Genesis (29 page)

Emily slipped from soul to soul, body to body, instantaneously, frictionless, tumbling helplessly from one to the next, her conscious mind removed from each slip, but her soul caught in a dizzying uncontrolled plummet from body to body.

Control, she had to regain control.

Slow, slow down.

Emily willed herself to slow her momentum, and, gradually, she did. The headlong tumble through Earth’s life began to ease
. Back,
she thought, edging her consciousness away from the perspective of an individual soul until she was once again looking out at the vast collection of life arrayed around her. Back further
. . .
and there he was, the brightest light, at the center of all of this life, burning so strongly that even in this metaphysical embodiment the heat from her son was overwhelming. Emily tried to follow the red pathways to reach him, but the connections, ever changing, proved too complex for her nascent awareness. There was so much connected to him, he kept receding each time she got close.

But that was okay, because now she knew exactly where he was.

Emily tried to pull her hand away from the wall of the ship, but it felt stuck, as though it were glued. She pulled harder, and this time her hand moved back, dragging with it long black fibers off the wall like melted plastic. In horror she yanked her hand to her chest. The fibers released her with tiny audible pops, snapping away as they melted back into the wall. An imprint of her hand remained on the surface, gradually filling in as she watched, until the wall was again perfectly flat.

Emily’s legs felt weak. She sank to the floor, her hand rising to cover her mouth as the full realization flooded through her. She was not Emily Baxter. At least, not the same Emily Baxter who had been plucked from that clearing in Las Vegas. She understood now that she had been changed, augmented, adapted by the Caretakers. She was an experiment.
Jesus Christ!
She might not even be the same woman . . . they could have created this body and implanted the
real
Emily Baxter’s memories in her head like a scene from some bad fifties science-fiction B movie.

No way. No way. No way.
Her mind repeated over and over, refusing to accept the possibility.

But does any of it really matter
? her inner voice asked.
If I feel like Emily, if I love like her, look like her, then surely that means I am her.

The only way she would ever know for certain would be to question one of the Caretakers. If she had to, she would beat the truth from the ones that had done this . . . this
abominable
thing to her. But they didn’t exactly seem interested in her, judging by their lack of contact since her arrival. And this ship—if that was what it actually was—she wondered if it were connected to everything they had created, acting like some kind of conduit to gather data? Or monitoring the progress of the alien takeover? Maybe the Caretakers weren’t even on board. Emily had had no sense of their presence within that fantastic web of connections she had just been connected to. Maybe this was all just automated.

But all that really mattered to her, right now, was to get to her son. Now more so than ever.

Emily pushed herself to her feet and made a conscious effort to breathe slowly and deeply as she tried to make sense of the jumble of thoughts bouncing around inside her head. The most important thing was to find Adam; that was why she was here. He was an innocent in all of this, and, Goddamn it, she was going to make the Caretakers pay for taking him from her. She was no longer worried about finding him. From the second the wall had released its grip on her, Emily had felt his presence again, and this time the sensation wasn’t a subtle tug. Instead she felt as though someone had grabbed her by the lapels of her jacket and yanked her hard. His position within the jumbled bioconnection had been ever shifting, almost impossible for her to follow within the context of an entire multidimensional metasphere, but back here in the physical reality of this ship, he was fixed in place. And she knew exactly where he was.

Emily began to climb upward.

Emily stepped off the staircase three levels up and straight into a corridor almost identical in appearance to the one she had just left. This one was shorter, though, terminating about twenty meters ahead of where she stood. On the left wall, halfway along, there was some kind of a recess, the rounded edges of a frame defining its clearly visible outline. By the time she reached it Emily saw it was an opening into a room: no door, just a gap in the wall leading into a sharply curving alcove several meters long, filled with shadow. She had stepped into the darkness and had taken a few paces before she stopped dead in her tracks.

Ahead of her, the alcove opened up into a dome-shaped room. At the center of the room, a thick column rose up from the floor and disappeared into the ceiling ten meters above. The column pulsed with vibrant colors, shot through with silent lightning-bolt flashes of energy.

Arranged in a circle around the base of the column was a row of Caretakers. Each of the aliens’ oddly humanoid bodies leaned against a slanted board that protruded from the floor. Tubes extended from the center column, each one radiating a different lambent color, each fleshy tube terminating, no,
melding
, with the body of an individual Caretaker.

