The Apocalypse Club (38 page)

“Oh, I’ll fill you in all right,” she said, this time shooting straight forward in a stabbing motion, the tip of the blade aimed right at my breastbone.

I ducked down and brought the spear gun up, catching her right under the chin and knocking her over onto the ground right at the edge of the trees. Blood was pooling under her leg. The clicking sound in the trees got louder. And closer. My hands were sweating so badly that I almost dropped the spear gun twice while trying to get a better grip. Ida scrambled back to her feet and leaned against one of the trees. All of the movement didn’t seem to be doing her leg wound any good. Blood was coming out faster than ever and she was having trouble getting it to support her weight. But I could see in her eyes that, even if she bled out, she was determined to see me go first.

“Just give up, Simms,” she said. “Even if I don’t get you, Hudson will.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Rule number five, Ida.”

She slipped and quickly pushed herself back up. “Rule number five? You fucking idiot! I’ll give you rule number five!”

She jumped, which I was absolutely not expecting. Partly because I didn’t think she could have managed to jump and partly because, well, I had never seen anybody jump anybody else in a knife fight before. She got surprisingly high up in the air, too, especially considering she had a hole in the back of her leg. She brought the knife up and fully intended to use her momentum to bring it back down again in my carotid artery.

Which I have no doubt she would have done had two PKs not hit her at the same time from two opposing angles.

They were smaller than the ones I’d seen in Tristan’s bestiary. Up close, however, they were a hell of a lot more bestial. They looked like hairy armoured half-humanoid spiders with two sets of jaws and eight claws, four of which were used for running/climbing and four for ripping/disembowelling.

Which was exactly what they were doing to Ida, who was sectioned off into four pieces so fast that she looked like video of an assembly plant shown in high-speed reverse. I had no intention of waiting around to see if they would show a similar interest in me. I turned and ran for my life up the side of the crater. I could see the C-Mech come into view just as I reached the top. It was waving its good arm and screaming something that I couldn’t make out because the only thing I could hear was the blood pounding through the veins in my head.

I didn’t stop. I ran straight to the top holding the spear gun up over my head like they had taught us to hold a weapon when carrying it through water in the JD. At the lip of the crater, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and jumped.

D
espite the almost tropical temperatures on land, the water was fucking cold. If it wasn’t for the survival suit, I would probably have spun around and jumped right back out again, C-Mech or no C-Mech.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to actually swim. All I had to do was hold on to the spear gun, the weight of which pulled me down to the bottom with remarkable speed. Halfway there I opened my eyes. This wasn’t bravery – I just didn’t want to hit my head on the bottom of the crater because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.

The giant blue ship loomed next to me like a planet, an illusion only strengthened by the weightless sensation of being in the water. The water itself was incredibly clear. I couldn’t see a single plant, animal or particle anywhere. Except for the cold and the inability to breathe, it was almost like being on land.

I reached the bottom and saw the opening in the ship that Violet had been talking about. She was right that it didn’t look like a door per se in that it didn’t resemble anything designed for humans to walk through (although, I reflected, given its age, it certainly hadn’t been designed for that). It was an oval opening curving about ten feet up the side of the ship from what (if it were an actual planet) would have been the south pole. I could see the outline of what looked like similar doors next to it, but none of them were open.

Using the spear gun as a sort of makeshift pole vault, I used it to help propel myself along the crater floor toward the door. I had always been pretty good at holding my breath (starving my brain of things it needed, like oxygen and a basic understanding of math or physics had always been in my skill set), but my lungs were at capacity. If I didn’t get a breath in the next ten seconds or so, my mouth was going to open whether I wanted it to or not and suck in whatever was available. I knew the ship had probably been sitting in exactly this position for millions if not billions of years, but if it suddenly and unexpectedly rolled sideways and crushed me like a crawdad, I would not have been surprised in the least.

