01-Spark - 6. The Queen

Chapter 6. The Queen

I stumbled forward, free. Now I had to act. I prepared myself to attack him right then, just in case he changed his mind. I knew he was a better fighter than I was, but if I didn't seize this chance I might regret it later. I got into second pose.

Andy saw how I tensed my body as I flowed into the offensive posture, and he reacted instinctively, assuming a defensive stance. Should I trust him? Or fight? We held the tension for a few long moments, but then I saw the streaks the tears had left on his bloodstained face, and I thought about the things he had said, the way he had set me free in good faith. The fight left me. I dropped my arms and my shoulders slumped. Andy did the same.

I gave him a sad smile. “Sorry. I just find it hard to trust in other people.”

“Me, too.”

Then the radio communicator crackled to life. Bentley's voice sounded from it, uncomfortably loud.

“I knew you would fucking betray me,” he said into the silence. “Are you so retarded that you assumed I wouldn't have you bugged, Lake?”

We both jumped, startled, and looked at the small communicator. It was acting like a one-way radio, and neither Andy nor I were close enough to turn it off. We only listened, spellbound.

“For that, you fucking faggot, and for thinking you could doublecross me, I'm going to have one of your brother's fingers. I'd send it to you to prove you I'm going to do it, but I'll do you one better. You'll get to hear your brother scream as I cut it off.”

“Bentley, don’t!” Andy yelled.

“Fuck you, Lake.”

We listened, horrified and helpless, as Bentley's voice trailed off and started shouting at someone. That someone answered, and I recognized Dean's voice. He sounded scared. Really scared. The voices got closer, and I started to be able to make out the words.

“No!” Dean was saying, his voice shaking with fear. “Please don't do it, Bentley. Please!”

Bentley answered in a sadistic tone. “Be still. You be a good boy, now, and I will only take one finger. Or do you want to lose more? Give me your hand! Over the chain, you idiot. Now don't move while I take out the pliers.”

“Please don't do it! Andy! Andy, help me!”

“Ah, here they are,” Bentley said, and I could almost hear him smile. “Don't worry, kid. It's just like cutting the leg off a chicken. Here we go.”

“Andy!” Dean screamed. “Andy...NOOOO!”

There was a sickening snip sound and then Dean's screams got much, much louder.

“DEAN!” Andy shouted helplessly. “DEAN!”

There was a sound of dragging something, and gradually Dean's screams faded away. Then heavy footsteps stomped back and Bentley spoke. “Such drama, right, Lake? It's only one little finger. It's not like I cut off his thumb or anything, but you'd think I'd cut off his entire hand.”

“Fuck you, Bentley,” Andy said, his voice shaking with fury. “I'm going to kill you!”

Bentley laughed. “I don't think so. Here's what you are going to do if you don’t want to listen to me dismembering your little brother piece by piece. You're going to get that Peacekeeper trick of yours to open the chamber. Right now. I can't do my thing if the entire chamber is protected like it is right now, so make sure he does it. Punch him or fuck him but make him do it, or your brother loses another finger. You have ten seconds.”

Andy looked at me pleadingly. From far off, but still audible, came Dean's cries of pain. Open the genesis chamber? But what could Bentley do from up there? I couldn't see any danger; we were deep underground and he was on the surface. Was he trying to get Andy to work with him again, step by step? Or did he have another way to kill the queen from wherever he was?

“Time's up,” Bentley announced. “This time I'm taking a thumb.”

“NO!” I roared, surprising even myself. “Stop. I will do it.”

“Nice,” Bentley said appreciatively. “So quick to betray your entire city. Are you sure you're a Peacekeeper?” He laughed.

“Don't hurt Dean again,” I told him. “Let him go. Or no deal.”

“Rick, don't do this,” Andy told me, placing a hand on my shoulder. He gulped, and tears made his eyes sparkle. “Dean… Dean will understand.”

My mind flashed back to Jane. To what she would have told me to do.

I took his hand from off my shoulder and held it briefly in mine. “No. This isn't what Peacekeepers do. We protect others, even if it's only one person. Especially if it's only one.”

Andy nodded slowly. “Thank you, Rick,” he said, his voice husky.

I hoped I hadn't just signed a deal with the devil, but I simply couldn't stand by while somebody tortured another human being. My job had always been to protect. And I would do it, even if I regretted it bitterly later.

I raised my voice. “Bentley. I need an answer. You let Dean go, I help you open this chamber. I need proof that he's free, I need him telling me that he's free to move, and then I need you on this line, not moving, long enough for Dean to run clear from you. Take it or leave it. Now.”

