He pushed the flickering, useless headset up out of the way, straining to make out Gormann’s massive form.
Fitch, Clements – anyone...
But it seemed that the room had widened out around him – he couldn’t even see the door anymore. Veils of shifting smoke and dust hemmed him in, with twitching, lurching shadows stalking behind them. Something was dripping out there, counterpoint to a noise like the slide and slither of wet meat...
Instinctively Dravin clenched his gun to his chest – a comfort, an anchor. His thumb came down on the little switch which tripped his radio connection.
It was the same slobbering, grinding sound, hashed up by static, overlayered with far-off screams and moans. Then fire control came through, out of a howl of feedback.
“Oh gods! What the hell is that thing? It’s all over the transport!” A burst of gunfire, suddenly cut off with a ripping snarl. “McMasters! What’s wrong with your face? Oh, please, no! NO!”
That’s when Dravin came face to face with his buddy Fitch.
For the first time since he’d seen daylight through a hole in little Ralf Jenkks, Special Constable Coyle felt like throwing up.
Fitch was only standing upright because of what somebody had done to him – he’d been all but crucified on a tangle of rusted plumbing. Jagged sheared-off pipes were punched through his arms, his legs, his chest – one dripping length of copper came up through his lower jaw and out through his cheek. There was no way he could feel it, though – one half of his head looked like it had been battered in with a concrete cinderblock.
Or...and now the thought had started, there was to way to cram it back into the recesses of his mind...or by the huge gnarled fist of Junior Constable Gormann.
He turned, panic-quick, his torch lit up and cutting a blazing arc through the gloom.
Nothing.
No – really nothing – no gunshots, no noise, no screams....even the radio was dead, when he dared trip the little switch again. This was supposed to be a warzone, wasn’t it?
Where were the Rude Boys, where was Grady Townsend? Where, for the love of all hells, were his boys from C-Tac? Something had gotten Fitch, that was for sure. But the hab was a silent as a tomb.
Silent for a second that stretched out into an eternity, anyhow. Then came the sound again, from behind him.
The sound of toothless jaws chewing gristle, of slobbering lips smacking with dreadful hunger. Dravin Coyle turned as if on wheels, slow and hesitant, thinking about that staved-in face, that burst eye dripping, the mouth slack and broken...
Oh, it was much, much worse. If only it had been the mangled corpse of his old friend, instead of the thing which now bathed him in its noisome breath.
It was as black as tar, glistening in the torchlight, its face stretched over the misshapen and battered skull of the late Constable Fitch. Needle teeth like those of some hideous deep-abyssal fish snapped open and shut as it flexed the dead man’s broken jaw, which now hinged open all the way down to his punctured chest. A tongue like a bullwhip of dripping flesh coiled out of that gaping maw, weaving hypnotically in the stale air. At its tip hovered a single unblinking eyeball, jaundice yellow, regarding Dravin’s jugular with unconcealed lust.
“Nicccce tryyy, Draaav." it bubbled. "Weeeer’e gonnnaa like you. Yoooouurrr’e gonna be fff-fffammily!”
He heard Fitch’s bones snap and break and reform as the thing stood up, its grotesque face still nailed on backwards, drooling black tar from between lacerated lips. An eyeball like a vast pustule rose up out of the slime, fixing Dravin with a mad pinhole stare.
And then its puppet-master stepped forward, through the curtains of shifting mist, and Dravin Coyle suffered a terrible intimation of his fate.
It was Junior Constable Gormann – and it was Clements as well. The screaming face of Dravin’s squad sharpshooter was frozen under boiling black tar, a contorted rictus of agony bulging from Gormann’s shoulder. One of his arms jutted at a crazed, broken angle from the big man’s back, its hand replaced with the dripping muzzle of his automatic. Gormann’s face was free from the crawling mass of filth which smothered his lumpen body – all but his eyes, two seething pools of liquid night. He was pale, almost bloodless, the horrorworks of scars which crosshatched his face pulsing livid purple.
One of his fingers ended in a tapering projection – narrowing down to become a tight black thread which linked him to the monstrous Steven Fitch.
When the monstrosity spoke, its voice issued from both its bodies, a mad disharmony which crazed and echoed in Dravin’s aching head.
“It showed me the way, boss.” said Gormann, reaching out almost tenderly to stroke his commander’s slime-soaked hair. Huge chunks and mats of it were peeling away from his skull now, but he couldn’t feel it. “We’re all going to be part of something beautiful, Constable. As good and true and right as how it felt when you were nine. I know what it was like, Dravin. You were an angel of righteousness, weren’t you? You were all-powerful. The blood, and the bits inside, and the smell of shit and cordite... I even know you had a hard-on, you little bastard. I know how you felt. And now we’re all going to feel it. When we become one, and give that feeling, that part of ourselves to the New Flesh.”
Dravin could hardly discern the horror in his head from the horror loose in the world, now. But Gormann’s words (spoken in a voice both intimate and clinical, a voice that could never come from the mouth of that big thug) touched something inside him.
