by D. P. Prior
The disk took them down to the ground floor once more. Mephesch crossed over to a console and flicked a series of switches. The amber net holding the statue flickered and then stabilized. Red emergency lights lazily blinked into being, bathing the kryeh in a hellish glow. The screen closest to Gandaw flashed on, tuning into a panoramic view of arctic wastes. The rest of the screens followed in rapid succession all around the circumference of the chamber, each showing a different landscape. The awakening continued on the next tier, each lightening screen chasing the next, the chain spiraling up through the levels until, finally, the single overhead screen 55 blinked to life and the Void yawned its terrible mysteries straight down at Gandaw. He looked away, feeling suddenly weak and foolish. When the pinpricks failed to activate, he asserted his will, ordered the chemicals to release. The exoskeleton emitted a whir and a sputter, but nothing happened.
Empty!
“I don’t believe it!” Gandaw whined, spinning on his heels. He pulled open his coat, revealing the bandolier of empty vials crossing the front of his exoskeleton. “Piece of shit!”
He clenched his teeth, calmed himself with the thought that the drones would be right there, filling up his syringes. They should have already been there, actually. In fact, where were they? He caught Mephesch watching him, the flickering light from the monitors casting his eyes in shadow. Gandaw wanted to scream then, but he couldn’t. Couldn’t lose control. Not now, not when the Unweaving was so close; not after so many centuries of equilibrium.
It was the power, he realized. Mephesch needed to route more power to the drones, otherwise they’d lie dormant. A wave of panic rolled over him. For a moment, he thought his prosthetic heart was skipping beats, but that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? He needed the chemicals. Needed them now. He had to have them.
“My drugs,” he said to no one in particular.
Mephesch snapped his fingers, and one of his kin melded with the wall. “We’ll have them for you in a moment, Technocrat.”
Quick as a flash, the homunculus walked back through the wall clutching a box of refills. Gandaw spread his arms so that the creature could discard the old vials and fit the new. Within seconds, he felt the calming surge of tranquilizers. He was so relieved, he almost thanked the homunculus. Almost, but not quite.
“So, what’s happening with the Null Sphere?” he asked. The algorithms and the statue should have produced a perfect sphere of nothing by now. His eyes tracked the screens until he located the view of the top of the mountain. It was hard to see anything. At first he thought the screen was dirty, but when he focused his optics, he saw that the summit was wreathed in filthy smoke. “That is meant to be the Null Sphere, is it not?”
He was dimly aware of Mephesch nodding slowly.
“Where is it? And what is this… this smog?”
The Null Sphere should have been plainly visible by now, a pool of oblivion hanging over the Perfect Peak, just like the Void peering down at him from screen 55.
“Well,” Mephesch said, rubbing his chin. “Uhm…”
“Is it dispersing? It’s meant to be compacting, increasing in mass. What is happening, Mephesch? It should be building toward critical. What is happening?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” the homunculus said.
“It’s meant to be nothing, you imbecile!” Gandaw yelled at the screen. “A great ball of nothing getting denser and denser until it explodes with such infinite, perfect, omnipresent, cataclysmic, devastating, sublimely ordered… uggghhhhh!”
Mephesch gave a polite cough.
Gandaw’s whole body was corpse-rigid until the exoskeleton made a pincushion of it and the muscles slackened.
“Yes?” he croaked, the tick-tock of his artificial heart deafeningly loud in his skull.
“Forgive me for thinking such a thing, Technocrat,” Mephesch said. “But is there any possibility—I know how absurd this must sound—is there any possibility that an imperfection could have crept into the algorithms?”
The ellipsis!
The homunculus stepped back, as if he expected to be hit. Gandaw impressed himself, however, with how calm he remained. Of course, it was all down to the drugs, but he’d designed them, so he should take the credit.
“Route them back to my office, Mephesch. And shut the Unweaving down. There’s no hurry.” He was a patient man, the most patient who’d ever lived. His great work had been eons in the making. What cost could it possibly be to him if he were to labor a few more days?
