The caverns had taken on the aspect of a fort under siege. Tens of thousands of people lay ill on whatever scraps of bedding were available.
There was no order to the way they were arranged. Nursing the bedridden was left entirely to those slightly less ill, and consisted mainly of taking care of their sanitary needs. Those qualified (or with basic how-to didactic memories) to operate medical packages circulated constantly, perpetually exhausted.
Erentz’s relatives had formed an inner coterie in the deepest caverns, where the light manufacturing tools and research equipment were concentrated. They’d also taken care to stockpile their own food supply, which could last them for well over a month. Here at least, a semblance of normality remained. Electrophorescent strips shone brightly in the corridors. Mechanical doors whirred open and shut. The clatter of industrial cybernetics vibrated along the polyp. Even Tolton’s processor block let out a few modest bleeps as basic functions returned to life.
Erentz let him into a chamber serving as an armoury. Her relatives had been busy since the reconnaissance in the Djerba, designing and producing a personal flame thrower. The basic principal hadn’t changed much in six hundred years: a chemical tank carried on the user’s back, with a flexible hose leading to a slim rifle-like nozzle. Modern materials and fabrication techniques allowed for a high pressure system, giving a narrow flame that could reach over twenty metres, or be switched to a wide short-range cone. Scalpel or blunderbuss, Erentz commented. There were also incendiary torpedo launchers; essentially scaled-up versions of an emergency flare.
She started into discussions with several of her relatives, mostly using affinity. Only a few exclamations were actually voiced. Tolton felt like a child left out of abstruse adult conversation. His attention wandered off. Surely the personality wouldn’t expect him to join the combatants fighting the dark creatures? He lacked the kind of driven intensity Erentz and her relatives flaunted, their birthright. He was afraid to ask in case they said yes. Worse, they could say no and kick him out of their caverns to rejoin the rest of the population.
There must be some important non-combatant post he could fill. He raised his processor block to type an unobtrusive question for the personality.
The Rubra of old would sympathise with that, and the Dariat section was his friend. Then he realized Erentz and her cousins had stopped talking.
“What?” he asked nervously.
“We can sense something in the rail tube approaching one of the endcap stations,” the block said. It was essentially the same voice Rubra had used to speak with him the whole time he was in hiding; though something about it had changed. A stiffness in the inflexion? Minor yet significant.
“One of them’s coming here?”
“We don’t believe so. They rampage about without any attempt to disguise themselves. This is more like a mouse sneaking along. None of the surrounding polyp is suffering the usual heat-loss death. But our perceptive cells are unable to obtain a clear image.”
“The bastards have changed tactics,” Erentz snarled. She snatched one of the flame throwers from a rack. “They know we’re here!”
“We are uncertain on that point,” the personality said. “However, this new incursion will have to be investigated.”
Several more people ran into the armoury, and began picking up weapons.
Tolton watched the abrupt whir of activity with bewildered alarm.
“Here.” Erentz thrust an incendiary torpedo launcher at him.
He grabbed it in reflex. “I don’t know how to use this.”
“Aim it and shoot. Effective range two hundred metres. Any questions?”
She didn’t sound in a forgiving mood.
“Oh crap,” he grunted. He rocked his head from side to side, attempting to force the stiffness out of his neck muscles, then joined them in the hurried exodus.
There were nine of them in the group which marched down the stairs to the endcap tube station. Eight of Rubra’s heavily armed, grim-faced descendants; and Tolton hanging as close to the back of the pack as possible while trying not to make it too obvious.
The main lighting strips were dark and cold. Emergency panels flickered with sapphire phosphorescence as if stirred into guilty life by the clumping footsteps. Not that they were of much use. Helmet projectors encased each member of the group in a sphere of bright white light. So far their power cells were unaffected.
“Any change?” Tolton whispered.
“No,” the block whispered back. “The creature is still moving along the tube tunnel.”
Rubra hadn’t damaged this particular station during the brief active phase of his conflict with the possessed. Tolton kept expecting everything to return to life in a blast of light and noise and motion. It was Marie Celeste territory. A carriage was standing abandoned at one of the twin platforms, its door open. A couple of fast food packets lay abandoned on the marble floor outside, their contents dissolved into a pellicle of grey mould.
Erentz and her cousins fanned out along the platform, and edged cautiously towards the blank circle of the tunnel mouth behind the carriage. Three of them dropped down onto the rail, and crossed swiftly to the far wall. They slunk back into various crannies, crouched down, and aimed their weapons forward.
Along with those remaining on the platform, Tolton secured himself behind one of the central pillars, and brought his launcher up. Nine helmet projectors focused their illumination on the tunnel entrance, banishing the shadows for several metres along its length.
“This isn’t exactly an ambush,” he observed. “It can see we’re here.”
“Then we find out just how determined they are to get at us,” Erentz said. “I tried the subtle approach back in the Djerba. Believe me, it’s a bunch of shit.”
