The Myrmidon

2. Descent

The blue LCD clock said something starting with a 2. Ready to throttle someone, including himself, Steinz had turned storage inside out like a raccoon in a pantry, half-delirious with frustration, claustrophobia, and lack of sleep. He had felt the first headrush in weeks when he turned up a well-hidden box containing four bottles of champagne, long neglected and doubtless meant for a very different occasion. Without even turning the lights on, he sighed deeply and sat down.

Forty minutes later, in what felt like a strangely lucid state of mind, he felt his way down the long, cramped corridor with the humming walls, and punched in the code that Trish had given him. It took him two tries, in the dark, before he got it right and the wall opened up.

As the wall slid he remembered how it went the first time and flinched back on instinct: but there was nothing waiting this time. The walls and ceiling dissolved again: space was infinite, throbbing and alive with the only other thing in existence.

It was dancing.

He never could bring himself to call it by the pet name the others had given it: not even in thought. Maybe it was the champagne interfering, but he could barely look at it; not even vague impressions of its form could stick right now. Just a palpable headache that wormed into his eyes like bleeding threads of that glow you see sometimes under a blacklight. Painful, without radiance or shadows. A million mingled instants of unearthly blue.

"Fuck you," he sighed, without even much bite to it, rubbing his eyes and sinking to the floor, pulling his legs crisscross. He scooted backwards till his back was against the wall; only then could he breathe comfortably. The walls groaned, distantly and not so distantly, and the thrum of the motors traveled through his back and filled his body. It was not just the motors. It wasn't just dark. There was something in the invisible box, there. It did not like him looking at it. It was doing this, on purpose. Making the room spin. Everything was staring at him. He desperately wished to be home.

"Fuck off." even weaker this time.

The dark was oppressive, seething. It stared and stared with lidless eyes into the wretched human nest within itself, breathless and cold and far, far too big.

He was on— they were all— on the wrong side of the glass.

The walls ticked. Far off, something banged on the outside. Just once. Metal settling, surely.

"Yeah, yeah, come in," he muttered, trying to force himself to keep looking at it. Trying to work up the nerve to say what he wanted to say. "Come in! You can't live in here, we can't live out there. Who's the bigger dipshit, huh?"

The creature did not slow, did not pause.

"Is that why you came? Huh? A big lot of metal tubes shoved up your ass, had to get annoying after a while; is that why?"

He struggled to hold himself together, voice shaking, waving vaguely above him.

"Bam, bam, bam on the human tank. Come in! Oh you made it so easy. You came in here to kill us, didn't you? Did you get it yet?"

Finally he had asked.

No answer. Just the dance.

It was so strange, and so very alive, and there was never a time when it did not fill him with the deep conviction that he had never been meant to see it... that it was outraged by his seeing it. It was a dance of the darkness down under the water... a dance of the silent cold down in the abyss. A world that, no matter how hard they tried to pretend, with their probes and their jokes and their arrogance, was not theirs. Had never been theirs. They had never been meant to see this, and now their unholy eyes had dragged it into captivity and beheld it, what would be the cost? Something broke in him and he had to smother a sob.