by Jack Conner
Avery tried to appear surprised, but it only confirmed what Uthua had said at the Deep Night gathering.
“And the Over-City,” San continued. “It’s become huge—a real city now. Wonder the thing can fly. It rolls in with the first wave of the army. Sometimes it goes by itself, ahead of the ground force. Softens up the target before the land invasion. It’s a monster. Nothing can stand before it.” He spat. “I don’t see that there’s any hope left, friends. Better to stay in here where it’s ... well, safer, anyway.”
“Who can take us through?” Sheridan said, not to be deterred
“You insist, I’ll set up an appointment for you with a procurer. I employ a good one, one of the best. He trades with the resistance for supplies and such. He’s ain’t cheap, and neither is my transaction fee. But he can get you out of the city.”
“Arrange it,” Sheridan said.
* * *
That night they stayed above San’s bar. The second story was used as a sort of tenement, and San charged steep rates for a one-night visit. On the third and fourth floors San carried out whatever illicit business he conducted, and he himself lived in a large suite on the fourth floor.
Avery and Sheridan shared a room. He requested his own, of course, but she didn’t trust him out of her sight.
There was only one bed.
“You’re taking the floor,” she informed him.
He eyed the grimy surface. “Of course.”
After they settled in, they returned to the cantina for some food and, not least, water. Even basic foodstuffs were expensive, Avery discovered, and he made do with a meal of canned vegetables and slabs of heavily salted meat of questionable origin. Protein of any variety was exorbitantly expensive. He didn’t know how everyday people here afforded to eat and supposed they must all live as scavengers, looting the fringes of their own city, consuming what they could and selling the rest.
The people in the cantina, who must have stumbled upon some pricey loot to afford San’s prices, eyed Avery and Sheridan curiously as they sipped their drinks in a booth.
Avery tried not to look at her. Tried to survey the crowd. He noticed several women and one young man that must be prostitutes. They circulated among the gathering, which thickened after dark, luring customers upstairs with whispered words and seductive gestures. Avery noticed the tense conversations of others. What did these grim people barter for food and water? Themselves? Their families? Avery wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
Sheridan watched him. He could feel it, like a prickling on the back of his neck, which grew warm. Then his cheeks. Finally he couldn’t take it any more and turned to confront her.
“What? What is it?”
She didn’t answer right away, just continued to stare at him. He was on the verge of barking at her again when she spoke. She did it so quietly he had to lean forward to hear and even then he wasn’t sure if he had heard correctly. It was a question:
“Why did you save me?”
This again. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t. “Because I needed you.”
She shook her head. Her auburn hair swished back in forth, gleaming in the candlelight that lit the stained oaken table. “No. I don’t think that’s it.” When he didn’t answer, she pressed, “Did you love me?”
He almost snorted his drink. “When?”
“Does it matter?” She started to say something, hesitated, then powered through it. “Did you ever, back on the Maul?”
He attempted another sip only to find the glass empty. They’d bought a whole bottle—sadly, of peach schnapps, which had just come in today, but even they couldn’t afford to be picky—and he refilled his glass instead of having to answer.
“Well?” she said.
He lowered the glass and met her gaze. She watched him with an unreadable expression, her eyes intense, but with what emotion he didn’t know.
He almost didn’t answer. But she would not rest until he did, and he was more than curious where she was headed with this.
“Yes,” he said, and it was a small sound. “Maybe. Once.”
She stared at him a moment longer, then she nodded. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“For what?”
“For telling the truth.” She leaned back and looked off. With hands that moved perhaps a touch too slowly, too in control, she sipped, then set the drink back down. It seemed that to her the conversation was over.
He felt himself growing angry. “That ... it?” She didn’t answer. “That’s what you made me answer the question for?”
She had bought a pack of Octunggen cigarettes off San’s people, and she lit one.
“Tell me,” he demanded. “I don’t appreciate games.”
“I’m not playing one.”
