The Nuclear Druid

by Felix R. Savage

  “Right up there,” Diejen said, pointing up the tunnel. “It’s a bit underwhelming. Not really worth coming halfway across the galaxy for.”

  “I have to at least see it,” Dhjerga said.

  So now Meg had to hold onto her resolve for however long it took to do the freaking graveyard tour.

  She trailed behind the Ghosts, digging her fingernails into her palms. After a few minutes the tunnel forked into two. Diejen and Dryjon led them down the wider fork. It ended in a tiny cave. They all crowded in to stare at a stone sarcophagus half-buried in phosphorescent fungi. Diejen was right, Meg thought: underwhelming summed it up.

  Dryjon pointed out an inscription in chicken-scratchy characters, explaining that he had scraped the fungi off the inscription when they first found the grave, before the monster caught them. Diejen translated it: “‘Here lies my mother, Scota of Caledonia, slain by my father.’”

  “What does that mean?” Dhjerga said. His mood seemed to have darkened. He was scowling and shifting from foot to foot. Maybe, Meg thought, the tropo crash was hitting him.

  “Don’t know,” Dryjon said. “Whoever carved this wasn’t very good. Look, here and here, his chisel slipped.”

  Axel squeezed between the Ghosts and bent over the characters. “These look like runes, but they aren’t Ogham or Viking runes ...” Of course, Axel had gone to top-flight schools where you learned that kind of thing. He had so many sides to him, and that was one reason she’d fallen in love with him. How could she have fucked everything up so badly?

  She left the cave, deciding to investigate the other fork of the tunnel.

  It was narrower, dank, and ended in iron bars, set into the ceiling and floor. The bars were set three feet apart, but that was still too narrow for an alien monster to squeeze through, suggesting that this was the Nessie equivalent of a safety gate. The sentrienza had not wanted the monster going beyond this point. Why not? Could there be another way out?

  Despite that tantalizing possibility, Meg was oddly reluctant to explore any further. A bad smell wafted from between the bars. She wrinkled her nose. Not rotten fish this time; more like sewers. She trained her night vision on the darkness beyond the bars.

  Nothing moved, and she was about to turn away when she heard a shuffling, dragging noise in the darkness.

  A hideous night-green shape shambled towards her.

  It screamed, and Meg screamed back.

  *

  Dhjerga heard screaming. He and Axel took off at a run, back up the tunnel. Dhjerga outdistanced Axel, because he had boots on while Axel was barefoot, but not by much. “Meg, Meg!” Axel bawled as he ran. He loves that woman more than is wise, Dhjerga thought.

  He met Meg at the fork in the tunnel. In fact, she almost crashed into him. She caromed off the wall and stumbled against Axel.

  “What the hell? Meg!”

  “It’s coming! It’s coming after me!” She spun, grabbing her Gauss on its sling, setting it against her shoulder.

  A heartbeat of silence. Then: scrape, scrape, scrape.

  Dhjerga raised his own gun.

  A grotesque form tottered out of the other fork of the tunnel.

  Dhjerga had thought he’d already seen the worst that this hideaway had to offer. The Loch Ness Monster had been bad. But this was worse.

  Short legs barely supported a pyramidal bulk of naked flesh. The lowest rolls of the body dragged on the floor, while the creature struggled to gather them up with weak little arms. In the bluish light from the star fungi, the monster’s skin resembled the hide of a hog, rough and wrinkled, with bristly reddish hairs growing in a line up its stomach and around the fleshy flaps of its chest.

  It stank like a hog pen, and left a smear of feces where its buttocks scraped along the floor.

  Yet worst of all, the blunt head atop the mountainous body, resting on stacked jowls, had lips and a nose. A few puffs of red hair clung to its scalp. Its blue eyes brimmed with fear.

  It was human.

  Dhjerga slapped Meg’s gun down. “Don’t shoot!” He knew that he was on the verge of solving the mystery which had distorted his life and deformed his soul. Where did the taint of evil come from? What had warped his people? The answer stood in front of him, gibbering and wringing its hands.

  “Stranger,” Dhjerga said, consciously forming his words in the Teanga. “Who are you?”

  The mountainous creature cringed against the wall. It whimpered. Perhaps it had forgotten how to talk.

  “It thinks we’re going to hurt it,” Axel said.

  Of course, Meg had been about to hurt it. She was hanging back now, wary.

