He ran anyway.
Dan’s coat swished out behind him as he sprint-shambled through the stacks, Mindy humming gently in his grip. The kid screamed again, muffled this time, like they were trying to shut it up. First sensible thing they’d done all day.
A corner loomed ahead. Dan slowed as he approached it, taking cover behind the wall of haphazardly stacked metal and—
There was a flash, a boom and a searing sensation of heat as an incendiary round took out a chunk of the corner. Dan stumbled into the open, egged on by the squeals and creaks of the scrap as it collapsed around him.
Through the rain of debris, he spotted two figures, one holding something big and gun-shaped, the other wrestling with something small and not-really-anything shaped.
Gun guy first.
Dan spun, avoiding a cube that had once been some kind of vehicle. Mindy kicked in his hand and a yellow bolt streaked through the night, its glow painting brief and brilliant horizontal stripes along the junk stacks.
The man with the gun spun, too, although not voluntarily. Even over the crashing of the collapsing corner, Dan heard the guy emit a strangled, “Urk,” then he toppled backwards onto the ground. The gun went off in his hand, and an explosive round fired straight upwards into the air. The guy holding the squirming infant stood his ground, watching it rise higher and higher.
Dan groaned. “Oh, you have got to be fonking kidding me,” he said, then he launched into another lumbering run, gesturing wildly as he tried to catch the guy’s attention. “Get out of the way, you dumb-ams piece of shizz!”
The man holding the infant blinked four eyes, but otherwise didn’t move. If Dan didn’t know better, he’d have thought he’d hit him with a stun shot, too. But no. It was just that he was an idiot.
The energy projectile was still rising, but more slowly now as the effects of gravity took their toll. Four-Eyes’s gaze went from the squirming shape in his hands to Dan and back again. From this distance, Dan could see the child flickering like a bad TV picture. No great surprise, as it shouldn’t really exist here in the first place.
Dan’s eyes flicked upwards to where the incendiary bolt had now reached its peak, and was accelerating downwards once more. Four-Eyes was still rooted to the spot, and was in danger of soon becoming a greasy one that covered quite a wide area.
Cursing to himself, Dan raised his gun and took aim. He had no idea if this was going to work, but it was the only chance. “Mindy,” he barked. “Slowdown, ten per cent.”
The cylinder spun, and when it stopped three blue lights shone out from the cylinder. Slowdown rounds drank the battery, but he was all out of options.
Still running, he raised the weapon and took aim at the falling projectile, trying to match its descent. He squeezed the trigger and Mindy ejected a shimmering energy bolt. It screamed past the falling explosive round and sailed harmlessly into the night.
Well, not entirely harmlessly. When it eventually came back down several dozen blocks away, it hit a Tribunal wagon, dropping its speed to a crawl just as it pulled out at a busy junction. The subsequent pile up caused a number of minor but painful injuries, mostly to the Tribunal officer who’d been driving. The fact he experienced them all in slow motion did not make them any more enjoyable.
Dan fired again, but the wobbly bit in his knee chose that moment to poke out, making him stumble and sending his aim way off. The round struck one of the stacks of metal, temporarily making it rust more slowly than the others around it.
Jamming his knee back into place, Dan stopped running and took aim. The flickering infant had now wrapped a number of abstract shapes around Four Eyes’ head and neck. They might have been arms or legs, but could equally have been tentacles, hair, or the concept of disappointment. It was hard to tell with some of these Malwhere things. Whatever it was doing, any thoughts of fleeing that may have been forming in Four Eyes’ panic-stricken brain would now almost certainly have been replaced by thoughts of getting this thing the fonk off me.
The explosive round was thirty feet above them now. Dan had a second, maybe two. He wasted half of one squinting down the sights, then Mindy kicked in his hands. The slowdown round whipped through the air, intercepting the tumbling orange ball somewhere around twenty-two feet from impact. Its velocity dropped to a fraction of what it had been, but it was still moving downwards, and that fonking idiot still hadn’t got out of the way.
