The Nuclear Druid: A Hard Science Fiction Adventure With a Chilling Twist (Extinction Protocol Book 2)

by Felix R. Savage

  Colm rushed at him and grabbed his arms. “What the hell is your problem? Have you got a death wish?” As he spoke Colm realized that Dhjerga had had a pretty thankless time of it recently. Perhaps his pent-up frustration was boiling out under the influence of alcohol and Colm’s unwise taunting. Colm knew quite well that Dhjerga was very touchy about his own ignorance regarding technology. All the other mages were equally clueless but they just laughed it off or rambled on in a snooty fashion about the superiority of the old ways. Dhjerga cared. “Don’t do it,” Colm begged.

  “I won’t have to go all the way,” Dhjerga said. I’ll do this.” He started to fade. Colm clutched his arms tighter in panic. His fingers sank through cold, prickly cloth and flesh. He could see the launch tower through Dhjerga’s head. Then, all at once, Dhjerga became solid again. Colm flinched back, his fingers stinging. “Partly here and partly there. Not many mages can do that. The Magus, of course. And me. It’s very difficult. The apple trees are still blooming at Dam Lizp Hol, by the way.” A pale petal or two drifted out of his hair.

  “Partly dead is still dead,” Colm said, rubbing his static-bitten fingers. “We don’t know at what altitude the liquid hydrogen starts. You’d have to make more than one trip to find the right depth. A lot of trips …”

  “I’ll ride the lightning. That’s what we used to do in the old days.”

  A new voice spoke. “No. I’ll do it.”

  Janz limped out of the shadow of the launch tower.

  Dhjerga rounded on him, finding a new target for his anger. “You were meant to be watching Lord Mackenzie!”

  “Sorry, sir. I thought he deserved a little privacy.” Janz winked at Colm. “Anyway, it will work better if I do it. You can send me as many times as it takes to find the right depth. Yes. We will probe Cerriwan, as if it were an enemy world. When I find the right place, I will tell you. You will go just once, for just a moment, to get your fix on the place. Then you can fetch the fuel straight into the tanks.”

  Colm took a deep breath. “We could make you an EVA suit,” he said. “It would have to be extremely tough to withstand those pressures. Like a suit of armor. I dunno if we could make it completely rad proof.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Dhjerga said angrily. Colm couldn’t tell if he was talking to him or Janz.

  “Do you have the tank ready?” Janz said, ignoring Dhjerga. “You will need at least 5,000 psi of cryo-compression.”

  “You know quite a bit about this, don’t you?”

  Janz smiled. “Many worlds. Many copies. Everything they know, I know.”

  “Ah. Right.” That explained rather a lot … such as the Ghosts’ lines of communication between Kisperet and the far-off front. “Well, the tank is ready.” The cryo-compression system was a plug-and-play module from Barjoltan. But Colm wasn’t 100% confident about the antiporosity of his improvised tank liner: he’d substituted carbonized chicken feather fibers for carbon nanotubes. “I’d like to fill it as close as possible to launch, so we don’t risk boil-off. If you’re really sure about this, we could start making the EVA suit now.”

  “I’m ready anytime,” Janz said, sitting down on a bench.

  Dhjerga grated, “No. I forbid it.”

  “Well, sir,” Janz said, “you did say that we are not slaves anymore. We are free.”

  “You were already free.”

  “But now I am even more free. And that means I do not have to obey you.”

  He smiled.

  Dhjerga stormed out of the courtyard.

  Colm watched him go. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He misses Lord Dryjon and Lady Diejen,” Janz said.

  Colm sighed. “That makes two of us.”

  CHAPTER 24

  T MINUS 1 WATCH. In the dark, acrid-smelling intertank space of the SOS, Colm checked the safety valve and heat exchanger of the LH2 tank one more time. He clambered out onto the scaffold, and waved down at the artisans watching from the rooftops. They seemed to be very far below. Fully assembled, the SOS stood 150 feet fall. It awed Colm what they had achieved—and make no mistake, this was their achievement, more than it was his. But it would all be for nothing if today’s risky operation did not work.

  Down in the courtyard, a scrum of mages buzzed around Dhjerga and Janz.

