Dark Fathoms Read online

  “Gas!” Krysty grabbed Ryan and hauled him back to the others. “Get him out of here!” she cried, prying the panga from his fingers. When she released him, Ryan fell over, completely unable to move. But he could still breathe, and still see, and what he saw down the other corridor chilled his blood cold.

  At least a half dozen more of the dreadful cyborgs—all hideous combinations of human and machine, were coming for them.

  Chapter Five

  The next few minutes passed very uncomfortably for Ryan. It was exceedingly rare that he was a passive witness to any fight, yet that was exactly the case. He could see and hear everything going on around him, but was unable to lift a finger or grunt a single word.

  Fortunately, his companions had lived and survived so long together that they instinctively knew what to do.

  “One of these days, Doc, you and I are going to have a conversation about how to dispense information in a timely fashion!” Mildred growled as she grabbed him by the shoulder. “Help me, dammit!”

  “I could not ascertain what kind of facility we had arrived in without more proof, which, I admit, we now have in abundance,” Doc replied as he got one of Ryan’s arms up and around his shoulder. Between the two of them, they were able to half carry, half drag the man’s deadweight back to the intersection and start down the left corridor.

  “Sure we can’t shoot, Doc?” Ricky asked, hefting his carbine. “Silencer won’t hurt ears any.”

  “It is not that...young Ricky,” Doc said, panting as he hauled Ryan along. “If a bullet...pierces the wall, it could very well...drown us all.”

  “Well, we got at least three of these things to get through down there. Not sure knives’ll do the job,” J.B. said, squinting down the left corridor.

  “I will,” Jak replied, handing Ricky his blaster.

  “Jak, you—” J.B. began.

  “Count ten, then follow.” The white-haired teen began walking down the corridor toward the first two cyborgs. One appeared to have been a woman in her former life. Now she had what looked like plastic skin covering the entire right side of her face, neck, chest and waist, with the ever-present liquid-filled tubes pumping whatever fluid they carried through her. She was armed with what looked like a stun baton, its tip crackling as she came at Jak in a stiff-legged walk.

  The second one looked like it had been two people merged into an unholy combination. One human body stood more or less upright, but it had the upper torso of another grafted onto its back, turning the whole thing into a freakish sort of two-headed human centaur. The rearmost one helped with locomotion by pushing along with its arms. The main body had had both arms replaced, one with a straight tube that looked like it contained some kind of grappling hook, and one that ended in a moving sawblade.

  “They’re almost on us back here!” Krysty shouted from the right. Ryan couldn’t see what was happening back there, but the screech of steel on metal told him his lover was ably defending their rear.

  “We’re moving, Jak! Draw your sword, Doc, and get in front of me!” Trading places with the old man, J.B. began hauling Ryan down the left corridor. “Jak, get done whatever you’re doing right now!”

  The albino glided loose and easy in the corridor, approaching the woman-cyborg, her teeth bared in a twisted grimace as she raised the stun baton. Jak was only two steps away when he heard a slight rustle from overhead. He looked up just as a third cyborg—the tube-covered head and torso of a black man with an additional pair of arms grafted to where his legs would have been—let go from where he’d climbed along the ceiling to drop on him.

  Or, at least it tried to.

  The bayou-bred guerrilla fighter stepped back from underneath the truncated cyborg, bringing his leg up as he did. The bone-shattering kick hit the mechanized freak’s chest, fracturing its sternum with a crack and sending it sailing over the female’s head and back down the corridor, where it landed several yards away. One of its tubes had ruptured in the fall, and now sprayed green liquid everywhere. It waved its front arms helplessly even as its rear ones began moving it back into the fight.

  The distraction was just enough to let the other two reach him. Jak hadn’t stopped moving, however. Leaping into the air, he lashed out with a roundhouse kick that snapped the female cyborg’s head to one side. But while the blow would have killed an ordinary person, she just kept shuffling forward, her half-skin, half-plastic head canted at an unnatural angle.

  “Take the other one. I will handle this unholy monstrosity!” Doc said as he stepped up to Jak’s side.

  Jak snorted, but moved to the larger creature. It tried to strike first, aiming its grapple at him and firing it with a hiss of compressed air. Dodging the projectile, Jak grabbed the metal cable and wrapped it around his hand once, then hauled back on it even as the man-machine tried to reel him in.

  Pulled off balance, the cyborg tilted forward, its rear half scrabbling for purchase on the floor. Jak kept winding it up, reeling in the atrocity like a huge fish. When it was near enough for him to grab, he let it take a clumsy swing at him with the sawblade then caught that arm behind the spinning blade with his free hand. Using the leverage from the swing, he kept it moving down and over into the monster’s torso.

  With a high-pitched whine, the blade bit into the cyborg’s chest, spattering Jak with gobbets of thick, dark red blood mixed with the strange green fluid. He kept the pressure on, making the thing shudder as the whirling blade savaged its insides. The rearmost part beat its arms against the floor. Finally, the blade either ran out of power or encountered a bone so thick it couldn’t saw through it and froze with a rattle and a spray of sparks. Jak unwound the cable from his arm and let the frightful being fall over with a loud crash.

