He could see the undulating silver mass of nanobots, but no Ollie. The multi-colored flashes of fire gave Dan a pretty good idea of where she was, though.
“Ye think she can do it?” Artur asked. “Ye think she can take out all them tiny robots?”
“No,” Dan admitted. “But I don’t need her to. I just need Aranok to believe she can.”
Artur waited for more of an explanation, but it soon became clear one wasn’t coming. “Ye’re a cryptic bastard, Deadman,” he grumbled. “Well, sure, I hope ye know what ye’re doing.”
“Me too,” Dan said, then he turned and hurried into the junkyard stacks, leaving the raging battle far behind.
* * *
Ollie stood in the center of a swirling vortex of silver, tiny bolts of lightning crackling across her body and flowing from her fingertips.
To say she was scared didn’t really do it justice. The rational part of her brain was still there somewhere, but it was merely observing as some more primitive and primal part took control of her body and unleashed a rainbow of Hells on the demon-cloud.
From its vantage point, her rational brain noted that the cloud was really very big indeed, and was currently surrounding her in all directions. On the other hand, it also noted that Ollie’s physical form was radiating an incredible amount of heat that seemed to be preventing the bots getting too close to her. The wall of the tornado’s eye was glowing white hot as millions of the tiny robots burned up.
The swirling tunnel folded upwards, briefly becoming an impossible shape that twisted around and folded in on itself, before several tentacle-like strands emerged from it and stabbed down in Ollie’s direction.
The primal part of her brain stepped up again and thrust her hands above her head. The aura of heat became a concentrated beam of white that carved through the tendrils, punched a hole in the impossible shape, then continued all the way into the upper atmosphere.
Unfortunately, somewhere between Ollie and the upper atmosphere of the planet Parloo was one of several million floating cities, so the beam passed through that, too. Around half of the blue glowing area on the city’s underside stopped being either of those things, which appeared to put a real dampener on its ability to stay aloft.
Slowly – reeeeeeally slowly – the city began to tilt, and then proceeded to start falling.
It was still Up There for now, but it was a little less Up There than it had been, and was getting further Down Here by the second.
The rational part of Ollie’s brain picked up on all this, but it had been relegated to such a small area now that it couldn’t really do anything about it. Even if it had been in charge, it doubted it could have done anything, anyway. Run away crying, perhaps, but nothing else was immediately springing to mind.
It decided to keep an eye on the falling metropolis for the moment, in the hope that it all somehow worked itself out. They probably had a spare engine somewhere. It would seem remiss for them not to.
Back Down Here, meanwhile, Aranok the Inhabitant was having his own internal strategy meeting, and it went something like this:
Ooh shizz.
Ooh shizzy, shizzy, shizz-fonk.
This was quickly seconded by all the other parts of his collective consciousness, and it was agreed that a new approach was required.
The swarm reformed, bunched together, then once again took the form of Aranok himself. It was potentially less effective than an ever-changing mass of gelatinous liquid metal, but he had more experience with this shape, and experience might just be what made the difference.
What Aranok didn’t know, though – what he couldn’t possibly have known – was that Ollie had a deep-rooted, practically pathological hatred for anything large and demon-like, and the sight of a fifty-feet tall one looming ahead of her did nothing to calm her rage.
Because he wasn’t aware of this, Aranok was feeling pretty pleased with his decision to adopt this form. He remained pleased with the decision right up until the point his legs were cleaved off by a scything energy blast, whereupon he concluded that it might have been a mistake.
The frog-like limbs collapsed beneath him, but as they fell they twisted and reformed, the severed thighs becoming the feet even as the feet fattened and reattached themselves to the demon’s hips.
Throwing out both spindly arms, Aranok toppled two towers of compacted metal cubes towards Ollie. She screamed – a raw, primal sound that had precisely nothing to do with fear – and the blocks changed direction. They slammed into the demon-bot, staggering him and getting wedged in his bulky frame.