  Janz was wearing an EVA suit made of leather and glass. He looked like an Arctic explorer with a fishbowl on his head. He needed to be able to see but he did not need to be able to move. The suit had no air supply: he would just be breathing the air trapped inside it, until the gravity of Cerriwan crushed him to death.

  Steeling himself not to think about the ghastly fate awaiting the copies, Colm gave his hand signal to the mages, and yelled, “Let’s do it!”

  Dhjerga stood behind Janz and rested his hands on his shoulders. It looked like nothing was happening. Then Janz removed his helmet to breathe, and shook his head. They resealed the helmet. The performance was repeated. Again. And again. And again. The watching artisans and mages suddenly let out a mass sigh as Janz’s knees buckled. Sethys Lizp and Linc Terrious rushed over to help Dhjerga hold him up.

  Everything they know, I know.

  Did Janz also know his copies’ pain? Was he experiencing, over and over, the agony of a living human body being ripped apart in a storm of hydrogen gas, or plummeting, still alive (for a few ghastly seconds), into Cerriwan’s toxic internal ocean?

  Colm dropped to his knees on the scaffold in unconscious imitation of the freeman. His knuckles whitened on the uprights. For an eerie moment it seemed as if everyone in the courtyard was experiencing the same pain as Janz, so intense was their empathy.

  Then Janz collapsed.

  The mages peeled him out of the EVA suit. Dhjerga put it on. He sealed the helmet, then did a slow flicker, the way he had on the night of the party. Fade, sparkle, back.

  A mechanical bell trilled inside the intertank area. Colm hustled back through the hatch and down the ladder. He peered at the tank capacity dial. The LH2 tank was filling up, unbelievably fast. He didn’t even need to look at the dial. He could feel the temperature dropping. In front of his eyes, ice formed on the outside of the cryo-cooled tank. The light had gone soft. He raised his gaze to the bright square of the hatch, seeking something, maybe God.

  Snow was falling inside the tank. It landed on his hands and face. He licked it off his lips, and tasted metal.

  When the dial stopped rising, the tank contained 200,000 liters of liquid hydrogen. Colm hadn’t believed this could actually work. But it had. They had fueled a spaceship directly from a gas giant, without blowing anything up. His mind reeled at the possibilities. This could make the square-cube law and Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation obsolete. Chemical rockets would be competitive again. They’d be faster than plasma drives. And more to the point … the ability to refuel the SOS meant it had a good chance of coming back from Atletis. And he did, too.

  He climbed back out onto the scaffold. “It worked!” he yelled to the artisans and workers standing on the roof of the steelworks, and the soldiers keeping watch. “It flipping worked!”

  A cheer went up. Down in the courtyard, Dhjerga, still wearing the EVA suit, sat on the ground with Janz’s head and shoulders on his lap. He tipped a cup of water to Janz’s lips as tenderly as a mother feeding a child.

  *

  “Let’s take the limethion,” Colm said.

  He was flushed with joy at the success of the fuelling operation. But he had not entirely stopped thinking objectively about his own situation. Janz was in bed, recovering, and Dhjerga was unlikely to leave his side for the time being. The SOS had to fly as soon as possible; the longer they left the LH2 sitting in the tank, the greater the risk that the cryo-compression would fail. For the next few hours everyone involved with the spaceship would be insanely busy.

  “I’ll go and fetch it from the zoo.”

  “Why?” said Quintana Terrious, an intimidating gray-haired mage who was also planning to fly on the SOS.

/>   Colm thought for an instant that she was onto him. Then he realized what she was really asking. “Well, it’s extremely vicious, isn’t it? It might be useful if there’s going to be fighting.”

  “If,” Lady Terrious echoed, sarcastically. “Well, I do not see why not, if the creature will consent to be bound and muzzled while it is on the spaceship.”

  The limethion did consent. It even put the required muzzle on itself—it had capable claws. Its deft movements reminded Colm of Gil, although he was under no illusion that the limethion would turn out to be anything like so personable. It had already told him frankly that he looked tasty. “You’re only to eat the enemy,” he told it. “Not us.”

  “Understood.”

  With the limethion’s leash looped around one wrist, Colm veered over to the noak tree and stuffed his pockets with its leaves. No one else was around.

  “What are you doing?” the limethion said.

  “Mind your own business, and if you tell anyone I won’t let you on the spaceship.”

