Distant Worlds Volume 1 Read online

  Rees waited in the elevator after deploying the drone. He had another one just in case something went wrong. Looking down at the elevator’s keypad, he scanned the numbers.

  The numbers stopped at eighty-seven. The button after it was blank.

  “Got it,” Squibby said over the transmitter. “Signal’s clean.”

  Rees stared at the blank button.

  Had it been blank when he took the elevator to the crime scene yesterday?

  He couldn’t remember.

  “Rees?” Squibby asked. “Are you still there?”

  Trust those eyes of yours, Detective.

  Rees pressed the blank button.

  “Hang tight, Squibby. I’m going to have another look at the top floor.”

  The elevator doors opened to darkness.

  Rees pulled out his flashlight and switched it on.

  There should have been a night crew working on the floor’s interior, but there was no sign of anyone.

  Slowly, he stepped out of the elevator, sweeping the flashlight toward every corner as he went. Not much work had been done since the previous night. The crooked angles and distended walls were still in place. He found that focusing on any part of the building for too long gave him a headache, so he kept his eyes moving, examining the various walls and half-finished rooms quickly as he moved through the interior of the eighty-eighth floor.

  Squibby’s voice crackled over the transmitter.

  “… es? Can… ear me?”

  There must have been some sort of interference from the structure. That seemed odd, considering that many of the walls were unfinished and the top floor was so high.

  “You’re breaking up, Squibby.”

  “Access… feeds. Somebod… rased… eight… loor.”

  “Listen, I can’t hear shit up here. Save it till I–”

  “Wha… uck?”

  There was a tinge of panic in her voice, something Rees wasn’t used to hearing from her.

  “Squibby? What is it?”

  “Sec… ity!”

  He thought back to what she said about the building’s unusual security program. It shouldn’t have been able to trace her so quickly.

  “Don’t try to–”

  “Shit!” Squibby said, her voice finally coming through cleanly.

  Then she screamed.

  The signal erupted with shrill static and Rees yanked the transmitter out of his ear. His ears felt like they would keep ringing forever, but after a few seconds, he realized they weren’t ringing at all. The sound was coming from all around him, a faint hum that filled the air and made the hair on his arms stand on end.

  He knew that sound, remembered it from somewhere.

  Gripping his flashlight tightly, Rees continued through the unfinished halls of the eighty-eighth floor. The construction become more riotous as he went deeper. Sometimes the angles of the walls and ceiling seemed to change when he swung the light over them, reverting to a more bizarre form once the darkness enveloped them again.

  Stubbornly, he kept going until he came to a large, open space along the tower’s outermost wall. Light should have been pouring through the large windows there, the glow from the surrounding buildings and slivers of moonlight that managed to punch through the nighttime smog.

  But there was no light. The glass was blacker than tar, and even the light from his flashlight seemed to leave it untouched when it passed over the surface.

  He swept the light downward. The pool of blood from last night’s murder had congealed on the floor nearby.

  There was another sound then, somewhere on the far side of the room; a staccato of rips that sounded like a length of fabric being shredded. The air seemed to shift from warm to cold with every breath he took and he felt slightly nauseated.

  He leveled the flashlight on the black void of the window.

  Another tearing sound, louder this time.

  Something in the glass shuddered under the light and the flashlight’s bulb went out with a pop.

  The darkness crashed in on Rees like he’d been tossed into the water on a moonless night. He stumbled back as the tearing sound grew louder and nearly fell, but something caught his arm.

  “Where are you going, Nicholas?”

  The voice was a chorus, a vast array of the familiar and the alien. He heard Vandum and Morgan, Squibby and Nallick. He heard voices he didn’t know, some he’d forgotten, and others he dearly wished to forget. It was all of them and none of them at once.

  Whatever held his arm tightened its grip as he tried to pull away.

  Panicked, Rees reached for his gun.

  The first shot ricocheted off something on the far side of the room, but the second and third thumped into something just a few feet away from him. His arm came free and he fell backwards, firing wildly. Two more shots clanged off the walls and a third smashed into the glass window. It shimmered for a moment, the light from outside blinking through like a strobe before the darkness slammed shut over it once more.

  Rees scrambled to his feet and ran blindly through the pitch-black halls. He bounced off walls, tripped over construction equipment piled on the floor, and clipped his shoulders on doorframes as he tried to find his way back to the elevator.

  A gust of air roared after him and flung his stumbling body forward. His head slammed into something as his feet went out from beneath him. He went down hard, his gun flying from his hand and skittering off into the void.

  Before he lost consciousness, Rees heard the bizarre choir of voices again.

  “Come now, Nicholas. I have so much to show you.”

  “Rise and shine, Detective.”

  Rees’s eyes responded sluggishly and it took a few seconds for the woman standing before him to come into focus. She wasn’t familiar, but he could tell what she was just by the way she looked at him.

  “Detective Rees, my name is Amanda Reilly. I’m with the city’s Special Intelligence and Counterterrorism Agency and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  There was a slight, stinging pain on the back of his head. Rees tried to raise a hand to rub it, but his limbs didn’t respond. He was strapped into his chair.

