Diejen patted his hand, bringing him back to the present. “It’s all right,” she said. “Today is a day for celebrating, not worrying.”
Not worry? She might as well have told Colm not to breathe. “Diejen, if he’s flitted, he may have gone to Earth. My family may be in danger.” He had never forgotten the evil promise the Magus had made him that night in the zoo, when he showed him a scrying of Bridget. I’ll have her, and then there will be one. Then I will have you, and there will be no mages left on Earth at all. Colm had told Axel roughly where to find Bridget, but he did not know if Axel and Meg had found her, because he’d lost contact with them after they exited the zero-gravity field. Five tropo pills left. He glumly feared he would waste them like he’d wasted the rest of his supply, just staying awake and cheerful. Juggling? Conjuring? Coin vanishes? He couldn’t do a goddamn thing left-handed.
“And how are you to help them,” Diejen said gently, reading his thoughts, “with this?”
She moved aside the lacy cuff of his shirt and touched his right hand. A lump of scar tissue marred the middle of his palm. The bullet he took on the first day of their invasion had shattered two of his metacarpal bones. They had healed, but not properly. He was lucky he hadn’t lost the hand, given that the mages scarcely had any medical knowledge, and relied on their dubious healing magic. He didn’t have a full range of movement in his middle and ring fingers anymore. And he was heavily right-handed.
He playfully tugged a lock of her hair. “If I was the suspicious type, Diejen, I’d think you deliberately let my hand heal wrong …”
Her eyes popped open. “Me? I wasn’t even there!”
“Lady Terrious. Dhjerga. Didn’t they heal it wrong, so that I wouldn’t be able to flit? They know I’m not like you. Magic doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve got to conjure it.”
“That is a serious accusation!”
“I’m Scottish,” Colm said, thinking to himself: and you are, too, aren’t you? All of you are. “I’m naturally suspicious. And I’ve not forgotten that none of you ever told me about the noak leaves.” The Teanga echo behind the word said: doire. They called it a doire tree. Doire: oak grove, sacred grove.
Diejen’s pale cheeks pinkened. “I never lied to you.”
“No, you and your brother just didn’t give me the information I’d have needed to get home.”
“You can go home now.” She was gazing up at the sky, keeping her cool. “If you can manage it.”
Yeah, Colm thought. Now that I’ve taught you how to build rockets, and steam engines, and machine-guns, and chainsaws. While his hand was healing, he’d kept busy the same way as before, designing and building equipment for the troops. His most recent innovation had been chainsaw bayonets. He could hardly close his eyes without seeing those abominable things spinning up. The Marines had wielded them with little show-offy flourishes, the way Axel did everything. It was worth it, Colm had told himself. They needed to win. Now they had won, but the Magus—he felt surer than ever—had escaped.
“All right,” Diejen said. “It’s true. We did not need another mage. We needed your magic.”
“It’s just engineering!”
“Call it what you will, it won the war for us.” She opened her eyes and turned her face towards him. “You won the war for us. Won’t you stay and enjoy the peace?”
Their faces were very close. Gazing into her green eyes, Colm felt himself losing it. Her scent filled his nostrils, tantalizing him. Her beauty, he felt, could wipe out the horrors in his memory, if they just held each other for long enough. He slid his left hand into the caramel waves of her hair, and gently kissed her lips.
The lips tensed. Her eyes narrowed.
Then she kicked off from the ground, throwing her whole weight backwards, so that the wheelbarrow tipped up the other way. They both slid out in an ungainly backwards somersault.
Colm, his reflexes slowed by alcohol, landed in a heap in the grass. Diejen nimbly jumped clear. She pulled him to his feet. “That will teach you to molest a lady,” she said, laughing. The laughter sounded a bit forced.
“I’ve never been turned down quite like that before,” Colm said glumly, yet hopefully. He was not yet sure she actually had turned him down.
She removed any lingering doubt. “My dear, I owe you my life. So does Dryjon. All the Families owe you a great debt. But I am still engaged to Gaethla Moro. He may not ever turn up again. Maybe he lies dead … down there.” She pointed at the ground. “But maybe he went back to Earth. If so, I mean to find him. Maybe I will kill him. Maybe I’ll kiss him. Maybe I’ll dump him out of a wheelbarrow… I don’t know yet. Anyway, it’s a thing I have to finish.”
