“Will this be considered an act of war?” Ludi asked anxiously.
“My immediate guess would be no – not on official channels, anyway,” Galatine said. “Warakurna Mine was so isolated and secret, so disconnected from all its sponsor corporations, they’d have to explain way too much about the whole abandoned mine that’s actually a waste dump thing…”
“The humans that worked there,” the Drake said, “the scientists, were inmates.”
“Right,” Galatine said uneasily. Her voice had always sounded a little strange to his ears, but it had a cold hollowness now that he really didn’t like. “That makes sense, actually. They – people like me – we’re sort of like the living equivalent of toxic waste.”
“Galatine,” Magna chided.
“I’m not being self-pitying,” Galatine told her. “Containment and deniability are the key concepts here. Rebranding researchers as prisoners makes a lot of sense. Governments have more authority now than ever, when it comes to redefining inconvenient people out of existence. The good news is, it’s difficult to complain when those sorts of people disappear. To even mention that Warakurna was destroyed, they’d have to admit it existed in the first place.”
“Containment and deniability may be off the table,” Frogsalt said. “We turned that place into a little volcano.”
“That’s a relatively minor issue,” Galatine said. “Considering some of the eruptions and subsidences caused by actual waste dumps, the sinkholes, assorted power network loops and drains … the occasional volcano in the middle of nowhere is pretty easy to wave off as a freak gas pocket and bury in the ‘Huh’ pages. Especially since Warakurna is near a sinkhole in the first place.”
“Okay, that’s the official response – what about unofficially?” Ludi pressed. “Let’s not pretend that we’re talking about people who are going to fill out police reports and insurance claims, or people who are going to guiltily cut their losses and pretend nothing ever happened. We’re talking about a Demon and his corporate minions.”
“Hold on,” Galatine spun from the coffee machine, “what?”
“Oh right,” Ludi muttered.
“Mercibald Fagin was there?” Galatine demanded. Ludi and Magna nodded. “What was he – what did he – how did you–?”
“Frog shot him with a blowdart,” Ludi said admiringly.
Galatine raised his eyebrows. They’d done a bit of research into Demon-slaying over the years, of course, especially once they began to suspect Mercy had made a behind-the-scenes comeback. Gabriel, as just about their only Angel-level contact to this point, had been his usual uninformative self, but had given them the high-level undead basics. Technically, Angel-matter making contact with Demon-matter caused a dramatic superchemical reaction, and could even kill – but the catch was, the amount of matter required for a fatal mix was basically 100%. Of both parties, which meant both the Angel and the Demon in question cancelled each other out in a very messy fashion indeed.
In small amounts, however, Angel-matter could cause severe, if temporary injury to Demons – and presumably vice versa. Unfortunately, according to Gabriel, this only worked when it was an Angel or Demon, or possibly some other kind of undead, wielding said matter. The effectiveness of bullets dipped in Angel blood, for example, was severely limited … and Gabriel had put his hairy foot down about letting Galatine branch out into experiments on Angelic matter in any case, a fact for which Galatine was quietly grateful. It wasn’t as if the living guns couldn’t kill Angels, anyway – and it was fairly likely they could kill a Demon, too. As such, further research had seemed redundant.
Still, it was intriguing. “Saliva on the pellets?” he asked her.
“Blood,” Frogsalt said, and put a hand on the Drake’s shoulder. The Dragon had tensed in her seat. “But we don’t need to talk about this now,” she went on. The coffee machine began to churn and rumble, and Galatine joined the others at the table. “We got out, we hid in an old graveyard for the day, then we flew back here. Stopping at … where was it?”
“Gunbarrel Plains,” Magna said.
“Right, Gunbarrel Plains,” Frogsalt said. “Church of Jalah’s Divine Apology and Gourmet Chico Rolls. They were actually very good.”
“Not bad if you like your big red54 in greasy cheese sausage on a stick form,” Ludi noted. “And who doesn’t?”
“They took my DNA,” the Drake said, abruptly and very clearly. “They took my me.”