  “Please, Detective, this will go much smoother with your cooperation.”

  Rees knew enough about SICA’s interrogation procedures to take her word for it.

  “Where am I?”

  Reilly smiled, which made Rees wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

  “I’m afraid I can’t say, Detective,” she said.

  True to form, Rees thought.

  Reilly reached into her pocket and produced a small plastic chip.

  “Case #4563367-6638, Addendum. Dr. L. S. Morgan,” she said. “You remember this, I presume?”

  Rees nodded.

  “Who else has seen it?”

  “Everyone that should,” he said. “You know the procedure for that sort of thing, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I also know that this isn’t a routine autopsy report. I’ll ask you again, Detective: Who’s seen it?”

  Rees shook his head. She likely already knew the answer, anyway.

  “Just me and Morgan.”

  He remembered Squibby’s transmission then, that last moment when something had gone wrong.

  “And Squibby,” he said. “What happened to Squibby?”

  Reilly raised an eyebrow.

  “That would be Lynn Squibel? Ex-cyberanalyst for the department?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Dead. Found her facedown in her rig. She’d bled out through the eyes and nose. Still trying to work out what fried her, but there wasn’t much brain tissue left to work with.”

  Rees closed his eyes. She didn’t have to be involved in any of this, could have gone on blissfully ignorant. But he’d needed her for answers, had gotten her in deeper than she needed to be.

  Her death was on him.

  “No one else, then?” Reilly asked.

  “No, just them.”

  “Good,” she sai
d. “I’d hate for anyone else to get involved. There’s enough blood on this case already.”

  “What do you mean?” Rees asked. “Did something happen to Morgan too?”

  “Well, it seems that a few hours after you left the precinct, your John Doe climbed off the slab and smashed in Doctor Morgan’s skull.”

  “Christ.”

  “The killer got away clean,” Reilly said. “Nobody even knew what happened until about four hours later.”

  “Wasn’t anybody watching the damn security feed?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Trouble is, there’s nothing on it.”

  “What do you mean?” Rees asked. “Every inch of that fucking lab is covered!”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it either, but I watched it with my own eyes. One second, Morgan and the body are there and then,” she snapped her fingers, “the room is empty. Not a sign of anyone or a hint that a bloody corpse was sitting on the table a second earlier.”

  “And nobody saw it leave?”

  “Not a soul. And it gets even better,” she said. “After they found Morgan’s body and forensics swarmed over the room, the security feed still never showed his corpse. That’s when I was called in. We never would have found out what happened had I not been able to salvage some of the data from Morgan’s optic implants. They showed some of what the security feed missed.”

  Reilly paused for a moment.

  “I’m… well, let’s just say it was an image I’d rather forget about as soon as I can.”

  Although he could only imagine such a scene, Rees shared her sentiment.

  “Wait,” he said. “Why the hell would Morgan’s eyes record the attack, but the security cameras were fooled?”

  “I wondered that too,” Reilly said. “Turns out, Morgan had his eyes replaced six years ago. Two years ago the city switched suppliers for all its optics and surveillance equipment and every security feed in the police department was replaced or updated. Care to guess the new supplier?”

  “Sircotin.”

  Reilly nodded.

  “My security clearance allowed me to dig up Morgan’s case file on the John Doe and your interrogation of Vandum out of the department’s datatrash heap. After that there were just too many coincidences to ignore so I came to find you. I figured an old school cop might have a useful hunch or two.”

  Rees shook his head.

  “I wish I did,” he said. “None of this makes a damn bit of sense to me.”

  She smiled again.

  “Oh, I think you know a thing or two that’s far more useful, Detective. I wouldn’t have spent the last week looking for you if I didn’t.”

  Rees gaped at her, trying to process what he’d heard.

  “You heard that right,” Reilly said. “It’s been a week since you walked into the Sircotin Technologies building. I had a feeling you’d gone back there, but it wasn’t I tracked down Squibel and went through her search records that I knew for sure. Didn’t make it any easier to find you, though. I turned the whole damn city upside down and never found a trace until you burst into the precinct three days ago raving in some weird language nobody could decipher.”

  Rees sat still, probing his mind for any memories beyond losing consciousness on the eighty-eighth floor of the Sircotin building. He did his best not to think about what had sent him racing through those halls.

  “I… I don’t remember anything,” he said.

  “No, Detective,” Reilly said, “you mean you can’t remember; your mind won’t let you. Whatever you saw in there must have had quite an effect. I need to know what it was.”

  “Why don’t you just go see for yourself?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “The Sircotin building collapsed the same night you disappeared; it just imploded like it had been scheduled for demolition. Killed plenty of innocent people. You’re the only living soul who saw what was going on inside that place. I might have asked your buddy Vandum, but I expect you know what happened to him?”

  Rees nodded as a door clicked open behind him.

  “Doctor,” Reilly said, “are we ready to begin?”

  “Yes, of course,” the doctor said as he walked around the chair to adjust something on the terminal beside Rees.

