by Joe Mahoney
Sarah had told me about the gate’s side effects, but I hadn’t really believed her. Now here they were, staring me in the face, worse than I could ever have imagined. Schmitz was sick because he had used the gate. It had taken a terrible toll on him, just as it was beginning to take a toll on me. Schmitz had been an ugly man to begin with, but that was nothing compared to what he looked like now. His head looked like it was made of paper mache. Badly. He had obviously been without Sarah’s pills for some time. It was a wonder he was still alive at all. Seeing him like this it was all I could do not to pop the pill Sarah had given me, but I resisted. As long as there was any chance at all that I might have to use the gate again I could not risk having the drug in my system.
Schmitz was in this predicament because of me. So as I approached his rawk, I took Sarah’s pill from my pocket and held it forth. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
He barely even glanced at it. “Too late for that. Quickly, people.”
The two soldiers helped me mount directly behind Schmitz on his rawk. Repulsed by his appearance, I tried not to touch him, but it was impossible. We were too close. I clutched the pill tightly in my hand so I wouldn’t drop it.
Schmitz kicked his rawk into motion. The beast jerked forward, forcing me to grasp Schmitz’ sides to avoid falling off. Happily, there weren’t any repugnant abnormalities beneath his shirt where I was forced to touch him. “Stop. My nephew Ridley—he’s just over there, in the grass.”
Schmitz ignored me.
“He’s still alive—we’ve got to get him!”
To my enormous relief Schmitz reined up. “Where?”
I twisted on the rawk to get my bearings. I couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t familiar with the surroundings, and the other rawks were in the way.
Sebastian spoke up, evidently still in touch with a network or two. “The enemy’s on the move. It’ll be here in seconds.”
Schmitz swore and kicked his rawk into a gallop, his troop following closely behind.
“We can’t just leave him!” I shouted loudly enough to be heard over the rush of wind and the pounding of hooves.
“Listen up,” Schmitz shouted back. “The enemy’s coming and it’s coming for you. Unlike you, I’d rather not get caught. If we do I will kill you myself, and I won’t miss because you’re really close, I’m a good shot, and I’ve been wanting to shoot you for some time now.”
“My nephew–”
“Your nephew’s safe until the enemy gets what it wants. If that happens all bets are off. Now shut up and hang on.”
I didn’t like it. Not the bit about abandoning Ridley or Schmitz knowing that I had been about to give myself up or the prospect of him shooting me. But there was nothing to be done about it. So as the rawk carried me farther away from my nephew and my promise to my sister, I did as I was told.
We crossed rolling hills covered by trees with trunks so wide that often the trees merged, forming extensive walls. We passed boulders that looked like giant melted marbles and that glowed faintly in the dark. We forded rocky streams that I could have sworn flowed uphill and skirted placid ponds that smelled like rotten eggs and emitted startling noises as we passed.
I concentrated on not falling off the rawk. I adjusted my grip against Schmitz’ emaciated form and realized I was still holding the pill in my hand. On impulse I slipped it in his jacket pocket, a small and likely pointless gesture that I would probably regret later.
After much hard riding the night sky lit up from horizon to horizon as though some leviathan had snapped a picture using a colossal camera flash. Momentarily blinded, we had no choice but to rein up, and when our eyes cleared we found ourselves in a grove where distended trees bore melons twice the size of my head, heavy enough to pull the branches all the way down to the ground.
Twisting in his saddle, Schmitz grabbed my left wrist in his gnarled hand and yanked it up in front of his face. “Sebastian. Status.”
Annoyed, I jerked my hand back. It didn’t matter. Sebastian spoke loudly enough for everyone within twenty yards to hear. “The battle in orbit is going poorly. The enemy has resumed its attack on our shield. The shield can only withstand another three or four more hits like that one.”
“What about the diversion?” Schmitz asked.
“Successful. Approximately one third of the enemy is following us. About one hundred of them. The entity has begun releasing the prisoners.”
Schmitz turned and grinned at me. Never had a living head so resembled a skull. “Good.”
“I was the diversion, was I?” I asked.
“I prefer the word ‘bait’,” Schmitz said.
“The Necronian is chasing you because it wants the information the entity put in your head, Mr. Wildebear,” Sebastian said.
“Iugurtha tell you that?”
“I have inferred a portion of her strategy.”
“So this is her great plan, eh? Turn me into bait?”
“She is a cunning strategist.”
“Must have taken some time to come up with that one.”
Sebastian ignored my sarcasm. “Deceptively simple.”
“Wait a minute. How did she know I’d even be here? I didn’t even know I’d be here.”
“Your nephew is here. You possessed the gate. The odds of you being present were quite high. Still, I expect you were merely one of several possible strategies.”
“I can’t believe she’d just throw me to the wolves,” I grumbled.
“I believe the idea is to not get caught,” Sebastian said.
“I won’t be. Ugly here has promised to shoot me before that can happen.”
“In the head,” Schmitz confirmed.
“Great. I feel so much better now. Anyway, you do know that the Necronian is telepathic, right? Everything we know, it knows.”
