“I thought you were going to fetch your sword.”
“I was looking for it. Some fucker’s pinched it.”
“One of your copies?”
“My lads wouldn’t do that. More likely someone else from the Mage Corps.”
Colm decided not to ask what the Mage Corps was. That word, mage, gave him a cold, sick feeling. It was too much like magician.
“I’ve been missed,” Dhjerga said. “They’re tearing the place apart looking for me.”
“Don’t they know where you went?”
“Have you ever met anyone else from the Mage Corps?”
“I wouldn’t know if I had.”
“Yes, you would. They’d be an original, like me.”
Colm was about to say that he couldn’t tell the difference between originals and copies, but the truth was he could. Dhjerga was nothing like his ‘lads.’ It wasn’t just that he spoke English. It was the eyes, the lines around the eyes, the sheer aliveness of him.
“Nope,” Colm said. “Never met anyone quite like you.”
“So then they can’t find us. There’s none of them can get a fix on you, no matter how bright you are. They could get a fix on me, but I know how to hide my light.”
Riddles piled upon riddles. Colm went into the shelter to help Bella with breakfast. Barley porridge with dried fish grated into it, ship’s bread and hawbrother jam, cimes, and most importantly coffee. The little girls unearthed a groaning Tan from the nest of sleeping bags the family shared.
“Best meal I’ve had in years,” Dhjerga complimented Bella, spooning porridge into his mouth.
Bella gazed at him steadily. “I heard what you were saying. Convince me we’re safe here.”
Dhjerga nodded. He turned to Colm. “You can see power, right?”
“No.”
Dhjerga ignored this. “Power is bright, but there’s nothing brighter than the stars. They outshine everything. You might reckon there’s a good world near that star, or that one—but how do you know where? You have to go over every square inch of the Big Empty—” Dhjerga mimed fumbling blindly. “You’re groping through the dark, blinded by the stars, looking for a titchy little power differential. Oh, and there are false positives everywhere. Useless rocks with no air or anything, one side hotter than the other ... Once you find a world, you’re golden. It’s finding them in the first place that’s the hard part. And the further away you are, the harder it is. I only found this place because he was calling me.” He aimed his porridge spoon at Colm. “So you can rest easy, lady: no one else is coming along unless I fetch them.”
Tan said, “Now I get it.” He laughed, Bella laughed, even Colm laughed in relief. What Dhjerga said was utterly nonsensical.
Unoffended, Dhjerga said to Colm, “You’ll get the hang of it.”
Tan said, “Just to be clear, you can send reinforcements to Haravalding, even though you’ve never been there? Lee’s counting on that.”
Dhjerga sighed gustily. “Didn’t I just explain? Once you find a world, you’re laughing. There’s nothing in between here and Haravalding except sea. I can see those big power plants they’ve got on the island as well as I can see you. When Lee gives the word, I’ll start sending my lads in.”
Colm said, “Can you see Kevesingod?”
“You’re not wanting to go back there, are you?”
“Can you see Axel anywhere?”
“Ye gods. Didn’t he get killed by the flying blowtorch?”
“I’d like to know for sure.”
“It’d take me all day to look for him, and I was thinking of having a swim. Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“I can’t,” Colm said. He shrank from Tan’s concerned gaze. Finished his coffee, passed on the porridge—he wasn’t hungry. In fact, he was sweating and itching. Tropodolfin withdrawal had set in.
Later, he went for a stroll around the lower decks, fighting with himself. Like an idiot, he’d brought Gil’s stash from Castle Nulth. It was burning a hole in his pocket. He wanted nothing more than to dive into an almighty binge. But now that he knew how tropodolfin interacted with his implant, he dared not touch the stuff ever again.
His wanderings brought him to a certain stateroom Tan had told him about. “Is this where I can find the Gorilla?” The names these people gave themselves.
Stubbled, unwashed bros leapt to hide computers and some highly suspect laboratory equipment. Back home, each of them would have been rich enough to afford the price of a bug-out ticket on a Hail Mary ship. Now they were prison ship drug dealers.
