by Ian Watson
Injured stealer... or hybrid shape. One or the other... Hybrids comprised a whole gamut of deformities. If taken for a hybrid, could she really fool a stealer brood, or their patriarch, over a period of time?
Maybe, thought Jaq, that was where the Callidus experiment had come unstuck... if indeed it had come unstuck.
‘That’s... the woman we share quarters with?’ Googol’s voice was filled with black wonder, with a fearful admiration, a certain desolation of the heart, and yes, a horror that nevertheless coursed thrillingly through his nerves. Jaq too felt deeply perturbed. Already, Meh’Lindi’s own skin seemed to be stiffening under that black second skin. It was forming a tough bony carapace as stimulated cells altered their nature, hardening to horn.
‘Can any assassin ever have tried this trick before?’ exclaimed the Navigator. ‘Wrenching her organs, distorting herself so utterly? And tried it in the midst of a combat zone?’
‘Curiositas, esto quieta!’
‘She did say she needed exercise.’ If Googol hoped to sound supercilious, he failed.
The black creature which had been Meh’Lindi unlatched the door and darted into a wide corridor, misty with smoke. Several armed hybrids roamed, seeming lost. Was Meh’Lindi thinking any of the alien thoughts of a genestealer? Understanding how it would react? Perhaps even radiating some protective aroma of brood empathy around herself? She bore down on the hybrids and, with her claws, she killed them almost before they realised.
A cloaked man who accompanied them gaped. His mouth opened in mute protest at this perversion of the proper order of affairs. Meh’Lindi ripped his head off.
No one seeing her on the move, rushing headlong through drear fuming tunnels, would really note the missing arms and absent tail, the sealed face, the scarlet sash. Or at least not note those betraying absences until far too late. She was keeping to the more furtive by-ways of the city and away from loyal troops.
Quarter-facet... Grimm arrived, puffing, at a narrow archway leading into a domed plaza. Three great avenues radiated away, choked with fighting, reeking with smoke. Explosions flared like novas inside a dust nebula. Shock waves rippled downward from some higher level of the city which boomed with devastation. Walls and braced ceiling groaned. Drums of architecture were being beaten until they burst.
A smoky miasma masked glow-globes, reddening the scene as if here was the lurid sunset of the heart of this city before final night consumed and extinguished it. A massive detonation shook the plasteel heights. Had a munitions factory exploded? The roofs of the avenues sagged, pillars buckling. Abruptly the dome collapsed, shattering like an eggshell.
Whole buildings, vehicles, and machinery came tumbling from above, wearing necklaces of fire.
Grimm scuttled away up a ramp, pursued by debris and clouds of dust.
Half-facet... Obispal spotted a lone purestrain genestealer lurking some way down a dismal arcade lined by shuttered clothing stores. The stealer loped slowly away as though injured, dodging from one steel column to the next.
Swinging his power sword and shouting to guardsmen, the inquisitor pounded after the fugitive alien. Was it sheer bravado on Obispal’s part that he disdained to fire explosive bolts at that creature which itself could not manipulate a gun? Or was it blood lust? He intended to cut it apart personally with his power sword – sword against claw – and be seen to do so.
The arcade proved to be a cul-de-sac. Twisted steel blocked the far end. As the inquisitor realised this, he grinned hugely. Though only briefly.
Activated by some unseen hand, a disaster-shutter of woven steel crashed down behind him, cutting him off from his guardsmen. Obispal whirled.
‘Carve through with a power axe, and quickly!’ he bellowed.
The genestealer was no longer fleeing but racing towards the inquisitor, claws outstretched. Swiftly, Obispal confronted it; and now bolts from his hand-tooled, burnished-steel gun hammered at the alien. Many of the explosive-tipped shells missed entirely. Some caromed off its carapace. One, however, detonated successfully, making instant puree within the creature’s armoured head. Yet already hatches in the ceiling were springing free. A dozen hybrids and another purestrain dropped down into the arcade. Still more hybrids followed. A whole rabid pack was rushing at Obispal, firing a medley of weapons inaccurately, hatred written on all their twisted faces.
