Exhaustion delayed him for a moment—just a moment.
Strange to say, the Walking Guns did not shoot at him. They circled him, wisping out tiny jets of plasma. Blunt heads butted his legs, sending him into a tumble. He spun among them, the sun flashing in his faceplate as they butted him this way and that, as if playing some rough game.
Oh. I see. You fuckers are sentient enough to have a sense of humor, is that it?
He bounced the Nessie mug off the nearest one’s snout, and flitted.
*
“Dad?”
Colm stared around wildly, trying to orient himself. A sentrienza grove, like the one on the Ruddiganmaseve, but with bonus corpses. Jesus, that’s horrible. Battlefield smell, hospital lights.
Two sentrienza in battlesuits dragged Lloyd away by his arms. He was kicking and thrashing, his face purple, he’d give himself a heart attack … He was wearing golden gloves. They’d neutralized him.
Further away, a naked, wounded sentrienza squatted on its haunches, in that dog-like pose they favored, hands cupped around Nicky’s face. The child stood stock still, obviously paralyzed with terror.
“Nicky!” Colm bellowed. Forgetting his exhaustion and confusion, he started towards Nicky. In his peripheral vision, sentrienza guards tracked him with their guns. What were his chances of reaching the boy before he got shot?
The repulsively wounded sentrienza lifted Nicky’s face, dragging the child onto his tiptoes.
“Come any closer,” it buzzed, “and I break his neck. It would not make him any less useful to me.”
Colm stood frozen on the yellow grass, mindlessly noticing how it was splashed with dried blood.
“So,” the sentrienza said, “there are three of you. Stay still. The nanosamplers are assessing your DNA … My, my. Three generations of one family. I could not have asked for a better-designed experiment.”
A raspy voice slithered through the air. “Then, you will not only give me Earth, but also my son?”
Colm swivelled his eyes without moving any other part of his body. The lights did not reach into the far corner of the grove. The trunks were sunk in shadow, and two specks in that darkness gleamed blue.
The Magus!
The Gray Emperor moved his shoulders in a way suggestive of a shudder. He said briskly, “Of course. That is part of our bargain. Everything and everyone on Earth shall be yours, forever and ever, including your child. Would you mind awfully going away now?”
Lloyd stopped fighting his captors. He yelled at the darkness, “You’ve got a child, you old monster?”
“Yes,” the Magus sighed.
“And why should he not?” the Gray Emperor said. “I am older than he—three thousand, two hundred and eighteen Earth years old, to be precise—and I still have children all the time. These are some of them, in fact.” He waved at the living corpses hanging from the trees.
“Jesus Christ,” Lloyd grunted.
The emperor laughed. “He commanded His followers to drive out demons in His name. But on your lips, the name lacks power.”
“It’s a question of faith,” Lloyd muttered.
“No doubt. What is this state of consciousness you call faith? Perhaps this experiment will shed light on that, too.”
Colm saw two more battlesuited sentrienza advancing through the trees. One of them carried a pair of gold ribbons. He had no doubt those were high-potential gloves. If they got those on him it’d be over.
“For myself, I have faith in nothing,” the Magus whispered. “Least of all in you, Your Imperial Majesty.”
“Understandable, understandable.”
"So I want it in writing. The Earth, and my son.”
“Oh, damn you,” the Emperor said. “Very well! Then you will go away. Yes?”
One of the guards left the grove. The other one trained its gun on Colm but did not attempt to approach him. He had a moment’s breathing space. He fought to think about anything other than Nicky, crushed against the Emperor’s scabby ribcage, tears trickling down his poor little cheeks. He remembered the Walking Guns butting him with their heads, like they were playing a game with him. Each of them a planet-killer, powered by a tiny black hole.
“They’ve promised to give you Earth?” he yelled at the Magus. “Did you know they just tried to destroy the whole planet? I saw them off. They were going to turn Earth into a black hole! There’d have been nothing left.”
