by Ed Greenwood
“Yes, Russark: centuries. The weres aren’t a few humans that the Devil has given the power to take wolf-shape; they’re a race from far, far away who’ve been using Earth as their private hunting preserve for a very long time.”
He drained his glass and moved to refill it, adding, “They’re greater conquerors than Bonaparte ever was. He defeated countries; they crush planets.”
Russark made for the desk, dipped his quill in an inkwell standing ready, and wrote on the topmost blank parchment beside it: “PLANETS?”
The Count nodded. “Countries,” he said, “but in the sky, not the sea. Big ones. There are thousands upon thousands of them, floating above us in the sky.”
Russark found himself gazing at the ceiling. After a moment, he shook his head to conceal a shiver.
“The Harhoun are rapacious plunderers who regard all other mammalian races, including us, as cattle,” the Count continued. “As food.” He strolled across the room again. “And they’re good at what they do. Very good. They always win, or have until now. In recent times, that has made them…bored. Hence their thirst for hunting, their delight in manipulating humans. Toying with their prey. Why, soon—”
A chime sounded. The Count stiffened, set down his glass, and made for the door, frowning.
“Either they’ve tracked us here faster than I’d have thought possible, or they already knew about this hidehold,” he snapped. “Wait here, Russark. My electrified defenses don’t distinguish between friend and foe.”
He hastened out, slamming the door in his wake, and left the unsettled Russark alone again. The Tarkanese stared at the closed door for a moment, wondering if he was locked in. Rather than going to check, he began to prowl about the room. It held curious, inexplicable things.
On a high bookshelf sat a small, almost spherical bowl of dark wood that contained some sort of reeking black syrup, barely visible through iris-like soft openings in the cloth that covered the bowl’s upper slopes, openings that dilated at Russark’s touch, then shrank closed again when he withdrew his quill.
On another shelf stood a small ornament of cut glass with a cube, rather like a gaming-die, balanced on one of its corners. When touched, it created an image of a face floating in the air, a face that had tentacles in place of a mouth. Its nose, eyes, and scalp looked human enough…and the face turned as Russark moved, regarding him with cold and knowing eyes before slowly fading away.
Shivering, he withdrew from the ornament and did not approach it again.
Another glass bauble, this one rounded, threw scenes at the walls and ceiling with beams of light that erupted silently out of it at a touch, and then vanished again at the next touch. Thoroughly frightened, Russark sat down behind the desk and resolved to touch no more strange things.
Instead, he looked at a thick stack of parchments beside the blank ones.
These, or their like, he’d seen before. Sousarkania’s news proclamations: wrinkled and weathered sheets printed out and tacked up on tavern walls and in village markets. Outdated ones had sometimes found their way to Tark Castle.
He flipped through them, wondering how long there would be a Sousarkania, or a Tarkania, if everything in Europe was changing so fast and so much…
A headline from months ago caught his eye, a brief story beneath it.
“Mysterious Murder of Count of Oporlto.”
For a moment, the study seemed to sway around him. Galorn Russark found himself halfway across the room, striding hard, sword up and darting back and forth, seeking a foe he could see and carve. He swallowed hard. He was more frightened right now than he’d been since the Markgrafina had come for his tongue.
If the real Count was dead, who had he been dealing with?
He’d be damned if he’d trade one set of lying captors for another.
Galorn Russark waited behind the door, shortsword ready. When it opened, he’d have only a fleeting second to thrust hard through the opening along the hinges.
There. The scrape of a boot—
The door opened.
“Only two of them,” the Count said heartily, “and—”
Russark drove his shortsword hard, into and through the body of the man stepping into the room.
Then he wrenched it loose and ducked away, keeping low.
The Count grunted in pain and flung one arm wide as he staggered into the study. A ring on his hand flared into life like an angry red eye.
A red beam lanced from it, aiming for where Russark would have been standing if he’d been sheltering behind the door. The beam carved—no, burned; burned as swiftly as a knife sliced butter—the door and its frame. Russark smelled scorched wood, and then the Count’s groans were joined by deeper ones that grew in strength.
The next thing Russark knew, the door and part of its frame and an entire bank of bookshelves had toppled onto him in a sliding thunder that pinned his legs, his shortsword…
He was helpless.