  “Please,” the creature sobbed. “Food?”

  So this was who ate those cylinders of compressed waste! The Loch Ness Monster had been its guardian, nurse, and captor. Faerie guards? The faeries had left, but their slave had stayed behind, to guard not just Scota’s grave, but this wretched … man.

  “I ask again, who are you?” Dhjerga said.

  “Dragon?” the man said fearfully.

  “The … dragon … is dead. You are free.” Dhjerga smiled, although he wanted to vomit. By Scota’s grave, there was moss growing in the man’s skin folds.

  Diejen and Dryjon emerged from the other tunnel.

  “Oh,” Dryjon said.

  Dhjerga nodded. “I think we’ve found our inscription-carver.”

  Dryjon muttered, “‘Here lies my mother, Scota of Caledonia, killed by my father …’ Could it be?”

  The three Lizps stared at the grotesque man-mountain in shared revulsion … and understanding.

  Dhjerga spoke the thought that was on all their minds. “This is the Magus’s son.”

  *

  “Hang on,” Axel interrupted. “That’s not possible. It’s just … nope. He’d have to be thousands of years old.”

  Dhjerga ignored him. He levelled his gun at the man-mountain. Hurt him? He’d do a damn sight more than that. For the sake of this … this creature, the Magus had rebuilt their entire society into a war machine, had slaughtered millions, littered the galaxy with slaves, and warped his own mages into killers. Did Dhjerga bear a grudge? Yeah, you could say that. So he’d do what he was made to do. He’d kill—

  Dryjon punched his gun arm. “Hold your damned fire, brother.” He moved between Dhjerga and the Magus’s son. With determined courtesy, he bowed. “Do you have a name?”

  “I … Drest.” The man-mountain’s voice was low, frightened. His eyes flicked from one to the other of them. How long had it been since he saw any other human beings? “Me … Drest.”

  “Drest, I am honored to make your acquaintance. My name is Dryjon. This is my brother Dhjerga and this is my sister Diejen. We’re, ah …” Dryjon smirked nervously. “Your long-lost cousins?”

  Drest pointed a trembling, broken-nailed finger at Axel and Meg. “Romans?”

  “No,” Dryjon said, “their names are Axel and Megumi. They are valiant humans of Earth.”

  Diejen broke in, “Drest, the Romans are no more! They wanted to enslave us, but instead we enslaved them.” Her smile was as brittle as glass. “You need not fear them any longer.”

  “What the fuck? Romans, now?” Meg said.

  Dhjerga knew that Diejen was simplifying it considerably. There had been intermarriage between mages and freemen, a little or a lot, depending on who you asked. That’s why the Lizps were mages and not pure druids like the Magus. They were also descended from the Romans, those marauding, raping, plundering killers. The present echoed the past. And yet he still understood nothing.

  “Oh, what a tragedy it has all been,” Diejen said, in a thin voice that made Dhjerga remember their mother on her deathbed. She’d died of a wound taken in the Magus’s war.

  And Diejen was shivering in her wet clothes. Dhjerga forgot the big questions as concern for the twins filled his mind. “Diejen, you and Dryjon must leave here.”

  “What,” said Dryjon, “when we’ve just met our long-lost cousin? There’s so much I w
ant to ask him!” He was shivering, too, but even the risk of death could not dim his curiosity. That was what he and Dhjerga had in common. Curiosity: their curse.

  Drest squealed suddenly, “My father left us. My mother died but I did not.” His eyes, mere flecks in his huge drooping face, filled with tears. “I cannot die.”

  “Oh boy,” Meg said suddenly. “Emnl used to hint about the gift of eternal life. I thought she was just fucking with me.”

  “They gave you eternal life, Drest?” Dryjon said. “And left you here?”

  Drest nodded. “My father said he would come back for me. But he never did. He never did.”

  A thought struck Dhjerga. A very good thought.

  He smiled. “Drest, what would you do to him if you could meet him again, your father? What would you do, hmm?”

  “Dead him.” Drest’s hands flexed. “Dead him, for leaving me and my mother! Dead, dead, dead!”

  “Guess you’re family, after all.” Dhjerga stepped around his brother and sister . Repressing a shudder, he took Drest’s pudgy, scaly hand in his own. “Dead him, huh?”

  “Yes!”

  “Sounds like a plan, coz.”

