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Parasite
Hanging on.⚠️ Content warning:
This article contains scenes of extremely graphic violence and gore.
Astrauskas and Sýkora raised their hands, neither defensively nor offensively, but in preparation to go either way. Dougall watched the carpet of red expand to envelop the entire warehouse, crawling over every container, every piece of machinery, every person. Diffusing the edges of reality's every inch.
All of it centred on him.
"What did you do?" Astrauskas demanded. She had something in her closed left fist, and the fingers of her right hand were splayed. He sometimes forgot that just because these two had Talents of a more contemplative nature, it didn't mean they had no access to the basic suite of practical magic.
Dougall screamed.
No, Dougall hadn't screamed. He'd opened his mouth to answer her question, with no idea whatsoever how he might do so, and the horror climbing up his throat had burst out of someone else in the far distance. Then another. Then perhaps a dozen more, in tandem.
His assistants turned in the direction of the uproar, and while they didn't scream, they did seem to forget for the moment what the real threat was.
"Oh, my god," said Astrauskas, and then she was swept aside. Her body skidded across the smooth concrete to slam against another container as something vast and shining dove into her, claws scrabbling at the frictionless floor surface, Sýkora diving in the other direction to avoid the razor-sharp copper arrowhead which flicked through the air behind it. Dougall took a step back, into the empty container, as the Mishepeshu regained its feet with a growl and shook its massive, horned head as though shaking off a mild concussion.
Sýkora pulled himself up by one of the open doors, and slid in beside Dougall. Just in time.
The big cats broke on the containers like water, an unending stream of them, more than anyone had ever suspected could still exist. They were barrelling deeper into the warehouse, into the caverns, perhaps even into the Site proper. Some of them were bloody, and not all of these were injured. Screams now filled the air, screams of frightened, injured, and dying human beings, and screams of unearthly things too. Screams of mythological creatures that were not, to Dougall's knowledge, afraid of anything.
Mukami remembered to seal the F-D subway station just in time; according to the temperature sensors embedded in the floor, something nasty was creeping to the threshold of the long-locked door, and it was something that already didn't obey the usual laws of containment.
Coordinating with Markey's people in Containment Control, she already had people on the move. People with specialized equipment, and basic boots on the ground. Anything that needed shifting, she could shift. Anything that needed shooting, she had only to give the word, and if she wasn't able, her well-trained agents knew under what circumstances they could take the word for granted.
Lillihammer had managed to get a message through the chaos, and Mukami had responded decisively. A sharp look at one of her terminal operators, and the F-D and cloverleaf bulkheads had closed. Now it was just a matter of monitoring—
The door slammed open, and Del Olmo staggered in. "You need to seal everything off."
She nodded. "I already did."
He hurried to the nearest terminal, scanned the indicators, and shook his head. "No, you need to seal everything off. Everything you can. They're going to do something terrible. This is just the beginning."
As if on cue, the document loop from F-D to A&R started throwing up errors. Something was crawling the long, narrow route to the incinerator.
"Dammit." She flicked the switch herself. The shutters slammed down, and she thumbed her radio. "Archives and Revision, this is S&C Actual. Shelter in place. I repeat, shelter in place."
"Getting reports from upstairs," one of the relay operators called out. "Containment failures throughout the Section. They're keeping it under key for the moment, but they want backup."
"Elevator?" Mukami asked.
"Stopped at the bottom," came the response. Then a pause, and with confusion: "Stopped below the bottom?"
"Never mind that." She drummed her fingers on the back of the nearest chair. "Tell everyone on sublevel one to focus on the subjects. Do not attempt to change sublevels. There may be structural issues with the membranes, and AO-"
She swore as she looked up at the indicator map for Applied Occultism. The tech seated in front of it was already waving frantically for her attention, and she nodded. He tapped a few keys, and horizontal bulkheads in the membrane between levels crunched shut.
"Where are they going?"
She followed Del Olmo's finger to the central monitor. A small set of biosignatures was moving sporadically down one of the halls in the heart of the refinery. She knew who they were. She'd known they were in there. She'd simply chosen not to think about it, since she couldn't contact them anyway.
But now she saw that they were moving, she could see they were moving the wrong way.
At a break in the feline tide, Dougall saw Astrauskas again. She was covered in cuts and bruises, and her clothing was in shreds, but she now had her back against the door of the nearest container and she was staring at them, wide-eyed, across the rippling river of copper and fur.
There was just enough time before the rush subsided for Dougall to form his first coherent thought since speaking what they now undoubtedly thought had been some sort of malefic magic spell: Why is this happening?
He turned to face the container once again. It was empty. It was empty. He walked to the back, ignoring Sýkora's suspicious glare, and swung his hands through the unoccupied space. There really was no Cannon. It had all been a lie, the longest con.
But why?
A klaxon sounded in the warehouse, and a recorded female voice intoned: "CONTAINMENT BREACH. PLEASE EVACUATE THE AREA. CONTAINMENT BREACH."
Sýkora grabbed the vertical lock bars on the rightmost door, and tentatively peeked out into the warehouse again. Whatever he saw produced a strange effect on his face; when he turned back to Dougall, his jaw was set. "Did you do this on purpose?"
Dougall shook his head. "I don't even know what this is. I swear."
Sýkora seemed to look right through him for a moment, then pulled his notepad out and began furiously scribbling. Dougall waited — it was one of the most difficult things he'd ever done — until the other man was finished before stepping up to him and asking: "What should we do?"
Veasna Chey died at a boil.
The soaked and steaming pseudopod of paper slapped across her flesh, which reddened and blistered and burned away as she keened in agony and scrambled across the simmering tiles. Reuben staggered back into the quadrangle formed by his desks, shielded for the moment from the tentacular advance, and watched in perfect helplessness as she died. As her clothing and skin and muscle sloughed away, transmuting into more and more paper as the chthonic entity expanded to fill its container, the stilled Salt Mines of A&R.
It had started with the lockers on the east wall. They had hiccoughed and burped as though air inside was somehow exchanging with stranger gases, and then the locks had burst and the doors had opened and the papers had come tumbling out, altered. Like kites on the wind. When one had plastered itself to Ahmad's face, and he'd started to shout, Reuben had thought they were in for yet another comical moment in the long history of textual anomaly breaches. And then Ahmad had managed to tear the sheet off, and it had taken his face with it, into it, and then it wrapped itself around him like a tarpaulin and pulled him down to the floor, cocooning him in glowing pulp, and the rest of them had started shouting, too. And then the lockers had sparked and smoked, and someone had rushed to the door to the ADDC, and their hand had fused to the handle, and a hurricane of paper had burst in and buried them, too.
In the first minute, there had been variety. The paper records heated and fused and rose into dozens of wildly different forms, and pressed into the crowd of alarmed and baffled archivists. Something like a man, with a hook for a hand. Something huge and hulking. Something like a vast, unblinking eye — and when it did blink, the lids swallowed Devi whole. The massive paper wall-monster spread its bulk across the doors, blocking all egress. Jansons picked up a chair and hammered it into the nearest window, an act of sheer desperation; every window at the Site was bullet-proof. The hook went through his carotid, and he bled pink glue.
Then as if to add insult to injury, the shutters slammed down and locked.
In the next minute, the forms began converging. Where they met with the archivists, the thoughtforms — that was what they had to be, monsters born of the raw material in the unabated texts — consumed flesh and repurposed synthetics. Where they met each other, they merged. As more and more rose up from the textual tempest, claiming biomass from the abandoned desks and filing cabinets and bookshelves, an apex entity gradually emerged. The breach alarm hooted and the lights flashed red, and the archive turned against its archivists with ravenous hunger.
At this moment, the sloppy pile of sodden pulp was inching across the room toward Reuben. Already his northeastern desk was beginning to smoke as the tide reached its base. The last of the archivists were cut off to the north, near the exit to the actual salt mines; Osmonova was tugging at the door and shouting, but nothing would give. The ceiling tiles were falling out, and cooking on the superheated floor tiles.
There was a protocol for this, Reuben suddenly realized. There was a protocol for everything.
He'd left his ID card in one of the desks, and in typical archivist fashion he couldn't remember which one. Reuben began pulling out the drawers, searching frantically. The papers he discarded curled at the edges as they hit the floor, and he kicked them away with a whimper—
There.
He snatched up the card and dove through the northern desk-gap, ignoring the shouts from his colleagues around the corner as he made for the Chair's office. His office, of late. There was only one way to put this right.
Then he stopped, dead, and stopped ignoring them too.
Ibrahim was calling his name. Ibrahim was screaming for help. Ibrahim said he couldn't feel his foot, and Reuben watched as a sneaker with a stub of flesh poking out began to reconfigure itself into something that could move of its own volition.
And then the biomass heaved, and a naked heap of half-digested humanity was expelled from a sudden orifice in the creature's skin, and it thrashed against the desks and moaned with something between revulsion and arousal. It had to be dead, but was moaning no less for it. And then the orifice opened again, and another processed packet of living waste was excreted to writhe on the tiles, stinking of burnt hair and gut flora.
Reuben threw open the office door, and dove inside.
Already the books on his shelves were beginning to gleam in the red light, red hot. There was a leak from one of the pipes in the ceiling. In a few seconds, there would be no more time to make bad decisions.
He dove under his desk, and hesitated.
Then he smelled the wood burning, and paper claws appeared at the edge of the desktop, and familiar voices began calling his name with the rustling of dead leaves, and he slapped the keycard to the hidden plate and reached up to press the fateful button.
Sýkora grabbed him roughly by the arm, and hauled him back out of the container. They had to dodge two more Mishepeshu on their way to where Astrauskas sat in the filthy wet, still dazed, against a now dented wall of ridged red metal; the big cats barely paid them any heed, like a herd of herbivores attempting to outrun some distant volcano. "We do what the voice says," Sýkora snapped. "We get the hell out of here."
But the hell was everywhere.
The warehouse seemed to stretch on to infinity, far larger than it had been when they'd first entered, now that traversing its length was an emergency rather than merely an irritant. Dougall kept looking back over his shoulder, a luxury afforded him because the others were pulling him along and actually paying attention to where they were going; the farthest containers were moving, sliding back and forth and even up and down, crashing into each other and breaking open. He had no idea what might be causing that.
The red haze wasn't lifting. It wasn't as simple a shift of tone; everything seemed to have a double outline around it, everything was just a little too indistinct. It felt raw. It felt dangerous, like the entire world had been recreated out of hot oven elements and nothing else. He expected every surface to burn him at the touch. But it wasn't a pure, true red, either, shading to burgundy or magenta in just the most minute—
"Come on," Sýkora shouted, and Dougall stopped looking behind. Ahead, the situation was only marginally less bleak.
