Chapter Forty-One Sadie
Forty-One
Sadie
The varvax dragged us up a set of stairs into a large room with windows that overlooked the enormous warehouse.
The room was full of strange-looking equipment, including a row of gurneys and IV poles, a tank with a large hose attached to it, and several trays with hypodermic needles and various metal implements.
One of the walls was dominated by what looked like a refrigerator with glass double doors, while another was lined with many large monitor panels, all of them dark.
Two varvax hoisted each of us onto gurneys beside each other and used small light-lines to strap us down by our wrists and ankles.
They’d taken our pistols and packs, and I wasn’t sure where the taynix had gone to.
The slugs could all change their appearance to hide in the nowhere, so I hoped they were hidden nearby, not captured or harmed.
As I lay on the gurney, strength began to return to my muscles, and my mouth was finally able to form words. “I thought you were taking us to your leader!” I shouted at one of the varvax, who leaned over the tray of medical implements.
The varvax didn’t respond, only strode over and stabbed me in the arm with a syringe. I thrashed in protest, but only succeeded in causing myself more pain while the varvax depressed the plunger and injected me with the full dose of whatever fluid it contained.
“Which one of you is Ivy?” Nedd asked, craning his neck to see as one of the other varvax gave him the same jab. He didn’t get an answer either.
The varvax chattered among themselves and then left us alone while whatever they’d injected us with began to take effect. At first I felt nothing, only an ache in my muscles from the electric shock. Then the ache subsided, and my fingers and toes began to tingle.
“Oh, stars,” I said. “I think they’re preparing us for cold storage.”
“Stay alert,” Nedd said. “Maybe we can figure some way out of this.”
I didn’t see a way out, but it was probably a good idea to take stock of our surroundings anyway.
I lifted my head as far as I was able, trying to see what was happening down near the portal.
The warehouse floor buzzed with activity.
Several varvax wheeled in racks with armor and weapons as others managed a set of cryopods.
As the pods opened and disoriented humans emerged from the fog, robed varvax busily equipped them for battle. “They’re waking up their army,” I said.
“It appears that way,” Nedd said.
At first the people emerging from the pods looked pretty unsteady, but that wore off fairly quickly. They didn’t appear to find it odd that the varvax wearing robes were thrusting weapons into their hands and strapping armor on their bodies.
The first ranks of the newly wakened soldiers lined up and marched through the portal to Blightfall.
I could hear Ivy’s voice echoing over the loudspeaker outside the windows.
“This settlement of humans has been corrupted!” she said.
“They are in league with the aliens! You must destroy them!” They looked more like rank-and-file soldiers, trained to work together as a unit, rather than specialized fighters like those from Blightfall.
Which made sense—Ivy wouldn’t want to send the humans she’d collected on this planet out to attack their own kin.
I strained against the light-lines that held my wrists and ankles, but they were fastened tight.
Whatever agent the varvax had injected into my body didn’t seem to be a full paralytic.
I could still move, so I tried jerking my whole body, but only succeeded in bashing my gurney into Nedd’s, jarring us both.
“They’re marching on our friends,” I said.
“And there’s nothing we can do to stop them.
” We’d come here for answers and resources, but now we were trapped with even more questions while the only available resources were about to be weaponized against us.
Not to mention that all those humans who had been promised a mission to save humanity were now being tricked into fighting against their own interests.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t see how this can get any worse. ”
“You sure?” Nedd asked. He turned his head toward me, his bio hand resting at the edge of his gurney centimeters from mine.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, we got into the nowhere! But now we’re prisoners here with no way to reach our friends.
Our radios won’t work. Our sidearms have been confiscated.
And we’ve been left here to watch while our friends are wiped out, if we even remain conscious that long.
” At least my head felt clear, and I could still move my limbs, though they felt heavy and sluggish.
“Good point,” Nedd said. “We can’t possibly make the situation any more terrible. Right?”
“I guess that depends,” I said. “What were you thinking of doing?”
Nedd stared at me. Hoid’s illusions had faded, revealing his bloodshot eyes and bruised face. “It doesn’t matter, right? Because no matter what I do it can’t get any worse.”
“Nedd Strong,” I said. “You’re scaring me. What are you planning to do?”
Nedd sighed. “If we had any chance of living through this, would you want to go out sometime?”
My brain stuttered. I spoke a bunch of syllables, but they didn’t add up to a single word.
“Um,” I said finally, “did you just ask me on a date?”
“Yeah,” Nedd said.
“While we are in mortal peril?”
Nedd groaned. “I knew I wasn’t reading you right. I am terrible at signals. I always get it wrong.”
A thousand butterflies exploded out of my chest. “Nedd,” I said. “This. Is. Awesome!”
Nedd’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Yes!” I bounced a little on my gurney, knocking it repeatedly against his. My whole body buzzed with excitement. We were clearly never going to get out of here to have that date, but just the fact that he wanted to was—
Something horrible occurred to me. “Wait, are you only asking me out because we’re going to die?