  CHAPTER 53

  “TAKE ME INSTEAD.” COLM bowed his head and stretched his hands out, willing the Gray Emperor to accept his offer. Me for the child. Me for my father. It’s a good deal. Take it.

  The Walking Gun that crouched in front of the emperor, with a piece of parchment on its back, waiting for the emperor’s signature, swivelled its head around and whined at him.

  “No!” It was the Magus’s voice. The lights dimmed. The shadow of the Magus surged between the trees and loomed over the man, the sentrienza emperor, and the child. The yellow grass under Colm’s knees turned into nails, frozen stiff. “Your Imperial Majesty, he is lying to you! He’s not a real mage!”

  “Right. I’m a chemical mage,” Colm said, looking up at the shadow. “Got a chip in my head and a Nessie mug full of nothing. As they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In fact, Mr. Gray—sorry, I’m Scottish, not awfully fond of imperial titles—I’m more a Ghost than the Ghosts are. Want a demonstration?”

  The sentrienza emperor chittered laughter. He was tickled, Colm thought, by the spectacle of two magicians vying for his favor. “Perhaps a small one.”

  “Right,” Colm said. For a terrible moment his mind was blank. Then he remembered the victory party on Atletis.

  Such a small victory, in retrospect, and not even a final one. But it had felt plenty final at the time, and the Ghosts had expressed their joy in giddy demonstrations of magic, each taking a turn to strut his or her stuff while the others watched and ate and heckled and laughed themselves silly. “It is like the Games of old!” Diejen had said, delighted, before getting up to take her turn.

  She had made the trees sing.

  Colm had watched in awe. When she sat back down, amidst applause, she’d explained how she did it. Colm had never tried it for himself, as it seemed kind of pointless, but with Nicky’s life at stake, nothing was pointless anymore.

  He raised his Nessie mug into the air, leeched power from the multifarious electromechanical systems under the floor, and started to conduct the sentrienza trees.

  “Oh come oh come Emmanuel,” they sang in chorus, sweet and low, their withered leaves forming mouths. “And ransom captive Israel.” It was autumn at home, Christmas was not far off: Colm had heard a syrupy instrumental version of this song playing at the Star Port Mall in Tokyo. “That mourns in lonely exile here, until the son of God appear!”

  Nicky stopped crying, entranced by the eerie a capella music.

  “Rejoice, rejoice,” the trees sang, and the sentrienza prisoners hanging from the trees joined in the chorus, They had so many tubes and lines going into them that they were practically part of the system. They ripped their stitched lips open and sang through the blood: “Emmanuel! Shall come to thee, oh Israel!”

  The Gray Emperor’s face twitched. He stared in amazement at the spooky sight. Even Colm had not expected the prisoners to join in. He only knew the one verse so he repeated it.

  “Rejoice, rejoice!” —yes, even here, he thought, even in the evil heart of the sentrienza empire, facing certain death, it was still possible and even necessary to rejoice. “Emmanuel shall come to thee, oh Israel.”

  The trees fell silent. The prisoners hung limp and bleeding. The emperor was yelping softly to himself.

  Lloyd applauded. “You’ve come on, lad,” he muttered. “You’ve definitely come on.”

  But Colm’s gaze was fixed on the emperor. “How about that?” he said nervously.

  The emperor stared at him, faceted eyes wide and wild. “That is real magic,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “Beautiful! Beautiful!”

  He pushed Nicky away. “Grandpa,” Nicky wailed. Ignoring Colm, he stumbled straight to Lloyd. Colm smiled ruefully. That was what he’d wanted, after all. Go, he thought at Lloyd. Go! What are you waiting for?”

  “You will stay here with me,” the emperor said to Colm, “and make the trees sing every day. There are no trees left on the surface of Elphame, you know. All of them died. These twisted underground specimens are all that remain. Yet you have given them new life!”

  “I guess so,” Colm said, quietly rejoicing. And he fetched the Emperor’s Walking Gun onto his lap.

  He had worked it out gradually, thinking about the Walking Guns that seemed to come with the Shihoka when he flitted. He hadn’t wanted them along, far from it, so how had they stuck to him?

  Answer: they hadn’t.

  Look at the way they’d rushed him when he finally emerged from hiding. Butting him and roughhousing like big metal dogs.

  They were not mere machines. They were sentient enough to be copied. And that’s what he’d done, accidentally. They had not really been trying to demolish the Shihoka. Like slaves, according to their nature, they had just been trying to get close to him, so he could tell them what to do.