“It’s all right,” Colm said, remembering that he was dressed as a security guard. “I’m not on the clock. I’m just looking for some information on this contraband I’ve found.”
The Gorilla turned out to be a hairy guy who’d once run a Martian water reclamation business. “Tropodolfin,” he said, examining a sample from Colm’s stash under a microscope. “Not ours. This is military grade. HRF stamps on the pills.”
“I’d like to trade it in for something less dangerous.”
“Everything is dangerous if you don’t know how to use it.” Any respect for authority had vanished when the Gorilla decided that Colm was one of the dirty ones.
“Ah, whatever you’ve got,” Colm said, keeping his smile nailed to his lips.
*
MEG SAT ON A JUMPSEAT across from James Lee, watching the sea whiz past below. She was grateful that it was too noisy to talk. She was thinking about Axel.
“Don’t say anything to Colm,” Axel had told her, outside the burning customs post. “I don’t want his Ghost buddies tracking me down.”
“But where’re you going?”
“It’s safer if you don’t know.” He’d looked around to make sure no one was watching, then tentatively stepped in close to her. They kissed. It was meltingly tender. Meg curled her fingers around his hand as he pulled away.
“Don’t walk off, Axel.” She had tears in her eyes. Maybe it was the toxic smoke.
He wheeled back and embraced her again, hard. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her forehead. “Don’t come after me,” he whispered.
“Axel!”
He moved away, duster flapping, heading down the road with the mara and shablags. She caught the last thing he said: “... not worthy of you.”
“Not worthy?” she yelled after him. “Not worthy? Does this look like a pedestal I’m standing on, Axel? These are my feet! I didn’t come six hundred light years for this!”
He was gone. She was alone in a crowd of aliens.
It had been easy to lie to Colm, since she, too, thought Axel was probably never going to come back. In hindsight, his recent stability had been too good to be true. She should have seen the downhill slide coming after their escape from the rock chimney. Now he’d gone ... gone into that dark place that had tried to claim him before. And this time she could not sign a contract with the sentrienza to get him back.
Her body as taut as a gear-chain, she stared down at the glittering water and ground her teeth.
She’d lost them both. Colm to the Ghosts, Axel to the ghosts in his head. She had only one option left.
Up and at ‘em, Gunny.
The helicopter droned over the sea, taking her back to war.
CHAPTER 47
AXEL SWEPT BROKEN GLASS into a dustpan. He dumped it into a garbage sack and went to look for a mop.
Hard physical work always helped with the depression. That had been his great revelation when he was in the Marines. The other thing he’d learned in the Marines was that even a bad job was worth doing well.
So he was tidying up the mess left by the Ghosts in Castle Nulth, and doing a damn thorough job of it. He mopped the floor of the low-ceilinged stone kitchen, scrubbed the blood off the cabinets, and tidied the pantry.
The Ghosts had devoured almost everything edible. Axel, however, found some packets of queazel slop that they had missed, or not considered food. He dumped one of them into a clean bowl. It looked and smelled
like cat food. He took it through to the conservatory.
“You have to eat,” he said, putting the bowl down in front of Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth.
Gil replied with a muffled moan. His head and forequarters were buried under a cushion. Axel whipped the cushion away.
“We need to talk.”
Gil wormed around on the couch and reached out with a trembling claw for the nearest bottle. The queazel reminded Axel of himself after his dishonorable discharge from the Fleet. He had a customized, ludicrously expensive esthesia implant, which allowed him to regulate his own moods with a digital dashboard in the corner of his eye. He didn’t think there had been anything wrong with him in the first place, beyond teenage moodiness. But years of relying on the implant had messed up his brain chemistry, so that nowadays his moods fluctuated wildly.
He’d disabled it after Drumlin Farm. Switched it on only once since, for their flight in the rented seaplane. Disabled it a third time after they reached the north pole. It made it easier to leave Meg.
