The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Ross Lockhart

  I raised my shivering face. I closed my liquid eyes. I stretched my mouth with noise.

  •

  Akropolis

  Matt Wallace

  Danny’s eight and the world is coming to an end. Chicken Little was right; the sky is falling. It begins as a big black ball high above the Earth, the blotted-out stars defining its shape. It burns yellow, then red before it descends over the farmlands of Danny’s home. It seems to draw the night, gathering the sky beneath it like miles of black silk sucked into a jet. The furls become a wave, fluid, chaotic, raging. Danny stands at the edge of the cornfield and waits to be crushed by it, his tiny mouth hanging open and the apocalypse reflected in the dark droplets of his pupils.

  When the wave finally breaks against the Earth they feel the tremors five miles away. It’s the dry season, and the heat blast causes the cornhusks to burst, creating a pestilence of shredded seed membranes that fall like snowflakes siphoned of their essence. The autumn wind carries them away, and Danny realizes it wasn’t the end of the world. His house is still there, the three lighted windows that make up its jack-o-lantern face shining out at him across their back field. The stars return. It was just something that fell from the sky, like Dorothy’s house, only bigger. Much, much bigger. A falling star.

  Danny follows his father, the musky old man lighting the way with an ancient Coleman lantern. Along the way they collect the Smiths from the next farm over. Their boy, Eric, is a few years younger than him, little more than a toddler trundling at his own father’s heels. The group follows the sky-streaked path above their heads for miles, to a crater the size of a lake, and the soil inside of it has been caramelized. It breaks like hardened wax beneath Danny’s tiny feet. His father grips him by the wrists and pulls his ankles free.

  It’s not a star. It’s a city. An entire stone city, an alien Atlantis, and steps above it leading to a high place of battlements and thick walls. Danny’s eyes are drawn to it immediately. A castle in the sky…

  * * *

  Danneth is thirty-six and he still dreams of it. Five of them entered the Akropolis that night; the first ones. It should’ve been hot, but the stone was cold when they touched it. They wandered the empty city for hours before finally making the trek up the long, steep steps. They made their way to the highest room in the Akropolis. It was empty too, a room with veined walls, lines thick and twisting like petrified kudzu. The strange runes that they would come to know as runati surrounding the throne-like chair with its stone skull cap, the dome designed to open heads and burn the runati into brains.

  Somehow it spoke to Danneth’s father. What it later took the scientists months to begin to decipher, the old man knew that first night. But he let them fumble with it, allowed them to study it, to begin to expose it to the world. He let them believe he was a simple farmer just happy to have made first contact with such a discovery. And when the time came that their inept ministrations were of no more use, he, the simple farmer, ejected the government from the Akropolis.

  Danneth is awakened from the dream by a Summoning in the back of his brain. Arric’s there, his words that aren’t really words, but an intangible form of understanding, conveying a message:

  “Two of our akropophytes are trapped in EV-Z-5. They were sweeping for rats and wandered right into an ambush. They’re panicking. It’s rendered them unable to cast. I would’ve interceded myself, but your orders are to be informed.”

  Arric is his second. He is ambitious, powerful, and devoid of all human mercy. Danneth keeps him close. Yes, because he is useful, but also because he has to.

  “I’ll meet you a hundred yards out,” is the message he transmits back.

  * * *

  Danny’s twelve and he knows that his father is no longer his father. Maybe he hasn’t been since that night. He comes to think of it as trial software. His father was the first human being to enter the Akropolis, that’s all. He was the connector to the human interface, the port that downloaded the Akropolis’ directions. But it’s more than a sterile program, it’s an entity, and when the old man finally dies, that consciousness dies with him. It is not passed on. It has served its purpose. It has done its job.

  * * *

  Danneth dresses quietly, watching Brya slumber in their bed as he does, listening to her breath, to the blood pumping warm and strong beneath her perfect breast.

  The akropolia uniform is his second skin. The cassock with its sleek black lines, the non-conductive pauldron fitted over his left shoulder, guarding his heart, the half-cape draped from its edges that conceals his arm, the arm that is the reason for his single glove. It’s become a cephalopod appendage, suckered and shiny and pronged like a spade. The left side of his face has abscessed to match it, a new lobe forming with each spell cast, swelling as his power swells. His children do not know. His wife does not know. They see only the glamour he casts over that part of himself: Five perfect, strong digits, and a chiseled profile.

  It begins in the second year of akropolia training, the runati changing dormant parts of their brains. Danneth has seen the resonance scans. Some think the new tissue looks like faces, like small alien cameos carved in gray matter. Danneth knows better. The physical manifestations are just a sacrifice, a side effect of power never meant for humans.

  He leaves their bedchamber and walks along the Akropolis parapets with their jeweled eyes shut tight against the crater below. The crater’s soil is fertile again, but scorched patches of earth as tall as men are lined up like memorials atop it. A month after they established rule, the United States armed forces launched a coordinated assault on the Akropolis. The stone lids covering the eyes of the parapets scraped back and the soldiers were reduced to shadows of ash cast forever against the ground.

