Although each Longcoat youth might have preferred some of these roles more than others (indeed a hulk like Hummer seemed better suited as a Bouncer than team members half his size—which was most of them), all Longcoats cross-trained to serve in any capacity as missions required.
A few finger gestures from Lion sent each crewmember scurrying over the first pungent creosote-soaked fence, the smell a mixture of tar and damp wood. They nimbly crossed the first back garden, dodging children’s cycles and outdoor furniture, then vaulted into the adjoining yard. At the third fence line, Lion motioned everyone to halt and forked his fingers at eye level, pulling them sharply down to his chin. Eastwood followed the others in enabling his visor and immediately saw through the now transparent fence before them, to espy their target in the next garden.
The sight allowed him to relax a little. Not everything that tumbled through a seam was an intimidating presence.
Tottering forward on four legs, the creature was advancing with an unsteady wobble. Recalling the wild swaying of the far larger and more menacing selagote, Eastwood was not surprised: evidently slipping through a seam from one dimension into another resulted in, among other things, a loss of balance. This intruder looked like a large greyhound, and even when the Longcoats clambered over the final fence, it didn’t look up.
Covered in black, glistening, leathery skin, the being had a long tail that dragged on the ground. Dripping like the rest of its body with a thin mucus, this appendage had collected a mass of dead leaves and broken tree branches that further inhibited its progress.
The head was oval and almost smooth, with two small dark eyes, an unthreatening slit of a mouth, and what appeared to be constantly twisting, turning, spoon-like ears. To Eastwood it looked more like a drunk shaved poodle than a major threat.
Lion plainly found it somewhat less cute, snapping his visor back into its housing and pressing a command stud that filled everyone’s pockets through thin air with new toys from Jax’s store.
“Weapons! Fire at will.” He’d seen this type before and knew better than to try and herd it back through the seam.
As his companions drew forth their newly materialized pistols, Eastwood hesitated. The creature evinced no hostility. It had not even noticed them. Yet Lion showed no hesitation in giving the command to shoot. Acutely conscious of his lack of knowledge where such matters were concerned as well as his status as the newest member of the group, Eastwood put hand in pocket but did not draw his gun.
“It’s just wandering around,” he murmured. “Shouldn’t we try to . . ?”
As it finally decided the group’s presence was hostile, the dog-sized being chose that moment to react. Turning in their direction, it reared on hind legs and let out a savage hiss through black glistening teeth.
Demonstrating that whatever they were, they were not ears, the pair of appendages protruding from its head swiveled in their direction. Starting from the general area of the hips, a red glow appeared along the length of the creature’s back. Traveling along its spine, it shot up the neck and into the head, whereupon it was projected in the form of twin beams from the flattened, slightly concave tips of appendages that were more projectors than listening organs.
Vector and Tucker dove backward as the solid stone of the house’s kitchen wall melted and ran like brown butter behind them.
“Fire, fire!”
Holding his ground, Lion had unleashed the full fury of his own pistol, which pinged in near silence. Crouching or lying prone across the grass or brick patio, his companions were also letting loose with all the weaponry at their command. All remaining uncertainty fled, and a startled Eastwood joined in.
As Jax continued shuffling inventory between coats, neither gunfire nor razor nets had any effect on the creature. Pellets and darts bounced off hide that was far denser and tougher than leather, while energy bursts were absorbed and harmlessly dispersed along its flanks.
Retreating back behind the wall of an outcropping conservatory at the edge of the home, Eastwood sought cover from this utterly alien intruder. From time to time Castle or Tucker would lean out in search of a clear shot only to be driven back as stone and metal melted around them.
“Wot the bloody ‘ell do y’call this one?” Vector was breathing hard as he reloaded his netcaster from one of his coat’s copious pockets, hoping to get a lucky shot.
“It’s definitely some kind of Runner,” panted Lion. “Thought I knew the type, but I’ve never seen one exactly like this before.”