  Turning to Doc, he found the old man still struggling with his opponent. He had impaled the female cyborg by shoving his sword through her gut, but it hadn’t slowed her in the least. Intestines leaked out of the gaping gash in her abdomen as she fought to bring the stun stick down on Doc, who was holding her wrist, struggling to keep the weapon away from his body.

  “Fuck’s sake, Doc!” Jak took one step and leaped into the air again. At the height of his jump, he brought his foot down on the cyborg’s head, tearing it completely off the body this time. A geyser of blood and green liquid fountained from its neck as it collapsed to the floor.

  “Thank you...Jak...” Panting hard, Doc retrieved his sword and wiped the blade on her uniform.

  The two turned back to see J.B. and Mildred, both still carrying Ryan, with Ricky on their flank, now watching in all directions after seeing what had almost happened to him. Spattered with more green and red fluid, Krysty followed by a couple of steps, watching their rear. “Got a half-dozen still coming back here!”

  “Look out!” The Armorer darted out from under Ryan, drawing his blade as he did. Jak whirled in time to see him stab the large cyborg, who had turned so that the secondary torso could take over the fighting. J.B. buried his blade in the thing’s throat, letting a crimson-green gush of liquid spurt out. He drew the blade out in a sweep, opening the secondary head’s throat. This time, the large man-machine fell over and didn’t move, just gurgled as its life’s blood—or whatever the liquid was—jetted out. Tubes flailed as air entered them, but nothing else moved on the fallen body.

  “Damnation! These things are surely loathe to die!” Doc said as the female’s headless body began jerking and moving again, trying to rise. Inserting his blade under the hoses, he severed three of them, making more green fluid spurt everywhere. It didn’t stop that thrashing body in the least, however. A few yards behind it was another small globe, weaving through the bodies and gore on the floor toward them.

  “Find a place to hole up!” J.B. said, heading back and taking Ryan’s shoulder again. “Move out!”

  “Door ahead!” Jak said as he hurled a throwing knife into the darkness. An electronic squeal rewarded his efforts. “Over here!”

  Like every other door in the place, this one did
not want to open. Jak and Ricky forced it apart and slipped inside to clear the interior, which stank just as badly as everywhere else. Motion-activated lights flickered to life as they entered. It was empty, and they pushed the door open wide enough to allow J.B. and Mildred to haul Ryan inside. Doc scooted in, and Krysty was the last one through, still waving Ryan’s panga at the grotesque, shambling horde pursuing them.

  “Close it, close it, for Gaia’s sake!” she said. Working with the two youths, she pulled the door shut again just as one of the lumbering monstrosities reached it. J.B. hammered at the control panel with the hilt of his Tekna, making it spark as he crushed the pad.

  “You’re trapping us inside?” Ricky asked.

  “If they’re part of whatever sec force runs this place,” J.B. grunted, “they’ll have codes for the doors.”

  A grinding noise came from inside the walls, and the door shuddered in its frame but didn’t move. A blow sounded on the other side, followed by several more, but the portal didn’t budge.

  J.B. leaned against the wall next to the door and took a deep breath. “Think we’re safe for now.” He took a look around at the small room they were all packed into. It was small, and looked as though it had been sealed for decades. Clothes littered the floor, all of them parts of some kind of uniform. An even smaller door, currently closed, was on the left.

  Most of the space was taken up by a large bed, which Mildred and Doc laid Ryan on.

  “How’s he doing?” J.B. asked.

  “Breathing’s steady, pulse is strong, and his pupils still respond to light,” Mildred said after covering them with her hand, then uncovering them after a thirty-count. “It looks like whatever he got injected with was meant to paralyze, not kill.”

  J.B.’s gaze flicked to Krysty, who mouthed a silent thanks to Gaia for that news. “How long will it last?”

  Mildred shook her head. “Hard to say. Depending on the dose, it could take anywhere from an hour to several for it to dissipate. Since we’re reasonably safe—” she took in their surroundings for the first time “—my advice is to hole up here till he’s able to move again. We can use that time to figure out what our next step is.”

  Krysty nodded. “Agreed.” She walked over to stand next to Ryan, her hand caressing his stern, scarred face. “Just rest, lover. You’ll be up and around in no time.”

  Concentrating all of his strength, Ryan exerted every bit of energy to close his one blue eye and open it again.

  She smiled at him. “A wink from you is better than anything else in the world...well, almost anything.” She turned to the others. “He’ll be all right in time. Thank you, Mildred.”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t do much—fortunately, he’s got the constitution of a grizzly bear.” The stocky black woman glanced around. “Couldn’t hole up in the kitchen for once, eh? Don’t know about the rest of you, but all this swimming and running and fighting for our lives makes a girl hungry.”

  Doc shook his head. “Your stomach must be made of cast iron indeed, Mildred, to be thinking of food after witnessing those—abominations stalking us.”

  “It’s the doctor in me, I guess, though you’re right, Doc. I wouldn’t wish that kind of existence on anyone, not even my worst enemy.”

  “What the hell were they?” Ricky asked. “Never seen anything like them before.”

