“It’s a Russian eye in the sky, but they won’t notice we’re piggy-backing the signal,” said Callan. “We like to keep an eye on Doctor Delirium’s movements, but after that business at LA we’ve upgraded the Doctor from nuisance to actual threat. Don’t suppose you know what the Apocalypse Door is, do you, Eddie?”
“Trust me,” I said. “You really don’t want to know.”
“Oh . . .” said Callan. “One of those . . . Batten down the hatches, people! It’s going to be a long night! Extra tea and jaffa cakes for everyone, and someone get me a refill of those nice little blue pills.” He looked at me, suddenly very sober. “Is it true? Is the Matriarch really dead?”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s gone.”
“I still can’t believe it. Not her, of all people. I thought she’d go on forever. I’ll miss her. I don’t think she ever approved of me much, but she never let me forget what it meant to be a Drood. I’ve had all my people on full alert, ever since I heard. This would be a really good time for an enemy attack, while we’re all so disorganised. Maybe that’s why they killed her? Cut off our head, and we’d all run around in circles? They don’t know us. They don’t know Droods.”
“The Sarjeant-at-Arms is on the case,” I said. “Now, Doctor Delirium . . .”
“Can’t show you the base itself,” said Callan, immediately all business again. “It’s hidden from view, under the jungle canopy. The Amazon rain forest is bigger than some countries, and most of it has never been mapped. But we can give you a pretty specific location.” He pointed to one particular display screen, now showing an aerial view of the jungle. ˚ From really quite high up. The tightly packed greenery stretched away for miles, dark and unbroken, like the surface of an unknown planet. One of Callan’s people obligingly put a large red cross over one area.
“And you’re sure he’s there, because?” I said.
Callan smiled smugly. “Abnormal energy spikes, unique electromagnetic fields, and far too many human life signs coming and going in what should be nothing more than miles and miles of jungle. And because we’ve got a low-level spy tucked away inside his organisation, who keeps us up to date on his every move. Technology is all very well and good, but you can’t beat cheating and a good-sized bribe to get you results.”
“I think it’s time I dropped in on Doctor Delirium, for a little head to head,” I said. “And maybe a slap or two, to put him in his place. Contact the local field agent, and tell him I’m going in. Do we know how far he is from Doctor Delirium’s new base?”
“Conrad’s already heading in the right direction, but given how far off the map the Doctor is now, even at best speed . . . forty-eight hours. Minimum. It’s a big area, Eddie. It’s not like there’s a local bus. What are you going to do, grab a ride on one of the Blackhawkes, and then parachute in?”
“I think I can do better than that,” I said. “Tell Conrad to make his best speed, and join up with me at the base.”
I called the Merlin Glass into my hand, and shook it out into a door. Through the gap, I could immediately see the same aerial view of the jungle as on the display screen. The Merlin Glass was on the job. Callan looked at me sulkily.
“It’s not fair. You always get the best toys! When I was in the field, I couldn’t even get a short-range teleport bracelet without filling out a dozen forms in triplicate. Did you know the Armourer once used one to take care of a kidney stone? Just programmed the bracelet and then teleported across the Armoury, leaving the kidney stone behind?”
“Certainly sounds like the Armourer,” ˚ I said.
“Wonder whether it would work with haemorrhoids . . .”
“You know very well you weren’t allowed gadgets in the field because you kept losing them,” I said, quickly changing the subject. “You were legendary for not knowing where you’d put things. The Armourer still keeps a list of all the things you’ve lost on his wall, and when I say lost, I also include broken and exploded. How can anyone misplace an enchanted motorbike?”
Callan shrugged. “It’s a gift. Not everyone could do it.”
I looked through the open door standing before me. The jungle canopy didn’t have a red cross superimposed over it, but I was sure the Glass could take me to the exact spot. It had never let me down yet. So I gave Callan a cheery wave good-bye, stepped through the Merlin Glass, and found myself high up in the sky, falling more and more rapidly towards the jungle canopy below.