Romolo didn't head to the F-D airlock, and he didn't run. He made his way to J&M's dedicated exterior monitoring station — one of the few initiatives with its root in Dougall Deering's busybodying that nobody resented — and received status reports from a cluster of frightened technicians. God, but the breach lighting was harsh this time. Something to look into after whatever crisis this was had been averted.
And what a crisis. Every monitor told a very different, very scary story. Unexpected pressure — water pressure? — had popped Intake Point-94 like a pimple. The DUAL Core was sending out power requests more suggestive of a QUAD Core, or higher. F-D was already cycling down, pumping its effluence elsewhere — his people knew their jobs — but still the recondicity was increasing, the pipes no longer sufficient even to contain their contents, much less direct their flow. In a matter of moments, someone up in S&C was slamming down doors and mobilizing response teams. Romolo's own options were primarily procedural. Switch this on, switch that off. There were no technicians within the dead refinery, and he wasn't about to send any in.
Unc.
Udo.
He pushed the thoughts aside. Saving Nascimbeni and his wife, and saving the Site, were the same thing. He didn't have to choose. He scanned each terminal over the shoulder of its user; he could have sat down at the main monitor and called up any feed he liked, but this gave each tech a chance to chime in with anything he might have missed. None of them did. He still didn't miss anything; he'd designed most of these systems, just as his predecessor had done.
There.
He spotted the incongruity immediately. The bulkhead seal to the F-D subway station was open; it must have failed, whether from disuse or whatever breached material was pushing on the door he did not know. He switched over to the levels monitor, and noted there was already too much gunk flowing into the system for human safety. A quick sidestep and a single pulled lever, and the Inter-Sectional Subway System was deactivated and locked down. The trains had already proceeded to stations or sidings, per breach protocol; he couldn't see which, because something was wrong with those particular sensors. Nothing he could do about that.
He tapped technician first class Charles Carter on the shoulder. "Vacuum flush," he said firmly. "Before the whole system is swamped."
Carter nodded. Alone among the occupants of the control room, he didn't look flustered. Breaches were old hat to him, though it was a hat he hadn't worn in a long, long time. His fingers flew across the keys, each stroke precise, and the ISSS became one massive materials transfer pipe. It still wouldn't hold all the recondite material in place, but between the simple volume of the kilometre-long track and the mass of bedrock sheathing it, most of the potential damage would not be done. They could clean up whatever weird plants grew in the park when the breach was no longer breaching.
Romolo trotted over to his own monitor and called up the F-A station feed. The visuals were already distorted as the ill wind surged to the terminal, and it only got worse as the seconds ticked past. The timestamp was suddenly in a language he couldn't read — was that even a language at all? — and artifact ghosts opened artifacted maws, and stars exploded in the darkened tunnels without casting any light whatsoever, and he called up the venting mechanism readout to watch as it filtered each component out and sent them to their appropriate—
"What the fuck?"
Everyone in the room except Carter turned to look at him, but he only had eyes for the readout. Instead of the expected rush of agency radicals and nest particles, the filters were picking up… calcium? Nothing but calcium. As he watched, the parts-per-millimetre gauge ticked ever downward while the calcium components ticked up. Less material, all of it bone.
No.
No, the filters weren't picking up bone. They weren't sucking in calcium. They were calcifying.
The filters were becoming bone.
He hammered the release, but it was too late. The subway was now filled with toxic gas, and none of it was making it into F-A, because the entire filtration system was now one long human femur. He paged over to the lakeside refinery's systems map, and watched with horror as the creeping ossification covered every piece of linked equipment, then spread from there to everything else.
Within an instant, the air filters were no longer filtering air. The recyclers stopped spinning. The exchanges stopped exchanging.
He had just cut off the oxygen supply for about two hundred people.
There were corpses everywhere. Cargo handlers, technicians, even a few researchers Dougall didn't recognize. Not because he didn't know them, although he probably didn't, but because one was missing her face, and the other was missing his entire head. The water panthers were fleeing, but they were also panicked.
He examined the faces of his assistants, and wondered what acts of desperation they might be driven to perform if they felt their backs were against the wall.
Emerging into the underground cargo transport system did little to improve the situation. The cats were running willy-nilly along the tracks, in every direction, down winding paths their ancestors had carved but which now served humanity's more structured purposes. There were fewer corpses here — the most striking was a woman lying face-down between two pairs of tracks, a single massive paw-print hole in the back of her lab coat — and even a few living people, scrabbling away from the furious, soaking wet cats, climbing gantries or hiding behind motionless pieces of machinery.
There was a horrible crashing sound from the warehouse, and the vast sliding doors began buckling outward. Astrauskas pushed off from Dougall and hobbled over to the controls, slamming her hand on every button until the aperture disappeared with a grinding and a final, exclamatory slam.
Dougall wanted to ask what was going on in there, what it was they had both seen that he had not. But he couldn't. He couldn't speak to them. Not when he saw what he saw behind their eyes whenever their gazes intersected.
Stewart couldn't find his radio.
This was not, in itself, unusual. He had a tendency to leave it places. Places he didn't even remember putting it down. Once it had been found at Site-232 at the bottom — the bottom! — of a shipping container. He'd been reprimanded for it. He'd been lectured. He'd been ashamed. But still he kept on losing track of the damned thing.
Losing the radio was not unusual, but the background situation certainly was, and it raised that eternal idiocy to the level of calamity.
The world was breach-red, and the man at the F-D airlock couldn't talk to anybody. He'd tried using the wall panel, but there was something wrong with the electrics; it spoke back to him in Spanish, and he didn't think it was saying anything nice. He tried rushing over to A&R and asking to use their phone, but found the shutters had already been lowered. There was nobody in Wettle's lab, all his staff having knocked off when Big Blue headed out for the ceremony.
And the bulkhead doors at the end of the cloverleaf had already snapped shut. He was trapped.
All these years later, and still his body braced for impact. She was going to find out. She was going to make him feel half his towering height.
Except she wasn't. She was somewhere else, doing something useful, and he was proving her right.
So he raced through his memories and raced through the limited space available to him, hoping their maps matched up. He hadn't left it in the archives, which was good. He hadn't left it in his bunk, which was better — he could probably do something about the shutters if he needed to, but bulk versus bulkhead was not a fair fight. He hadn't left it in…
He had left it in.
He shoved the door to the replication labs so hard that the glass cracked, which should have been impossible. Whatever was radiating out of F-D, it was breaking down the bonds in sturdy materials far afield. He wondered what it was doing to his bones. He pushed past the counters and desks and slammed open Wettle's office door, entered his least-favourite room in the facility, where he'd been weeping in frustration as part of his own memorial activities just an hour prior, and finally snatched up his radio from where it had fallen on the floor.
S&C radios had a rudimentary message recording system. He saw the blinking red light — strange that it was red, the ambience shouldn't have been enough to alter its green hue — and twisted the dial just so.
Halfway through the first recorded transmission, his gut was tight as a barrel. He thumbed the transmit button, and said "Director?"
Director? Director? Director?
His own voice echoed back to him, mocking. It pinged off Wettle's filing cabinet, and dented the metal. It pinged off of him, and he fell to the floor. It pinged off the wall, and a framed swimming certificate fell to the floor, and the glass shattered, and still the pinging continued. At first the damage was merely structural; this was, after all, only an office.
And then a lab.
And then a refinery.
As the pings grew more distant, and covered more distance over more time, it was harder and harder to hear them.
Until the explosions began.
There was something wrong with Dougall's watch. If the digital display was to be believed, mere minutes had passed since he'd opened the container. And that couldn't possibly be right.
Sýkora was leading them to the subway station. Standard protocol for evacuating the warehouse was to head up to AAF-A, like most of the researchers were doing. The trains wouldn't even be running now, if there really was a Breach scenario in progress. All the other people they passed on their mad flight were heading to the assigned mustering points in the undercroft, rushing into stairwells or clambering up ladders as the Mishepeshu dominated the low-lying areas.
But Sýkora had done the math, and Dougall's own predictions had already proven worse than worthless, so he allowed himself to be towed to uncertain safety nevertheless.
To his left, a man raised his hands over his head and screamed as a jet-black panther with gleaming copper highlights pounced upon him, tearing out his ribs and intestines with an almost playful batting of serrated claws.
To his right, a woman cowered behind a fuel truck, gibbering softly to herself and weeping freely. Her tears were black.
Ahead, the wide stairs to the access tunnels that would take them to the station.
Behind…
There was a sound like thunder, and a sound like rain.
The containment specialists had wanted a measure of autonomy for years, but Ibanez wouldn't allow it. Once she'd hopped jobs, Mukami was much more accommodating. Mukami, in fact, was more accommodating than anyone else at the Site.
David sat at the confluence of a dozen different containment feeds, with a dozen technicians arrayed around him in a semicircle at their own machines. The fact that this disaster was being monitored from four different locations — here, J&M, S&C, and Operations Control — should have resulted in bedlam, but a careful delineation of responsibilities meant they were actually force multiplying their efforts.
For example, while it was Mukami's job to deploy the troops and keep the choke points tight, and Ambrogi's to watch the pipes, and Ferber's to field the flurry of questions from all corners without explicit breach duty, David could manage the big picture.
Containment was all about interlocking systems. It had been folded under the umbrella of security because keeping the things locked in was conceptually related to keeping everyone else locked out, but his was a far more holistic field. He and his people combed data from all corners, collated and compared, made connections nobody else could make from their tall and narrow silos, and kept it all from cascading.
In theory.
In reality, everything was absolutely fucked right now, and it was no great honour to be the one who could see the sheer scope of that fuckery. Some ineffable force was fractal-spiralling out from the vicinity of Replication Studies and causing catastrophic failures in electronic systems Site-wide. Something was draining the abatement tanks in AAF-B, and depositing their contents in random dorm rooms in Hab and Sustenance. Someone had forgotten to cut off a code stream, and the monitoring stations within AAF-D had told their cousins in F-C something so startling that all the tanks up there were rupturing now in sympathetic protest.
The vacuum flush had cleared most of the subway, but it hadn't done anything for the material still Euclidean enough to remain in the overstrained pipes. Much of it had come down from S&C, the detritus of the messier subjects in containment, and so much of it had been sent back up there. But now something very wrong was going on in AO, all the conduits sparking in some hellish symphony, and where once there had been wizards there was now a ravening coven of twisted witches, and worse. The bulkheads were already down, so they couldn't get out, but AO was between F-D and S&C, so the material flowing up there—
"Cut off the upflow," David shouted. He was already tapping out commands on his own console, but the more the merrier. There was more than one way to stop up the drains, and he could only tackle one at a time. "The orphic backwash—"
It was already too late. One moment, a squad of Mukami's guards was jogging down a hall to attempt recapture of the creeping biofilm which had once climbed up out of the telekill sump, and had since been reduced to a foul-smelling fraction of its size. The next, they were opening fire. And the next, the fried sensors in the smoke detectors misjudged the sudden ozone spike, and showered them with what should have been water.