Bleakly, he watched Gil shake the bottles with increasing desperation. Maybe he should take up drinking instead of being harnessed to technology. But no one would be getting sloshed at Castle Nulth today. The bottles were all empty, as Axel had dumped out their contents while he was cleaning up.
“I need a drink,” Gil said piteously.
Axel poured him some water.
“For the love of God, a real drink!”
Mildly curious, Axel said, “Do you believe in God?”
“Believe in, no; fear, yes. We queazels are God-haunted. Torn between the poetic and the prosaic, the sky and the dirt. Just like you.”
Axel had minored in Romantic philosophy He rested his elbows on his knees. “We humans don’t believe in God anymore. We believe in physics.”
“Yet some of you still pray.”
That was true. Axel had caught Colm praying several times during their journey to Juradis. “Yeah; well, physics hasn’t been treating us very well lately.”
“Your understanding of physics is pitifully limited. Dr. Zaragoza was on the path to a deeper understanding. Ah, poor Emile!”
Axel regretted letting himself get sidetracked. The metaphysics were fascinating, but that wasn’t why he’d come here. “Who were your contacts in the Human Republic?”
“Contacts?”
“I can add two plus two. An alien outfit like Crasibo Lovelace doesn’t win a ten-figure government contract without inside help. Who were you working with? Or should I say, who did you bribe?”
“The Ghosts killed my seneschal and all my servants,” Gil said, shivering. “What did they do with the bodies? Did they eat them?”
“I put them in the walk-in freezer. You’re welcome.” That said, the castle generator was no longer working—the Ghosts had smashed it up, in their usual wantonly destructive way—so the freezer had no power. The corpses would begin to stink soon. “You can’t stay here,” Axel said, in case this had not sunk in yet. “The sentrienza will be looking for you. They’ll hold you responsible for the mess at the customs post.”
Gil shuddered and moaned.
“I’ll help you get away ... if you tell me who you were working with.”
“The truth?”
Axel’s heart began to pound. “Yes.”
“You would not like it.”
“That’s my problem. Go on.”
“No.”
Axel felt like hitting the queazel. He had to know who the traitors in the Human Republic were. That’s why he had come all this way, risked everything. Find out who they were ... and stop them. The information was right in front of him, hidden away in the queazel’s brain. But Axel couldn’t force him to spit it out. He refused to stoop to torture. And he didn’t know how long they would have before the sentrienza arrived.
He tried a different angle. “What were you doing with Colm Mackenzie?” His voice involuntarily deepened on Colm’s name. He remembered Meg and Colm embracing in that linen closet, among the stacks of fusty-smelling queazel sheets and blankets. She’d never really been his.
“I thought Lieutenant Mackenzie was my friend,” Gil said, sadly.
“So did I,” Axel said. “Did he bring the Ghosts here?”
“I was trying to help him.”
“Help him do what?”
Gil’s hindquarters lashed against the back of the couch. “If he dies, it has all been for nothing.”
“Why?”
“He was our last chance!”
“Last chance for what?”
“He was the last of the chemical mages.”
“The ...?”
“It is what we called the experimental subjects. That was the code name of the project. CHEMICAL MAGE.”
“And this is where we came in. Who else was involved in this project? I want their names.”
“You are not a very polite human,” Gil complained.
Axel realized the queazel was playing with him. Jerking him around, indulging some sick alien sense of fun, while Earth’s fate hung in the balance.
He pulled his gun. It was the same home-engineered pistol he’d got from the shablag, reloaded in preparation for the attack on the customs post, where he hadn’t fired a shot. Gil stared at the weapon.
“I killed Emile Zaragoza,” Axel said. It wasn’t true, but the queazel didn’t know that. Anyway, in a deeper sense, it was true. Zaragoza might have lived to a ripe old age if Axel had not come knocking on his door. Just like Axel’s Marines on Majriti IV, Zaragoza had died because of him. Why not add to the tally? “I’ll fucking kill you, too, if you don’t tell me what I need to know.”
Gil nervously ran his tongue around his muzzle.
“Am I fucking getting through to you, you filthy little fur-rag?” Axel shouted.
