Chapter Thirty-Eight Sadie
Thirty-Eight
Sadie
Nedd and I hurried up the stairs. We emerged into a room deep in fog, which emanated from two large machines that were mostly buried beneath the billowing haze.
They emitted a loud hum, dampened only by the roar of the large fans that ushered the fog in the direction of the ramp.
On this side of the fans, the floor was covered with only a thin layer of errant mist.
On the left wall was the nowhere portal.
I’d never actually seen one before, not even on our own planet.
Still, I recognized it from its description: a wall covered in scribbles, as if someone had walked along it with a piece of chalk, moving their hand up and down and drawing line after crooked line.
I wondered if there was some code in the scribbles, some language I was illiterate in.
As Nedd and I stepped up to the wall, my pack suddenly felt lighter. I peered inside and found Hoid in the bottom, but Bob had disappeared.
“Um, Nedd,” I said, just loud enough to be heard over the machines, “Bob is gone.”
“What?” Nedd said. “Where’d he go?”
Over the whir of the fans, I could make out the vibrations of Dayan’s voice over the arena’s loudspeaker.
“Um,” I said, “I think he went to project Dayan’s voice through the hypercomm. Do we go in without him?”
“Yes,” he said. “Our orders are to go through the gate, so we need to go. We might not be able to use him to communicate out of the nowhere anyway.”
I reached forward, touching the strange scribbles, wincing as if the portal might suck me through like some magical vacuum.
Though my feet stayed planted on the floor, my fingers passed through. The portal was open.
I looked up at Nedd and grinned. If we did this, there might be no coming back.
We were about to enter the nowhere, domain of taynix, cytonics, and godlike AIs.
I’d heard the nowhere described before—a great archipelago of floating landmasses, drifting in an abyss of space.
A light at their center, bits of cities drifting along like asteroids between them.
If I got stuck, at least I would see something most normal people never got to see.
And I, Sadie Chay, was going to step through first.
I grabbed Nedd’s hand, clutching my pistol in the other. He looked over at me in surprise. “I don’t want to be separated,” I said. That wasn’t weird. If I had a good reason, it couldn’t be weird.
Then, without waiting for him to reply, I stepped through.
I didn’t appear on an island in a floating abyss.
Instead, Nedd and I stood side by side next to the wall inside some kind of warehouse, massive and rectangular, with a row of dark windows up by the ceiling.
The room was as big as the largest of the farming caverns back home; huge banks of what looked like thousands of cleansing pods were stacked one atop the other, all connected with tubes and wires, along with some dials and wheels that looked like they might be used to rotate the pods to provide access to each one.
It was like some kind of giant spa where the population of an entire Detritus cavern might go to take a simultaneous bath.
That couldn’t be right. I doubted a bunch of varvax were collecting the best of the best of human melee fighters to clean them. Though I guessed I shouldn’t judge their cultural heritage if they were.
More alarming than the thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of pods, were the varvax racing around them.
The gate we’d passed through was unguarded.
Rather than defend it, the varvax ran here and there, lights flashing and sirens wailing, alerting them to do…
whatever it was they were doing. There were dozens of them, some with clipboards, others wheeling carts piled with fluid-filled IV bags.
These wore no robes, and their exosuits were fully intact, rather than missing their heads.
Most of them didn’t look like soldiers. More like… vat workers.
Ivy’s voice came over the loudspeaker, though the words were in another language. I turned on my pin so it would translate. “Intruders at the gate,” Ivy said. “Don’t let them disrupt the preparations!”
Several varvax ran toward us between the pods, sidearms pointed in our direction. “Stop,” they said. “Drop your weapons!”
If we dropped our weapons, they were probably going to kill us.
Instead, Nedd and I dove for shelter behind the nearest pod and fired our pistols.
The varvax returned fire, hitting the pod in front of us.
A viscous liquid began to pour out of it, turning immediately to steam as it depressurized.
A wave of cold wafted over me like a blast from a refrigerator, and through the broken part of the pod, I could see the arm and hand of a human inside.
They weren’t farming people. They were freezing them. “It’s some kind of stasis pod,” I said. “They’re preserving all of these humans.”
“That answers the question of where the gladiators are going,” Nedd said, firing again at the varvax over the top of the pod.
We were leaning against some kind of vitals panel, I realized.
The pod was monitoring and reporting blood oxygen levels, temperature, and heart rate.
I wasn’t a medical expert, but all of those rates looked far below human normal.
The person inside wasn’t literally frozen, but their vitals had been reduced to a minimum while the pod kept the person medically alive.
I thought about Liba’s assertion that there were other planets training humans with other skills—pilots, ground troops, navies.
Had they all been sent here? Ivy probably didn’t need a hundred thousand highly specialized melee fighters like the gladiators.
If this really was a well-rounded army of trained humans ready to fight aliens, they could be exactly the resource we needed to fight Ivy and get home, especially if there were ships and sidearms stored in this facility.
Could we wake them up and get them to be on our side?
But it also raised an important question: Why had Ivy collected this army? What did she intend to do with them?
“Are you people incompetent?” Ivy said. “Do I have to do everything myself?”
“Oh, scud,” Nedd said as a host of small drones, no bigger than a taynix, flew over the top of the pods. One looked identical to the camera drones from the arena, but the others had small weapons, each glowing with an eerie orange light.
“Come on,” Nedd said, ducking and running along the back of the bank of pods. I followed with my pistol pointed behind me, pausing only to take aim at one of the drones and shoot it out of the air. It landed on the far side of a pod with a heavy clank.
The other drones were too fast, though. They descended on us.
Nedd and I shot wildly, but we only succeeded in taking down one more drone before one pressed the glowing barrel of its weapon against the skin at the back of my neck.
I reached around to seize it and toss it away, but I was too late.
A current of electricity ran through my body, sending all my muscles into spasms. My pack hit the ground, and I heard Hoid squeak inside.
My whole body screamed in pain, and I thought I screamed along with it, though I wasn’t sure if that was aloud or only in my mind.
“Bring the humans to me,” Ivy said over the loudspeaker. “If you all can’t deal with them, I will.” The current stopped, but my muscles still cramped, and I lay helpless on the floor, unable to resist as varvax grabbed us by the arms, hauling us away.