by Brian Lumley
Meanwhile, as their arrival’s effect on the electrics wore off, and as Shania brought her heightened psychic energies more properly under control, the lights had stopped their gyrations. Also, it had dawned on Ian Goodly that if any of the enemy had taken the opportunity to creep closer to the building, then he and his E-Branch colleagues—not to mention their new friends—would make excellent targets in the now well lit foyer. And ever aware of the future’s unpredictability and devious nature, the precog said, “We should move well away from the windows.”
Scott told him, “That’s good advice—er, ‘Xavier’?—but there’s maybe five or six of them out there who won’t be bothering you anymore.”
Still Trask told Chung and Goodly, “Get up on a table and take some of those bulbs out of the chandeliers, all but one or two.” And seeing Millie Cleary pinning pages from a Swiss broadsheet over the circular windows, but yet leaving narrow gaps at both sides through which the defenders were able to observe and shoot if that should once more become necessary, he nodded his approval.
Then he turned back to Scott and Shania. “So then, those blasts we heard were your shotguns, and you’ve taken out maybe half a dozen of those people out there?”
Scott nodded. “Yes. I don’t think we got them all, but we certainly scared off any who we missed! They weren’t expecting trouble from the rear.”
“And those?” Trask indicated a pair of fragmentation grenades dangling from Scott’s ex-army web belt. “What, you raided an armoury or something?”
Glancing down at his belt, Scott replied, “Oh, those! No, I took them from one of the men we shot. That was probably his next move: to toss them in here.”
Trask nodded. “Then we’re lucky, and we’re very grateful.”
Dozens of questions crowded Trask’s mind, but right now he had other things to do, and anyway he didn’t know which ones to ask first! Shaking his head, he looked again at Scott, and took an even longer look at his companion. Despite the black finger stripes of soot on her face, this was obviously a lovely woman. In face and form . . . why, hers was an almost unearthly loveliness! On considering that last thought, Trask was only a little surprised to find himself frowning . . .
Looking this way and that, familiarizing herself with her surroundings, Shania had seen the unnaturally crumpled shape of Norbert Hauser at the foot of the stairs. Her hand at once flew to her mouth, and she asked, “What? Were the Mordri Three here? Did they actually leave their refuge to risk coming here?”
“The Mordri Three?” Trask repeated. “Is that what you call them, those shape-changing bastards up in Schloss Zonigen? Well, one of them was here, yes.” He grimaced and added, “That’s the result,” meaning Hauser. “He wasn’t one of mine—thank the Lord, but he was a friend. As to why that murderous thing came: if I remember correctly he was looking to discover some sort of god-figure? But he was also trying to kill us, and it seemed to me he was as mad as a hatter!”
Shania glanced at Scott and said, “They’ve felt your presence, enhanced by my own and Wolf’s.” Then she hurried over to the collapsed form of Hauser and went down on her knees to lay her hands on his transformed body. It was far too late for him, however, and shaking her head sadly, slowly she stood up again. “He’s gone and I can’t help him. I’m sorry . . .”
Just for a moment as she had laid hands on Hauser, a pair of small lightbulbs in the central chandelier—the only ones Chung and Goodly had left secured in their sockets—had begun flickering and jolting again. Having noticed this, Trask had at once associated it with the electrical chaos that had ensued as this disparate trio first arrived. Now, as the lights steadied up, he said:
“You can’t help him? But surely there’s nothing you could do that could possibly have . . . helped . . . him?” Pausing for a moment as suddenly he knew the truth of it, Trask felt himself stiffening up a little, frowned, and said, “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” But it was more a statement than a question.
“No, she isn’t!” Scott rasped, half crouching, his weapon pointing at the floor but in Trask’s general direction. “Shania is one of us, so don’t you go jumping to any wrong conclusions, or start making any serious mistakes!”
“Take it easy,” said Trask at once. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Well, perhaps he had, but not entirely.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Shania. “Anyway, you’re right to be suspicious, for your lives are at stake.” She crossed the floor to Trask. “But tell me: which one of them was it, and how did you beat him off? Bullets wouldn’t have been much use.”