The memory of her first encounter with these aliens in Las Vegas had faded, apparently, because Emily’s breath caught in the back of her throat, frozen there by the sheer strangeness of these creatures. The distilled light from the central column played over their metallic-gray skin, creating the illusion of movement where she knew there was none. Their featureless oval heads faced straight ahead, as if their attention was drawn to some distant point.

From the shadows of the alcove, Emily counted ten of the humanoids, but she knew there must be more on the opposite side of the room, obscured by the central column of light.

Emily slowly backed up into the shadows of the alcove. The ring of Caretakers hadn’t sensed her yet; none of them had so much as lifted a skinny digit in her direction. Carefully she edged a few centimeters closer, scanning the room. On the opposite side to where she stood was an alcove mirroring the one in which she now hid. Each time she looked at it, she felt that same molecular tug toward it, like Ariadne’s thread guiding her through the Minotaur’s maze.

Other than the column at its center and the motionless Caretakers surrounding it, there was nothing else in the room, no furniture or architecture she could use as cover to reach the other side. Emily ducked back the way she had come, double-checking the corridor to make sure she hadn’t missed another door or junction that might give her another way past the room. Apart from the stairs, the alcove was the sole way out of this corridor. If she wanted to get to her son, she was going to have to cross the twenty meters in plain view of the Caretakers.

Emily slid the knife from its scabbard on her ankle, grasping it tightly in her right hand she walked back through the alcove. If any of these alien
fucks
so much as twitched, she was prepared to cut its Goddamn head from its shoulders. She took a step into the room, then another and another, her back against the wall while keeping her eyes fixed on the still-motionless aliens. She had to pass within a meter of them.

She held the knife at arm’s length. If they tried to come after her, she assumed they were first going to have to jettison the filaments that stretched between them and the central column. That should give enough warning of their intentions, but their eerily still forms had set her nerves jangling. Each step felt like a moment in a horror movie when the music stops. The watcher knew that at any second
something
was going to spring out of the shadows with heart-shattering surprise. The unsuspecting never saw it coming. She wasn’t going to end up like one of those fictional victims.

The Caretakers remained motionless, their bodies as still as a frozen pond. Their overly elongated arms rested against the curve of their thighs, each of their three slender fingers raised slightly in an arc.

There was the vague memory of a smell captured within the air of the room . . . a scent of sulfur, like someone had dropped a lit match into a box of matches, or maybe spent gunpowder? Emily had the distinct impression of something having been burned, energy expelled.

She reached the opposite alcove unmolested and was about to step out into the mirror image of the first alcove when the peal of curiosity bells ringing in her head got the better of her.
Oh, for God’s sake, this is
exactly
what the idiots in the movie would do
. Her inner voice berated her to just keep on going; she’d gotten by them for whatever reason, so why ruin a good thing?
Keep on going, for fuck’s sake
.

But it had just been too easy. Something was out of place here. Emily twisted around in one sharp movement, her mind made up, and strode to the Caretaker nearest the alcove.

It gave no indication that it even knew she was there.

Switching the knife to her left hand as she approached, Emily waved her empty hand in front of the alien’s featureless face. “Wake up, dummy!” she said, loud enough that she knew the Caretaker would hear her. She was just waiting for one of those skinny arms to flash up and grab her wrist in its equally skinny digits. That would be all the excuse she would need to plunge the blade into the dome of the fucker’s head. She shifted anxiously from foot to foot, her muscles clenched, ready to explode.

The Caretaker did not move, did not even flinch at the bark of her voice.

Emily moved the knife back to her dominant hand, extending her arm out until the tip of the knife pressed against the creature’s throat. Maybe the threat of death would motivate it into action? The Caretaker remained perfectly still.

She pushed gently . . .

.
 
.
 .
and screamed in surprise. It was like pushing the knife into a
deeply burned log; the blade sank all the way up to the hilt and then
the knuckles of her fist. The Caretaker’s body cracked and a moment
later collapsed like a condemned building, crumbling into a gray mound on the floor at Emily’s feet. It was nothing more than ash.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Emily said, trying hard to maintain a semblance of composure. The knife and the hand that held it were covered in a gray dusty residue that she wiped away on her jacket. “You have got to be fucking shitting me,” she repeated in utter disbelief.

Were they all like this? All of them equally as desiccated? She moved from alien body to alien body, carefully pushing the knife into each of the remaining Caretakers’ chests. By the time she was done with the last of them, there were thirty piles of ash lying on the floor.

