“What?”
Nicola and Peel looked up at it, saw that it was reaching out with three tentacles towards three separate corners of the cell. Meanwhile its mouth had closed around the Ranger, puncturing the skin of the man otherwise held in stasis.
Nicola’s hand went to her mouth. Her eyes became wide. “How did it move?”
The assassin cackled manically. “It doesn’t exist in space and time. It’s not confined by it, only slowed.”
“And what is it reaching for?”
It was Peel who answered his girlfriend, finally understanding. “It’s reaching for where the three of us will be when it escapes the stasis field.”
The three watched the suspended monster for a long period of time, fighting their fear towards their fates if they could not escape this cell. The monster was moving, not quickly and not noticeably, but it was moving. Several hours had passed since their arrival and more of its teeth had sunk further into the flesh of the Ranger, even though the Ranger remained frozen in time.
“How do we get out of here, you fucker?” Nicola screamed at Anderson, who could do little more than rock himself back and forth, back and forth in what was now becoming a near catatonic state. She turned to Peel, and he could see the whites of her eyes enveloping the top and bottom of her irises. She too was close to breaking point. A shoggoth could do that to anyone.
He gripped her again, stroked the back of her neck to calm her. “We’ll get out of this, I promise.”
“How can you promise? Reznikova is dead, and the other five rooms didn’t feature that… thing.”
“That shoggoth,” Peel whispered to himself. He knew nothing about these creatures, what their purpose was, where they had come from, nothing. He too felt as Nicola did, that this was an alien horror that was beyond their comprehension, a dimensional entity that existed in the higher universes if Anderson were to be believed. As humans, collectively and individually, they were all powerless to stop or even slow it, should it be free.
“Wait a second!” the Major exclaimed. “What did Reznikova keep saying, that each equation could only be solved if the assumption was this was a four dimensional universe, one comprised of space-time?”
Nicola sat up, hope in her eyes again as she stared into Peel’s equality courageous expression. “It has to be a matrix about dimensions, but why?”
Peel’s mind was already racing. “I think this place was a trap designed not for us, but creatures like this shoggoth. If they operate in dimensions greater than what we humans do, or which the Pentapods existed in, then it would be impossible for it to get through this trap.”
“But for a Pentapod it would be easy.”
“And in theory: for a human too.”
Nicola stood, finally excited. Peel joined her. She was glancing around the room, studying it. “The answer is in front of us Harrison. Right in front of our eyes?”
He looked up, but all he saw was the twenty-sided Icosahedron. He shrugged, wishing he understood mathematics as well as she did.
“Five perfect solids honey. Only five perfect solids can exist in our universe, and we’ve just passed through each of them.”
“Except for the last one.”
She grinned, “Except for the last one.” Her excitement was infectious, and Peel couldn’t help but feel Nicola was on the right track now.
“Five would explain one axis of the three by five matrix, but what about the three side?”
Nicola was laughing now. “Well that’s easy. The first will be how many sides. The tetrahedron has four sides, the cube or hexahedron has six— Let me work this out, four, six, eight, twelve and twenty. Start looking for that line somewhere.”
Peel and Nicola scrambled about the cell, quickly identifying then discounting each matrix, until Peel came across one that might be what they were after, one that he suspected they missed on their last search. He called Nicola over, and together they studied it:
4 6 4
8 12 6
6 12 8
20 30 12
12 30 20
“That’s the one,” she said with confidence.
“How do you know?”
“The right column: that is the number of faces. The left is the points, or vertices, where the edges meet. The middle column is the edges.”
Peel imagined a cube because it was an easy solid to create in his mind; saw the eight vertices, twelve edges and six faces. “This has to be the one, the final solution?”
Nicola wasn’t looking at Peel though, but up, and the two tentacles of putrid matter that were less than half a meter above each of them. A similar tentacle was almost upon Anderson. The three of them had presumed the exact positions where the tentacles had been reaching for all along. The creature had known where they would be in the future.
The woman he loved, and admired even more after the events of today, grabbed his hand and held it tight in hers. “It has to be a sign, Harrison, that we’re right.”
“Push it,” Peel exclaimed, gripping her tightly in response. “I love you.”
“Me too.”
She pressed down hard, closed her eyes.
Read the rest of the story in The Weaponized Puzzle
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Interview with David Conyers
What inspired you to write “The Weaponized Puzzle?”
