Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (78 page)

He’d known that was a risk long before he washed up on that pier in Hong Kong.

He managed to get down four of those steep, endless-feeling flights of stairs before the claustrophobia started to creep past where he was able to ignore it effectively.

By the time he got down two more, he found himself struggling to breathe, to even think clearly. He’d also slowed down.

He forced his legs forward anyway, clicking into a part of his light that nearly detached him from his body altogether. He knew it would slow his reaction times, too––quite possibly more than was safe. He also knew he’d never make it down if he didn’t do it, no matter what mental dialogue he came up with to convince himself.

His claustrophobia had gotten worse in the last few years, not better. He’d talked to Balidor about it…and Allie. Both seemed to think it likely stemmed from regaining the specifics of his memories that caused the claustrophobia in the first place. Allie thought engaging Menlim’s construct in New York hadn’t helped much, either. Whatever the cause, what used to be a minor annoyance had turned into an actual operational limitation…which didn’t thrill him, for a lot of reasons.

Allie had promised him she would help him with that.

The thought tightened his throat.

He couldn’t think about her right now.

He made it down two more of those long flights of stairs before his light being detached ceased to help him. By then, he felt his chest compressing; he was sweating too much for the level of exertion…he was also breathing too much. He could tell he was losing rational functions…although the fact that he could tell that much told him that the distancing technique with his light was helping him to keep his mind clear, at least.

He imagined he felt people following him now.

That part, he felt less sure about. Meaning, he didn’t know if that was the claustrophobia speaking or some higher part of his light.

He did feel an increasing pressure to get inside this thing somehow.

He was also beginning to think he wouldn’t be able to reach the bottom.

At the seventh landing, he found himself staring at a door in the organic-hued wall. The outline was faint, but he could see it, and his Elaerian light confirmed it was there when he did a brief snapshot-check from those higher structures.

He’d been staying out of his light otherwise, so couldn’t feel anything on the other side.

He felt no organics in the door itself, really. The metal felt dead, but there was something strange about it, too.

It was the first door he’d encountered down here…that he’d noticed, at least. Given how strange this whole structure was, if only in terms of the depth and the sheer size he sensed, he didn’t feel confident he wouldn’t have missed things, though.

He felt no construct down here, either, but he knew he couldn’t trust the more passive areas of his sight for that. He couldn’t do a directed scan without risking being seen, so he laid a hand on the door cautiously, trying to decide if he should risk another flare from the telekinesis to get it open. Feeling that pressure again in the higher areas of his light, he made up his mind.

This would all be for nothing if he didn’t manage to get out of the damned stairwell.

Sliding into the telekinetic structures, he activated them the instant his light coiled into the mechanism of the door.

Like with the guards, he cracked it crudely, retracting his light in the same millisecond. He’d done it faster than with the guards…but still found his heart beating loudly in his chest by the time his vision cleared and his hand fell on the outer door.

The panel had already separated from the frame.

The crack emitted a brighter sliver of that gold-tinged light. Revik noticed only then that the gold light appeared to come from the very walls and floor of the staircase. So something organic lived here after all…just so low-level in aleimic structure that Revik’s light couldn’t pick it up as a living being without reaching out.

Taking a deep breath, he shoved the panel inward with his fingers.

He followed with his body immediately when no alarms went off…and when no secondary security measures shot at him or tried to sever his arm.

Pushing the panel closed behind him, he remained by the door once he got inside.

He found himself coming to a dead stop in fact, staring up at a much higher ceiling than he’d expected, despite the height of the stair flights between landings. From what his eyes told him, the cavernous room had to encompass close to two of those flights.

Revik’s eyes scaled up, taking in the height of the enormous, pale gold and green vats that stretched in over a dozen perspective-altering rows in front of him and to each side.

The ones nearest to him appeared to scrape the ceiling, and shimmered with so much organic power they pulsed in steady but non-synchronistic bursts, making it difficult for his eyes to focus on them. Tapered at the bottom, so that they appeared to be standing on end like squat tops, they nearly touched between the aisles, too.

The room smelled faintly of sulfur although he could tell some of that smell was being scrubbed by air vents situated in long lines above the vats themselves.

Despite not liking the perspective of the hanging vats, or the smell, Revik found himself walking down the first of those rows. His heart pounded again, but it didn’t feel like claustrophobia that time. He almost wondered if he was having a physical reaction to the vats themselves.

He suspected he knew what was in them, although he didn’t scan to find out for certain. That would take more of his light than a snapshot or a shield, so he didn’t want to risk it until he had a damned good reason. He’d already more than halfway decided to wait until he was well and truly caught to begin conducting scans for real.

Until then, he would focus on getting as far in as he could.

Even so, the similarities with other organic storage and cooking facilities didn’t escape him. In particular, Revik remembered sharing memories with his wife after the op against the Registry in São Paulo, Brazil. He remembered the vats filled with organic machine composites that Allie described to him, and what they’d looked like inside that warehouse-like building she and Wreg infiltrated under the Black Arrow main offices.

