by Tim Curran
Amphis, a horde of them, stood fifty yards from the fence in serried ranks, five or six deep, as if paused in their attack waiting for a signal. They had their heads raised to the sun, huge eyes staring upward, mouths gaping as song poured out of them, oblivious to the bullet riddled bodies of their kin lying all around them.
Then, as quickly as it had started, the hum stopped. The amphis seemed bemused, for all of a second, then turned away and were quickly lost from sight as they waded deep into the watery fens.
“What the hell just happened?” Ridder asked.
“Damned if I know—but if it’s something that stops the amphis like that, we need to know about it. Let’s see what the boffins have to say.”
It turned out that the boffins weren’t saying much of anything—at least, nothing that made sense to Sam, although the hangar was full of excited chatter, backslapping, and sporadic applause.
Sam’s on-board companion spoke in his ear again.
“They think it has worked—after a fashion. They only used a quarter of the power at their disposal but readings show a distinct temperature drop across the North Atlantic—both in the air and in the ocean. They’ll have to wait and see if they have caused any associated disruption elsewhere, but for the time being it’s being considered a success.”
“So now what?” Sam muttered. He wasn’t thinking about temperature drops—he was thinking about the ranks of amphis outside, heads raised in song. He realized now what it had reminded him of—it had felt like he’d been in a church—it had felt like a hymn.
But a hymn to what god—what kind of god?
The rest of that day was spent in settling in and babysitting the scientists—not that they needed much looking after here, in what was probably the best-defended bit of ground in the country these days.
After a time Sam started to relax, at least enough to join Ridder for a smoke outside the hangar.
“All quiet,” the other man said. “But have you heard the news from the Yanks?”
Sam shook his head—he’d been too preoccupied in trying to make sense of what was going on inside the hangar itself to worry about matters across the pond.
Ridder stubbed out his butt on the concrete before continuing.
“It’s not just Washington they’ve lost; Baltimore, Philadelphia, and most towns along the Delaware have fallen. They’re not calling them incursions now—they’re calling it an invasion. And they’re talking about using nukes if our little circus here doesn’t get results in the next 48 hours.”
In some ways Sam was happy to know that matters were being brought to a head—being baked in a slow oven wasn’t any way for a man to go, never mind a whole planet. And it wasn’t as if he was given any time to worry about it. His companion pitched in as he was finishing his own smoke.
“They’re not waiting. They’re going straight for half power at the top of the hour.”
Sam checked he had a full load in his rifle. He had a feeling he was going to need it.
The hum from the hangar started up right on cue at the top of the hour, a bass vibration that pounded in Sam’s gut and brought tension at his jaw and pain in his ears. His stomach roiled, and he was thankful he hadn’t yet eaten as acid boiled in his throat. He saw that Ridder was in similar discomfort, but that was all forgotten when he had a look out beyond the fence again.
The amphis were back—in numbers far greater than before, a horde—an army—of them already starting to press up against the fence as the hum from the hangar went up another notch. They came forward in waves, singing as they approached. The guns on the watchtowers burst into action, but the press of the beasts was just too great—they were already swarming over the fences north and south as far as the eye could see. Even as Sam raised his rifle he knew it was going to be worse than useless. The tower guns fell silent as the amphis seethed over and around the watch positions. The fence collapsed—in three places—under the weight of the attack.
“The chopper guns,” Ridder shouted. “We can still mow them down.”
But even that thought had come too late. The amphis’ song was louder even than the hum from the hangar as they came forward across the runways in a loping stride that belied their aquatic origins. Sam raised his weapon, but there was no immediate threat—every pair of huge, pale eyes seemed fixed on the hangar.
Their song rose again, filling the air with reverberating sound that once more reminded Sam of a church service, every voice calling out in praise and glory. He felt sudden tears at his eyes and wiped them away angrily as Ridder tugged at his arm, dragging him back to the hangar.
They reached the doorway just ahead of the approaching throng.
“Inside, quick,” Ridder shouted, but as Sam turned for a last look at the amphis he saw that they had stopped. They stood in rank after rank, as far back as the perimeter fence and beyond, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them. They had come to a standstill just yards from the hangar door, looking skyward, mouths open, the song pouring out of them in waves, washing around the airfield, setting everything—air, reeds, sky and clouds, all pounding to its beat.
Sam felt his head drift, as if he’d had too much Scotch. The ground underfoot seemed to swell and buck, like the deck of a boat in heavy seas, and he tasted salt water at his lips. His sight went dim, deep shadowy black and green obscuring the sun, and for the first time in weeks a cold chill ran through him, icy water gripping tight and seeping into his marrow.
He might have been lost there forever had Ridder not pulled him inside.
The hangar door slammed shut, and Sam’s sight cleared, the sudden brightness of the overhead neon dazzling him momentarily. He realized he still heard the singing from outside, but now it was overlaid by the louder hum from inside the hangar itself.
“Sam?”
He heard Ridder shout, but didn’t feel any strong urge to answer until his companion spoke loud in his ear.
“Is everything all right, sir? Do you require medical attention?”
The hum from the hangar cut out, and at almost the same instant the singing from outside came to a halt.