It wasn't water anymore.
The orphic backwash had corrupted the fire suppression systems, and what came out of the sprinklers was opaque and shimmering. The guards screamed — it seemed like everyone not safely locked in a monitoring room was screaming now — and clawed at their helmets and riot gear. It was all constricting around them, and suddenly Markey could see their clothes through their armour, their skin through their clothes, their lunch through their skin…
The biofilm saw its chance, and inched toward them as they scrabbled wetly on the tiles.
And then there was a sudden flash from one of the monitors behind him, so bright that he could see it reflected on the back wall, and he turned to see smoke rising from one of the screens and a containment tech splayed back in their seat, hands contorted upward in supplication or agony, the black holes where their eyes had been also smoking.
"What was that?" Markey snapped.
Technician Vuković, voice quavering, responded. "He was monitoring sublevel four. It's gone."
"Gone?"
"Something spectroclastic. Went through like an orbital strike. And we just lost a whole containment block upstairs, too."
David called up the floorplan. S&C's new smoking crater now aligned with the most compromised section of AO, which loomed over A&R, which was itself—
A&R lit up, too, and an automated message appeared on his screen. Wirth had activated the shaped charges.
The archives were gone.
There was a clear path from the worst of the mess to everything that was left. Everything he was still charged with preserving.
A quick set of keystrokes confirmed that Mukami was protecting the lower reaches, while Gwilherm was securing topside. That left him, alone, to contain what was left.
There were things around every corner in AO. Above them, the former security guards were running like rain through the gutters, headed for the lowest point, where they would fall on everything else like a torrent.
"Markey," he said into his microphone. This deployment required something different from the usual rotating code phrase: his voice, his microphone, his fingerprint, a retinal scan, and three words.
"Execute Protocol INTERITUS."
"GO!" Sýkora shouted, pulling on Dougall's arm so hard he thought it might pop out of its socket. "NOW!"
But Dougall couldn't help but turn and look.
The contents of the tracks were rushing toward them. The battered-down warehouse doors. The loading lorries. The corpses. The cats. It was all being borne down the tracks at a pace far swifter than human feet, sweeping toward them on a bubbling runner of pitch-red-black water.
It was the lake.
The lake was reclaiming the tunnels.
They mounted the stairs two or three at a time, slipping and sliding even with the water so far behind, so desperate was the ascent. They were halfway up when the fuel truck reached them, wiping out the entire bottom half of the stairs and shattering the tiles on the walls all the way up to the level of the undercroft. The truck didn't explode — the only way in which reality had asserted itself in the past however many minutes — but it did begin leaking an oily black liquid, which the waters lapped up and spread across the ruined tracks.
And then the walls.
The water crawled up behind them as they fled, and everything it touched turned colourless red. The sound it made was not the sound of water. It sounded hungry.
The maintenance tunnels were empty of human presence, and there weren't any cats, either. The transport tunnel below was already filled to the brim, and the almost obsidian waters were lapping at their feet as they dragged their exhausted bodies down Sýkora's seemingly endless route to safety.
If safety was still something that existed.
Because everything here was red, too. The flashing breach lights. The walls and floors. Their panicked faces. Dougall closed his eyes, and even the darkness was red. His thoughts were red. The pain in his lungs and joints was red.
The turnstiles and tiles of the station were red, too. But that wasn't nearly the worst of it.
The last thing Janet heard from her radio was something between a scream and a squelch.
She instinctively turned to face AAF-A, a few hundred metres to the southwest. There was something strange about the way the red light hit it, something off about the refraction. It was too bright…
"Captain!"
She stood up in the pursuit vehicle. Agent Navickas was down the hill at the treeline, pointing. "I think we've got civvies?"
Janet thumbed her radio again. "P&S Actual?" Still no response.
So she sat back down, and gunned the motor.
There were indeed civilians in the water of Lake Huron. Civilians in bathing suits, despite the cold. They were screaming as Gwilherm pulled to a stop at Ipperwash Beach, and it didn't take her long to realize why.
The lake was moving.
It was creeping up the shingly shore, lapping around the stone kettles littering the area and crawling up their surfaces in that way that water didn't. Her agents on foot caught up, weapons drawn, as she hopped out just in time to see an extremely localized wave roll over one of the hollering bathers. They didn't re-emerge, but Janet felt certain she saw the red water grow even redder.
She drew her service weapon as a new chorus of shouts sounded from behind.
Wavering, translucent forms were marching out of the F-A outflow pipe just down the beach. Their arms were raised in supplication, and she could already hear their moans on the wind. The closer they got, the higher the waters rose. They were almost wading already.
"What do we do?" Agent Pei shouted.
Janet lowered her weapon, and jogged to the back of the vehicle. "Gear up," she shouted as she popped the trunk. The apparitions were now walking past them, approaching the freezing swimmers. Janet passed out the equipment, thank Christ for Mataxas, and her people started slinging the little packs over their backs and checking the give on the nozzle feeds.
That was when the screams got louder.
The swimmers and the spectres met at the foreshore not fifty metres from where the MTF was preparing to engage. It was now obvious the latter were the staff of AAF-A; Janet could clearly make out AcroAbate jackets, front company employees, and don't try to figure out which agents those are. It won't help. The swimmers were apparently paralyzed, whether with fear or cold or something more supernatural she couldn't tell, and made no move to flee the outstretched hands.
Those hands went straight through them, as was common with spectral entities. Less expected was the result: the flesh turned dark and rimed up with frost, and limbs began cracking and snapping and falling to the water, which was already spiderwebbing with ice.
She was almost more surprised to learn that the screams could get louder.
"Advance!" she shouted, after checking to make sure the entire unit was loaded for bear. She raised the nozzle of her paraspectral abatement wand, and led the charge down to the beach. The turn of a dial, and a steady stream of chalky fluid paved her way forward.
The fact that she could see it told her all she needed to know about the gravity of their situation.
The bathers were dying en masse. There had been maybe fifty of them at the outset, and now there were less than half that — or rather, more than half of them were less than half the people they had been just moments ago. Like zombies, the former Foundation employees were falling on them with grasping fingers of icy death. The most the victims could manage was to recoil, and several fell over backward in the process. The rising waters claimed them as the paraspectral spray finally reached its first targets.
The ghosts turned to face Janet and her taskforce, far too late. Where the fluid touched their translucent forms, they immediately began disintegrating, like paper touched by flame. They accepted this fate without complaint.
"What about the civvies?" Navickas called to her.
"Spray them too!" Janet shouted.
Within seconds the lake was bright and glossy, and bubbling. The swimmers spat and clawed at their eyes as the material overtook them, sinking to their knees, disappearing in the swell. "We're killing them!" Pei shouted, but Janet ignored her. She kept the flow going, and watched as the pitched battle gradually diminished to foamy wrack on an empty shore.
And then there was an awful sound, far worse than the screams had been, and the ground trembled beneath her feet. She raised an arm in warning, then took a step back.
Then the foreshore collapsed.
It weathered away in an instant, and the water, now bubbling furiously, swelled in. The MTF began retreating back to the vehicle without needing to be told, but it was too late. Several lost their footing and fell, and all of them were soon at least up to their laces in orichalcum-laced water. It spun around Janet's ankles in tiny whirlpools, and a slick, severed leg knocked against her boot heel, and—
—and Lake Huron overtopped its banks, and came for them.
There was no other way to describe it. The lake was rising far beyond its basin. It was consuming the shore. "Retreat!" she shouted, redundantly, and then there was a shrill whistle as the water touched the wheels of her vehicle, and the tires immediately popped. She could see shapes in the water now, serpentine shapes, but they never broke the surface. Perhaps they were the surface. Overhead, a red moon rose, and the reflection…
It lunged at her, and she fell back with a roar. Something acid clawed at her right leg, and she filled her horizon with abatement fluid in self-defence. Whatever it was backed off, backed into the water again, and the burning in her thigh made her gasp in shock. To her right, a blurry red shape rose up again and pulled Agent Golubev screaming into the tide. His arms came off at the shoulders, and blood mixed with water mixed with foam. His head was still bobbing in the lakerise as the shape appeared again to her left, pulling two more agents down by their scalps, fingers running through their brain matter and spines and tearing five great gouges down their torsos before they disappeared. The water was a mass of hands and paws and claws. "Retreat," Janet rasped, kicking at the shingles and forcing herself back up the shore. "RETREAT!"
But it was already less an order that others could obey, and more of a mantra for herself.
None of them had the energy to leap, at this point. They clambered over the stiles, Dougall falling hard on his knees and howling, and dragged each other to the edge of the platform.
There were no trains. There was something in the air, however…
Astrauskas was shoving a mask into his hands even as he began doubling over. It felt like someone had breathed fire down his lungs. At the roof of the tunnel, a glittering mist was gradually dissolving the panels and the bedrock above it.
"Vacuum flush," she grunted through her own mask as Dougall fitted his on.
"Why isn't it flushed, then?" Sýkora demanded, breath fogging his mask.
There was no answer save for the sounds of the platform's final passengers, pressed up against the curved station walls or splayed near the gap. Clutching masks to their faces, or choking to death. Some of them were turning white. Off-white.
The colour of bone.
There were only two trains on the Blue Line — all the lines are Red now — and when the system was shut down, they were supposed to divert to sidings when they could, or else stop where they were. The nearest siding was accessed by a tunnel just before the kiosk; the glass was all fogged up, and they could see the twisted silhouette of its dead occupant.
Because of the lockdown, nobody had taken the tunnel. Dougall unlocked it, and they continued their frantic flight. It took seconds to cover the remaining ground, and they burst out on the narrow, sealed-off stretch of track.
Finally, a stroke of luck. The only one Dougall had seen since opening that fateful container.
Astrauskas broke off and charged into the train, her thin little legs driving her to the driver's compartment. The effort of hauling Dougall along had exhausted Sýkora, and he thrust his Chief through the doors with a final heave that seemed to sap his remaining strength. He lay there on the tiles, panting, as the overhead lights turned a dimmer shade of pink for an instant, and the sealed door began grinding open. Astrauskas was starting up the train, manually.
Dougall reached a hand out the door, though Sýkora was several metres beyond his reach.
The other man shook his head.
