The Darwin Elevator (46 page)

At least thirty seconds passed with no sign of the subhuman. Maybe she’d found someone else to “play” with. Maybe the surprised guards in Nightcliff’s yard had managed to quell the bizarre attack. Whatever the case, time was wasting.

Skyler backed into an inner room, waiting until the last second to aim his rifle away from the hole he’d made on entry. The stale air reeked of mildew. Shards of wood crunched under his boots.

He crept through a grand dining room. Chairs lay in disarray around a table ten meters in length. A chandelier had fallen on the polished wood surface at some point and toppled off to one side. Skyler stepped around it and continued into a kitchen beyond.

Big enough to service a large restaurant, the kitchen had four rows of counters. Commercial-grade stoves, ranges, and sinks ran the length of each. Or parts did, at least. Much of the equipment had long ago been removed, in part or in whole. Missing faucet heads, a stove with no door or control panel. The scavenger in Skyler noted these on instinct. What was missing, what was useful.

He went to the far wall, fixated on the idea of a wine cellar. But a search of the kitchen turned up nothing. He looked through a walk-in freezer, a pantry ten times the size of his quarters at the hangar, and lastly a small and simple dining room where he assumed the staff used to take their meals.

Back in the main dining area, Skyler took the first hallway leading out of it. Other than the occasional hint of light sneaking past a boarded-up window, the only illumination came from his gun-mounted bulb.

The hall had once featured a plush carpet. Now the fabric sluiced away under his boots like dead skin. Rectangular patches on the walls marked where paintings once hung.

Skyler tapped each light switch he passed. None worked. For the best, he thought. The lack of power had probably led to the home’s abandoned state, and that suited him.

Each door he passed opened to reveal simple bedrooms, and one small recreational area with bookshelves and even a chessboard, game frozen in mid-play.

At the end of the hall, he came to a door different from the others. Thick and sturdy, with a large metal handle and a key card panel on the wall beside it.

Skyler tried the handle and found it to be broken. Deliberately, from the scuff marks. The door pushed open with ease and he stepped inside.

Stairs led below. Skyler sighed with relief and trotted down them two at a time. At the bottom he found another door, just like the previous, also forced open long ago.

Inside he found an office. A wide space, one side lined with cubicles, the other with a collaborative area—couches facing a large bank of panel screens that went from floor to ceiling. Every screen had been shattered, left to rot. In his mind Skyler could see them bright and alive with news from the world’s financial markets, or the faces of distant Platz employees delivering to Neil news of high-profile mergers.

A massive circular door dominated the far wall. A safe, suitable for any bank vault. Scorch marks stretched out from the main tumbler, and an electronic pad on the wall beside hung by frayed wires.

Despite the damage, the vault door was closed tight. Skyler stared at it for a long moment. He racked his mind to recall Neil’s words. He’d used the word
secret
in describing the entrance.
No, Skyler thought, it was “hidden.”
A giant vault door did not equate to hidden.

From above, a faint sound reached his ears. A light scrape, gone as quick as it had arrived. He stood very still and listened.

Dozens of times in the past he’d found himself in places like this. Pitch black and deathly quiet. Danger lurking ahead or behind. He’d never deliberately scoured through such a place alone, though. The lack of Samantha’s presence only furthered his unease.

Total silence followed. A phantom noise, perhaps. Imagination and fatigue, conspiring against him.

Moving to the center of the room, Skyler turned in place, scanning the area with his light. It
felt
right that the hidden entrance would be here. Over and over his attention returned to the massive safe door. A voice inside him said that was the point of it. The barrier was so large and tempting that any interloper would get tunnel vision the moment they saw it.

Skyler put it to his back and looked at the rest of the room.

The door through which he’d entered. Nothing interesting about it.

The cubicles. Maybe they could be concealing some small access passage? His gut said no.

Last choice, the bank of destroyed video screens. It looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to each one. An odd thing to do in a world where such devices were always needed, especially in orbit.