“I was the Uzzizellan ambassador to the Human Republic,” Gil moaned. “I can trace my lineage back for a thousand years ...”
Axel hit him with the butt of the pistol.
“Ow! No! Don’t hurt me! I’ll take you to them!”
“That’s better. Eat, and then we’ll go.”
“I need a drink ...”
Axel levelled the pistol at him again. “I said fucking eat!”
Trembling, the queazel lowered his muzzle to the bowl of slop.
CHAPTER 48
THE VIENNA WAS ONE day out from Haravalding when a chill descended on the reactor room. Seventy Ghosts materialized in a shower of sparks.
Surveillance alerted the sentrienza officers on the bridge. Their Walking Guns piled into the reactor room ... and lurched ignominiously to a halt as their power sources died. That left the bridge undefended.
The Ghosts led the assault. Within a short time, they had a ship full of dead electronics and dead sentrienza, steaming on towards Haravalding under solar power.
Colm dragged a bullet-riddled sofa out of the bridge and positioned it on a spongy green walkway overlooking the foredeck. The sea breeze blew in through jagged shards of the bubble that had formerly enclosed the walkways. The glass had supposedly been bulletproof, but maybe that had just been a lie. Anyway, it had shattered under a volley of large-caliber rounds imported from the Kuiper Belt.
He sat down on the sofa and scraped at spots of sentrienza blood on his arms. Below, on the foredeck, passengers were flinging sentrienza corpses into the sea. Colm searched the sky for planes. He hadn’t got over his jittery premonition that this was going to end badly. He felt in his pockets and found the cocaine dispenser he’d got from the Gorilla. The guy had recommended this stuff as a less dangerous replacement for tropodolfin. Colm tapped out two small heaps of powder onto the back of his hand and snorted them.
Chemically induced optimism was better than nothing.
A couple of the Vienna’s security guards came hooting and swearing out onto the walkway, dragging armloads of clothes, both human and sentrienza size. Colm joined in their scandalized glee. He wound a sparkly scarf around his head, rolled up his cargo pants to the knee, and tied
another scarf around his waist as a sarong. “Jesus, what’s this?” A pair of fake breasts. He added those to his costume and sashayed back inside, fluttering his eyelashes.
None of the humans had ever visited the bridge before. They’d been shocked to see how the sentrienza officers lived. Low-ceilinged rooms shaped like caves. Fake flowers growing out of the walls. Luxurious cushions and throws in painfully clashing colors. Shag carpets soft enough to have sex on. It was a sleazy bordello, welded to the top of a floating prison.
Now the breeze tossed silk flower petals around the bridge. The security guards were puzzling over consoles, preparing to dock the Vienna in the deep-water harbor at Haravalding. Colm’s entrance drew gales of laughter.
“They used to bring passengers up here,” whispered Tan, who was the only one not laughing. “Female passengers.”
“The fucking perverts.” Colm spotted a sentrienza corpse in the corner, propped it up, and did a pretend lap-dance. The security guards doubled over with mirth, which egged Colm on to an even more outrageous performance. It’s always better to laugh than to cry, and cry they would if they thought too hard about what was happening here.
Dhjerga Lizp sauntered in. Colm raised his sarong, showing off a pasty, ginger-haired leg. Dhjerga cracked a wintry smile. “Mission complete. Two hundred and twenty-five ships in our hands. Three sank. Sorry about that.”
Colm took off his fake breasts and draped them over Dhjerga’s head in place of a laurel wreath. When the ruckus of celebration died down, they turned on the net.
Riots had broken out on Haravalding, Gissthung, and all the other equatorial islands. Sentrienza were being tossed out of upper-storey windows. Spaceports were under siege.
Meg reported from Haravalding that the leaders of the Organization were negotiating with the sentrienza, promising clemency in exchange for their withdrawal from the planet.
Everything was going their way. So why did Colm feel so damn jittery?
He pulled off his sarong and turban, dropped them on top of the corpse he had been flirting with. A purple pimple floated in the haze on the horizon. Haravalding.
*
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 29