“Stupid bloody literal Glass! ”
The Merlin Glass had already disappeared back into its subspace pocket, leaving me plummeting towards the jungle, grabbing handfuls of fresh air along the way. I turned myself over so that I could look straight down. I really was a hell of a long way up. The cold air slammed against me, buffeting me this way and that and tugging at my clothes, but not slowing me down in the least. My first thought was to summon the Glass back, and go somewhere else through it, but I was already travelling at such a speed that my arrival at another destination would prove just as tricky. Besides, I’d come here to get my hands on Doctor Delirium, and I wasn’t giving up yet.
So I subvocalised my activating Words, and armoured up. The golden strange matter flowed swiftly from my torc, and engulfed me in a moment from head to toe. The air that had been slamming me about with increasing force was immediately cut off, and I could breathe more easily. I hadn’t realised how cold I was, until the armour warmed me up again. I was still falling hard, but the jungle canopy didn’t look that much closer. I had time to think about this.
I concentrated hard, and huge golden glider wings spread out from my armoured back. They cupped the air, and slowed me down some. I was still falling, but at least now I had some control. The armour couldn’t fly, but by gliding in a series of tight circles, I was at least slowing my descent. I spiralled down and down, the huge green jungle rotating swiftly beneath me. I fell and fell, and I made a point of enjoying as much of it as I could. On the grounds I’d probably never have such an experience again. The jungle canopy suddenly leapt up towards me, becoming clearer and more detailed with every moment. I waited as long as I dared, and then pulled the glider wings back in, curled up into a foetal ball, and braced myself as best I could.
I hit the canopy hard, like being thrown naked through a brick wall. I punched through the outer layers in a moment, my armour protecting me from the worst of the impact. It still knocked the stuffing out of me. I smashed through layer after layer of the canopy, slamming through one thick branch after another, shearing them off their trunks. Each breaking branch threw me back and forth, knocking me out of my curled-up ball. My arms and legs flailed helplessly. All I could see was a green blur, with dark shapes rising swiftly up to hit me again and again.
I was still falling at a dangerous speed, trees and greenery whipping past me so fast I lost all track of which way was up. We Droods trust our armour to protect us from everything, but that’s only because we haven’t tested it against absolutely everything yet. It was entirely possible that the golden armour might survive the fall intact, but I’d be crushed to jelly inside it. The continuous impact of branch after branch was slowing my fall, and I grabbed at every passing branch as I fell, but they all broke off in my hands. I fought to turn myself over, so I was facing down, and the ground shot suddenly up and hit me in the face.
I don’t think I’ve ever hit anything that hard in my life. Riding a collapsing hotel from the penthouse floor down to the lobby, from the inside, was nothing compared to this. ˚ The ground hit me like a flyswatter, the impact jarred every bone in my body, and the world went away for a while. When I slowly came back to myself, I ached all over but . . . I was alive. I just lay there for a while, enjoying the idea of not being suddenly dead after all, my golden mask buried deep in the dirt of the jungle floor. I slowly got my breathing back under control, wriggled my toes and fingers to make sure everything was connected, and grinned stupidly. The armour had got me through again.
I pushed down hard with my golden arms, and
slowly forced myself up and out of the hard compressed earth. Light returned as dirt fell away from my golden mask, and when I finally rose to my feet I found I was at the bottom of a deep crater. I’d hit the jungle floor like a meteor, and blown out enough earth to make a hole a good twenty feet in diameter. Steam was still rising from the smooth sides. I punched holes in the compacted dirt of the crater walls, and used them to climb up out of the hole.
The jungle pressed in close all around me, crowding right up to the rim of the crater. The trees were packed tightly together, stretching away in all directions, the space between them filled with hanging lianas from above, and thick bushy undergrowth. The only open space was the one I’d made, by falling through it. Broken branches and splintered stumps showed down the stripped sides of trees, and bits of broken vegetation were still floating slowly down. The thick overhead canopy blocked out most of the light, lending the jungle floor a gloomy, twilight ambience. Bright light streamed down through the hole I’d made, so that I seemed to be standing in a golden spotlight. Dust motes danced and swooped in the illuminated air.
