by Tim Curran
At first she thought the Tower itself was one of the creatures—Masters, Danny had called them—that had gazed down upon them from the sky. The Masters had returned, as Danny had said, and they’d needed to form bodies for themselves. But while she could feel waves of power pouring off the Tower, she sensed that the structure itself was empty. The creature—the Master—was here, not inside the Tower but beneath it. The Tower was a façade, mere decoration, like a church. It gave people a physical place to go in order to commune with the infinite and the unknowable. And maybe the Tower served the same function, but it was also possible its only real purpose was to announce to the world that I Am Here.
She thought then of the thousands of eyes—thousands upon thousands—that had filled the sky, regarding the humans below with the same detached curiosity those humans might regard a bustling ant hill. Had they all descended and found themselves lairs as had the one below the Tower? How many places like this were scattered across the world? How many similar scenes were playing themselves out at this very moment?
It’s their world now, Kris thought. And maybe it always had been.
The eyes of the dead people gazed upon them as they approached. Kris could feel a single intelligence peering through those dead eyes, and she knew that the thing beneath the Tower looked upon them.
A line had formed in front of the Tower, and Kris, Danny, and Sheri took their place in front of it. It moved at a fairly good pace, and it seemed like it didn’t take long for people to receive their Thrall marks.
Danny squeezed her hand so tight it hurt, but she didn’t ask him to loosen his grip. Whatever becoming a Thrall meant, Kris feared that these last few moments might be the final time that she and Danny would truly be themselves, and she wanted to make them last as long as she possibly could. She thought of Kenny then and wondered how her husband was doing. Had he died when the Masters first arrived or had he accepted a Thrall mark, too? She wondered if she’d ever find out, either way.
Eventually, sooner than she wished, it was their turn. Now that they were at the front of the line, she could see a person—or rather, a hideous parody of one—standing at the base of the Tower. It had been formed from parts of other bodies, some male, some female, and its skin came from different races. It was made of more than flesh, though. Metal, plastic, and glass formed its body as well, and thick liquids oozed from its pores—oil, transmission and brake fluid, engine coolants.… A rusted fan jutted from where its mouth should’ve been, and spark plugs protruded from otherwise empty eyes sockets. Its large sagging breasts had battery terminals in place of nipples, and a thick cable emerged from between its legs, ending in frayed, sparking wires. More wires and hoses stretched from the thing’s back, attaching it to the Tower.
She felt Danny begin trembling a half second before she realized she was doing the same.
Sheri leaned close to her ear and whispered and, despite the din of the engines, Kris heard her clearly.
“All you have to do is stay still and let it touch you.”
The horrible conglomeration lifted its right hand—a thick-fingered calloused paw that Kris imagined had once belonged to a burly trucker—and reached for her forehead. But just before the rough tips of those fingers came in contact with her skin, she said, “Wait!”
The hand stopped but didn’t withdraw.
“What are you doing?” Sheri hissed. Kris ignored her.
She had no idea if the thing—an avatar of some sort, she assumed—could see her with its spark-plug eyes, but she looked at them anyway while she spoke.
“My son … He has something growing inside him. I’ll serve you willingly, gladly, if you make him better.”
She had no idea what the extent of this being’s power was, but she had witnessed a number of remarkable, if nightmarish, transformations since the sky turned yellow. And if there was any chance the Master could heal Danny, she had to take it.
The avatar looked at her for several moments before turning its face toward Danny.
“Mommy, take me home. Now!” This word came out as a half-shout, half-sob.
Kris knelt down next to her son. Tears threatened, but she fought them back. She needed to be strong for Danny a little longer. After that, she could cry all she wanted—assuming she was still capable of it.
“We’ll go home as soon as we’re finished here.” A pause, and then she added, “I promise.”
She looked up at the avatar and nodded. The creature touched Danny’s forehead and then drew back its hand.
Danny’s body stiffened as if he were experiencing a sudden seizure. His eyes bulged and his lips drew back from his teeth. His fingers contorted into arthritic claws, and he hunched forward, a “Guh-guh-guh” sound coming from his mouth.
When he’d bent forward, his shirt had ridden up, exposing his lower back. Kris watched as the tender skin at the base of his spine began to swell, becoming darker as it tightened. When it had swollen to basketball size, the skin began to tear, and it burst open with a spray of blood. Danny screamed—once—before falling at the feet of the avatar and lying still. Sparks from the creature’s cock-wire showered down on Danny’s head like rain, setting his hair to smoldering.
Kris gasped in horror as the cancerous growth emerged from Danny’s back, pulling itself free of his body with tiny limbs that ended in claws. The tumor had no features—no eyes, nose, mouth or ears. Its corrugated hide was a sickening dark purple, and it glistened with a coat of something that resembled mucus.
She turned to look at the avatar, and a single word sounded in her mind loud as a trumpet blast.
BETTER.
Then the fingers touched her forehead.