I like mixing up science fiction with the Cthulhu Mythos. I feel this is a great opportunity that really hasn’t been taken up before, except perhaps by Jeffrey Thomas and Charles Stross. I also enjoy the spy thriller genre, so that is the third ingredients to my mix, and then you get my Harrison Peel series with “The Weaponized Puzzle” being the fifth tale in the series.
Feedback from readers is that they enjoy the ‘Easter Eggs’ is distribute through the narrative, in particular linking to current developments in the fields of cosmology, quantum mechanics, theoretical physics, and so forth. I read a lot of science magazines and science websites looking for ideas. In this tale I adapted the Platonic Solids, dark energy, higher dimensional mathematics and the quandaries of trying to visualize higher dimensions.
I have a lot of fun writing this series, throwing Peel into more and more complicated scenarios with lots of weirdness and horror, but also action and intrigue. I think in Peel I’ve found a genre mash that works for me: action science fiction thrillers.
What else can you tell us about the Harrison Peel series?
So far I have two books released: The Impossible Object and The Weaponized Puzzle to be followed by The Elder Codex in 2014. I have plans to compile at least five more books after that, and likely many more. These interconnected stories recount the adventures of Army Intelligence Officer, Major Harrison Peel, who travels the globe fighting the good fight against alien monsters wherever they appear threatening to destroy humanity.
I believe that if the horrors of Lovecraft’s creations exist as written, then they have to encroach upon the world in their various guises to a point where the world’s governments (at least governments in the developed world who have the resources to notice these things) would have learnt of them by now. But because the general public knows nothing about their existence, there must be a conspiracy to why these horrors are kept secret—more than just to ensure that the whole world does not go mad knowing the truth of their existence. Spies are the instruments for hiding state secrets and uncovering the secrets of enemy nations. Hence, I decided to create a character for this kind of story who was a spy, and Major Harrison Peel came into existence.
Peel has appeared in at least fifteen short stories and novellas in various ezines, print magazines and anthologies. All pit Peel against the various gods and monsters that H.P. Lovecraft created.
Your stories often take readers to the world’s exotic locations, and the Harrison Peel Files are no different. Where do Peel’s adventures take him?
Exotic locations are the staple of spy fiction, and so to make this setting work, foreign lands are a must. More importantly, these la
nds must be dangerous places.
Unlike the majority of Cthulhu Mythos investigators penned by other authors who concentrate on stories set in the US and the UK, Peel’s missions often send him to various unsavory locations across the globe, such as the jungles of Cambodia and the Congo, outback Australia, into the wastelands of Antarctica and Pakistan, the mountains of Tibet and Peru and so forth (another advantage of using a spy character is that exotic travel is expected of them). As a soldier and spy, Peel is proficient in combat and deception, but he often finds the only way to survive through any adventure is to think his way out of it. His ability to pre-empt what these alien horrors are planning is often the only thing that saves him from a horrible death, or so is my intention with these tales.
Peel stories are deliberately written in the style of thriller adventures, a little bit like what a James Bond, Dirk Pitt or Jason Bourne novel might be like had it included alien monsters. There are exotic locales, villainous characters, deceit, excessive amounts of military hardware and lots of action. Its pulp, I know, but if you the reader enjoy that kind of thing, then hopefully you’ll get as much fun out of Peel’s escapades as I get out of writing them.
So there are lots of Peel stories out there in the elder ether. Until they are all collected, what is the reading order?
Okay, here goes… I won’t include tales that I’ve yet to write, and some stories are still to be released, but here is the order (with more tales to come):
“Made of Meat”, “Driven Underground”, “Impossible Object” and “False Containment” in The Impossible Object. Then there is “The Weaponized Puzzle” and “Weapon Grade” in The Weaponized Puzzle. “The Spiraling Worm” with John Sunseri in The Spiraling Worm from Chaosium is next, but keep in mind this collection is in print version only and into limited stock. The novella will however appear in The Elder Codex next year.
After that there is “The Road to Afghanistan” in What Scares the Boogeyman?, “War Gods of Men” with David Kernot in a future issue of Lovecraft eZine, and The Eye of Infinity from Perilous Press. These stories will make up the forth book in my series.