“Fine. We’ll try this a different way. Did you ever love me?” It sounded so juvenile he was almost ashamed to ask it.
A plume of smoke escaped her lips. It curled up toward the shadowed ceiling like a fleeing ghost.
“I’ve only ever loved one person,” she said.
“Yourself.”
Her eyes narrowed, and they seemed to snap as they settled on him. “Marisca.”
He had known she would say that, of course. “Bullshit. If you loved her, you wouldn’t be bent on destroying the world in order to avenge her. Do you think she would want that?”
“I’m not going to destroy the world. I’m going to save it. But it’s going to be my way, not yours.” In a whisper, she said, “Octung wins.”
He fumed, and she smoked in silence. When her cigarette was down to her fingers, she stabbed it out in the ashtray. Some of the anger seemed to have drained out of her.
“Doctor, I ... think I owe you an apology.”
He waited.
“For all those years on the Maul,” she said. “I used you.”
It caught him off guard. “Yes ...”
“But you should know that my heart died with my daughter. I will never be capable of loving again.”
Does she think that will hurt me? They drank in silence after that, until at last, motivated by he knew not what, he said, “I’m tired of you calling me ‘Doctor’. My name is Francis.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Really? You want me to call you Francis?”
“It’s my name.”
She was silent, thinking. “I suppose you expect me to let you call me Jessryl.”
“It is your name.”
“Yes, I suppose you can’t call me ‘Captain’ anymore, can you? Or ‘Admiral’? Very well then.”
“Jessryl.” He tried it out. “Jez-rill. I like it.”
She sniffed in amusement. “No. You can call me ‘Sheridan’. That’s my name, too.”
He almost laughed. She never changed.
She raised her glass in a toast. “To Francis.”
He raised his. “To Sheridan.”
They drank.
That night, after they retired to their room, she surprised him. He was just throwing some blankets on the floor and about to lie down when she said, “No.”
“No?”
Patting the bed, she said, “Come here.”
He paused. She hadn’t spoken in a tone of command. She had spoken softly, almost seductively.
“I ... I can’t.”
She reached her hands up behind her head and unfastened the pin that held her hair. Her auburn tresses spilled out over her shoulders, shining and honey-colored, with some streaks of rich, dark honey and other streaks of lighter, sun-kissed sweetness mixed in. Now that she had some food in her, a flush had entered her cheeks, and her eyes flashed appealingly. There was no hint of a leer or a snarl on her face. She stared at him directly, honestly, seriously. As he watched, spellbound, she unbuttoned the top button on her blouse. Then the second. The white of her bra popped into view. A swell of cleavage. Firm breasts strained against the fabric.
“Come here,” she said in that same strange, soft voice.
Maybe it was the schnapps, maybe something else, but he was tempt
ed. He had never seen her like this. Perhaps she could change. That was such an unusual and unexpected thought that it set him back.
“No,” he said. “I can’t. Layanna ...”
Sheridan paused. Then undid another button. The swell of her breasts were very clear now. Avery remembered holding them. Squeezing them. Kissing them. He began to feel a heat below.
“Layanna isn’t here,” she said. “I am.”
“That’s not the way it works.”
“I saw the tension between you two. You’re no longer together, are you?”
He said nothing, but he did not move toward her. She stared at him, and he couldn’t read her eyes. Was it anger? Disappointment?
“Come,” she said. “To me.”
He kicked off his shoes and, with exaggerated nonchalance, lay down on the blankets he’d spread across the floor. Putting his head on the pillow, he said, “Wake me in the morning.”
For a moment she said nothing.
“You’re a fool, Francis.”
He closed his eyes. “It’s been said before.”
* * *
In the morning Avery and Sheridan were met by a short, broad-shouldered man named Rais, who happened to be San’s prime ambassador to the outer world. He led Avery and Sheridan out of the dead city and into a system of mines, long abandoned and off any maps the Octunggen might have had. Rais led them right under the Octunggen patrols. Avery hated to be back in dark, winding tunnels, most of them half flooded, and he was glad when Rais led them to an entrance on the other side—the Octunggen side.
