Pyke had cursed and put a single shot from the big plasma gun right between the man’s eyes. The man had been one of Raven’s—Dervla recognised him, and as much as Dervla despised her and her thugs she knew that no one deserved such a horrific end. But wall-birthed horrors and monsters were not the only hazards awaiting interlopers into this grotesque netherworld. The worst enemy was in the air.
They passed an abundance of types of weird plant that gave off odours varying from pleasantly sweet to toe-curlingly acrid. Most of the passively fragrant ones seemed safe, unlike the squirters and sprayers whose payloads could make you blind or deaf or temporarily bestow synaesthesia upon your unwilling senses. Dervla saw that happen when Moleg got a faceful of orange mist from a hanging yellow pod—he reacted with coughing and wheezing, and spitting to try and rid himself of the taste, then seconds later he turned edgy and panicky, his voice reduced to a wordless drone as if the mist was attacking his brain’s speech centres. When any of the others spoke he waved them to be silent while trying to hold his hands over his ears. Then he stuffed paper towel plugs into his nose (and ears), pulled on his gloves, tugged his jerkin hood tightly over his head and tried to stumble on with the rest.
The effects did wear off several minutes later but by then Kref had been stung by a flying, whining thing, causing him to start waving and lashing out at invisible attackers. Also, Pyke had been spat upon by a trumpet-shaped bloom at the tip of a coiled stem which had lunged out of the foliage at him—it made him hallucinate that he, too, was some kind of plant with tentacle branches to reach out with. Somehow, Dervla and Ancil had managed to keep Kref from charging off down the corridor while Moleg’s senses gradually returned to normality. Pyke left planthood behind, puking his guts out along the way, and Kref was calming down and reporting a fading of the hallucinations—and that was when a flock of spiderbats swept along the corridor, a storm of horrible piping fluttering forms. And, of course, everyone was bitten and thereby discovered the psychotropic delights of spiderbat venom.
In the grip of utter, primal terror, the need to run was overwhelming, especially because a side effect of the venom populated the mind with monsters dredged from the darkest corners of the subconscious. As Dervla scrambled away, with Kref, Pyke and the rest forgotten, she was trying to escape the drooling, grinning maw of Meatmaker Mosk, a 3V character that had haunted her childhood, leering and trudging through her dreams for far too long, even into puberty. After that, there were few definite memories she could recall; crouched in this safe zone now, she assumed that during her mad dash through the corridors of the Steel Forest she must have picked up some more doses of mind-altering chemicals, prolonging the ultra-headtrip substantially. Her wrist timer told her that nearly an hour and a half had lapsed since they had entered the wreck. She could only remember blurred fragments from the last hour or so, one moment where she heard a hard chatter as someone fired off an entire magazine, and another moment where she fell down a flight of steps, no, two flights. All these bruises and cuts, had to be two.
So, what now? How the melting hell do I find the rest without getting my brains scrambled again?
Well, first things first, as always—scout first, curse later. The corridor she was facing—which was the way she’d come—went straight ahead for about six paces before turning left into another corridor of suppurating purple hues, home to a variety of buzzing nasties, including a flock of spiderbats. Which meant she had to explore the rest of the passage, past the S-corner refuge where she still was.
Gathering her resolve, she got to her feet, beam-blaster at the ready, and went left, rounding the corner. Pale blues with a metallic sheen still dominated here. The walls sprouted ferny fronds, tinkling white-berry bushes, serpentine roots half embedded in the bulkheads, weird tubular leaves and opaque pipes that coiled in on themselves while pale blobs slowly oozed along inside them. Cautiously she brushed through the clicking, rustling foliage. The next corner mirrored the corridor behind her with a rightward corner, and when she rounded it her heart sank. Before her was hot glaring scarlet, molten brass and scorching sulphur. Clouds of insects wavered and darted among the lush growths which gave off sporadic plumes of sparkling vapour.
