Chapter XIV: Technical Issues

AN:

Hey there, Fan-fic-folks!

I don't really have anything else to say for this upload, so I'll just talk about some things I've enjoyed recently.

So.., uh... Pfft. Um. Okay, so by now everyone knows American Gods is great, Good Omens is great, etc - Gaiman and Pratchett are literary Gods. Shit I've enjoyed recently includes Siames' album, particularly the live performance with Pato Pacheco; an Audio-series called The Leviathan Chronicles, which is a little weird but decent enough; a Danish series called The Rain that's fun even in a language I'm not fully fluent in; an older series called Carnivale that I'm rewatching and still have no idea if I actually like or not; and a horror game called Dark Fall that creates atmosphere really damn well. Check any of 'em out and give 'em a go. You might be interested.

Thanks for reading and, as always, please review.

"Say hello to my little friend!" Chloe fired at the door, grinning in manic delight as a portion of the EarthGov tower about two metres in diameter was blasted into pieces.

We all stared at it, then at her, then at it again.

Copse promptly took the grenade launcher from Chloe, who let it go (after a moment of mild resistance) with a disappointed 'aww'. He just raised an eyebrow. "As much fun as you're having, Chloe, I would like to have a station to escape from by the end of all this."

We agreed completely. Chloe slumped slightly as we headed for the door. I leant a hand gently on Chloe's shoulder as we passed her and hmm'd comfortingly. She straightened up, just a little, and gave me a wordless nod of thanks. She re-picked up the parts-pile and followed us in.

The base inside was as clean as the outside. Originally. anyway. It was kinda funny, actually; the base here had survived the monsters, the Unitologists, and a rapidly-breaking down station, but one bluenette punk engineer with a grenade launcher tore the walls down and spread bits of blackened metal all over the place.

The entryway had a small reception set into the back wall, a bank of elevators signposted down a corridor in the far right corner, and two staircases dominating the far left and close left corners. The centre of the room's ceiling had that same massive, Earthgov logo dominating it, casting shadow from a light somewhere upstairs down onto the floor. It was a nice effect, actually, framing the shattered pieces of whatever artwork had been central here to an almost striking level. I couldn't identify the art, but it didn't really matter. Whatever it had been before, it was modern art now.

And yes, that was a burn.

We started for the stairs, making it about halfway to them before Chloe called out a groaned "Oh fuck no! Can't we take the elevator this time? Please?"

I chuckled and called back, without stopping. "Sorry, Chlo'. Getting stuck in the elevator is still something we seriously want to avoid. Come on, it's not like you can't Kinesis the stuff up the stairs too." I stuck a hand blindly behind me, suppressed a grin when hers slipped into mine after a couple seconds of huffing. Heh. "We'll be on the right floor in no time, I promise." She squeezed my hand and sighed indulgently, but didn't say anything. She just followed.

So, we took the stairs. I was tempted to make another joke, but gave it up after I felt the silence. Something about it felt... dead. We were all tense as we reached our floor and headed in through the large doors leading off the stairwell. The main corridor was lit only by emergency lighting, casting that familiar deep red haze over all in sight.

As we walked along the corridor, the t-junction ahead and the identical-nature of every EarthGov corridor threw my mind back to when we'd first started this. When Kate had guided us into the other corridor. She'd taken us to a side-office to avoid worshippers.

To... Avoid... Worship-. Oh. I hadn't quite thought of that until now. "Oh no."

The others looked back at me, and I noticed that I'd fallen behind in my weird reflective fugue-state. I found myself staring slightly, focused intently on some random fixture on the wall so I didn't focus on what my mind had just put together. "She knew. The whole fucking time, she knew."

The others blinked, look at each other. They picked up that something was wrong, but had no idea what. "Who knew what?"