Kris walked down the highway, threading her way between rows of abandoned cars. Her Thrall mark burned as if it were aflame, but that was okay. The pain would lessen eventually. And if it didn’t, that was okay, too. She kind of liked the sensation.
In her arms she cradled a slick purple mass. It was hard and cold, and the claws at the end of its thin legs dug into her skin. But she liked the way that felt, too.
Things were going to be different from now on. Much different. But as long as the two of them were together, everything was going to be all right. More than all right, in fact.
She looked down at the wet lump she carried and smiled.
Things were going to be better.
THE CALL OF THE DEEP
William Meikle
Sam Green kicked the dead amphi over, sending it tumbling down the Embankment steps to drop with a soft splash into the murky river. It sank in a flurry of bubbles.
“How many was that?” John Ridder asked.
“Twelve,” Sam replied. “And we didn’t get them all. The buggers are getting more confident.”
“Or more desperate,” Ridder replied, harnessing his assault rifle across his back and lighting a smoke. “It’s the heat, they say—and I can’t say as I blame them. They’ve been down there minding their own business all this time, then we go and fuck it up for everybody.”
“Speak for yourself,” Sam said, harnessing his own weapon. “I’m from Glasgow, remember? A wee bit of warmth is just the ticket.”
Humor was the only answer to what they were facing, and both men knew it.
The problems had been building for years—seas rising, storms increasing, and drought across vast swaths of the tropics. It took the Eastern Seaboard wipeout of 2066 for developed countries to finally sit up and take notice—but by then it was decades too late. The methane deposits in Northern Russia blew out in 2070, the Eastern Antarctic melted over the next decade, and the worst case scenario predicted in the early years of the century came all at once.
London was getting hit hard—the river burst its banks regularly now, despite the new barriers at Greenwich and Tower Bridge. It was a constant battle to keep the old city above the waterline—when it wasn’t baking in temperatures that topped forty centigrade.
Then the amphis started coming up out of the river.
/> Sam had laughed when he’d been told about them at the briefing, thinking it to be a joke.
“Come on, Sarge—the creature from the Black Lagoon? Really?”
Now that he’d seen them up close, he knew there was no humor to be had from them—they were vicious, relentless in their attacks, and fearless even in the face of automatic weapons.
Nobody really knew what the amphis wanted, only that they were weird, and they were pissed off. As Ridder had said, Sam would be pissed off, too, if some arseholes up top had screwed quite so thoroughly with his environment.
Besides, mine is not to reason why.
The first big attack had come off Scarborough last summer; two hundred locals dead before anybody noticed. But now that the threat was known, defenses were proving adequate—for the time being anyway. The amphis seemed to have habits and arrived in swarms. “Guard the city,” was a simple enough order to follow, especially now that martial law had been declared and the boffins were guessing the location of the attacks on most nights.
The streets had been quiet last night—at least until the amphis came out of the river. The firefight along the Embankment was intense, but not long lasting. And finally the tide had turned; the threat of flood was receding, and the amphis had gone with it—for now. As the sky lightened in the east to bring the dawn, Sam allowed himself to relax—at least enough to join Ridder in a smoke.
He wasn’t given time to finish it; his implant buzzed, he tongued the switch, and HQ came on the line in his ear.
“You’re needed. Both of you. Right now.”
That was another order that was easy to follow.
The briefing room in the Admiralty was already packed full when they sidled in and tried to look inconspicuous by the doorway. Ridder smiled, and Sam might have responded in kind—but the words from the General at the head of the long table brought all chatter in the room to complete silence.
“The Yanks have lost Washington.”
Nobody spoke—they didn’t have to. The battles across the ocean were common knowledge, longer and fiercer than any on the European side. But nobody had expected this. The General gave them all plenty of time to digest the implications before continuing.
“They’ve decided it’s time for what they call the ‘Hail Mary’ scenario.” He turned to look at where Sam and Ridder stood.
“That’s where you lads come in. There’s half a dozen scientist chaps downstairs that we need to get to Lakenheath Air Base—all in one piece and ASAP. The choppers will be leaving the roof in ten.”
“Babysitting duty, sir?” Sam said. “We’re of better use here, surely?”
“You’re of use where I say you’re of use,” the speaker said, and Sam shut up fast. You learned quickly when an officer used that tone—this conversation was over.
Two minutes later he followed Ridder up onto the Admiralty roof to where the choppers were waiting. His implant buzzed and the General came on the line.
“I couldn’t say, Sam, but this is more than just babysitting. The Yanks have a plan, but it’s risky. You and Ridder are there to pull the plug on them if they try to do anything really stupid. We don’t want a repeat of Boston. Understand?”
Sam understood only too well.
While the situation in London might be bad, at least the city was still habitable, in the main—Boston had been abandoned to the amphis last winter after an attempt to foul the seawater and kill the attackers had backfired and poisoned millions onshore. Just thinking about it gave Sam the cold chills as he helped usher a group of miserable-looking civilians onto the two choppers. He looked out the window as they banked up and away from Westminster, giving him a bird’s-eye view over the partially flooded, almost deathly quiet city that used to be the heart and soul of the world.