"Why?" Dougall rasped.
Sýkora reached into his pocket, pulled out the notepad, and flipped it through the open doors.
Dougall caught it at the same instant as a shining copper claw slashed across the other man's back, and he screamed — Dougall, not Sýkora. The latter simply collapsed under the weight of the massive cat, which yowled furiously at the incandescent lights above and shook red-black water from its sodden fur.
And then the doors closed.
And the waters finally caught up to them.
In an instant the cat was washed away, paws paddling madly against the torrent, slammed against the nearest window and cracking the outer glass, while the protective inner layer remained intact. The train shuddered into motion, and Dougall pulled himself up onto the row of seats on the platform side, pressed his hands to the window, and…
…and there he was. Just for a moment. Imrich Sýkora, drenched from the waist down, matching the gesture from the other side. Blood was pouring from the wound in his back and swirling in the rapidly rising waters around him, and as the train pulled away he was slowly losing ground. His teeth were grit and his eyes were nearly shut, and as Dougall watched his hands clenched into fists, as though he intended to try his luck at battering his way inside…
…and then he bobbed in the water, very strangely, as it rose to the halfway point of the windows, and higher, and higher, and Dougall realized that the parts of him above the water line were the only parts left, that the rest had been dissolved away, and the last he saw of his assistant was a skeletal hand pulling pointlessly at the last shards of the outer glass before even that was swept away by the train's escape from its station.
And then Dougall was flung clear across the car, to the front, to slam against the closed compartment door, and he saw red stars, then nothing more.
"They're still breaking through."
Del Olmo watched as Markey glanced from monitor to monitor with lidded eyes and a stunned expression; despite the other man's dull shock, he found himself unable to follow either the movements or their significance. It was like he was fighting the inertia of a dream. "Breaking through what? Where?"
"Everything," Markey moaned. "Everywhere." He finished punching his buttons, and pointed at a monitor near the top left. A man with a split-open head was gorging himself on tiles, drywall and insulation. Markey stabbed again, and Del Olmo saw what once might have been a woman, but was now a writhing mass of chitinous scales which moved not quite like a single, coherent being. She gleamed like coral in the light thrown by the exploding high-capacity power lines she was sawing through with her raw flesh, which bled pink pus and flaked off with every serrated swipe. She was wailing directly at the camera as she did so, and Del Olmo almost believed he could hear her. On the right, researchers and security agents were clustering together behind the Section's many doors for protection, to mixed effect; a thing simultaneously like a rhinoceros and a bloated corpse charged one cell and exploded, taking out the door, half the chamber, and everyone in it. On the middle monitor, a cluster of human legs jutted out from a massive trunk with a concave edge, like a tree stump. It was surging against a breach bulkhead, over and over, and as a crowd of new horrors staggered into view and joined in the assault, he realized that he recognized the number painted on it.
Beyond that door, Applied Occultism overlapped with Archives and Revision. If they made it that far…
"I can't get my people in position." Markey pointed once again, his mouth a grim line. With the Salt Mines on fire, it was impossible to reach the overlap point and reinforce the horizontal bulkheads. As they watched, a creature of burning pitch wobbled its way down a corridor, pinging off the walls and leaving material on every surface that dripped and burned unceasingly, like napalm. A few of the surviving guards were taking potshots at it; the spray every time they hit was spreading the conflagration wide, and already a few of the officers were themselves on fire.
Del Olmo took the mic from Markey. "Del Olmo Pleural Jeden Symphonic Shteyim Malleable. Protocol MC-721-AO. Execute."
Markey didn't ask what that meant. He knew his job.
Modified strains of Schubert filled the air in Applied Occultism, accompanied by a steady drone and quotations from the Bhagavad Gita in a lilting cadence. Del Olmo still couldn't hear it, but he knew how it would sound. Curiously assonant, and very calming.
One by one, the creatures on the monitors began to howl as the stun memetics reached whatever passed for their ears.
And then, one by one, they began to melt.
"What the fuck?" said Markey. And then he was going to say something else, and Del Olmo was going to reply, but neither of them did. Instead, they watched the monitors where the unaffected humans trapped on the second sublevel were displayed.
They were howling, too.
They were also melting.
"Why?" Del Olmo whispered, his voice as lifeless as the other man's now, as the entire surviving complement of Applied Occultism and their security escorts melted into a thousand flopping neuron-sheets which linked their raw nerve endings together to form a single biomass.
And when that started to scream, they didn't need an audio feed to hear it.
At first he thought the train was bleeding.
He was wrapped around the divider between a row of seats and a door, and every inch of him felt battered and tenderized, but nothing seemed broken. His body was twitching every which way, and no joint encountered any unexpected resistance. He was intact, which was more than could be said for the train itself.
It was in ruins. Some of the windows were gone, impossibly, and they opened on a yawning reddish blackness which howled like the wind. There was something dripping from the ceiling, running down the walls, pooling on the fabric and the floors, and it was red, but then everything was red. The lights were off, but the glow persisted.
There was a horrible shuddering creak, and at the far end of the train, the roof collapsed to become a distant, forbidding wall.
I have to get out of here.
He might not have broken anything, but he seemed to have sprained everything. It was agony just getting to a sitting position, and a nightmare attempting to stand. He didn't know how long he'd been out, but it hadn't been nearly long enough to catch his breath. He thumbed the release for the door he'd been thrown into, and to his surprise, the door actually opened.
The rest of the train was in no better state. He carefully avoided touching any of the corroded or soaked material, smelling all sorts of astringency on the air; the water from the lake had smelled like peat and stale cat urine, but this was something somehow worse. That didn't make sense, but he couldn't put his mental finger on why. His brain had certainly been rattled around its cage by the sudden crash.
The sudden crash. Something hit us. He'd been thrown to the back of the car by an impact.
From the direction in which they'd been travelling.
Oh, no.
The train had been stopped before leaving the station. They were still in AAF-D.
Or were they? Beyond the windows, intact or not, the groaning darkness was complete. The station had been well-lit, well enough for him to watch a man he'd worked with for twenty years melt like a—
He coughed, and kept coughing, allowing the pain of his raw lungs to override the horror of his memory. If he started thinking about it now, if he let the enormity of what was occurring overtake him, he'd never get out of here. So he kept moving, to the front of the train, where Astrauskas..
There was a window set into the door to the driver's compartment, and it was slick with something. Something red, but of course, that could be anything.
He thumbed the release, and retched.
There was something in the compartment. It could have been Rozálie. Its flesh and gristle had been peeled back from the bone in interlocking spirals, from head to toe, like the skin of an orange. The compartment had a skylight, and something had eaten it away, leaked down, filled the space…
Dougall staggered back, and saw something sizzling with caustic energy crawling out of the compartment toward his shoes. Even without touching, the leather was starting to steam.
He turned, and again, he ran.
Much of the train was dissolved into helical nonsense, wherever the material that had killed Astrauskas had leaked in, but the front had clearly been battered apart. The second pilot's compartment was simply gone, as were the first few cars, and the rest of the moving machine had apparently dragged their remnants along for a long way, because a trail of debris stretched from where he stood into the distant dimness. It was as though the train had been forced back into the tunnel by some sudden impact, and then the waters had shoved it in the other direction with even greater force, and the thing had simply laid waste to everything in its way until finally coming to rest here, where it sat steaming and corroding to rust before his eyes.
But where is here?
Here featured a faint light to the south. At least, he thought it was the south. If it wasn't, they'd travelled even farther than it seemed. So he walked a ways in the rumbling dark, a primordial claustrophobia setting his every hair on end, his every nerve on edge. There was a sound of dripping water. There was a sound of distant bellowing. From time to time, flakes of red rock tumbled down from the red tunnel ceiling and walls.
Up ahead, the next platform. What he could see from the tracks suggested it was entirely intact. He could even read the name on the tiles: R&E Station. Just a short jog to Operations Control in Admin and Oversight, assuming whatever had happened at AAF-A wasn't also happening here.
And assuming that here wasn't experiencing something just as bad, or worse, of its own.
Assumptions caused this, he told himself as he crossed into the station proper, and began considering how to haul his tired bones up onto the platform. Maybe stop trying to figure it out, and just focus on getting out.
He jerked his hand back in alarm. He'd placed it on the stippled line that marked the final gap, testing his purchase and strength with a little pressure, and had been about to set down the other and essay a pull-up, when something had tapped his knuckles.
He blinked up at the ruddy gloom, and a crimson-edged silhouette looked back down at him. "G… get a bag," the woman growled, and not at him. "We've got another one."
And she reached down with two vinyl-sheathed hands, and pulled him up.
They left him in the decontamination shower for an hour. When he finally got out, his skin was blistered and broken; it was red, too, but then so was everyone else's.
The main mustering point for R&E was the central foyer that branched off to the various subSections, and Dougall was heartened to see how many people were waiting in it. Most looked hale and healthy, though almost all were clearly terrified. There were only a few casualties like him, convalescing in the little triage area set up at the security checkpoint before the subway station; the snub-nosed medical doctor had given him a final once-over before shoving him roughly out so she could focus on the actual injuries.
Injuries mainly sustained, he realized, when the train he'd been riding had come barrelling along the tracks from AAF-A, smashed through two supposedly-impregnable bulkhead doors, and hopped the rails to demolish a substantial stretch of R&E's westernmost walls.
Ana Mukami was pulling off her esomat suit when Dougall pushed through the throng to meet her again. "Hey."
She glanced at him, and shrugged. "Busy," she grunted. It was practically a grunt of pain.
"Right. I need to get to Operations Control."
Her glance travelled down, then back up. "Deering." Her voice was curiously flat; this woman was known for practically speaking music.
"That's right."
"Figure this is a magic problem?" she slurred, gesturing at the empty air which glowed illustratively sanguine in non-response.
"I…" He swallowed the lump that suddenly formed in his throat, and then another that instantly took its place. "I have information," he hazarded. "I might be able to help."
"Mm." The Chief of Security and Containment considered this offer with dead eyes. Maybe it was just the strange light. "I'll call Hellstorm."
Hellstorm. That would be Karen Elstrom, who would be coordinating the disaster response. Maybe the chaos had been confined to the lakeside facility. Maybe it wouldn't spread.
Or maybe it will, because you had to get on that fucking train…
He grabbed Mukami's arm before she could thumb the transmit button on her radio. "Something very bad was happening up north. If my train broke through—"
She let him keep his grip. She could have broken his arm. "I know," she choked out. What is wrong with you, woman? "The bulkheads collapsed — which th… they're not supposed to do — but then the tunnel collapsed too, so…" She made a complicated gesture approximating that's that, and then spat on the floor.