"Kate." I looked up at Chloe, who just gave me a sad smile that welcomed me, finally, to the Kate-is-a-baddy club. That she had to give it while poking out from behind a massive stack of parts-boxes only slightly ruined the effect. "She knew that we were helping her with something illegal-" A chorus of shocked sounds broke free from the others. Oh, right. Wowzers, yeah. We never told them any of this. Even Copse only knew that we'd been in the base, not why. I forced my gaze away from Chloe and looked each of them in the eye for longer than I could really stand, and filled them all in. "Kate invited us across the road here yesterday; there was this supposed Unitologist ceremony, she wanted our help with some technical set-up. Well," I amended at Chloe's amused grin. "They wanted her help with the technical set-up. I was just along for the ride."

I told them how we'd seen this thing, this... Marker. I had no idea why I called it that, or why I could hear the capital letter in my voice, but I did. And I could. It... felt right. "And after Chloe and she did something to the computers, those... that was when Jetson made his message. When those monsters appeared. And she knew."

For a moment, I let my gaze drift back to that random fixture on the wall - and what the hell was it, some clear plastic circular thing - afraid to meet any of their eyes and see the judgement, the accusation, I expected there. But a familiar hand slipped back into mine and squeezed. I let myself look up and met Chloe's eyes. They were soft in that way she only rarely let herself get, and only ever with me or Rachel - I still queued up that old vid of her Blackwell production of The Tempest whenever I wanted to see her like that.

I looked over at the rest of them, curious despite myself at their reactions. Joyce looked as horrified as I expected, David matching her in his own gruff, reserved way. Copse, on the other hand, was gazing at us with barely restrained curiosity. It bucked and roared like an untamed horse. "And this was... just across the promenade, you say?"

Chloe nodded. "Yeah. The security door we walked past to get in here." She looked over at him, frowned. "Why?" A smirk. "Looking for a holiday destination?"

"No, it's just... we could go check it out? Maybe if we reverse whatever you did before, it'd stop this!" He said it with enough passion that for the first time we actually started to consider it - walking back into that hellhole. Chloe and I exchanged looks. Why hadn't we thought of it? Reversing the polarity was a joke we made often enough.

"We can talk about our next move when we get this freaking generator back online." Our steps had been getting slightly bouncier over the last ten minutes. Enough to worry me. "Unless you want us to float off before suffocating to death?"

He smirked. "Only if you're really annoying."

Chloe laughed at that, choking it back into a muffled cough when I gave her a mock-angry glare. She grinned innocently at me and walked past, the lowering gravity making her long strides even longer as she loped along. I had to dash to keep up, which got a chuckle from all of them, the bastards.

The base was quiet, to our surprise. We didn't see a soul, the entire way there. At times, it was so quiet I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. When we finally reached the door down to the generator-room, Copse held out a hand to stop us. We all grouped up a little short of the doors, let him and Chloe go peer through the doors quietly.

They conferred without speaking. A few seconds passed. They looked again. Copse leaned in a little further this time, like he'd spotted something. For a moment, we all went tense. Ready to run if something shrieked. If something was hungry. Another few seconds passed and the waiting was beginning to get unbearable. I had enough butterflies in my stomach to start a zoo. Or at least a pretty good insect-charming booth at a travelling circus. Dog, I hadn't rambled to myself this much since school.

Since he caught me.

The area passed the doors, further along the corridor, opened out into a small lobby. The far wall was that anti-breakable glass they put in places where people might try to get aggressive with staff. Banks and fast-food places and flowershops. So those people couldn't hurt the workers. The lights were off in whatever office space was on the other side of the glass, but one in the back was still flickering. I watched, peering closer at the lamp, simply for something to distract myself from the burgeoning panic I was feeling.

That's where I saw him.

His hair was artfully mussed, those same black glasses hiding a pair of penetrating eyes that seemed to be flecked with red and bloodshot. But, not quite. What I thought were veins, Lichtenberg-like shapes fractal across his eyes, were actually symbols. Angular, looping, jagged, smooth. They almost seemed alive, almost seemed to move across the whites of his eyes - those eyes that were locked onto mine as his mouth spread slowly into a mocking grin.

I flinched, and he vanished. Shit.

