by Toby Weston
The wing of flying bombs was accompanied by fighter support: a second sequence of remotely dispatched commands initiated blasts of infrasound and the malicious vibration of nest boxes containing thousands of gene-engineered wasps. Once deemed sufficiently furious, solenoids clicked, releasing clouds of weaponised arthropods. These followed pheromone vapour trails laid down by the cockroaches, homing in on the perceived source of their irritation, and used their biological weaponry to deliver a brutal cocktail synthesised by their heavily tweaked metabolisms: Bullet-Ant and Box-Jellyfish venom, spiked liberally with Psilocybin.
The soldiers were about to have a very bad trip indeed.
While the roaches were attacking, Segi, satisfied his brother was safe, turned on the Dread Ray. He jacked up the power to its bowel-emptying max, letting the beam sweep backwards and forwards over the already panicking soldiers.
Yüzbaşı Tomar had been knocked to the ground as the mechOid began thrashing madly, mimicking the actions of its agonised flailing pilot. Now he staggered to his feet and stepped away from the prone-spasming mechOid, swatting at the bugs buzzing around his head. He pulled out his pistol and was swinging it around, looking for somebody to shoot.
The officer still in the cruiser had just experienced three explosions in quick succession. The blasts were amplified by the confines of the auto. He tried to close the windows and batted madly as he felt something agonising happen to the side of his face. His ears were ringing appallingly. From inside the Çiftlik, clouds of thick, yellow smoke had begun to rise, obscuring the buildings. Terrified, the officer dragged the door shut and put a hand up to the side of his face. The flesh was ragged and his hand came away covered in blood.
Tomar took a swat at an insect with his left hand. It exploded, stripping flesh from his fingers like cladding from a pipe.
Waves of deep infrasound washed out from the Dread Ray, vibrating skulls and breaching bowels, spreading a new wave of terror over the soldiers.
We shouldn’t be here! the officer thought from inside the cruiser. The women are Djinn. Then, without instruction, his auto started up. It edged forward in a circle and then roared off, back the way it had come.
Tomar watched in a cold rage as the cowardly officer apparently fled the scene. He was being abandoned. This insubordination pushed him over some threshold of rage and he started shooting at the retreating vehicle. His bullets ricocheted off the armoured glass, leaving crazy stars.
The soldiers who were not hopelessly lost within agonising hallucinations seemed to agree that leaving was a fantastic idea. They started fighting past each other to squeeze into the cab of the ancient manual truck. Others, gaining a sense of the way things were going, began to pile into the back.
Panic, pain, psychoactive insect venom and the effects of the Dread Ray were affecting people in different ways. Tomar, the black-moustached Yüzbaşı, was now on his knees with his fists in the air, while most of the other soldiers were either gibbering in the back of the truck or clustered in the front, trying to remember how to drive.
At the other end of the spectrum, Zaki’s would-be executioner—the soldier whom Tomar had ordered to shoot an innocent boy—had descended into psychotic calm. An uncanny tic pulled intermittently at the side of his face, giving him a wicked lopsided smile. He left his rifle lying in the dirt and retrieved an RPG from the truck.
He was now striding out from behind the bus, back towards Tomar and the gate, the launcher’s tube resting on his shoulder. Turning his head, he took in the chaos. The screams of soldiers and the cracks of exploding bugs were dull within the sickly, curling smoke. There were no signs of the enemy. Even the farm buildings were only vague shapes lost in the yellow soup. With cold calculation, the soldier picked out the silhouette of the farmhouse, the most conspicuous enemy target, and, with a chuckle, pulled the trigger. The rocket-propelled projectile roared away with a hissing scream.
The rooftop countermeasure was easily able to track the explosive missile, pinging pulse after pulse of microwaves off it as it flew; but the smoke made its lasers ineffective against such a relatively massive target. It was simply not able to deliver enough energy to deflect the heavy hunk of metal. It switched tactics and tried to attack the warhead’s primitive brain instead; however, it was foiled again, finding the model so ancient that there was very little in the way of intelligence to work with.
For what seemed like an eternity to its tiny lightning-fast quantum mind, the countermeasure device watched as the rocket-propelled grenade crept inexorably towards its target—its progress leaving exquisite vortices in the yellow smoke.
Finally, it emerged into clear air, just a few metres from the house. Now, the device tried to put as much energy into the detonator cap as possible—there was a small chance that it could be made to explode before it struck—but it was too little too late. The rocket flashed through a window and exploded somewhere deep inside the old building. At this point, the laser countermeasure lost interest and went back to scanning for threats.
For Segi and Zaki, watching in horror from behind the barn, there was a colossal explosion that shattered glass and sent plumes of dust and household debris flying out of the windows. From their vantage point, they couldn’t see that the whole rear corner of the house had been blown out; they watched as, seemingly in slow motion, the old farmhouse slumped and collapsed in on itself. One end of the building became nothing more than a pile of stones with projecting wooden beams and fluttering curtains. The most optimistic assessment was that the two women, who had been sheltering in its cellar, were now buried under many tons of rubble.