Colm had completely misunderstood. He had thought she was inviting him to stay with her. He now realized that if she was not here, Atletis wouldn’t be so charming. In fact, it was only for her he had come here, and stayed so long.
“Well,” he said, trying to make the best of it, “shall we travel together? Your magic, my pills. No molesting, promise.”
“Well …” Diejen glanced around with a panicky expression.
“No,” said Dryjon’s voice. He rose up from behind the hedge, rather red in the face, but wearing the look of nervous determination that Colm knew so well, because it was just like Diejen’s. The twins had played him. Dryjon must have been there all along—and must have witnessed Colm’s clumsy pass at Diejen. Colm flushed, recalling how Dryjon had reacted the last time someone messed with his sister.
But Dryjon wasn’t wearing a sword today. He wasn’t even drunk. He struggled through the hedge, catching his shirt on the twigs. “Sorry, Colm. You are not to go to Earth. You must stay here and help us rebuild.”
“Must?” Colm echoed, staring from one to the other of them. “Must?”
“The power sources need to be mended,” Dryjon said bravely. “You’re good at that sort of thing.”
Colm held onto his temper by his fingernails. Icily, he said, “I seem to recall that you made me a promise. If I helped you liberate your homeworld, you would help me liberate mine.”
“We’re not breaking our word!” Diejen exclaimed. “We will liberate Earth. Now that the Magus is gone, it only requires talking our friends in the Mage Corps around … or kissing them … or tipping them out of wheelbarrows,” she finished, with a pale attempt at humor.
“And actually, er, we never promised to take you home,” Dryjon said.
“I don’t need taking,” Colm snapped. “I’ll just go.” Pain shot through his right hand as he clenched his fists. He was talking out of his ass. He couldn’t go anywhere on his own unless he learned to play the spoons left-handed. The twins remained tactfully silent. “Oh, fuck it,” he breathed, and turned on his heel. He stomped away through the meadow, the twins following him at a distance.
The limethion slunk up to him. “Are you going to go talk to Dhjerga now?” it lisped.
“Yes, I am.” Would Dhjerga take his side against the twins? It seemed like a pretty long shot, but he had no other hope.
CHAPTER 32
COLM HAD ONLY VISITED Dhjerga’s camp in the forest once, several months back, and had forgotten where it was. The limethion led the way. Dryjon and Diejen trailed behind them. Little grew on the forest floor between the crowded, unhusbanded birches and noaks. The leafy canopy overhead was full of life. Red squirrels crashed through the branches overhead, and crows called. It was eerily like the forest on the south shore of Loch Ness, and Colm wondered if the Magus had planted it from memory. Then he noticed a familiar smell.
Decomposition.
Moments later he saw the first corpse, lying on the leaf mould, slightly chewed.
It was a Janz.
Behind him, Diejen pointed it out to Dryjon. Colm heard their surprised voices, and turned. “Janz died on the first day of the invasion. But Dhjerga made as many copies of him as possible before he croaked.” He tried to keep his disapproval out of his voice. “Since then he’s been making copies of those copies. Putting off the evi
l moment, so to speak.”
“No wonder they’re dying like flies,” Diejen said tartly. “Copies of copies are always poor-quality.”
“We’re going to ban this sort of thing,” Dryjon said. “I want to ban copying altogether, although I’m not sure if everyone will go along with it.”
“We managed on Earth for thousands of years without any copies at all,” Colm said.
“Yes; I don’t know how.”
They followed a trail of corpses, assisted by the limethion, whose nose led it unerringly from one ripe body to the next. Suddenly it stopped dead. “I am not going any further. There’s a bad smell beyond here.”
“I can’t smell anything except you, alien,” Diejen said, but her laughter was brittle.
Colm gestured for quiet. He could hear the faint hum of machinery, and now his esthesia implant prickled. He strode forward, guided by the warm pull of the power source hidden in the trees ahead.
