What in God’s name was he doing?
Lightning struck, harder and harder, thunder on the heels of flashes in the skylight, one after the other, right overhead—and then a distant thrumming became audible over the rain, and she realized it wasn’t lightning. It was electrical discharges: the Prince Edward must have arrived here—locked in mortal combat overhead with the Zeppelin-Rogers One Naught One.
Bloody hell. She wanted to trust in Lord Birmingham’s skill and mettle, and in the prowess of the great airshark he flew, but the ZR-101 was a newer, tougher vessel, built by a genius; there was no guarantee that the Prince Edward would prevail, especially in these conditions.
True, Jeremiah could wait on her pert arse and hope that the cavalry arrived, but Lord Christopherson looked up at the skylight, snarled, pulled on a pair of goggles, and waved to his men to “Start the procedure!” Clearly her uncle wasn’t going to wait and hope that the ZR-101 succeeded, or even to join the battle to try to tilt the scales in his favor; instead, he was wholly focused on continuing his hellish experiment.
What was he thinking? What could be so important to leave his ship and her crew to its fate? Did he hope to steal away before the battle was decided? Or did Lord Christopherson somehow believe, if he completed his work, he could prevail . . . even if the Prince Edward succeeded?
Maybe with the Foreigner on his side, he could.
It was all up to her.
Jeremiah leaned up closer, keeping quiet, keeping herself in the shadow of a support beam so that her uncle would not see her as he had before. Come to think of it, they had to stop meeting like this. Her eyes narrowed.
The copper egg was glowing now, rattling within its cage like a kettle at a fierce boil, foxfire flickering off it as its surface started to crack. Her uncle, still wearing his suit and apron but with his sleeves rolled back to his elbows, was unwrapping a leather bundle containing tongs, pincers, and surgical equipment. And the suited men . . . the suited men were carefully peeling the foil back from the back of the cow, exposing a shaved spot on the nape of its neck and top of its head.
Lightning struck. The cow lowed. The egg began to crack open, shards of its surface striking the cage with enough force to partially bend the bars outward. And then her uncle turned round, carrying a long bladed scalpel in one hand . . . and a blowtorch in the other.
“I’m so sorry,” Jeremiah whispered, drawing the pistol Marcus had loaned her. She loathed lethal weapons, but her uncle’s plan had a weak link, a single point of failure she could take out with a single fatal shot. She took careful aim, and her hand did not shake. “Please forgive me.”
Then she fired.
The cow screamed as the double-paned window shattered; the twin layers of thick observation glass had deflected the bullet a hair, and it ricocheted off a piece of equipment. Hands stinging from the recoil, Jeremiah aimed and fired again at the cow: her uncle might have a legion of helpers . . . but that foil-wrapped cow looked like it was one of a kind. Confirming her suspicions, Lord Christopherson seized a huge metal case and hurled it up onto one of the tables between her and the animal, absorbing her shot and blocking further volleys.
“Form a barricade!” Lord Christopherson roared. “Protect the host!”
The white-suited men stepped forwards, trying to arrange boxes and crates to protect the cow while the egg cracked and shifted. Jeremiah had guessed right: that egg was going to hatch and eat—no, God, take over—the cow. She had to kill the cow before the monster got its host.
Jeremiah plucked a chair from beside the table, whirled, and hurled it through the bullet-fractured glass. The double panes shattered and fell outward, and Jeremiah drew her Kathodenstrahl again, discharging half a dozen blasts down into the room; then she set her grapple, made a running start, and leapt, throwing her body sideways to slip through the long slot of the window.
A few last shards fell and cut at her as she flew through the window, but Jeremiah pulled tight on her cable, body whipping around then swinging down, boots striking the wall in a brief bit of ersatz abseiling before she landed amidst flickering foxfire and cascading shards of Victoriana-thick glass. Around her were stacks of machinery, sparking where moments before they had been blinking, and a meter in front of her was the caged and glowing copper egg.
