The Demon!
The Drake must have moved, because the humans skittered and scrambled away and hid behind chunks of rock. She looked with some surprise at the stream of fire roaring from her mouth–
The tiny Angel stepped into the fire and whacked the tip of the Drake’s muzzle with an open hand, like she was a misbehaving puppy. Lightly, but the shock of it was enough to make her snap her jaws shut.
“Stop that,” the Angel scolded, and turned her head. “Are you okay?”
“Completely done on this side,” Paraludi announced, clambering back into view and patting at her smouldering clothes. Cara-Magna also emerged, not quite as badly singed.
“I’d say we’ve got ten minutes before reinforcements arrive,” Frog said. She took the metal spike from Cara-Magna and pushed it up casually into the Drake’s neck before she could even think about flinching. Energy crashed through her, bringing with it time, and – somehow, unfathomably – even more pain. But still no memory. She was grateful for that.
The Drake reared back and got her foreclaws underneath her. The humans backed away again. The Angel spread her wings and folded her arms.
“Mercibald,” the Drake said, her voice feeling raw and harsh in her throat. It almost felt as though she’d been roaring, really roaring as hard as she could, for days on end. Strange. “Mercibald Fagin. The Demon. He’s here.”
Frog immediately spun and faced the door, wings flaring high. She produced a little wooden tube from the folds of her robe, which the Drake noticed was uncharacteristically short and simple compared to the heavy dark garment Gabriel usually sported. She was also barefoot. Combined with what was clearly a blowgun, it gave her a primitive but strangely formidable look.
“We know,” Cara-Magna said, and looked at Paraludi. “We … suspected.”
“That explains why we had so much trouble finding holy ground nearby,” Frog said, her eyes not leaving the door. She passed the stimulant spike back to Cara-Magna, then reached into her robe again and pulled out a small dark pellet. The Drake thought it smelled of blood, but only in the odd way Frog smelled human.
Angel blood and clay, she identified the pellet. How odd.
“Drake,” Paraludi said urgently, “can you … change? Can you go human, so we–”
“No!” the Drake screamed, and was again surprised to find fire blazing from her mouth. The Angel had leaned in and flattened out her wings, shielding the humans, and a moment later she clapped the great limbs together with a boom, sending the flames back down the Drake’s throat. She coughed, shuddered, sobbed. “I can’t,” she rasped. “I can’t.”
“Frog, we haven’t got time to–” Paraludi began.
The Drake swung her head at a cold pulse from the doorway. The Demon had strolled into the cell and was standing, arms folded, smiling at them.
“It’s crowded in–” Mercibald began, unfolding his arms and cupping his hands as if about to burst into spontaneous applause.
Frog’s own hands blurred as she raised the tube to her lips, fired, thumbed a second pellet into the tube, fired again. The pellets made sharp crack sounds as they broke the sound barrier.
One pellet took the Demon in the hand, the second in the side of his neck. He let out a wet, garbled scream … and vanished, in a spiralling burst of jarring darkness that made the deepest unlit nest seem merely gloomy in comparison. By this stage Frog had fired a third time, and the pellet took a chip out of the already-shattered edge of the doorway behind where the Demon had been standing.
Mercibald Fagin was gone, leaving behind a pair of obscene black sprays of stuff that bubbled into the treated stone before vanishing.
“That was suspiciously easy,” Paraludi said. “Is he dead?”
Frog curled a wing around and glanced at it.
“If these go black in the next few minutes, we can stop over on the way home and pick up a bottle of champagne,” she said, “but otherwise no, he’ll bounce back,” nevertheless, she seemed satisfied. “Demons – once they reach a certain maturity – can only jump like that a fixed number of times before they dissolve for good, though. And Mercy is very mature, and has got a very limited number of jumps left in him. Whether he only went up a couple of floors or halfway down to the Castle Basements, it’s one jump closer to death.”
“Let’s hope he did that second thing,” Paraludi said.