I let out a long breath. Why am I seeing him again? I thought I'd gotten over that crap after... What even was the point of therapy if I'm still all screwed up..? My eyes sagged down to the floor, unconsciously tracing the little patterns in the metal like I'd learnt to do whenever I felt overwhelmed. Drag my mind away from the fear and the panic and tether it to something real, something concrete in the world around me. Ground the whirlwind. My heart pounded, a deep, regular rhythm that seemed to reverberate through my entire body, even down to my toes. But it was worst around my arm, where he'd put in the needle. I could feel it pricking my skin, in that agonisingly unbalanced way that a tiny thing of metal can feel like it's a sword jabbing into you.

That's when I felt breath on my ear. "Always take the shot, Max. Get the whole picture. Make it whole. Make us whole. Make us whole." All I could see were those red symbols going past my vision like the Matrix code. Over and over and round and round and over and over and round and-.

I blinked and everything was normal again.

Wowzers. That was... That was a lot. What the heck is happening to me? That writing... I've seen it before, and not just in my weird black-out hallucination moments. It's the same stuff that was all over the walls, written in blood. So, this event is causing something in me. Made something go wrong inside my head. I swallowed thickly.

Forcing the fear down, I focused back into reality just in time to follow the others through the open doors into the cavern-like space of the main generator room.

It was cavernous in most aspects, bizarrely. I hadn't seen anywhere else on the station quite like it. It had to have been two hundred metres tall, and maybe three hundred metres in diameter. Every inch of the outer wall was covered in city-like sets of equipment boards - silicone and metal and plastic structures all pointed at the massive, ringed gyroscopic generator that hung on near invisible lines in the middle of the room.

At eight points around the room, these long tower-like things protruded from the walls. They were tipped with these four tesla-coil like structures, one in the middle and three at equal angels around the centre, tilted inwards so they all focused together on a single point - the generator sphere.

"This is fucking amazing." Chloe seemed thrilled with the thing. She pointed to various pieces of it, rattling off names and specifications in the same way she'd rattle off our usual takeout order. Quickly, enthusiastically, and without really caring if the person she was saying it to was actually listening. I loved that about her. That passionate intensity. She was the best.

We had to rush to keep up as she dashed forward to one of the consoles dotted around the floor below the gyro-sphere. Before we could even think about whether or not we should stop her, nevermind actually go about doing so, she pushed a button on the console. Immediately, the flooring gravity stopped.

I screamed as that little force that kept my feet on the ground vanished and my running momentum carried me upwards as well as forwards, leading me to spin legs first like the beginning of one of those curve-things we talked about in Physics that I cannot remember the name of. All that I remember going through my head was just a litany of 'crap crap crap'.

Anti-gravity was not the natural state of photo-nerds, we liked stability and structurally-sound things that let us get clear shots. This was just a recipe for the kind of blurry selfies I always took whenever Chloe convinced me to drink - which was often enough that I actually had a freaking album of the things somewhere.

Copse spun quicker than I could see and grabbed onto one of the tower-outcroppings, wrapping himself around it like a drowning man trying to catch a rubber floaty. Meanwhile, I was stuck. Out of reach of everything, all I could do was just float along. This was fun. That was a lie. What was fun was screaming at Chloe about how I was going to kill her for marooning me in the air like this. She really was gonna pay for this one. Dog, I was starting to feel sick.

All I could see of Chloe were... flashes, really. Like I was taking really long blinks. Everytime I spun in her direction, something else seemed to be going horribly wrong. The first time, the console below her had caught fire. The second, she was on fire. The third, she'd put herself and the console out, but the entire top of it was charred.

The fourth, she was on fire again. The console seemed fine though.

Before I knew it, I'd slammed into the sphere. Cursing under my breath, I wriggled about on it to reposition myself. "Crappity, crappity, crap, crap, shoot, sugar, darnit!"

Really vitriolic stuff. I was real angry.

I took the opportunity, despite my aching ribs, to take another look around the room. David didn't seem to be doing well. Heh. He just spun round and round and round, his cane clutched in his arms as he glared angrily at every handhold that was just out of reach. Join the club, David. It's not a fun one. The jackets are bright neon pink and have those icky spike-things on the sleeves that keep jabbing me whenever I try to cross my arms and-

Huh. Might be getting that conflated with that one time at Firewalk...