There was a pause. A long pause, sly and calculating. I didn't expect him to actually agree, but I was ready to negotiate. Then, suddenly, Bentley answered.

“Sure, why not. Dean's useless now, anyway. I’ll let him go as soon as you say the words that will open the chamber.”

“No deal,” I said. “You let him go first, then I open it.”

Bentley made a big show of sighing. “No trust anymore, huh? Fine, Peacekeeper. Have it your way.”

There were sounds of somebody walking away, and then some rough words spoken. A few seconds later, we heard two people approaching the communicator on their end.

“Here. Tell them that you're free,” Bentley ordered.

“Andy?” Dean asked shakily.

“Dean! Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“Just… Just my pinky. On my left hand. He gave me a bandage.”

The fury on Andy's face was terrible to behold.

Bentley cut in. “Enough with the family reunion. Tell them you're free and get the hell out of here before I shoot you down.”

“Are you free to go, Dean?” Andy asked anxiously.

“Yes. I can go.”

“Then run, Dean. Get to the city. Tell them everything and they’ll help you. Go now!”

“Andy…”

“GO!” Andy yelled.

We heard hurried footsteps fading away. Dean said something as he ran, but he was already too far away and the communicator didn’t pick it up.

Bentley sighed loudly again next to his microphone. “Okay. I kept my word. Now open the chamber, Peacekeeper, or I shoot Dean down. He's still in my sights and I got a good sniper rifle with me.”

I nodded even though he couldn't see me. “Five minutes, then I do it. Dean needs time to get away.”

“Okay, okay. You got it.”

We waited out the five minutes. The channel was open all the time; Andy was making sure that Bentley didn’t hack it to mute the sound of a shot. When we were as certain as we could be that Dean was well away, I spoke again. I had given him as much time as I could. If I didn't fulfill my end of the bargain and keep Bentley busy doing whatever it was he needed to do, Bentley might simply go hunting after Dean with his rifle. I couldn't let that happen.

“I'm ready,” I told him.

“About damn time. Open the fucking chamber already.”

I closed my eyes briefly. There was no backing away now. “Computer! This is Peacekeeper Rick Dwight. Open the inner doors. Request for full access to the genesis chamber.”

There was a slight pause. Then, “Access granted. Welcome, Rick Dwight.”

“Nice,” Bentley said. “Now I can do my thing. Good talking to you, Peacekeeper. I'll check back in before everybody dies. Just to let you know how you made it possible for me to kill so many people. Bentley out.”

The line went dead again. Neither Andy nor I said anything at first. On the screen, a bright countdown told us that we had fifty-seven seconds before the chamber was unlocked. I stared at the numbers, avoiding Andy's eyes. The enormity of what I had just done was only now dawning on me. I felt the insane urge to take it back, but there was no way to cancel the countdown now and deep down I knew that if I were faced with the decision again I would still do the same thing. Besides, what could Bentley really do, all the way from the surface? Most likely nothing. He had seemed so confident of his victory, though... Forty-two seconds to go. The silence lengthened. If I had done the right thing, then why did I feel like I had betrayed everybody?

“You didn’t have to do that,” Andy said suddenly, his voice quiet. “But thank you for saving my brother.”

I was forced to look at him, at the genuine worry for me in his eyes mixed with relief that his brother was okay for now. He held my gaze, and I felt as if he were looking directly inside me, understanding how horrified I was, how conflicted, how relieved. Emotion came rushing in—what the hell was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I keep it under control? I felt a lump on my throat as it tried to overwhelm me. In a way, I had betrayed everyone by doing this. They had counted on me, and I had failed—it didn’t matter that both choices had been awful. I should have been able to do something more.

Then Andy did something very unexpected. He stepped close, very close, and set a hand on my shoulder. Then he leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek with heartfelt tenderness.

“Hey. It’s all right,” he said, his lips close to my ears. Then he leaned back and looked at me in a way that let me know that he understood exactly how much it cost me to save one life at the expense of thousands of others.

I was going to say something in return, but then the countdown ended. And the floor started moving under our feet.

“Initiating access to genesis chamber.”