He struggled to get free; unable to claw at the floor, he was forced to roll. The roll got him half-twisted around before more books fell crushingly upon him, and the world went away.
Someone was clawing at the weight on Russark’s legs. Someone who was spitting blood and gasping in pain. The Count of Oporlto, his monocle covered with glistening redness, more of it dripping down from his mustache.
The nobleman had crawled to Russark, leaving crimson smears on the carpet. The Tarkanese struggled to pull free and get away from the Count, but as he got one foot free, the Oporltan clutched at it. Russark kicked out, hard; the Count fell back onto Russark’s other ankle, wet and heavy, and did not move again.
In a fresh surge of revulsion, Russark twisted and drove his shortsword at the floor like a pick, then tried to haul himself away from the fake nobleman. The Count’s head bobbed loosely as if it belonged to a broken doll, moved only by Russark’s struggles.
But something was moving down there…something black, slimy, and glistening. Something that smelled like the syrup he’d found. Something fat and short and wormlike that slithered like a leech out of the Count’s slack mouth and onto Russark’s still-trapped leg.
He kicked and squirmed and struggled in a desperate frenzy, dragging the bookshelf and dead man and all across the carpet. It was rucking up now into stiff waves that impeded his clawing…and the leech, if that’s what it was, oozed slowly up his leg. He tried to roll over again, to crush it, to grind his hip against the floor and…and…the full weight of the fallen door was on him now, its handle lodged against his hip, preventing him from rolling any farther.
The leech was past his hip now, somewhere where a man who still had hands might be able to swipe at it, but Russark could only pant and twist and claw vainly at the floor with his shortsword.
Then he felt something cool and sticky on his neck, moving up his throat, past his chin…
He strained to lock his mouth shut, then bit and snapped and shook his head furiously, trying to keep the thing out of his ear. The wet, cool, sticky, inexorably wriggling thing…
He screamed, ripped off his sword, and fought to get up, get clear of the door and the shelves, and—managed it.
Too late.
It was in—inside his head—and there was a sudden and silent explosion in his mind, a confused welter of visions. Thousands of identical slithering leech-things were taking over all manner of bodies: humans, wolf-headed and stag-headed human-like hairy things…giant spiders…things that looked like flying bladders with long, insect-like legs…the girl who’d been in the river…Trask…one of the envoys gaping up at the Wargallant…thousands of leech-things making their enslaved bodies fight the Harhoun. With guns and swords, in lands where the sky was blue and lands where it was orange—and more than once, floating in a great starry void like the night sky.
Always, always fighting the Harhoun.
Leeches, leeches everywhere…
Not leeches, Galorn Russark. We are the Maelen, and we shall conquer the universe. On the sly—not by despoi
ling and destroying like the Harhoun. We are…gardeners, farmers. Nurturers, mostly—but silent slayers when we have to be.
It was the Count’s voice, and he was in Galorn Russark’s head.
Revulsion surged in Russark. His mind…tickled. Convulsed, slithering…suddenly heaving…
Russark vomited brandy all over the Count’s fine carpet, staggered blindly past the table until he fetched up against the desk, and tried to claw his own head off.
It was in his mind—leechlike, wormlike…
The suave, dry voice of the Count murmured again from inside him.
Yes, my Silent Slayer. I am in your head. We’re stuck with each other now.
Philosophy
By Ronald D. Ferguson
From forty meters away, the Bug-Eyed Monster looked like a tall gymnast in green leotards—so much like a human girl that Communication Specialist Corporal Emanuel Jacobs hesitated and missed his shot. The BEM slipped into a canyon crevice and then pinned Jacobs down with a narrow stream of laser fire that chipped away at the waist-high rock shielding him. When the laser glanced off his helmet, he smelled burned plastic in spite of his respirator filter. He crouched lower.
Sergeant Mason had the better angle.
“On your left, Sarge!” Jacobs shouted.
Sarge leaned around a two meter-high speckled boulder, aimed in the general direction of his left and launched a white-light grenade. The concussion was all but noiseless and little of the brilliant light passed through Jacobs’s visor, but the BEM blindly staggered from behind the crease in the canyon wall. Before Sarge could pick her off, the BEM’s head exploded.