Las-fire, gouts of flame, and ordinary bullets ripped and charred his clothes but were deflected by the ornate armour he wore beneath. His head was unprotected. With a juggler’s dexterity he switched the boltgun swishingly to full automatic. Ejected cartridges sprayed like grain at harvest time on some granary world. Firing the bolter with one hand he waved the sizzling power sword frantically in front of his face as if fanning wasps away. The explosive clatter in the arcade was ear-splitting. Obispal’s cloak caught fire.
As Obispal backed against the front of a store the grille that sheathed it tore open from within. A genestealer claw reached and plucked the inquisitor through the gap.
THREE
BACK THROUGH THE gap flew his blazing cloak, still weighted with a few grenades. These exploded in the face of the mob. Obispal’s power sword sailed out in an arc and danced across the floor, severing several feet. All of a sudden, the point of view shifted into the darkness beyond the torn grille, just as the purestrain leapt over the bodies of its kin to force entry.
Claws as mighty as its own batted the purestrain’s claws aside and ravaged its head so that the purestrain shrieked and hung incapacitated, blocking the gap. In infra-red the scene was clear. It was the monster-Meh’Lindi who had jerked the inquisitor to safety. She had disabled the stealer which tried to follow. Now she was simply restraining Obispal, holding the disarmed man firmly at claw’s length.
That high-pitched whine must be the sound of a power axe or two butter-slicing through the disaster shutter outside. Obispal writhed. ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Who? You aren’t a genestealer. You aren’t a hybrid. What are you?’
How clearly could Obispal see? Meh’Lindi didn’t reply. How could she through that snout of teeth sealed with syn-skin, even if she wished to?
Outside, now: gunfire, screams, sizzling. The guards must be through the barrier.
‘Aaaah—’ Obispal sounded to be on the verge of deducing the truth.
‘Watch out within!’ came a call. Laser fire began to slice through the crippled purestrain. The claw released Obispal, thrusting him away. Meh’Lindi turned and raced off up a steel stairway. Obispal stamped his elephantine boots in furious pique before composing himself, locating his discarded boltgun and preparing to welcome his rescuers.
‘Shade ungrateful, ain’t he?’ drawled Googol.
‘He walked into a trap,’ said Jaq. ‘The whole universe is full of traps for the unwary. For a moment Obispal was unwary and he knows it. He knows that someone else knows, which is humiliating. At the eleventh hour, he underestimated the genestealers – as if they had only been his playthings. His campaign went so well up until now.’
‘Ah yes, he did so well,’ echoed Googol sardonically. He scrutinized the tiny facets of devastation aswirl around the eye-screen. ‘Whole cities destroyed, millions slaughtered. So splendidly.’
‘Stalinvast will very soon be cleansed, Vitali. There can be worse fates for a world.’
‘Can there be?’
‘Exterminate,’ Jaq whispered to himself.
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Vasilariov won’t be totally ruined. The tide of battle won’t even reach us here in the hotel.’
‘That’s consoling to know.’
‘No more does the tide of Chaos threaten our Emperor.’
Meh’Lindi in stealer guise was racing at a crouch through dark ducts and service tunnels. She mounted ancient stairways that spiralled so high around shafts dribbling with condensation as to shrink into their own vanishing points. She crossed gantries bridging delving chasms. She descended other stairways. She popped through hatchways into alleys and back into
ducts again. Always she chose the most deserted routes. Only occasionally did she encounter fugitives from the slaughter who had wisely dodged into such hidey holes. These she brushed aside and raced by, to their evident great relief. Still, from the major avenues the rumble and squall of flight reached her constantly, a doleful drum-backing to her own claw-clicking progress.
At one intersection, she paused, senses alert.
Quarter-facet... Grimm trotted along a precarious overhead catwalk above a river of humanity, puffing, ‘Huh, huh, huh.’ Below, the surge was growing ever denser as if that river had met a dam ahead. Moving pavements must have failed under the weight they bore, otherwise one side of the crowd would surely be pulled to the rear.
Bodies were conglomerating together, asphyxiating. Corpses were carried along, standing upright. The nimblest escapees hopped across the heads of the living and the dead, until a twisted ankle or a gasping angry hand brought them down. Then they sprawled afloat upon the waves of craniums, arms thrashing.
The very walls of the avenue seemed likely to burst. Upthrusts of men and women forced cones of tangled, crushed bodies higher than the rest of the mass. The flood of tormented flesh appeared to be one single myriad-headed entity which was now compressing itself insanely until eyes started, skin split, until blood vessels sprayed. If Grimm fell into that...