He frowned. "Why would the tunnels collapse?"
"Don't know. Can't raise anyone north of the main circuit." She thumbed on the radio. "S&C Actual to, to, 43 Actual, over."
"Say again?" a male voice responded.
Mukami grit her teeth, and tried again. "S&C Actual to 43 Actual, over."
"This is OC," a male voice responded. "43 Actual is… otherwise occupied. What can we help you with? Over."
Mukami cursed under her breath before answering. "Got D-Deering here with intel. He washsh…" She closed her eyes. "He was at F-A when the shit hit. Over."
There was a brief pause, and Dougall thought the comms tech was about to ask for a second repetition when a hoarse female voice cut in. "This is 43 Actual. Escort Dr. Deering to Operations Control. Use your override, but lock it up behind you."
Mukami rolled her eyes, and it took Dougall a moment to realize she was annoyed by the other woman's break in radio protocol. "Acknowledged. Out."
Maybe the worst of the damage has already been done, he thought as Mukami seized his upper arm and led him out of the foyer, working her jaw from side to side. At least we still have order.
Except 43-Actual, he suddenly realized, was the callsign for the Director.
Karen Elstrom was only the Deputy.
Where the hell is Lillihammer?
Their haunted house procession through the rest of R&E, the brief connecting passageway at the west end of the dorms, and into Admin and Oversight had a sobering effect on Dougall. Not that he'd been in high spirits after the cavalcade of horrors he'd experienced, but rather he'd been on the edge of a nervous breakdown since the nasty shock of finding he'd lied to himself in a new and profoundly destructive way. The empty corridors and silence forced him to recognize the change of pace. The rush to survive was over. Now it was time to figure out what the hell had gone wrong in the first place.
By the time he realized he was going to need his story straight, it was too late.
Operations Control was the first hub of activity he'd seen since the mustering point in the labs. The cubicle block at the entrance to A&O had been abandoned, and all the Site's administrative officers were occupying seats at the rows of metal consoles facing the big board. Elstrom was hunched over the supervisor's station at the rear, so she was the first person to notice them save for the pair of S&C guards who let them pass in the first place.
She didn't turn around, just glanced over her shoulder and nodded at Mukami. The S&C Chief led Dougall down the first steps and around the front of the station, so that Elstrom could glower at him from on high. It was her way. "Report."
"The lake attacked us," said Dougall. "We—"
"Know that." Elstrom waved his unfinished sentence away, then captured a light cough with the waving hand before returning it to her console. "Know about the cats, too. What else?"
He'd never liked this woman. She was too direct. "The, ah… the effect, the red haze, it started there too. In the warehouse, by the loading docks."
Elstrom's red eyes — they had once been blue — narrowed. "Which is where you were, according to the last reports we got from F-A."
"That's right."
She arched a brow, the question obvious.
He took a deep breath. "I think we'd better discuss this in private."
"I don't care what you think. I care what you know. Say it, right now."
Elstrom ran a tight ship. There were voices all throughout Operations Control, but they were hushed. Technicians conversing over equipment in sotto voce. Operators speaking calmly into their microphones. He felt more exposed than he had in the middle of the warehouse, with the cats at his back. "Ah…"
One of the guards — Radcliffe, wasn't it? — put one hamhand on Dougall's shoulder.
And that was entirely too much.
Dougall stretched up to his full height, and Elstrom's other eyebrow raised as he opened his mouth. "I have classified information to disclose," he snapped. "Classified at the highest possible level. Classified by the Temporal Anomalies Department. I need to speak with the Director."
He could feel the eyes on him. Hear the squeaks as the chairs on the nearest rows of consoles turned in his direction. Elstrom stared into his soul through the salmon filter of her librarian's glasses, scowling, and then finally she pushed off the console, straightened up, and cleared her throat. "The Director is dead," she growled. "Along with everyone else in facility -D."
Dougall stared at her, as she stared back, and everyone around them stared at one or the other. Too many eyes for him to focus. To grasp the complexity of that statement, and what it meant for him.
"We're about to start a C&C in the boardroom," Elstrom continued. "So, let's go hear your story."
He wondered if speaking it aloud would make it make any more sense to him.
Udo, he realized as Radcliffe gently steered him back to the admin cubicles. Udo was in AAF-D.
He didn't feel anything right away.
Maybe he wouldn't feel anything ever.
It was indeed technically a Chairs and Chiefs meeting.
Dougall was a Chief, and so were Noor Zaman (Hiring and Regulation) and Dolly Ferber (Administration and Oversight). Bradbury was Chair of R&E, and she was physically present in the room; Du was Chair of Quantum Supermechanics, and he looked like it physically hurt him to sit down and wait.
And that was it.
Dougall sat down in his usual chair, and looked over the tiny assembly with a frown. "This isn't even quorum."
"We don't need quorum." Elstrom shoved her chair out of the way and hunched over the massive oak table. "I want explanations, and advice, and then if I think it's warranted, I'll issue some orders. I've got all the emergency powers I need to do whatever I think is necessary."
"Sure," Dougall acknowledged, "but where are the others?"
"Locked down," she snapped. "Gwilherm's still up north. Anoki and Wirth are locked down. Mukami's too busy to babysit," Dougall hadn't even noticed her slipping away, "and Del is dead and Wettle is dead and the retirees are dead and this explanation is taking too much time. Dougall. What do you know."
He glanced from face to anxious face. All of them except Bradbury were looking at him. Bradbury's face was streaked with tears, and she seemed to be on a different planet. "Ah…"
"Just spit it out." Du was restless in his chair, fingers tapping an uneven tattoo on the table.
"Okay." Dougall placed his own hands on the cool surface, palms down, as though he could draw strength from all the clever people who had sat around this table before. As though they'd be willing to help him if they could, knowing what he knew. "I think what's happened here is related to the breach back in '02."
Du shook his head and rolled his eyes at the same time. "There was no breach in '02, Dougall. I thought you'd know that, considering how often you brag about having stopped it."
"Sure," he agreed, "but that's the thing. I stopped it then. I never told you how."
Du's teeth went clack as his mouth swung shut. Now Dougall had everyone's attention; even Bradbury's swimming eyes were on him. He'd dreaded this moment, but suddenly realized there was a pleasurable component to the admission.
He was going to tell them something amazing, something only he understood. Something they'd all failed to guess for fully two decades. He was the one with the power of prophecy now, and Ilse…
He wondered if Ilse was even still alive.
"On the day I stopped that breach," he began, "I heard a voice in my head. My voice, but not my voice. It told me what was about to happen, and it told me how to stop it."
"What." Elstrom didn't make it a question. Merely a commentary.
"Some version of me, some future me, reached back in time and told me how to prevent a disaster from happening. I, he told me…" No need to go all in with the details. Some of the details still ached. "…he told me that if I didn't do exactly as I was told, F-D was going to explode, and a lot of people were going to die. And I believed him. So I did what he asked."
Du had recovered swiftly from the initial shock. "Personally," he sneered, "I wouldn't find scientific advice compelling from any iteration of Dougall Deering."
Dougall had long become accustomed to the supermechanicist's condescension. With Du, it was always easier to be the bigger man. "Well, he was right. There was a materials breach impending, and I did stop it, in the nick of time."
"And then you didn't tell anyone about the magic phone call," Ferber finished for him. "Because you thought it would make you sound like a crazy person."
"Because the voice told me not to tell anyone," Dougall corrected.
"It does make you sound like a crazy person, though," Zaman observed.
"You experienced an anomalous event, and then kept that to yourself." Elstrom's arms were shaking. "I don't need to tell you what a massive, potentially catastrophic flouting of protocol that is."
Dougall waved her off. Her eyes narrowed to pinpricks. "I worked with Ilse Reynders for years, ah…Director?" Elstrom nodded curtly. "I know a lot about temporal protocols. This was an obvious threat to causality. We're not supposed to talk about that kind of thing."
"You're supposed to report it," Elstrom snarled, "to TAD. Did you do that?"
He paused. "No."
"No." She shook her head, and coughed into her shirtsleeve. "Well, when the rest of this is settled, we'll have to see about calling you to account for that massive, ongoing breach of trust. For now, I'd like to know what the hell it has to do with what's going on around us."
"The last thing I had to do," he told her, told them, "was call up Site-120, have them send over a few specific storage crates, open one of them, find a device inside that the voice called 'the REISNO Cannon', and use it to speak with my past self. Use it to become the voice, and complete the loop."
It had not been the sort of evening where outlandish things seemed unlikely. Nobody so much as batted an eyelash at this revelation. Dougall almost felt disappointed, and then out of nowhere he saw Imrich Sýkora dissolving and Rozálie Astrauskas wound through the train cabin in gory spirals, and he nearly vomited.
"And then what?" Ferber, usually calm, collected and gracious, was visibly champing at the bit. "You forgot?"
"Of course I didn't forget." He wanted to scream. "I've spent every day since September the 8th, 2002—"
"Don't care!" Elstrom slapped the table. "Dougall, I do not care how you feel, how you've felt, how you're going to feel. This is not your catharsis. This is where you explain yourself. What happened with the Cannon?"
"It doesn't exist."
They stared at him.
"The container was empty."
After a moment of two of chewing on that, Elstrom pulled her chair back over and sat down in it. She steepled her fingers in front of her, just as McInnis had so often done, then craned her neck forward and hooded her eyes, as he never had.
Du spoke first. "You said the Cannon was supposed to come from 120?"
Dougall nodded. He found, to his surprise, that the bait-and-switch made him angry in retrospect. It was the first strong emotion he'd felt besides shock and terror and confusion in hours.
"Who built it?"
9 September
SCiPnet was down, so they only had access to information in the 43NET database. For obvious security reasons, however, that system contained a fairly current Foundation credentials list synced with the central manifest six hours before the world had gone red. If they hadn't had that, Dougall never would have been able to convince them that Dr. Placeholder McDoctorate actually existed.
"He's supposed to be working out of Site-87." Eileen Veiksaar, Chief of I&T, had been found in a mass of melted wires and insulation half an hour ago by a Random Walks patrol. She'd been trying to keep ahead of the systems malfunctions plaguing the Site as the haze washed over everything, and it had gone very badly indeed. Still. She was covered in tiny first degree burns, and looked a little like someone had slapped her on a griddle and left her to cook, but she wasn't dead. "That's a few hours' drive at most. Wisconsin."
"We need to go get him." Dougall turned to Elstrom, who was back at her podium again. "We need to."
"Why?" The Director gazed down at him with no more pity than before. Less, perhaps. "Hasn't the window already passed?"