Even despite Boston, a bunch of scientists with a risky plan might be just what is needed right about now.
He stopped looking out of the window after a while. There was little to see but mile after mile of waterlogged fields, submerged towns, and abandoned vehicles, all punctuated by thick fog banks. The oppressive glare of the sun almost blinded him, and the same glare was also cooking the interior of the chopper meaning that the journey was not the most pleasant. Sam was glad when the pilot announced they were bearing in on Lakenheath.
As they landed, Sam’s implant buzzed and Ridder came on.
“Hope you brought your passport—welcome to the USA.”
Sam smiled thinly. This wasn’t their first rodeo in these parts—and he liked the Yanks well enough. He just hoped that his role as ‘cleaner of fuck-ups’ wasn’t going to be required.
The country around here was flat—good for an airfield, but also prone to flooding, and Sam knew that huge expanses of open water and reed beds surrounded the facility on all sides. On a calm summer’s day in the past the air would have been filled with dragonflies, kestrels, butterflies, and the sound of bullfrogs. But now, under the hammer of the sun, there was just an oily heat haze and too-hot concrete. Sam was looking forward to some respite, and hoping that the Yanks had brought some of their fabled air conditioning with them.
They weren’t given time to see the sights—everyone was shepherded in some haste into a hangar in the center of the airfield. Sam only had time to further note that the whole perimeter had been heavily fortified with gun towers and higher fences since his last visit, before the hangar doors shut and the lights went up.
The first thing Sam noticed was that the air conditioning was definitely on—it was still hot inside the hangar, but not so much as to impair his faculties. The room was a flurry of activity—massive screens showed scenes from numerous sites around the world, excited people shouted into headsets, and the holoviews glistened and roiled. Whatever was going on, it seemed important, but Sam and Ridder were only allowed to stand by the door and watch—it seemed they were to be excluded from any sort of explanation.
Sam tongued his implant and engaged the iris viewer; he heard the drone and whine in his medulla oblongata as the processor kicked in—that had taken some getting used to, way back when, but now it was as much part of him as his own eyes and ears. He let it process data for a while, then the soft voice of his companion spoke in his ear.
“It looks like some form of atmospheric system,” she said. “High intensity ionospheric enhancement technology, of the kind utilized by the HAARP program in Alaska, but with a greatly boosted power input. There are scenes in the main screen from Egypt, Kamkatcha, and a point in the South Pacific. Logic processing gives a ninety percent probability of sites like this one at each of those areas—four corners of a quadrant.”
“Yes,” Sam whispered. “But what’s it all for?”
“Rapid impact weather modification on a global scale,” the companion said, her robotic monotone and matter of fact manner only adding to the fresh chill in Sam’s spine.
The cleaner of fuck-ups might be needed after all.
The six scientists they’d brought from London were in a huddle at a corner desk. Sam set his gaze on them and told the companion to listen in. He only understood every third word but he hoped his listener would be able to condense it succinctly for him. There was talk of Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes, heating-induced scintillation, and great concern over calibration of something called the fluxgate magnetometer. In the end, his companion did indeed boil it all down to a simple sentence.
“My first conclusion was correct. Weather modification,” she said. “All across the planet. They’re planning on a sudden lowering of the global temperature, and they’re hoping to do it without putting any undue stress on the biosphere.”
This wee part of the biosphere is bloody stressed already, thank you very much.
“So what’s the big argument about?” he asked.
“They are considering just how much power needs to be applied,” his companion replied. “The plan is to hit the ionosphere as hard as can be managed. There is a branch of opinion that the risks are worth the effort, but not all are con
vinced, and there is concern about the stability of the magnetic field and the tectonic plates, especially in the Pacific.”
Ridder chose that moment to buzz in on Sam’s implant.
“You getting all of this?”
“As much as I can manage,” Sam replied. “Keep your wits about you. This has the feel of something that could go sideways PDQ.”
As if to punctuate Sam’s point, heavy gunfire started up outside, deafening even above the chorus of frightened chatter that rose up in the hangar.
Sam led Ridder outside. The source of the gunfire was two of the tall towers at the perimeter of the airfield. They sent volley after volley of heavy fire into the surrounding wetlands; from his current position Sam couldn’t see any target. His companion whispered in his ear.
“Amphis—the base has been getting periodic attacks for several weeks now, hence the heightened security.”
Sam became aware of a rising hum from the hangar behind him, a vibration that ran through the ground and set his gut tingling, like standing too close to a bass speaker at full volume. The gunfire from the towers faltered and failed until the hum was the only sound, getting ever louder.
Out in the fens beyond the fence, something—many things—answered, raising guttural voices in unison until it seemed that a vast choir wailed in the warm breeze wafting across the runways. Sam strode past the silent helicopters that had brought them here and walked over towards the nearest portion of the fence to look out past the perimeter.