Chapter 139
What did I expect, Connor thought to himself.
He thought that as he shot through the entry of the black cube that wasn’t so much shadow as a gateway to another world, another time and place.
He thought that as he tumbled through a void with no dimensions or volume.
He thought that an instant became infinity, which bent back on itself to a frozen point before he made the jump through the shadow wall.
In this infinite pinprick of matter curved onto time looped back over onto distance expressed as energy, the monsters fell with him and clung to nothing forever.
Their stench filled the vacuum, saturating nonexistent subatomic particles boiling in the icy heart of a neutron star.
It was all madness, all contradictions and impossibilities.
Connor accepted that. He wrapped himself in the protection of Toshiko, her ancient amulet, and the power of the architects who had created the prison.
And then his fall ended, and he stepped into a chamber dark as midnight and anchored in a dimension that wasn’t his own.
Lined with walls that seemed to bend at strange angles and disappear only to reappear, the surfaces patterned with mazes and spirals interrupted by stretches of symbols he hadn’t seen before—some raised, some etched.
Out of space, out of time, out of reality.
Ice frosted the ceiling and upper stretches of the giant chamber, while desert heat rolled up from a sunken pool big enough to house the Lucky Sevens, the archaeologists’ ship, the two abandoned ships, and a Coil Sector Fang destroyer.
The pool was huge.
And it was gridded with blue lasers—weapons-grade lasers. They laced the interior, bouncing off mirrors to create a lattice that left so little room even he couldn’t have moved down there.
This was…well, not the prison, but the entry to it.
Somewhere beyond that deep pool, the murderous, corrupting alien watched.
Selen had been here. She’d been close to the thing that controlled her.
Once so close to the source of what had perverted her, could she be saved?
He intended to try.
After he repaired the compromised seal.
Behind him, something scurried: a set of huge insect legs scraping across the stone.
The mutations were coming through.
One after another, the things passed through the void: winged and tentacled spider things; giant bugs with snake heads snapping dagger teeth; snakes with beak-lined tentacles slapping against the floor.
Unsurprisingly, their stench filled the gargantuan room.
Even here, away from the ones he needed to protect, he couldn’t fight them all.
But he had a plan.
He turned and tapped the ends of his blades together. “Welcome! Let’s finish this.”
Several of the winged things dove at him as the grotesque things surged across the floor.
Connor ran.
He skipped, hopped, and jumped.
He flipped and bounced off the walls, using the strange angles to pull off maneuvers that confused the monsters.
It was the connection to the alien technology, the sense of awareness it gifted that enabled him to do what he was doing. The best athlete trained for exactly this sort of feat wouldn’t have been capable of what he did then.
Now he needed to find the limits of his abilities.
When he landed after a particularly high jump, he whistled and scraped the blades together. “Come on! Keep up!”
The monsters probably didn’t understand what he was saying, but the taunting felt good, and it seemed to encourage them.
And the thing that had created them understood.
Good. Anger was a weapon, too.
Connor slowed for a second, letting several creatures close, then he darted toward the far corner of the pool.
They followed. Flapping wings and buzzing told him some of the flying creatures were coming in for a strike.
A few centimeters from the pool’s edge, Connor launched and tucked.
It was the limit of what he knew he could do: a few meters over the wide-open abyss of the dark pool.
He landed a couple meters beyond where he expected.
The pursuing creatures…didn’t.
They plunged into the pool, where the lasers sliced them into pieces.
Foul smoke rose from the depths, and Connor had a sense of the things flopping and splatting in pieces off the bottom.
Then he was engaged with the flying things.
To come at him, they dove, but they lacked coordination. They operated individually and clumsily.
He hacked off tentacles, stingers, and abdomens.
The flying things gave up, and now more of the creatures on the ground lunged toward him.
Repeating what he’d done before seemed unlikely to pay off, so Connor relied upon what he’d just confirmed: He could now jump farther than a human could realistically hope to.
After sprinting half the width of the pool, he angled to the left, hugging the wall, then cut back toward the pool.
Hot on his heels, the last of the ground creatures followed.
“Keep up!” He hopped when a tentacle reached for him.
Then he hurled himself into the air, swinging at the lowest of the flying terrors.
And the things slithering, hopping, skittering, and lurching followed.
They slipped over the edge of the pool, where gravity and lasers finished the job.
Connor landed on the far edge of the pool, arms windmilling to keep his balance.
His heart thundered, and his breath sounded like a tempest.
Nothing remained of the creatures that had come from Selen’s armor.
“Is that it? Are we done?” He slumped to his knees. “I have people who need attention. They’ll die without me.”
Instead of a hologram, the blue glow of the lasers winked out.
One by one, the beams disappeared, and the complicated lattice became nothing more than an artifact in the awareness gifted by the builders’ technology.
Then a wave of fetid, smothering heat belched up from the empty pool, and a sound so deep it was felt rather than heard shook him.
From nowhere, a black, oily fluid bubbled up, covering the destroyed creatures.
In seconds, the fluid filled the pool—liter after liter after liter.
And in the depths, something moved.