Finally, Sam’s head cleared.
The hangar was once again a hive of activity.
“What just happened?” Sam asked.
Ridder was obviously as confused as he was, but the companion, as cool and calculated as ever, had been paying enough attention for all of them.
“They are saying that they have beat the ionosphere ‘like ringing a bell’. The whole planet shook—temperatures are falling all over. Most of the scientists are declaring it enough of a success that they should immediately go for a full power hit.”
“There are no doubters?” Sam asked.
“Yes—there are dissenters. There was a serious rise in tectonic activity in the South Pacific, near the base at the southernmost aspect of the quadrant. There is also a severe tsunami alert for New Zealand, Hawaii, and as far north as Japan. But the USA in particular are saying that it is a price worth paying. And given that the invasion on their eastern coasts is gathering pace, the Western powers are inclined to agree with them.”
Another thought struck Sam.
“And what about the amphis? Any reports of them massing—or singing?”
His companion wasn’t capable of either mockery or sarcasm, so there was that to be thankful for, and the reply, when it came, sent a fresh chill through Sam despite the heat in the hangar.
“There have indeed been reports of singing. The consensus of opinion is that the experiment has a harmonic frequency that the aquatics are particularly attuned to and …”
Sam tuned her out. His attention had been caught by fresh activity in the main control area. Several of the scientists—he recognized three of them from the chopper trip—were gathered in front of the world map. They no longer looked quite so happy.
He walked over to investigate. It took him several seconds to get their attention and several more to get them to talk one at a time.
“It’s
the harmonics,” one of them finally explained. “We used too much power and the whole planet is responding—a ripple across the whole planet, and it’s getting stronger by the second.”
“Well, turn the fucking machine off, then,” Sam said, before he saw their faces.
“We did that ten minutes ago,” one of the scientists said, just as the sound of singing rose up again from outside the hangar, even louder than before.
By the time Sam climbed up into the hangar’s gantry the whole structure was reverberating—it did indeed feel like being inside a giant bell. The scene outside did not improve his mood any.
From the height of the gantry he had a view of the whole airfield—and of the horde of amphis who stood on every inch of it. All of them had their heads raised high, mouths open in a single unified chorus of song that rang and echoed, seeming to fill the air, an almost solid wall of sound.
Once again Sam started to feel light-headed, starting to drift, and he had to concentrate to maintain focus.
He called up his companion
“Can I get an air strike out here, sharpish? We could take them all out at once.”
“Negative, sir. It’s the same all over—everyone is under siege and nothing is leaving the ground.”
He could see it in his mind’s eye—ranks of the amphis, around Westminster, around the old palaces, coming up out of the river, singing as they came.
Maybe the Yanks are right. Maybe we do need to use the nukes.
He couldn’t watch any more— just the sight of the ranks of upturned, amphibian features made him light headed and queasy again. He made his way slowly down off the gantry, barely aware that his heartbeat had synchronized with the rhythm of the chant, not noticing that he moved like a dancer, keeping the beat with his feet.
There was an argument going on among the scientists.
“Look, we’ve been ordered to do it,” an American voice said.
“No. You’ve been ordered to do it. The last thing this planet needs now is more gung-ho cowboy crap. We don’t know how much damage we’ll do.”
“But we know we’re fucked if we don’t.” An Irish voice this time, but no one was paying much attention, everyone intent on getting their own voice heard.
On the other side of the room Sam saw that the Yank guards were getting antsy, and to his right, Ridder’s grip had tightened on his rifle.
We’re only seconds from a firefight here.
He stepped forward and raised his voice.
“Okay—what’s this order you’re on about?”
The American scientist managed to speak up first.
“It comes from the Chief of Staff in NOMAD. ‘Ring the bell again. Ring it hard.’ It says we’re to go full power.”
“And what are the risks?”
“What are the risks if we don’t?” the scientist replied, and Sam had no answer for him as the noise of singing outside went up another notch and every fiber of his being called out for him to join them.
“Just do it,” he said, and the scientist turned away towards the controls. Two of the Europeans moved to stop him, but Ridder moved to stand in their way, and he wasn’t a man to argue with in his current mood.
The whole hangar was already ringing and vibrating, even as the scientist spoke two commands into the mic.
The chorus of amphis swelled in a crescendo, the hangar, the ground, the air, Sam’s whole body rang, a planet-sized tuning fork sending out a tone that could not be ignored.
They lost the Egyptian corner of the quadrant first—the Great Rift Valley tore wide open along its whole length, a three-thousand mile volcanic wound that sent a fresh scream all around the world and swallowed all the old civilizations of man as if they had never been.
The same tsunami that took out Japan and most of the Pacific Rim was three hundred feet high when it hit California. It washed L.A. and Frisco up against the Rockies just before all the big faults slipped at once, sending rock and water and earth and people seething and roiling in a boiling hell.
The folks in the hangar had a great view on their monitors from surviving satellites—for as long as it lasted. The amphis outside sang ever louder, with ever more fervor.
Something in the Pacific answered.