“Not true,” the emperor said swiftly. “There would be a black hole. Its event horizon would still contain everyone and everything on Earth. So, not a lie.” He glanced into the shadowy corner, then back at Colm. Membranes slid down over his eyes to make them gentle and lustrous. “You defeated my extinction squad? Really?” Of course, they wouldn’t have got the news at Elphame yet. “I must know how you did it.”
Colm was tongue-tied. The Magus whispered menacingly, “You tried to trick me?”
“Tit for tat, you horrid ghoul,” the emperor said. “Anyway, the extinction protocol seems to have failed. So you shall have the planet in its natural state, humans and all. Is that acceptable?”
The darkness breathed. “Yes,” the Magus grumbled softly. “But I want it in writing.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” the emperor said. He winked at Lloyd. “See, I can take that name in vain, too … Bring writing materials!”
A guard brought a piece of what looked like parchment, and a stylus whose end glowed red-hot. The emperor clicked his fingers. A Walking Gun loped through the trees and crouched in front of him, flattening its back to serve as a writing desk.
The emperor blew on the end of the stylus, and then tested it on Nicky’s arm.
Nicky convulsed. He drew a huge breath, face reddening, and screamed piercingly.
That scream shredded any other ideas Colm might have had. He took a single stride forward, knelt on the grass, and choked, “Let him go! Take me instead! I’ll be better for your experiment. I’ll cooperate. I’ll do whatever you want. Just let him go. Please.”
The emperor tilted his face on one side. “Well, well. Is this the state of consciousness called love?”
“I’m begging you. Let the child and my father go. Keep me.” Colm stretched out both hands, palms up, offering them for gloves. Finally, he understood why he was here. Why he’d been made this way. It was so he could make his death count for something.
CHAPTER 51
MEG, AXEL, AND DHJERGA cautiously ascended the tunnel that sloped up from the Loch Ness Monster’s cave. Meg took point, carrying her Gauss, senses extended into the greeny dark. The tunnel was wide and high enough for the Loch Ness Monster itself. She wondered if it had ever come up this way.
An odor of dead fish tinged the air. It got progressively stronger and more repellent as they walked. The walls grew paler and paler green and then turned dark gray. Meg’s night vision had automatically taken itself offline, because there was light coming from up ahead. Not the welcoming glow of human LEDs, but a bluish gleam. Its source came in view: a cluster of fungi on the ceiling. The fungi were phosphorescent.
Meg and Axel startled at the sight.
“I’ve seen these somewhere before,” Meg said gloomily.
“Yup,” Axel said.
“In the sentrienza mound on Sakassarib.”
“Yup.”
“And on board the Ruddiganmaseve.”
“And in the Duke of Noom’s mound.”
But what were sentrienza star fungi doing in a cave under the bank of Loch Ness? The question answered itself.
“I guess now we know how Nessie got here,” Axel murmured.
“Yeah,” Meg said. She reversed her Gauss and swung it at the fungi, smashing their fleshy petals off. Phosphorescent fragments fell to the floor. “The sentrienza brought it.”
They walked on. There were more clusters of fungi. Meg gave up—she couldn’t smash them all.
“But this cave is old,” Axel said. “And the legend of Nessie? Thousands of years old. I think she was first spotte
d in the fifth century.”
“An alien monster could be long-lived,” Meg said. “The sentrienza are pretty long-lived themselves. I think Emnl’s dad was five hundred or something. He was like ninety percent bionic.”
Dhjerga broke in. “Our legend of Scota’s grave mentions the faeries. It’s said that faeries guard her grave.”
Meg and Axel stared at him. “Thanks for mentioning that earlier,” Meg said. “How about fetching us some more ammo, before these faerie guards come to see who’s trespassing?”
Dhjerga spread his hands. “No power,” he said quietly.
And who ever heard of a sentrienza mound without power? Unless it was … deserted.
Meg did not relax, but when they finally reached the end of the tunnel, she removed her finger from the Gauss’s trigger guard. A mat of star fungi on the roof illuminated an installation of machinery, dominated by a large tank. It had clearly been here for a very, very long time: the fungi had grown down from the ceiling in stalactites that actually encased the top of the truss holding the tank in place. The displays were dark and dead.