This is hopeless, Dervla thought. The other corridor was a gauntlet of horrors but this one is worse! She leaned against a nearby patch of comparatively blank wall and let out a long sigh. Breather facemasks would have been handy—there was a box of them back on the shuttle-barge but those gauzy suits provided by Ustril had made the masks seem unnecessary. Trouble was, she’d collected them all in after reaching the wreck. If that’s not a cautionary tale, I don’t know what is.
She rubbed tiredness out of her eyes then ran her fingers through her hair, noticed how long it was getting and longed for a shower and the chance to get at her cosmetic shears back on the Scarabus.
“You are a stranger here—are you seeking the gateway?”
She almost jumped out of her skin when the calm voice spoke to her out of the pale blue tangle of leaves immediately to her right. She turned abruptly and found herself staring at a pair of lips hanging from the end of a long, leafy stem. Behind it an ear protruded on a branching twig. Both disembodied organs were fleshy and light blue with darker highlights. Her immediate reaction was to accept that she’d been dosed with another hallucinogenic, but she quickly realised that apart from the ear-mouth pairing nothing else had altered in her surroundings. So far as she could tell.
“I’m seeking my friends,” she said hesitantly. “I lost them in one of the decks above.”
The mouth dipped and swayed gently on its stem for a moment. “Many have lost themselves here and found different modes of being. Are your friends seeking new modes of being?”
“No, we were following one of our party who, erm, entered by mistake.”
“Mistake?” The blue lips pursed thoughtfully. “All actions have a purpose, thus this errant companion must also have a purpose—does it seek the gateway?”
Dervla considered this for a moment. “We are uncertain about our companion’s purpose but we fear for her safety. We know that dangerous enemies entered before us.”
A branching stalk snaked round from behind the mouth, carrying a dark blue pod which split neatly along its length and parted to reveal a single limpid eye.
“How charming,” the voice continued. “Your species is not unlike our own, at least as it once was in another age. I should introduce myself—I am Shogrel, Second Remedial, Linkflow Subcast, to employ my old shipboard rank.”
“Dervla, first mate aboard the fast-merchant Scarabus. Can I ask … how do you know that the other intruders are looking for this gateway? And what is the gateway itself?”
The podshell halves curled back and the eye moved a little closer, while the lips seemed to express a restrained anger.
“We know because they tried to gain our confidence with friendliness at first, thinking to fool us into revealing the gateway’s location, but when that failed they seized and started to torture some of us, again to no avail. As for the gateway, all you need know for now is that it is a cherished place for us, one that we will do all we can to protect.”
Dervla nodded, trying to appear calm and collected while madly attempting to recall something useful from that pamphlet on first contact that Pyke had made her read six months ago, just in case this situation qualified.
“Thank you for your kind words, Shogrel … erm, could you possibly direct me along the safest route to take while searching for my friends?”
Which was a tough proposition, of course, given the berserkly hazardous territory into which they had strayed. But she’d remembered how the pamphlet suggested portraying oneself as naively uninformed in order to gain more background and, hopefully, offers of assistance.
“I am afraid that there are no safe routes through the forest for a species like yourself,” said Shogrel’s mouth. “Your cell patterns have already been tasted and savoured by our forest, and our membranes have sensed y
our speech, filtered its words, laid bare their meanings. But your biology has no defences against the Steel Forest’s ecology of airborne zymones.”
Dervla’s shoulders sagged. “So I’m stuck here!”
“Not at all. There is a way to shield you from the harmful effects of the forest’s chemology, but preparations must be made …” Shogrel’s voice tailed off for a moment then resumed. “Apologies—I was calling out to the rest of my conglomerate for assistance … ah, now there’s an adjunct I’ve not seen for a long time!”
Through the shiny foliage a pale shape came creeping, a slender-fingered hand. Dervla stared wide-eyed as it attached itself to an available twig and dangled beneath the mouth, clenching its fingers then extending them one by one, as if counting to six, then repeating it over and over. Shogrel’s eye watched while Shogrel’s lips smiled.
“Right is a perfectionist, counts it all up, down, in and out … oh, good, some depth perception at last!”
