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“Figured out where we are yet, Sam?” Caine asked.
Sam groaned.
“Yeah, kind of have other things on your mind right now, huh? You know about the meteor that hit the power plant all those years back, right, Sam? Sure. You’re a townie.”
Sam rode the next wave. He didn’t want to scream. Didn’t want to scream.
“Meteor plows right through the power plant, right into the ground. Like our boy Goose, here: so heavy, moving so fast, it’s like shooting an arrow into butter. Tears a massive hole. Stops here, what’s left of it.”
They had advanced fifty feet into the cathedral space of the cavern.
Sam nodded, not capable at that particular moment of speech. He tried to lift his hands, but their weight was too great.
Caine took his wrists and lifted up his hands, a motion that caused Sam to roar in agony.
But the light shone brighter.
And there, revealed, the thing being born. It was more lump than any definite shape. A seething hive of rushing, twisting, greenish crystals.
But as they watched, the surfaces facing their way took on a perfect, mirrored surface.
“Looks like he’s ready for you, Sam,” Caine said.
Then, a different voice. Eerie and awful.
“I am the gaiaphage,” Lana said.
The transformation had begun when the gaiaphage touched the first of the scattered uranium pellets. Lana felt the surge of power, like grabbing an electrical wire, like grabbing every electrical wire in the world.
She had cried out in the shared ecstasy of that moment.
Food!
The gaiaphage’s terrible hunger was gone. In its place a rush of power. Rage unleashed.
Now! Now it would become!
The billions of crystals that formed the gaiaphage’s shapeless, random form began to rush like ants. Rivulets became streams, streams became rushing rivers. What had been little more than scum on the surface of rocks formed into mounds and peaks. Here and there, sharp points. Here flat and there peaked, here pliable and there stiff.
Crystals folded in endless dimensions, layers within layers. Even at this wild speed it would take days to finish, but already the barest outlines were beginning to reveal themselves.
The gaiaphage that had been spread through a thousand feet of the subterranean cavern now condensed, came together, like stars drawn into a black hole.
Lana could feel it all, as though her own nerves were part of the gaiaphage. And maybe they were, she thought. Maybe there was no longer a line between them. Maybe she was part of it now.
It was all around her. In her ears and nose, in her mouth and hair. Swarming insects covering every square inch of her.
And yet, she had begun to feel a sickness inside her. A feeling that was her own and not the monster’s.
What fed the gaiaphage was blasting her apart, cell by cell.
She had to hide it. Couldn’t let it see. She had to die to stop it, had to die of the radiation that churned her stomach.
Around her the crystals were hardening, forming a thick shield. And the surface of that shield began to shine, like steel. No, like a mirror.
A tremor of fear shook the gaiaphage.
Lana opened her eyes and saw the reason. Three