“Re-route the algorithms?” Mephesch protested. “But that will take—”
“Seventy-six hours and thirty-nine seconds precisely.” And then he’d need at least forty-eight hours to comb the data stream to make certain there wasn’t more than one error. For he knew without a shadow of a doubt what the problem was, but he was no hack. With his knowledge of the algorithms, he could go straight to the offending symbol within seconds, but if one flaw had crept in to his tapestry of perfection, was there not just the tiniest possibility of another? What was so galling was that he’d missed it, right up until his triumphant review of the data stream when the process had already commenced. Wasn’t that always the way? You could scrutinize something again and again from every conceivable angle, and then, at the point you put it into action, the gremlins appeared?
Mephesch pulled the main power lever, and the pulsing mesh around the statue shut down. A crackle ran around the chamber as the main lights blinked on. Gandaw clenched his jaw and zoomed in his optics so he could inspect every last detail of the statue. He’d done the same a thousand times before, but he had to be certain. He was about to break off and head for the elevator, when he thought he glimpsed movement—the slightest shift of its jawline, a glint in one of its eyes? He glared for an instant and then shook his head. He turned on Mephesch to see if he’d seen the same, but the homunculus started, as if he’d been caught daydreaming, the ghost of a grin melting away from his face.
Gandaw held his gaze for a long, uncomfortable while, but Mephesch had become as inscrutable as stone, his deep-set eyes twinkling in the strobing light from the screens. Finally, the homunculus gave a low bow and set about flicking the switches that would stream the data to Gandaw’s office.
Not for the first time, Gandaw wondered about the origin of the homunculi. How come, of all the mysteries of the universe that had succumbed to the scalpel of his science, only the Abyss crossing the mouth of the Void and Mephesch’s kin had continued to vex him? Everything had emerged from the same unified field, and so everything could be returned to it, and yet the Abyss, these crafty beings, and the gaping emptiness of the Void itself all seemed to say he’d got it wrong, that he’d missed something. Something very, very important.
With the steely resolve that the drugs provided, he shut out the voice of doubt. The theory was infallible. All that exists would cease to exist, save for the epicenter of the Unweaving, which was the Perfect Peak itself. That would have to include the Abyss, and if the Void really was nothing, then surely it would simply dissolve like a raindrop in the ocean of nothingness he was about to create. He emitted something like a sigh of relief. The theory still held good. These little disparities could easily be accounted for, squeezed into the perfect circle of his logic.
For an instant, his thoughts took on a life of their own, bubbling and echoing with laughter from a dark space he didn’t recognize. He clamped down control in an instant. Had they been his thoughts, some kind of pseudo hallucination, or was it something else? He put the lid on that inquiry, too. He hadn’t come this far to balk at the final hurdle. He was Sektis Gandaw, after all, Supreme Technocrat, perfectly rational, perfectly evolved, and perfectly in control. He did not entertain self-doubt, and he was certainly not prone to superstition. He couldn’t help himself, though, from glancing up at screen 55 and frowning at the mist covering the mouth of the Void. As he peeled his optics away, he saw Mephesch watching him. It was of no matter. Gandaw had a nasty surprise for him and the other homunculi once
this was all over: the same one he’d used on those thieving dwarves when they’d come to take the statue from him all those centuries ago. After that, he’d simply have to get rid of the aborted experiments in the roots of the mountain, and he’d have a blank canvas.
The smile that was curling up his lips of its own accord froze in place. His prosthetic heart thudded, and his skin was pierced by a dozen pinpricks. There was a shadow to his right.
A chill voice spoke inside his head. “Technocrat.”
Gandaw suppressed a sigh of relief. He’d forgotten, though, and that was not acceptable. “Malach HaMavet.”
The Thanatosian stepped back and gave a half-bow.
Gandaw’s optics ran over him with a begrudging admiration. Not one of his creations, but fit almost perfectly for purpose: gangly limbs for speed and reach, obsidian skin as tough as boiled leather, padded feet for silent stalking, hollow bones and fibrous membranes between his arms and torso that allowed him to glide, and an ovoid cranium packed with senses so enhanced he could scent, hear, see his prey from miles away. And the speech—it was almost a masterstroke. Psionic induction that utilized the same pathways as an auditory hallucination in those it communicated with. The possibilities were endless. A private conversation in a crowded room; plotting, subterfuge, confusion of one’s prey.