  “Good, plug him in and let’s get started.”

  Rees couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he could see the three-inch spike in his hand clearly enough. It was connected to a fiberoptic cable that fed into the terminal. He became aware once again of the pain on the back of his head as the doctor brought the point of the spike closer to him.

  “Don’t be afraid, Detective,” Reilly said. “We’ve installed a cranial datajack into your skull so the good doctor here can interface directly with your brain and tear down those troublesome memory blocks. It shouldn’t cause any permanent–”

  Rees couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. He knew that because he was still alive, because he hadn’t been ripped apart by whatever energy had washed over him and prevented his escape. But then the silence caused him to doubt, and he wondered if that was all death would be, nothing but a black void, silent for all eternity.

  Then a soft light swelled up in the distance and Rees realized that he was no longer where logic said he should have been. The rising sun was a queer color, a blend of orange and purple tinged with a bit of brown, and it cast dim light over an equally strange landscape. It looked like nothing so much as a vast plain of wax that had once held a far different, perhaps even majestic, form, but now found its features heaped and lumped into sickly, misshapen columns and piles.

  As the light grew brighter, he saw bizarre, winged shapes circling in the sky overhead. Confused, Rees staggered toward the sun, but within a few steps he found himself on the precipice of a towering cliff that overlooked something… horrible.

  He could find no words to describe it, none that could convey the hideous nature and instincts of the swelling mass of flesh, fangs, and eyes.

  A few hundred of its countless eyes turned on him and Rees screamed.

  The sound of his cry echoed painfully throughout the eighty-eighth floor and he staggered when he found himself back in familiar surroundings. Hastily rigged work lights strung along the ceiling provided enough illumination for Rees to see clearly now and he quickly found his gun on the floor. He picked it up and placed the barrel to his temple.

  “Please, Nicholas, don’t do anything rash.”

  Rees’s mind snapped back from the brink and he turned to see a tall, striking man wearing ragged, wrinkled suit encrusted with dried blood. The man should have been a stranger, but the suit, and the seven bullet holes still visible on it, was too familiar. There were two new holes as well, fresh blood dripping from each.

  “You’re confused,” Kurush said, “afraid. You’re wondering how it is that you could be in two places without moving. You’re wondering how it is that I can be standing here before you now.”

  Rees pointed his gun at the man who should have been dead.

  “Oh, come now, Nicholas, we’ve been through this already, haven’t we? It was Vandum’s charge to do the same so that we might be here tonight, though he knew it not. At least give me the chance to speak.”

  Rees wanted to squeeze the trigger. He tried to squeeze the trigger. But nothing happened. His finger would not budge and Kurush simply stood there looking at him without a trace of concern.

  He lowered the gun.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Kurush gestured to the unfinished, crooked walls around him. Rees tried to speak, but found that his voice no longer worked.

  “Do you understand what you’re looking at, at what generations of work have achieved? I wasn’t always just an architect for Sircotin, you see. I’ve held its hand since its inception, from one innovation to the next, always working towards a singular goal. This building is the very essence of what the company was built to achieve; it’s a transmitter, a direct line of communication to the true essence of the universe.

&
nbsp; “I once thought as you do, that all attempts to improve man lead to folly. I resisted change just as you have done while everyone around you reshaped their lives to accommodate the ingenuity of great minds. But then I saw the truth. I reveled in the brilliant, magnificent energies of creation, of the great swirling chaos from which true greatness is born. We think ourselves creatures of reason, of logic, but that is not our true nature. Tell me, Nicholas, do you dream?”

  Rees didn’t want to nod, but he did.

  “Of course you do,” Kurush said. “And do your dreams not seem more vibrant and alive than this banal prison we’ve created for ourselves? That is because we are born of dreams, Nicholas, not of reason. We are shaped in His image, the fruits of His terrible and divine genius. Even now He seeks to reach across the cold gulf of space and touch us, to give us but a glimpse of our destiny. It’s a grave burden to endure such secrets for so long, Nicholas. You must help me now to carry on the work of a thousand lifetimes.”

  A part of Rees’s mind, the rational, conscious portion, tried to raise his gun again, but his body would not obey. It was too much under the sway of his unconscious mind, the dreaming mind. And it had seen. It had seen it with Rees’s own eyes, seen the swelling, pulsating plain of flesh and bone; it had seen the thing that would drive mankind to horrors and virtuosities beyond his meager imaginings. It had been but a glimpse, but it was seared in his soul so strongly that even death would not free him from the sight of it.

  Trust those eyes of yours, Detective.

  Had those words been a warning or an invitation? Perhaps there was no difference between the two.

  Kurush stepped closer and placed his hands on Rees’s head.

  “This is not the end, Nicholas,” he said. “There is never an end, only the infinite beginning.”

  And then Rees saw more.

  The horror of the previous sight was but the surface of a power unfathomably greater than even a madman could conceive. The man who called himself Aran Kurush, the man shot dead only a day earlier, carried Rees through the nightmare until he could at last go no farther had to turn away before his very being was incinerated.