Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Was there a fight?” Hedy asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

  Marie studied the dark steel walls, watching her silhouette in the smooth, brushed metal. She shook her head.

  “No marks, no bullet holes, nothing that looks like a battle. No blood and no bodies. Just…their stuff.”

  She remembered what the bartender had told her. Angelic war technology. Occult gene splicing. And some of the stuff those crazy mothers built has had centuries to breed.

  Nessa crouched down and scooped up a handful of paper. She sifted through the pages one by one, finding nothing but incomprehensible math and text written in an alien script. She opened her fingers and let them flutter to the floor at her feet.

  “If they’re still alive, they can’t have gotten far. Let’s keep looking.”

  Marie felt a trickle of sweat run down her spine, plastering her blouse to her back. The ship was a sauna, the air stagnant and hot. She led the way, careful now, bracing her stolen pistol in both hands and keeping the muzzle pointed to the deck.

  She rounded another bend, eyes still adjusting to the twilit gloom, and a shot rang out.

  She threw herself sideways, grabbing Nessa and pulling her down, as a bullet chewed into the steel plating at her back and tore open a chunk of wall. A second shot blasted the face of a dead computer screen, spraying the deck with fragments of glass. A figure at the far end of the hall darted out of sight.

  “Stay back,” a man’s voice shouted, quavering on the verge of panic. “Stay away from me! I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot you dead!”

  They backed up around the corner, fast, getting out of his line of fire.

  “It’s okay,” Marie called out. “We’re with the Network. We’re…reinforcements.”

  “They’re gone,” he moaned. “They’re all gone.”

  “Who’s gone?” Nessa said.

  “All of them. Owens, Nineteen, Flack, the triplets, all of them!”

  Marie and Nessa shared a questioning glance. Marie leaned closer to the bend in the hall, calling out to him.

  “Did you kill them?”

  “Did I…” he sputtered. “Are you stupid? The ship did it.”

  “We didn’t see any bodies. Are you sure—”

  “It ate them,” the man bellowed. “Owens was first. Everybody thought he just wandered off, but then it came for Flack the next night. Took him right in front of us. We heard him, screaming inside the walls…”

  His voice trailed off. Marie took a step out of hiding. Nessa pulled at her sleeve. Marie held up a reassuring hand. Back when she wore a badge, she’d had to calm a dangerously disturbed suspect more than once. She could do this.

  “Sir?” Marie said. “We’re here to help. I’m coming toward you, okay? I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to come closer, so we can talk without shouting. Is that all right?”

  Whether it was all right or not, she was already moving, making her way down another debris-strewn hallway toward the man’s voice—and toward his gun. A tattered tent slid under her heel. Another tent was a crumpled pile of canvas and aluminum, beside a clutter of cardboard boxes. She’d found the expedition’s base camp. Marie felt a presence and glanced back. Nessa and Hedy were right behind her, standing at her shoulders.

  “You need to leave,” the man said, the last word breaking into a sob. “It’s too late for me. I’m marked. But if you leave, maybe it won’t come for you.”

  “It’s all right,” Marie told him. Closer now, she could see his shadow on the floor just around the bend. “We’re just going to have a talk. Can you do me a favor, first? Can you put the gun down for me?”

  His shadow crouched low. Metal clanked against metal.

  “Good,” Marie said. “That’s really good. Thank you.”

  She gripped her pistol and stepped around the corner.

  The man in the middle of the hall stood there trembling, with a needle-nosed gun at his feet and his pudgy body sheathed in a glossy orange jumpsuit. His hair was a rounded chocolate-brown tuft like a soft-serve ice cream cone. He jerked in two directions at once, like he was torn between snatching his weapon up again or retreating. Retreat won, and he staggered back on unsteady feet.

  “You’re not Network,” he breathed. “Who are you?”

  “Friends. I mean it, we’re not going to hurt you. Can you tell us everything that happened here? From the beginning.”

  He kept retreating, taking one step back for every step Marie took toward him, like there was a bubble of space shoving him away.

  “The gateway,” Nessa said. “The way to Elysium. Did you find it?”