Frog stood up. “I think we should get the Drake back to her nest as soon as possible,” she said, once again clasping the Dragon’s angular shoulder reassuringly. “Ludi?”
“Right,” Ludi, looking as blank and baffled as Galatine felt, jumped up and ushered Frogsalt and the Drake back out of the door. Galatine rose instinctively to say farewell.
“Sit,” Frogsalt waved a hand and smiled, “I’ll be back for my coffee in just a second. I want to … get the Drake comfortable and ready to move. She doesn’t need to hear all this again.”
“Of course,” Galatine hastened.
“There’s a service tunnel that we use, I reckon we can get there and back before dawn…” Ludi’s voice faded as she led the Dragon and the Angel out into the warehouse. Galatine looked questioningly at Magna.
Magna shrugged. “That’s what she told us when they got to the rendezvous point,” she confirmed, “and she hasn’t said much else since.”
“Her DNA … that’s not possible,” Galatine breathed, and sat heavily back down in his seat. “Dragon samples burn up and turn to clinkers after extraction.”
“Let’s face it, though,” Magna said. “Dragons don’t exactly have a history of letting humans experiment on them. And the only reason it hasn’t happened since the war is that the Dragons were all gone – except for the Drake, who was in hiding. And for good reason, by the sound of it. We dramatically misjudged the risks of turning the Drake in to the authorities,” her expression darkened. “I’m not entirely sure Greyblade misjudged them.”
“But her DNA–”
“You know Dragons can’t lie,” Magna grimaced. “Although I have no idea how that rule holds up when it comes to a Dragon telling people things she might have seen in a stress-related paranoid delusion,” she added doubtfully, “while half-comatose on a cocktail of drugs. Either way, something was going on in that place. Something I wish she could have burned twice.”
Galatine nodded. “Well, whether it’s on the record or not,” he said, “someone knows we’re gunning for them. Someone with the resources to build underground Dragon prisons and have Demons dropping by for visits.”
Fat Tuesday, who had been squatting comfortably in his big metal refrigeration suit to one side of the doorway and listening to the little people jabbering, was finally spurred to contribute.
“Her’s a Dragon?” he rumbled in surprise.
Galatine let out an amused sigh. “You’ve met her before,” he said, “remember Gabriel telling you?” Tuesday responded with waves of bafflement detectable through his heavy cluster-iron helmet, and Galatine added, “you know – Turkeyman?”
Tuesday perked up. “Where Turkeyman at?”
Galatine and Magna looked at each other wearily.
“So – war, then,” Magna concluded.
“War?” the humans turned to see Frogsalt had reappeared in the doorway. “This has been a war since the Pinians left,” the little Angel said. “It’s just spent the past thirty years as coals buried under the ground,” she stepped into the room, spread her wings and snapped them meaningfully, buffeting them with a brief gale. “Now it’s time to scrape the dirt off those coals, and fan them a bit.”
LYING LOW
They battened down and waited for the Adelbairn alien quarter regulatory and security department to come for them. They watched their tunnel entrances and waited for the next coordinated set of raids that meant the nest had been compromised. The authorities didn’t come, and the TrollCagers slowly relaxed and lowered themselves back down off high a
lert.
Not all the way off it, though.
While they were waiting for the Adelbairn alien quarter regulatory and security department, they also waited for Mercibald Fagin to appear at the doors of Ogrehome and begin tearing the place – and his employees, at least at some level of the deep bureaucratic strata – apart. Frogsalt stayed with them, tiny and grim and ready at all hours of the day and night, their fierce guardian pixie. She told them she had no idea where Mercy had gone. For all anyone knew, he’d been completely incapacitated by the emergency teleportation, although it was probably too much to expect him to die from it. They simply didn’t know enough about Demons and how they worked. Frogsalt admitted she wouldn’t have even known he was in the Drake’s cell if she hadn’t been able to see him. Her superhuman senses had told her nothing.