Castle shook his head. “Tough son of a gun. Wouldn’t want to visit its home dimension.”
Taking a deep breath he raced out across the brickwork, firing as he went. Eastwood couldn’t see if the other boy’s shots had any effect on the creature, but there was no mistaking the crimson beams that tracked him, tearing long gouges in the garden beds as they sought their target. Castle made it safely to cover on the other side behind a heavy steel and cement barbecue, where Hummer and Jax were trying to maintain a steady fire while avoiding the deadly light.
Images and terminology flashed unbidden through Eastwood’s mind. “It’s a teeleoth. A sun-grazer. It munches fusion. That’s why your weapons can’t affect it. The atomic structure is too dense.”
Lion and Vector exchanged a glance before the latter youth gaped at their younger associate. “Now ‘ow the ‘ell would you know that, Eastwood? I never ‘eard of such a creature.”
“A wasteland mutant from the fission wars of the Second Age.” Eastwood spoke with a confidence whose source was as much a mystery to him as to the others. He swallowed and looked suddenly bewildered. “I—I don’t know how I know this.”
“Never mind that.” Vector pulled back as a section of melted wall slid like grey lava down in front of them. The heat from the molten stone was blistering. “How do we end it?”
“You can’t.” Eastwood was furiously pondering their situation, willing new knowledge that refused to come.
Meanwhile constant fire from the other Longcoats across the yard kept the creature occupied.
It was Lion who came up with the strategy. He grabbed Vector’s sleeve.
“There’s something I need that Jax doesn’t have a line on. Give me a hand.”
While Hummer, Jax and Castle continued to provide covering fire, Lion led Vector through a broken wall into the home’s sitting room, down a hall and out the front door into the street beyond. Both lending their weight to the effort, the two of them succeeded in wrenching loose a piece of a parked delivery van. The owner would not be pleased. Considering that the excision was in the service of saving a sizable portion of London, the team leader thought the vandalism justified.
Returning to the scene of battle, Lion gathered himself preparatory to making the effort he had envisioned. Tucker and Hummer looked on uncertainly, having taken cover inside the kitchen behind a thick refrigerator. The fact that no lights had come on upstairs suggested the occupants were either the world’s deepest sleepers or the townhouse was unoccupied; not uncommon in this neighborhood.
“You sure this is gonna work?” Tucker asked him doubtfully.
“No I’m not.”
“What happen if doesn’t?” Hummer added.
Lion thought for a second. “If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to find a way to pocket it and hope it doesn’t burn its way out.”
Eastwood glanced rapidly at the faces of the two youths as Castle continued to lay down cover fire that the teeleoth summarily ignored.
Holding onto the piece of van, Lion took a deep breath and stepped bravely out into the open.
Accurately pinpointing this latest threat, the teeleoth adjusted its projecting antennae. Yet again the devastating duo of beams lanced outward, generated by complex organic structures within.
The lasers struck the formerly side-mounted van mirror and bounced straight back at their source. Lion’s instinct had proven correct: the Longcoats could not nullify the teeleoth. But it was quite capable of annihilating itsel
f.
Reflected by the mirror, the amplified light hit the creature somewhere between neck and torso. It let out a high-pitched whistle at the uppermost limits of human perception. Squinting tightly while holding the mirror out in front of him, Lion had a brief glimpse of what looked like a four-legged ball of plasma as the creature exploded into nuggets of carbonized meat.
There was a flash of red-tinged light, and for an instant a small portion of inner London was bathed in tropical heat. Then it was gone, it was over, and the intruder was no more.
Emerging from cover, the rest of the Longcoats filled the rear garden and regrouped, their hot leather steaming as the pre-dawn air lowered the ambient temperature again.
Raising his gaze, Lion scrutinized the yard where the sun-grazer had formerly roamed: burnt grass, scorched paving stones, and a half demolished ground floor facade. So much for keeping it covert.