  He shook his head, shivering “Found it on a map of the ship, but we never made it that far. We found the reactor. Verified integrity. Carted up some loose relics from the war for shipment back to Adam. I think…I think that’s when it sniffed us out. Thieves. It doesn’t like thieves.”

  “Focus,” Nessa said. “Where is the gateway?”

  He pointed a trembling finger down the corridor.

  “Just past the reactor room. There’s an access hall, but it’s blocked. You’ll never get through. Even if you did, even if the ship doesn’t eat you first, there’s a guardian. Old, preserved with Enochian magic, still active.”

  He kept backing up, until his shoulders thumped against the bulkhead wall. Marie crouched and scooped up his fallen weapon. She still had the bulky handgun she’d taken from Nadia’s guard, but right now, more firepower felt like a good thing to have.

  “As it happens,” Hedy told him, “my mother and I brought a little bit of magic with us. Let us worry about the guardian. What’s blocking the corridor?”

  “It. It is—”

  The man froze. His mouth hung open, eyes in a thousand-yard stare. His tremble became convulsive, like he’d grabbed hold of an electric wire.

  “It?” Nessa demanded. “What is ‘it’?”

  “Nessa.” Marie touched her arm. Her eyes went wide as she pointed to the floor. The man stood upon a square of dark metal grating, two feet across.

  Something was under the floor.

  Spaghetti-thin tendrils, like the arms of a jellyfish, had snaked up from below and lassoed fleshy ropes around his ankles. Hundreds of them. They slid up his calves, coiling, pinning him to the spot. As some of them spiraled upward, others pressed against the glossy fabric of his jumpsuit—and through it, piercing the suit and the skin and bone beneath.

  “It’s here,” he whispered.

  Then he began to scream.

  Dozens of tendrils snaked out from the tops of his boots, where they’d impaled his feet through the soles. They were fat, wriggling like scarlet worms, siphoning his blood. More worm heads emerged from his legs, tasting the air before burrowing back inside.

  He thrashed, trying to break free, but the tendrils held him like steel cables. More whipped up from beneath the grate and lashed onto his hands, sliding in and out of his wrists. Blood guttered onto the grating. Just under the dying man’s shrieks—rising an octave as the tendrils slid between his legs—Marie heard a sound like greedy, wet slurps from beneath the floor.

  She raised the man’s gun, aimed at the grate, and fired. The needle-nosed pistol let out a tiny kick and a spurt of air as some kind of fléchette, silver and blinding fast, sparked off the steel. She tried to get closer, to get a better shot; Nessa and Hedy grabbed her arms and hauled her back.

  “He’s already dead,” Nessa told her.

  But that wasn’t true. Dead men didn’t make sounds like that, half-sobbing, half-screaming, as the worm heads impaled his chest like a pincushion and leaked scarlet trails down the front of his jumpsuit.

  An anemone stroked his cheek, almost affectionate. Then it slid through the tender skin, piercing his tongue, and out the other side of his face.

  For a moment, the tendrils froze, as if caught in mid-decision. Then, as one, they hauled downward. Bones snapped and the man spat a gout of blood as he was slammed against the grating. Then again. The third time,
the square—only two feet wide—buckled and broke. He fell into the gap, middle-first, stuck.

  On the fourth yank, it folded him in half. He disappeared under the floor. There was a wet sound, like a hundred sets of teeth chewing with their mouths open, and then silence.

  Thirty-Two

  The tendrils didn’t come back. There was no rustling behind the walls, no sounds beneath the floor. Just the barely audible hum of distant engines, idling for eternity.

  “We need more weapons,” Marie said.

  “We need more knowledge,” Nessa replied.

  Hedy stared at the broken square of flooring. Spatters of blood marred the dark steel of the bulkhead behind it, the only evidence of what they’d just seen.

  “There’s nothing like that on my world,” Hedy said. “Yours?”

  Nessa shook her head. She brandished the Cutting Knife. Clytemnestra was a hazy silhouette on the blade.

  “You’ve been around longer than any of us,” Nessa said. “Any idea what that was, or how we can fight it?”

