Kullervo’s face tightened visibly. “You brought us in here. I thought—” He broke off, realizing that it had been someone else guiding them in, that Gundhalinu knew nothing at all of the route they had taken into this place. “Well, we went … we came in over there … I think.…” He kicked off, into a rising arc through the luminous liquid atmosphere. Gundhalinu followed, watched Kullervo disappear through a vaguely doorlike opening, and reappear almost immediately. “No. That’s wrong.” Gundhalinu could see a trickle of sweat crawling down Kullervo’s cheek inside his helmet. “I thought I was sure … but the light changed, or something. It must be over there—”
Gundhalinu caught his arm, holding him back. “Wait. Give me a minute.…” Gleaming pinholes and fist-sized windows punched through the broken walls let illumination in from somewhere, meaning they were probably close to the outer hull of the ship; but there was no exit that way. He searched the claustrophobic space, trying to collect his wits enough to superimpose the schematics of Old Empire ship design that he held in his memory over what he could actually see; trying to judge where inside the ship’s skeleton they were lost. The guts of an Old Empire freighter bore little resemblance to the insides of a Hegemonic ship. All the ships built since the Empire’s fall were small and compact, with the compressed disc shape of a coin, the only form that allowed them to survive a passage through the Black Gates. It took an entire fleet of them to carry the goods that one of these freighters could transport. This ship, like most of the Old Empire’s starships, had never been intended to pass through a Black Gate—or even to land on the surface of a world, most likely. It had been a huge angular sprawl of storage, environments, drives.… “Where’s the drive unit?”
Kullervo pointed downward at the unidentifiable excrescence of equipment below him and to the right. As that identification locked into place, Gundhalinu began to recognize the opaque surfaces that had once held data displays, once been alive with the languages of dead worlds … to spot repair accesses and broken fragments of equipment. He looked to his left, saw an opening where he needed to find one. “This way.” He gestured and kicked off, swimming toward the way out.
Kullervo followed him, so close on his heels that they were almost one person, making physical contact with him every few meters as they threaded their way back through the shifting liquid tunnels, the vast darknesses and pied convolutions of what had once been Fire Lake’s reason for existence.
“How much farther?” Kullervo’s impatient voice and hand tugged at him, as he squeezed past a buckled section of wall.
Gundhalinu blinked, as a shaft of pure, sea-green light struck him in the eye. “We’re there.” He pointed toward the gaping rent in the hull wall waiting ahead.
Kullervo’s head and arms squeezed past his hip, as if Kullervo couldn’t wait long enough for him to move aside, desperate to see the light. He laughed, or something like it. “Gundhalinu—”
Gundhalinu looked down and back as Reede’s hand clamped over his arm like a vise. He froze as he saw metal flash in Kullervo’s other, rising hand—
Kullervo jerked suddenly, convulsively, releasing Gundhalinu as his hands flew to his own throat, to the clear wall of his helmet. Gundhalinu saw the fine mist of blood from the gash on Reede’s shoulder, where a piece of twisted wreckage had ripped his flesh, and ripped loose the helmet’s seal. He saw Kullervo’s face, stricken with terror, drowning in bubbles as water forced its way in at the broken seal, forcing the air out.
Kullervo floundered, fighting to get past him, knocking him aside as he reached out to staunch the flow of escaping air. Reede’s own panicked struggles wrenched the helmet free, sent it tumbling away, carried by the capricious current down into the dark heart of the wreck. Reede lunged after it, following it down to certain death.
Gundhalinu caught him around the waist, dragging him back up toward the light, the opening, survival. Kullervo thrashed wildly; but the water slowed his motions as Gundhalinu got behind him, got an armlock around his neck and dragged him, struggling like a hooked fish, out through the gap and into the open.
Gundhalinu swam up and up through the river’s brightening depths, feeling Kullervo’s struggles grow weaker. He felt as though he had been swimming forever through the green light that seemed to fill his head like music, like an hallucination, like a dream. His lungs ached; he realized that he had been holding his breath, counting his heartbeats. He sucked in a lungful of air, only half believing that he could. Locked in his grip, Reede had stopped struggling. But somewhere up above him, inside that tunnel of light glowing brighter and brighter, was the open air—
His head broke the surface of the water, and all around him were the canyon walls, the color of the blood rushing behind his eyes. He swam to shore, towing Kullervo’s unresisting body after him. He dragged Reede onto the beach and fell to his knees, pulling off his own helmet.