Hummer wiped his thick neck, cast an approving glance at the creature’s remains. “Hey Lion, where is cape and boots? I see Superman do same trick in movie.” He mimicked Lion holding the mirror and made an exploding sound through pursed lips. “We write this one up as ‘The Zod Technique’ on report,” he chuckled, talking into the small camera on his shoulder that recorded all their missions.
“That’s how we do it, kid,” a relieved Lion cawed at Eastwood. “Look to your tools and your environment for the advantage. Always stay on your toes.” Then to himself in a quieter tone, looking around at the carnage, “Or you’re left with a real mess.”
But Eastwood wasn’t listening. A frown knitted his brow as some deep elusive knowledge swam in his head now, flickering in his mind’s eye.
“They use their environment too,” was all he said as he suddenly sprinted to scoop up the nearest glob of charred flesh.
He had barely done so when the wet grass under the scattering of black chunks burst into blue flame simultaneously, the same scene playing out on Eastwood’s glove as he clutched what quickly morphed into a thrashing pygmy version of the teeleoth, joined by a half dozen replicas springing up and staggering ungainly around the patio as they found new legs.
“Fusion is a chain reaction, a multiplication,” Eastwood shouted above the sudden chorus of otherworldly hissing and chirping that was filling the twilight. “In spawning season, a teeleoth burns its mate into pieces and each piece becomes a new teeleoth! It’s how they breed. A pair of these can easily become a hundred . . .”
His voice trailed off as he struggled to keep a grip on the slick skin of the quickly growing creature, its otherworldly cells reproducing rapidly.
Realization dawned on Tucker first. “S’truth, Lion. You just made babies with that thing!”
As if on cue, the litter of teeleoths roared in unison and burst into the air, tungsten claws puncturing brick walls and shattering the glass conservatory as they bounded from one spot to the next with amazing alacrity, zigzagging around the tribe of humans. As their backs started glowing with the first traces of crimson, they left ghostly trails in the darkness, geometric lines that intersected at great speed. It looked exactly like the threads of a giant net, getting tighter with every leap.
Teeleoths were pack hunters, their perky ears serving as antennae for group coordination as much as being a large surface area to discharge the fusion their lithe bodies forged. In perfect symmetry, they were corralling their two-legged enemies.
It was now a question of whether hunter or hunted was more deadly.
Muscular cords getting stronger by the second, the slick creature in Eastwood’s grip nearly wrestled free as it twisted at his throat, razor fangs snapping open and shut hungrily. Belying its sheen, the skin tore at his glove, covered with tiny serrated scales. Scales through which a now familiar red line began to etch, like lava threading through crags of rock.
As its monstrous siblings darted and slashed at the other Longcoats, an idea began to form in Eastwood’s mind, and as he held the twisting teeleoth with a vice grip from an increasingly bloodied hand, the events around him seemed to slow, their sounds dying out into a dull thrum at the edge of thought.
The notion came through faintly at first, blowing in like the mist off an unknown sea into the crevices between his conscious thoughts, until his mind was full of that dreamy fog in which images flashed and knowledge appeared fully formed.
Was this memory? Was this premonition?
He found himself turning to the question of why he grabbed the creature. Something about its ears. Something about that glow.
Adapt to your surroundings.
Make use of what’s available.
Weapons have no effect on these things; they’re an incarnation of fire itself. There are three ways to extinguish fire. One, with water. But this downpour of rain is not enough. Two, by snuffing out all the oxygen. No chance. Three, fight fire with fire. But don’t blow it up.
In the thumb-snap of time it takes for dreams to play out, Eastwood saw himself pressing down forcefully on the back of the sun-muncher’s head, pushing its ears forward, directing the dual beams that shot out as if they were his own personal cannon. He saw the thought of carving an arc of light across the grassland, tearing into the other animals with a single slice, enough to eviscerate but not to explode.
This split second of thought had shown him how to twist and lead his targets until all would be put down, his new friends made safe. Then the pressing of both ears inwards toward the leathery skull, beams burrowing downward to lobotomize the hellish jackal until the mass of muscle ripping his arm to shreds stopped twitching and fell lifeless to the ground, to rise and multiply no more.