  And now he had another one sitting in his lap. If it had a tongue it’d’ve been licking his face.

  “Here’s what you do,” he muttered to it, while everyone else was still trying to work out where the heck an extra Walking Gun had come from, and why it was behaving so oddly. Colm pointed to the Emperor and his Walking Gun. “Sic ‘em.”

  His Walking Gun leapt at the Emperor’s Gun and slammed into it, razor claws slashing. While the two Guns rolled over and over, Colm calmly duplicated them both again. Two times two is four Walking Guns pouncing on the Gray Emperor.

  They pinned the emperor and snapped his neck with the coil-powered, titanium-edged teeth.

  “Heh, heh,” Colm said. Then he turned to look for Lloyd, hoping his father would already have flitted with Nicky. What he saw chilled his blood. “Watch out!” he howled.

  The sentrienza guards were rushing at Lloyd and Nicky as Lloyd struggled to peel his gloves off. Nicky, panicking, ran from the battlesuited figures. He was only two. He tripped and fell on the grass—

  —in the Magus’s shadow.

  Colm hurled himself into the shadow as it drew back between the trees. He landed face-down in a mighty boot-print, still cold.

  When he sat up, Lloyd had got his gloves off. He was grimly dealing with the guards, fetching lightning from the life-support equipment. Massive bolts of electricity jagged out from the medical units, and fused the guards’ battlesuits into lumps of carbon, whilst putting the poor torture victims out of their misery. The deafening cracks left the air charged with ozone. Thank God the ground was dry, and the fake soil and fake grass did not conduct electricity.

  Colm’s Walking Guns won the fight with the Emperor’s Gun and came prancing back to Colm for new orders.

  The Gray Emperor crawled behind them.

  Oh. Thought he was supposed to be dead.

  The emperor’s neck was clearly broken. He was holding his head straight with both hands, trying to joggle it back into place.

  “That l
ooks painful,” Colm said.

  “Yes. I am experiencing the state of consciousness called pain. However, I shall survive. I always survive. The pinnacle of sentrienza biotechnology is the gift of eternal life. I gave that gift to myself thousands of years ago—”

  “And now you’re paying for it,” Colm said. He beckoned to the nearest of his Walking Guns. Stroking its steel neck, he copied it again and again. Elphame was riddled with power sources, near and far. There were power lines behind every wall, under every floor. The planet was a technological marvel: the sentrienza had destroyed their homeworld’s original ecosystem, but recreated it underground. Wizened trees, fake skies, holo rivers. All of it powered by electricity.

  Now, slaved to Colm’s will, a growing army of Walking Guns embarked on a mission of destruction. They spat flechettes and slugs into sensitive machinery and howled their former masters’ brains to jelly in their heads. Colm reckoned the emperor knew what was happening. “Told you I was pretty good at this,” he said, although he was horrified at the scale of what he’d let loose. Each Walking Gun could destroy a planet, and now hundreds of them were rampaging through Elphame’s subterranean habitats. In for a penny, in for a pound. He copied some more of them to the nearest heimdalls.

  The Gray Emperor gave up trying to make his head stay on straight. It flopped over at an awful angle. The lustrous eyes stayed on Colm in their new position. “We tried so hard to civilize your species,” he buzzed. “And this is how you repay us!”

  “Yeah well; sorry about that.” Colm had no energy left for conversation. Nicky was gone, again. Nothing could make up for that failure.

  Lloyd, holding Mickle, stumbled over. He said to the Emperor, “How does it feel to have your planet wrecked? What goes around comes around. We’ll do the heimdalls next, won’t we? All of them.”

  “Already doing it,” Colm said.

  “I should have initiated the extinction protocol much earlier,” the Gray Emperor buzzed. “But I had hopes for you! Such high hopes!”

  “Expect nothing of people, and you won’t be disappointed,” Lloyd said.

  “But there are certain expectations. There is no such thing as a free lunch, nor a free ride, nor free energy. Entropy always increases. As in the physical universe, so in sapient relations. What is given must be paid for; what is received must be paid forward. This is beauty, this is living in harmony with nature, this is the law! We have taught every other sapient species to obey the law. But then you humans came along, with your impossibly strong biofields, your impossible mass-energy conversions, your impossible states of consciousness—”