Still. Despite my slightly sadistic pleasure at seeing someone else get fricked by the ridiculously sudden loss of gravity, I did have to smile when Joyce somehow managed to bend backwards in mid-air and grab hold of his ankle, swinging David around like a rambunctious six year-old and wrapping her arms around him when she'd got him straightened. Aww. I squeed a little. And also felt a little self-conscious. A forty-year old woman is more flexible than I am.

Lucky David.

Chloe took an opportunity to slam herself back into the ground a couple times, putting out the flames (mostly), before jetting off to another of the consoles. I groaned. That's just... ugh. I tapped a button on my suit, activating the thruster and firing myself at the ground again. Once I reached it, I spun around and carefully slammed into the floor.

Ow.

Once I was righted again, and boy that was a hassle, I looked over at Chloe. Dog, I hoped she wasn't still, y'know, on fire. Or at least, only on fire metaphorically. Lucky for me, she wasn't, and I'd looked over just in time to see her key in the reactivation sequence for the generator as... it... oh. What's that down there? That port shouldn't look like that. Oh. Oh no. That's not good.

I stared down into the port in horror. Oh dog, it's full of tentacles...

Huge fleshy things had crawled out of what I later found out was the lower exhaust port below the generator, for the removal of excess heat into a water-vat below us (which the cheapskates at EarthGov used to heat their base) and they were quite honestly the ugliest things I'd ever seen. My brain took a step back, going into picture mode again to stave off the disgusted fear. Think finding a cockroach on your hand, then finding that cockroach sprouted weird fleshy tentacles and tried to start humping your hand, and you'll probably have some idea of how I was feeling right then.

Grossed the frick out.

I wasn't sure who screamed first, but it triggered the creature and one of those tentacles lashed out at me. It was even uglier up close. That was all I managed to think before it slammed into me, knocking me into one of those silicone cities on the wall.

"Max!" Chloe yelled desperately, pulling up her gun and emptying an entire clip into the tentacle that hit me. Dog, it didn't do a thing! "Shit!"

Another tentacle lashed out at Joyce and David, both of whom quickly spun out of the way. I winced as the tentacle smashed one of the metal tower things. I gulped. I'd seen the movies. I still had no idea what those things did, but they seemed important and big engineering things tended to explode when you broke too many bits off. Like Copse said to Chloe, I want to have a station to escape from.

Okay, okay, okay. What do we even do with this? What do we do against this thing? Do the tentacles count like arms on the other monsters? Fuck it. "Go for the tentacles!"

"No shit, Maxie! We can't see anything else to go for!"

Oh, right. Um. Oh shoot! I rolled left as the tentacle came for me. It crashed into another section of the silicone city. Man, I hope that stuff isn't too important. Or explosive. It pulled back slightly and began to flail around, pounding the area around me and sending little quakes through the metal and silicone beneath me. It was everything I could do not to get crushed. Dog, that thing is truly disgusting. Having to swallow back nausea didn't make dodging any easier. It pressed on something primal in my head, the kind of thing that feared the Dark before the advent of Fire, as surely as it pressed on my throat.

I tried to keep track of the others, really, I did, but keeping myself from getting crushed beneath the weight of the huge thing slamming down with astonishing speed into every spot I stopped in had grabbed my attention and held it. Somehow, I could even feel the vibrations from each blow, even when I wasn't touching the outer wall. I- There! I thrust myself through a sudden gap in the tentacle's attack and finally got free of it.

For a second or two, anyway. Apparently it could hear/see/somehow perceive the thruster and the tentacle whipped back into my legs. The red, gristly, pulsing muscle tensed as it tried to grab on, like every slaughterhouse nightmare a little kid could have when they finally found out where sausages and chicken sticks came from.

I couldn't repress the shudder.

