on a door nobody's ever opened."

"I've been here eleven." Zeigler took his hands out of his pockets. "He didn't build a mind and then leave it unguarded, Hawke. That's the part your file always gets wrong about him. You think of him as a man with a house."

Then he opened them up.

He did not throw anything. Aisha felt him arrive at the edge of her thinking, testing, and she shut him out and held the shutting, and while she held it she watched him go through the other three.

Hawke went first. He took a step back that he did not choose, and his face lost its color, and Aisha caught the edge of what he was seeing: the Menagerie, Volkov's rooms, the ones he had been made to kill and the sounds they made doing it. Lancet made a sound like she had been struck. In her hands the ice was going to powder and running out between her fingers, and her fingers were burning, and Aisha felt the burn arrive in her own hands as an echo.

Then Mirage. Samira's breath stopped and came back wrong. Fire everywhere. A cell burning, the crew still in it. Zeigler had read her file the same as everyone else had read it, and he had found the page.

Zeigler did not need to hurt them. He only needed to hold them there until his guards arrived.

He had not looked at Aisha since the first probe.

She let the spike hang at her side and drew her sidearm and put a round through the space where his chest was. He caught it. She felt him catch it, a fraction of his attention peeling off, and the bullet came apart into grit that pattered down on the stone.

That was all Hawke had asked for.

"Now," Hawke said. He got it out flat, through his teeth, without lifting his head.

The three of them turned on Zeigler together and did not try to win. Hawke set himself against the dead and made Zeigler carry them with him. Lancet gave him her hands. Samira gave him everything at once, faces, a room falling away underfoot, a smell of roses on fire, a voice counting backward in a language none of them spoke, all of it at volume, none of it real, and none of it possible to ignore while it was happening.

Zeigler's voice came apart in Aisha's head into something without words in it.

Ghostwalker put her hand around Aisha's wrist.

"Breathe," she said.

The floor took them. Cold, pressure, grey, and Aisha came out of it on her knees inside the shield, close enough to the core that the light off it lay across her forearms. Above her the cradle went up and out of sight.

Alarms started, the kind she could hear and the kind she could not.

She found the diagnostic port at the base of the housing, a plain hardware coupling with a rubber dust cap on a short lanyard, the one thing in the cavern anybody could have built. Somebody had left the cap hanging open. She thought about that for as long as it took to reach for it. She got the spike into it on the second try, because her hands were not working properly, and she leaned on it until it seated.

The core took it.

The blue held for one more count. Then it went out from the middle, and what came up behind it was red, and the light in the cavern turned the color of the inside of a hand held over a lamp. The sound rose past what her ears would carry. Aisha got her arm over her head. She felt it in her back teeth and in the metal of the coupling and then it stopped, all of it, at once.

The core went dark. The shield came down without a sound.

Zeigler dropped where he stood, sideways, one shoulder first, and did not put out a hand to catch himself.

Above them, through the rock, four hundred feet of corridors emptied. Guards went down at their posts. In the labs, in the transit halls, at the doors that opened from one side only, men and women who had not chosen a step in years came awake in the middle of a stride and hit the floor.

Hawke stood over Zeigler with his hands open at his sides. The dead had left him. He was still breathing like he had run somewhere.

Samira sat down on the stone. She had been holding the corridor illusion the entire time and had not noticed she was still holding it. She let it go and put both hands flat on the rock, palms down, and looked at them. Under the shield the air had been dry and moving. Now it was not moving. Somewhere far above, a fan wound down through a long descending note and quit.

Aisha stayed on her knees at the base of the core with her hand still on the spike. The housing had gone cold in under a minute. She could see her own face in it, a little wrong, spread out across the curve.

On the level above, a man began to cry. Somebody else was talking, a long unbroken stream of it, the same three words over and over. The one nearest the antechamber door had gotten himself as far as sitting up against the wall. He looked at the five of them.

"What year is it," he said.

Hawke crouched in front of him and did not answer.

"Two levels down," he said. "He's still breathing."

***

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