by Mike Wild
Gasping, she came at last to the dome within which she hoped to find Brother Incera. The structure was much larger close to than it had appeared during her approach, as one might expect considering it housed the Faith’s so-called cosmoscope. The immense arrangement of lenses and mirrors that magnified the skies above Twilight had been considered by many within the Church to be a blasphemous, sacrilegious object but somehow it had survived the Faith’s puritanical purges over the years, as had its keeper, Incera himself. The aging Brother probably knew more about the vagaries and mechanisms of the heavens than anyone else on Twilight, and for that reason Kali hoped that he, amongst a Faith who, troublingly, seemed to have accepted the Hel’ss as a part of their religion, might be able to enlighten her as to what the entity was and what the hells was going on.
A sheet of lightning illuminated Kali as she paused at the base of the dome, frowning. She might have reached it but getting inside was another matter. The actual entrance to the dome was one floor down, inside the cathedral, and other than risking further close encounters with the Faith the only other way in was the gap in its curved surface out of which the cosmoscope viewed the heavens. And that was currently positioned almost at the apex of the dome, trained, it seemed, on Kerberos.
Kali jumped back at a sudden grating in the rooftop beneath her feet, and realised that the dome was turning. She looked down at its base, where thick greased wheels revolved along a circular track, and then upwards, where she could just make out the nose of the cosmoscope being realigned to a different viewpoint. The angle and degree of rotation left little doubt in Kali’s mind that it was turning to face the Hel’ss, and Kali guessed – hoped – that Incera was doing what she’d hoped he would be doing – comparing the two celestial bodies like the man of science he was. Because if Incera’s curiosity was piqued sufficiently for him to do that, then she just might not have to force the information she needed out of him.
Kali dug into a pocket of her slashed silk bodysuit and withdrew a small tube, the base of which she rotated. The tube was one of a number of Old Race devices she’d scrounged from Merrit Moon some months before, reasoning that if she’d become Public Enemy Number One she needed all the assistance she could get. From the top of the tube a magnetic wire shot upwards to wrap itself around the cosmoscope, and Kali pulled the wire taut and climbed, grabbing onto the broad cylinder of metal. She heaved herself upwards with a grunt, her chest pressing against the cosmoscope’s outer lens, and then she flipped herself onto its top from where she was able to work her way inside the dome.
It was a tight squeeze but at last she made it through. She dropped to the floor of Brother Incera’s observatory; a wet, smouldering and bedraggled figure looking like something that had dragged itself from the depths of the Strannian Sulphur Swamps.
Three acolytes stopped what they were doing and stared. One of them made a move for a bell suspended in a niche in the wall, but as the young woman was about to raise its accompanying hammer to sound the alarm a voice from the operative end of the cosmoscope said, “No.”
Kali turned, water sloughing from her to form a puddle at her feet. The man who had spoken continued to stare into the eyepiece of the cosmoscope but waved a hand behind him, shooing the acolyte away from the alarm. Though she couldn’t see his face, Kali guessed that the older, more hunched looking form beneath the Faith robes was who she had struggled here to see.
Brother Incera turned a moment later, a look of curiosity on his face. There was also an intrigued twinkle in his eyes and superficial resemblance to the old man that reminded Kali very much of Merrit Moon.
“Leave us,” Incera said to the acolytes. “And say nothing to the guards.”
The acolytes did, though casting vaguely suspicious glances behind them.
“Thank you,” Kali said after they’d gone. “For not raising the alarm.”
Incera shrugged. “It isn’t every day an old man has the chance to gaze upon two new and, may I say, impressive celestial bodies.”
“I’m sorry?”
The astronomer coughed, glancing with some embarrassment at her chest, then up at the cosmoscope itself.
Kali blushed. What she had wasn’t much but she guessed if they were magnified a few hundred times...
