Colony by Benjamin Cross (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📗

Less than four or five paces now separated the two of them in their stand-off. At this range even the mist had lost its grip. Callum could make out every detail of the creature, from the bunched folds of purple-grey gooseflesh below its eyes, to the thread-like blood vessels pulsing in its bared gums. At this range its musk was as overpowering as the reflected colour still coursing through its plumes.

The world was thrown into deep silence. All that existed now were himself, Darya, the creature and something else. It was nothing visible. It was a contract. An understanding, older than the creature itself, which kept it from simply lashing out with its hind claws and tearing his throat out.

As Callum went to take another step forward, it stopped displaying suddenly and turned its head upwards. There was a new look on its face. The colour shed from its feathers. Was he winning? Had he won? Was he about to die?

Callum was desperate for reassurance from Darya, but speech left him at the sight of the creature’s whole body bathed in a mysterious light. The light intensified, spreading out into a halo until he could barely see the creature for the glare.

As a low rumbling sound grew louder and louder, his voice returned at last: “What the hell?”

There was a crunch followed by a piercing shriek as a large mechanical arm appeared out of the mist and came crashing down in front of Callum’s face. The bucket-fist pounded the creature into the ground like a child crushing an ant, and the force of the impact vibrated through the rock under Callum’s feet.

In that moment, as Darya’s grip tightened around his shoulder, he wasn’t sure what scared him the most: the creature, the sound of gunfire, explosions and screeching that rushed to fill the air once more, or the towering mechanical beast now emerging from the mist.

The arm reared upwards, the blood-stained bucket clanking at its hinge. Beneath it, the creature’s lifeless body shook violently. Blood and bone burst up through its now-dull plumage. Bathed in the light streaming from the machine’s headlamps, its entire upper torso was pulped. Its legs twitched and a startled look lay splattered across what remained of its face.

“I do not think that he plays possum this time,” Darya said.

Callum said nothing. There were no words for how he felt in that moment.

2

Peterson had never given up before. It was weird. Kind of comforting. He’d always figured he would be racked with panic when his time finally came. But if anything he felt a deep sense of calm.

“Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…”

Only, where was his film reel? Weren’t a lifetime’s worth of memories meant to be flashing past his eyes in one big cognitive chunder? There were enough of them for sure. Good and bad. But now that it came to it, there was only one thing on his mind.

Stupid! he scolded himself. You’ve known toenails longer than you’ve known her. How can you even pretend to be in love with her? Just look what you’re risking.

“Oh yeah, and what’s that then?” he slurred.

No reply.

What was that Robert Burns claptrap McJones had spouted back on the ship? But t’see her was t’love her, love but her and love forever.

“But to see her was to love her,” he repeated. Perhaps it could be just that simple. He had no real clue. Robert Burns obviously thought so, and so did McJones. All Peterson knew was that she was what he was thinking about now, as he drew his last breaths. Ava, and the knowledge that because of him she was in deep shit.

His desire to succumb was waning. He fought to regain it. Death – nice, responsibility-free death – would be so much easier. Wouldn’t it? But, sprawled out in the carnage of the upturned cabin, his sense of acceptance was being replaced by a strange, very much alive kind of restlessness.

Perhaps he was looking at it all wrong. Did it really matter what he felt for Ava or not? Whether it was love or delusion or just plain old animal lust? No. What mattered – at least, what he figured to matter – was that he didn’t bail on her without a fight. As a human being, he owed her that. As a human being suffering his consequences, he owed her those last breaths of his. And that went for McJones as well and any other sorry sons of bitches that were suffering because of his stupidity. Hell, it even went for Lebedev.

He pushed himself up off the ceiling. The decaying atmosphere was starting to make him feel sick, light-headed. He shook it off. He’d wasted enough time already. If he was serious about not bailing on anybody but Davy Jones, then it was now or never.

He wrestled the tool kit from beneath the upturned console and grabbed a screwdriver. He prised up the flooring and got to work on the reinforced panel secured across the top of the specimen chamber. The screws were structural and not intended to be removed. He had to score away the anti-corrosion paint before using every last ounce of his strength to unfasten them, all the while supporting the weighty metal panel on his shoulders like some kind of twenty-first century Atlas.

At last, hands and shoulders numb, he allowed the panel, and the better part of the underlying refrigeration module, to clatter down beside him. He wiped the condensation from the inside of his glasses and stared through into the chamber.

A deep sigh escaped him. “Here we go again.”

The gap was just big enough for him to squeeze his shoulders through. Having pulled on his Arctic wetsuit and diver’s utility belt, he tucked the IRS inhalator into a waterproof bag and fed it up into the chamber, along with his face mask and a single-use respirator. He clipped his diver’s knife and an underwater lamp to his belt and then grabbed his harpoon gun.

As