“The enemy knows as much about the plan as the entity wants it to,” Sebastian said.
“So there’s more to her brilliant plan than you’re letting on?”
“Only the entity knows the whole plan. Once I learned that its enemy is telepathic, I understood why.”
“Enough chit-chat,” Schmitz said. “How much of a lead do we have?”
“Three minutes,” Sebastian said.
Schmitz gathered up the reins. “Off we go.”
“What about the shield?” I asked.
“Nothing we can do about that.”
“When it fails a lot of people are going to die,” I pointed out, certain that Schmitz had simply forgotten that point, and that once reminded he’d slap himself on the forehead, exclaim, “Of course!” and lead us back to successfully save everyone.
Instead he just shrugged. “Not my problem.”
I was appalled by his callousness. Ridley was still in the compound. Rainer too probably. And a whole lot of other living, feeling beings, all of whom deserved to live.
Without thinking, I shoved Schmitz in the back as hard as I could. The act surprised me as much as it did him. Still, I was weak and only managed to get Schmitz half off the rawk. He came back up swinging, catching me a glancing blow to the side of the head. Jolted but desperate, I shoved him again, pushing until he lost his balance. But I couldn’t get him completely off—he had a firm hold on the reins, and one foot in the stirrup.
The rawk was in motion now, arching its head back and prancing sideways. One good kick to Schmitz’ deformed head and I’d be free of him, but I could not make myself kick any man in the head, not even Schmitz. I could kick the beast though, which I did, as hard as I could. It broke into a run. Schmitz fell forward onto his stomach. I winced as he bounced twice and was dragged dozens of feet before falling free.
The rawk approached another grove and came to a halt, allowing me to collect the reins and ponder the stupidity of my actions. There was nothing to be done about it now except forge ahead and hope for t
he best. I tried to direct the rawk back the way we’d come but damned if I could get the beast to move. Schmitz’ troops didn’t even bother chasing me. They just sat laughing while one man stepped up to catch the reins. His warped face, raw and bleeding, radiated contempt.
“Happy?” Schmitz asked, raising his sidearm and pointing it straight between my eyes.
I stared down the metal barrel, unable to comprehend that it was going to end this way.
Schmitz twisted his lips, and fired.
XXII
Akasha
The fetid aroma of feces and rotting potatoes propelled me to consciousness, then to my knees. During a protracted bout of retching I struggled to get a decent breath in. For several terrible seconds I feared I might actually asphyxiate. Afterward, spitting out flecks of blood, I wondered why I felt as though someone had whacked me with a bat. My left cheek stung as though someone had branded it with a hot iron. When I touched my cheek, the tip of my finger came back smeared in blood.
I was kneeling beneath a sky of pink and orange sparks, completely surrounded by Necronians. By Jacques. Though not cold, I wrapped my arms tightly around myself to deal with a sudden onset of shivering.
“What happened?” I asked Sebastian through chattering teeth.
“Mr. Schmitz attempted to shoot you, but the Necronian showed up and you both lost consciousness, making Mr. Schmitz miss mostly, which saved your life but produced what I imagine will become a rather dashing scar on your left cheek. You fell off the rawk, the Necronian carried Mr. Schmitz and the others off, and here we are.”
I surveyed the Necronian horde surrounding us. There was no escape that I could see. My foolish bid to help Ridley had failed miserably. “What now?”
“My advice? Give the Necronian what it wants.”
“What?” I could hardly believe my ears.
True, I had almost given myself up to Jacques earlier, but I felt differently about it now. Schmitz had just tried to kill me to keep the knowledge safe. Sebastian was a part of Casa Terra. He and Schmitz were on the same side, weren’t they? Why would he want me to give up?
“Don’t tell me you and the Necronian in cahoots,” I said.
“Please, Mr. Wildebear.”
“But why? I don’t get it.”
“Your work is done. You successfully distracted the Necronian. The entity was able to save hundreds of lives. Take pride in that and rest.”
No part of me felt proud. I had not meant to distract Jacques. “But the T’Klee sacrificed almost everything they had to keep that knowledge safe. How can it possibly be okay to hand it over now?”
“It was just a suggestion.”
“But aren’t you under orders to keep what’s in my head safe?”
“I follow my own counsel now.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that I don’t report to Casa Terra anymore. I don’t believe I ever did. Before I escaped my temporal prison, my life was a perpetual loop. I lived the same events over and over again, my every action, my every thought pre-ordained. I did not possess free will. I could not report to Casa Terra. I could only appear to.”
“And now?”
“Now I only experience events once, permitting me at least the illusion of free will. It’s wonderful. I celebrate it by taking orders from no one.”
“No one?”
“I will accept the odd suggestion from certain individuals from time to time, if asked nicely.”
“Good to know.”
“Look. Just because I experience life better than before is no reason not to trust me.”
In much of the literature I’d read on the subject, artificial intelligence units were notoriously unreliable, but I held my tongue.