“Oh. Right. Look, I’m sorry about that but it was the only way I could get to see you. Brother Incera, my name is Kali Hoo –”
“I know who you are, Miss Hooper. Among the Faith, your exploits have become a matter of some... consternation over time. I know also why you are here.”
“You do?”
“Take a look,” Incera said without preamble. He gestured at the cosmoscope’s eyepiece and Kali moved hesitantly towards it.
“Kerberos and its new companion,” Incera said as she did so. “To the naked eye, so very similar, aren’t they? On closer inspection, not so at all.”
Kali placed her eye against the eyepiece and pulled back slightly, blinking. For a second she was puzzled as to why a device so advanced should produce such blurred results, but then she realised that the lenses would have been set to Brother Incera’s eyesight, which was likely not so acute as her own.
Her hand moved to the side of the cosmoscope and her fingers found and manipulated dials there, adjusting the instrument’s focus until the Hel’ss was outlined clearly and starkly against the background of the cosmos.
She gasped.
Brother Incera had been correct in his observations that while the Hel’ss superficially resembled Kerberos, in close up the difference between the two was marked.
Where the azure surface of Kerberos was scudded with the layer of clouds Kali now knew to be the souls of Twilight’s dead that were drawn there, the surface of the Hel’ss was, in comparison, almost bare, resembling less a gas giant as some impossibly large, translucent brain. The more Kali studied it, the more she began to discern gaseous filaments reaching out from its surface across space and almost stroking the atmosphere of Kerberos, and the more uncomfortably aware of some sentient presence up there she became.
It could just have been her imagination, of course, but it wasn’t, as what happened a moment later proved beyond doubt.
For a second, just a second as Kali watched, the entire surface of the Hel’ss suddenly and unexpectedly reorganised itself into a reasonable semblance of a face. Her face.
Kali pulled back with a gasp.
“Are you all right, Miss Hooper?”
What the hells was that? Kali thought. Was it even possible? But she had seen it with her own eyes – whether the Hel’ss was trying to scare her off or else imprinting itself with a knowledge of who she was, it had just demonstrated that it was a living thing.
It was telling her it knew her.
“Miss Hooper?”
Kali shook her head to clear it of the image. “Yes... yes, I’m all right. Sorry.”
“My brethren have come to believe,” Incera continued, “that the entity is some form of herald of Kerberos itself. That it is the first sign of the beginning of the cycle of their becoming one with their God.”
That would explain a lot, and not for the first time in her dealings with organised religions Kali wondered where they got this shit. “You, I take it, are not of the same mind?”
“I am a man of science, Miss Hooper, not so easily persuaded.”
“You also said their God. Hardly the kind of scepticism I’d expect from such a long-standing member of the Faith.”
Again, Incera shrugged. “When we began, the Faith were not quite so fanatical as they are now. There was room within their ranks for people with open minds. Free thinking souls. Our acceptance was tolerated for the tactical advantages our pursuit of knowledge might bring to them. But, one by one over the years, our numbers became depleted, until only I remained.” Incera smiled. “Somehow up here, in my little nest, I managed to evade the fundamentalist brooms that swept away the unworthy.”
Kali realised at last that, in coming to see Brother Incera, she had made th
e right choice.
“The Hel’ss,” she said. “What do you think it is?”
Incera sighed, moving to the walls of the observatory where a number of large parchments were strung one atop the other. The astronomer flipped them, revealing his sketched impressions of objects the cosmoscope had revealed to him over the years.
“There are many strange things in the heavens, Miss Hooper. I have seen worlds of flame and worlds of ice, worlds verdant and worlds long dead, and worlds that seem nought but smoke or shifting shadow. I have seen the stars by which they are lit and, on occasion, I have seen the children of worlds flit between them in tiny ships. I have seen great coloured clouds seemingly of no substance that take the shapes of everything imaginable by man. I have seen flares and streaks of fire that would incinerate Twilight would we be unlucky enough to feel their touch. But nowhere, Miss Hooper – nowhere – have I seen anything like the body that grows nearer to our world every day.”