"We don't know that. We're still in the damn future, aren't we?" Dougall looked to one side, to where Du was still hunched over Veiksaar's terminal. "Xinyi, back me up here."
Du shrugged. "If the thing exists, we ought to try it. If it doesn't exist, maybe it needs to. Maybe something stopped him from building it, and he just needs the push."
"What could have done that?" Elstrom asked.
"Probably something dipshit over there did differently that he wasn't supposed to, when his future-dipshit-self sent him incomplete instructions."
Dougall found that actually, he wasn't fully capable of handling Du's approach to human relations right now. "You're talking to the dipshit who stopped the worst AcroAbate disaster in human history from taking place."
"Yes," Du nodded. "That is the dipshit to whom I am speaking. I'm also speaking to the dipshit who caused the worst AcroAbate disaster in human history. Unless your brother and thirteen other men frying to death on your instructions isn't your fault, either."
Dougall hadn't even realized he'd tried to move forward until Radcliffe's meaty hands arrested him mid-lunge. "Come over here and say that to my—"
"Tase him," Elstrom shouted, "if he says another goddamn word."
Dougall froze.
"That's better." She cleared her throat again, took off her glasses, and wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. She raised her voice, and adopted a cooler, more commanding tone. "Get me Chief Mukami." Her eyes met Dougall's, and he recoiled at the disgust he saw there. "We're going to have to organize a field trip."
There weren't any fields.
Site-43 was nestled beneath Camp Ipperwash, a relic of an old military camp surrounded by trees and farmland. Or rather, it had been. Dougall wasn't sure why he was joining the little party on their jaunt topside via the elevator — now the only way to escape the main facility, with the loss of the subway system and helicopter stack — except for a vague sense that he ought to see them off, as moral support. Now he wasn't sure he ever wanted to see the sky again.
The sky, of course, was red. There were still clouds, and there were still stars, but it was all still red. He hadn't expected anything else.
He had expected the fields and copses and structures to still be there, however.
Camp Ipperwash was so much rubble. The elevator shaft was still intact, but it opened on a scene of complete and total destruction. Bricks and metal thrown in every direction, until it was impossible to even guess at the footprints of the disused barracks and messes. The trees were barren and twisted into strange shapes, corkscrews and spirals and perhaps even fractals — the ones that didn't look like grasping hands. Some of the hands seemed to be full of beet red dirt. Their little party walked a few metres out of the elevator, and the door closed behind them, and they didn't really notice.
They were fixated on the massive, gaping pits that stretched away from the Site in all directions.
They were still opening up now, Dougall saw. In the far distance, a red barn crumbled and tumbled into a red maw that swallowed up the fences, tractors, and trees surrounding it. The country road grid pattern was still visible, but everything around it was slowly toppling into the grand chasm opening up all around Site-43. Something like an animal called out in the hot, lonely air. Something like.
"Wh-when did this happen?" Mukami walked around the elevator, scanning with wide eyes. "I've been getting reports every ten minutes. They didn't say anything about this." Her voice was practically a croak at this point. The doctors hadn't been able to identify anything wrong.
"Was it these guys?" Whatever Radcliffe was looking at, Dougall couldn't see. The man's massive bulk blocked his view. "Were these the guys you were getting reports from?"
Mukami walked to stand beside him. She stiffened. "This… this didn't happen in ten minutes."
He shook his big head. "Wouldn't think so, no."
"So who were you talking to?" Dougall called. He was the only one still standing near the elevator. The rest had fanned out into the collapsing redscape.
Mukami didn't answer. She simply clenched her jaw, and headed for the pile of bricks and mortar that had been the tiny emergency motor pool.
Dougall took a step forward, and then danced to the side in horror as a hand landed on his shoulder. It was only Du. "We'd better get you back inside."
"I need to see this." Dougall straightened, and then carefully removed the other scientist's hand from his person. "I need… I just need to see it."
"It's not safe for you out here. And you know more than you're telling," Du added darkly, "so I'm not letting you out of my sight. And honestly? Nobody here gives a damn about what you need. Come on."
Du had his finger just inches from the button to close the elevator doors when a roar became audible in the distance. They walked back out to see a jeep rolling slowly down the road to the coast, where whatever Lake Huron had become was still lurking, if it hadn't shuffled off somewhere else entirely. Even at maybe a kilometre away, they could see it was full of agents in riot gear.
Their little group reconvened in time for the MTF vehicle to pull into the pitted tarmac of the vanished camp. It spun in the ruined parking lot, and backed up until Dougall could see the tall, rangy woman propped up in the bed; her uniform trousers were shredded above the knee, and her exposed legs were the reddest that red could be, and there was something very wrong with the way she was breathing.
"Need a lift?" Janet Gwilherm called, through clenched teeth. "Trade you for an elevator ride."
They didn't speak on the way down.
She probably didn't know that he knew.
When she found out, he was damn well not going to be alone with her in an enclosed space.
Du certainly wouldn't have tried to hold her back, and even in a wheelchair, Dougall suspected she could outrun him.
Koda Anoki, the de facto chief psychologist because… well, because he was, began the interviews shortly after the red dust settled on what was left of Army Camp Road.
It was important to have records, he said.
Something in the way he said it, though, made Dougall hear the word evidence instead.
"About eighty percent casualties," Gwilherm said with her mouth almost completely closed. The doctors Forsythe were each kneeling by one of her thighs, and they were applying something from a spray bottle that made the blistered skin glisten like watermelon. "Ninety-five if everyone we left behind got caught. Probably did."
Gwilherm's jeep had contained just five people from the Mobile Task Forces stationed at AAF-A. She was saying she'd lost nearly a hundred people at the lake.
The hospital room wasn't precisely silent as the Director considered this information; screams and weeping were audible from the wards outside. It was still too close to silence, Dougall decided. Every time everyone stopped talking, he started to remember how his heart had felt when the light from the warehouse had spilled into that empty, impossibly empty container…
"What the hell happened?" he asked.
Gwilherm gave him a suspicious look before responding. Probably she was wondering why he was involved in this at all. Everyone at Site-43 who knew Dougall worked there also knew he worked alone. "The lake overtopped its banks. Started eating everything."
"Define eating." Elstrom was sitting in the corner, massaging her throat. "Define everything."
"At first it was just lapping up higher and higher, pulling in the beach." Gwilherm barely winced as the doctors worked on her legs, even when what Dougall took to be the remains of her skin started sloughing off under the aerosol assault. "Then it started reaching out." She made a brief gesture with her right hand, forming claws; that did make her wince, and she closed her eyes while relaxing the fingers again. "It took five men in about five seconds. That's after we dealt with the ghosts."
"Ghosts," Dougall repeated.
"You'd have to ask Mataxas what they're called. Human-shaped, but shimmering. All along the coast, as the water rose up. Like the water was chasing them out."
"It was chasing the cats, too," Dougall remembered. "The water panthers."
Gwilherm's lip curled. "Well, I think it caught them."
"Why?"
"Because when the lake put out its little fingers and started trying to pull my men down, it formed them into screaming little kitties made of black water."
Dougall stared at her.
"Between that, and the ghosts, and the other thing—"
"What other thing?" Elstrom interrupted.
Gwilherm glanced at Dougall for a moment, uncertain. It wasn't a look she often had on her face. Then she looked at the Director, and shrugged. "We didn't get a good look at it. We were in retreat by then. But it was also pulling people into the lake, the way they say the panthers used to do. Pulling them down."
"How high are the waters now?" Elstrom had her glasses back on, though her eyes were still squinting and her voice was still hoarse.
"Too high for gravity," Gwilherm responded. "Like a 3-D bell curve, or whatever the fuck." She winced in sudden pain, and glared at the CMO before finishing. "The lake would have to cover half of North America for this to make any sense, Karen, but F-A is fucking under water."
10 September
Dougall was in his quarters when the jeep returned. Staring at the ceiling.
He'd thought about saying something. Saying it into the dark, alone but out loud. Trying out the words.
He'd thought about saying he was sorry.
The thing was, he wasn't.
Something in the back of his mind was still telling him he'd been right. Still insisted he'd done the right thing. Still wouldn't accept that his intentions had been anything but pure, that this was more than a cruel cosmic joke at his expense which he did not deserve.
When his pager buzzed, he got up and headed for the door without bothering to check his appearance in the mirror. Everything looked the same in red, anyhow.
At least it hurt less when a nurse tilted his head back and applied a few drops of something milky to each eye. "Enough strain going around," he grunted before moving on to the next lucky recipient.
"I don't know what I expected from a guy named Placeholder McDoctorate," Helena Forsythe sighed as she stripped off her examination gloves, "but this feels about right."
Behind the opaque glass, the man in the straitjacket was howling. Dougall recognized snatches of technobabble, scientific formulae, and clinical speech, in between inarticulate howls and the one thing the man had come back to again and again since Mukami and Radcliffe had picked him up in what was left of Wisconsin. He sounded like an alien trying to sound like a human scientist at the top of its lungs. He looked…
Dougall blinked. It was damn near impossible to focus on anything with this milky fluid running across his retina.
"Is he injured?" Elstrom was slumped over a wheelchair, and talking into one of her handkerchiefs. "Physically?"
Forsythe shook her head. On the other side of the glass, her daughter was still examining their unruly patient at a safe and respectable distance. "Sure. He's covered in abrasions and bruises. A broken rib. Nothing we couldn't tidy up reasonably well, and he can't hurt himself much more now."
They watched as he fell to the floor, and started rolling around. Forsythe bit her lip.
"What?" Dougall asked.
"How bad was it out there?"
Dougall looked at Elstrom. Elstrom looked away, but she did answer. "Bad. I'm still waiting on a full report."
He knew that wasn't true. Mukami had spent an hour in Elstrom's office, while the doctors did their work. Whatever was going on outside the demesne of Site-43, the Director didn't want to tell them. That was probably not a good sign.
"How soon until you can get him stable?" Elstrom pressed. She glanced at the handkerchief, and hurriedly tucked it away in her pants pocket.
Forsythe sighed again. "Chemically? I have no idea. If you're going to try and get anything useful out of him, he'll need to be a lot more—"
"MOM!"
Her daughter's voice from the speaker at the door made Forsythe spin to face the window, and Elstrom get to her shaky feet. Billie had her radio to her mouth, and was backed into the far corner, eyes wide with fear. Placeholder was standing at the glass, dark, curly hair wild and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of mania.
"THEY'VE LEFT US," he bellowed, and Dougall imagined the glass shook. The pataphysicist slammed his head into the glass, reopening one of the gashes on his forehead that the doctors had stitched up, and with the interpolation of a blood smear Dougall saw something altogether different in the screaming mirror image. "THE AUTHORS HAVE LEFT US!"