  The silhouette spread its hands. “This place, all of it, is from before even my time. My sisters and I fought the Kings of Man, but the Deadknot is the ground where they declared their rebellion. This is where they became the kings. Either it’s some monstrosity that found its way here and made a nest for itself, or…”

  “Or it was always here,” Marie said. “The bartender told me they engineered things. Living things, made for war.”

  “Not much prey on a dead ship,” Nessa mused. “Presumably it doesn’t need to eat to survive. Sustained by some sort of magic.”

  “But it evidently likes to eat.” Hedy glanced sidelong at Nessa. “You’ve got a look in your eyes. What?”

  Nessa snapped her fingers. She drew a line from the broken grating to the warren of corridors behind it, the direction the dead man had pointed them.

  “Plenty of plunder in the Deadknot. Some scavengers have presumably struck gold on other wrecks, but not here. No one ever comes back from the Logos. It’s also the only ship in this entire angelic scrapyard that still has an operational power source.”

  “Like the centipede,” Marie said. “It’s not nuclear or electric power. It’s magical energy…”

  She trailed off as she made the connection.

  “That thing is being fed by the generator. That’s what kept it alive all these centuries. Alive and…maybe growing.”

  “Mm-hmm. Kill the power, kill the beast.”

  “But we need the power,” Hedy said. “The gateway won’t work without it.”

  Nessa lifted her chin, resolute.

  “Then our only option is to slip past it. There’s a chance it’s gone dormant. Remember what he said: it took the first of his teammates and didn’t come back for another until a day later. Maybe it’s full and likes to nap after a good meal.”

  “We’re staking a lot on chances and maybes,” Hedy said. “Look, we still have two of the three Elysium keys. We’ve got the candle and the bell; all we need is the book. Marie, did Mother’s other incarnation have any idea where it is? At all?”

  Marie shook her head. “None. She was counting on the Marquis to deliver. Which, as we’ve seen…he didn’t.”

  “So it’s the gateway or nothing,” Nessa said. “I do not have time to go hunting an artifact that could be anywhere on a hundred worlds, if it even still exists.”

  She took a cautious step forward, then another, keeping her eyes on the floor. Testing it, like she was venturing out onto a frozen lake.

  “We advance,” she said. “Only up to the generator. We’ll see how it looks from there, and if it’s truly impossible, we’ll cut a doorway home. But only if.”

  They advanced.

  The way forward was a chessboard. Dark metal squares, almost black, interspersed with grillwork. Moving in single file, they carefully stepped from solid floor to solid floor, eyes on the darkness below.

  Hedy stepped across sheets of brushed steel, spaced wider than the rest, and her foot slipped. Nessa and Marie froze as she fell to a crouch, catching herself before she could tumble onto the grille. She held up a shaky hand.

  “It’s okay, I’m—”

  The floor shivered under their feet.

  Nessa pointed toward her pursed lips. She mouthed the word sound. The rumbling slowly settled down.

  It’s drawn to noise, Marie realized. It hadn’t gone after the last man on the Network expedition until he opened fire and started shouting. If he’d stayed quiet, he might have lived.

  So all we have to do is stay quiet.

  She felt like her feet were made of lead as she eased her way along the corridor. Every step sounded like cannon fire in her ears, but the creature stayed dormant. She gripped the bulky pistol from Nadia’s throne room in her left hand, the needle-nosed gun in her right. No telling if they could even hurt the thing, but the weight was reassuring. Nessa was at her side, eyes sharp behind her glasses and studying the floor like a chess master pondering her next move.

  Now that she knew the stakes, Hedy didn’t step from square to square. She hopped. Light, bounding with long strides and coming down on her toes, impossibly soft. Marie realized that if she closed her eyes she wouldn’t even know the witch was there. Hedy turned, a delicate spin on one foot, and flashed a grin at Nessa.

  “Mouse,” Nessa whispered, shaking her head.

  The corridor twisted and went black. The emergency lights ahead were dead, turning it into a chasm of darkness. No way to tell what they were stepping on, or falling into. Marie held up a hand. Then she knelt down, opening up her black bag with careful fingers and fishing out some of the survival gear Tricia had packed for her.

