Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

Yilda had forged on as if he’d forgotten his two companions. Despite Liis’ best efforts, the gap only widened. When he was a black dot on the horizon (and hard to make out against the base of the structure), Liis called her own halt. Her heart hammered wildly; perspiration filmed her. When she checked, between deep breaths, her display told she was nine kilometers from the dome. Until this moment she’d given the structure only a cursory examination. Now she scrutinized it more closely.

Yilda had told them the dome itself was ten kilometers in diameter, and over two in height. It was large enough to house a small city. But seeing it like this, it seemed unimpressive. She had to remind herself that, set in the midst of a vast plain of ice, there was nothing against which she could compare its scale. The east side of structure was cloaked in impenetrable shadows thrown by the westering sun. Small details became apparent when Liis magnified her display. The dome appeared to be made of a uniformly light-coloured, perhaps translucent, material, and was not as featureless as she had first thought. Regularly spaced black specks, like pinpricks, peppered its surface as if they marked the vertices of a grid, though no joining lines were visible. At its apex, a dark, black spire thrust upward through the dome. She stared at the thing until Hebuiza finally caught up to her several minutes later. Then she pushed off again.

Liis expected all detail on the dome to vanish with the setting of the sun. But as the monstrous incarnadine disc fell past the horizon, the dome had fluoresced, throwing its features into relief. Now, four kilometers away, thin lines were visible between the regularly-spaced points Liis had observed earlier, forming the anticipated grid. But far more numerous were the crooked, branching lines that veined the structure like blood vessels, making it look more organic than artificial. To be visible at this distance, the black points would have to be at least a dozen meters wide and the finest veins several meters in width. It looked like an elaborate arterial system, pumping fluids vital to the operation of the dome. Of everything she had seen thus far, this scared her the most: the idea that the dome itself was a massive, living intelligence-and they were microscopic intruders, like a virus, hoping to penetrate its outer membrane and breach its cytoplasm.

Liis slowed. Yilda’s tracks vanished in the distance; she couldn’t see him at all now, even when she amplified her night vision and maxed out the magnification of her display. For all she knew, he might have already arrived at the dome. Behind her, Hebuiza was again lost to sight.

Briefly she considered waiting for the Facilitator to catch up. But her consideration was really no more than a reflex, a quirk of her fatigue: when she remembered it was Hebuiza behind her, she felt anger burn in her throat. Fuck him, she thought. Let him take care of himself. She kicked off, her physical strength nearly spent, anger propelling her across the last few kilometers that separated her from the dome.

The illusion of the dome being an organic creature gave way to a certainty that the monstrous thing was alive.

Its surface glowed with a pallor that intensified as dusk faded into night, throwing the structure’s features into sharp contrast: this close, Liis could see the veins branched into ever smaller tributaries; long, grey tendrils hung like vines from pores the colour of rotting meat; here and there were meter-wide, pendent vesicles of bright green and smoky orange; the skin of the dome itself wasn’t as uniform as it had appeared from a distance, rather it ranged from rough and tattered in places to smooth as the head of a drum in others. And there was movement throughout. Where the material of the dome hung slack, ripples, driven by gusts of wind, ran across its surface like wind through a flapping sail. The veins themselves constricted and relaxed in slow, rhythmic cycles, pumping whatever matter they carried. The tips of the vines twitched in seemingly random and spasmodic patterns. And the large, regularly spaced, black interruptions Liis had observed earlier now looked like blistered and eyeless faces with gaping mouths. In the centre of each one was either a long horizontal or vertical slit. The lips of the horizontal slits pulled inward in regular rhythms, sucking desperately at the atmosphere; the vertical slits expelled gases in roiling clouds from between puckered lips. When one of the larger ones vented, a slight tremor rumbled through the ground.

Liis had followed Yilda’s track blindly the last half a kilometer, her attention fixed on the ceaseless motion that played itself out across the exterior of the dome. She felt cowed in its presence. That it was alive she no longer doubted. Whether it possessed intelligence or not, she couldn’t have guessed. Perhaps it knew she was there; perhaps, in whatever mammoth organ housed its intelligence, it had guessed at her intentions-and had dismissed them as insignificant. Or perhaps it could see her no better than her own body sensed an invading virus. In either case, it had done nothing to impede her.

A few hundred meters from the dome, Yilda’s tracks ended abruptly where the ground began to incline steeply. Around the base of the dome, a skirt of snow had accumulated, forming an embankment that rose fifty meters. Yilda had dug a deep trench, perhaps thirty centimeters wide by three meters in length, at the bottom of the slope; in it, he had discarded his skis, his poles, and his auxiliary batteries. He had already dragged his sled three-quarters of the way up the embankment, leaving a trail of deep footsteps in the centre of a wider, shallow depression formed by the bottom of his sled.