“No one’s home,” Meg said, half-relieved, half-disappointed.
“What is that?” Axel said.
Meg shrugged. Unexpectedly, it was Dhjerga who provided the answer. He circled the installation, brushing his fingers along a torpedo-shaped unit installed near the tank. “I’ve seen one of these before. It’s a thermal depolymerization plant.”
“A what?” Meg said.
“This is a generator. It runs on biodiesel, which is produced from waste.” Dhjerga knocked his knuckles on the upright tank.
Something knocked back.
Meg crossed swiftly to the tank. She banged the stock of the Gauss on it, and listened.
“Help!”
A faint human voice.
“Help …”
Two human voices.
The tank stood on stilts. Its top was three meters off the floor, too high for them to reach. Meg, the lightest, stood on Axel’s shoulders, while Dhjerga steadied them both. She heaved at the tank’s lid, realized it was spring-loaded, slammed the release. The lid flew back.
The smell of rotten fish hit her like a punch.
The tank was half full. In a soup of lakewater, weeds, dead fish, and mud stood two people, a man and a woman. The water was up to their necks. “Help,” the man said.
Meg hung over the edge of the tank, the metal cutting into her stomach, reaching for them. When the man grabbed her hands, he almost pulled her in, too. She managed to help him get a grip on the edge. He reached back for the woman. Meg knotted her prosthetic hand into the woman’s soaked clothes, and somehow both of the prisoners heaved themselves over and out of the tank.
Meg sprang to the ground amidst glad cries. Dhjerga had his arms wrapped around the prisoners. The three of them danced in circles, weeping and shouting and hugging like they’d never let go.
“Does Dhjerga know them?” she muttered to Axel.
“Yes,” Axel muttered back. “They’re his brother and sister. That’s Dryjon and that’s Diejen.”
The Lizps’ joy was contagious, and Meg caught herself smiling, while her eyes grew damp. Against all expectations, Dhjerga had found his missing loved ones. But where was Nicky?
She cleared her throat. “Um, guys, hate to intrude, but …”
Diejen broke away from Dhjerga, rushed at Meg, and hugged her, too. She kissed her on both cheeks. “Thank you,” she exclaimed. “I am getting you all dirty and wet. Do you mind?”
Diejen’s elation suddenly infected Meg. She seized the Ghost woman’s hands and they spun around like children, laughing, until Meg saw that Diejen was falling-down tired, and probably dehydrated and maybe sick from standing in that tank for how long? She put her arm around her. “What the hell were you doing in there?”
“I thought our doom was upon us,” Diejen said, shivering. “Dryjon came here looking for Scota’s grave. I came after him. We got in here but then we could not get out. There is a … ward? Something … We could flit out of the tank, but not out of the cave. And every time we left the tank, the monster would find us, and sting us again, and put us back in.”
“We ended up staying in the tank because it was the only place the monster would not attack us,” Dryjon said. He looked around nervously. “Where is it?”
“Back that way, dead,” Meg said, noting that the twins had been stung multiple times, and were still alive. Good news for Axel.
Dhjerga was fiddling with the computer controls. Suddenly the tank’s lid snapped shut and a grinding noise came from inside.
Diejen went pale. “If we were still in there …” Meg finished the sentence in her mind. Diejen and Dryjon would have been ground up with the fish and lakeweed to make biodiesel.
Dhjerga rubbed his hands on his jeans. “Once, I put corpses into a machine like this. In those days I didn’t care. I just didn’t care.”
Meg cleared her throat. She noticed that the generator’s display had lit up. “So the monster’s job was to fill the tank. With fish. Um. People. Whatever. The grinder would probably come on automatically when it sensed that the tank was full.”
Dryjon nodded. “The monster kept throwing more fish and things in on top of us.”
“Then it would power the generator,” Meg went on. “But what does the generator do?”
“I think I’ve found it,” Axel called. He was over by the wall of the cave, inspecting the rock. “There are metal filaments embedded in the rock. This whole cave is a Faraday cage.” He turned to the twins. “That’s why you couldn’t get out.”