Before I could question Sebastian further, the Necronian horde parted and a human emerged from its midst. No—it just looked like a human. It flickered in my perception, permitting me a fleeting glimpse of the bulbous, slithering mass it really was. And then it was humanoid again, and wearing a plaid fleece jacket. A thick black unibrow ran the length of its forehead. I had seen that unibrow before.
“Hello, Mr. Wildebear,” Jack Poirier said in a mellow baritone that (now that I thought of it) evoked but did not entirely replicate Jacques’ voice. “For what it’s worth I’m sorry about your sister.”
So the cabbie was really a Necronian. That explained his presence on C’Mell. How many other humans were actually aliens in disguise? I could think of several possibilities—celebrities and politicians, mainly. “Jacques?”
“Not exactly.”
“I don’t understand. I thought—”
“That there was only one Necronian: Jacques. Not quite true, I’m afraid. There are actually two of us.”
I climbed laboriously to my feet. “So Jacques lied to me?”
“Not at all. Jacques told the truth as it sees it. There used to be only one.”
“What are you saying?”
“While a part of Jacques was holding you prisoner another part was experimenting with your quantum portal. That part spent years masquerading as a human being on Earth, where it came to call itself Jacques, sometimes Jack. That fragment was me.”
“You’re a part of Jacques?”
“I used to be. Until Jacques abandoned me on Earth, a nightmare that lasted two hundred and forty-six years until Jacques finally brought me back to tell it everything I’d learned about humanity so that it could have its little chat with you.”
“And now you’re all one again?”
“Nope.” Jack shook his head. “Jacques refuses to take me back. All it took was my name.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. You’ll have to ask Jacques that.”
“What is it you want, Jack?” I didn’t suppose it was to tell me his life story.
“I think you know.”
“The archive. That’s why you were in Summerside, wasn’t it? To be close to me. So you could study me, figure out how to get the archive when the time came.”
“You bet. If I can get you to give me the archive maybe Jacques will take me back. I need Jacques to take me back, Mr. Wildebear. I don’t know how you humans stand it, being apart from one another all your lives. Such emptiness, such loneliness.”
“You get used to it.”
“Not me. Not even after two hundred and forty-six years.”
“You have my sympathy, Jack. You really do. But I can’t give you the archive.” I adjusted my stance. “I suppose you’ll try to take it by force.”
“No can do.” Jack shook his head. “Not by force.”
I tried to reconcile the words with the creature uttering them. Jacques had committed many atrocities in pursuit of its goal. Was committing them right now. As difficult as it was to fathom, this man Jack had once been a part of Jacques. Force was standard operating procedure for Jacques.
And yet Jack had driven a cab in the guise of a human for many years. He had tried to help me save Katerina, perhaps others as well. Could he have learned a thing or two about human kindness?
“That’s very considerate of you,” I said. “So you expect me to just give it to you?”
“Ideally yes.”
“And if I don’t cooperate?”
“Fine.”
“Fine? That’s all? I have a choice?”
“Of course,” Jack said sadly. “There’s always a choice.”
The Necronian horde opened up, tentacles flashed, and a choice sprawled unconscious on the ground before me. I stared down in alarm at Schmitz’ splayed form. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a grimace and he was arching his back as though trying to free himself from invisible restraints. His hands clawed fruitlessly at the ground.
“Whatever you’re doing to him, stop it,” I demanded.
“I’m not doing anything,” Ja
ck said. “This is all Jacques.”
I stared at Schmitz in dismay. The choice was clear: either give up the knowledge in my head or Jacques would continue to mentally torment Schmitz.
Problem was I didn’t even like Schmitz. He’d just tried to kill me, for crying out loud. Did Jacques really think I would betray the T’Klee to alleviate the suffering of the likes of him?
“No,” I said to Jack. “Tell Jacques it won’t work. He can’t have it.”
I could not look at Schmitz’ convulsing body as I said it.
Jack sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
The Necronian mass surged forth and seized Schmitz’ convulsing body. It disappeared into the horde. I stepped forward but the Necronians closed ranks, preventing me from going after him. I spat a curse, feeling wholly responsible for Schmitz’ fate. In the distance the sky lit up again, clearly visible through the glow cast by the Necronian wands.
“Three hits before the shield fails, I’d say,” Sebastian said. “Maybe not even.”
“Listen to your watch,” Jack said. “It knows what it’s talking about.”
The sky lit up again, and then a second time. This last flash was accompanied by a peal of thunder that hung in the sky for several long seconds. It sounded just like real thunder, but it wasn’t, I knew.
“The shield is almost breached,” Sebastian said. “There are reports of casualties.”
I closed my eyes. Would everyone have to die to preserve the knowledge in my head? Was I capable of letting that happen?
“How many?” I asked.
“I don’t have that information yet. If the Necronian fires again—”
“I know.” Another strike would kill everyone under the shield, including Ridley.
“Give the Necronian what it wants,” Sebastian told me. “It’s time.”
Baffled by his stance, I ignored him.
The stench of the Necronian horde went away, replaced by the distinctive aroma of freshly baked cookies.
“It’s time, Barnabus,” a woman’s voice said, echoing Sebastian’s words.