I reached the opening, tossed the spear gun inside and pulled myself in after. I felt a floor under my feet and stood up. Inside was, surprisingly, brighter than the outside. I could see the surface of the water above me. I pistoned forward on oxygen-starved legs. The floor curved upwards. My foot slipped and I involuntarily inhaled nostrils full of icy water. My throat closed and my chest convulsed, but I forced myself to keep moving. The space around me started to get foggy and dark.

My head broke the surface. I coughed and gagged and sprayed out as much water as possible before taking the largest single intake of air I had ever done in my entire life. The fog lifted and the lights came on again.

I looked around and saw that I was in what looked like a giant glowing blue room with curved walls. The floor sloped down towards six separate notches like the one I had just crawled out of, but the doors at the bottom of the others all appeared to be closed.

“It looks like a cargo bay,” I said to myself. All the cargo, however, appeared to be long gone.

I crawled forward out of the water, dragging the spear gun behind me. I couldn’t see any individual lights anywhere. It was like the structure itself was glowing. I couldn’t say why, but it wasn’t an eerie or sinister kind of glow – the kind you expected from radioactive materials in science fiction movies with low budgets – but a familiar, friendly and almost reassuring sort of light. I couldn’t tell if the floor under my feet was metal or stone. It all seemed like it was one single piece of material. I couldn’t see a single join or straight line anywhere.

“Violet?” I said. “Max?”

My voice echoed all around me. I had been in caves that reminded me of this. Very recently, too.

Instead of an answer, I heard a dull gong that reverberated through my legs and made impact tremors in the water at me feet. It puzzled me for a moment. I couldn’t see anything in the room that had moved. In fact, it didn’t seem to have come from inside.

Which meant that something big had evidently hit the sphere from the outside.

Something, perhaps, like a giant half-man, half-robot that had probably jumped into the water shortly after I did. Something that wanted nothing more than to get in here and kill everyone else on board in whatever order they presented themselves.

I scrambled to my feet and looked for some sort of handle or closing mechanism for the door I had just climbed through, but of course there was nothing. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw a large shadow pass in front of the opening. If it was trying to come in, there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do to stop it, I thought. Maybe its limited mobility would keep it out. Could it drown? Probably not. But if it couldn’t get in, it would be stuck out there.

My positive visualizations were interrupted by the very real visualization of a giant mechanical hand emerging from the water right in front of me and waving wildly around.

“Shit!” I said, stepping backwards so fast that I almost slipped and fell into a nearby bay. There was no point in hanging around here. I needed to get out and find Violet and the others.

I ran to the centre of the bay where I found the bottom of a ramp leading up in concentric circles. I didn’t know where it was going, but it was away from here and that was all that mattered. The ramp took me up and around and up and around . I had to stop and lean against the wall a couple of times because I was moving so fast that it made me dizzy. Who designed this? I wondered. If you could build something that could travel from one end of the universe to the other, then what was so hard about installing an elevator?

I made it to the top of the ramp and staggered into a room that was more or less the opposite of the shape of the room I had just left. Over my head was what looked like the top of the sphere. The only difference from being on the outside was that I could see through it. I could see the blue water, the lip of the crater, and the clouds drifting by in the sky overhead. It was an incredible sight.

“Mark!”

Violet’s voice snapped me out of my reverie. She and Max were on the floor with Tristan on the other side of the room. Evidently, they had used the other ramp. I ran over.

“How is everyone?” I asked.

I didn’t need to be a trauma surgeon to see that Tristan was not doing well. I could see a long trail of blood from where he was lying that led back down the other ramp. A lot of blood. Violet had done an admirable job of using the sleeve of Max’s survival suit to make a compression bandage, which was doing a decent job of preventing more blood from leaking out, but did not address the more pressing issue of getting blood back
in
.

“Good to see you again, my boy,” Tristan said in a ragged whisper. “I must confess when we parted that I feared the worst.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to smile. “Me too.”

“What happened?” Max asked.

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Ida saw the error of her ways and sincerely regretted her actions. Or was just about to when a couple of PKs got her.”