  She shook a chemlight, snapped the plastic tube, and gave it an underhand toss. It clattered midway down the hall and rolled to a stop. The tube glowed to life, bathing the corridor in hazard orange. They waited a moment, listening, watching, to make sure it hadn’t drawn any attention before moving on.

  Fifty feet ahead, ship lights returned, pushing through the narrow gap of a half-open doorway. One by one, they squeezed through to the other side.

  They stood upon solid floor, in a rounded chamber that narrowed as the walls soared upward, as if they were standing in a giant metallic funnel. Curved screens covered the walls, a mosaic of rectangles in different sizes. Some were dead and dark, some cracked or blown-out, the floor littered with shattered glass. Others flashed waves of alien script and drew neon vector lines, plotting a course laid before the dawn of human history.

  And at the heart of the room stood majesty.

  A great globe of molten copper hovered above a rounded dais, floating in midair. It whirled, spinning, lightning storms rippling across its face. Marie watched, breathless, as it spat sparks that unfolded in mid-arc and became graceful, shimmering hieroglyphs of gold. The glyphs burned out as they plummeted to the floor.

  “The generator?” she whispered.

  Nessa circled it, palms raised, closing her eyes as she basked in its hum.

  “Has to be. Feels like a hot bath and a glass of red wine.”

  “Be careful,” Hedy told her.

  “I know, I know. I can feel it because I’m infected. It’s a siphon. Pulls in the raw stuff of the Shadow In-Between, pure magic, and converts it to energy.” Nessa twirled her fingertips, taking in the ancient chamber and the screens all around them. “Imagine it. Limitless power.”

  Marie drifted across the chamber. There was another exit on the opposite end, another malfunctioning door, this one open a single scant foot with nothing but darkness beyond. She set her bags down and was reaching for another chemlight when Hedy’s voice echoed at her back.

  “Uh, you should take a look at this.”

  Nessa and Marie stood behind her. Hedy had found a screen depicting what looked like a map of the ship, in cross section, indecipherable text over geometric slices to mark the Logos’s eleven decks. They didn’t need to read it: the angry flashing and bright red color was a warning
sign in any language.

  “I’m guessing,” Marie said, “that it says something to the effect of ‘large obstruction in the machinery.’”

  A bulbous ocher shape glowed on the map. It reminded Marie of a sprouting potato, old and dirty and bristling with tubers. The shape had wedged itself into the heart of the ship, clogging rooms, rupturing entire decks. Its tendrils snaked out through the Logos, worming through air vents and access shafts.

  “He told us the ship ate his friends,” she said.

  “He wasn’t entirely wrong,” Nessa replied. “That creature is…mammoth.”

  Marie gave an uncertain glance to the metal plate beneath her shoes.

  “Still a ‘no’ vote on the ‘shut down the generator’ idea?”

  “Still a no.” Nessa led the way, striding to the opposite door. “He said the gateway was just past this room.”

  “He also said the passage was blocked and we’d never get through,” Hedy pointed out.

  Marie hovered at the edge of the doorway, squinting, trying to see anything in the darkness beyond. She picked up a chemlight, shook it, snapped it, and tossed it in.

  It was a tunnel of flesh.

  The dark steel walls of the corridor had buckled and broken, fallen to land in shards along the grille of the walkway. And all around it, clinging to the skeletal struts, were bloated curtains of gristle and meat. The creature had grown around the corridor, half crushing it, swallowing it inside of its massive bulk.

  Its flesh was putrid gray, like steak gone rotten. In the dim light, for a moment Marie thought it was covered in ants. Then she realized the wriggling movement was the hungry sway of anemone, the tiny worm-head growths coating every square inch of its skin.

  “Be extremely quiet,” Marie breathed.

  Hedy took a step back, cupping a hand over her mouth and pointing with the other. The end of the flesh corridor was maybe fifty feet away, the broken door skewed to one side but open far enough to get through, and there was a light at the end of the tunnel. A soft, golden glow that pulsed like the sun’s rays rippling off the waters of a pool.