Beyond the Void by Sean Dalton

Author:Sean Dalton [Dalton, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-11-19T12:33:00+00:00

* * *

8

Pain, the clawing madness of it. The suffocating nearness of an other. Thoughts meshing unwillingly. Flashes of mathematical symbols, blurry images, concepts in colors too brilliant to bear. And the pain, always the pain. Entwining through him in a radius from his mind. Sickly tendrils of control. No way to fight. No way of escape.

One master.

One subject.

Two struggling.

The pain ... horrible, blinding, intensifying.

Loss.

Surrender.

One.

* * *

9

Caesar and Phila sat on a metal floor that was bone-numbing cold and harder than a Vynerian angel’s pelvis. They had forcefields for walls, active, not passive, force-fields that crackled viciously if you got within centimeters of them and just about crisped your fingers off if you touched them. Caesar much preferred the passive kind that simply stood there, bending a bit beneath your weight if you leaned on them while their low vibrational energy waves gave you a massage.

“How long have we been here?” demanded Phila, getting up to start pacing again. She had a nasty bruise on her temple. “My chron has stopped.”

“So’s mine,” said Caesar. “Look, toots. If you want to count seconds, go ahead. What we ought to be thinking about is how to get out of this cage.”

“I am.” Phila swept past him, striding hard. The walls crackled ominously as she passed them. “Look there and there. See them?”

“See what?”

“No! Look at the floor. Did that gas dissolve your brain cells?”

Caesar looked at the floor in each of the four corners. “Yo,” he said. “I see the beam sets.”

“Right.” She squatted in the center of their cage and faced him at eye level. “Beam sets. The circuit running this field has to interconnect to form walls. Otherwise it would just keep running in a straight line. Each connection point marks a corner. So if we disrupt that—”

“Tell me how, kid, and I’ll kiss your feet.”

Phila grinned and pulled out her prong. “The bots didn’t take this. No circuits so it didn’t register on their sensors. You can be too sophisticated, now, can’t you?”

“Yeah.” It was Caesar’s turn to be impatient. “So they’re dumb about a few things. But if you start prying on a beam set with a knife blade, you’re going to be one crispy cookie.”

Phila snorted and got down on her stomach. She scooted across the floor until her nose was almost to one of the beam sets. It was fist-sized, very slightly raised above the level of the floor with a thin crack running around it that showed it could descend to floor level when deactivated. Phila released only one blade of her prong and inserted the sharp tip into the crack with surgical precision.

The hair prickled on the back of Caesar’s neck. He moved prudently to the opposite corner to watch. Phila’s head went up. She laid down her prong.

“Caesar, you idiot! Not the opposite corner. If I slip and set off sparks, they will always go in a diagonal. Don’t you know anything?”

Caesar blinked and hastily scrambled to a new position. “You’re Miss Dynamo. I just blow things up.

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