Emily stood back and surveyed the room, unsure. Something incredible had happened. Something . . . inexplicable. But what, exactly? The Caretakers, these seemingly unstoppable creatures that had destroyed her world in a day had in turn now been destroyed. These ones, at least.

Emily stared down at the last pile of dust at her feet. That smell of expelled energy she had picked up when she first entered the room made sense now. The Caretakers’ bodies had somehow been incinerated where they stood. She leaned in and checked the weird board each body had been propped against. No scorch marks, no signs to indicate a fire or instantaneous combustion. But the question of who, and why, and, most importantly,
what
could be capable of accomplishing something like this escaped her. What could overpower these omnipotent creatures so swiftly and absolutely that they had not even had the time to react before they were reduced to dust?

Perhaps she had been wrong all along. Perhaps there was a God watching over the sad remnants of humanity after all, because that was the only entity she could think of that could have moved so swiftly and completely to defeat these aliens.

And that idea scared her more than the Caretakers.

Emily’s thoughts were in free fall as she exited the room of dead Caretakers. The implications of this were, well, just overwhelming, and confusing, and, quite frankly, terrifying.

She supposed it was possible that what she had just experienced was some kind of medical bay, or maybe even a mausoleum, but that seemed unlikely. From what she understood from the conversation she had had with the Caretaker she’d encountered in Las Vegas, these aliens were tools of a much higher, much older race—sentient, yes, but still effectively machines programmed to carry out a very specific job. And they were just as capable of transforming themselves as they were of transforming an entire planet. They were cold, calculating biological machines, with almost no understanding of human emotion. Emily did not think they were any more capable of caring for their brethren than they were for the billions of human lives they had destroyed, and she was certain they would not honor their dead . . . if they even died in the sense that humans did. Emily shuddered. Humans had been pretty good at screwing themselves over, but the Caretakers . . . they were a whole new level of cold-bloodedness.

She had to find Adam and get both of them out of this place. Throughout the entire journey, right up until the first Caretaker had crumbled to dust, Emily had never really doubted that it was her son who was guiding her, calling her. But after what she had just seen back there in that room, she was not so sure. She felt a sharp splinter of doubt lodge in her chest.

Was it too much of a stretch of her imagination to think that whatever had managed to stop the Caretakers in this ship so completely could, under the disguise of her son, just as easily manipulate her to come here? But what would that achieve? And why her? Surely whatever was capable of doing this could just as easily have abducted her when it took Adam. Hell, judging by what had happened to the Caretakers, whatever “it” was could have killed every last living human being left in Point Loma without breaking a sweat. There were just too many threads at this point, and none of them seemed in any way connected. It made no logical sense, which meant that there was some other force at play here that she was not able to see . . . not yet, anyway.

The new alcove led into another corridor that looked exactly the same as the others.

She could still feel that constant ping from Adam. It grew stronger with every step she took, in fact, but Emily moved with caution now. It was all very well following her instinct, but if she were being manipulated . . . she let the thought go unanswered because the answers she felt swirling around in the shadows were just unacceptable to her.

A little farther along, the corridor ended at a T-junction.

Ping! She felt a tug to her left as she approached it.

Rounding the left corner, Emily almost stumbled over the prone body of another Caretaker. It was on its knees, slumped forward as if it had simply collapsed on the spot, one spindly arm reaching out and propping the body against the wall. Its pose reminded Emily of an exhausted marathon runner. She reached out and tapped the thing’s chest with the tip of her toe and watched the torso crumble away, leaving only the midsection and legs intact, like a biological exhibit at some weird intergalactic sideshow. She could see the remains of organs she did not recognize within the exposed torso, all turned to cinders.

Emily stepped gingerly over the Caretaker and carried on down the corridor.

The ping had become a beat, thrumming through her limbs. A sense of anticipation, not the good kind, had begun to take hold of Emily as she grew nearer to the source. A half hour ago she would have expected herself to be running at this point, but now, with what she had just witnessed, she was actively resisting the urge to sprint, and it hurt. She faced the very real possibility that her son was not even alive, and with that possibility came the probability she was not going to make it out of here alive either. And hanging over everything was the unnerving sensation that she had been manipulated, played all along.

So no way was she going to run into any trap that might be waiting to spring shut on her.