Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 33

The Blue was humming with intensity as it stared into Brodham's eyes. His limbs were paralyzed. The Blue was searching his memories the way one picks through the grass for a dropped set of keys. The pattern is random, but the goal is clear. As he pulled up Brodham's memory of Petar's interrogation, the hum intensified. Brodham couldn't blink, couldn't move.

And while the Blue picked through his memories, Brodham caught glimpses of the Blue's own mind. He didn't catch much, but what he did see was dark, scattered, and terrifying.

In front of his eyes, a burning landscape opened up, stretching out of his field of view and peeling away the warm summer afternoon. It was wholly alien, twisted and uncomfortable. In an orange sky, two full moons hung at opposite ends of the spectrum. The ground was dry and hard, strewn with yellow, distorted growths like a Dr. Seuss picture book. To the left, a mercilessly bright sun rose halfway over the horizon, massive and globular. Brodham felt like a mouse huddled in fright on a table as a giant peeked an impossibly large eye over the edge.

The scene shifted. Bright orange growth all around. To his left, another Blue...another Koschei, his mind whispered...walked stealthily through the foliage, rifle held ready at its shoulder. They came upon a clearing and a primitive group of humanoids scattered in front of them, running for violet thatched huts at the edge of the clearing. Both Brodham and his partner opened fire. The figures in the back dropped to the ground writhing. They were shaped like people, but their features were too exaggerated, just barely imperfect. Their piercing screams echoed through Brodham's skull.

While his partner knelt and wrapped their wrists with some sort of rope that glowed and twisted as if alive, Brodham continued to the huts at the rear of the clearing. He looked back to his partner. Twelve of the humanoids were on the ground, faces pressed to the sticky dirt, electric wires cinching their wrists together. It's enough, whispered a thought from nowhere. Brodham walked to the nearest hut, heard whimpering voices from inside, held his hand against the dry, reed-like material. Flames licked between his fingers and spread up the wall. He walked away.

Behind him, the whimpers became screams.

In front of him, the other Koschei knelt over one of the bound figures and pressed his hands to its neck. The Koschei's neck arched, his face tilted toward the sky, and his eyes widened. With a feeling of almost compassion, the Koschei choked the life out of the figure, pulling its energy into himself.

Enough, a voice hissed. It took Brodham a moment to realize that it had come from him.

Another shift. Another barren landscape, the same but different. A wide, flat clearing stretched away into the distance. Humanoid figures like the ones in the clearing knelt in the dust, the low sun blazing over their naked backs. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Picking through the rocks, pulling out nuggets of dull gray and placing them on conveyer belts that floated a foot off the ground and criss-crossed through the clearing. Cloaked Koscheis stood guard at spaced intervals.

One of the humanoids collapsed. A Koschei walked over, held its fermion rifle to the figure's head, and then walked away, leaving the headless corpse in the dust where it had fallen. Some of the other workers flinched, but nobody spoke out.

In a wide square around the mine, for that's what it was, the ground shimmered an electric blue. Knowledge flashed again into Brodham's mind: electrified earth, shockturf. Sudden death for any would-be deserters from the slave ranks. The perimeter must have been miles to a side, and inside it, hordes of miners toiled beneath the orange sky. There were so many. Brodham felt a strange sense of vertigo at the sight.

And in the distance, a gleaming metal tower rose into a sky darkened to crimson by a vortex of stormclouds. Every few seconds, a lightning bolt flashed from the clouds to the tip of the tower.