A second eye sprang into view and snapped open, then winked at Dervla. Shogrel’s eyes, she realised, were quite beautiful, dark brown with hints of amber. When the nose arrived, lifted into place by a helping hand, Dervla’s suspicion grew into certainty.
“Shogrel, may I ask—are you female in gender?”
The lips laughed. “I was once and shall undoubtedly be so again, perhaps, but this arrangement is only a temporary alliance in order to provide aid.”
The feet showed up separately, and the left hand clambered down from the leafy ceiling with Shogrel’s other ear clinging to its back. Dervla watched them assume disembodied positions, borne up by a fast-growing web of rootlets. She had to remind herself repeatedly that she wasn’t hallucinating, even though it was entirely possible.
“Dervla of the Scarabus, may I ask you to perform a small task for me?”
“Sure, I’d be happy to help.”
“Would you be so kind as to uncover my torso? My hand will show you the way. The rest of me will follow shortly.”
Dervla nodded, and with Shogrel’s left hand perched on her shoulder she retraced her steps, weaving past clumps of fronds, tinkling bushes, chiming bamboo-like stems tipped with gleaming spines. Not far from where she’d found refuge earlier, the hand tapped her shoulder and pointed at a large mass of growth which took up half the width of the corridor. Dervla went up to it and, wary of sharp-edged leaves, tried to peer inside. Shogrel’s hand, though, jumped off her shoulder, landed on a jutting branch and burrowed into the tangle. A moment later the foliage parted again and Shogrel’s hand beckoned. Dervla already had gloves on so she gingerly pushed the gap wider, and through a network of shoots and tendrils she could see an actual female torso. Pale and unmarred, it rested amid a cradle of grasses and sprigs, with clusters of plant stems and vines bursting forth from hollows in the neck and the shoulders.
That was when Shogrel’s organs arrived in single file, a march of the disembodied, squeezing and slipping through the interwoven stalks and leaves. A dense web of tendrils began to form from the neck up, a kind of scaffolding for the eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Similar meshworks were coalescing where arms and legs had once been. Shogrel let out a delighted laugh as she admired her hands and feet, then unhurriedly stood up straight. Dervla stood back as she emerged from the leafy refuge, looking around her, looking up and down, rocking her woven head from side to side, lips curved with amusement. Then she brought her hands together in a single quiet clap.
“Ah, back in the world of attachments!” she giggled. “Binocular vision, a sense of balance, coordinating smell and taste, hearing in binaural … a panoply of jostling inputs. I am sure I can rely on their judgement, though.”
Dervla looked on with uneasy amazement, fairly convinced that this was not a hallucination. “What kind of technology made all … all this?”
“I cannot explain all the details in the manner of the High Conjecturists, but I do have a broad understanding of it. Firstly, however, if we are to journey through the Steel Forest you must accept these.”
Shogrel opened her pale, beautiful hands to reveal loops of tiny blue flowers. There was a circlet to go around Dervla’s head and bracelets for each wrist. When she peered closely at one of the wristlets, the little blue flowers turned to look up at her and every one had her face.
“Now you are ready to face all that the Steel Forest has to offer!” Shogrel laid one hand (supported by an arm made from webby roots) on her shoulder. “I will lead the way, just to be sure that my neighbours understand.”
Retracing her steps along the purple corridor was like rewinding the flashes and fragments of a nightmare. But the biting liana blooms that had lunged and snapped at her back then now hung and swayed in midair, as if spookily attentive to her presence. And the gator-dogs now only gambolled playfully about her feet, with no hint of their former belligerence.
“This part of the forest occupies the lowermost corridors of our ancient, timeworn vessel,” said Shogrel. “A few local denizens still capable of objective scrutiny have reported the presence of an intruder on the deck above. I do not know if this is a member of your group or one of those others—would you like to investigate?”
Shogrel spoke the last word with the kind of girlish mischievousness that would normally make Dervla’s lip curl. But she found herself warming to the leafy alien, especially now that she was no longer under assault by the undergrowth and its wildlife.
“Sooner we start, sooner I can find my crew,” she said.