“This is where I leave you,” Rais said. “Just go outside and you will find a road. Take it to the right and you will go down-slope, to a small town known as Huyku. To the left is open country. Swampland.”
He extended his hand for the second part of his payment.
Avery half-expected Sheridan to shoot the man, but to his surprise she selected several bills and handed them over, and Rais disappeared back into the darkness.
Avery and Sheridan looked at each other.
“This is it,” she said.
He grimaced.
They emerged into the hot, humid air of jungle and swamp. Vine-entangled trees loomed over them. Still, there was a path, one leading left, into the jungle, one leading right, where lights bounced off the clouds overhead, obscuring the stars. A town. And in that town would be an Octunggen outpost.
This was it, Avery knew. This was his last chance to separate Sheridan from the Device before it came into Octunggen hands. She was wounded. That would help.
Taking a deep breath, he acted. He raised his leg to kick it into her wound—hating the thought of marring the work he’d done and redone over the last several days—but she was no longer there.
Something battered his neck. Another something drove into a kidney. Another kicked his legs out from under him, and he found himself floundering on the road, gasping, Sheridan crouched over him with an arm pressed into his throat.
“Can’t ... breathe ...”
She snorted, sounding more amused than anything else. “Are we done playing hero?” When he didn’t reply, she added, “I could kill you right now, you know.”
At last he sighed and allowed his body to go limp. She got off him and pulled him to his feet.
“I’m impressed,” she said. “You almost got me.”
He had been miles away from getting her. Still recovering his breath, he rubbed his sore throat and dusted himself off. It was then that he noticed seeping on her leg. Her activity had reopened the wound.
“I’ll need to address that.”
She hiked her head toward the distant lights. “First let’s say hello.”
Not even bothering to hide his fear, Avery followed her through the swamp toward the Octunggen-occupied town.
Chapter 4
Green fire flashed somewhere in the swamp. It glowed brightly, reflecting off the great, brooding oaks and sycamores festooned with moss and flowering vines, then faded gradually, like a little sun being extinguished.
“What was that?” Avery said, having to shout over the roar of the fans. He and Sheridan occupied a flat-bottomed aluminum swamp vessel, powered by an enormous fan mounted on the back that slammed them along with bone-jarring speed. Four other similar vessels surrounded them, protecting them. Octunggen troops crowded the vehicles. The Device was in the hands of the enemy.
Sheridan indicated her ear-muffs and shook her head. Avery, who wore them also, understood. It was a rhetorical question, anyway. Green fires were only a tiny a fraction of the strangeness here.
The vessels roared on. They were Lai craft that the Octunggen had appropriated for their own use, much like the rest of the country.
About noon, the boats slowed, and ripples spread around them as they pulled to a stop. The pilots gathered on the central boat, the one Avery and Sheridan rode, to consult maps and smoke cigarettes. Only the lead pilot, the one driving Avery and Sheridan’s vessel, wore an Octunggen uniform. The other four were the petite, darker-skinned natives, bare-chested and tattooed. They pointed emphatically at a map, but the Octunggen pilot narrowed his eyes and shook his head.
As they continued shouting at each other in Lai, Avery turned his attention to the swamp, which stretched around them for hundreds of miles in all directions. Laisha was a vast country peopled by a race, the Lai, that had swept up from the continent of Consur thousands of years ago and had forged through the swamps that consumed this region, hell-bent on conquest, until they could go no further and had to stop, whereupon they had decided to settle. They had settled in no ordinary bog. Fed by multiple rivers that ran directly to the Atomic Sea, rivers which passed through no other countries capable of countering the corruption on the way, the swamps crackled with other-dimensional energies and were strange and wild, populated by odd creatures and odder phenomena. Avery had read about the area and been curious about it in a vague sort of way, but had never particularly wanted to visit it. The stink of stagnant water and the mixture of both lush and rotten vegetation that pervaded everything failed to change his outlook much.