  “Cybernetic limb replacement was not unknown in the late twentieth century, although it was in its infancy,” Mildred answered. “But I’ve never seen anything as complete as those...things.”

  “Bigger questions are—who made them and why?” J.B. asked.

  “I believe you have already seen proof of what the scientists behind the Totality Concept were capable of in furthering their blind pursuit of their goals.” Doc rubbed his eyes. “And we have all seen many examples of what they did in the decades after skydark, practically none of it with benign intentions. I imagine that this entire place is just another example of their collective insanity.”

  “Well, that may explain why this place is here, but not what’s happening here now,” J.B. replied as he pushed off the wall and headed toward the smaller door. “I suggest we find out what’s behind this.”

  Jak held up his hand. “Listen—stopped.”

  Everyone cocked an ear but heard only silence from the other side of the door.

  “Waiting to bushwhack us when we come out?” Ricky asked.

  “Mebbe. Put a bullet in that when we come to it, if need be,” the Armorer said. “Right now, let’s get this other door open.”

  Doc drew his sword, and J.B. had one of his knives out, as well. “Looks like an internal door, no lock. Shouldn’t be anyone alive inside, but just in case...”

  The Armorer kept the knife handy as he reached for the recessed handle, gripped it and pulled the door open in one smooth move, ready to gut anyone or anything that came at him from the other side.

  Nothing moved.

  The room was silent.

  Silent, but not necessarily empty.

  J.B. waved an arm inside, tripping the motion sensors that activated the lights. “I think we know what happened to at least one other person here.”

  He walked inside, letting the rest of the group see an empty office with a small desk and two chairs. Brittle papers covered with mold were scattered across the desk, and an odd pattern of stains was on the back wall.

  Chapter Six

  Mildred broke the silence first. “Looks like brain spray.”

  “Leader checked out?” Jak asked. “Not be first time.”

  “More than likely. Certainly the regular enlisted men didn’t live in such style,” Doc commented.

  Krysty tried to pick up one of the sheets of paper, but found them clotted together with mold. The entire sheaf flaked apart in her hand. “Damn. It would have been nice to know what he’d killed himself over.” She did find an identification card on the desk and slipped it into her pocket.

  “Got something odd here,” Mildred said from where she was standing near the wall opposite the body and the desk. She held a stiff, moldy uniform shirt in one hand as she examined an odd panel built into the wall.

  It had a small grille that looked like some kind of speaker next to another red-orange light that was glowing more strongly even as she watched it. As the others clustered around it, they were all surprised to hear a voice emanate from the small speaker.

  “Identify yourselves, humans.” The voice was artificial, but smoother and more human-sounding than any droid or computer they’d encountered before.

  The companions looked at one another. Then Doc stepped forward, holding up a hand for silence from the others. “Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, working on Operation Chronos, part of Project Cerberus, a subsection of Overproject Whisper, under the Totality Concept.”

  “One moment, accessing files.” The seconds stretched out as the group waited for the computer. “Records show that a subject Tanner, Theophilus, first participated in an experiment as a subject for Operation Chronos in 1998. Final entry shows that you were the subject of another Operation Chronos experiment, in the year 2000. As you are still alive on current date, experiment was therefore judged successful. Affirmative?”

  Krysty stole a glance at Doc, who stood before the interface with gritted teeth. Judging by the pained expression on his face, she figured he was trying not to break down at the clinical, dispassionate recounting of the utter destruction of his life and, for the most part, his sanity. The old man sniffed and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his frock coat before straightening again.

  “That is correct,” he replied. “I have arrived here through the mat-trans system with replacement personnel. Request...orientation and temporary passes, including appropriate security clearances, for all new personnel.”

  “One moment.” Once again the computer did its silent, blinking act. “I will need each individual to step forward and give their names, identification numbers, and primary duty designation for processing and security car
d issuance.” A small piece of the wall slid out when it had finished. “A blood sample is also required, to ensure there are no diseases or genetic abnormalities present.”

  Sweat beading his forehead, Doc shot an alarmed glance at the others before leaning forward again. “Um, I’m afraid that there was not time before accessing the mat-trans to assign them identification numbers. Request that identification numbers and cards be issued immediately.”

  A few beats of silence passed. “You are not authorized to make that request, Dr. Tanner. Will add the additional members of your group to temporary personnel until those records can be accessed.”

  “Waiting long time,” Jak muttered, earning him glares from Doc and Krysty.

  “Dr. Tanner, please look into red circle for photo, and then state required information. When you are finished, place your index finger on the pad to your right. You will feel a small sting in your finger.”

  Doc did as the computer instructed. There was a flash, as if the unwinking red orb had processed Doc’s face in front of it. “You, uh, already know my name. I confess that I do not remember my ID number, but you probably have that, as well. Duty designation...let’s see, what was I called? Ah, yes.” A tear trickled from his eye as he answered his own question. “Time-trawl Test Subject Number 4A.” He wiped the tear away and put a trembling finger on the small pad, wincing as something pricked him.

  “Accepted. Next.”

  Krysty stepped forward and faced the glowing red orb. “Krysty Wroth.”

  The computer answered much more quickly this time. “Partial record of a Wroth, Krysty on file.”