Ollie’s hands came up on their own again as one of the cubes was launched back towards her. The already crumpled metal collapsed further, becoming smaller and more densely compacted. She redirected it with a wave and it hit a junk stack like a wrecking ball, bringing the whole thing crashing to the ground.
The rational part of her brain hated to admit it, but it was starting to rather enjoy this. Sure, the Up There city was still tilting, still falling, and would likely kill them all in a colossal fireball, but that was a worry for later. Not much later, admittedly, but a few minutes down the line, at least.
For now, though, Ollie’s brain just stood back and watched admiringly as her most primal instincts clapped her hands in front of her and the stacks of compressed metal closed like the walls of a battle-station trash-compactor, crushing the demon-bot between them.
Aranok became liquid metal and flooded out through the gaps in the junk. He took to the air again, fluttering like a sheet on the wind as he searched for some other viable form with which to turn this pitiful sack of bone and guts into a greasy spot on the ground.
He was part of the way through changing from a generic swarming blob to a whirling sphere of spiky death when a wide blast of fiery energy obliterated a few hundred thousand more nanobots. Relatively speaking, it wasn’t a lot – barely zero-point-one per cent of his total number, but it was enough to tell him that the nanobot phase of his life was probably over, and the time had come to move on. It had been fun while it lasted, but the girl was just too powerful to fight.
He’d just have to take back control of her, and use that power for himself.
The nanobots collapsed as one, becoming an inert silver hillock amidst all the debris. The now non-corporeal Aranok set his sights on Ollie and poured through the air towards her. She raised her hands and blasted him with a fizzing beam of blue energy. It passed through harmlessly through him, and the Inhabitant writhed in glee as he launched himself at Ollie’s head.
A hand caught him by the throat. This took the demon by surprise, as he hadn’t had a throat just a moment before. Now, though, a gloved hand was most definitely holding him by it, and quite tightly, too.
“Well now,” Dan said, the words emerging as an angry, yet also quite satisfied-sounding growl. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“The gloves!” cried Artur from Dan’s front pocket. “That’s why ye came back, for the old monster-grabbers. Ye crafty big bastard, ye!”
“Yup,” said Dan, holding Aranok firmly around the windpipe as he crunched a jab into the bridge of one of the demon’s many noses. “That’s why I came back.”
Coughing and wheezing, Aranok raised both frog legs and drove them towards Dan’s stomach. Deadman caught one of the feet around the ankle and twisted sharply until something in the demon’s knee made a popping sound that would likely haunt it for the rest of its life. However many minutes that might turn out to be.
Aranok let out a burbling wail. Several of his eyes bored into his captor, and Dan felt those icy fingers go digging around in his brain again, frantically searching for a handhold. He saw glimpses of a hole in his chest and a hole in the ground. He saw Vanshie, panic writ large on her face.
“Ain’t gonna work,” he said, tightening his grip and forcing his fears back down into the dark where they belonged.
With his free hand, Dan fished Artur from his pocket. “O
llie. Catch,” he said. Artur yelped as he was tossed through the air, went sailing over Ollie’s shoulder and thudded to the ground.
“Oh, nice catch, peaches,” Artur complained, spitting out dust as he got back to his feet. He took one look up at Ollie and decided it best not to push the matter any further. She stood rooted to the spot, her whole body trembling, her breath snarling in and out of her in vast red vapor-clouds.
“Uh, ye alright there? Sure, ye’re looking a little… on edge.”
“Calm her down,” Dan urged, marching away from them, partly carrying and partly shoving the struggling Aranok on ahead. “Be right back.”
The Inhabitant’s bony fingers dug into Dan’s wrist, but a few crunching jabs to the thing’s guts took some of the fight out of it.
The fingers in his brain became ice picks, but everything precious or delicate was buried beyond their reach now. Aranok squealed in despair and threw out his leathery wings, as if just the sight of him in all his glory would be enough to make Dan back down and let him go.
It wasn’t.