Jeremiah stared at it in frozen fascination. She’d rarely been this close to a Foreigner and never one like this. Within its cage, the egg was splitting apart, but it was clear it wasn’t an egg, but a protective shell: the “jagged” cracks actually a purposeful but alien symmetry, the glowing writing engraved across its surface really intricate organic veins, all revealing the close-fitting sections of copper to be the outer carapace of some awful bug thing made seemingly of golden fire.
This was the Burning Scarab the Owl spoke of. A bright, blazing eye seemed to see her from between the cracks, and the monstrous thing began screeching and twisting and tearing asunder the bars of its cage. Jeremiah looked up to see her uncle peer over the hasty barricade of boxes—and realized that as much as the stacked crates shielded her uncle and the cow from her, they shielded her and the thing from her uncle—and she knew what she had to do.
“Mya—” her uncle began—but she shot him in the face with her Kathodenstrahl, and he toppled backwards out of sight with a terrific crash. She sprayed the rest of the room for good measure, hearing other hidden foes fall with thumps; then, lit only by crackling foxfire and the egg itself, she stepped up to the cage where the thing was still struggling and screaming.
The iron bars would act as a Faraday cage, so she stepped right up to it, put her Kathodenstrahl right into one of the cracks, and fired. The thing convulsed and chittered but did not die, and as it pulsed Jeremiah felt a sudden answering pain within her cheek and neck where she’d been splashed the other night by spattered fluid from the Zodiac Machine.
That lit a sudden, unaccountable fear in her, and she discharged her Kathodenstrahl again and again until it was spent, hoping to stop its heart, but all it seemed to do was enliven the struggles of the thing within, making its chittering grow louder; was the thing laughing at her? Enraged, out of ammo, and out of options—she again drew out Marcus’s gun.
“I am sorry,” she said, firing straight into the crack at the glowing eyestalk.
The monster screamed, a horrific wail that Jeremiah would never, ever forget. All the cracks seemed to widen at once, the “copper” shards battering and denting out the supposedly stronger iron. Jeremiah screamed too, firing again and again, until her wrists hurt and the floor was littered with spent shells, but other than torturing the thing to the point of agony her only accomplishment was agitating it until the cage seemed held together by a rivet and a single band.
“Fine,” Jeremiah said; she might be out of charges and out of bullets, but she would not let that stop her! Glancing about, she popped the glass of a wall case with the butt of her gun and hauled back a fire axe. “I tried to make this merciful—”
“Mya, don’t!” her uncle cried weakly, still slumped on the floor, but raising one trembling hand. “Material weapons can’t permanently harm the Scarab—”
Jeremiah froze, staring at the thing. Then she raised the axe.
“Then you shouldn’t have brought it here!” she screamed, and, aiming carefully between the bars, planted the axe in the middle of the copper egg.
If the first scream was bad, its answering scream was a thousand times worse, as glowing yellow ichor splattered over Jeremiah and the room. The thing actually seemed hurt by the blow, but so was the cage. Weakened, at last the cage fell out of its housing and cracked open on the floor.
Jeremiah fell back in horror, tripping over a cable and landing on her arse as the iron bands of the cage sprang free like whips, knocking the ax from her hand. It slid under a heavy lab table, and Jeremiah desperately scrabbled for it—then jerked back as the copper p
etals of the thing began stretching out, one sweeping just centimeters past her face. Antennae followed, testing the air, then legs, some broken, some bleeding. The thing unfolded, then slumped over, dragging itself across the tile with a metallic scrape and a terrible, anguished cry.
Jeremiah kicked back, slipping in spattered ichor, casting about for a gun, for a chair, for a potted plant, for anything to strike that birthing monster. There was something almost human in its outline, and something awfully not, as the wolf-sized prawn-thing dragged itself, wounded, keening, away from the iron bands that had been its prison during its entire time upon the Earth.
For a moment Jeremiah felt pity.
And then, just as the expanding copper petals resolved themselves into four great wings, the monstrous thing lowered the dripping, smashed mess that was its head—fixing upon her one eye, glowing over a dripping metal proboscis.