“Got ’em,” Sarge yelled. “They can’t take that bright light or the heat.”
“Sure you did.” Jacobs checked his Blaser charge: Low. “She auto-destructed after you blinded her.”
No more BEMs up on the ridge, but hadn’t he seen two in the canyon? Jacobs straightened and sprayed Blaser pulses down the incline on general principle. After the initial volley, the pulses sputtered and died. He ducked back behind the boulder and jerked the exhausted Jolt pack from his weapon.
“Hey Sarge, toss me another Jolt pack. I’m out.”
Sarge threw him a fresh pack and kicked the supply duffle. “That leaves me three spares. You might ease up on the spray cast, Jacobs. Now if BEMs were FEMs, I could take ’em all out with my sparkling smile and never waste a joule.” He tapped the side of his face shield. “I think that was the last one. Just as well—I got no response from Base except the automated homing beacon, so help ain’t on the way.”
“Technically, Sarge, the BEM warriors are semi-androgynous and tending female, but your ugly face has yet to slow one. I’ll quit spraying the hillside if you quit trying to be witty. You sure we got them all?”
Sarge peeked over the boulder. “Yeah. I counted ten in the ambush. There’s always ten. That had to be the last one. Can’t see Sanchez from here neither.”
“Sanchez stopped firing fifteen minutes back. I saw Lieutenant Simmons go down with a big hole in his chest, and I can’t tell about Murphy—got some sort of glitch in my visor. Check your status monitor.”
“Oh yeah, I always forget biometrics…that ain’t good. Got no signal from that damn Shavetail.”
“I told you Simmons is dead. My visor just rebooted. Piece of shit. Why do they give the junk to the communications specialist?”
Sarge slumped against the large boulder. “Yeah, well, I got biometrics from Sanchez, and he’s dead too. I suppose I’m officially in charge of your sorry ass, as if that were any different from before. Okay. Let’s take ten—no, make it twenty—to see whether any more BEMs poke out their heads, then we’ll reconnoiter and see if we can find Murphy.”
Jacobs took a quick peek downhill, saw no movement, and then, crouching low, ran the five meters to join Sarge. Breathing hard, he dropped to one knee behind the granite boulder.
“What?” Sarge patted the large rock. “You think mine’s bigger than yours? Is that witty enough for you?”
Jacobs’s legs suddenly felt shaky, and he squeezed his hands around his Blaser to quell the trembling. He sank with his back pressed against the boulder, adjusted the oxygen extraction rate of his respirator, and rested his Blaser on the rock-encrusted soil. “Witty? Let me explain your wit mathematically. Would you agree that if someone is a half-wit, then they are dumb?”
Sarge guffawed. “Here we go…Mr. Smart Ass has to have his say.” He flipped up his helmet visor and looked about, sipped water from the nipple inside his respirator mask, and then opened the mask just long enough to pop a piece of nicotine candy. His broad nose dilated, and sweat beaded his black forehead despite the chill. “Okay. Give me the full monty, College Man.” He lowered the visor to partial status.
Jacobs nodded and scribbled in the loose red dirt. “So, we have ‘half wit equals dumb.’ Multiply both sides of the equation by two to obtain that ‘wit equals two dumb.’”
Sarge adjusted the extraction rate on his respirator, exhaled heavily, and sagged against the boulder. “You did say ‘T-W-O’ dumb?” White sclera emphasized his dark irises.
Jacobs exhaled and nodded. “Yeah. Dumb plus dumb, which is definitely ‘T-O-O’ dumb. Thus, the equation becomes ‘wit equals too dumb,’ which exactly describes your wit. Irrefutable mathematical proof. Q.E.D.” His heart rate slowed from trip-hammer to steady pound.
Sarge shook his head and chuckled. “You are one messed up white boy. Time.” He stood with a nervous twitch but kept tight against the boulder. Even through his light body armor, Sarge’s thick biceps looked massive against the rock. “We need to find Murphy, collect tags, and get the hell out of here before more BEMs show. Let’s do it now.” He snap-closed his helmet visor.