Frog was looking at the Drake again. “You two, go,” the Angel said, half-turning to talk over her wing. “Head to the cemetery. I’ll get her out of here,” she turned back to the Drake, frowning. “No changing,” she said, as the two humans scampered out. “But you can’t fly with those wings, and I don’t think I’ll be able to carry you. But getting out through the tunnel is going to be difficult,” she chewed her lower lip. “Okay,” she said, “curl up as much as you can around your exposed skin, I’m going to break through to the rock. You can dig from there.”
“What’s wrong with my wings?” the Drake said, looking back and opening them experimentally.
Frog looked sympathetic. “Nobody has actually had the heart to tell you, have they?”
“No,” the Drake said, and sighed. “But I know, of course. I’ve never been on the surface in my natural form. I’ve never learned to fly. I suppose the muscles never developed.”
“It makes tunnelling easier,” Frog shrugged.
“I’m good at tunnelling,” the Drake brightened, eager to impress the Angel. “Have you … I suppose you’ve seen Dragons who can fly? Normal, ordinary Dragons?”
“Not since the war,” Frog said distractedly. “Now, curl.”
“Up,” the Drake said. She didn’t have time to think about the other Dragons.
“Yes, curl up.”
“No,” the Drake said, and tilted her muzzle. “Break the ceiling.”
Frog looked at her appraisingly. “That’s not a bad idea,” she said. “The shielding is thinner there, and the levels we came down all seem to be made out of normal ’crete and steel … I guess they figured you’d never bother to try to get out that way – and even if you did, you couldn’t get the leverage–”
“No,” the Drake insisted. “We need to go up, and destroy the rest of this place. They’ve … they’ve taken…” she shook her head. “They took things from me. I have to make sure it’s destroyed.”
Frog nodded. “We’ll trash everything we can,” she said, “and the rest … I honestly wouldn’t worry about it. If they’ve recorded anything, collected data, this prison is apparently a completely enclosed system, and Galatine gave us a sort of a computer virus…”
“A what?”
“Sorry, I’m old-fashioned,” Frog grimaced. “I don’t know what else to call it, but it was a series of signals we introduced into the prison system and left to … sort of breed into a massive error. It will wipe out everything they haven’t taken out of here on record bars,” she frowned. “Do they still use bars?”
“It will destroy the information?” the Drake would normally have been horrified by this idea, but things had changed.
“Like it never existed, Galatine says,” Frog told her. “He knows more about the computers than I do, you need to ask him. It’s what helped us get in here in the first place. The nolo … something-or-other, he calls it. He’s been working on unmaking the living guns and stopping them from being rebuilt. It basically resets the whole area of knowledge to zero. Mind you,” she went on thoughtfully, “if we bring this entire building down, I don’t imagine Galatine’s virus will have much left to do.”
The Drake nodded. “Very well.”
“Once we’re done … it’s a long tunnel back to Adelbairn, you know,” Frog pointed out.
“Once we’re done, I’ll change,” the Drake promised. “You can – you’ll carry me back?”
Frog nodded, and put a tiny hand on the Drake’s claw.
“All the way,” she said.
FUGITIVES
Galatine sat at his workstation, scraps and half-finished prototypes he
aped and forgotten around him. He was watching the remote uplink, following the progress of the infant subsystem as it developed, fed, then gracefully aged. There wasn’t actually much to see, since the whole point of the sealed network was that nothing got in or out. If anything went wrong with the corruption, he didn’t want it getting out into the national grid.
Neither did Osrai.
“Life cycle complete,” the voice, which Galatine had always thought of as a ghost in the computer system, reported calmly. “The subsystem should be deactivating and disseminating into its own data spoor as we speak.”
Galatine nodded, but was still concerned. The jailbreak had been a handy opportunity to test the program he was beginning to work on, but it was still just an experiment. And the lives of the majority of his friends were riding on it. He had not intended that to be the case – at least not until he was much farther along.