I swayed slightly as a very noticeable spiral motion took hold of the floor. Andy was as surprised as I was. I had expected a door to open somewhere, not the entire floor to begin spinning even as it descended, like the bottom lid of a cylinder that had detached from the walls and was spinning ever downwards. The motion wasn’t too violent, but seeing the walls rotate around us as we descended was disconcerting. The process was noisy, but less so than seemed normal for such a big structure moving. I had a few moments to wonder just who had designed this complicated way of accessing the chamber of the queen, trying not to get dizzy. Then the growing silver of the bottom section of the wall all around us suddenly turned transparent as we descended into another cylinder, larger. It encompassed our circular platform, but this time all the walls were made of glass. It felt like descending into the center of a cylindrical aquarium.

“Oh my God,” Andy said when we were halfway down. He was pointing at something very large that towered behind one of the transparent walls.

The spinning motion slowed down, but I scarcely noticed. All I could do was stare. The further we descended, the bigger she became, and when the floor finally touched the bottom with a muffled bump, I saw that the being in front of us was almost twice as tall as me.

“I can't believe this,” Andy said in a hushed voice, instinctively coming closer to me, backing away from the creature. “We had oral descriptions from one of the scientists, but I never imagined… Seeing her like this, for real… She's more terrifying than I could have ever imagined.”

I agreed. “Get away from the wall, Andy. Just in case. I've heard she can be dangerous, even behind that thick glass. And don't stare at her for too long. She can sense your attention.”

I was just parroting the safety advice we had been given years ago during basic training, just in case we needed to come into this chamber for an emergency. Most of my mind, however, was entirely caught up in staring at the queen that was responsible for creating the 02-spark that kept the city running.

She had a long and sinuous body, supported by slender-looking, barbed-tipped spider legs. Her exoskeleton glistened red under the bright white lights that cast their merciless beams down on her bloated, pulsating abdomen. The upper part of her body reared up, reaching almost as high as the ceiling of her enclosure, and the cruel V-shaped head that topped her terrifying body was lined by nearly a dozen completely white, disturbingly intelligent eyes. Two incredibly long and thin antennae sprouted from the edges of the V and were constantly moving back and forth, over the walls, over the floor, over the dozens and dozens of tubes that pierced her abdomen and held her motionless in place. I counted three sets of scythe-like mandibles working silently, never stopping, as if she were trying to talk or masticate food that wasn't there.

I took a step back. I couldn't help it. Andy copied me, and backed all the way against me when the queen sensed our motion and swiveled her barbed head so that an entire row of eyes could look down at us. She made no sound through the thick walls of her prison, and somehow that made it even more horrific.

Andy pointed at a gigantic machine to which all of the many tubes connected. His finger was shaking slightly. “There. That is the genesis machine. It's even bigger than I imagined. Some people back on the Mainland have been suggesting that we replicate the technology you have here, adapt it somehow to re-create an electrical grid that is not dependent on spark.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “I'm not a scientist, but even I can see that it's pointless. The entire array here, the machine, this torus-shaped containment chamber, everything is far more advanced than anything we can ever hope to make. Or you. I doubt Islanders remember any better than we do.”

“She's doing something,” I said.

And she was. At the sound of our voices, her antennae had stopped moving and hung in the air, quivering slightly. As soon as we were quiet, she started moving them again.

“Is she listening to us?” Andy asked me, his voice full of awe tinged with fear.

The antennae's motion stopped.

“I'm not sure,” I answered. “I don't even want to find out.”

We were spellbound by the spectacle. I saw some tubes pumping something into the queen's segmented body, and other tubes extracting something else. Spark, if I had to guess. 02-Spark in its pure and unrefined form, glowing from within the tubes with a soft, blue-white light of its own. The heavier extraction tubes led straight to the genesis machine, and the device itself was very obviously connected to an ancient-looking structure that encompassed the back of the entire room, full of cables thick as ropes, pipes, switches and even the occasional stray arc of pure electricity. Several parts of the room glowed with the remnants of splashed spark. The lower half of the queen’s legs were coated by it, giving a brilliant sheen to the dark surface underneath. Everything looked impossibly delicate and complex in its operation. This entire place was the center of our grid. If anything happened here, if anything got destroyed, there was simply no rebuilding it.

“Can she move?” Andy asked me, looking all around. “The space that she’s in is so big… Do you think she can walk all around it?”

I shrugged. I couldn't say why, but I wanted to get out of that room as fast as I could. It wasn't fear, not exactly. It was more the sensation that the creature in front of us was not only an animal. She was still looking at us, still halting the motion of her antennae at the sound of our words. There were people back in the city who refused to believe she was sentient, or aware of her slavery, and I had been one of them. Now, though, I found myself believing the complete opposite.

“Let's look for a way to get out,” I said. “Maybe we can go back up and re-seal chamber before Bentley can do anything like he threatened.”