Sunlight pierced the trees. A makeshift workshop occupied a clearing. Beneath the slat roof, Janzes bustled around a nest of pipes and heavily shielded containment housings. And there were the surviving Marines, monitoring a large piece of equipment with a hatch like a spaceship airlock …
“Where is he?” Dhjerga’s voice came through the trees behind him. “Colm! Colm! Come back! Don’t go too close!”
Colm needed no telling. He now knew what he was looking at. He turned and ran.
“You could have warned us!” he said to Dhjerga, when he caught up with the Lizps. They were a quarter of a mile away, walking back towards the village.
“I tried,” Dhjerga said.
“I don’t get it,” Dryjon complained. “What are you doing out there?”
“He’s making nukes,” Colm said.
He studied Dhjerga, looking for signs of radiation poisoning. Dhjerga didn’t look sick, only unkempt and depressed.
“I’ve limited my exposure,” Dhjerga said. “The Marines have taken over on-site management. Their suits protect them.”
“Nukes?” Diejen said.
“Improvised nuclear bombs,” Colm said. “The most effective weapons of mass destruction my people have ever come up with.” He stared narrowly at Dhjerga. “You fetched a thorium reactor.”
“Your friends gave it to me.”
“You’ve been running it to extract uranium from the fuel. I suppose you’ve got it set up somewhere out of the way.”
“At home in Lizp Province.”
“And you’re fetching the uranium to that little workshop back there. Sintering it into hemispheres ... Making bombs.”
“It’s really Janz doing it. He’s the one who knows about that stuff.”
Colm nodded, remembering Majriti IV.
Diejen burst out, “Dhjerga, Janz is dead! Those slaves are not Janz! They’re just copies!”
“I know that,” Dhjerga grated.
They came out of the trees within sight of the village. The Son of Saturn impaled Cerriwan. Tension simmered among the three Lizp siblings.
“I’ve had it with this place,” Colm said. “I’ve had it with you lot.” Dhjerga workshop seemed to presage the next phase of Ghost atrocities. Now they were going to start nuking each other. “I’m finished,” he said. “Done. I’m going home, one way or another. Dhjerga, will you help?”
Dhjerga, caught flat-footed, stammered, “Well …”
“No!” Diejen said. “You mustn’t help him! We need him here.”
“What,” Colm shouted, “so I can help you build ballistic missiles?”
“The nukes aren’t for us,” Dhjerga said. “They’re for your friends!”
“I just bet they are,” Colm said. In a passion of loathing and frustration, he strode away from the others. A stunted apple tree grew on the edge of the forest. Colm jumped, caught a branch, ripped unripe apples off it. Three. Four. Five.
The Lizps watched him with identical worried expressions.
Breathing hard, Colm put down the apples and fished out his tropo blisterpack. He popped out all five pills and tossed them back. Two and a half times the recommended maximum dose. If this didn’t do it, nothing would. The rush practically ripped the top of his head off. Dizzy, he picked up the apples and began to juggle.
The apples cascaded out of his hands … and fell to the ground. His right hand was just too stiff. It was useless. All the same, he tried again and again.
“I can’t watch this,” Dryjon muttered. “By Scota’s grave, man, give it up.”
“Don’t you like it here?” Diejen said. “Don’t you like us?”
Dhjerga turned on his brother and sister. “No, he doesn’t. And I know how he feels. I don’t like you two right now, either.” He stepped forward. Colm was just picking up the apples again, shaking with determination and despair. “Here,” Dhjerga said, holding out his hands.
Colm stared at him for a second.
Dhjerga grinned the old crazy grin that Colm remembered from Majriti IV. “Use my hands.”
All right.
With his left hand, Colm threw an apple to Dhjerga.
Dhjerga threw it back.
Another.
Another.
Another.
Like any good team, they quickly got into a rhythm. Throw and catch and throw. Colm’s right hand might be unusable, but between them they had three hands. The apples arced through the sunlight, green and glowing. Colm focused his thoughts on Bridget, the sister he hadn’t seen in almost ten years. He saw a hooded figure in a black mac, trudging along a rainy beach. She looked very small from here.
Faster, faster!
The obelisk of the SOS blurred.
He could feel the rain.
Everything went silent.
He smelled the salty scent of the sea.