In that moment Jeremiah became an animal, turning and scrambling frantically to get away from the squealing thing dragging close behind her. She bruised her knees and bloodied her hands as she desperately tried to regain her footing. At last she stumbled to her feet and dove for cover—just as the thing leapt into the air and slammed into her back.
———
Jeremiah screamed as the thing bit into her skull with a sickening crunch.
37.
Back in the Fold
THE PAIN WAS excruciating. Like getting punched or stabbed? No. This felt like being raped. It was digging, digging into the back of her skull, cracking things open, the blood just pouring down her shoulders, the sudden painful breath of fresh air upon some part of her body that should have never been outside. “Get it off me,” she screamed. “Get it off me, get it off me—”
There was a crunch and Jeremiah collapsed forwards. The thing was heavy. It was so heavy. She held herself up with her arms, barely; then there was another crunch, her vision blurred, and her left arm slid out from beneath her. The shift in weight brought a new pain, quickly followed by another as the thing obscenely pressed closer to her, gripping her with spindly arms, a rasping tongue probing the back of her spine.
Then the tongue dug in, and Jeremiah shrieked.
Jeremiah didn’t know how long she lay there, listening to shots and shouts, lightning and the plaintive lowing of the tortured cow—and that terrible, terrible chewing and crunching. She had vague memories of her uncle’s burnt face crying out, of distant explosions while the monster ate upon her, of white-suited figures dragging her uncle’s struggling form away.
Things only grew coherent again when Marcus appeared in his rain-drenched white shirt, leaping atop the overturned cabinet brandishing her left Kathodenstrahl. Seemingly moments later, the Faraday-vested form of Sergeant Natasha Faulkner-Jain burst in as well, running up on the opposite table; then she suddenly seemed to realize that the crackling aetheric weapon he held wasn’t brandished by one of her own people. The two aimed at each other and froze in a standoff.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Whose side are you on?” Marcus barked back.
“Victoriana and the Earth,” she snapped. “And you?”
“I’m with Jeremiah,” Marcus said, pointing his gun away.
“He is indeed,” Jeremiah said weakly, raising her right arm—the only working one she had. “A little help, gentlemen and gentlewomen—”
“Oh, God—” Marcus said, staring at her in horror.
“Blood of the Queen,” Natasha said, her eyes showing their whites.
“Is—is that a Foreigner?” Marcus said.
“I don’t know,” Natasha said. “I’ve . . . I’ve never seen one.”
“It is indeed,” Jeremiah said, hand dropping to the tile. It slid a bit in the blood. She felt strangely detached. “I don’t know what he planned with it . . . but I thwarted him. I did indeed. Is the cow all right? I had to shoot at the cow. I think it was the intended host.”
There was a sudden crunching sound, and Jeremiah wanted to be sick.
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” Marcus said. “What is it doing to you?”
“I do believe,” Jeremiah said distantly, “it is eating me. I do indeed.”
“This, this is wrong,” Natasha said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“You are telling me,” Jeremiah said. Now she was getting muzzy; things seemed very far away, and it all seemed to be happening to someone else. There was another crunch, but she didn’t feel it this time. Perhaps the thing was anesthetizing her. “You are telling me indeed.”
“Let’s get that thing off her,” Natasha said, stepping forwards.
“Don’t let it touch you,” Marcus said, seizing her arm.
“Its blood establishes some kind of rapport,” Jeremiah said distantly. “I think that’s why Lord Christopherson chose this facility: it special-izes in contain-ment. Con . . . tain . . . ment.” As an abstract proposition, she realized she was talking quite funny. “Now that . . . is wee-ard.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll still get that damned thing off you,” Natasha said, raising her weapon.
“Yes, get it off me,” Jeremiah said, even more distantly. “A capital idea . . . but it seemed impervious to everything.” Well, not axes; was it vulnerable to steel or iron? But after hearing the thing’s terrible keening cry when she’d hit it, she strangely didn’t have the heart to suggest it. She tried to marshal herself to come to her own aid, to proffer some profitable suggestion to get the thing off her, but felt a heavy weight settling upon her soul. This was more than anesthetic. What was the thing doing to her? Weakly, she said, “Actually . . . actually seemed tickled by the Kathodenstrahls . . .”