When Osrai had been created, centuries ago, it had been a semi-emergent artificial intelligence. The act of weaving it together out of the thousands of near-sentient programs floating around Earth’s perfectly isolated computer network at the time had been inspired, but had in part been happening on its own anyway. Still, the intentional structuring of the new life-form had spared a lot of trial and error. Osrai had been born, and had promptly hidden itself away in the endless labyrinth of machines and electronic storage across the exiled globe-Earth.
In the time since, in the years of the Exposed Earth, Osrai had grown and adapted to whatever old and new junk had shown up. Galatine liked to think it had something of an affinity with the TrollCagers, but it was hard to know. Osrai was everywhere.
Well … not quite everywhere, it seemed. The artificial intelligence, like the Drake’s entire network as far as Galatine could tell, had not known about the laboratories and research going on in Warakurna Mine prison. And where there was one gap, there would be others. Probably just as bad.
The subsystem Galatine had given to Magna to infect Warakurna was sort of a relic. It was either a program-segment that had never been integrated into Osrai in the first place, or one that hadn’t been integrated fully and had later been shed, or one that Osrai had spun off and discarded like a semi-sentient electronic snakeskin for some reason of its own. Galatine had, with a little help from Osrai, adapted it to wipe out data. And it was very good at what it did.
Warakurna Mine was a practice run, a trial. He was just glad it had apparently succeeded, because it had also been a rescue mission.
He checked the files on his own system. The subsystem53 was still intact and under development in his own strictly quarantined digital nursery, and the copy he had sent out to do its hungry work in the Warakurna system had apparently behaved exactly the way the simulations had promised. Although it was hard to be absolutely certain, because the remote uplink was also reporting that the Warakurna Mine network had also experienced a physical meltdown, possibly due to an incendiary attack. And the more he thought about that, the less surprised he was.
He sat back in his seat, rubbed his eyes, picked up his coffee cup, drank, gagged on the cold, sour remnants, put the cup down and rubbed his eyes again.
“Thanks, Osrai,” he said. “I think we can call that a successful test,” he lowered his hand and stared at the screens, wishing they could tell him more. Or anything. “Although a test of what functionality, specifically, I don’t have a clue.”
“As soon as you start to specify goals, it gets harder to pinpoint success,” Osrai said. Galatine thought this was probably a joke, but it was hard to figure out when all you knew for certain was that your eyeballs felt like a pair of hard-boiled eggs.
“Let’s just say ‘success’ for now, and unpack the simulations in the morning,” he said.
“You should get some rest,” Osrai approved, “although I also feel duty-bound to point out, it is eleven a.m. at this point.”
Galatine sighed. “To be continued this evening, then.”
All of his work was like this, he reflected as he stood up and reeled and tried to remember which direction his bed lay in. Piece after piece, prototype after prototype. None of them ready. None of them quite capable of doing what his brain insisted they should do. None of them really meant to go together, and now all of them had to be sewn into a tapestry that unified everything and achieved not only the impossible … but the unimaginable.
How did it go together? What did the tapestry show? All he was really certain of was that he’d know it when he saw it.
He wasn’t insighted like Ludi and Magna. His talent was more … external. It might start in his mind, but it had to become a thing of bolts and plates and electricity and code and chemicals before it was real. And it never started as today I shall design a gun that uses souls as ammunition or today I shall invent an artificial mind that eats knowledge and shits geometric digital foam. If it did, he would never have made it this far. He would have thrown himself into a live reactor at the first opportunity.
No. It started as today I shall take this piece of technology apart, and put it back together with these components replaced with something else, I don’t know yet but I’m sure it will turn up.
Osrai said he reminded it of its creator.
Galatine collapsed into the little bed, barely even noticing the fact that a half-dismantled enhancement block was digging into his kidneys.