Beside him Reede took a shuddering breath, and his stark blue eyes opened, staring in disbelief. Gundhalinu sat back as Kullervo struggled to roll over, coughing, and retched water onto the warm red stone. He collapsed again, his eyes empty, mirroring the sky.
“Reede…” Gundhalinu touched his shoulder tentatively.
Kullervo looked toward the sound and opened his mouth, but no words came out. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, looked down along his body at his feet, still trailing in the water. “He tried to drown me,” he mumbled.
“Who did?” Gundhalinu asked blankly.
“I’m going to kill him, that bastard!” Kullervo’s hands tightened into fists; he struggled to sit upright.
Gundhalinu put a hand on his shoulder again, holding him back. “Take it easy—You lost your helmet. Your helmet caught on the wreckage.” He showed Kullervo the raw scrape on his shoulder, still oozing a thin film of blood.
Kullervo rubbed his eyes, looked up again. “You saved my life,” he murmured.
“It was nothing—”
“Don’t say that!” Kullervo said furiously. “My life isn’t worth shit, and I don’t care if I die tomorrow—but not like that. I have dreams about dying like that.…” His eyes darkened. “I owe you.”
“It was nothing you wouldn’t have done for me,” Gundhalinu finished.
Kullervo stared at him for a long moment, frozen, and then finally he looked down. He got unsteadily to his feet. He started away along the shore toward the trail that led up, stumbling, supporting himself with one hand against the rock; not looking back or waiting for help.
Gundhalinu stood up and followed, with the Lake’s voice inside him like a madman’s laughter.
NUMBER FOUR: World’s End
“What do you think?” Gundhalinu asked, with eager impatience.
Reede stared at the displays, nodding slowly. “Looks good…” They had done minor structural repairs on the salvaged drive unit, under Gundhalinu’s guidance but at Reede’s urging, and now he had introduced their sample of the stardrive into it. Gundhalinu had wanted to wait until they returned to civilization. But he had pushed, insisted—aware that Gundhalinu’s need to know had to be as great as his own; that he could break down Gundhalinu’s knee-jerk sense of responsibility if he made the temptation irresistible enough.
He had tried, and he had been right. And now he had fed the stardrive plasma into its intended matrix. They were watching the process imaged on the displays as the plasma settled into its new home—and from what he could see, it was doing fine. The piece of equipment had been in an incredible state of preservation for something buried underwater in a wreck that was gods-only-knew how ancient. But nothing obeyed the rules of the known universe in World’s End, because of the stardrive. And the stardrive had wanted this unit saved, as it had wanted itself to be saved.… “I think it’s happy,” he said at last.
Gundhalinu moved closer, staring at the images on the screens. “Then so am I—” He let out a whoop of sheer elation. “Gods, I’ve never been this happy! Thank you, gods!”
“Neither have I.” Reede force
d the words out, almost choking on them as elation died stillborn in his throat. He picked up a calibrator. It felt hard and heavy inside his clenched fist, like a stone. He looked back at Gundhalinu. “Because now I don’t need you anymore—” He swung, aiming for Gundhalinu’s head.
Gundhalinu was already reacting, as if a sixth sense from his years as a Blue had told him something he couldn’t have known. He shouted for the troopers loitering outside, lunged backward before Reede’s own momentum could catch up to him. He collided with a table in the crowded space behind him.
Reede’s fist with the calibrator caught him in the side of the face, slamming him back into a pile of equipment. Gundhalinu fell, crashing down in a rain of electronics gear. He lay still; Reede saw blood.
Reede spun back again as Hundet burst into the tent. Hundet took it all in in one glance; the stun rifle he already held in his hands rose to his shoulder.
Reede reached frantically for the knife at his belt. He flung it without even time to aim, trusting blind instinct and his perfect reflexes. The blade caught Hundet in the chest, stopping his forward motion with the shock of the counterblow. He seemed to hang, agonizingly suspended in midair, through an endless moment before his legs gave way and he sprawled facedown on the floor. Reede crossed the lab in less than a heartbeat to the place where Hundet lay in a spreading pool of red. He rolled Hundet with his foot.