Hildra’s monkey Hildebrand chittered unhappily from time to time, but for the most part the screaming of the fans seemed to cow him.
The midday sun beat down on Avery. They’d been traveling since dawn, and he was exhausted. They had been buckled into their seats for hours, and now Sheridan paced and smoked a cigarette at what passed for the bow. Sweat gleamed on her forehead. Avery stood, too, and worked the kinks out of his legs with various stretches and bends. The after-echo of the fans throbbed in his ears.
Around them, toads croaked by the hundreds, a wet, throaty chorus that was somehow both soothing and eerie.
“Interesting place, isn’t it?” said Sheridan.
He shot her a sour look.
“Hey, don’t blame me,” she said. “You came with me willingly.”
She’d given him the choice of fleeing into the jungle before they reached Huyku. The jungle would likely have killed him, but he could have doubled back, tried to return to Vulat.
Almost against his will, his gaze traveled to the Device. It was securely strapped down, next to where Sheridan had been sitting.
She smiled wider: Go for it.
The soldiers on the lead boat—there were a handful on each—consulted with the Octunggen pilot and eventually settled on a course. Evidently they had been lost or had simply not trusted the native guides. The highest ranking of the Octunggen, a Major Rost, pulled out a radio transmitter and spoke into it sharply, then waited for a reply. It didn’t come. Irritated, he shook the transmitter and mashed its buttons, but it made no noise except a squawk of static.
“Don’t bother, Major,” said the Octunggen pilot. “You won’t get a signal.”
“Why the hell not?”
The pilot, climbing back up into his chair, swept a hand at the surrounding swamp. “The toads, sir. I’ve spent a lot of time out here and I’ve seen it before. Something about their croaks interfere
s with radio signals. You won’t be able to use that as long as they’re singing.”
“Toads!”
“You must be new to the area, sir, if you’ll forgive me. It’s the damndest place, the Atomic Swamp.”
The Major grunted.
“Oh, it’s real interesting,” the pilot continued, grinning nastily. “There are snakes here whose venom will drive you mad. Fireflies whose light displays hypnotize. There are crustaceans the size of monkeys who live in the trees and reproduce with spores. There are flowers whose resin can send any woman into a fit of passion, if given in exactly the right amount, or age her ten years overnight if administered wrongly.”
“Let’s get going,” the Major said.
The boats’ fans roared back to life, and the craft shot forward, threading their way sometimes through tight, brackish channels between looming trees that stretched off into thick, oppressive jungle to right and left, sometimes skimming along the surface of stagnant lakes that almost seemed to be mini-seas. Once the procession was brought to a halt when one of the soldiers vanished over the side of his boat despite his seat belt, which was found torn and bloodied. The swamp gave no hint of where he had disappeared to, and it was determined that one of the great salamanders must have gotten him. Larger than crocodiles, they lived in large numbers here, lurking just below the surface, and they were a menace to travelers, not only because they had enormous, teeth-lined jaws and could move quick as a fish, but because they also possessed a long, frog-like tongue that could snare people off passing boats before anyone noticed—as apparently had happened now. Avery stared at the water with new fear.
The boats resumed their journey, and it wasn’t long before he saw signs of civilization: people fishing in small craft, or checking traps, or scampering up trees to relieve them of fruit, sometimes having to shoo away the crustaceans. All were the short, dark Lai. Evidence of crude villages or towns revealed themselves—bowed stone walls, or buildings made of bamboo, a column of smoke, chickens running about screeching—the evidence of even greater civilization growing more compelling with every mile. At first the Lai were mostly naked and covered with intricate tattoos, but they grew steadily more clothed and less inked as the journey progressed, and at last the towers and domes of a great city arched over the vine-hung trees and wide bodies of water ahead. It was nearly sundown, and a red smear of light on the horizon dwindled minute by minute. As daylight faded, the lights of the city brightened.