With obvious effort, Andy took his eyes off the creature. “Okay. Where do we start?”

“Computer, request to return to the previous level,” I said loudly. “Close this chamber and seal it.”

There was no answer. “I guess that means voice won't work,” Andy said.

“Well, it was worth a try. There's got to be something else. Look for a console or an interface panel. The scientists that work down here have to have something. I don't think they just come down to stare at the queen.”

“All right.”

The circular space was not that big, but even so it took us more than five minutes to finally find the hidden panel set on the floor. It activated at my touch, and deployed a virtual work interface with actual screen holograms superposed over the glass walls of the area. Most of the holograms were displaying incomprehensible information, text and graphs that kept on changing. They were rows of numbers, organic diagrams of the queen’s body in three dimensions, chemical reactant simulations and other kinds of data I had no name for.

“Wow,” Andy said. “Actual working holographic technology.”

“Do you know anything about it?” I asked him, totally at a loss as to how to operate it. I had never seen it before either.

“It shouldn't be too difficult,” he told me. “I studied the basics of this during specialist training. In theory, it should be no different from normal interfaces, only more convenient.”

“Bentley said you were the coder,” I said, remembering one of the comments I had overheard. “Are you a tech guy, then?”

Andy grinned even as he set his hands to a virtual keyboard that to me looked nonexistent. “Officially I'm a military software engineer. But yeah, I guess I'm a tech guy.”

“Okay. Do your thing, then. I won't get in your way. Just get us out of here.”

As Andy worked, I thought about what Bentley had thought he could do with this chamber unlocked. We had to be at least six or seven levels underground, with no way up other than the way we had used, and that was blocked. How could he hope to damage this chamber from outside? Just the fact of not knowing was wearing my patience out. Was there a way he could link to this room from the surface?

Andy’s bug. Of course. And Bentley was probably hearing everything we were saying right now.

“Maybe we should get rid of the bug Bentley put on you first,” I said to Andy. “Who knows what kind of information he's gathering using it.”

Andy nodded, his brow furrowed in concentration as he worked with the holograms. “Of course. Already on it, actually. There's an app here to detect extraneous electromagnetic communication sources. I'm trying to activate it now, to block Bentley off completely.”

“I won't even pretend I understood that,” I said.

Andy's hands flew through the air, hitting barely-visible buttons. I stopped to watch him, and realized that it wasn't only his hands and fingers he was using. The system was tracking his eye movements somehow, and was responding to his body language in other ways. I tried to follow whatever it was he was doing, but I had never been particularly good with old computers. The ones we used at the office were simply terminals, connected to a single working machine somewhere in the city center. The most advanced thing I had ever learned about computers was how to hack simple security systems, and that had been more than ten years ago.

“Found it,” Andy said, pointing to a three-dimensional model of himself that had appeared in front of him. A blinking red dot on his left boot was the obvious spot where the bug had been detected.

He took the boot off, turned it around his hands for a bit as he examined it.

“I know it's here,” he muttered. “I just can't find it”

“Give it to me,” I said. “You can work on getting us out of here while I find the bug.”

“Sounds good,” he answered, throwing the boot at me. I caught it easily and began to examine it. I turned around in my hands and looked at it from every angle, comparing it to the holographic display. The ambient light was brighter closer to the wall, so in spite of my disgust I had to get closer to the queen to see better and find the thing.

It took me a while, but eventually I discovered that heel of the boot had a detachable cover that had been sewn shut. I tugged at it, loosening it enough eventually for me to pull it out. Attached to it I saw a small black square. It had tiny holes on one side and was heavier than it should have been.

“Hey Bentley,” I spoke into the square. “I found your little toy.”

I was very surprised when the thing crackled to life from some kind of speaker wired to the heel of the boot. Bentley spoke to me over a deafening background noise of something crunching repeatedly. “Well done, Peacekeeper. I knew you would be resourceful. And thank you for taking my transceiver out into the open. I won’t be needing it anymore now that the link has been established.”

“What the hell? What is going on?” Andy yelled behind me. I turned around and looked. Every single screen had blanked out. Nothing happened for a couple seconds, and then a written message was listed on all of the screens at the same time.

“Lifting protective dome cover. Disengaging electromagnetic shield,” the computer said, echoing the writing.

“What are you doing?” I asked loudly. I was certain that whatever was happening was Bentley’s fault.

For an answer all I got was laughter. Disgusted and furious at him, I threw the communicator down on the floor and crushed it with my boot.