Dead. Hundet’s eyes stared up at him in unblinking hatred as he leaned down and jerked his knife from the dead man’s body. He wiped the blade on Hundet’s tunic impassively, and put it back into his belt sheath. He picked up the rifle, checking its charge. He adjusted the setting to maximum; on that setting it would stop a man cold from a considerable distance, and kill him easily at short range. Holding the gun, he went outside.
Trooper Saroon stood in the open space between domes, clutching his rifle indecisively. His face was tense and worried as he watched Niburu and Ananke, who stood looking toward the lab. The expressions on all their faces changed abruptly as Reede came out of the dome, carrying Hundet’s gun.
“Freeze!” Reede said, but he could have saved his breath. Saroon stood frozen already, with the look on his face turning to pathetic betrayal as he grasped what must be happening. He stared at Niburu and Ananke again, in disbelief; his gun wavered.
“Drop it,” Reede said, gesturing with his own weapon. Saroon tossed the rifle away and raised his hands. He kept stealing glances at the tent, hoping against hope that someone else would come out of it. “Niburu,” Reede said, “Ananke. This is it. We’ve got everything we came for, and more. Get inside and get started—I want that stardrive unit in the rover now. We’re leaving, as soon as I take care of details.” He moved a few steps toward Saroon, getting within fatal range, and raised the rifle again. Saroon sat down abruptly in the sand as his knees buckled. Reede adjusted his aim downward.
“No, Reede—!”
Reede lowered the rifle, furiously, as he found Niburu squarely in his line of sight. “Goddammit! Get out of the way, you stupid bastard.”
But Niburu stood motionless, placing his body like a shield between the trembling boy and the gun. “You don’t have to do this. What’s the point—?”
“Yes, I do. Get out of the way.” Reede gestured with the gun, feeling his face harden over. “Get out of here if you don’t want to watch. But get the fuck out of my way. Now!”
“No. I won’t let you kill him.” Niburu stood straighter, white-faced and tight-lipped. He barely topped the kneeling trooper’s height, but Reede found nothing absurd about his position. Slowly, as if he were hypnotized, Ananke moved forward, ready to add his body to the human shield. Reede’s hands tightened over the gun.
But as he began to raise it again, Ananke glanced away, distracted by some unexpected motion. Reede followed his glance, swore as his eyes caught sight of something—someone, disappearing around the bend of the canyon. Someone running like hell toward Fire Lake.
Reede ran back to the tent. A glance inside told him all he needed to know. The far wall of the dome gaped, letting in daylight. Gundhalinu was gone.
Reede went after him down the canyon, leaving Saroon behind, forgotten. Gundhalinu was the one who mattered, the one he had to stop. Because Gundhalinu was heading for the Lake, and he didn’t know why. The canyon seemed to go on forever, shimmering with heat, until he began to wonder desperately whether the Lake was shifting reality around him, stretching out spacetime so that he would never reach his quarry. He had almost drowned because the Lake protected Gundhalinu; the Lake loved Gundhalinu.…
But he burst out of the canyon mouth onto the open shore at last, and Gundhalinu was there, standing silhouetted by the Lake’s hellshine on the barren, tortured stone. Facing the Lake he raised his hand, to throw something—
“Gundhalinu!” Reede raised his rifle even as he shouted the name. He fired.
Gundhalinu staggered as the shock hit him; the impact carried his arm forward. His hand released whatever it had held, as his nervous system went dead and he collapsed on the beach. Reede saw something too small to identify disappear into the shimmering haze.
Reede ran forward, crouched down, rolling Gundhalinu’s helpless body onto its back. Gundhalinu stared up at him, bloody and bruised but completely aware.
“What was it?” Reede said fiercely. “What did you throw into the Lake?”
Gundhalinu didn’t answer; silent whether he liked it or not, because his voluntary responses had been put on hold. He breathed in ragged gasps. He’d taken a bad hit, enough to affect his autonomic nervous system. But Reede saw triumph slowly replace the fury and the betrayal in the other man’s eyes.