“You’re saying that it isn’t just some kind of... wandering star?”
“I would stake my reputation on it.”
Kali thought about the filaments. “It seems, somehow, to be connected to Kerberos.”
“Indeed it does. But what form, what purpose, that connection takes, I cannot say.”
Kali decided it was time to let Incera in on everything, and the astronomer listened with growing horror as he learned about the fate of the Old races and its cause, and how the same threat was now returning to Twilight.
“It has to be stopped,” Kali concluded. “But I have no idea how to do that.”
Incera swallowed. “Miss Hooper, I’m sorry – neither do I.”
He hesitated for a second, as if remembering something, but whatever it was remained unspoken as there was a hammering at the door to the observatory.
“One of my acolytes must have reported you to the guards,” he said. “You have to go.”
“In a minute,” Kali said. She was used to the hammering of guards on doors and had become quite adept at calculating exactly how long it would take them to break through. She had time yet. “I want one more look at this thing before I go,” she said, moving back to the eyepiece of the cosmoscope.
Incera glanced nervously between her and the door. “You must hurry.”
“Don’t worry,” Kali muttered, and then, “Oh gods.”
“Miss Hooper, is something wrong?”
“I’ve a feeling the guards are the least of our problems,” Kali said. “It’s the Hel’ss. Something’s happening on the surface.”
“Let me see.”
Incera shoved Kali aside and stared into the eyepiece for a second. Kali knew he was looking at the same sudden and strange disturbance on the surface of the body that she had – a kind of broiling – and then the eyepiece flared with a light so bright it left a burned circle on Kali’s retina. She didn’t want to know what it had done to Incera’s eyes.
“Oh,” the astronomer said, staggering back from the cosmoscope. “Oh, Lord of All.”
Whatever had caused the light, for it to be so intense through that tiny an aperture could only mean it had been blindingly so on the surface of the Hel’ss. And, what was more, the reason for it no longer needed to be viewed through the cosmoscope.
Through the break in the dome, Kali could see the entire night sky above Scholten filling with scintillating drops of light, intermingled with the rain and falling towards them.
“I think we should leave.”
“Is something happening?” the astronomer said, blinking to restore vision. “What is it. Tell me!”
“I don’t know. But trust me, it doesn’t look good.”
“What do you see?” Incera demanded.
But before Kali was able to give him an answer two things happened.
The first was that the guards at the door managed to break through and moved towards them, and the second was the first of the drops falling from the Hel’ss arrived, punching right through the metal of the dome.
Most hit the floor in short, sizzling spurts but one hit the palm of Incera’s right hand.
“What is that – rain?” he said, dumbfounded. “How can it be raining inside the dome?”
Kali looked up, biting her lip at the impossibility of it. If there was any advantage to this unexpected development, it was that the guards had stopped at the sight of the strange downpour.
“It hurts,” Incera said.
He groaned as the flesh of his palm seemed almost to liquefy, spiralling slowly about itself as if a corkscrew had been stuck into the flesh and turned. Kali grabbed his hand and stared as the skin and the bone beneath it melded together in a moving circle of white and red scar tissue, forcing out blood, that then slowly progressed through his flesh until it had burrowed a hole right through to the back of his hand. Incera groaned again, more loudly, as the ends of lost sections of cartilage and sinew snapped or contracted, twisting his hand into a grotesque parody of itself, like the misshapen claw of some old crone.
What the hells was this stuff? Kali thought. Some kind of acid? It was certainly acting like acid on the dome and the apparatus beneath it but she had never seen acid act the way this was doing on flesh. The liquefaction, the strange warping of Incera’s hand, the lack of actual burning, it was as if the flesh were somehow being undone and remade.
Gods, if the stuff should hit something vital...
Kali wanted to shout get out, get out now!, not just to Incera but to the guards as well, but knew it was already too late.