Wondering just how much their definitions of subtle were at variance, Tolton tightened his grip on the launcher. Once again, he checked the safety catch.
“Getting close now,” the personality cautioned.
A speck of grey materialized at the furthest extreme of the tunnel’s shadows. It rippled as it moved steadily forwards towards the station.
“Different,” Erentz muttered. “It’s not concealing itself this time.” Then she gasped as the habitat’s sensitive cells finally managed to focus.
Tolton squinted at the slowly resolving shape, pointing his launcher to the vertical so he could strain ahead. “Holy shit,” he said quietly.
Dariat emerged from the tunnel mouth, and smiled softly at the semicircle of lethal nozzles pointing at him out of the blazing light. “Something I said?” he asked innocently.
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Tolton whooped happily, and emerged from behind his pillar.
“Careful!” Erentz warned.
“Dariat? Hey, is that you?” Tolton hurried along the platform, grinning madly.
“It’s me.” There was only a slightly sardonic tone colouring his voice.
Tolton frowned. He’d heard his friend’s voice loud and clear, never even needing to concentrate on the lip movement. He came to a confused halt.
“Dariat?”
Dariat put his hands flat on the platform edge, and heaved himself up like a swimmer emerging from a pool. It looked like a lot of effort to lift so much weight. His toga stretched tight over his shoulders. “What’s up, Tolton? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He chuckled as he walked forward. The frayed hem of his toga brushed against one of the fast-food packets, and sent it spinning.
Tolton stared at the rectangle of plastic as it skidded to a halt. The others were bringing their weapons to bear again.
“You’re real,” Tolton stammered. “Solid!” The obese grinning man standing in front of him was no longer translucent.
“Damn right. The Lady Chi-Ri smiled on me. A warped kind of
smile, I guess, but definitely a smile.”
Tolton reached out gingerly and touched Dariat’s arm. Cold bit into his questing fingers like razor fangs. He snatched his hand back. But there had definitely been a physical surface; he’d even felt the crude weave of the toga cloth. “Shit! What happened to you, man?”
“Ah, now there’s a story.”
“I fell,” Dariat told them. “Ten bloody stories down that lift shaft, screaming all the way. Thoale alone knows why suicides are so fond of jumping off cliffs and bridges; they wouldn’t if they knew what that trip’s like. I’m not even sure I did it on purpose. The personality was bullying me to do it, but that thing was getting closer, which made me weaker. I probably lost control of my legs I was so debilitated. Whatever … I went over the edge and landed smack on top of the lift. I even penetrated it a few centimetres I was falling so hard. Shit, I hate that.
You’ve no idea how bad solid matter feels to a ghost. Anyway, I was just forcing my legs through the lift’s roof to get out of there when the bloody bogeyman lands right bang beside me. I could even feel it coming, like a gust of liquid helium blowing down the shaft. But the thing is, it didn’t break when it hit. It splashed.”
“Splashed?” Tolton queried.
“Absolutely. It was like a goo bomb detonated on top of the lift. The whole shaft was splattered in this thick fluid. Everything got coated, including me. But the fluid reacted to me, I could feel the droplets. It was like getting caught in a spray of ice.”
“How do you mean, reacted?”
“They changed while they were going through me. Their shape and colour tried to match the section of my body they were in. I figured it’s like my thoughts have a big influence over them. I’m imagining my shape, right. So that imagination interacts with the fluid and formats it.”
“Mind over matter,” Erentz said sceptically.
“You got it. Those creatures are no different from any human ghost, except they’re made up of this fluid; a solid visualization. They’re souls, just like us.”
“So how come you became solid?” Tolton asked.
“We fought for it, me and the other entity’s soul. The impact made it lose concentration for a moment, that’s why the stuff went flying off. Both of us started scrambling round to suck up as much as we could. And I was a hell of a lot stronger that it was. I won. Must have got seventy per cent of what was there before I made a run for it. Then I hid in the bottom floors until the rest of them had gone.” He looked round the circle of faintly suspicious faces. “That’s why they’ve come here. Valisk is saturated with energy that they can use. It’s the kind of energy that makes up our souls, life-energy. The attraction is like a bee for pollen.
This is what they crave; they’re sentient just like us, they’ve come from the same universe as us, but blind instinct rules them now. They’ve been here so long they’re severely diminished, not to mention totally irrational. All they know is that they have to feed on life-energy, and Valisk is the biggest single source to emerge here that they can remember.”
“That’s what they were doing to the nutrient fluid,” the personality said. “Absorbing the life-energy from it.”
“Yeah. Which is what trashes it. And once it’s gone, you’ll never be able to produce any more. This dark continuum is like a bedamned version of the beyond.”
Tolton slumped onto the bottom stair. “Just fucking great. This is worse than the beyond?”
“I’m afraid so. This must be the sixth realm, the nameless void. Entropy is the only lord here. We will all bow down before him in the end.”