Unfortunately, the movement attracted it again and distracted me enough that I couldn't dodge in time. This time, it hit my spine, right at the point where my neck met my shoulder. I screamed as my vision just... flashed and for a brief moment everything went sort of... liquid-y. Out the corner of my eye, I spotted him. Dark hair, dark eyes, pearly-white teeth. That teasing smile. Then he was gone.

The hit took me across the room. I managed to roll with it this time, preventing me from getting skewered on a tower-spike or slammed into the walls again. That would've been painful. I twisted again and planted my feet on the wall, pushing off it with as much force as I could. I found myself rocketing across the room, giving me a chance to look for the others.

Joyce and David had split apart, though Joyce had somehow ended up with David's cane. She was hitting a nearby tentacle with it. I blinked slightly at the sight. David, I couldn't see, but I could hear him yelling between bursts of gunfire. Chloe was hunched over one of the consoles, frantically pushing buttons.

And Copse..? Copse was being violent. Frighteningly, efficiently so.

I watched as he took his rifle and cut into the tentacles nearest him. Between bullets that ripped and tore and the gun itself that bludgeoned and battered, he managed to crush two of them into mush. It was amazing. And so distracting that I rocketed myself head-first into a wall again. I rolled out of the way of another slam attack from the tentacle. What was- something poked me in the side. I twisted and found the broken metal tower thing floating beside me.

Fuck it. I pushed off again, but this time I aimed straight for the tentacle. It trying to hit me just made it easier. The tip of the broken metal spear just... went right in. I could see the metal poking through the other side, and somehow the flesh inside the wound, the flesh that'd exploded outward as I stabbed through it, that flesh was... wriggling. It was still meat, don't misunderstand. It even looked and smelled a little like under-cooked chicken. But it was like the meat had taken the form of maggots. Been infested by them. Hundreds, if not thousands, of writhing, squirming maggots made of the moist flesh that exploded out of the wound, like egg sacs popping in raw sausage casing. (AN1)

I couldn't hold back the vomit this time. Which really only made the smell, that sickly sweet, almost fruity smell, so much worse than before. Now it had tinges of iron and that odd chlorine-smell of stomach bile mixed in. I wanted to vomit again.

Finally, through my sickly delirium, I caught a glance of what Chloe had actually been working on. One of the side panels lay open and she was buried up to her arms in wiring. She pulled and twisted something, then looked up at the tentacle above her head with a confident grin. It was ridiculously hot. "I've got you now, fucker." One of her arms pulled out of the panel and she slammed it down on an appropriately big, appropriately red button.

The sphere suspended above our heads glowed a bright, blinding blue. Parts of it began to swing, revealing that it wasn't a smooth sphere, but several rings and ovals fashioned into a shape that resembled one.

The tentacle tried to strike down at Chloe, but she darted out to the left and it crushed the console. From her triumphant laugh, the loss of the console didn't really matter, and the rapidly faster and faster spinning of the rings only confirmed it.

As the generator rumbled into life, as it built up to a deafening roar of thunder, a shrill squeal pierced the air (and our eardrums). Something down in the exhaust pipe, whatever was the source of these tentacles... it was pissed. Almost in an instant, the tips of the tentacles began to burn. They burned hot enough to turn them to ash and the fire spread down the tentacles like flowing water, leaving behind more and more ash as it spread. It flowed down the tentacles and into the hole.

Then the squeal just... stopped.

A moment of silence passed.

"Fuck!"

I hit the ground at about the same time as the others. I don't really know if I was the one to swear before I hit, but afterward the only sound I could make was a groan.

Hands wrapped around me, but the slight numb ache across my body made it impossible to tell how many or where. They pulled me to my feet and plonked me upright. I promptly sagged and they caught me again. I looked up into the concerned eyes of Chloe and Joyce.

It was at that moment that the doors exploded inwards and a horde of EarthGov soldiers stormed in, armed to the teeth with guns that they promptly pointed at us. One of them, very evidently an officer, stepped forward and said simply to us "Put your weapons down. You are under arrest."

Chloe groaned. "So now you bloody turn up?"

AN1 - I wrote this while eating chicken. Fear my iron gut, people. :D