Trask nodded, took her to a small table near the reception desk, and showed her the flamethrower. “You’re right. He was hit maybe a dozen times at close range, and any one of those shots would have stopped a man stone dead. But not him, he kept right on coming. This is what finally stopped him.” He rapped his knuckles on the weapon’s dully glinting casing. “He didn’t like this one little bit!”
“A fire weapon,” she said, nodding. “Oh, yes, that would do it. He would fear that. Even self-repairing flesh will get eaten up by fire. So who was he, Mordri Two or Three?”
Frowning, Trask shook his head. “I don’t know how they’re numbered,” he replied, “but this fellow was thin as a lath and all of seven feet tall. His hair was silver and worn in a sort of stiff coxcomb. I believe his name is Guyler Schweitzer.”
“The last and least of them,” said Shania. “Mordri Three!”
David Chung spoke up, the tremor in his voice showing how his nerves were beginning to play him up. “Well, if that was the least of them,” he said, “I can certainly do without seeing the worst of them!”
“You won’t,” Shania told him with a shake of her head. “At least, not down here. Not if Mordri Three went back to the high crag displaying burns. Gelka Mordri—or Mordri One—won’t be taking any more chances with her subordinates, not now that she knows you have a fire weapon.”
From out in the night came the screech of tires on tarmac; and from the window where Millie was squinting through a gap in one of her broadsheet “curtains,” she reported: “I can see headlights moving—one set anyway—lighting up the road back to Schloss Zonigen. It seems some of them are pulling out.”
“It’s pretty much the same at the back,” said Paul Garvey, having returned from his vigil at the rear of the hotel and now standing framed in the doorway to the dining room. As he spoke, footsteps sounded on the stairs where Techs McGrath and Taylor, the final members of the team, descended into view.
“Aye,” McGrath agreed, emerging more fully into the light. “There were just one or two o’ they left, and as they made for their car Graham here sent a bolt through another scrawny neck. Their losses hae been heavy, which may . . .” He paused as he saw the newcomers, then continued: “. . . Which may or may not be why they’ve suddenly decided tae leave us be. But what’s all this? Is it no a couple o’ new recruits ah can see?” He eyed Scott’s and Shania’s weapons appreciatively.
And Trask didn’t hesitate to reply, “Yes, it most definitely is. Or if not recruits, reinforcements certainly.”
Hurried introductions all round followed, and soon Millie reported a second vehicle’s headlights lancing the night on its retreat up the precipitous zigzag road to Schloss Zonigen. This had to be the last one or two members of the group that McGrath had reported.
And now Trask and his crew were able to relax a little and begin asking questions of the newcomers in earnest. The locator David Chung was barely able to contain himself.
“Scott,” he said, when Trask okayed it. “So you’re not the Necroscope, Harry Keogh. Okay—but I have to say you felt very much like him, and—”
“I felt like him?” Scott cut in. “How do you mean?” But in fact he knew what Chung meant. It was just that he still tended to back away from it.
“Ah!” Chung fingered his chin. “How do I mean? But how can I explain? Let me try. You see, I have this knack, and—”
And now Shania cu
t in: “David is a psychic sensitive,” she said as she read Chung’s mind. “He’s a locator. Which means he can find things, including people. And because people—especially gifted ones—have individual auras, their own feel, he’s able to remember them. David remembers how Harry Keogh . . . well, how he felt, that’s all.”
“Yes.” Chung nodded, looked puzzled. “That’s it exactly. I couldn’t have put it much better myself . . .” And then he continued: “But then again there’s this other thing, the way you came here—and not only you but also that Mordri creature—which must have been via the Möbius Continuum. So if you’re not Harry Keogh or . . . or some kind of Necroscope, then what are you? And what are these Mordris? Because it’s obvious that they used the same route.”