  The akropolia, their families, and the first citizens of the city were never even roused from their beds.

  Danneth arrives at the needleport chamber. It has a name in the Akropolis language, but they’ve come to call it that because it’s a literal translation of passing yourself through the eye of a needle. Microscopic beams of light transport them across the globe in minutes.

  There is no navigational system. The akropolia controls his own destination.

  * * *

  Danny’s fourteen and he’s having trouble gripping a fork with his left hand. His fingers have begun to merge and his thumb grows suckers. But he can split tree trunks with invisible blades created by his mind, and more. He’s to be the first of the akropolia, an extension of the Akropolis itself, a force with the power to bring order to the world. His father laid the foundation for him before the stroke claimed him, and now the Akropolis will care for Danny until he comes of age, while he prepares.

  Himself, and the others. More coming every day.

  * * *

  Danneth and Arric walk over the ruins of 57th Street. Danneth was here when the city still stood. New York was the last major American metropolis to submit to their leadership.

  The rioters fall over each other like lobsters in a tank. They’re massed around one of the freestanding fall-out bunkers that are the only remaining structures intact throughout the city. The stragglers who infest these evacuation zones think they’ve formed some sort of resistance movement.

  “Let me bring what’s left of these buildings down on their greasy heads,” Arric imports.

  “I’m going to talk to them.”

  Danneth can feel Arric’s eyes on him. The fact that he doesn’t voice the thoughts they’re conveying reassures Danneth, but only a little.

  He murmurs at first, the verbal commands accessing those parts of his brain changed by the runati. The akropolia have come to call these commands “spells” and think of their effects in the same terms. The spell Danneth casts will enhance his vocal range and affect the waves that carry it.

  “Disperse,” his voice booms across the ruins like an angry god. “Disperse, or be dealt with. The choice is yours.”

  The strength of a mob is the strength of the sea, and they surge
toward Danneth and Arric in the same way. Their obsolete guns crackle and pop, producing all the affectation of children’s fireworks. With a wave of his distorted left hand, Arric magnetizes a dented blue-flecked mailbox. The tide of bullets part from their chosen course and riddle the aging receptacle, followed by the weapons that fired them, flying from the hands of their owners. There’s a mashed chorus of screams as fillings are ripped from teeth.

  This time when Danneth opens his mouth his voice turns into a nuclear-amplified shriek. The sonic wave brushes them back, peeling layers of bodies like a razor on skin. Limbs break and necks snap under its force. The ones left standing belong to Arric. He focuses on the emergency floodlights hung along the street. Their gas and luminescence are converted into laser beams that descend as Zeusian thunderbolts, striking down the rest.

  They step over the wracked corpses, smoke pouring from their mouths, from the gaping holes in their chests. A few are still alive. One, a middle-aged man in a Navy surplus flight jacket, grabs the harness of Danneth’s boot.

  “I know what you are,” he croaks.

  Danneth crouches down low, sweeping back the half-cape. “Do you think us inhuman?” he asks the man, making no move to disengage the hand on his boot. “In a literal sense, I mean.”

  “I know what you are,” the man repeats. These are his last words.

  Arric removes the door of the bunker without laying a finger on it and the akropophytes stagger out into the morning sun. Before they can speak, Arric has cast a binding spell around them. The electromagnetic field engulfs the akropophytes. By Arric’s hand they rise through the air.

  “You two are pathetic. We give you the power of the akropolia and you hide like children while monkeys shake you in a can.”

  Defiant beasts live in the dark caves of Arric’s eyes. Danneth knows he has overridden his second-in-command enough for the day. The next action is his to take alone.

  Electricity crackles up through the stream tethering Arric to the field and infects the spherical force surrounding the young men. They begin screaming as it courses through their muscles.

  Danneth turns away, leaving the akropophytes to be disciplined.

  I know what you are.

  “So do I,” Danneth says to no one.

  * * *

  Danneth is eighteen and he has the power to eat worlds. The government has no choice but to deal with him. At first the akropolia supplement the old forces; they did in the Middle East in two weeks what the president was still stumbling over after twenty years. Traditional police are obsolete. Two akropolia can maintain order in each city. Armies follow. Soldiers, weapons, technology, they all become meaningless. Danneth can render a nuclear reactor inert from halfway around the world. He can boil submarines at the farthest depths of the ocean. He can bring down planes or cast a spell that causes the sky to swallow them.

  Their power is as absolute as the protests are inevitable. Congress passes a bill to restrict the akropolia’s authority. The bill is ignored. Danneth learns the United States government is conspiring with three rival nations to develop a technology that will retard the runati’s effect on human brain chemistry.

  The akropolia make their first true alliance with the Chinese. Danneth will oversee the construction of a Manchurian Akropolis. The American government considers this an act of war.

  The war lasts approximately 18 hours.