Reede kicked him anyway for not answering, out of spite or something darker. Gundhalinu’s face spasmed with pain. Reede straightened up, looking toward the Lake; watching, half-blind, for some clue. And then he saw it—a glitch, a ripple, a shimmering transfiguration in the distortion all around him. He could almost feel it … the vision of his worst fear coming true. And yet something inside him was filled with wonder.
“You did it, didn’t you—?” he said, looking back at Gundhalinu. “That was the virus! You’ve infected the whole fucking Lake with it!” He kneeled down, catching Gundhalinu by the front of his sweat-soaked shirt, and dragged him up to sitting. He held Gundhalinu’s bruised face clamped in his free hand so that they were eye to eye. Gundhalinu met his gaze unflinchingly, and blinked once, slowly, like a nod.
Reede slapped Gundhalinu, hard; feeling the other man’s pain with the same dizzy sense of terror and pleasure that he felt when the pain was his own. “I was going to kill you because I had to, because you knew too much.… But now it’s too late for that. Now I’ll just have to kill you for revenge.” He let Gundhalinu go, letting him fall back onto the mottled surface of the stone. He pushed to his feet.
Picking up the stun rifle, he leveled it at Gundhalinu’s head. Gundhalinu’s face did not change, could not. But in his eyes Reede saw desperation and fear … grief, betrayal, loss. The muzzle of the gun sank slowly as Reede’s hands lowered, suddenly strengthless; as his mind’s eye replayed his waking to a vision of red rock and glaring sky, to Gundhalinu’s face hovering above him and the knowledge that the man he had just been trying to kill had saved him from death by drowning.
His rage and resolve drowned in the clear, sweet river of his memories. He remembered all that they had accomplished together, the uncanny way their minds meshed, the knowledge that he had never worked with anyone before who had … who had … He turned his back on Gundhalinu’s naked vulnerability, stared out at the seething, blinding Lake, the face of Chaos. He listened to it screaming, inside his head. But because of what they had created together, already it was transforming into something new, into Order.…
He hurled the gun, watched it tumble end over end, arcing out and down until it disappeared into the eye-warping haze, the way Gundhalinu’s flung vial had disappeared.
He turned back, his eyes burning with the vision
, his hands trembling. “Ilmarinen…” he whispered. He fell to his knees, lifting Gundhalinu’s hand, pressing it against his face, his lips. He looked down, saw Gundhalinu staring up at him in anguish and incomprehension through the shadow-bars of his nerveless fingers. Ilmarinen— And his mind imploded, as the black hole at its heart tore coherent thought limb from limb.
He staggered to his feet, looking toward the Lake and back again with sudden fury. “Why did you make me do that? I have to kill you—!” His hand jerked the knife from his belt as if it had a will of its own; his body kneeled down again beside Gundhalinu’s. He pressed the blade to Gundhalinu’s throat. His entire body was trembling now. He held himself that way, unable to finish the act, paralyzed as completely as his victim by the anguish of unbearable loss.
He fell back, the knife dropping from his hand to clatter on the hot surface of pitted stone. Beneath his hands he felt the pressure of countless screaming mouths and mindless eyes. “Get up!” he shouted, shouting at himself now. “Get up and do it! Do it! Do it!” He picked up the knife again.
“Reede!”
Reede looked up, feeling something that was almost disbelief as he saw Ananke appear at the mouth of the canyon; as he remembered that he and Gundhalinu were not alone in the universe, the last two men alive.
“Reede! Come on!” Ananke waved his arm, his voice almost shrill as he gestured toward camp.
“What?” Reede shouted furiously, climbing to his feet with the knife in his fist.
“Kedalion says we have to get out of here now!”
“Why?”
“Because he called in the army!”
Reede swore in disbelief. He forced himself to look down at Gundhalinu one last time … seeing the trefoil that shone like a star on Gundhalinu’s chest, hearing the harsh sound of his labored breathing. Reede touched the solii pendant hidden beneath his own shirt. “Live, then, damn you—” he said, his voice shaking. “It won’t matter anyway. We have what we need.” He brought his heavy boot back, kicked Gundhalinu in the side with all his strength; felt dizzy with relief as he made Gundhalinu cry out, feebly, involuntarily.