  “Consider me muzzled,” the limethion said. “Literally.”

  The SOS, Colm calculated, could carry six. The limethion weighed as much as a man. The other four crew-members would all be mages: Dhjerga, Lady Terrious, her youngest son Linc, and another Lizp whom Colm did not know very well. He got back to the steelworks to find that this man had been kicked off the crew and Janz given his place.

  “He wants to go,” Dhjerga said glumly. “And I can hardly say no after he got us the fuel.”

  “Yes,” Janz said. “I am always staying at home while my copies travel the universe. This time, I want to go myself. Yes, I do.”

  Colm threw up his hands. “Up to you.” He just wanted to do this before his tank liners failed and the whole bloody rocket exploded under them.

  But the Ghosts had their own way of doing things, and a sense of ceremony that was not undermined by the ease of going and comings in their society. This would be a going like none Kisperet had ever seen, and mages from all the Families had come to Ilfenjium to watch. Colm begged them to stay in their villas and use spyglasses. They would be able to see perfectly well from there.

  The crew boarded the rocket to the strains of a band. Snow fell in the sunlight, as the cryo-cooled fuels froze the humidity out of the air around the rocket. Their jewellery and boots picked up a dusting. Inside the cramped capsule, Lady Terrious took her boots off and settled into her goosedown-padded couch. “I hope you remembered the mead, Dhjerga. One does get thirsty on long journeys.” The limethion lay down at her feet. “It is very cramped,” it muttered disapprovingly. Colm stifled a howl. It was all so ludicrously unprofessional. None of them were wearing spacesuits. The EVA suit they had made for the fuelling journey had severe mobility issues, and it would’ve been impossible to make a suit for the limethion. But what did it matter? If the SOS did not reach Atletis, they were dead. End of story.

  He buckled himself into his own couch, in front of 24th-century electronic displays set into a walnut dashboard crafted by a master cabinet-maker. “Ready to launch on my mark.”

  Despite everything, he felt childishly excited. He had sneaked a handful of noak leaves before they boarded. His esthesia implant fed the heat of the ship’s systems into his body. He was like a kid on a sugar high. He could not flit, but he could fly.

  The gas generator ignited. The main engine caught. The anchors fell away. Flame engulfed the courtyard, and Son Of Saturn howled into the sky with a boom that shattered every window in Ilfenjium.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE ORIGINAL SATURN V had had three stages. Stages one and two fell into the Pacific. Stage three pushed the Apollo spacecraft towards the moon.

  Son Of Saturn was a single stage rocket. Kisperet was slightly smaller than Earth, with a smidge lower gravity. Atletis was also smaller than our moon, and it orbited just 198,000 kilometers away, as best Colm could reckon it with a telescope and trigonometry. He calculated that he could get the SOS there with a single mighty push. Oh, it was back-of-the-envelope stuff. But he couldn’t stand the thought of his lovely handcrafted rocket falling into the sea.

  As it turned out this would not have happened anyway.

  Kisperet had no sea.

  Colm switched his gaze between the single, fuzzy camera feed and the porthole he had built into the crew capsule. He could not believe what he was seeing. Kisperet had shrunk to a globe. White and gray clouds hid a part of the northern hemisphere. Green land glimmered in the gaps between the clouds. This ‘continent’ was where they’d come from. It looked to be about the size of South America. But it was not a continent as such. Instead of ocean, it was bounded by desert. The rest of the planet was a dead, dull, uniform brown.

  “By Scota’s grave,” Dhjerga said quietly, floating beside him. “It does look different from up here.”

  Colm remembered his claim, long ago, that flying gave you a new perspective on your homeworld. It had certainly given him a new perspective on Kisperet. “Where’s the sea?”

  Dhjerga stuck a finger in his ear. “I can’t hear you properly.”

  “You know. Sea. Lots of water in one place. Like on Juradis.” Juradis was a water world with two small polar continents and a scattering of islands.

  Lady Terrious drifted up to them. She was coping well with the novel experience of freefall. It had taken years off her lined face, and the Kisperet-light from the porthole turned her gray hair silver. “There used to be a sea,” she said. “There is still a small body of water—can you see it?—near the equator. Ah, it is hidden by the clouds. It has grown smaller and smaller over the centuries. Our world is losing its water. That is why the Magus decided we should go back home.”