While held by the gloves, the demon was fully corporeal. Dan took full advantage of this and smashed the monster’s head into the rusted chassis of an old pick-up. Aranok hissed, then rained a flurry of blows on Dan’s head and upper body.
“Knock it off,” Dan warned, cracking a backhand slap across the Inhabitant’s distended jaw. He dragged him into another of the narrower passageways, out of Ollie and Artur’s sight. The demon’s squirming intensified as he anticipated what was coming next.
“Don’t kill me,” he croaked, all hints of the big bad Malwhere monster crumbling away like a decaying façade. “I’ll go. I’ll leave. I promise.”
Dan flicked his dry tongue across the front of his teeth. Despite the lack of air in his lungs, he sighed. “A few weeks ago… Hell, a few days ago, you’d be dead already. I’d have killed you without a first thought, let alone a second one.”
He looked back over his shoulder in the direction they’d come from. “But… I don’t know. Things change, I guess. Everything changes.” He pulled Aranok in closer until they were nose to noses. “So, between you and me, I’m trying to change, too. It won’t be easy, but I’m trying.”
Even with the hand on his throat, Aranok managed a grateful nod. “Th-thank you,” he sniveled. “Thank you. You won’t regret it.”
“I said I’m trying to change,” Dan grunted. He brought his other hand up quickly. There was a crack as the demon’s neck snapped. Releasing his grip, Dan watched the Inhabitant’s lifeless form slump to the ground. “Didn’t say I was there yet.”
As Dan stood over it, the body seemed to go into a high-speed decay. The flesh dried out, darkening until it became charcoal, then dust, then smoke. Whatever was left of Aranok swirled upwards on the breeze, then dissipated in the air.
Dan nodded in satisfaction, then staggered and fell against the closest junk stack as his legs decided enough was enough and exhaustion dragged down on him. He knew the Tribunal would be on the way, but the sirens sounded distant, and he reckoned he could spare a minute or two to rest up.
“Deaaaaadmaaaaan!”
Artur’s voice was a panicky roar that rolled across the junk yard and poked into every corner.
Dan groaned and pushed himself back into a standing position. He shambled, even more zombie-like than usual, out of the alleyway. “What is it now?” he muttered, then he blinked in the glaring intensity of the blue glow that was now painted across the ground and over the stacks.
Tilting his head back, Dan looked up. An entire city was falling towards them. That was… unexpected. It was maybe a third of a mile up, but getting steadily closer despite the best efforts of its one working engine.
“Oh,” Dan spat. “Fonk.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Artur said. “Any ideas? Because I am clean out.”
“Ollie?” Dan barked, hurrying to her side. The aura of power had gone again, and Ollie’s rational brain had been sucked back into action, quite against its will.
“Huh? What?” she spluttered.
“Falling city,” Dan said, keeping it brief. “Can you stop it?”
“No!” Ollie said, her voice a barely-audible whisper. “No, I can’t.”
“Maybe ye could push her into the path of it,” Artur said, making no attempt to hide the accusing edge to his voice. “See if maybe that spurs her into action, eh? Oh, wait, we’re already in the path of it.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Dan grunted.
“Well, previously we had some tiny robots giving us shoite, and now a feckin’ city’s about to fall on us from out of the sky, so I’m not entirely convinced that it worked at all, no.”
They stood together, looking up and looking lost. There was nothing to be done, Dan realized. Nothing but the waiting.
He felt something squeeze his hand through the glove, and looked down to find Ollie holding it. How long had she been doing that for, he wondered? And why?
He watched her for a moment, her head back, her eyes locked on the tumbling city, fear etching the lines of her face. Could she stop it? Maybe. He had no idea. He just knew he couldn’t ask her to try. The kid had been through enough today. Hell, she’d been through enough every day.
There was nothing to be done.
Nothing but the waiting.
“Still, if there’s one silver lining to this, it’s that we’ll take out a few million of those stuck-up bastards with us,” Artur said, gesturing up at the falling piece of Up There. It was so close they could hear snatches of screaming on the wind, and the blaring of some kind of klaxon alarm.