Their arrangement was odd, he realized. Two-wide, running floor to ceiling. Almost like a—

Door.

Eyes locked on the monitors, Skyler swung his legs over the couch between him and the wall and stood in front of the devices. They were mounted flush to the wall. He stepped to one side and looked at them from the side, running a finger along the edge of one screen. He could just detect a ridge there. A sliver of space just before the point where the monitor connected to the wall.

I’ll be damned,
he thought. The monitors must have been smashed to dissuade anyone from taking them off. A clever trick, he had to admit.

He searched for a button, or lever … anything that might open the panel. He ran his hand along the bottoms of every table and desk, tried tapping the buttons on each monitor attached to the wall. Nothing worked.

“Fuck it,” he said aloud. No time for caution and decorum. Platz could hire a crew to come back here later and fix things.

He set his rifle on a desk near the entrance, pointing its light at the bank of screens. Then he swung the bag Prumble had given him onto the floor and removed one brick of plastic explosive.

Blasting caps inserted, Skyler selected a detonator. With no more fiber cable, he couldn’t use the switch, so a timed charge would have to do. He went with a twenty-second fuse, mentally planning his route. Up the stairs, through the hall, under the big table in the dining room in case any chunks of the ceiling were knocked loose.

He stood facing the bank of monitors, the explosive charge nestled between the two bottom screens.
Here goes …

With a press of his thumb the twenty-second timer started.

“Play with me.”

A raspy, thin whisper from the doorway. In the room. Next to his gun.

The subhuman woman stood there, crouched, coiled, her head tilted to one side like an ape. Her bloodshot eyes were as wide as saucers. “Play,” she repeated.

Skyler eyed the gun. Then her.

Fifteen seconds.

He stepped toward the weapon and the woman mirrored him, jutting sideways a half meter. A grin curled the corners of her mouth.

Ten seconds.

Skyler thought of trying to fight her. No time for it. He thought of feinting for the gun and then running past her. Might work, but she could just as easily tackle him.

Five seconds.

He hesitated.

Four.

Three.

Skyler spun and ran backward, three steps to the cubicle near the giant safe door.

The subhuman laughed and gave chase.

One.

Skyler dove.

Blinding white light enveloped him. The walls shook. No, everything shook. The blast caught his legs as he tumbled like a gymnast over the half wall that fronted the cubicle.

The sound was so loud it shut his ears down. Everything went silent and slow. He had a strange awareness of his rag-doll body flipping over, his feet smacking into the far cubicle wall. To his strange delight, the wall gave way. A temporary surface standing a meter from the room’s physical wall. The panel collapsed, softening the impact to his feet.

Sound returned as a high-pitched whistle, blaring at him from everywhere and nowhere. Lying on the floor under a shower of debris, he covered his ears to no effect; the whistle remained.

Shell-shocked, Skyler pushed himself up onto wobbly legs and surveyed the room. The brick-shaped bomb had done its job, and more. Half the wall had been removed along with the panel of monitors. Through the smoke he could see an adjacent room.

Not a room, he realized, but a hallway, lit from a series of soft yellow lights along its floor.

Skyler staggered through the wreckage on numb feet, tripping twice. He glanced toward where the subhuman had stood, but saw no sign of the creature in the haze. She must have taken the brunt of the blast, and been completely annihilated.
Good
.

Coughing, he entered the hall.

Skyler had descended more than a hundred steps down the spiral, scaffold staircase that lined the silo, when he realized where he was.

And that he’d left his gun behind.

He stopped and gripped the cold metal rail, taking in his surroundings.

The silo, a perfect circular tube cut from the earth itself, extended fifty meters above him. In the center of the man-made ceiling was a sphincter through which ran the cord of the space elevator, a perfect straight line of black thread so thin he had to squint to trace it. The rickety staircase wound its way around the inner wall of the silo, all the way down.