The sound seemed to rise up from the ocean itself, an answering ring to the tuning fork, but amplified now into something that shook the whole planet to its very core.
Sam’s head spun, a dizziness that felt like floating. He tasted salt water again, and felt the chill as black ocean depths threatened to take him away.
He was only brought back by the voice of his companion in his ear, calm and eminently reasonable amid the cacophony and turmoil.
“They are attacking the hangar, sir.”
He didn’t really need to be told. The metal frame of the building creaked, bent and tore, like so much paper, as the amphis poured in. Even as he raised his rifle Sam knew it was too late—far too late—for everybody.
The huge monitor showed a final, zoomed in shot of the Pacific Ocean taken from satellite. It was the last thing Sam—or anyone in the hangar—saw: the ocean parting, great black blocks of strangely shaped stone rising from the depths. And out of the stone, something impossibly huge rose—wispy, almost gaseous, as if it was not quite fully present in this reality.
The amphis cried out in prayer.
The waking god answered.
The tsunami that came down the North Sea was five hundred feet high and washed most of Southern England away with its passing, but by then everybody was long past caring.
Sam floats.
We all float now. We are alone, in a vast cathedral of emptiness where nothing exists save the dark, the cold, the pounding beat from below and the song of our risen god.
Shapes sing in the dark, wispy shadows with no substance, shadows that caper and whirl as the dance grows ever more frenetic. We taste salt water, are buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, but as the beat grows ever stronger, the song gets ever louder, we care little. We give ourselves to it, lost in the dance, lost in the dark.
Lost, singing, in the sweet, cold dark.
HOWLING SYNCHRONICITIES
Konstantine Paradias
Anatoly couldn’t help but think about the dog, even as he watched the world below him unravel.
Behind him, the great idiot face of the moon was infested with pulsing yellow tumors. Beneath him, the Soyuz shuttle drifted aimlessly in perpetual freefall. The sight of Wei’s crushed face drifting past the porthole enveloped in a halo of broken teeth felt oddly familiar to him. Even in the all-encompassing silence, Anatoly could hear the soft clattering sounds that the teeth made, as they drifted by the controls and grated across the airlock. Like tiny pearls, a bounty worthy of Cleopatra. Through the sterilized air fed to him from the suit’s tanks, Anatoly could make out the overpowering scent of gunpowder discharge. He was momentarily haunted by the sight of billowing black smoke hanging over the dog’s blasted skull.
Anatoly checked the communications channel one last time. The people from Baikonur had long since stopped screaming. Belousov had kept going until the bitter end, spouting an endless stream of gibberish across every frequency. Houston had picked up on it, tried to kill the broadcast before it could reach any civilian networks. Memetic attack, they had called it. Killing words, like the hexes of the Mongol Tngri. Anatoly had read about them when he was a child; he had adopted their practices. Barely six summers old, and he would sneak out in the dead of night to work the forbidden magic: he would get on his knees and dig through the dead Aral sea bed, burying clay pots festooned with nonsense syllables among the hecatombs of dead fish, wrap them in layers of rotted kelp to blight his mother’s suitors.
They had sent the word out, those engineering braves, killed every channel they could get to before the word-virus would reach the civilian centers, their brains infected from the start. Anatoly heard their vocabulary devolving, their thought-processes tumbling down into dark dusty wells where the monkey that
dwelt in every man mashed them to a pulp with jagged bits of onyx.
“Iä! Iä! Fhtaghn wghan’ahl,” Belousov’s message snaked through the cloud of static. Anatoly knew what it meant; his own understanding expanded as the gods reached out through him, extending tendrils of pure mind from their perch upon the moon to broadcast their message to the infestation of humanity: Amen! Amen! The waiting’s at an end!
Anatoly had seen the gods reflected on the surface of the shuttle as they flew past the face of the sun: the great bloated things that moved in a solemn procession; titans infested with teeming city-states, crowns of hardy fungal fauna adorning their misshapen heads. He had no name that could ever accurately encompass their nature. He only knew them by virtue of their presence, of the cancerous black shadows that they shed upon the minds of every living thing. He knew them as locust-gods, swarming across the length and breadth of Creation, squatting in the orbit of stars to feast on the detritus that their gravitational pull sent into their waiting maws. Ravager-deities with virus-like intent, their minds laden with forbidden knowledge, driven by world-consuming appetites; hordes of supplicants chanting praise into their minds, themselves creatures broken and orphaned of the worlds that spawned them.
Anatoly didn’t know why they chose him to be the vessel through which they would broadcast their message upon the Earth. The hungry gods could have found others better suited to their bidding. Looking through the hive-like structures that had become his eyes, his consciousness swimming through pitch-black oceans where the minds of arrogant sorcerers and zealots were mired, Anatoly saw mankind in its entirety, lone beacons of purity and genius flaring out among the masses. Wei, the engineering genius with whom he had shared this final trip had been a polyglot, immersed in the arcane faiths of the world. Hughes, their comms expert, had been burdened with a vast intellect, utterly lacking in empathy. A quick glance let Anatoly see the secret clusters of nihilists who had prepared for this moment, entire generations seeking to harness the power of the ancient, hungry things.