They didn’t know what Mercy was planning to do about the research, and the priceless specimen, of which they’d deprived him. Frogsalt was convinced that he’d be furious, and that his vengeance would be dramatic as only a Demon’s vengeance could be. Demons had a bit of a reputation for melodrama, and even though Mercy was supposedly exceptional in the keeping-it-low-key department, Frog insisted he was not immune.
Nevertheless she was ready – eager, even – to face him. This, as far as Galatine could tell, was not exactly typical for an Angel. There weren’t many historical records concerning the dynamic between the glorified and the diabolised, but most of it seemed to consist of both sides putting their noses in the air and looking the other way. Full-blown confrontations rarely went well for anyone concerned. Best-case scenario seemed to be mutual cancellation.
Bizarrely, it was Big Thundering Bjørn who came closest to solving the riddle of Frogsalt.
“She want the big black flappers,” the Ogre said to Galatine and Magna one morning, while Ludi and Frogsalt were somewhere out among the crates. “Wings.”
Ogres, Galatine had noticed, sometimes threw up odd, random memories and knowledge. They’d been around for unthinkable lengths of time, and their brains were simple things not much given to long-term retention of any but the most basic data-bites. They had, however, imprinted lots of experiences and snippets over the years, and even though those had been almost entirely paved over, the odd cobblestone would still work its way to the surface sometimes. It was particularly prevalent when an Ogre was injured, and regenerating – part of the regeneration seemed to go into rebuilding synapses, that would fire off once or twice before going back to sleep.
Big Thundering Bjørn hadn’t been injured as far as Galatine could tell, although the four ancient monsters were forever shouting and pummelling each other in an affectionate and apparently tireless way. He’d just … remembered, aimlessly, and had thereafter been able to provide no additional information whatsoever.
Either way, he seemed to be right. Frogsalt had allowed Gabriel to recruit her because she just plain wanted to kill a Demon, and killing a Demon was apparently one way to be promoted to Archangel. When Galatine and Ludi confronted her about it, she confessed without equivocation.
“The only catch is, Mercy’s life is already claimed by another,” she told them.
“Who?” Galatine insisted.
“Someone I wouldn’t want to annoy by cutting in,” Frogsalt replied cryptically.
“Is that why you missed?” Ludi asked her nonchalantly. “In Warakurna?”
“Missed?” Frogsalt laughed. “I got him two very solid hits, and would have put the third right between his eyes if he hadn’t scarpered. No, if I get a chance to finish Mercy, I won’t worry too much about who it annoys.”
The Drake had vanished back into her nest, and had made it very clear she was not to be intruded upon. When a Dragon closed her doors, the prudent stayed away.
Frogsalt told them that it meant a great deal that the Drake had remained so calm in their presence, and had agreed to remain in human form for as long as she had. She had survived brutal treatment in Warakurna, and it was uncertain whether she had been forced to remain in Dragon form at the outset, but by the end it had been purely defensive. She also seemed to have developed some kind of deep-seated horror of the shapeshift process, and perhaps of her human form in general. She’d gone back to Dragon form before closing her nest to visitors, and nobody seemed to know if she’d ever come back. To her humanoid guise or to her interactions with the surface world.
Galatine was a little concerned about this, because the truth was they needed the Drake’s network. And they needed the Drake to swim its murky waters. Gabriel had admitted to being completely out of his depth, and Galatine was almost as badly off. There was something about the data, something that made him uneasy. And it wasn’t just the possibility that Damoraks were infiltrating Earth along with Karl the Bloody-Handed, although that was a terrifying possibility. But without the Drake’s help, Galatine didn’t think they’d have much chance of figuring it out. Whatever ‘it’ even was.
Still, they had time to let her unpack. Time they could spend waiting for the heat to die down. The important thing had been getting her back underground without any further intrusion by the authorities, or Mercy’s goons. If indeed there was any functional difference at this point.
They waited, and nobody came, and they waited some more.