CHAPTER 33
BRIDGET MACKENZIE WALKED ALONG the beach of Isle Martin, rain driving in under her hood, muttering four-letter words. Much as she tried to stay good-humored, she’d had just about enough.
Her father was driving her round the bend.
He’d been easier to live with—for a while—after they picked up and moved to the island. And she too felt safer with the sea between them and the Ghosts. Their food situation had not deteriorated as much as she’d feared. Birches and pines covered Isle Martin, left over from the re-wilding craze of the late 21st century, which had seen forests planted all over Scotland. Wildlife flourished on the island, so their diet now included squirrel as well as fish and potatoes. Better yet, the tourist center where they were camping had had a little convenience store. It still made Bridget smile to remember the joy on her children’s faces when they saw all those chocolate bars and packets of crisps.
But then the Shihoka had arrived. Friends of Colm’s! How could she say no, go away, we can hardly feed ourselves? She couldn’t, not after she saw their baby. So she had just said, gruffly: that ship is a power source, you can’t keep that here. Axel had ended up parking the ship in the channel between the island and the mainland. There it stood now, thirty yards out from the beach, up to its belly in the tide, painted in the green and blue colors of the Fleet.
It’ll be fine there, Axel had said. The Ghosts don’t like the sea. (With total confidence, like he knew what the Ghosts liked and did not.) They won’t go near it.
And so far, he’d been right. But Bridget couldn’t look at the ship without seeing a reminder of how the Fleet had abandoned Earth. And unfairly or not, Axel was a living reminder of the same betrayal.
Meg was easier to get along with. She was teaching the kids karate. She bagged more squirrels and rabbits than anyone, and the one time they saw Ghosts moving around on the mainland, she had dropped them with that fearsome Fleet rifle of hers. A full kilometer away, in the mist. Meg was a lovely lass, but a bit scary.
Which brought Bridget to the problem which had sent her out of doors in this dreich weather, to stomp along the beach with a fishing rod over her shoulder for an excuse, but lacking the calm and focus it would take to go fishi
ng, much as they needed the food.
Meg was not the maternal type. In theory, Bridget had no problem with that. These two awful years had opened her eyes to just how much pampering children didn’t need. So Meg preferred hunting and patrolling to childcare? Fine. Others would look after little Nicky.
The trouble was that others included Lloyd Mackenzie.
He would not leave that baby alone.
Although Axel was a wonderful father, Lloyd was forever criticizing the way he handled the baby. (Lloyd considered Meg a lost cause.) When Bridget’s daughter Morag, now 13, babysat, Lloyd would hang around barking at her—be gentler with him! Put another pair of socks on him, he’s cold! Can’t you see he’s hungry? It was downright funny, Bridget had observed to Ted. When she and Colm were little, Lloyd had never so much as changed a nappy. Now he was the world’s expert on babies? But it didn’t feel funny. Bridget had lost count of the number of times she had waked in the night and seen Lloyd sitting up by the fire with Nicky on his lap, shuffling that dog-eared old pack of cards to amuse the seemingly hypnotized child.
Today, she had caught him and Nicky playing with a pair of spoons.
Her boots crunched on the pebbles. She was nearing the headland, where the beach ended and the cliffs began.
At the very end of the beach, something white lay half in and half out of the lapping waves.
Maybe it was a sentrienza drone. The bloody things did not even pretend to be stealthy now that there were so few humans left on Earth. Bridget supposed the sentrienza were nervous about the Ghost takeover, and wanted to see what the Ghosts were up to. Good luck to them. The drones were powered equipment, and so they couldn’t last long in Ghost-infested areas. Several of them had previously washed up on Isle Martin, intact, but powerless. Ted’s mother, Sunita, was good with electronics. She’d built their hand-cranked Ka-band radio from drone parts.
Bridget walked towards the drone, planning to salvage it.
The driving rain lifted for a moment.
Dammit.
Not a drone.
A human body.
It would hardly be the first time one of those had washed up here, either. Now she’d have to lug it up the cliff and throw it off, so that the currents would carry it away and the children wouldn’t see it. Pathetically, she was still trying to protect them from the collapse of their world.
The Nuclear Druid: A Hard Science Fiction Adventure With a Chilling Twist (Extinction Protocol Book 2) Page 19