Natasha hesitated. Then she raised her weapon again.
“Damn Austrian toys,” she said. “Their failure won’t stop me from trying.”
“That’s my girl,” Jeremiah said. Natasha was actually dimming in her vision now, growing shadowy and distinct, though from her lack of reaction Jeremiah knew the dimming was inside her, not the lights. She tried to force words of encouragement out, “That . . . is my . . . girl—”
“Together now,” Marcus said. “Perhaps two guns will be better than one—”
“Take mine,” Jeremiah said, pushing it towards him. “I drained it, but you might squeeze a half blast from the dregs of the cylinder, now that the chamber’s had time to charge. All at once, you might knock it out and”—she swallowed, then whispered—“and please, God, get it off me.”
Marcus seized a towel from a table, picked up her Kathodenstrahl with it, and aimed both of them down on her. “All right, on three. You ready?”
“As ever,” Natasha said, pulling out a tiny deranger pistol and aiming it parallel to her blaster. “Hang on, Commander, we’ll have you free in a jiff.”
“One,” Marcus said, then hesitated.
Jeremiah stared at Marcus: his dark eyes, his face filled with concern, his dark angelic curls, damp with rain. He wasn’t too good to be true; he had proven himself to be on her side. She’d reached him: when they had connected . . . they had really connected. Jeremiah smiled.
“One,” Marcus repeated. “Two! Three!”
There was a flare of bright light . . . and then nothingness.
———
EVERYTHING WAS a jumble after that: blurs and pains, muffled voices and jostling bodies, cutting of clothes and changing of positions. She sank deep down into silence, but one thing never left her: she surged back up in fear whenever she felt or heard that awful, awful crunching.
That seemed to go on forever. Then, she was sitting upright, painfully upright, in a chair, a chair strangely reversed so her body was pressed hard into its upright back by firm bands wrapping around her body in every place she could feel. She knew the sensation; she was tied up.
Reflexively, Jeremiah squirmed. Straps painful
ly cut into her arms, pinning them to armrests, and her fingers scraped against the inside of some rounded metal housing. She wondered if she’d become violent as the thing had been . . . eating upon her. She couldn’t blame them for stopping that, but still . . . it hurt. She wore little more than a thin shift, providing no protection at all from the cruel embrace of the heavy bars which curled around her chest and cut into her breasts. She could feel more heavy straps pressing into her from behind. What was this thing they’d bolted her into?
She squirmed again . . . and something behind her shifted and squealed.
Jeremiah screamed, feeling the heavy weight on her shoulders, on the thing pressing down on her head, biting into her head and neck. It was still there, still eating on her, into her; they hadn’t succeeded in freeing her from it. “Oh, God!” she said.
Then her vision seemed to clear, and she saw Sergeant Natasha Faulkner-Jain standing before her, bruised and bloodied. She fell to her knees, heavily, too heavily, and stared into Jeremiah’s face. “Oh, Jeremiah,” she said. “I’m so sorry I’ve failed you.”
Then Chief Engineer Barrowman, covered in blood, stepped up behind her and hit Natasha with a spanner so hard it nearly took her head off.
Jeremiah screamed again as Natasha toppled. Barrowman leaned back, let the spanner drop, shaking. Then he seemed to notice her screaming.
“Well now,” Barrowman said, leaning down to check on her, hand pressing against a strap she hadn’t felt against her forehead. “She didn’t get to you, did she, Commander? Both of you still nicely tucked in, and all that? Good. Good.”
“What?” Jeremiah said. “What? Barrowman, you’ve killed Natasha!”
“Bloody hell,” Lord Birmingham said, stomping into the room, dragging behind him with his mechanical arm a semiconscious Marcus. He gathered his free arm under Marcus and set him down on the deck beside Natasha. “You didn’t have to kill her, Barrowman!”
Jeremiah stared as Marcus’s head lolled, as blood pooled around Natasha’s head. She couldn’t believe this was happening. “This isn’t real,” she said.
Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine Page 28