“The Eye of Infinity” ends of a cliffhanger so to find out what happens readers will need to turn to “Consequences” co-written with C.J. Henderson which will appear in Chaosium’s forthcoming Cthulhu’s Dark Cults II. Then I have to write some more stories, before “The Masked Messenger” with John Goodrich occurs (appearing online now at Lovecraft eZine), “Stomach Acid” with Brian M. Sammons in Cthulhu Unbound 2 and finally “The R’lyeh Singularity” in Cthulhu Unbound 3.
That isn’t the end of it, and I have lots of plans for Peel, but that’s all I can talk about right now, except perhaps to say I have plans for things to get much, much weirder for Peel after “The R’lyeh Singularity”. Much of what is to come will be foreshadowed in the stories as I release them.
You’ve edited several Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, what can you tell us about them?
I’ve edited Cthulhu’s Dark Cults which features characters, cults, monsters and locations from Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, a fiction book for the game. It gathered many positive reviews and made the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award. All these stories are set in the 1920s and 1930s, but there is a sequel in the works with tales set in the modern day.
The other Mythos anthology I co-edited was Cthulhu Unbound 3 with Brian M Sammons, which features four lengthy novellas from Cody Goodfellow, D.L. Snell, Tim Curran and “The R’lyeh Singularity” mentioned above, co-written with Brian M. Sammons. This anthology features a Wild West tale, a weird body horror tale, a prison tale and of course, spies versus Cthulhu.
What stories would you include in your ultimate Cthulhu Mythos anthology?
Most readers of the genre know Lovecraft and his contemporaries, such as Brian Lumley, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Ramsey Campbell, and so on, so I wouldn’t go there. I like reading modern Mythos tales because that is where all the interesting developments are occurring in the genre. If I was going to put to all my favorite modern mythos tales into one book, this would be it:
“A Colder War” Charles Stross
“A Study in Emerald” by Neil Gaiman
“The Long, Deep Dream” by Peter Clines
“Than Curse the Darkness” by David Drake
“One Way Conversation” by Brian M. Sammons
“The Star Pools” by A.A. Attanasio
“The Patriot” by John Goodrich
“Red Cells” by Jeffrey Thomas
“Long Meg and Her Daughters” by Paul Finch
“The Big Fish” by Kim Newman
“The Battle of Arkham” by Peter Rawlik
“The Patriot” by John Goodrich
“Cahokia” by Cody Goodfellow
“Incident on Highway 19” by C.J. Henderson
“Requiem for the Burning God” by Shane Jiraiya Cummings
“Nightingale” by Alastair Reynolds
The last story isn’t strictly Cthulhu Mythos, but it could be. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of good stories by excellent authors. I know there are a lot of excellent Cthulhu Mythos authors I haven’t read. Perhaps I’d have to do a second volume.
What is your favorite H.P. Lovecraft story?
That’s easy, At the Mountains of Madness.
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About David Conyers
David Conyers is a science fiction and horror author and editor from Adelaide, South Australia. He has a degree in engineering from the University of Melbourne, and today works in marketing communications. David’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Albedo One, Ticon4, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Book of Dark Wisdom, Lovecraft eZine and Jupiter, as well as more than twenty anthologies. His previous books include the science fiction Cthulhu Mythos blended thriller, The Eye of Infinity, published by Perilous Press and the prequel The Spiraling Worm, co-authored with John Sunseri. Previous anthologies he has edited include Extreme Planets, Cthulhu Unbound 3, Cthulhu’s Dark Cults and Undead & Unbound. He has recently embarked down the route of e-publishing, releasing further collections in the Harrison Peel tales, and collections of his science fiction and weird fiction short stories.
Also by David on Kindle
The Impossible Object: The Harrison Peel Files Book 1
The Weaponized Puzzle: The Harrison Peel Files Book 2
The Eye of Infinity (A Harrison Peel novella)
The Nightmare Dimension
The Entropy Conflict
The Uncertainty Bridge
Cthulhu’s Dark Cults (Editor)
Cthulhu Unbound 3 (Editor) (with Brian M. Sammons)
Undead & Unbound (Editor) (with Brian M. Sammons)
Connect David Online
Website: http://www.david-conyers.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/DavidConyers1
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Conyers-Science-Fiction-and-Weird-Fiction-Author/281995881823494
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/465863.David_Conyers
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/David-Conyers/e/B002BLY0BQ/
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Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 33