In the end, Sadiki had no choice.
Yes, the escape pod was prepped and waiting for her. FourDee was already there, and perhaps Dakarai, too, if they’d found him. Communications were failing fast. Whole relay sections were going down. Radio transmissions had already been reduced to static.
As much as she needed to get out of here, Sadiki knew that she had to go back to her office one last time. There was a final detail that needed taking care of.
She stepped through the hatchway and paused long enough to look across the office. Even now, in the midst of everything that was happening, Sadiki felt a creator’s wistful appreciation for the prison: the project that she and her brother had designed together, the algorithm into which Dakarai had breathed life, and the sheer elegance of the plan itself. It had been almost perfect. Only the persistent rumors of the existence of Iram Radique—that incorporeal galactic bogeyman whose base of operations was allegedly somewhere inside the prison—had marred the otherwise perfect machine of money and violence that was the Hive.
Not that it mattered now. The experiment had served its purpose. Soon everyone inside would be dead. Then she would head for the escape pod to depart with Dakarai, leaving Cog Hive Seven to tear itself to pieces. There would be other opportunities, other worlds.
Tapping in the command for inmate population control, Sadiki watched as a long list of digits scrolled across the screen in numeric order, each one representing an active prisoner here. There were a little over four hundred of them currently—the scum and filth of the galaxy, none of which she ever wanted to run into again.
She selected the entire list and clicked a single command: Terminate.
One by one, numbers began to disappear off the top of the list.
For a moment she sat there, watching them vanish. It would require some time to complete, she realized—she didn’t want to overload the system at this critical juncture, and she would rather be sure that every single inmate was dead before she ventured down below again. Besides, the process wouldn’t take too long. Perhaps only thirty minutes or so, until it reached the highest numbers.
She was rising to leave the datacenter when something inside the wall moved.
Stepping back, pushing her chair out of the way, Sadiki gazed up uncertainly at the wall in front of her, above the monitor displays. At this point her sensibilities were so keenly attuned to the screens and keyboards and numbers that the unexpected presence of something living, rustling, so close to her caused the small hairs on the back of her neck to prickle.
Her thoughts returned to the prison’s most recent reconfiguration, initiated in her desperate last-ditch bid for self-preservation. It had been a drastic move, and if she had planned on spending any more time aboard Cog Hive Seven, it would have been catastrophic. Instead, she simply didn’t care. Except—
Except that it had resulted in some unwelcome alterations in the prison’s infrastructure. Subtle, nagging changes. For example, staring at the wall in front of her, Sadiki noticed a slight gap, perhaps two or three centimeters wide, where the pressure-treated plates hadn’t joined together properly. It was a small thing, but—
Something was moving inside the gap.
Retreating swiftly from it, Sadiki walked across the chamber and reached into the wall cabinet on the opposite side, pulling out the KYD-21 blaster pistol that she’d stashed there and had never actually planned on using. This particular model, fabricated in hadrium alloy with a guardless trigger, was one of her personal favorites. It had heavy-duty stopping power despite its size, and its cool ridged handgrip felt good in her grasp.
Sadiki pointed it at the gap between the walls.
“Who’s there?” she said aloud, suddenly disliking the sound of her own voice. The quivering of her diaphragm gave it a kind of quailing tremor that she’d always found so repellent in others.
A wild possibility flicked through her mind, and she took a step closer to the gap between the wall plates.
“Dakarai?” she said loudly. “Is that you?” Extending her arm, she tightened her finger on the trigger. “Jagannath? Have you found your way back up? You’ll regret it, I guarantee that.”
She listened but heard nothing. Closer now, cocking her head slightly, Sadiki leaned in toward the narrow opening and held her breath.
She waited.
All at once something huge and white exploded from the wall, unfathomably large and faster than she could see, lashing outward toward her face, striking straight for her eyes. It was so big that Sadiki’s first impression was that the wall itself had somehow burst to life in front of her.
Then her vision disappeared in a liquid swarm of reddish black, and a jagged corkscrew of pain went curving down to the very base of her skull, twisting down her spine to encompass her entire body.
Sadiki screamed in pain and fell to her knees, then scrambled backward across the floor. Her finger squeezed the trigger, firing off shots at random, and behind the cloak of blindness, she heard metal screeching and twisting around her, as if something bigger than she’d ever seen was dragging itself out of the wall.
Then she knew what it was.
The Wolf Worm.
Clutching the blaster in her right hand, she wiped her left wrist across her eyes in an attempt to clear her vision, but she still couldn’t see. If anything, the blindness had become more pervasive, overtaking whatever remained of her vision and stranding her in total blackness.
Backing her way into the far corner, extending the blaster outward in her trembling grasp, she held her breath and listened for the thing’s approach, tracking its advance purely by sense of sound. She could hear it, the massive weight of the thing, the sticky squelching of its advance toward her across the floor of the datacenter.
Sadiki fired again, three times in quick succession, and tried to remember how many rounds she’d already squeezed off. The KYD held seventy-five shots, so there was no immediate threat of running out of ammo … but who knew how long this would be her only weapon?
Somewhere in the enervated darkness, the thing in front of her moved again. For an instant Sadiki almost considered making a blind run for the hatchway on the opposite side of the room—she thought she could find it from memory, but if she was wrong …
She listened, visualizing it.
And then all sound disappeared.
She squeezed the blaster’s trigger again, felt it recoil slightly, but heard nothing. Her entire universe became one of pin-drop silence. It was as if she’d gone deaf as well as blind, all her most vital sensory organs abandoning her at the moment she needed them most.
And then Sadiki realized what was happening.
Somehow the sealed datacenter had put itself into silent mode.
“No!” she cried into the void, but the soundproof systems devoured her voice, swallowing it whole, along with every other sonic disturbance. She had no sense of where the thing was now, how close or far away, whether it was hovering just centimeters from her face, its maw open and ready to latch onto her.
Panic seized her, and she started firing randomly into the great expanse of darkness, swinging the weapon back and forth, strafing the space around her as if she could somehow shoot a hole through it, penetrating the thick layer of isolation that had left her utterly exposed here.
At last the blaster stopped recoiling, and she realized it was empty.
“No,” Sadiki croaked again, but heard nothing. “No.”
This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be. Not now, after she’d come so far and worked so hard to build her empire. From the beginning, she’d taken every precaution, calculated every risk, considered every angle. For all of it to end up here, with her crouched in some remote corner, blind, deaf, and mute …
Tears formed in her sightless eyes, and her body started trembling, the imperfect balance of sanity tipping away from her in increments. Knees drawn up against her chest, arms extended, she gripped the useless weapon in both hands, as though if she held on to it tightly enough, it might yet save her.
She was still sitting like that when it fell upon her.