by Scotto Moore
But Maxstacy eventually lost that duel. His entire body melted into gore and then ash by the time the song was over. He fought well enough that she couldn’t just make his head explode like a water balloon, but in the end, he might have suffered less if he hadn’t fought the way he had.
Sierra untied me, and we went outside onto the lawn, where the portal in the sky above Airee was now wide open. I nearly fainted from sheer terror at the giant war machine gingerly stepping through the portal and setting down on the lawn next to Airee’s semitrailer. It was maybe three stories tall, a mechanized exoskeleton around some kind of mutated flying dinosaur, with five spindly arachnid legs holding up its trunk. No head, no eyes, no mouth—just a giant cyborg spider beast, covered in dripping acidic ooze, hanging out on the lawn. Rows of hooks and planks hung down from the exoskeleton; this thing was clearly a troop transport.
Airee smiled when she saw us. “You got here just in time,” she said. “I’ve organized a prison break.” The twins were already climbing onto the beast. “As you might guess, this portal goes to the right dimension. You’re both invited to join me on my triumphant return home.”
Sierra and I exchanged a quick look. I realized I knew absolutely nothing about Sierra’s life after she graduated. Nothing about whether she had friends or family or any kind of connection to this world. I certainly didn’t qualify. She said nothing and took off toward Airee.
The new bass player had passed out in a heap. Sierra stepped over her; she would someday wake up and be relieved or mortified to learn they’d left her behind on this planet.
“Are you joining us, Herald?” Airee asked. “Or is this tiny planet suitable for your limited ambition?”
I was surprised to learn that I was tempted. Very, very tempted. But something in Airee’s eyes conveyed her intent very clearly: the world she was heading back to was not going to enjoy her reappearance, not one bit.
I tried and failed to think of something meaningfully human to say or do. She laughed—not mocking, almost affectionate.
“Do you know why I’m here?” she asked with a grin. “My crime was stealing the knowledge of my enemies and wiping their existence from the very fabric of reality. I know many things.”
“Not enough to avoid being caught?”
“Enough to avoid being caught twice.” She flipped a thumb drive through the air at me. I wasn’t ready; it bounced off my chest and landed at my feet. “It’s track ten. Your reward for serving as my Herald. If you ever decide you want to finish raining down hell on this little world, post track ten on your internet, and I will hear it. I will return, and we will finish what we started here. We will take this world for ourselves, once and for all.”
But she was from the future—she already knew what I was going to do with track ten, even if I myself didn’t yet know.
She leapt up onto the spider beast, which leapt up through the portal, which disappeared, leaving only the cool night air in its wake. And leaving a semitrailer parked on the lawn of a disintegrated music professor, and leaving a passed-out bass player from Lawrence, and leaving the rest of the country still freaking out about the weird music she’d left behind on the internet, and leaving the military freaked out about portals of mass destruction, and leaving a stunned music blogger behind to answer for all of it, etc.
Coda
I was taken to a Magneto-esque security facility. A mountain of evidence connected me to Airee’s trail of destruction, up to and including my willing participation in said trail of destruction. They considered me beyond dangerous, despite every willing effort I made to comply with them.
I answered every question truthfully. I told them every single thing I could possibly remember about what happened. All about the Ten Charts and the Viereck recordings. All about the portal to the wrong dimension and then the portal to the right dimension. All about the command-and-control language that was woven into each of the tracks that Airee released from her album. Even “Overture,” the track without vocals, utilized musical themes of command and control that were diabolical in their effectiveness. I told them all about how Earth was secretly a prison planet for the worst individuals from some hellish future where at least once, Airee had succeeded in erasing some of her enemies from ever having existed. I made it clear that whoever “Airee Macpherson” was on paper, she’d been annihilated long ago by a criminal psychopath from another dimension, who’d taken over her body, and then escaped back to her home on the back of a war beast that she’d summoned down out of the sky. I was very lucid and rational about all of this.
And I was extremely clear: if they cared at all about the future of the planet, they needed to destroy the thumb drive they’d confiscated from me. Under no circumstances could anyone ever be exposed to track ten. They nodded politely.
I was deemed criminally insane. I spent a lot of time in bad places.
* * *
Every now and then, they’d come back and start over with the same questions. Maybe they were trying to catch me in a lie. Maybe scientific advances were catching up to the phenomena they’d observed and they needed my unique perspective. Maybe they were just freakishly bored and I was the only target in the vicinity. I saw the same interrogators over and over again, and I told them the same stories, over and over again.
But I must confess, my aversion to the idea of track ten getting out certainly diminished over time. I might have even suggested, once or twice, that someone should maybe go ahead and listen to it—you know, in a soundproof room, on a device that could never be connected to the internet, just for the sake of science, you understand. They always nodded politely. I never had any idea what the hell they actually wanted.
* * *
Maybe ten years after I last saw Airee Macpherson, I got an unexpected visitor. They dragged me into a small conference room and chained me to a table and left me alone for an hour, and then the door finally opened, and a young woman in a crisp military uniform came in and sat down across from me. We were silent for a while, eyeing each other.
Then I realized—this wasn’t one of my periodic interrogators. This woman had a different look about her. Like she was unnaturally excited to be here. And then my dim-witted eyes finally adjusted, and I realized I was looking at Sierra Nelson. She smiled when I recognized her and said something in a horrible, guttural language that I knew immediately to be the language of the Ten Charts.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Track ten just got out,” she said. “Airee’s back—like she promised. She’s waiting in a bus outside. Tour starts tonight.” She unlocked my handcuffs.
“Can’t wait to hear it,” I said. “What’s it called?”
“It’s called ‘Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You,’” she said. “C’mon, let’s hit the road—it’s a long drive to Lawrence.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jen Moon and Kira Franz, my beta readers; Lee Harris, my editor; Brady Forrest; Joe and Ola Pemberton; and Ramez Naam.
About the Author
Photograph by Ian Johnston
SCOTTO MOORE is a Seattle playwright whose works include the black comedy H. P. Lovecraft: Stand-up Comedian!, the sci-fi adventures Duel of the Linguist Mages and interlace [falling star], the gamer-centric romantic comedy Balconies, and the a cappella sci-fi musical Silhouette. He is the creator of The Coffee Table, a comedic web series about a couple who discover their new coffee table is an ancient alien artifact that sends their house shooting through the void (thecoffeetable.tv).
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Track 01
Track 02
Track 03
Track 04
Track 05
Track 06
Track 07
Track 08
Track 09
Track 10
Coda
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
YOUR FAVORITE BAND CANNOT SAVE YOU
Copyright © 2016 by Scott Alan Moore
First published in 2016 by Scotto Moore
All rights reserved.
Cover photo by Shutterstock.com
Edited by Lee Harris
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-31489-5 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-31490-1 (trade paperback)
First Tor.com Edition: February 2019
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