Dan shouted as he ran, but soon realized it was no use. Whatever the infant was throttling the guy with had fully cocooned his head, and even if his quota of ears matched that of his eyes, he was highly unlikely to be able to hear a thing.
When he passed beneath the incendiary bolt, Dan felt the heat of it even through his hat. Mindy was out of power now, so he shoved her back in her holster, which gave him both hands free. He grabbed the ankle of the stunned guy with one while the other found a handful of Four Eyes’ jacket. Neither man protested when he dragged them both back the way he’d come, something grinding damply in his knee as he stumbled backwards out of the path of the explosive.
They were a little over twenty feet away when it hit the ground. It fell with the speed of a balloon on a breeze, then set about the slow, laborious process of exploding. Even as he continued to pull the men clear, Dan couldn’t help but marvel at the way the air and the ground both rippled lazily, and the tear-shaped bolt became a fiery orange liquid seeping outward in all directions at once.
Had the bolt itself been all Dan had to worry about, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The eruption of flame was still moving at ten per cent speed, and he’d be well clear before it could come anywhere near him.
Unfortunately, the slowdown round only applied to what it hit, not whatever that then subsequently hit, and so when the hard-packed track erupted, the molten lumps of rock were ejected up and out at regular explosion speed.
If Four Eyes and his stunned buddy got hit, it was their own fonking fault. Dan couldn’t risk the kid taking a shrapnel wound, though, so he released his grip on the gun guy’s leg, and spun Four Eyes around so he was shielded by Dan’s bulk.
The debris rattled against Dan’s back like machine-gun fire. He pushed Four Eyes on, taking a grim sort of satisfaction from the muffled whimpers and sobs that managed to escape whenever the infant flickered in and out of reality.
As Dan shoved Four Eyes around the partially collapsed corner, the rain of shrapnel stopped hitting him. The slow boooooooooooom of the explosion was still going on, each inch of its progression throwing up more chunks of rock. They were out of harm’s way here, though, and Dan relaxed enough to study the child more closely. This made his head ache as his brain rebelled against the thing’s very existence.
It had no shape as such, although it could equally be said that it had every shape, all at the same time, including several that shouldn’t have been possible. Trying to focus on it was like trying to empty the ocean with a sieve, albeit without the inherent risk of being swallowed by a fonk-off big fish.
Four Eyes wore Mal-Mitts, of course. It was the only way he could have grabbed and held the child for any length of time. The gloves were technically illegal, but the average Tribunal grunt wouldn’t know what they were if they woke up wearing them, so they were easy enough to get your hands on – or in – if you knew who to ask.
“You really shouldn’t mess with this stuff,” Dan grunted, pulling the gloves from the end of Four Eyes’ arms.
From within the infant’s tangled shape came a muffled mumble that may have been, “Now you fonking tell me,” but might equally have just been a series of panicky sobs.
Even with the numbness of his not-quite-alive nerve endings, Dan felt his fingertips tingle as he slipped them into the Mal-Mitts. Cupping his hands out in front of him, he made a series of low coos and high whistles. The child stopped squirming almost immediately. Its abstract shapelessness became marginally less chaotic for a moment, then it unwound itself from its captor’s head and hopped into Dan’s arms.
/> A mind-bending series of fractals filled Dan’s view as the thing excitedly licked his face. “Alright, alright,” he grunted. “Knock it off.”
Four Eyes watched him in wonder, his peepers all blinking in turn as he wheezed some air back into his lungs. “H-how did you…?”
Dan cut him off with a forearm across the bridge of his nose. The kidnapper dropped, every one of his eyes blurring with tears as snot and blood oozed from both nostrils.
“You have no idea what you almost did,” Dan spat. “Stay there. I’ll be back.”
Dan strode off, doing his best not to look at the thing in his arms for fear it brought on a migraine, a panic attack, or a profound sense of hopelessness and despair. The fact it kept trying to jam itself into his face made this difficult, and he’d barely walked for half a minute or so when he decided he’d gone far enough.