Dougall staggered out in a daze, clutching at the handrails on every wall for support. What the hell does that mean. And why did it cut him to the quick?
He pulled himself along until the railings ended, and he was out of Health and Pathology. Time to find his own feet. He took a deep breath, and walked confidently into the wrong Section.
Placeholder's ranting must have unbalanced him even more than he'd realized. This wasn't the habs, this was the psych wards. Dammit.
He almost turned around when he noticed something large and striking at the end of the hall. A tall figure with broad shoulders and bronze skin. A figure Dougall recognized, but hadn't expected to see. "Chief?"
He hadn't spoken loudly enough to be heard over the intervening space, but somehow the other picked it up anyway. The All-Sections Chief — that wasn't their name, of course, wasn't even their title anymore — strode over to him, po-faced until they got a better look at Dougall. Then, they forced a smile.
Dougall had never seen a forced smile on that face before.
"Dr. Deering. Do you need help?" The ASC looked over their shoulder. "Should you be upright?"
"I'm not patient. I'm not… not a patient." There was a bench nearby, and Dougall flopped down on it with a little help steering. The ASC sat down beside him, and waited until he'd caught his breath. "What are you doing down here? I thought you were…"
Dougall actually hadn't had any idea what had happened to the ASC after Falkirk summarily dismissed them, so he let the other take over. "I was," they agreed. "I was outside when… it started."
Not even McInnis could regulate his emotions as well as the ASC. They were a lawyer, a lawyer whose cases tested the limits of a never very patient public and meant literal life and death to the people on the res. They could hide a lot behind that practiced twinkle in their eye. "Okay," said Dougall. "But that doesn't explain how you got down here."
"Hitched a ride." The ASC took a deep breath. "I was well on my way to 87 when Janet picked me up on her way back home."
"Why were you headed there?"
"I thought maybe things might be different. Safer. Or at least strange in a way less… prejudicial to staying alive."
"Was it?"
The ASC smiled grimly. "Not from what they told me."
Dougall's breathing was more regular now, his pulse less elevated. Just talking to the ASC was almost always a calming activity. He sat back upright. "Well, I don't know how much better it'll be down here."
"As good as we make it, I suspect." The ASC clutched Dougall's shoulder. From anyone else, it would have felt like condescension. From anyone else Dougall would have taken offence. "Same as any other place."
Dougall nodded. It seemed like the appropriate response, whether he meant it or not. "What're you doing in P&P?"
"I had my medical checkup, but the Drs. Forsythe wanted me to get a quick psych evaluation before I get pressed back into duty. Would you believe," and they pulled a neatly folded printout from their jacket, "that the system spat out this as my assigned psychologist?"
Dougall glanced at the proffered page. Where the consulting doctor's name was meant to be, there was simply a string of utter gibberish. Not even English. Dougall couldn't begin to understand what it might refer to, but… "I'd have believed you," he said, "even if you hadn't shown me. Nothing works quite right right now. Veiksaar's up to her nose in broken tech."
The ASC shrugged. "I suppose I'll knock on a few doors. See which doctor is in." The ghost of a smirk crossed their lips, for an instant. "It won't hurt to reintroduce myself, anyway. I have been away a long time."
Something still wasn't right. Ghosts and mad cats and the rising lake and… "Wait. Chief. What happened to the rest?"
Suddenly the other's face looked tight, like they were actually a taxidermy of themself. "The rest of what?"
"Didn't you have people out there? On the res?"
"Yes." The ASC nodded. Then they buttoned up their suit, and stood up. "Yes, I did."
It had been over a day since the breach, and they were still taking the full measure of what had been lost.
All four Acroamatic Abatement Facilities were effectively destroyed. F-D was little more than a shattered, toxic shell. As the red wave that Du was calling the "paradox wavefront" hit -B and -C, it swept every micron of anomalous material out of the pipes and vats and conduits as if they hadn't even existed, as though the stuff had been merely suspended in air, and deposited it in every corner of the Site without apparent discrimination for context. Veiksaar was managing a master list of every room that had been confirmed free of esoteric effluence, while S&C agents in esomat and hexmat suits engaged in the laborious task of checking every dorm room, every office, every lab and every closet for the hundred-odd staff members not yet accounted for.
One researcher in memetics had been fused with his bedsheets, and was still alive. Plucking the threads out of his skin wasn't anywhere near the top of the triage; they'd just cut his head and genitals free, and moved on. One of Dougall's occultists had been finely diced when she tried to push her way through a glass door, and it had reorganized around her like a diamond-edged cheese grater. Elstrom's secretary had been flash-candied by the appearance of a metric ton of red-hot syrup that filled his office perfectly; the HR officer who'd first opened the door had sustained only a minor glazing. At least ten people had been scared to death by something; only some of the somethings appeared on security footage.
It was still impossible to make contact with the Foundation at large. Though the Site's main transmitter was at AAF-A — declared a total loss after Gwilherm's field report, which painted a vivid picture of a rattling wall of bone and its steam-wreathed spectral curtain as the hungry lake rose up to overtop it — there were backup systems at Camp Ipperwash that could have made up the difference. These, of course, were somewhere beneath a pile of rubble they now lacked the machinery to move.
Intake Point-94 at the centre of the lake had, of course, been shattered. The tunnels beneath F-A where Wynn Rydderech had spent his sad post-elderhood were already half filled with the mewling, clawing lake, and the eternal factory was surging, spluttering, and sinking into the murk. A miasma was rising up from beneath the main facility now, slowly baking the ontokinetic shielding that formed Site-43's protective membrane. Nobody had the faintest idea what they could do about that.
Every living thing in the containment blocks, sapient or not, had been struck dead by Markey's intervention. This qualified as the only nice miracle in an ever-expanding list of nasty.
The security and maintenance personnel worked double overtime blocking off the remaining apertures through which the Blue Line connected with the main subway circuit. Mukami executed the second half of SUNDOWN Protocol, the pyroclastic activation of expanding foam cells in Rydderech's cavern to entomb him with the help of the Lake Huron waters; this had the effect of doubling the lake's rate of rise, but whether it achieved anything else was impossible to tell from so far away. Some of the doors in the main facility did open on the cavern's farthest outgrowths, but they'd all been bolted shut and Scranton Reality Anchors set up in front of them.
Romolo Ambrogi estimated that when the cavern was completely filled with water — as it must do, given Lake Huron's approximate volume of three and a half thousand cubic metres, assuming the other Great Lakes didn't also catch sentience from their upstart sister — one of two things would happen: homeostasis would be reached and there would be no further encroachment, or the water would start eating through the softest material it could reach, which he figured would be the bedrock due to the space-age materials employed in the facility's undercarriage.
Dougall gloomily added a third suggestion, which almost got him kicked out of the meeting: "Or since it doesn't obey the laws of gravity, once it's finished filling the cavern, the rest will start crawling over the pits to drown us all from above."
The only immediate point of light came from Koda Anoki, the Site's chief psychologist, who had been working on Dr. McDoctorate since he'd become more variably verbal. The pataphysicist was still muttering dark omens and spitting pure nonsense, but between his shrieks and warnings he did have the occasional moment of lucidity. Anoki was able to provide Dougall with the answers to two very important questions for the next C&C meeting:
Q. Have you ever heard of a device called "The REISNO Cannon"?
A. No. Very funny. Terrific joke on the madman. Bravo.
Anoki had wanted to stop at that, but Dougall had given him the second question and insisted, despite its absurdity, that he ask it.
Q. Do you think you could build it anyway?
11 September
McDoctorate glared up, not at Anoki, not at Dougall, but at the security camera mounted on the ceiling. "Sure. I can build nothing. We're already nowhere."
"I'm marking that down as a 'yes', said Dougall, and he flipped over the cover on his notebook. "You coming?"
Anoki shook his head. "I'd like to stay and chat with him a little more. This is the longest coherent period he's had yet."
"It was that terrible joke." McDoctorate leaned forward, a conspiratorial glint in his eye, and Anoki leaned closer too.
As Dougall left, the pataphysicist was slamming his face into the shiny metal table while Anoki struggled to pull him back.
"So," Dougall concluded. "That's progress."
It was all eyes on him now; nearly every Chair and every Chief whose location was known, had made their location the C&C boardroom at midnight. Usually he relished the attention, particularly given how hard he had to work to win it. Not today.
Elstrom worked her lips together until there hardly seemed to be an aperture of any kind on that side of her face, and said nothing. She'd barely opened her mouth all day, and when she did, her words came out in a dry rasp.
"Thank you, Dr. Deering." The All-Sections Chief — they were still calling them that, for lack of anything more appropriate, and they'd been reintroduced to the ranks of the elite by silent agreement — gave him an encouraging smile with no gusto behind it, and turned to the others. "Any progress on determining the nature of this problem, Dr. Du?"
Du pointed at Dougall. Most of the Chairs and Chiefs sitting around the mirror-polished table turned to look at him, confused. Nearly all of them had missed that first crucial briefing, and Dougall hadn't felt the need to catch them up. Apparently neither had Elstrom; at the moment he thought of her, she turned her head and coughed, wetly.
"Please elaborate." The ASC looked as confused as anyone else. Elstrom had never seen the purpose of a deputy, like Falkirk before her, but after shouting herself into a right state over the past twenty-four hours she'd obviously reconsidered her position re: having a mellifluous mouthpiece.
"The paradox wavefront originated with Dr. Deering." Du showed no pleasure, evinced no vindictiveness, as he threw his colleague to the dogs. He had the affect of a man simply stating what was so. "His attempt to coordinate a stable time loop wherein he prevented the breach of 2002 by sending information back in time failed to account for all possible variables, as inevitably it would, and the resultant realistic sheer reacted negatively with the materials being pumped through the AcroAbate systems, backlashing into a bloom of tremendous ontokinetic potential."
"You did that?" The ASC blinked at him. "Dr. Deering?"
Dougall sighed. "Yes. I was acting in the best interests of this facility, but yes. My actions, prompted by my future self using a complex device designed for just this very purpose, inadvertently triggered the long sequence of events which resulted in our present… difficulties." It almost sounded bloodless, with that much qualification. He'd recited it while waiting sleeplessly for the jeep to return from Wisconsin.
"Can you paraphrase Dr. Du's explanation of that trigger?" Now that Dougall examined them out of the clinical light of H&P, the All-Sections Chief looked blasted and unkempt. Dougall had never seen them as anything but the pinnacle of self-presentation. "I want to make sure I understand what you're admitting to."
"I'll fucking paraphrase it for you." Both of Janet Gwilherm's legs were bandaged from crotch to toe, covering up long stretches where the skin no longer existed. "This stupid mother fucker caused an XK Scenario on a whim."