That those vats stood right outside the room housing mainframe storage for the official Seer Registry angered all of them…Wreg especially.

Allie hadn’t been angry though.

Anger wasn’t the word for what Revik felt on her light the one time they’d talked about it. She’d been sickened by it, light-sick…depressed. She almost hadn’t been able to talk about it at all. She finally shared her memories with him, in lieu of having to voice her impressions aloud. She answered all of his follow-up questions during the debrief, but didn’t offer anything additional.

It had hurt him, that pain on her.

At the same time, it moved him past where he could express. Fighting the memory out of his light when it wanted to combine with what he’d felt off her that morning, Revik took snapshots of the vats with his light, if only to distract himself.

Scanning the rows with his eyes, he tried to decide if anything else lived in the warehouse-like room or if he would have to go back the way he came.

In the end, he decided to risk continuing forward.

He walked for what must have been twenty minutes before he could see the other end of the narrow aisle. Marking the location of a door up ahead, about twenty feet past the last two vats in his aisle, Revik decided to continue forward again. As much distance as he could put between himself and that entrance by the horse barns, the better.

As he reached the door, he pulled the majority of his aleimi back behind a second layer of shielding. Stretching out his hand, he grabbed hold of the door handle.

It wasn’t locked.

His mind immediately dismissed the room’s contents.

Even so, he pushed the handle down and walked through, igniting floor lights once he’d stepped inside the secondary chamber. Closing the door behind him, he glanced up, realizing at once that the new room had a much lower ceiling than the cavern he’d just left. Low enough that his breath clenched, bringing his eyes up to the mirrored sheen of organics.

Dark green in color, they were so filled with living material they rippled, reacting to his eyes and light as he took in their length.

No wonder they hadn’t bothered to lock the door.

The damned machine might have even let him in.

Even so, he hesitated, wondering if the organic might try to kill him if he crossed the room without authorization of some kind. He knew he’d need his light soon, either way. He had no idea where to even begin looking in a place this size without his light…not without physical specs, some kind of map or place to start.

He was running out of time.

Either way, he’d be caught; he knew that, so that wasn’t his primary concern. Given what he’d left upstairs, being caught was a given. Being strategic about when and how he used his light had more to do with extending the amount of time he had down here.

Taking a breath, he pushed off the wall.

He began to walk, cautiously at first, then with more purpose when the sentient wall only followed him, rippling along behind him like a curious puppy. It didn’t try to do anything to him, or even scan him really, although Revik had been bracing for both.

He found the lack of any active protocol curious.

From proximity touches with his aleimi, meaning what he could feel without actively scanning it, it felt almost like the wall had yet to be programmed with a specific purpose.

Which meant this part of the complex might still be under construction.

Or else no one had flipped the “on” switch yet.

Apart from the organic, the room was featureless and relatively shallow. He could feel storage bins along the walls from contact with the organic and noticed protective suits lived inside a semi-transparent case lining one wall.

Those could be for workers or techs on the vats he’d just left behind. But why have such a high-grade organic guarding over what amounted to a storage room?

He reached the next wall, which was also featureless.

He could feel from the organic that something lived on the other side.

After the barest hesitation, he reached out with his bare hands, touching the living material to see if he could find a way through without going into the Barrier. After feeling over the strangely soft, mirrored green surface for a few seconds––politely, or as politely as he could be without engaging the sentient directly––he found an access panel.

That one seemed to have its security protocols disengaged, too.

His nerves rose slightly as the next door slid into the organic wall, giving him a view of a multi-leveled room covered in metal catwalks. Unlike the room he stood in now, most of the new room appeared to be dead metal.

He could see four visible levels and the ceiling seemed to be even higher than what he’d seen in the vat room, although it was broken into multiple floors. His mind tried to wrap around the architecture of that, but he let that go after a few seconds, too. He was starting to think there were active constructs down here, though. He even wondered if the organic room had turned him around without him noticing, spitting him out on another level.

He’s seen design specs for that kind of thing before.

Well, he’d talked about them…specifically when he worked for Salinse. They’d thrown around ideas regarding design parameters for a new base, including added security features with complex constructs. Revik also remembered a brief discussion of a platform-type elevator with enough organics to confuse the motion as it rose and fell.

It might even have been his idea.

Stepping fully into the next room, he caught hold of the guard rail as he balanced on the catwalk, looking down. Some kind of generator room.

He could feel hydro power, some solar, gas…

And what felt like a full-sized fusion generator.

So this facility had some serious fucking power capabilities––more than what lived aboveground in the City, for sure––which had to be another indirect indication of its size. He heard a few machines humming, but still saw no people. Most of the smaller, solar, gas and hydro generators didn’t appear to be switched on either.