“This’ll have to do,” he said, shutting his eyes and giving his brain a break from trying to process the unprocessable. He’d need it. The kid was bad enough, but things were about to get much, much worse.
Dan made another series of whistles and coos, louder this time. It was almost a tune in the same way a floor is almost a ceiling. The elements involved are broadly similar, but the whole thing is upside-down and back to front, and mistaking one for the other could ultimately prove harmful to your health.
A patch of air directly ahead of Dan bent at right angles to itself, folding and unfolding simultaneously. Dan knew to keep his eyes closed for this part. It was that or projectile vomit himself inside-out, and that wasn’t something he’d put high on his list of priorities.
Dan counted in his head, not opening his eyes until he was well into double figures. Even fully realized in this dimension, the infant’s mother made Dan’s brain flatten itself against the back wall of his skull. It was fat and thin, short and long, 2D and 3D and every color under every sun that had ever – would ever exist. It was simultaneously taller than Dan, smaller than Dan, neither of those things and both.
Most of all, it was wrong. That was the easiest – perhaps the only – way to truly describe the thing. It was exactly the wrong thing in precisely the wrong place, and its timing was off, too. It was a thing that all rational thought said shouldn’t exist. Couldn’t exist. And yet, here it was, gazing down at him (he assumed – it was hard to be sure) and waiting for him to hand over its kid.
“I told you I’d find it,” Dan said, raising the infant towards its mother. It was difficult to judge just how far to raise it, as the mother was both billions of light years away and close enough that Dan could feel her cold heat on his parchment skin. Dan decided just to put both arms out straight, and hope he hadn’t touched her anywhere inappropriate.
Both shapes – all shapes – blurred as one absorbed the other. The mind-bending pulsating spiked, and Dan jerked back as if icicles had been jammed into both eyes. The air around the thing grew hotter and colder, the atoms cracking and popping audibly.
“We had a deal,” Dan said, forcing himself to gaze into the twisting heart of the thing, no matter how much his brain felt like it was about to melt. “I get the kid back, you don’t bring the whole world down around our ears.”
Reality itself creaked and groaned on all the entity’s infinite sides. “I kept my end. Now you keep yours.”
It took Dan several seconds to realize he was talking to himself. The thing had gone. Long gone. Some niggling little part of his subconscious told him it had left long before he’d even arrived, although he knew that couldn’t really be the case.
Or maybe it could. Fonk knew with those things.
Whatever, it was gone now. The planet and the rest of the galaxy still seemed to exist, so all things considered it could’ve gone a whole lot worse.
“Don’t move,” hissed a voice from behind him.
Dan turned, sighing. The gun guy was standing well beyond reach, the flames of the explosion still creeping through the air in the adjoining alleyway behind him. He looked in bad shape, his face and arms lacerated and dented by the hail of flying rocks Dan had abandoned him to.
“I said don’t move!”
“I know. But I ignored you,” Dan replied. The guy was too far away from him to reach, but close enough that even if the guy shot and missed, the explosion would reduce Dan and everything in his immediate vicinity to a colorful mist. “Put down the gun, son. It’s over. The holluck’s gone.”
“The what?”
“Seriously?” Dan said. He jabbed a thumb into the space behind him, which was now mercifully free of brain-twisting entities. “The pan-dimensional demi-god you tried to kidnap. And, more importantly, its extremely ticked off mother. They’re gone. It’s over. Now, it’s been a long night, so put down the fonking gun.”
“That was our payday,” the gun guy said, his teeth clamping together as he fought back tears. “That was going to set us up for life. And you ruined it!”
“Son, I saved your life and the lives of everyone you’ve ever known. That thing would’ve torn the galaxy apart trying to find its kid, and it would have started with you.” Dan flexed his gloved fingers, then balled them into fists. “Now, put down the gun, and say ‘thank you.’”
Gun guy snorted as if he’d just heard a joke he didn’t quite get. “You what?”
“You heard,” said Dan, tilting his hat back a little. He both loved and hated the expression of horrified revulsion the man adopted when his face was fully revealed.