“Excellent. We go this way.”
As they trod lightly among purple spiral roots and ducked through creeper-smothered hatchways, Dervla reminded her guide of her promise to explain something of the science behind this strange mode of existence. Shogrel duly gave an account of the origins of the Steel Forest, or at least as best as she could remember.
Their ship, the Mighty Defender of the Arraveyne Heart, had escaped from the imminent collapse of the Arraveyne Imperium, taking with it huge quantities of precious exchangeables and works of art sequestered from the Imperial vaults. The architects of this grand escape also gathered together (and in some cases abducted) pre-eminent scientists, their lab equipment and data archives and brought them aboard the immense vessel. And among their number was the great conjecturist, G’sovo Jush.
Shogrel went on to explain how the ship’s commanders, a cabal of high dukes of the Imperium, encouraged the scientists to resume their work while the flight from the fallen Imperium got under way. Unfortunately, the ship’s passage through hyperspace attracted the attention of a near-mythical creature called the Damaugra, which then proceeded to dog the ship on its evasive course. In the meantime, the “guest” scientists either resumed their researches or initiated new projects, encouraged by the ship’s captain, High Duke Strano. Before departing the Arraveyne homeworld, G’sovo Jush had been working on an advanced gene-flux technology by which living flesh could be augmented with the properties of other materials, even non-organic materials. But then came the Damaugra’s devastating final assault in the vicinity of the planet Ong, and the decoupling of the Mighty Defender’s ship segments, leading to the catastrophic crash-landings.
At that point in Ong’s past, according to Shogrel, the deserts were not so widespread yet the storms were much more violent. The planetary climate was experiencing great instability and vast electrical storms were a constant feature, girdling the globe. After the decoupled segments of the Mighty Defender reached the surface, scattered across hundreds of miles of inhospitable terrain, the surviving passengers and crew found that their communications were rendered useless by the raging storms. They were cut off from the rest of the ship, and from the supplies in the central hold section. There were no vehicles suitable for the wind-torn environment outside so a few decided to set out on foot to try and locate other parts of the ship. They never returned.
While all this was transpiring, G’sovo Jush had not been idle. In collaboration with another conjecturist called Vreyba, he had fused his gene-flux techno
logy with Vreyba’s radical mind-transcribing apparatus. The strengths and advantages of the metal that encased them, the ship that protected them, would be infused, engraved, into the codes underpinning their flesh and bone. At the same time, the subatomic structure of the ship would become the new refuge for minds, new roads and bridges for thought, new avenues of perception, new tools by which they could adapt the wreck’s interior then adapt to it in turn.
Listening to this incredible account, Dervla realised that in the quest for survival the ship’s passengers had diverged wildly from the boundaries of conventional carbon-based life. As they climbed to the next deck and unhurriedly strolled through corridors thronging with phantasmagoria, Shogrel pointed out this particular type of trilling bloom or that pack of octo-lizards as the manifestations of former crew members or passengers.
“Can we talk with them?” Dervla said.
Shogrel smiled sadly. “Many have lost any sense of a unified consciousness, others have difficulty connecting with objective reality. Then there are those who view objective reality as a hindrance. We will be conversing with some of them but for now we should ready ourselves—we are approaching a chamber where an intruder has recently taken up residence.”
Dervla’s sense of orientation, usually so dependable, had already failed her and she couldn’t tell if she were moving towards the stern or away from it, or to port or starboard. Through the leafy, mossy passages they walked, cautiously now. Topaz and sky-blue light tubers pulsed here and there. Ahead was a T-junction and a wide, gaping door. She looked at Shogrel as they approached.
“Through here?” she said.
Her root-woven, sprig-sprouting guide turned with a smile and Dervla saw that she was missing an eye and a hand.
“I’ve sent scouts inside,” she said. “They should not be long … and here they are!”
The absent hand had emerged from the doorway and scrambled along the wall foliage to where Shogrel stood with her other hand outstretched. The hand-errant crawled across to resume its former position, dropping off the eye on the way.
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