Jacobs flexed his sore left shoulder and pushed himself away from the boulder. Maybe moving was better before all the adrenaline subsided. “I thought you said twenty minutes, but it’s thirty klicks to base—that’s a couple days’ march through this terrain. Yeah, I’m ready. Two days should give you enough time to think of a better retort.”
“Is that all what’s left of the kid?” Sarge asked. “Sanchez was the only guy here younger than that Shavetail Simmons. I guess he won’t be writing no epic novel now.”
“Damn. I really liked that kid. I’ll get his tags.” Jacobs pressed his palm against the soldier’s forehead and activated the read function. Data flowed from the dead boy’s embedded chip into Jacobs’s primaries. “I don’t think he really wanted to write a novel. It’s just that in all the vids, the guy who wants to be the novelist is the one who survives combat.”
“Sure, the survivor always tells the story.” Sarge checked his pockets. “I got three nicotine chews left. You want one? No? So, you think he pretended to be a writer just for mental insurance?”
“Yeah, we all do that…what the hey! The kid stored a journal on his chip.”
“You got room for it?” Sarge popped another nicotine candy. “I’ve already tagged the Shavetail. What with the eight guys we lost in the days before this, I don’t have much storage left.”
“Sure. I got plenty of room. His family will want all that’s left of their son. Damn big journal. Maybe he wrote his novel after all. I’ll annotate the body location in case the family wants to drop a marker. What about Murphy?”
“I think I found what was left of him a few hundred meters back. Never found his chip. He pulled the supplies and backup Jolt Packs on the hover sled. They must have exploded when he was hit.”
“Damn. How much power do we have left?”
Sarge held up a single Jolt pack. “I combined all of the Shavetail’s into this one. Even adding what Sanchez has, it ain’t gonna be full. Don’t worry. We got enough juice to make it to base.”
“That’s what you told me after yesterday’s fire fight.”
Suddenly, Sarge spun, his Blaser immediately at the ready. “Did you hear that?”
“No,” Jacobs said. He focused on the download. “I can�
��t hear anything over your blathering. Wait a sec for me to cover you; I’m almost done with the download.”
But Sarge was already stalking down the trail through the canyon. Jacobs cursed under his breath until the journal download was complete, and then he closed the chip connection. He inoculated the kid’s body with freeze-dried bacteria. Once the bacteria activated from the body moisture, they would digest the corpse, bone and all. He straightened what was left of the boy’s legs and arms, and gave the remains a final salute.
Jacobs un-slung his Blaser and peeked past the rocky outcrop and down the canyon trail. Mid-trail, forty meters down the canyon, Sarge stood shaking his head.
Reckless. Wide open in hostile territory. Before Jacobs could yell for him to get off the trail, Sarge waved him forward.
“Did you check for BEMs?” Jacobs asked.
“Yeah, nine or ten dead, but you won’t believe what we’ve got here,” Sarge said.
Blaser still at the ready, Jacobs cautiously started down the stone-riddled path. “Cake and ice cream? I’ll take chocolate.” But not Rocky Road.
“Close,” Sarge said. “We got ourselves a BEM; live, but unconscious. How do you suppose they keep warm in them skin-tights? First time I’ve seen any blue tights. I patted it down and couldn’t find any hidden weapons.”
Jacobs trotted the remaining distance. “Alive. She didn’t self-destruct? I thought they automatically blew when they were incapacitated.”
The BEM’s upturned face was vaguely human with thin lips, a flat, almost non-existent nose, and small frilly ears. Almost six centimeters in diameter, a nictating membrane covered the namesake myriad-lens bug-eyes. Short, smooth orange and brown fur striped the top of the creature’s head, spread to the neck, and disappeared inside the blue leotard.
“Sooner or later, there had to be a BEM with a flawed auto-destruct mechanism. You and me have won the lottery, my friend. If we get this prisoner back to Base, the rewards will be unlimited.”
Jacobs walked point while Sarge guided the recalcitrant BEM along the rocky path. Jacobs glanced back at the sound of rocks rolling loose. The lanky alien stumbled over the plastic tube that loosely shackled her feet, but she didn’t fall; despite being hobbled, she recovered her balance with several short, quick steps.