  * * *

  When Danneth and Arric return to the Akropolis, a page is waiting with an official communiqué from the LSoN. Danneth has been invited to a summit in Geneva, hosted by what’s being called The Last Stand of Nations, to negotiate a treaty between the akropolia and the final holdouts of human civilization.

  “It was a mistake to let them regroup there,” Arric says. “And I don’t understand this need of yours to negotiate. Imbuing them with power they don’t have. I could pacify the entire continent myself, tonight.”

  “ ‘Pacify.’ You mean subjugate.”

  “Semantical horse shit. The akropolia rule this planet, Danneth. We don’t govern. We don’t serve. We rule. You can dance around the word, but its meaning dictates our actions. It baffles me how you’ve brought us this far with your attitude.”

  A crowd has gathered, akropophytes and akropolia alike, black cassocks and gleaming pauldrons. Arric has sympathizers, admirers, followers. Soon he’ll challenge Danneth for leadership of the akropolia.

  “I’ll take the evening to consider it,” he says.

  * * *

  Danneth is twenty-four and the last vestige of the American government has been swept away. Fort Braddock fell at 6:13 this morning, Akropolis time. Danneth pulled the general’s skeleton through his skin. He orders it to be cast in bronze above the fort’s welcome banner as a memorial. And a warning.

  The akropolia now rule unopposed.

  * * *

  The next morning at breakfast in the main hall, Brya, forever Danneth’s most loyal supporter, publicly accuses Arric of committing a very ugly assault against her. Arric is surprised, but only for a moment. Then he looks to Danneth. Arric is smart. That’s the problem.

  Danneth makes the challenge that Brya’s accusation has allowed him to make. The duel is epic. Arric thinks it’s because he and Danneth are so evenly matched. Danneth knows it’s because that’s what they expect, the other akropolia and their citizens. They’ve bought into the myth they’ve become, the myth Danneth helped architect.

  In the end he superheats Arric’s blood to a temperature of roughly one thousand degrees. His body does not melt, it explodes. A grand deathblow. It’s a feat beyond Arric’s ability to defend, beyond any of the akropolia’s ability to cast. But that will change. In time, their power will grow. Danneth, however, will always be one level beyond their reach, and that is how he will lead.

  That night he dispatches the akropolia to lay waste to Western Europe. The Last Stand of Nations is barely that. The remaining populace surrender unconditionally.

  * * *

  Danneth is sixty and he is no longer recognizable as human.

  * * *

  Danneth is one hundred and seventy-four years old and he awaits their arrival.

  Many seconds have served under him, but he still remembers Arric well. Arric was right about Geneva. Danneth realized that then. But he was wrong about the akropolia. They were never meant to rule.

  They are meant to serve.

  Soon there’ll come a night like the one when he was a boy. A night when the sky falls again, and their masters, the true masters of the Akropolis, will come home.

  •

  Boojum

  Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

  The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately?—when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by.

  The Lavinia Whateley was a Boojum, a deep-space swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.

  Where there was light, she could make oxygen. Where there was oxygen, she could make water.

  She was an ecosystem unto herself, as the captain was a law unto herself. And down in the bowels of the engineering section, Black Alice Bradley, who was only human and no kind of law at all, loved her.

  Black Alice had taken the oath back in ’32, after the Venusian Riots. She hadn’t hidden her reasons, and the captain had looked at her with cold, dark, amused eyes and said, �
�So long as you carry your weight, cherie, I don’t care. Betray me, though, and you will be going back to Venus the cold way.” But it was probably that—and the fact that Black Alice couldn’t hit the broad side of a space freighter with a ray gun—that had gotten her assigned to Engineering, where ethics were less of a problem. It wasn’t, after all, as if she was going anywhere.

  Black Alice was on duty when the Lavinia Whateley spotted prey; she felt the shiver of anticipation that ran through the decks of the ship. It was an odd sensation, a tic Vinnie only exhibited in pursuit. And then they were underway, zooming down the slope of the gravity well toward Sol, and the screens all around Engineering—which Captain Song kept dark, most of the time, on the theory that swabs and deckhands and coal-shovelers didn’t need to know where they were, or what they were doing—flickered bright and live.

  Everybody looked up, and Demijack shouted, “There! There!” He was right: the blot that might only have been a smudge of oil on the screen moved as Vinnie banked, revealing itself to be a freighter, big and ungainly and hopelessly outclassed. Easy prey. Easy pickings.

  We could use some of them, thought Black Alice. Contrary to the e-ballads and comm stories, a pirate’s life was not all imported delicacies and fawning slaves. Especially not when three-quarters of any and all profits went directly back to the Lavinia Whateley, to keep her healthy and happy. Nobody ever argued. There were stories about the Marie Curie, too.

  The captain’s voice over fiber optic cable—strung beside the Lavinia Whateley’s nerve bundles—was as clear and free of static as if she stood at Black Alice’s elbow. “Battle stations,” Captain Song said, and the crew leapt to obey. It had been two Solar since Captain Song keelhauled James Brady, but nobody who’d been with the ship then was ever likely to forget his ruptured eyes and frozen scream.