He remembered that moment, the moment when the gun had made him God. And he smiled as the black fluid flowed out from Fitch’s mouth, slow-motion waves of it sinking into his skin. He smiled even as it slicked over his teeth, wriggled down his throat like a handful of live worms. He would live in that moment now, forever...
“It showed me the way, boss. It said that I was waiting for it, all along. It named me – Exalted.”
Then the barbs came out, and the black tar flashed to boiling point inside him, and the pain began.
It was just exactly as terrible as he could imagine.
Kronos jammed the shutdowns as fast as it could – sealing off huge chunks of the Wetsystems with every switch, acutely aware that with each override it was isolating the greater part of its own city-sized brain.
The bad sector, down near the ruins of the Valley View was irretrievably lost. Thousands of minds had been infected there already – only a hundredth part of Kronos’s jealously guarded hoard, but enough to spawn horrors all over the Last City. The connections to and from the bad sector formed a black spiderweb of wire and sub-ether links – here they meshed with the fire control systems of C-Tac, there a single skein of fiberoptics linked them to a synthesoy extruder... there was no time to track every last vector of infection. All the great machine could do was slam the doors shut and slide home the bolts, locking the Saprophytes outside. No doubt there would be terror on the streets tonight. But the important thing was that the Forge remained under Kronos’s control.
There was still the matter of the Blacksteel to consider, and the treacherous Illuminatus of the Ashishim. But there was a sure and certain way to deal with them. All it required was the key to unlock the door...
Simeon Blaire was far from an ideal candidate to wield the force of the Forge; indeed, the effort would probably burn his feeble mind to ashes. But freedom of choice was the cost of being a mere machine... no doubt a more suitable candidate could be chosen after young Simeon had been used up and wrung dry, and after the Wetsystems had been recharged with a fresh generation of the dead. In Kronos’s millennial timescale, this was just a minor delay. And if Blaire were to fail?
Well, it was wise to remember that the Game was a human conceit. There were others equally vicious and single-minded who would serve admirably as fodder for the Forge. After all, this was hardly its intended use. Even the one who was trying to kill Blaire right now would be acceptable, at a pinch.
Another bank of switches hammered closed, and the lights in Kronos’s
asteroidal palace flickered and dimmed. So many vectors, so many connections...
All that mattered was keeping the things Nyl had unleashed from the controls.
Leighton Cressmeyer was having a very bad evening. In fact, he could honestly say that getting held up at gunpoint was the highlight of his day. He’d been burned, robbed, battered, bruised and confused, taken for a ride by a mad Ashishi that had racked up his blood pressure tenfold, and now....
Now, he wasn’t sure what he’d seen behind that door. Or rather, he had a horrible, sickening certainty that he knew exactly what bits of it were. He also knew just what it wanted from him, and that was why he was running.
He remembered coming through the very same factory during his horrific ride, although how he knew... well, it wasn’t his fault if his eyes had been clamped tight shut. That woman drove like a demolition racer, like the myths were true and the agents of the Illuminatus could really throw away bodies like ragged old clothes.
Still, even if this was one ‘fac over, Leighton was pretty sure there was nowhere in Elysium that was supposed to make things like that. The worst part was when all of them had turned to look at him at the same time, revolving as through the black lake of slime they stood knee-deep in was twisting them around by their feet. Mekan? No – there was something hideously organic about them, about the hot hunger in their collective stare. And the scream, when he bolted back for the mass-shifter tunnel! That was an animal noise, if ever he’d heard one. It was lust and agony bellowing from a hundred throats at once.
Now they were at his heels, and Leighton knew he couldn’t escape. His breath was burning in his lungs, his muscles were tight with pain. He could feel his hammering heartbeat in his temples – this was probably the furthest he’d run in his whole life! He’d even hitch a lift with that Ashishi hellion again...
Then came the sound again, echoing off the blue-lit metal walls of the tunnel. He could smell them now, their rotten-meat stench rolling in front of them like a wave. Although – although Leighton wasn’t so sure they were a them. They acted like ants, or termites... like they were all just parts of one great slimy black mass, for all that they had arms and legs and eyes apiece.
And teeth, his mind added. Don’t forget the teeth.
Leighton felt himself slowing down as the charnel stink flooded around him in an almost palpable cloud. When he looked down he saw why, and a stifled scream knotted up his chest.
The black liquid had caught up with him, and it plucked at his heels with a thousand little anemone tendrils. It could have tripped him up, flooded over him like an oilslick, poured down his throat and drowned him. But he knew that they – it was playing with him. The fact that he knew seemed to make it stronger – a playful little surge of vile fluid slapped him to his knees, and he scrambled up again with a shout of pain. The stuff burned! Not like scalding water, or even the hot bitumen it resembled – it stung like acid, raising blisters on his exposed skin.
Leighton cowered against the wall, tears streaming down his face. This was it, then. The end, melted down to bones and sludge by some kind of chemical demon...
He risked a glance out of one blurry eye and saw the viscous swill slowly spinning, as though it were draining down some vast plughole. From the hole in its oily black surface a creature was rising – one of the homunculoid fiends which had chased him from the manufactorium.