“Technically, they’ll be taking us out,” Dan said.
Artur tutted loudly. “Well, way to spoil a perfectly nice moment,” he said. “Sure, ye couldn’t have just left me with one fecking happy thought to keep the chill from me bones in the afterlife? Oh no, ye had to go and…”
The silver mound shifted beneath him, stopping him short. “Hey. Here now. Did ye feel that?”
He grabbed frantically at everything within reach as the ground swallowed him like quicksand. Dan bent and made a grab into the pile of inert nanobots and…
And…
Wait. No. They weren’t inert. Not anymore.
They billowed up around them, tentatively at first, but quickly finding their confidence. Uncovered once more, Artur spun, fists raised. “What the feck was that about?” he demanded.
As the nanobots spiraled upwards, Ollie shrank back behind Dan, but he kept hold of her hand and stopped her. “Hold on. It’s OK,” he said. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. It was not something he did often, and it didn’t really suit him, but this was one of those rare occasions that warranted it. “It’s all going to be OK.”
The nanobots formed a vast halo that grew spokes until it resembled a giant wheel lying horizontally in the sky. Dan and the others watched as it positioned itself beneath the city and matched its speed, so now both the platform and the nanobot wheel were falling.
The platform groaned as the nanobots slowed their descent and it came to rest atop them. The blue light of the engine was blinding now, turning night into day. The heat it gave off wasn’t yet enough to cause any damage, but the air rolling over Down Here was warm, and would soon become uncomfortably so.
And then, with a final creak, the city stopped falling. The nanobot wheel inched higher, levelling the platform out. Dan heard Ollie laugh with relief as the whole thing began to climb again, and had to resist joining in.
Instead, he raised his wrist-comm to his mouth and spoke into it. “Nice work, Tressingham.”
There was silence for a while, only broken by the soft whispers of static. Finally, a voice broke in.
“Thank you,” Tressingham said, then the comm-unit bleeped once more, as Tressingham hung up.
“Well now, there was a night and a half, eh?” Artur said. He raised his eyebrows as if an idea had just occurred to him. Dan didn’t need any detective skills to see
through the act. “Oh! Hold on a moment! Ye know what we should do now?”
“Pretty sure I can guess,” Dan said.
“Pub!” Artur exclaimed, then he frowned. “Why are you two holding hands, by the way? Is there somethin’ ye’re not telling me?”
Ollie and Dan both looked down at their hands, then yanked their hands apart. “He looked scared,” Ollie said.
“I looked scared?” said Dan. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t scared.”
“A city was going to fall on our head,” Ollie pointed out.
“Was I concerned? Yes,” said Dan. “But that’s not the same as…”
A blaster round punched a hole in his stomach, ejecting a dribble of intestines out through his back. He looked down at the wound, his shoulders heaving in dismay.
“Oh, great,” he muttered, as dozens of Tribunal Enforcers and marksmen swarmed the junk yard. “There goes another shirt.”
“On the ground. Face down. Hands where we can see them!” barked a voice on a loudspeaker.
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Dan shouted back.
“We just saved the whole city, ye fecking eejits!” Artur hollered. Ollie started to point out that it was the nanobots who had technically done that, but he waved the objection away. “They don’t know that, do they?” he said. “Besides, we saved it from the nanobots in the first place. And from yerself before that, when ye were going all crazy and trashing the place, like.”
“We will open fire.”
“You already opened fire, you dumb piece of shizz,” Dan said, pointing to the almost perfectly circular hole in his stomach. “So how about you give us a break.” He jabbed a thumb in Ollie’s direction. “Or she will start blowing stuff up again.”
“What?” Ollie said, but Dan stepped in front of her.
“I mean it. Back off, or she cuts loose.”
There was silence from the Tribunal ranks. Tucked behind a full-height photon shield, Dan could see an officer talking anxiously into a wrist-comm.
“Very well,” the man said, once his conversation was over.
Dead Inside: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 2) Page 22