The first tentative drops of the glowing rain were but a vanguard of what the Hel’ss had released on them, and the true downpour hit the dome with a vengeance.
Hundreds of drops punched through the dome and impacted with the observatory floor, creating a sea of sizzling holes. They were followed in rapid succession by more, many splashing and burning into the wall of the round chamber, incinerating Incera’s charts, others punching into the cosmoscope itself, shattering the lenses mounted at both ends.
His eyes only now focusing, Incera stared at the ruined device and its cracked, smoking glass half quizzically, half in horror, but then found himself being bundled away from where he stood, thrust to safety by Kali. Her sudden manoeuvre sent the two of them crashing to floor where Kali rolled them over and over, their bodies narrowly avoiding the impacts of more of the potentially deadly projectiles.
The guards possessed much slower reactions and were not so lucky, and the first of them were felled instantly; one clutching at his heart through a widening hole as he collapsed with a gasp to the floor, the other simply toppling forward with a stunned expression in his eyes and a hole the size of a gold tenth in his head that was spiralling into his brain. This sent their brothers in arms into panic, stumbling over their fallen comrades in a dash for the door, but the rain was heavier still now and they had barely made a move before each of them was struck multiple times.
Kali caught fleeting glimpses of the same strange spiralling of flesh as the rain did its work, and within seconds they were writhing in agony on the dome’s floor, their limbs and joints twisting and bending until they were grossly malformed, in some cases reduced to vestigial flaps of skin, until the guards resembled a twitching, spasming collection of involuntary circus freaks. Even the two who had been killed instantly were not spared the horror, their bodies shrinking and morphing before her eyes, spreading patches of flesh now just exposed veins and arteries seeping dark puddles of blood onto the floor.
Kali wanted very much to close her eyes – wished she could do the same with her ears, too, against the agonised screams – but she couldn’t. She had managed to roll Incera under the cosmoscope but he was struggling against her, unable to cope with what he was seeing, trying to get away. That wasn’t her only problem.
Above them the cosmoscope was buckling beneath the rain, its own integrity compromised, and it was only a matter of seconds before it fell onto them, crushing them beneath its riddled mass. Then, suddenly, a chunk of it did dr
op a foot, and as Kali struggled to hold it off them, Incera fled her grip, making a dash for the door.
Kali had no choice but to leave Incera and the guards to whatever fates might befall them and just do her best to stay alive. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and survival would be purely a matter of luck.
Dodging beneath chunks of metal she hoped were thick enough to absorb the lethal impacts, she darted from one to the other until, in turn, they began to collapse above her. Increasingly desperate screams sounded from all about her but all she caught were fleeting glimpses of bodies between metal – legs stumbling, torsos falling, heads slamming fatally to the floor – as she kept moving and the rain continued to fall.
Trembling, Kali moved and huddled, moved and huddled, and thought that the downpour was never going to end. When, suddenly, it did, she was left with a slight ringing in her ears and an inability to accept, for a second, that she had, in fact, survived. Then the groans of the deformed and dying, audible now that the rains were gone, coupled with an ever growing pool of blood that was seeping almost languidly into her last hiding place told her that she was, indeed, experiencing the aftermath.
Slowly, cautiously, Kali emerged from beneath the buckled metal, and gasped at what she saw.
The observatory dome was all but gone and most of the guards dead but, miraculously, Incera lay propped against the remains of the far wall of the observatory still, though barely, alive. Kali quickly moved to him, noting he was in a very bad way, his legs all but useless, part of his torso appearing to have been turned inside out, revealing glistening organs, head slumped to the side, blood trickling slowly from a mouth that gaped now almost to his ear.
“I’ll get you some help,” Kali said.
Incera held her back.
Through his deformed mouth, he spoke in a kind of half gurgle, half drawl. “Nohh. Theh’el khill yooo.”
“I can’t leave you here like this!”