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That yearning to obey, to get his reward, was strong, but it was nothing next to his instinctive, compulsive, irrational need to say . . .
“NO!”
It came out as a strangled, half-coherent roar, and Armo the defiant was suddenly filled with more blind rage than he had ever known before.
He hurled himself at the glass.
Wham!
Again.
Wham!
Again.
Wham!
And then whatever slight self-control Armo had was swept away on a torrent of madness. Rage filled him. He could feel it, he could feel the adrenaline, he could feel an animal fury that took control of him. Armo became almost a bystander, as if watching from a distance as the body that was not quite his went completely, utterly, berserk.
For a full three minutes Armo ripped and tore and pummeled everything around him. He shredded the cot. He beat the toilet and sink away from the wall, water spraying in a jet. He lifted the twisted steel toilet and bashed it against the glass again and again and again with a violence unlike anything he’d ever imagined, wilder than anything from the DiMarco-induced dreams.
DiMarco backed away from the glass, her face a snarl to match his own, but she was small and weak and he . . . he was power and violence made flesh. He was insanity! He was all the manic fury in the world distilled down into one white-furred, two-legged, canine teeth–baring, roaring, mindless engine of destruction.
The control device, still in his neck, stabbed him deep, like needles in his brain, but the pain was just gasoline sprayed on an open flame. He reached clumsy paws around, dug one great claw into his own flesh, and with a beastly roar ripped the module out and threw the bloody thing at the glass.
“Gas! Gas!” DiMarco’s voice cried.
Armo heard the hiss of the gas and even in some distant way knew what it was. But the beast he’d become was all out of damns to give. He raged and hammered and roared, but slowly, slowly he weakened, limbs growing heavy, already-dim eyesight dimming further. But by then his fur was no longer white but red with his own blood. His blood smeared the walls and the glass, which was cracked and starred though unbroken.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll . . . kill . . .”
He weakened . . . settled onto his rear end . . . felt a very different gaze on him, watchers without eyes, laughers without mouths, many and one, and somehow both far away and right here.
His last roar was for them, for those silent voices. “And I’ll . . . I’ll . . . kill you, too.”
ASO-5
THE OKEANOS EXPLORER had begun its life as a US Navy surveillance ship by the name of Capable. It was now a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel, 224 feet long, 43 feet wide, with a complement of forty-six crew, officers, and scientists.
It was overly full at the moment because in addition to the crew and the scientists, a detail of six contractors had been added for security. These were ex-Delta and ex-Marines whose job was to keep an eye on the crew and the scientists as they retrieved ASO-5: the Mother Rock.
The Okeanos also had one supernumerary with no assigned duties: the chief engineer’s fifteen-year-old son, Vincent Vu.
Vincent was third-generation Vietnamese-American, born in San Jose, California, raised by both parents in a stable, kind, pleasant home. Vincent was a good student. Vincent was a good big brother to his two little sisters. But Vincent had been trouble since he hit puberty, and his teachers and, later, his family recognized that something had gone wrong with him.
The doctors said it was bipolar disorder. They were correct, but their diagnosis had been incomplete because Vincent had not told them everything. He had not told them, for instance, about the voices. The voices had warned him not to divulge their presence, because then the doctors would say that Vincent was schizophrenic.
Vincent had access to Wikipedia and WebMD and all the rest, so he knew what schizophrenia meant. Bipolar was a serious stuff, a major mood disorder. Schizophrenia, well, that was to bipolar disorder what pancreatic cancer was to high blood pressure: orders of magnitude worse.
Or better, the voices suggested. Without us, the voices whispered, you’d never even know that your mother was only a hologram. And you might not know that you are destined for greatness, that you are not a normal human, that you are born of the pit.
That your true name is Abaddon.
He had Googled that name, Abaddon. It seemed he was one of Satan’s angels, said to sit upon a throne of maggots.
The doctors had meds for his bipolar disorder, which Vincent hated taking because they left him feeling logey, droopy, fuzzy. And frankly, he enjoyed the manic periods and had no desire to give them up. It was during the manias that he set out with a camera bag over his shoulder and obsessively photographed shapes and juxtapositions, unfinished high-rise construction, crushed vehicles at a junkyard, abandoned factories, outdated computers—anything that was hard angles and devoid of humans.
Unfortunately, Vincent didn’t always avoid human subjects. A camera traced back to Vincent had been found in the girls’ locker room at school, and Vincent had been expelled.