Shania answered him. “You must be aware now that the Mordris are, well, alien to your world, extraterrestrial. They come from a race called the Shing’t, most of whom they have murdered along with their planet. They are evil, insane. The scientific achievements of the Shing’t are far in advance of your own, but fortunately for you—for all of us—Shing’t weapons technology, at least on a small-arms scale, is nonexistent. They have no enemies and wage no wars; therefore there are no sidearms—and in any case the Mordris would not care to use such. So they rely on dupes, mercenary men such as the ones you’ve fought off tonight, to fight for them. As for the way they move from place to place . . .” She looked at Scott, who now took it up:
“It isn’t the Möbius Continuum,” he said. “And yes, having been there I know about the Continuum; but Mordri teleportation isn’t it. As Harry may have explained it to you, what he called the Möbius Continuum is of the mind: it’s metaphysical, and can only be conjured using weird maths. But what the Mordris do is science, pure physics. That’s how they became space-travellers, and for short distances they use the same principle on a smaller scale.”
“You’re saying it’s a mechanical, scientific thing?” said Chung.
Shania held out her localizer where they could see it. “It can—or could—take me anywhere I wanted to go in this entire world. Now it’s almost all used up. After just a few more short trips it will be finished, useless. But up there in Schloss Zonigen, the Mordri Three are building a much bigger machine, what you would call a spaceship: in fact, a large man-carrying device for surfing gravity waves. And when it is energized . . . but no, we can’t allow it to be energized, for not only would that give the murderers their escape route, it would also mean the total destruction of your planet!”
Trask was beginning to understand things. Looking at Shania he said, “These Mordris murdered your race, an entire race?” His expression showed the depth of the sympathy he felt. “Well, that surely explains why you’re here.”
Shania nodded. “Call it revenge if you will, but I call it justice. With Scott’s help—and Wolf’s, and now yours—I’ll stop them if I can.”
With Wolf’s help? That made twice Shania had mentioned the animal in this way. But Trask let it pass, turned to Scott, and said, “I think we know your reasons well enough.”
“Mordri Two is my reason,” said Scott, gruffly. “You probably know him as Simon Salcombe. He killed my wife.”
“Yes,” said Trask. “When you boil it down that’s why we’re here, too. If it wasn’t for you, your loss, we might never have investigated in the first place.” Then he looked at the precog and said, “Ian, if I’ve ever seemed to doubt you—”
“It isn’t a problem,” said Goodly, smiling one of his oh-so-rare smiles. “But if we get out of this with our skins intact you can treat me to the best lunch money can buy. Yes, and Anna Marie English, too.” And turning to Scott and Shania, he said:
“We couldn’t join forces with you at the beginning of this thing because we didn’t want to jeopardize your part in it. You see, I knew that you—both of you, in fact all three of you—would be the prime movers in whatever was coming. Any interference on our part might take the initiative away from you, might destroy your effectiveness.”
At which Shania said, “And we couldn’t let you in on what we were doing for the very same reasons. If we had alerted you, with all of your special talents, it might have meant alerting the Mordris, too. For they must have known of you as surely as I did. You and your talents, you stir the psychic aether.”
“And so you kept your shields up,” said Paul Garvey.
“As best we could.” Shania nodded.
“And so did you,” said Scott. And then he grinned, albeit ruefully. “You know, you people gave me quite a rough time!”
They once were your enemies, said Wolf, who until now had kept absolutely quiet while sizing up the situation. Or so you thought. But as it now turns out they are your friends?
“That’s right,” said Scott out loud, without thinking.
Millie Cleary and Paul Garvey gave massive starts, staring at Wolf where he cocked his head on the side, one ear bent in a querying attitude. Oh? he said. Did you think you were the only ones who could talk inside your heads?
Now Millie and Garvey stared at each other, and their jaws fell open. Seeing their astonished expressions, Trask was immediately alarmed. “What now?” he asked.