“Recovered, I trust?” Gandaw said. Only hours ago, the Thanatosian had been lying in pieces in a stasis tube.
HaMavet ran slender fingers down his body and inclined his featureless head. The blades that adorned his harness like splinted armor glistened, and one hand hovered above the handle of the pistol Gandaw had instructed the homunculi to give him.
“I am… better than before.”
That would be the effect of the forced regeneration following vivisection. HaMavet was, after all, just another flawed organism of someone else’s universe, and before Gandaw could find a use for him, he needed to know him inside out. He’d accomplished the latter with his usual scrupulosity. No fiber, no cuticle, no enzyme, no cell had gone unscrutinized, and while nothing’s perfect, HaMavet’s anatomy, not to mention his abilities, was a great improvement on anything Gandaw had found on Aethir or Earth. Thanatos, the homunculi had called the dark world they’d snatched him from, a planet of pure hostility. It hadn’t figured on any of Gandaw’s charts, but it was undeniably there, once he’d been shown where to look. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like it one little bit. There was about it something of the dread he got from the Void. Neither could be accounted for in his theories, but it was of no consequence. If he was right about the Unweaving, and he undoubtedly was, the slate would be wiped clean, and then there’d be no more nasty surprises.
He tapped out a sequence on his vambrace, and a projection beamed forth: Shader, the black-haired woman, and the albino, Shadrak. The memory of the homunculus’s bullet shattering his borrowed skull threatened to break the surface and was swiftly quashed.
“These three were spotted by a sentroid in the Dead Lands. They must have followed me from Earth.” Mephesch had reported an impact with the mountain’s shields. It appeared one of the missing plane ships had been found after all this time. “There was another with them, a creature of the Sour Marsh.” At the tap of a button, a second hologram sprang up showing a tall man with pointed ears. He wore an ever-shifting cloak that seemed to have been woven from foliage, and he carried a bow. Not one of Gandaw’s, and not from Earth, which either meant he was something altogether unaccounted for, or one of the horrors from beyond the Farfalls.
“You told me yours is a planet of death,” Gandaw said.
HaMavet was motionless. He had no eyes, but Gandaw knew he was drinking in every detail of the holograms. All living things were targets to the Thanatosian. Even Gandaw himself. The only difference was, he had something HaMavet wanted.
“You said you are harvesters. Your people live only to slaughter.” No reaction. “Track them, and kill them.” He was taking no chances. A lot could happen in seventy-six hours, and although nothing could penetrate the Perfect Peak’s defenses, he’d learned long ago from Maldark and the dwarves never to underestimate his enemies. “Succeed, and I will return you to Thanatos.”
HaMavet gave an almost indiscernible bow.
“Be cautious,” Gandaw said. “The small one has a gun like the one you carry.”
Faster than thought, HaMavet’s pistol was out of its holster, and a blast reverberated around the chamber, ever diminishing until it was swallowed by the darkness of screen 55. There was a moment’s silence, and then a kryeh on the second tier flopped backward and pitched over the railing.
HaMavet spun the gun on his finger and snapped it back into the holster.
Impressive. The weapon must have been totally unfamiliar, but already the speed, the accuracy… Gandaw nodded his approval and then glared at the blood pooling from the kryeh onto the burnished floor.
Mephesch clicked his fingers, and a team of homunculi came running.
384 WAYS TO KILL
Shadrak had thought up far more than a dozen ways of killing the hunchback; he’d reached thirty-two and was still working on it. Blade to the balls, smother him with a cloak, throttle, drown, poison, garrote—if only he had Albert’s cheese-cutter—bludgeon, shot to the head, shove him off a cliff, bury him alive… He’d come up with twelve variations on each, imaging three-hundred and eighty-four scenarios in all, each checked off with a finger. Didn’t help his mood none there was dirt under the nails. Shog knew what germs were in among all the filth, but out here, in this cesspool of a swamp, there was sod all he could do about it.