“This is not a Starbridge realm,” the personality retorted sharply. “It’s an aspect of physical reality, and once we understand and tabulate its properties we will know how to open a wormhole interstice and escape. We’ve already put a stop to these creatures consuming any more of us.”
Dariat glanced suspiciously round the empty station. “How?”
“The habitat’s nutrient fluid arteries have been shut down.”
“Uh oh,” Dariat said. “Bad move.”
With their nourishment denied them, the Orgathé began to search round for further sources of raw life-energy, crying out in their own strange intangible voices. Their kith who had infested the southern endcap organs shrilled in reply. Even there, the rich fluids were drying up, but the organs themselves were suffused with a furnace glow of life-energy.
Enough for thousands.
The Orgathé pummelled their way up through the starscrapers one by one, and took flight.
Dariat, Tolton, Erentz, and several others stood outside one of the endcap caverns they were using as a garage for the rentcop trucks. They shielded their eyes from the bruised tangerine nimbus of the light-tube to watch one of the dark colossi soar upwards from a collapsing lobby.
With its tattered wing sails extended, it was bigger than a cargo spaceplane. A small pearl-white twister of hail and snow fell from its warty underbelly.
Erentz puffed a relieved breath out through her teeth. “At least they’re still heading for the southern endcap.”
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“If they can’t die, what do they want with all that life-energy?” Erentz asked.
“It boosts them above the rest,” Dariat said. “Once they’re strong, they’ll stay free for a long time before the life-energy leaks away again.”
“Free of what?” Tolton asked uneasily. He had to stand several paces away from his friend. Not out of rudeness; Dariat was cold. Moisture condensed across his toga as it would on a beer bottle fresh from the fridge. None of the droplets stained the cloth, though, Tolton noticed. And that was only one of the oddities this reincarnation displayed. There were differences in behaviour, too, little quirks which had come to the fore.
He’d watched Dariat quietly as they’d all walked up out of the tube station. There was a confidence about him that had been missing before; as if he was merely indulging his relatives rather than helping them.
That deep anger had been expelled, too, replaced by sadness. Tolton wondered about that combination, sadness and confidence was a strange driving force. Probably quite volatile, too. But then given what poor old Dariat had been through in the last few weeks, that was eminently forgivable. Worthy of a verse or two, in fact. It had been a long time since Tolton had composed anything.
“We didn’t have a real long conversation on top of the lift,” Dariat said. “It was the kind of pressurized memory exchange I experienced in the beyond. The creature’s thoughts weren’t very stable.”
“You mean it knows about us?”
“I expect so. But don’t confuse knowing with being interested. Absorbing life-energy is all they exist for now.”
Erentz squinted after the receding Orgathé as it headed over the circumfluous sea. “We’d better get organized, I suppose.” She couldn’t have sounded less enthusiastic.
Dariat gave up on the dark invader, and looked around. A crowd of ghosts was hanging back from th
e cavern entrance, keeping among the larger boulders littering the desert. They regarded the little band of tenacious corporeal humans with grudging respect, avoiding direct eye contact like a shoplifter eluding the store detective.
“You!” Dariat barked suddenly. He started to march over the powdery sand.
“Yes, you, shithead. Remember me, huh?”
Tolton and Erentz trailed after him, curious at this latest behaviour.
Dariat was closing on a ghost dressed in baggy overalls. It was the mechanic he’d encountered when he went searching for Tolton just after the habitat arrived in the dark continuum.
Recognition was mutual. The mechanic turned and ran. Ghosts parted to let him through their midst. Dariat chased after him, surprisingly fast for his bulk. As he passed through the huddle of ghosts they shivered and shuffled further away, gasping in shock at the cold he exuded.
Dariat caught hold of the mechanic’s arm, dragging him to a halt. The man screeched in pain and fear, flailing about, unable to escape Dariat’s grip. He started to grow more transparent.
“Dariat,” Tolton called. “Hey, come on, man, you’re hurting him.”
The mechanic had fallen to his knees, shaking violently as his colouring bled away. Dariat by contrast was almost glowing. He glowered down at his victim. “Remember? Remember what you did, shithead?”
Tolton drew up short, unwilling to touch his erstwhile friend. The memory of the cold he’d experienced back in the station was too strong.
“Dariat!” he shouted.
Dariat looked down at the mechanic’s withering face. Remorse opened his fingers, allowing the incorporeal arm to slip away. What would Anastasia say about such behaviour? “Sorry,” he muttered shamefully.
“What did you do to him?” Tolton demanded. The mechanic was barely visible. He’d curled up into a foetal position, half of his body sunk into the sand.
“Nothing,” Dariat blurted, ashamed of his action. The fluid which brought him solidity apparently came with an ugly price. He’d known it all along, simply refused to acknowledge it. Hatred had been an excuse, not a motivator. As with the Orgathé instinct was supplanting rationality.
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