  Home … A bell rang in Colm’s mind. He ignored it, fascinated and horrified by the dying world below. Kisperet’s slightly lower gravity, and maybe a weaker magnetic field, were allowing its water to escape into space. That kind of process was exponential on a scale of aeons. It happened slowly at first, then faster and faster. “What about the rivers?”

  Lady Terrious understood what he meant. “You have not visited the mouth of the Great River. It is a wonder of the world. The water pours over a cliff—and vanishes! There are mages constantly on duty, fetching it back to the frozen north.” A shadow crossed her face. “I am afraid some of them left their posts during the war. This rebellion has cost us many, many works of water.”

  Colm shook his head in amazement. The mages of Kisperet were keeping their homeworld’s water cycle going, literally by sheer willpower. It really testified to the power of the human spirit.

  Kisperet shrank into space, a brown pimple on the face of Cerriwan.

  *

  The Son of Saturn covered the distance to Atletis in a day and a half. All the mages eagerly gazed at the little moon as it got bigger.

  Its green and white coloration had not been an illusion. Atletis was covered with trees. Clouds massed over lakes and sparkling polar ice caps.

  “But it’s tiny,” Colm said. Smaller than our moon, how did Atletis hold onto its air? Could this, too, be magic?

  Lady Terrious shook her head, her silver halo of hair swaying. “It is a heimdall.”

  “A what?”

  The elderly mage folded her lips shut. She could not or would not say.

  Colm saw no sign of human habitation. The forests looked as deep and dank as the Cairngorms. It would be a challenge finding an LZ that wasn’t covered with trees. As they orbited the little moon, he pieced together camera images into a map of the surface. “Where do you want to land?”

  Dhjerga, Lady Terrious, and the young Lord Terrious had all been to Atletis, of course, in the days when they worked for the Magistocracy. But they didn’t know where on Atletis they’d been. The horrible thought came to Colm that they may not have been to Atletis at all. The Magus might have lied to them to conceal the location of his headquarters.

  Dhjerga stared at the map. “I don’t even know what this picture is! It’s pretty …”
/>
  “It’s a map,” Janz said. “There was a lad who saw one like it once at headquarters. Innismon is here.” His forefinger came down on the map.

  “Good thing you came along, Janz,” Colm said in relief.

  Innismon, the Magus’s headquarters, was not visible from orbit. It must be hidden beneath the trees.

  “But there must be something we can see from here,” Linc Terrious said. “The Magus’s power source: a river, a dam …”

  “There’s no river on this map, Janz,” Dhjerga said. “Are you sure you’ve got the location right?”

  “Yes,” Janz said with stolid confidence.

  Colm chewed his lip. “How about landing somewhere else?” He didn’t want to sacrifice the hope of getting away from Atletis alive. That meant looking after the SOS. Keeping it intact. It would be hard to do that if he landed on top of the enemy’s headquarters.

  “I am hungry,” the limethion said darkly.

  Lady Terrious settled the debate. “Wherever we put down,” she said, “they will find us instantly. This ship, after all, is a power source. Therefore I suggest that we land at the location Janz has identified. We have a single chance at victory. We must assault Innismon with overwhelming force, and capture the Magus’s power source, just as we did at Ilfenjium.”

  *

  Colm made the best of it. On Majriti IV, on Ross 458 c, and on Mu Arae d, he had often employed the Navy pilot’s favorite tactic against the Ghosts: vaporize ‘em. A ship’s drive, after all, was its most powerful weapon. The pilots of the Unsinkable used to brag about the number of Ghosts they barbecued on their drops. Colm decided to take out as much of the Magus’s infrastructure as he could with the SOS’s drive.

  Guiding the ship down into the atmosphere of Atletis, he had a sense of déjà vu. He was landing on a moon occupied by hostile Ghosts. Just like the old days. To put the cherry on the cake, Atletis was a moon orbiting a gas giant … well, a moon orbiting a moon of a gas giant … and as on Majriti IV, static-electric discharges sparkled through its upper atmosphere. This would make for a hairy landing. He remembered Meg singing, I see lightning, I see lightning! There was no point sharing his misgivings with the Ghosts around him. They barely understood physics.