“What about Hudson?” Violet asked.

I gritted my teeth. “Uh, he’s right behind me. What is this?” I looked around the room.

“Not sure,” Max said. “Might be some sort of control room. Look at this.”

I got up and followed Max to what looked like a coffee table that appeared to be floating in air on the other side of the room. The centre of the table was sunken and there was a spherical indent in the centre. Based on the size of the indent and the fact that the marking at the bottom was the same as the one I had seen carved on the blue sphere, I had little doubt what was probably supposed to sit there.

“What the hell is this?” I asked. “Alien furniture?”

Tristan said something, but I was too far away to hear what it was. I raced back.

“We think it might be some sort of control panel,” he breathed.

“Control panel?” I said. It certainly didn’t look like any kind of control panel to me, primarily because it was missing one of the fundamental things something would need in order to be called a control panel – controls.

“Yes,” Violet said. “Looks like you need a sphere to activate it.”

“Then we’re fucked,” I said. “The only sphere we had got dropped off the station into the sea. It could be anywhere by now. We’d never find it in a million years. I didn’t check every bay in that cargo room downstairs, but it looked empty. No luck there, either.”

“Not quite,” Tristan said.

“Huh?”

Violet looked me in the eye. “There is one sphere left.”

I frowned. “What the h—” I stopped, suddenly realizing what she meant. “Oh. Shit.”

“Exactly,” Max said. “It’s in that fucking C-Mech’s head.”

I could hear loud noises echoing up the ramp from the cargo bay far below. “Right. So we’re completely fucked.”

“Not necessarily,” Violet said.

“Meaning what?”

“I quickly reviewed the specs of the model six-six-six —”

“When did you do that?” I asked.

She ignored me. “—and it does have kind of an interesting defect.”

“Which is?” Max prompted.

“Well, they all have emergency shutoffs in case the person running them goes batshit and runs off on some crazy killing spree,” Violet said. “Which has happened several times. Hudson had that feature disabled. Hardly surprising, considering he didn’t want some scheming vice president to unplug him after he’d downloaded his mind into that thing.”

“Right,” I said, waving her along. “So where does the defect part come in?”

“Well,” said Violet. “You can’t remove that without also removing the overdrive control, which is designed to shunt power off in the event of a spike. The initial power sources were unreliable. The overdrive made sure they didn’t fry the circuits if something went wrong. The spheres are an entirely unknown power source. If the regulator goes, so does it.”

“How do we get the regulator to go?” Max asked.

“Hit it,” Violet said. “In the throat. With a spike.”

“Okay,” said Max, grabbing the spear gun. “I’m on it.”

“Whoa!” I said, holding out a hand to stop him. “You can barely even walk.”

“So?” Max said. “Neither can the C-Mech. This way, it might almost be a fair fight.”

“Forget it, hop-along,” I said, reaching for the spear gun. “I’ll handle this one.”

Max swung his arm to keep the gun out of my reach. “You went the last time. This time it’s my turn.”

Violet grabbed the spear gun. “I’m going. I wouldn’t trust either of you to hit the floor you were standing on with your ass if you fell down.”

“But…” I started to object and stopped. How was I supposed to say that she should stay with her father because he could die at any moment without actually voicing the awkward unspoken truth that Tristan was quite obviously going to die? “But…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Violet said, calling over her shoulder: “You’ll be fine until I get back, right, Dad?”

Tristan waved feebly. “Of course, my dear. I have no intention of running off.”

Violet unclipped a grenade from somewhere on her belt and handed it to Max. “You stay here with my Dad. If that thing somehow gets past us, use this.”

From the way she said it, I wasn’t sure if she was telling him to use it on the C-Mech or on themselves. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. I was, however, curious about her use of the word “us.”

Max took the grenade. “Roger that.”

“Come on, Simms,” Violet said, waving me forward. “Let’s go unplug this mechanical motherfucker.”