Already human trees were growing towards his catwalk as survivors clawed and clutched upward. Glow-strips flickered, as if to this stifling hell of pain and terror was soon to be added darkness.
‘Why no knock-out gas?’ Grimm shouted over the groans and shrieks, as though some responsible official might heed him. ‘Does your governor want even more of his population culled?’
A hatch popped. A black claw seized Grimm. Lifting him clear off his feet, a horny black arm hugged him. The little man’s head was pressed against a jutting jaw.
Grimm gibbered in his own tongue, obviously regretting his impetuous excursion to visit the war front.
Then Jaq and Googol heard him pray squeakingly in proper Imperial Gothic, as if thus he might be heard across the galaxy. ‘Oh my ancestors! Oh let me not betray my race!’ That prayer might as well have been couched in his own patois. In Imperial Gothic he should have been praying to the God-Emperor for help.
Googol guffawed. ‘The poor tyke must think she’s going to give him the genestealer kiss. Oh, la belle dame sans merci.’
‘Don’t utter sorcerous spells,’ Jaq said sternly.
‘I wasn’t. That’s a phrase from some antique poem. It suggests, well... a fatal woman. Meh’Lindi.’
‘Very fatal,’ agreed Jaq.
‘Not towards our friend Grimm; though he doesn’t realize.’
Meh’Lindi had darted back into a service tunnel and was decamping as fast as could be, cradling Grimm, who was wailing like a baby.
‘She’s taking him somewhere special and secret to deliver the fatal kiss,’ decided Googol. ‘That’s what he’ll be thinking. Forever after he’ll have to stay celibate to avoid polluting his people.’
‘Celibate? You’re joking. The victims of stealers forget that they’ve been infected. The stealer that kisses mesmerizes too.’
‘So the victim simply yearns to mate?’
‘With ordinary mortals, ha! And enthral those in the same enchantment.’
The hybrid babies that were born would likewise hypnotize their parents to perceive beauty where there was twisted ugliness. ‘Alas,’ sighed Googol, ‘our flustered friend hasn’t noticed certain discrepancies yet. He must really be wetting his britches.’ Hugging Grimm to her, Meh’Lindi scaled gloomy networks of girders bracing shafts, dived along murky tunnels.
‘Even so,’ murmured the Navigator, ‘to languish in her arms...’
‘Are you a poet, Vitali?’ Jaq asked. ‘I do believe you’re blushing.’
‘I compose a few things during slack times on journeys,’ Googol admitted. ‘A few verses about the void. Love. Death. I might scribble them down if I like them well enough.’
And you probably do like them well enough, thought Jaq.
‘Beware,’ he said, ‘of romanticism.’
Meh’Lindi had reached a small neglected storeroom cluttered with dusty, cobwebbed tools. A glow-globe on stand-by provided a dim orange light.
Shouldering the door shut, Meh’Lindi set the squat down somewhat abruptly, though not ungently. Grimm stumbled away a few paces. Since there was nowhere else that he could go, he faced the seeming monster almost defiantly.
‘Huh! You shan’t. Huh, I’ll kill myself.’
‘How very bashful.’
Googol’s tone suggested not only mockery but yearning, impossible desire.
The mock-stealer gestured at her snout, clad in syn-skin. With her claws, which were hardly designed for delicate manipulations, she displayed her sash, tapped the various items of equipment clipped inside the fabric.
At last the light of understanding dawned in the little man’s eyes. Hesitantly he approached her, reached for a little canister. Meh’Lindi nodded her horse-like head. The solvent, yes.
Grimm sprayed her, and first her jaws snapped open, revealing dagger-fangs. She hissed at him. Was she trying to force that alien throat and ovipositor of a tongue to master human words? Still he sprayed, now almost without flinching – her chest, her arms, her back – until all the syn-skin had dissolved away. If anything, revealed, she looked even more evil.
‘She needed his hands,’ sneered Googol. ‘That’s the reason she snatched him. Soon as he injects her with the antidote to polywhatnot, she’ll leave him to find his own way home.’
But Meh’Lindi neither gestured for the hypodermic nor did she abandon Grimm. Picking the squat up again, she tore the door open and resumed her journey through the obscure, sombre entrails of Vasilariov. She could scale the heights and shin down depths that the squat could never have tackled on his own, or at least not so swiftly.