"It wasn't a whim." Even in the red tenebrescence, even with half of the Chairs and Chiefs missing, he couldn't stand to be scrutinized like this. They had no right to judge him. It wasn't his fault. "I was trying to prevent a disaster."
"You would seem to have done a very poor job of that." Du's eyes were fixed on an empty point of space just over Dougall's shoulder. No doubt he was already planning some genius method of escaping their present conundrum. Dougall couldn't wait to hear what it would be.
"Of course he did," Elstrom spat. Literally spat, into yet another handkerchief. She had to be running out soon. "He's never been a competent manager. Why would you think you could manage something this complex?" Her once-blue eyes bored into him now, and he was briefly reminded of his former fiancée.
And his ex-wife, whose blazing orange irises were now boiling red on the floor in AAF-D.
"I already told you." It was amazing how bureaucracy could make even a crisis seem more frustrating than dangerous. "I was following clear and sensible instructions—"
"You didn't think to report any of this?" Mukami was always among the most level-headed (if mealy-mouthed) at these gatherings, but there was a frantic gleam in her eye now. Nascimbeni had been her husband, after all. "It never occurred to you that this was a matter of concern for the security team?"
In spite of his exhaustion, the burn of embarrassment raised his hackles. "I'm the Chief of Applied Occultism," he reminded them. "I've got confidentiality exemptions no-one else—"
"Had," Sokolsky drawled. Alone among them, the memeticist looked to be both living in the present moment and standing on an even keel. He was tapping at a tablet computer, and leaning on the west wall; Del Olmo's chair sat empty in front of him, its usual occupant still unconscious in H&P. "I'm pretty sure all your special privileges are about to be revoked. Consequence of screwing the entire human race with your dipstick scheme. If it had been me—"
"But it wasn't you." Dougall found himself standing, and his voice rose to the occasion. "It wasn't any of you. It was me. I had a unique opportunity to set things right, and I took it. Something else interfered. Something else made it not work. None of this, none of this was my fucking fault."
And one by one, stiffly or painfully or vibrating with rage, the other Chairs and Chiefs rose to meet him.
"The decommissioning," Romolo snarled, feeling his fingers clench of their own volition. "That was your idea. Fourteen people died because of you, and your stupid idea. And today we find out a little bird tweeted it in your fucking ear?"
"You killed him." Melissa's voice was a whirlpool of tears, and she didn't care. "You killed him, you son of a bitch."
Reuben steadied his wife with a hand on the small of her back. His flesh, covered in rectilinear red spots, ached with every flex. "You killed my best friend." He forced enough emotion into it that he found, to his surprise, he almost meant it.
"You've breached protocol," the ASC rumbled, "to a staggering extent. I can't even begin to imagine the arrogance…" They couldn't finish. The weight of what was happening was only just now bearing down on their shoulders. The res. Their people. Allan…
"This isn't productive," said somebody nobody else could hear. Somebody getting desperate.
"I move for demotion." Karen's lips barely parted as the words came out. She felt her jaw locking with fury, bloody bile rising at the back of her throat.
"I move for execution," Janet half-shouted. She was still wearing her service weapon at her hip, where the bandages were least bloody. Nobody had suggested she surrender it. It would be so easy to put a neat little hole in that furrowed forehead…
"We might still get some use out of him," Sokolsky mused. "I say induce a chemical coma until we need more answers." It was darkly pleasurable to see the panic in the supercilious occultist's eyes at this.
"What were you thinking?" Mukami was shaking her head, as though that might help clear the deep red blur. "You weren't thinking. You never think. Do you realize what you've done?" She wasn't even sure she did. Was all the damage known, or was there more yet to come?
Her husband had been days from retirement. Like Blank. Like Wettle. This was their reward.
"He's too stupid." Even Du was beginning to warm to the subject. "He's always been too stupid. They elevated him way beyond his talents, whatever those are supposed to be. Peter Principle in the flesh." It felt good to get this out in the open. The collapse of professional courtesy was a glorious thing for academics.
The ASC struggled to maintain their famous composure. "Your… your…" They surrendered to the impulse. They could do nothing more. "Your abject idiocy has robbed us of a resource of stability and leadership we could use now more than ever." They didn't look at Elstrom. She knew it was true, anyway. "You've created a crisis, jeopardized our operations, and compromised our ability to respond in one fell swoop."
"I think—" Dolly began.
"You arrogant fuck," Melissa spat, and the Chief of A&O shut up. "You arrogant FUCK." She felt she could say it 'til doomsday, assuming that wasn't already the date.
"Imbecile," Reuben agreed.
"Murderer." Romolo felt the need to reciprocate burning in his bones. This man had taken his entire family from him in one moment of catastrophic arrogance. He deserved to die. He deserved worse.
"You aren't worth a tenth of any of them," Sokolsky grinned. "If I ever get hold of that device, I'm going to call my past self and tell me to push you into that grounding conduit."
"Phil was twice the man you ever were," Noor added, and he watched with satisfaction as the last of Dougall's stomach fell out. The occultist sat down heavily, and the light in the room shifted. The shiny surface of the table blurred, and Noor reached up to wipe away tears for what felt like the hundredth time today.
This time, there were none. He'd cried himself dry. He'd had family in Grand Bend, and Mukami had told him that Grand Bend no longer existed.
"You're a talentless hack." It was the first time Eileen had spoken. She'd been searching for just precisely the right words to express how she felt. "I'm confident you gamed the hiring and promotions processes. I could just never prove it. Nobody as pathetic as you deserves to be in a position of power."
"He's not in a position of power now," Karen crowed. The hateful man's comprehensive dismantling filled her with a sour sort of jubilation. "He's persona non grata. As soon as we get this mess cleared up, he'll be on the next flight to Area-06. Assuming it still exists."
"Why wait and see? Prison's too good for him," Gwilherm opined. "What's there to rehabilitate?"
"He's not a monster," someone objected. "He's just a fool—" They didn't get the chance to complete their sentence, because Gwilherm cut in again.
"He's a self-centred bastard. We ought to put him out the front door, and see how the lake likes him."
"He probably tastes worse than he works." Eileen's lip had curled until it would curl no more.
"He's like the trash he used to process," Sokolsky nodded. "Only good for disposal."
"And he's shitting bricks right now," Reuben added. "Can't even take his just deserts like a man."
"He's the best of all of you. He knows better. He's always known better."
Everyone in the room froze, except for Dougall.
The voice hadn't come from any of them.
"Dougall is the man for this hour," the voice continued. It was harsh, grating, like speech simulated by scraping rusted metal with stone. "You will come to know his value, very soon."
They hadn't noticed it, in the crimson gloom. Hadn't seen the subtle shift on the shining wood, so focused were they on the catharsis of recrimination.
Hadn't noticed the figure in the reflection on the table, the visage of Philip Deering with blood-streaked empty sockets and a wide, manic grin.
It lunged out of the wood, and in a single swiping motion tore off Xinyi Du's arm.
In Applied Occultism, Dr. Brady was halfway through the glass double doors to the lounge when something grabbed him. He was pulled into the door edge, only two centimetres thick, and his body curled up into itself to become a thick smear that slopped to the aquamarine tiles by the bucketload.
In Psychology and Parapsychology, Dr. Augustin was considering throwing her diploma to the floor when it suddenly filled with a face out of nightmares, reached out, and seized her hand. It pulled her into the frame, through the glass, and her neck snapped and her head lolled back and it took that, too, and the only thing stopping it from abducting her completely was the fact that her torso burst open as the creature tried to haul her off the ground, and her guts spilled out, and her pelvis detached from her spine, and her lower half fell over backward while the upper was pulled clear with a cracking of ribs and a grinding of gristle.
In his office at the back end of Hiring and Regulation, Galen Wallis picked up the framed photograph and wished occluding tears would come. Would rob him of the need to see her smiling face. Would let him surrender to the crushing sense of loss.
Because the tears didn't come, he was watching when the hand shot out of the glass. It still wasn't enough warning for him to escape that taloned grasp at his throat, and it pulled him face-first into the portrait. He screamed in despair as the glass shattered, standing up at his desk in shock.
His wife stared back at him from the torn photograph in its ruined frame, and he cried tears of blood.
Shiny red tears of blood.
In the gymnasium, technician Simms avoided his own reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. It didn't matter what he looked like now. What mattered was the image in his mind's eye of the man he could become. This was a crisis. No time to be soft. Time to step up.
Agent O waved at him as she headed for the elliptical machines. She kept the hand aloft for a few moments after the bleeding apparition behind him wrapped its taloned hands around his midsection, and pulled him bodily into the mirror. By the time she'd regained the initiative and crossed the padded floor, both of them were gone.
And then one of them came back.
In I&T, technician De Lang was rewriting the style sheets used by the Site's various computer systems to optimize viewing in low-light, blue-starved environments. A test run produced something almost pink-on-black, and he smiled at the tired reflection of his face he was suddenly able to see again on the monitor.
And then it wasn't his reflection.
And then the thing in the screen pushed itself out, clawed hands digging divots into his keyboard tray, and it opened its gnashing maw, and then technician De Lang didn't have a face anymore.
In the main cafeteria, Eddie Wyers squinted at the pan of boiling oil. He was going to fry something. What was the point in cooking fancy, when everyone was already depressed and everything looked uniformly monochrome?
The oil sizzled against his skin, and he dropped the pan and screamed. The hand kept coming out, and it slapped his chest with a blazing print that seared clean through the ribcage. His innards were frying in seconds.
In AAF-B, technician Routledge wiped the condensation off the pipe for the fifth time in as many minutes. The last vestiges of decomposited parasapience runoff cycling through the system were well past recondicity, and there was no way to abate it now with the loss of F-A. All he could do was wipe off the saline solution, and try not to think about why the slowly-noögenizing pipes were weeping.
The renewed breach alarm startled him, since the lights were already red, so he briefly neglected to wipe away the residue. When he looked down again, it was grinning at him. When he blinked, the grin was burning in his eyes.
He felt them burst in the instant before his brain died.
Koda Anoki placed both hands on the interview table, pushing his exhausted body up as he prepared to take his leave, and something else gripped both of them and pulled him all the way in.
Placeholder McDoctorate watched him fall. The realization of what madness really looked like did wonders for his mental state.
In the Chairs and Chiefs boardroom, almost everyone was screaming.
On the table, in the reflection, the mockery of Philip Deering was still moving its mouth and grinning.
Dougall couldn't hear what it was saying. It wasn't looking at him.
It was looking at Du's severed arm, now in the reflection too, as the man bled out on the carpet.