“Eh?” said Garvey, his eyes on Wolf again. “Oh!” The telepath finally got a grip on himself. “What’s wrong? Well, nothing very much. It’s just that this fellow here”—he indicated Wolf—“is unusually clever.”
“He’s what?” said Trask.
“He’s not only clever,” said Millie. “He’s a telepath!”
“Damn!” said Trask, as once again the truth, if not quite the whole truth, struck him. “Zante—Jazz and Zek—and Wolf! Zek’s wolf from Sunside/Starside! We’ve wondered about that.”
“No.” Scott shook his head. “That’s Wolf Senior, and this is Wolf Junior. A wolf of the wild, born here, and one hell of a fellow in his own right. He makes up our Three Unit.”
“Your what?”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Scott. “It isn’t important.”
“But about Wolf—” Trask was frowning again, for something wasn’t quite right here. He turned to the precog. “Ian, don’t I recall asking you to contact Zek about this?”
“You did,” said Goodly, “and I didn’t.”
“You what? You lied!?” Trask could scarcely believe it.
“What, to you?” said the precog. “Quite impossible! Fortunately you never mentioned it again, so I didn’t need to lie.”
“But . . . why?”
Goodly sighed, and said, “Because I wasn’t about to—”
Trask finished it for him: “—To compromise anyone? Yes, I can see that now. And even if you didn’t follow orders, once again I owe you one.” But the precog simply shrugged it off.
Mystified by much of what they’d heard, the techs had gone to the windows and were peering out into the night. It was full night now, and up in the hollow crag the lights were still coruscating in a frenzy of activity. Graham Taylor turned from his window and called out, “Has anyone taken a look at what’s going on up there recently? A few fireworks is all that’s needed, and then it would be like some kind of crazy aerial carnival!”
At which Shania joined the techs and looked out and up at Schloss Zonigen. As Scott, Trask, and the others followed her to the windows, she said, “Yes, the Mordri Three are in a passion, allowing their energies to run wild. Now might be the time I’ve been waiting for—my last opportunity—to discover their best-kept secret.”
“Using your telepathy?” said Paul Garvey, who understood.
“Yes.”
“Their best-kept secret?” said Trask.
And Goodly answered, “When they intend to launch, searing our world with their exhaust.”
Shania started to nod, then shrugged and said, “Well, not quite, but close enough.”
Scott took her elbow. “Not again.” He shook his head. “You can’t be serious about trying to contact them. They may be mad, but it’s still three minds to your one.”
&
nbsp; “Not really,” said Millie. “There’s also myself, Paul, and Wolf. Yes and you, too, Scott. E-Branch was right about one of your talents at least: your telepathy.”
But Shania had already put an arm around Scott’s waist and was reassuring him. “No, I won’t try to probe the Mordris; and certainly not Gelka. She’s quite obviously in a state with herself; who knows what she’d do if she sensed me trying to enter her mind? But what about all of those other people up there—the ordinary people—surely they must know at least something of what’s going on? It’s their minds I have to probe. But I’ll need all of you to give me cover.”
“You’ve got it,” said Scott, “as long as you’ll promise to leave those mad devils well alone.”
Whenever you are ready, said Wolf.
And Paul and Millie nodded in unison, which was sufficient in itself. But then, accepting Trask’s authority as usual, they looked to him for his approval.
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s do it. But first: Graham, and David. We still need to keep a watch. You two take the upstairs rear; it’s a good vantage point. Alan and Ian, upstairs here at the front. The rest of us stay here, and if we need it I’ll fix up a watch roster later. Where’s Frank Robinson?”
“I’m . . . I’m here, boss,” said that one, coming out of the shadows in the farthest corner of the room. “I . . . I feel like a bloody fool, a rotten coward.”
“Well don’t,” Trask growled. “Because this isn’t over yet, not by a long shot, and I’m still going to need you. You’re our spotter, remember?”
“I . . . I got a terrific shock, that’s all,” said Robinson, “It . . . it sort of unsettled me.”
“I’ll say!” Trask nodded. “But how about now? You’ve settled down again?”