‘Damn it, Grimm looks positively snug now. He’s enjoying his ride in her arms, don’t you think, Jaq? I suppose he’s just her voice in case she needs to identify herself!’
‘Jealousy, Vitali, is a consequence of romanticism...’
THE DOOR TO the Emerald Suite flew open and in darted the monster-Meh’Lindi. She set Grimm down. The squat tugged his flak-jacket straight, brushed dirt off it, combed his gingery beard with his fingers, flicked at his knotted ponytail as if a fly had landed on it. For a moment he smiled lavishly at Meh’Lindi, then thought better of it. ‘Huh, huh, quite a caper.’
‘We’ve been watching,’ said Googol. ‘A virtuoso exhibition, my dear!’ He sketched a graceful bow in the direction of the assassin. ‘I did tell you not to pull any stunts,’ Jaq reminded her. ‘Now Obispal knows that there are other Imperial agents on this world unbeknown to him. On the other hand, he’s still alive, which might salve his ego.’
Meh’Lindi advanced and knelt before Jaq. Was she begging his pardon? No, she was presenting her genestealer semblance for his inspection.
He reached out his hand and stroked her horny, savage face. Googol whistled agitatedly. Despite himself, Jaq felt fascinated. He could touch – he could caress – Meh’Lindi in this murderous alien guise like someone stroking a kitten, as though he was absolved from the normal punctilios of duty and common sense. In this form she was perhaps more deadly than ever; yet for that very reason she refrained from causing harm, suppressing her reflexes.
He examined her carapace, her tough coiled-spring legs; and knew that he was examining Meh’Lindi intimately, yet at the same time he wasn’t. He was hardly aware of his audience. Meh’Lindi hissed cacophonously.
‘She needs to eat, boss,’ said Grimm. ‘For energy, before changing back.’
‘Can you understand her?’ Googol asked incredulously.
‘Understand her? Understand? Huh! Who can plumb and penetrate such a person? Her mouth makes noises and I interpret. I have, after all,’ and Grimm grinned raffishly, ‘enjoyed rather longer in her company than ei
ther of you two. Just recently.’
‘Shall I call room service for something special?’ Googol enquired coolly. ‘Such as a whole genuine roast sheep? Supposing that chefs and scullery lads are still alive, haven’t fled, or aren’t all pressed into service to boil up synthdiet for all those refugees. Our lady needs a banquet. Or would that be too flamboyant? Would we draw attention to ourselves?’
‘As you know full well,’ said Jaq, ‘she can make free with our own food stocks.’
Which, presently, Meh’Lindi did, ravenously consuming fish, flesh and fowl from out of the stasis-boxes which they had brought to the suite from Jaq’s ship, the Tormentum Malorum, which went by the alias of Sapphire Eagle while they were visiting Stalinvast. Rich planet though Stalinvast was, real food couldn’t necessarily be guaranteed in a hive city, even in a wealthy hotel, not least in a time of strife.
Jaq noted how wistfully Grimm regarded what he rated as gourmet ambrosia disappearing into the monster’s maw remorselessly. Did Meh’Lindi relish exotic veals, smoked fillets of sunfish, sirloins of succulent grox? Or was she trained, and her body geared, to subsist on any available fodder whatever, algae, cockroaches, rats, who cares? Could she taste the difference?
Grimm could.
Which wasn’t wholly surprising. The race of squats had evolved away from the human norm inside the caves and cramped, carved-out seams of bleak mining worlds which were barren save for minerals. Squats had become stocky, tough and self-reliant. During the millennia of genetic divergence, while warp storms cut their worlds off from the rest of the galaxy, they were forced to manufacture their own food and air. They knew famine – and still commemorated those hard times. Squats thrived in adversity. Often they preferred a harsh world to a sweeter one.
Yet they did like to eat, and handsomely, if they could.
Their artificial hydroponics gardens were famous for nutritious output; and after recontact by the Imperium they spent a fair tithe of their mineral wealth on importing exotic foods. If their staple diet still consisted of hydroponically grown vegetables, these were deliciously spiced and sauced – a far more piquant diet than the recycled synthfood that was the lot of the majority of most populations on crowded worlds. Given the slightest encouragement, a squat’s appetite was – to judge by Grimm – that of a keen connoisseur.