Are you taking pity on me because you hope you’ll never have to follow through?
” My mind raced away from me, finding one terrible conclusion after another, and I barreled after it, barely able to keep up.
“Are you hoping to die here rather than have to go out with me?”
“What? No!” Nedd looked appropriately horrified about this idea. “I’m asking because I want to, and you said I couldn’t make things any worse, so this seemed like a good time. Did you…Did you say yes?”
“Yes!” I said. “Yes, yes, yes. Oh, scud, now we definitely have to live through this.”
Nedd grinned. “Yeah, I’d say we definitely do.” He looked sideways at me. “Did I make this awkward?”
“A little! But in the best way.”
“All right,” Nedd said. “I’ll take that.”
Nedd wanted to go out with me! I was a little confused as to why, but this wasn’t the time to ask questions. This was the time to find a way to get out of here.
“What do you think would happen if I started screaming?” I asked.
“You’d make yourself hoarse,” Nedd replied.
“True,” I said. “But would it annoy the varvax into coming back and actually taking us to Ivy? Do you think this room is soundproof?”
“It isn’t,” Ivy said. “And the varvax are extremely hard to annoy with the sounds of human suffering. Believe me. I’ve tried.”
I looked around, but the voice seemed to be coming through a speaker, not someone physically present in the room. “Hey!” I said. “Weren’t your people supposed to bring us to you? We were hoping we’d get to finally meet, but now we’re stuck here alone.”
“You are not alone,” Ivy said.
Scud, that was ominous.
“Not literally, I suppose,” I said. “We are here with each other.”
Ivy sighed. “I should have remembered how obtuse humans can be. You’re such frail creatures, basically sacks of meat and juices walking around on a pile of sticks. Maybe that’s why you insist on everything being concrete and tangible and visible.”
A moment later, a hologram popped into existence at the center of the room. It was a girl roughly our age, with blue hair like mine, though she was several centimeters taller and had a more angular face. She was wearing a DDF flightsuit, much like the ones we were wearing.
She wasn’t one of us, though. She couldn’t be.
“Ivy?” I asked. “Is that you?”
“It is as much me as anything is,” Ivy said. “Would you find someone older more comforting? I thought maybe you would like a friend—humans are so precious about their friendships—but if you would prefer—”
The hologram aged several years, now looking more like the mother of the girl who had stood there before.
“I think I’d prefer to see your true age,” I said. That would at least give us some information about her.
“There is no way to represent my true age in human physiology,” Ivy said. “Human bodies deteriorate to decomposition in just over a century. This representation is as good a visualization of my true age as any human body would be.”
Oh, stars. We’d assumed Ivy was a varvax, but—
“Do varvax live that long?” I asked.
“They do not,” Ivy said. “Their lifespans are not even as long as your own.”
All this time, we’d assumed Ivy was a varvax because of her speech patterns, and because she had varvax working for her. But if she’d been hiding her true purpose here from the Superiority, if she’d lived longer than an organic being could—
“You’re an AI,” Nedd said, echoing my thoughts.
“Yes,” she said. “Specifically, I am IV-128, an advanced Writian model from the Onward product line. That’s a bit of a mouthful, and I do know how you humans like your comfortable, familiar titles, so for brevity, you may call me Ivy.”
She sounded a little like M-Bot—the AI who’d been a member of our flight for a while—but crazier. While she smiled sweetly at us, her team of varvax returned and undid my restraints, wrestling me off the table.
“What are you doing to her?” Nedd asked.
“They’re preparing her for storage,” Ivy said. “I’ll tuck you away until I have a use for you. Humans with relatively high survival skills are hard to come by.”
The varvax forced me into the clear glass refrigerator, attaching me to the back wall of the box with more restraints—small light-lines that coiled around my ankles, wrists, and chest to lash me to the wall.
I fought against them, but there were too many of them, they were too strong, and my body felt leaden and unwieldy.
“Don’t worry,” Ivy said. “The analgesic will ease your pain as your organs enter stasis.”
Stars. That’s what they’d injected us with.
It hadn’t disabled my limbs, but I did feel somewhat disconnected from my body, my limbs sluggish.
The varvax returned for Nedd, lifting his body between them and hauling him into the refrigeration unit next to me.
He twisted and fought, but the injection must also have weakened him somewhat, because he ended up strapped to the back of the refrigerator beside me, equally helpless.
The varvax even noticed his prosthetic and used the light-line ties to lash his shoulder to the wall in addition to his wrist, so he couldn’t detach his arm to get free.
“By the way,” Ivy said, her voice clear through a speaker in the top of the refrigerator unit, the mouth of her holographic illusion still smiling benevolently at us through the doors. “You’re welcome.”
Yes, she was definitely insane.