Down, he looked, following the spiral of the stair, leaning over to follow its path along the pit. He estimated it descended another five hundred meters. A series of red lights, placed at regular intervals along the length of the tube, provided the only illumination.

Skyler leaned over farther and tried to see the bottom, but a thick and misty air concealed whatever lay there. An uneven humming sound drifted up, raspy and constantly shifting pitch like a failing motor.

He decided to go back for his gun, just in case. Two steps in that direction and he froze.

At the top of the stairwell, the subhuman emerged from the same tunnel Skyler entered through. It staggered to the first step and screamed, more at the sight of him than the pain she must be in. Even from this distance, Skyler could see bleeding cuts and scrapes along her entire body. Portions were charred, black skin already cracking.

She had indeed taken the brunt of the explosion. Remarkable that she survived, he thought. More so that she could still walk.

He’d barely finished the thought when she started to come down the steps. Running, cackling with inhuman emotion.

Pure fear gripped Skyler and held his feet firmly where he stood. Every instinct told him to run, not fight. He thought he could defeat the woman in a fight, considering her injuries compared to his own. What he feared was that she didn’t want to fight, she wanted to dive on him, to “play,” and in the process she’d take them both over the railing and to their deaths below.

Yet his body refused to take action. The creature raced around the spiral stairs motivated by emotions so primal and unfiltered that Skyler almost felt jealous.

At least the woman could move.

Then she fell, tumbling down a few steps before hitting the outer wall in a violent stop.

As the subhuman clawed her way back to a stand, Skyler found the will to flee. He turned and took one step, then another. Soon he jogged, then ran, clanging down the metal stairs as his initial fear receded.

Countless steps blurred together. The humming noise grew ever louder as he went. He felt dizzy from the winding path, sure he would slip as the subhuman had. If that happened he would roll a long, long way before his inertia died out. Against every instinct he had, Skyler slowed down to a manageable pace. He glanced up and saw the woman on the spiral directly above him, still chasing, and gaining ground.

She fell again. He heard her yelp and sputter, then settle into a deep moan. A worse fall than the previous one. Skyler halted his progress and took the opportunity to catch his breath.

The air here, thick and warm, made the simple task of sucking in a breath a conscious effort. His clothing dripped with sweat. More than anything in the world, he wanted a sip of cold water.

At the railing he leaned over again. The strange, jerky hum from the depths of the pit was loud enough now to make him want to cover his ears. He’d descended to roughly the halfway point and could now make out shapes in the moist air below. The Elevator cord went straight down into the heart of a dish-shaped floor. The dark material, fanned out like the iris shutter of a camera lens, looked like nothing Skyler had ever seen before. Pure matte black, with geometric patterns laced through—

Something slammed into him, lifted him. The woman.

Skyler shouted his surprise. He made a mad grasp for the rail and missed, and then he was falling. He twirled around, the warm air growing hotter, rushing past him with ferocious speed.

He heard fluttery laughter, close by. The subhuman, flailing through the air above him. They would both die, he thought, in this dark pit that no one knew about.

Then the laughter became overwhelmed by the
hum
, deep and terrifying. Sputtering and shifting all the time. It came from below, from the dish-shaped iris that now raced toward him.

Some perverse corner of Skyler’s mind wanted to see the Builders’ construction material close up. He spun around. Maybe he could discern some detail before splattering his brains across it.

To his shock the iris pulsed open at the last instant. He sailed right past it with a
whoosh
. The subhuman did, too.

A bright light waited below, and as he fell into it time began to slow, until he felt suspended in midair.

He felt as if every dream he’d ever had, everything he’d ever seen or smelled or tasted or touched or heard, suddenly became available for leisurely review. As if every last neuron in his brain had opened and presented its contents. He found he could focus on all of it at once, and yet any specific memory or sensation he tried to access refused to come forward.

Skyler took it all in with a serenity like none he’d ever known. He felt warm and weightless, as if in a bath. Everything glowed, electrified. Part of him knew the sensation should overwhelm him, and yet he found it merely curious.