Four Eyes staggered to a stop beside him. When he saw Dan’s face, his expression quickly switched to match that of his partner.
“Wh-wh-what are you?” Four Eyes whimpered, his voice muffled by the corks of dried blood bunging up his nose.
“Right now, I’m the best chance you two have of surviving the next few hours,” Dan told them. “I know you stole the holluck to order. Probably didn’t even know what you were getting into. Whoever was paying you to get it, they’re going to come after you. They’re going to make sure you don’t talk. That’s how these guys work. Trust me.”
The two men exchanged a nervous glance. The gun waivered.
“I can keep you safe,” Dan told them. “Tell me who the buyer was, and I can take them out before they can get to you.”
There was an exchange of frantic whispering between the two men. Four Eyes gave a resigned nod towards the gun. When it didn’t lower, he put a hand on the barrel and nudged it downwards. Gun guy didn’t resist, just sighed and looked defeated as he lowered the weapon all the way.
“We… we didn’t know,” he mumbled. “We didn’t know.”
Dan put a finger behind his ear and pushed it outwards, indicating he was waiting to hear something. It took gun guy a few moments to figure out what.
“Thank you,” he said, fixing his eyes on the ground at his feet.
Four Eyes wiped a smear of blood from below his broken nose. “Thank you,” he said, visibly grudging every syllable.
“You’re welcome,” Dan said. “And I know you didn’t know what you were doing. You’re clearly idiots. So, how about you tell me who’s behind—”
A Jonta Exodus fell on the men from above, cutting Dan’s line of enquiry short.
He blinked, but otherwise didn’t move as a spray of blood spattered across his face. He watched in silence as two of the car’s four wheels rolled off in different directions, before wobbling to a stop and falling over some distance away.
A six-inch tall figure dropped onto the car’s crumpled roof, the dress it wore billowing out around it like a parachute.
“Got it,” announced Artur, straightening and dusting himself down. He put his hands on his lower back and cricked his spine, then looked around him. “Now then,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “What’d I miss?”
CHAPTER THREE
There was no fixing the Exodus. Not tonight, at least, and probably not ever.
The crane – or its magnet, at least – was similarly ruined, and it took Dan a full hour to find the kidnappers’ buggy, th
en use it to drag his car somewhere that wasn’t sitting directly atop two squishy piles of humanoid remains.
He eventually abandoned it beside the rotting hulks of several other wrecks. Most of them looked like they’d been there for months. All of them were in better condition than the Exodus.
“This is a nice vehicle,” Artur said, nodding appreciatively up at the open roof. The blue glow of the city engines rippled over them, making the buggy feel like a miniature submarine at the bottom of a rolling ocean. “We should keep it. It’s the least they can do, what with the trouble they put you through.”
“It’s too hot,” Dan said.
“I’m sure if you press enough buttons one of them’ll be the aircon,” Artur suggested. He pressed a button. It wasn’t the aircon. Nor, as far as he could tell, was it anything else.
Dan pressed it again, switching off whatever – if anything – had been switched on.
“No, I mean it’s too hot. It belongs… belonged to two low-lives who, in case you didn’t notice, were recently crushed to death by a falling car.”
Artur snorted. “What? And you’re worried the Tribunal might come poking their nose in? Ye think they give a shoite?”
“Not the Tribunal,” Dan said, clambering out of the buggy’s bucket-shaped driver’s seat. “But whoever hired them to steal the kid might come looking for answers, and I’d prefer to meet them on my own terms.”
He pulled his collar high and his hat down low, then began marching in the direction of the exit.
“Wait, we’re not walking, are we?” Artur called after him. “Are ye kidding me? It’s fecking miles away! And, though you may not know this about me, I’m by my nature a very lazy person.”
He looked up as he scampered along after Dan. “Also, it’s getting late, and you know what my temper gets like in the wee small hours. Sure, I can’t help meself.”
Dan opened his mouth to retort, then decided against it. He held open a pocket of his coat, and waited for Artur to clamber inside. “Fine,” he grunted. “We’ll try to get a cab.”
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