They had a lot of weapons to choose from, but Siegfried had grabbed an old-fashioned dumb rifle with manual sights and standard, dumb lead bullets. Screaming with rage, he put it to his shoulder and dashed out from behind the barn.
The killer with the rocket launcher saw him and reached for the pistol at his hip.
Segi raised his weapon and pulled the trigger.
The countermeasure noticed this new activity. A bullet was in flight, microwaves pulsed out, and a trajectory was calculated. The projectile would narrowly miss the probable intended target. The shooter was recognised as friend, the target labelled in the battle space as an enemy combatant. The enemy was armed and dangerous; the metadata which tagged him indicated that he was responsible for a lot of the collateral damage sustained so far during the brief skirmish. An analysis of the situation suggested that the friend had probably intended to shoot and kill this enemy. Using vis own initiative, the device amped its lasers up to maximum power and, despite the smoke, managed to pump enough energy into the speeding metal nugget to minutely adjust its trajectory.
The bullet terminated its flight, crashing into the soldier’s chest, smashing ribs, tearing through lung, muscle and heart.
Segi would probably have shot the tripping Tomar too, still kneeling, dazed and hallucinating. However, Zaki put his hand on top of his brother’s rifle and pressed gently down on the barrel.
A few seconds later, a remotely piloted miniature drone took down the Yüzbaşı with a tranquilliser flechette. He slapped a palm to his neck and then collapsed to his knees.
The soldiers had piled into the back of the truck and somebody had remembered how to drive. The vehicle bounced and juddered away on the dirt road, quickly becoming lost within clouds of dust thrown up by its spinning wheels.
With no immediate targets for his rage, Segi ran to what was left of their house, while Zaki, together with various autonomous drones and conscripted arthropods, searched for soldiers still lurking. They found only the body of the killed murderer and the peacefully dozing form of Yüzbaşı Tomar.
Only when they were quite sure that everybody was gone, dead, or unconscious, did Zaki also approach the rubble.
Chapter 13 – Entanglement
The second night on the Xepplin, Keith had returned to his tiny cabin to find Dee in his bed.
“You’re late,” she said, effortlessly avoiding the par
t of the conversation where she explained why she wasn’t in her own cabin.
Keith puffed his cheeks and blew theatrically through pursed lips.
‘I don’t need this shit,’ is what he wanted to say.
—a little later, a tiny expert-system, a node in the Xepplin’s autonomous nervous system tasked with monitoring atmospheric friction, detected a succession of unexpected vortices injecting chaos into the carefully contrived laminar flows that it maintained. The ripples were being thrown off by some transient source of rhythmic vibration inside the Xepplin’s envelope. The system tracked the errant oscillations to Keith Wilson’s cabin; although obsessive and simple minded, the expert-system had enough street-smarts to know that calling out an engineering mechOid to tighten a loose panel, or to close a banging door, would not help this time—
Keith lay alone in his bed afterwards. Dee had excused herself, returning to her own cabin, claiming that Keith’s single bed was too narrow for a good night’s sleep.
Back on Bäna, after the hasty meeting in the palace, Dee and Keith had been hurried through a series of exhausting briefings, then given just six hours to prepare for their departure. They hadn’t had much time to speak before leaving, and the few scraps of conversation they had managed had been terse and professional. Conversation over dinner the day before had remained assiduously mission focused.
Now, without negotiation, they somehow seemed to be a couple again—two lovers enjoying a dreamy airborne cruise.
Keith tried to recall any early signs of a thaw. He conceded that, perhaps, the one or two occasions where Dee had allowed herself to laugh during dinner earlier could be taken as omens, but it was all very confusing. He was beginning to suspect that their proximity to Atlantis—or, perhaps, somebody there—might be the key to Dee’s unpredictable romantic swings.
Keith fell asleep, baffled but contented; lulled by the slow, almost imperceptible, rhythm of the great Sky Whale as it swam its high ocean.
They ate breakfast the next day in the bow restaurant. The twenty tables would seat only a quarter of the passengers, but the restaurant was relatively empty. People had joined and others got off in Los Angeles; but, as a net effect, the Xepplin felt less crowded. Many passengers would be disembarking at Ter Tholen and were already operating on Caribbean local time, further reducing the contention for dining spots.
The journey provided ample opportunity to get a head start on their mission. Cruising with the sub-tropical jet stream, the Xepplin would take three days from Ter Tholen, out over the Atlantic, and up the Mediterranean to Zilistan.
While the Sky Whale crossed the ocean, they were able to work with the Silicium Kin on the ground, running through necessary physical preparations and providing care and husbandry advice for their prisoner. There was also a lot of digital clean-up work to be coordinated within the PKF administration. Keith focused on this, liaising with a team of ‘N-Cyber-Rōnin’—their designation, not his—working to re-orient the affiliations of the Zilish bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Dee took responsibility for reprogramming the mind of the PKF Yüzbaşı.
None of this work required a physical body. However, presumably to ensure that they did not suffer from muscle atrophy from spending too much time in the digital, Dee had initiated an intense programme of nocturnal aerobics.