He’d thought the living guns were his life’s work. Then he’d thought the Exorcist, the fountains, destroying the living guns, was his life’s work. Now … now he didn’t know what his life’s work was. All he knew was that he didn’t have the rest of his life to fuck around with it anymore. If he didn’t finish this, nobody would. And that would mean he left this world a worse place – far, far, infinitely worse – for his presence.
And that was the only thing keeping him from walking downstairs and taking a piss in Big Thundering Bjørn’s fridge-suit.
“Gunsmiff!”
His study reverberated with the clanging of Ogre-club on the metal framework below, and Galatine lurched upwards in a little shower of wire clippings and components. He rose, frowned at the four visible clocks in his room – all but one of them said it was close to midnight, and the fourth was set to fractal time that still basically corroborated the other three’s story – and quickly straightened himself out.
“I overslept,” he muttered accusingly.
“No,” Osrai replied, “you slept. There is a subtle difference.”
“It’s not a subtle difference,” Galatine said. “If you sleep, you still get the things done that you need to do. If you oversleep, you don’t get them done and the world is conquered by a Damorak God.”
“That’s an overly dramatic definition.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Galatine grunted.
“Alright. The team is back from Warakurna Mine.”
Galatine ran down the stairs fast enough to make Tuesday take a shuffling step back and briefly raise his club. Magna, Ludi and Frogsalt were in the clear space between the aisles and the end-rooms. The Angel was cradling the gangly, distorted shape of the Drake in her arms. The tiny figure holding the elongated one would have looked comical, but the broad sweep of her wings lent it a little balance.
“Is she alright?” Galatine asked, picking his way around the still-rumbling Fat Tuesday as quickly as he dared and crossing to the others. “Are you all alright?” he blinked at the two women in their dusty, nondescript shirts and trousers and coats. Had he ever seen them not wearing TrollCage overalls? “I like your blatantly-obvious-fugitives-on-the-run costumes,” he added.
“Well we weren’t going to go in there with logos on our chests,” Ludi said. “We went over this before we left. I told you he hadn’t been listening,” she added to Magna.
“But we’re fine,” Magna added.
Galatine looked at Frogsalt, who was setting the Drake back on her feet. The Dragon was naked, but her pallid body was more … unsettling to look at than anything else. He felt it was only r
ight to focus on the Angel in any case. “Is the Drake – is she … ?”
“She’s been drugged and had tests run on her,” Frogsalt said.
“She was mutilated,” Ludi said indignantly. “I’m glad she burned that damn place to the ground.”
“That was actually about the tenth question on my list, but okay,” Galatine said. “You performed a hard exit, then?” he waved them through to the kitchen and began preparing food and drinks, not sure whether there was anything he could offer the Dragon. Not in her current form, and they didn’t really have space for her in her natural form … and he didn’t have anything to offer her in that form either. If we had the raw materials to feed into a giant industrial beef-cloning machine, we could have a ton and a half of beef, he thought disjointedly. If we had a giant industrial beef-cloning machine.
“That’s one way to say it,” Frogsalt said. Humans, Angel and Dragon seated themselves at the table, and Tuesday shuffled aimlessly into the space too, making it immediately overcrowded. “Another is that I banged a hole in the cell roof, and the Drake slagged her way up through the mine like it was an ice dollhouse.”
“Good,” Galatine nodded. “I mean, obviously, good that you got out, and good that you destroyed it all – but I was also a little concerned that the nolovirus had sent back false readings through the uplink or something.”
“So we’re going with ‘nolovirus’?” Ludi asked in disappointment. Frogsalt beamed.
“More to the point, it worked as intended?” Magna added. “The data from Warakurna Mine’s research, it’s all gone?”
“As far as I could tell from the echo,” Galatine said, “and in among all the being-burned-into-slag that happened at the same time. But burning it was the right thing to do,” he repeated hastily. “It’s better to be sure, and the prototype testing of a stupid computer program isn’t important compared to whatever happened to the Drake in there. I hope it’s all gone.”
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