“It’s a trap,” Dryjon said. “I should have known. Honestly, I feel so stupid. Scota’s grave.” He shook his head.
“I’m not sure it was designed as a trap,” Axel said, returning to them. “I mean, why would they expect anyone to come here? No one knows about this cave. We used to have powerful scanning equipment. We’d have noticed a TDP plant running under the bank of Loch Ness, even if it was only turned on occasionally. The Faraday cage is there to hide the plant … How did you get in, anyway?”
Dryjon sighed. “We found a cave and went in. And further in, and further in. I know. Stupid.”
Meg yelped, “So there’s a way out?” but no one heard her, because Dhjerga, still fiddling with the machinery, let out a cry of shock.
They all rushed to him. A knobbly black unit, next to the tank, connected to it by pipes, had begun to spit brown cylinders into a metal container. Meg smelled a yeasty odor that reminded her of that all-time favorite shipboard food, Pink Slime.
Axel picked up one of the cylinders. His arms were working again, kind of. He had to use both hands to lift the small cylinder. He sniffed it.
“You are not going to eat that,” Meg said.
“Not a chance.”
“It’s made of rotten fish.” And, Meg thought, it would have been made of living people.
“Ain’t sentrienza technology awesome?”Axel said, dropping the cylinder back into the basket.
“Monster chow,” Meg said. But that made no sense, because why import a monster into Loch Ness, set it up with its own automated cafeteria, and then just … leave it?
Axel shook his head. “The food’s made from biowaste. But the TDP plant is also producing biodiesel for the generator. What does that do?”
No one knew. Meg lost interest and began to look for the way out. She tapped and thumped the walls until she found a metal plate set into the rock. She whacked it. A Nessie-sized section of wall swung back with a hiss of sentrienza hydraulics.
Dryjon and Diejen jumped. “We tried that …”
“Betcha the door only opens when the genny’s running,” Meg said. She stepped out cautiously into another corridor. Star fungi encrusted the roof. As before, she didn’t even need her night vision.
The others came out after her. Axel examined the walls. “No Faraday cage.”
The humans and the Ghosts regarded each other. No Faraday cage, and a work
ing generator, meant the Ghosts could flit.
“You guys go on,” Meg said, flapping a hand. “We’ll be fine.”
She could see that Dryjon and Diejen were at the end of their strength. Not surprising, after their ordeal. They needed to get out of here, get dry, get warm, get some food inside them. So did she, actually. But she couldn’t leave Axel.
“You should come with us, Meg!” Dhjerga said.
“But she’s not—” Axel started. Then he slumped slightly. “Oh.”
Meg felt terrible. “I’m not really like them,” she said. What use was a magical heritage when it couldn’t even help her save Nicky?
“Exactly,” Dhjerga said. “You don’t know how to flit. Axel’s got his battlesuit—”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Axel said, standing there in his freaking underwear, with his arms not even working properly.
Meg took a deep breath. Her resolve was going to fail her any minute. “Would you guys just go, please? They need medical attention.”
Dhjerga closed his eyes for a moment. He seemed to be communing with his conscience. “All right,” he said at last. “Come on, you two.”
He put his arms around the twins. Axel silently pushed Meg towards them. She pushed him back. This was it, didn’t he get it? He was never going to get out of here. She and Dhjerga had drained his battlesuit’s fuel cell. He was stuck here, in the Loch Ness Monster’s cave. So she was going to stay here and die with him. Without Nicky, what was the point of living, anyway?
“See you soon,” Dhjerga said lightly, but there was nothing light in the glance he exchanged with her. She nodded fiercely.
The three Ghosts faded.
CHAPTER 52
MEG WATCHED THE THREE Ghosts fade, holding back her urge to shout at them: Wait, wait, take me …
Dryjon suddenly became solid again. “Actually, before we go, I’d like to see Scota’s grave once more.”
Dhjerga flashed back into solidity. “You found it?”
“Oh, didn’t we say?” Diejen said, becoming solid in her turn.
“You’re joking! Scota’s grave really exists!? Where is it?”
The Nuclear Druid Page 29