***
Yüzbaşı Tomar wakes, disorientated and thirsty, lying on his stomach, his fingers clenched in the dirt. The sky is red; the colour of blood. The dry dust, which his hands clutch into, is ochre; the colour of scabs. The house is white as bone. The bodies, or rather the skeletons, of four dead are lying around him; tatters of flesh blowing in the hot wind.
It is so hot and dry that he can smell the thin strips of flesh cooking on the bone, and see tiny bubbles as the fat boils out of what remains of shrivelled lips and ears.
All around is the sound of keening. For a while, he assumes it is the wind. However, watching ruined jaws spasm, he realises the dead are trying to scream; but the only sound that leaves the tatters of their lips is a whistling rasp.
Tomar screams—a loud, echoing noise that continues long after he has closed his mouth.
He stands and looks around for anything familiar. The collapsed house is the only landmark he recognises.
Two black ravens perched on the gate are watching him.
Tomar knows his mind is not right, that something is wrong with his head; but, whenever he tries to think rationally, bubbles of pus form within his skull. If he persists, they grow until they burst out of his nose and ears, warm mucous spilling from the orifices in his head and washing down his uniform—which, for some reason, is white, or had at least started out that way. It quickly becomes yellowed and stained with blood and mucous from his head’s bursting vesicles.
One of the ravens hops into the air and glides towards him. It swoops. Beating its wings in front of Tomar’s face, quite unexpectedly, it proceeds to pluck out his left eye.
Tomar screams again. The sound echoes and repeats endlessly, adding layers of horror with each reverberation.
The second raven flies towards him. Tomar closes his eyelids, the skin over one empty socket folding awkwardly. He claps his hand to his face, but this raven will be happy with a testicle. Its sharp beak slits the material of the Yüzbaşı’s trousers and splits his sack in one decisive motion. There is a flash of pain. Tomar stares, unbelieving, as the bird flies away, drawing out a streamer of gore behind it. A prize is clasped in its beak. Tubes and vessels extend like a stretched rubber band, wings beat at the air. The bird thrashes and jerks; finally, it succeeds in tearing the gristly umbilicus free at the root.
This time, the scream goes on for hours. Its intensity seemingly waking one of the skeletal shapes, which shrugs itself free of dust and rises unsteadily to its feet. The corpse begins shambling towards Tomar. Others are standing, too. Desiccated flesh, stumbling towards him.
The Yüzbaşı pulls out his pistol and shoots the lead shape. The sky turns black. The animated shapes drop. Tomar passes out.
***
“Bloody hell!” Keith said, ashen faced. “That is brutal stuff. Where did you dig all that up?”
“Just random posts culled from the n/horror boards,” Dee replied distractedly, working on some detail of the next scenario she was putting together for their captive.
“How will this get him on our side?” Segi asked.
“This won’t,” replied Dee. “We’re just softening him up at the moment, building deep enough trauma. We need to embed fake memories next, make him think it was him who shot the rocket. We want to build guilt and a sense of impending divine judgement. After that, once we actually get to you, we will give him a few glasses of Rakı, then Keith and I will dump him back at his base. He’ll be our bitch.”
Segi looked at her, slightly shocked.
“You are not feeling sorry for him, are you?” she asked from where her avatar was sitting close to the unfortunate, dangling prisoner. “He’s a piece of shit. He could have gotten you all killed.”
Segi seemed to consider, then nodded.
“Right,” said Dee. “Give him another fifty micrograms. Then we’ll let him lie down and sleep for a few hours before we get going again.”
The Yüzbaşı was trussed up like a spider’s lunch, half hanging from a beam on the ceiling. His legs had spent most of the previous eight hours kicking the jig of a hanging man as he danced to the drugs in his blood and the horrors streaming in through the Spex, which Zaki had taped over his eyes and ears.
Dee had insisted that he was fine; that, if he could stand flat-footed, it wasn’t torture. Segi was not entirely convinced.
“I can’t watch anymore. I’m starting to feel sorry for the shit-sack,” he said, after lifting the plaster on Tomar’s neck and dropping on another dose of lysergic-acid-diethylamide.
“Sure thing. I’ve got it here, anyway,” Dee said cheerfully.
Segi nodded and headed back to the other end of the barn, where he was cheered by
the sight of his mother and great-aunt doing their best to fix a lunch of fresh vegetables with the few utensils Segi and Zaki had managed to salvage from the rubble of the Çiftlik house.
Segi was amazed at how well they were dealing with things—
Some Kin had quickly gotten a remotely piloted cockroach down into the rubble and confirmed the women were alive. Zaki had risked bringing the former battle-suit oids into the open, and together they had quickly cleared away the debris and exhumed the two—shaken, dusty, but physically unscathed—women. The rescue had been fast and efficient; even so, they had been trapped for several hours. It must have been a terrifying and traumatic experience, confined in the dusty dark; however, the two women’s coping mechanism of shrugging it off and just getting on with things seemed to be working. Segi smiled with pride.
Zaki and Keith were working alongside the cyber-rōnin, buried to the hilt in the ZKF’s command and control systems. Keith knew he was mostly in the way, but this work was a lot better than helping Dee with the brainwashing.