I moved out of the spotlight. It made me feel like a target. I amped up the mask’s sensory input, and the stench of the jungle hit me like a fist in the face; all rot and decay and thick unfamiliar smells. Out of the spotlight, I could see a long way into the twilight, but everything was packed ˚ so closely together it was hard to make out any details. There were large animals out there, watching me silently from a cautious distance, but none of them seemed interested in bothering me. Inside my armour, I gave off no scent to mark me as prey.
The jungle was full of sound: growls and howls, cries and screams, coming from every direction at once as the jungle got on with life as usual. It was all eat or be eaten, with a hell of a lot of running in between. Higher up, there was a constant squalling of disturbed birds. I caught brief flashes of gorgeous colours, and the occasional rush of disturbed air, but the birds kept their distance. The loudest, closest sounds were the buzzings, clickings and rustlings of the millions of insects that swarmed all over the jungle floor. Any number of little darting things flicked through the air, while a great sea of motion swirled around my feet. There were ants and beetles and things I couldn’t even put a name to, boiling all around me. I saw centipedes as long as my arm, rippling slowly as they moved, and tiptoeing spiders as big as my fist. Some tried to climb up onto my feet, but just slid back down again, unable to gain any purchase on the armour. The bigger ones kept well away; I think the armour upset them.
I turned the sensory levels back down again; it was all just too much to bear. And I’d already spotted what I was looking for. The Merlin Glass, for all its bloody-minded literalness, had delivered me to the right spot. I could see Doctor Delirium’s secret base, not half a mile away, glowing brightly in the sun beyond the trees.
There was no track or trail, or anything like a path, so I just moved forward in a straight line, forcing my way through the thick masses of vegetation by sheer brute strength. I kicked through the undergrowth, broke protruding tree branches with my hands, and elbowed aside the smaller trees. Nothing in the jungle could stand against me. Sometimes, when I’m in the armour, it feels like I’m moving through a paper world. Through something less real than me. I try not to let it affect me. It’s a dangerous thing to believe. The armour can make you feel like a god, but it’s important to remember that it’s only as good as the idiot inside it.
Hanging lianas slapped against my shoulders and tied to curl around my arms, but I just tore them away and continued on. The bushy undergrowth didn’t even slow me down. Thorns three or four inches long, thick as spikes, clattered harmlessly against my armour. I could hear small things hissing and squealing under my feet, and made a point not to look down. The larger local wildlife continued to observe me, from a respectful distance.
A huge millipede, nine or ten feet long, fell on me from above, and I made a high-pitched startled sound despite myself. The millipede tried to coil around my head and shoulders, failed to find any footing, and dropped away. I cringed, even inside my armour. I’ve never liked insects. Especially ones big enough to have forgotten their proper place in the scheme of things.
A large spatter of bird poo hit my right arm, white against the gold. I flexed the muscle, and the poo flew away as though shot from a gun, leaving nothing of itself behind. It was such a familiar reaction, I didn’t even have to think about it. (London is, after all, a city full of pigeons.)
The tree line came to a sudden halt, looking out across a vast earth clearing. I stopped in the shadow of the last trees, to take a good look at Doctor Delirium’s base. The first thing that struck me was that there was no sign of movement anywhere. No guards, no people, nothing. And all the jungle sounds had died away. No living thing had followed me to the edge of the clearing. No birds sang, no wildlife stirred. Even the insects at my feet seemed strangely subdued. As though something about the base frightened them . . . I held my position, studying the characterless buildings carefully, looking as far down the empty dirt streets as I could. There was something unnatural about such stillness, such silence . . .
I stepped forward, leaving the jungle behind me, and moved out into the earth clearing. Immediately a powerful force field seized me and held me in place, brought into being by my presence. It pinned me to the spot, great waves of energy coruscating around my armoured form, while small stabbing lightnings crawled all over it, searching for a weak spot and a way in. The air shimmered like heat haze, and the dirt at my feet was scorched black by discharging energies. But powerful as the field was, it was no match for my armour. It couldn’t touch me.