Liis stabbed at her bindings with the tip of her pole, unlocking them; she stepped free and flung her pole into the trench. With the toe of her boot, she nudged her skis in after. Then she too began trudging up the slope, grateful that the job of filling the hole, and hiding their equipment, would fall to Hebuiza after he’d dumped his gear.

At the summit the slope flattened. A narrow ridge ran along the gradual curve of the dome. An unnaturally exact line on the dome demarcated the juncture at which the snow ended; above it ran network of fine mauve veins. The veins must have somehow prevented flakes from adhering to the structure above. Reaching out, Liis placed her hand on the surface just above the veins. It was rigid and impossibly smooth, like cloudy, white glass. Muted vibrations sang through the material of her glove and into her palm. She let her hand slide off. A few hundred meters to Liis’ left, the material of the dome hung in long folds, like huge curtains. Yilda’s trail moved off that way, disappearing around the first fold that projected out onto the ridge. Sucking in a deep breath, she started after him. In the periphery of her vision, she saw Hebuiza’s lanky figure hauling his sled up to the base of the slope.

Liis dragged her toboggan as far as the fold that blocked the ridge; there was barely enough clearance. She edged around the obstruction.

On the other side she found Yilda. His leads were undone, and he crouched by his sled, his tail coiled behind him. Here, between two folds, the material of the dome flattened out for a small distance; rising along the wall were dozens of the dark blisters Liis had seen before. Yilda had pulled his sled up next to a small one, perhaps two meters in diameter, that began at knee height. The thing looked like it had been blackened by fire; dark bubbles and delicate, flaking skin marred its surface. Fat, horizontal lips, a meter and a half in length, pulled weakly at the atmosphere, absurdly reminding Liis of the movement of a new-born’s mouth. From the right corner of the tarry lips a strand of viscous fluid dribbled down the blister and fell onto the ridge near the heel of Yilda’s boot. The Facilitator ignored it. He continued to unpack his gear from the sled and lay it out in orderly rows. With a curt gesture, he indicated she should do the same.

Liis unfastened her own leads. With her good hand, she coiled her tail into a loop. She turned her attention to the line that secured the tarp on her sled. Slowly, painstakingly, she loosened the knot. At last, it came undone. She held the loose rope in her hand, staring at it. Penirdth helped me tie this, she thought, and dropped the line like it had scorched her hand.

Yilda’s sled was empty. He’d already attached his bulky backpack to his harness and secured his tail to it. On the ground beneath the blister he’d arranged a coil of rope, half a dozen carbineers, and a thirty centimeter, self-boring ice screw. It looked like he intended to climb the face of the dome. But Liis didn’t have any of her climbing gear left. Nor, she believed, did Hebuiza. They’d discarded that gear, at Yilda’s insistence, back at the pass. They had no hammers, no crampons, no pitons, and no carbineers-except the half dozen that lay in front of the blister. Yilda threaded the end of the coiled rope through a carbineer, tied it off, and snapped the carbineer onto a ring on the base of the ice screw. He placed the screw back on the ground.

Liis looked up the long, dizzying, curve of the dome. How could she possibly climb with her broken arm? Yet Yilda seemed insensible to her plight. Was he mocking her? Or was he waiting for her to fail so that Hebuiza could dispose of her the way he’d disposed of Binlosson?

Yilda had unfolded a pick and shovel and was using them alternately to scrape out a shallow hole near the edge of the ridge. A hole the size of a grave. Turning, he pointed impatiently to Liis’ sled, then tapped his own backpack, signalling her to prepare as he had.

Liis pulled the tarp off her sled.

She had little left. The only items visible were her backpack, a heavy cylinder containing plastic explosives and detonators, and two long nylon ropes. Before she could do anything, she felt Yilda’s presence at her side. She tried not to flinch. The Facilitator crouched down and grabbed her pack; he quickly stuffed everything on her sled, except for the rope, into the pack. Rising, he held it out so that the straps dangled in front of her. When Liis didn’t react immediately, he shook it vigorously. Then she understood: he was going to help her put it on. She turned and let him position the pack on her back. Then he began buckling her straps before she could begin fumbling with them.

As soon as the pack was on and her tail secured to it, Yilda spun away and crouched down in front of her sled again. He shifted the remaining contents around. Underneath a rope, he found six flares, wrapped in a plastic package. She’d forgotten about them. Yilda tore the package off, stuffed three in a side pocket of Liis’ backpack, and tossed the