The fog cleared. Eastwood snapped back to the present and knew what he must do.
He looked up and saw the Longcoats standing in a circle around him, slack jawed, the teeleoth already slumped at his feet. Broadening his gaze, the steaming ruin of carcasses lay everywhere.
He hadn’t been dreaming. He had been doing.
The next few minutes were a blur. Castle scooped the teeleoth sections into his quantum pockets, or Q-Pocs, as they called them. Jax ran up the interior stairs and pronounced the building empty.
Crouching outside, Tucker spread wide two metallic sticks that stretched a thin elastic film between them. With the touch of a green button, the sheet detached and dropped to the patio’s paving, then continued falling through the ground, leaving a tunnel in its wake. Into this Hummer dropped a small grenade.
Vector sprayed a red ‘LC’ ringed by a circle onto the flagstones of the street. Both the L and the C looking like two Vs joined at their angular corners and rotated out of alignment around the circle’s arc. The paint was indelible, unlikely to fade even under pressure hosing, the better to pinpoint the site to other Longcoats as the location of an unstable seam.
Lion led them hurriedly back to the subway access, pausing only for Castle to dispose of the canine remains down the hole Tucker had made before they multiplied.
They felt the smallest vibration as a sinkhole opened up in a suburb several blocks behind them, swallowing the garden and rear quarter of a foreign lawyer’s holiday home.
Safely on a morning train, the Longcoats gathered around Eastwood, the smaller boy nearly disappearing as coats flapped against him. Questions came quickly and furiously. Answering them was a simple matter.
“I don’t know,” he said repeatedly, helplessly. “I just don’t know.” It was not a very satisfying response, either to his questioners or to him.
Hummer shouted above the din of screeching brakes as the carriage rounded a curve. “You knew how to beat selagote, and how to defeat the—what you call it—a teeleoth?”
His right hand rested on the pistol in his coat pocket. “If dangerous intrusions are on rise, we going need all help we can get. Is shame I guess you can’t teach us your tricks.”
Across the aisle Tucker was nodding.
“If the Foundation expects us to cope with this kind of increase we’re going to need better equipment.”
�
��Yes,” said Jax as she jabbed at wristband buttons that pulled each pocket’s contents across the aether to her central stash. In turn these would drawn back to the Chimney, replenished and redeployed before the Longcoats got back there themselves.
“We used to be able to see a seam forming well before they broke through,” she said. “These days we’re lucky to scramble to a gig in time.”
Eastwood listened to this exchange above the din of the rattling subway train as he searched the reach of memory, something nagging at him so close he almost had it. Now he looked up, meeting gazes individually, bemused and assured all at once.
“You need better gear? I think I can help.”
Somehow they were not surprised.
13 Learn more by pointing a search engine to “Calabi Yau space”, “compactification” or “Kaluza-Klein theory”. A layman’s introduction to this branch of spacetime physics is available at “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compactification_(physics)”.
14 Immanuel Velikovsky (1895—1979) was a respected psychiatrist who studied in Vienna under a pupil of Freud’s. He worked with Albert Einstein to stock the library of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but is best remembered as the controversial author of Worlds in Collision (1950, Macmillan), Ages in Chaos (1952, Doubleday) and Earth in Upheaval (1955, ibid). Citing ancient calendars and histories, plus geological and astronomical events, he argued a revised chronology for ancient cultures that is very different to what is generally taught; that Earth has suffered cataclysmic disasters in ancient times; and that electromagnetism plays an important role in celestial mechanics (his writing pre-dated knowledge of dark matter). His revisionist and creationist approach incited a furore in the academic establishment, fanned at first by intellectual rivalry and later by conflicting scientific discoveries. Despite the controversy, Velikovsky’s books became best sellers.
BURROUGHING DEEP
Echoes of Worlds Past Page 10