I flexed my golden arms slowly, testing the strength of the field holding me in place. There was a definite tension, a solid resistance, like pulling against chains, but nothing the armour couldn’t handle. I leaned forward, into the field, and set my strength against it. The lightnings jumped furiously, and great sparks detonated on the air, but I moved forward, step by step, chest stuck out as though breasting a tide, and the field could not stop me. I walked right through it, and suddenly it fell away, defeated. The crawling energies were gone, the air was clear again, and there was nothing left to stop me walking into Doctor Delirium’s secret base.
I looked around me, braced for an attack from any direction, ready for shouting guards with big guns, or mercenaries with super-science weapons . . . but there was nothing. Just the silence and the stillness and the empty dirt streets. Except, when I looked carefully, there was something. The slow buzzing of flies, not far away.
Inside the huge earth clearing, the sun shone harshly on blunt and ugly steel and glass structures, presumably the science labs, surrounded by blocks of simple wooden terraces, low-ceiling huts mostly, the size of a village. It had clearly all been built for function, not style; thrown up quickly by people who had been on the move before, and were prepared to move again at a moment’s notice. Doctor Delirium’s little kingdom was a shabby state of affairs. The main building dominated the centre of the village, a steel and glass monument to the Doctor’s ego. His main science lab, where he let his genius run riot.
I started down the narrow street, heading for the main lab. I was still tense, my skin crawling in anticipation of the attack I’d never see coming. From some hidden gun position, or some automated defence system like the perimeter force field. The sound of my heavy feet crashing on the ground carried clearly in the hush, and my golden armour blazed brightly under the hot sun, but still nothing moved in the streets between the low buildings. Nothing but me.
The sound of buzzing flies was getting louder.
I rounded a corner, and there on the street ahead were a series of vague black shapes. I couldn’t work out what they were until I got close enough to disturb the black blanket of flies, and they sprang up into the air, leaving the bodies behind. There were dozens of them, stretching the whole length of the street. I looked back and forth, checking the side streets, and the bodies were everywhere. Dark hu
ddled shapes, buried under flies. The dead men and women lay alone, in twos and threes, and in great piled-up heaps. I made myself walk on, flies buzzing angrily all around me now, harsh and strident. I stepped around and over bodies, some dressed in black and gold, others clearly scientists and workmen. Their ragged clothes were soaked in blood and their wounds were terrible. Flies crawled all over them, jumping up when I came close, and settling again after I’d passed.
The whole place was a Jonestown—everyone was dead. Only here, the people hadn’t killed themselves; they’d killed each other. I moved out of one street and onto another, and the dead lay everywhere, broken and butchered. I knelt down to examine some of the bodies, waving the flies away with my golden hand. They hung on the air nearby, buzzing angrily but unwilling to approach my armour. I checked out the extent and origins of the wounds with my golden fingers. I didn’t have to bother about infection, as long as I didn’t armour down. The stench, of spilled blood and exposed guts, of so many dead people, suddenly became too much for me and I shut down the mask’s ˚ scent detectors. I daren’t armour down long enough to throw up. I straightened up, and stepped back from the bodies.
I felt sick, in my stomach and in my soul. I had no place here, in this village of the dead. I wanted to turn and run and get the hell away, leave this madness behind. People aren’t supposed to see things like this, do things like this. But I was a field agent, and I had work to do. I’d be weak later, when I had time. And if I had nightmares later, well, that came with the job, sometimes. Something terrible had happened here, and I had to find out how and why, to make sure it could never happen again. Duty and responsibility have their uses—they keep us going when courage might not be enough.
I made myself let the stench back in. It wasn’t so bad, knowing it was coming. And bad as it undoubtedly was, there wasn’t much actual decomp. Blood and guts, yes, but not much rot or decay. Given the blazing heat of the overhead sun, this wholesale slaughter couldn’t have happened that long ago. This . . . was a recent massacre. Whoever or whatever had done this, I hadn’t missed it by much.
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