It was like a ragged patchwork of fears, this thing – here a disemboweling horn, there a vast and bloodshot eye, there a stick-thin arm terminating in scissor claws. It had no face, just a globular protrusion between its uneven shoulders, a stump split by countless drooling mouths. In a mad, hysterical way, it was almost funny. The thing was trying so hard to be terrifying that it was almost pathetic.
Slow, dripping noisome gobbets of reeking oil, the thing reached out to caress his face with one razor claw, slicing a thin gash in his cheek. It hissed like an adder at the sight of his blood, looming up over him, a wave about to break....
Then it collapsed back in on itself in a welter of whiplike tendrils, back into a flat black sheet of liquid on the floor. Even that gruesome tide began to recede, pulling back from Leighton’s feet like a torrent in reverse.
He was still breathing. He was still alive...
It only took seconds – and the creature was gone. Not for the first time since he’d stared down on that horde of oozing black demons Leighton entertained the thought that he’d been drugged.
The Ashishim were known chemheads, right? Perhaps the whole thing was just a mad hallucination? Perhaps that crazy bitch wanted to cover her tracks?
Oh, he knew deep down that it wasn’t true. All the more reason to hold onto the thought with both hands
The lights began to flicker, then, and he knew that the- the thing was regrouping. Perhaps calling up its friends for a little dinnertime entertainment.
Then he felt a deep rumble come up through his feet (the soles of his boots had been eaten away to nothing by the tide of acid slime). Far away, around the spiral coil of the mass-shifter tunnel he heard switches locking into place, shunting one of the immense cargo pods his way. That was why the creature had fled. Those mass-shifters had been built to slam their loads all the way up the ‘lev and into orbit. If he was caught out here he’d soon be nothing but a long streak of red on the tracks.
Leighton smirked to himself – score one for the human race. That stupid creature didn’t know what was coming, he wagered. Anything bigger than it was probably scared it shitless. But Leighton Cressmeyer knew a thing or two about moving goods. He knew all about the emergency ports in the tunnel walls, every quarter mile, regular as clockwork.
This section of the tunnel was straight for about three miles – a gentle upward incline with the loading ports of a dozen manufactoria opening out into it. Up near the ceiling vast clamshell doors hung open, with cranes and pulleys and feeder pipes swinging in the gloom. All he had to do was find the emergency port, and the mass-shifter would go past like a bullet down the barrel of a gun. Hopefully that slimy beast would still be in the way.
The rumble was growing louder with every second, and Leighton forced himself up to a painful lope, frantically searching for the tell-tale black-and-yellow panel. There! Just a little further! And it seemed that he’d be just in time – he could actually see the shifter coming down on him now, a wall of metal still miles distant, pushing a plug of stale air in front of it like a tidal wave. The hot wind streamed around Leighton as he reached the hatch, exultant, and twisted its handle.
Nothing.
Now the wind stopped, and he looked up, to where the house-sized shifter was still screaming toward him. The pressure was rising, and he felt his ears pop. That could only mean....
Oh, no. But yes. Oh yes. When Leighton turned back the other way there was a second giant cargo shifter coming down the tunnel, on a collision course. Score one for...for whatever they were. Because now he could see the scarred and pitted faceplates of the shifters, he could see the seething black skin which slicked over the metal. Left, right, and they were both the same. Writhing, oilslick black, spiked up into a wall of razor teeth... And around the edges of the emergency hatch, a dripping, oozing leakage of rotten fluid, jamming it shut.
Only half a mile now, and they were coming in at the speed of passenger jets, thousands of tons of screaming steel riding an electromagnetic pulse....
Emergency overrides reversed the wave at just the right second, slamming on the shifters’ brakes.
All for me, thought Leighton Cressmeyer. All that trouble, just for me. It was terribly sad to think that this was the most important that he’d ever felt in his life.
Then the terror took him, and he screamed, hopeless and cathartic as walls of jagged black teeth hammered down on him. He screamed right until those teeth met in the middle of his chest, until the two great mass-shifters hammered together with enough force to shake the whole sector.
The Worm raged in its confinement, battering itself against
the impenetrable electronic walls of the infected sector.
Second by second its taint spread out through the wires, waking nightmares in the streets and down among the habs and manufactoriums. But still...
The damned machine had reacted too fast! Now it was hemmed in, locked away from its triumphal feast of pain by a delicate meshwork of code.
In its impatient hunger the Worm had learned only so much from Technician Nyl – not nearly enough to slice its way through the most sophisticated ice ever created.
It would have to use force, then. It would have to take the fight to Kronos out there, in the real world of meat and blood.
For every mind bound and vivisected in the Wetsystems it could wake a single Saprophyte. And just like every time it crossed the barrier and entered the world, there were those who welcomed it. Men like Junior Constable Gormann, who felt the same hunger, the same ravenous lust for destruction. They would become its Exalted, most valuable of its slaves. Its rank-and file saprophyte soldiers lasted only so long, before the corpses they animated rotted away in their embrace. But even more would be born from the dead, once its chosen ones began the great harvest.
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