Mud slurped at his boots, smothered his britches, and stuck to his cloak like a lead weight. The air beneath the mangroves grew even more stultifying than his thoughts, and the stench of rotten eggs steamed from the bogs. Twice, three wolfish heads burst to the surface, swaying atop sinuous necks. At first, he’d assumed there were three creatures, but on the second appearance, he spotted the hump of a scaly back, and it was clear all three heads belonged to the same beast.
It weren’t just Dave had him riled, mind. It was also the elf. Those looks he’d given, like he knew some big shogging hilarious secret he didn’t have the balls to share. It was bad enough putting up with the piss-taking as a kid—the dwarf jokes, and the “look like you’ve seen a ghost” crap. Yeah, he was different. Yeah, he was a freak, in most people’s reckoning, but then to have some pointy-eared tree-hugger make out like he weren’t even human… And he weren’t the first, neither.
Then the bitch, Rhiannon, was constantly grumbling about food, but there was fat chance of finding any, far as Shadrak could see—least anything he’d want to shove down his gullet. The odd snake, brightly-crested lizards, and turtles with bony spines protruding from their shells didn’t exactly work up no appetite.
What was most unsettling, though, was the course of the suns. They climbed and fell in the sky with no rhyme or reason. Soon as dawn came, midday sweltered, then cooled into dusk, which was immediately followed by a second rising. An hour later, midway through their arc, the suns dropped like falling apples, and the swamp was shrouded in night. Could’ve been the Sour Marsh screwing with things, or maybe that’s just the way it was on this shogged-up world. Less than a day, and he’d already had enough of it.
Shadrak weren’t no idiot; he knew what made him tick: he was a creature of routine and habit. How was that s’posed to work when there weren’t no way of gauging time, when the suns didn’t know their asses from their heads?
When they stopped to make camp, he slipped away by himself. He imagined the others thought he was scouting, making sure there was nothing creeping out of the dark, but truth be told, he was sick to death of the hunchback’s ear-bashing of Shader and his ‘scarlet woman’. One more word, and he’d have killed the shogger—all three-hundred and eighty-four ways. And he’d have taken his time about it, too.
Silver limned the tangled undergrowth as the enormous disk of one of the moons glided into the sky. T
he two smaller moons followed, washing the foliage with a wavering half-light.
He could still hear Dave bollocking Shader for not acting when he had the chance, telling him his eyes should be on Nous, not on the flesh of his whore. He tensed, listening for Rhiannon to explode. The bitch was a hellcat; he had the cuts and bruises to prove it. But it was Shader’s voice that shut the hunchback up. Pity Shadrak couldn’t make out the words, but whatever they were, they’d done the trick. Probably the knight would have to beg his insipid god for forgiveness now, because it was doubtful Dave would have stopped for anything less than a cuss backed up by a threat. Shadrak knew men. Knew religious types, too. Only one who’d surprised him over the years was Bovis Rayn, and to be honest, the surprise hadn’t worn off none, either. How could a man look so serene when you poisoned him then blew his brains out? Didn’t make sense, if you asked him.
He felt a familiar warmth at the edges of his awareness, knew it was Kadee smiling and shaking her head. She understood, right enough. Least she thought she did. But Kadee was a child in her understanding. Shadrak loved her for it. Loved the peace it gave her, but when all’s said and done, she was just another superstitious Dreamer.
The presence left him, and he instinctively drew his cloak about his shoulders. This weren’t the time for ghosts from the past. Weren’t the time for grieving, neither. The way Shadrak saw it, he had a couple of options. It’s not like he was cut out for this saving the world kind of thing. That was best left to hero types, like Shader—or rather, what Shader most likely considered himself. The reality was, Nousians weren’t no better than Dreamers. They were all just people hiding from the truth, praying to their imaginary friends. Didn’t matter how complicated they made the bullshit, it was still bullshit, at the end of the day. Say one thing for killing folk, say it makes you honest. Everyone bleeds when you cut them, and most everyone shits themselves when they kick the bucket. No amount of dressing that up with fancy spiritual talk changed the cold hard facts.