Galatine watched as much of the networks as he could, without access to the resources under Sprawling Adelbairn that he admittedly lacked the skill to utilise anyway. He got some help from Osrai, as always, but the mind in the machine was subdued following the revelation of Mercibald Fagin’s reappearance. Galatine thought it might be embarrassed. It was less worrying than the thought it might be frightened.
There continued to be no sign that their cover was blown, either in Vanning or Sprawling Adelbairn. And that was good, because there was still so much to be done.
So much.
And then, finally, Gabriel returned.
THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL
The Archangel didn’t waste time explaining himself, or his absence, or his abrupt reappearance.
“You broke the Drake out of a top secret prison?” he demanded, long arms folded and dusty-black wings seeming to fill the shadows of the warehouse aisle. “After my one parting instruction was not to leave the TrollCage?”
Frogsalt was standing in front of him, with Galatine, Magna, Ludi and two of the Ogres, Tuesday and Hungry, arrayed behind her as if the tiny Angel could provide cover for them. In a very real sense, Galatine supposed she could. Night had fallen some hours before and they’d been preparing to turn in.
“Oh come on, Gabe,” Frogsalt said with a toss of her bone-white hair. “You know that was never going to work. You brought me here for a reason, and sitting around in a warehouse wasn’t it.”
“I don’t know why I brought you here yet,” Gabriel growled, “but I’m already regretting it.”
“Go on,” Frogsalt challenged. “Tell us you regret that we broke the Drake out. You regret she’s free again, back in her nest and away from the humans that were experimenting on her.”
“No,” the Archangel said heavily, “I don’t regret that. You did good. You took a huge risk and put all of us and possibly the entire Earth in danger, but you did good,” he frowned. “What do you mean, experimenting on her?”
“She’s not saying,” Frogsalt said before any of the humans could answer. “You can ask her if you want, but she said she wants to be alone.”
“No, I’ll let her be,” Gabriel said. “But sooner or later we’re going to need her network. And her deep caves,” he added, “and her access to the Overhell,” he scowled at Galatine over Frogsalt’s wings. “Have you at least made progress, amidst all the reckless swashbuckling?”
“I didn’t leave the warehouse,” Galatine said in an attempt to lighten the mood. Gabriel just scowled at him. “I’ve made some progress,” recognising that the Archangel had no intention of enlightening them about his trip downstairs, he turned to lead them into the Exorcist chamber. His latest series of experiments
had taken place in there, and some of the more intact results were gathered on a little folding table.
“Hmm,” Gabriel looked at the scorched and melted little collection of metal buttons. “I’m no scientist, so if you say this is progress I’ll honestly try to believe you…”
“I’m running simulations,” Galatine said. “If the general idea is that we intercept a … soul … and feed it into the power network rather than letting it go back to where it came from…” he gestured at the buttons. “These are miniaturisations of the process. We can’t make a mechanism like a gun, it’s more like a battery,” he shook his head. “Actually it’s more like a dam,” he went on. “A huge reservoir of power, pressing against a single least-resistance escape point. Only this dam happens to be full of water that’s consciously trying to get out.”
“It’s sort of the founding premise of actual soul power,” Frogsalt, who had been bored enough in the warehouse to pick up a surprising amount of the basics, and some of the intermediates as well, spoke up. “Not like the guns, which are dirty and inefficient and don’t drain right.”
“Yes,” Galatine said. “Now, as with a dam, we have runoff points and pressure release vents: the fountains.”
“Do they work?”
“I haven’t integrated them yet,” Galatine admitted. “The theory is sound, though,” Gabriel frowned, but nodded. “What I’m trying to make here is the dam, not the slipways,” he went on. “It’s not a single solid case like a gun capsule, or the prototype that Stormburg and his Flesh-Eater pal made, although it borrows from both designs. Those won’t work, because they were meant to do something different. This … it’s decentralised, like the sinkholes. The reservoir is being lifted from unreality into reality, after all – the dam is just pinpointing its least-resistance point in the real world.”
“Or points,” Gabriel added.
“Seals,” Frogsalt concluded, eyes bright. “It has a certain classical appeal, Gabe.”
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