Resolution Read Online Free Page B

towards his hiding place.
     
    He pulled back close against the metal face, but that was dangerous: too much pressure would bounce him off the ledge and into the void. The vessel-thing continued to rise.
     
    Oh, Chaos.
     
    Tom pulled his legs beneath him, formed a squatting position, and got ready for the only manoeuvre he could think of. If it had eyes upon its back, he was dead.
     
    Still rising.
     
    He shut his eyes, rehearsed the jump. The muscles of his thighs began to quiver with stress and cold.
     
    Now.
     
    Tom launched himself from the ledge.
     

     
    He seemed to fall slowly.
     
    Slowly...
     
    And then it was very fast, metal surface rising towards him and he struck feet first against the hull, rolled and lashed out, grabbed for an antenna - missed - and rolled again, unable to stop with the edge of the carapace in sight, the fatal drop waiting for him and then another antenna - grab - and this time he got it.
     
    The vessel/creature was still rising.
     
    Splotched oval patches decorated the dorsal surface. Membranes, amid the metal?
     
    Hurry.
     
    Carefully, knowing it would be easy to slip and slide right off the hull, Tom crawled to the nearest patch, pressed down with his fingertips. They sank into soft, membranous material.
     
    Get inside.
     
    Tom rolled forward, and dropped through.
     

     
    He crouched on a cold metal deck, scanning the empty corridor, then chose a direction at random and took it.
     
    I’m still breathing.
     
    It was a reminder. If he was breathing his homeworld’s air then Eemur was maintaining a link and there was still some sort of chance.
     
    You don’t know that for sure.
     
    Siganth was an Anomalous world. Just as a human body is formed of trillions of cells whose individual identities are irrelevant to the whole (indeed, to avoid cancer, the body must command many of its cells to commit suicide), so did the Anomaly consist of trillions of once-human and alien beings it had subsumed. To be Absorbed was to become an unthinking component of an unimaginably greater whole: individuality no more relevant than a single cell’s or bacterium’s chemical drives.
     
    Tom’s skin went cold, scraped by electric tension as he crouched in the corridor. It was dread, and there were only two choices: to slink away or face it. Something lay ahead. Fate, not chance, had led him to this vessel; he could feel himself being drawn forward.
     
    Nerves wailing, Tom advanced.
     
    There was a diamond arch. Beyond it lay a great chamber in which jagged metal buttresses grew from the walls, stippled with viral crystals. Shards of black glass floated in the air, some spinning, some hanging still.
     
    Tom crept closer.
     
    Oh, sweet Fate.
     
    The air shone like ice, and at the chamber’s centre a figure hung suspended, writhing.
     
    A human figure.
     
    He was unclothed and screaming, though no sound reached Tom’s ears. The man’s face was half-coated with silver scar tissue and his right hand was a claw, but those were old injuries. What happened next was different.
     
    Invisible fingers hooked beneath the captive’s skin and peeled it back, stripping his flesh bare. The skin seemed to twist through an impossible angle, and disappeared from sight. What was left was a writhing, agonized, flensed victim. Even as he struggled, something dragged greyish fat from his body; the globules rotated, then winked out of existence. Arteries broke loose, whipped like cables cut in a storm, pulled themselves into nothingness, were gone.
     
    Still the man lived, and suffered.
     
    The vivisection continued, taking his eyeballs, then plucking out the bones one by one until only this remained: a fine tracery of thread-like nerves in the air, connecting to his floating brain. Everything was gone, save the ability to sense massive, agonizing pain.
     
    No...
     
    Something worse occurred.
     
    As Tom watched, the field reversed the process, pushed bones into place and layered strips of striated