The Atomic Sea: Part Five: Flaming Skies

by Conner, Jack

  He rushed from the epic battle and dropped the Device into the specially designed trunk. Like the original, this one came complete with straps to put it on one’s back. Avery had been afraid he’d have to carry it but had resigned himself to the possibility. Grateful to Octunggen pragmatism, he slipped it on. He was just about to remove the gloves when he remembered—the key. Damn.

  Dreading what he would see, he scanned the bulks and limbs of the embattled Collossum for the silver spear that would activate to the Device. He breathed a sigh of relief. When Sartrand had struck Uthua, the rod had been flung from Uthua’s grasp and had embedded in a wall low enough for Avery to reach. Smoke poured around it, and the section of wall it jutted from was slowly blackening. Skirting the battle once more, Avery went to the rod and, straining his shoulders, pulled it free.

  It was hot, even through the gloves, and he made sure not to let it touch him. It was so bright. He tried not to look at it. Just holding it made him sweat.

  Edging around the battle for the final time, he shook off his right glove and stuffed it in a pocket. The left he needed to grip the rod.

  He moved toward the door, and only when he reached it did he glance back to see Sartrand being engulfed by Uthua. Over half of him had already been shoved through Uthua’s amoebic wall, and the other half, squirming and thrashing, was soon to follow. Sartrand, his human self, turned and raved at Avery, and his eyes spoke elegantly of betrayal. Even through the otherworldly fluids Avery could hear his screams and accusations. Avery met his anguished eyes for a moment, just a moment, and then looked away. Even as Uthua ate the rest of Sartrand, Avery ducked through the door and ran as fast as he could go. The Over-City shook around him.

  Chapter 7

  He hurried through the tight, stinking corridors of the laboratory, hearing the screams and thrashings of the damned. As he rounded a corner, he saw four guards beating on the cell doors, trying to quiet the prisoners.

  As one, the guards turned toward Avery.

  Avery shot the first one through the head, the second through the chest. That one reeled back into the third. The fourth went for his gun, brought it out—Avery fired even as he ducked aside. The man fired, too.

  Both shots went wild. Avery rebounded off a door and pulled the trigger again, hitting the man in the chest. The guard squeezed off a final shot at the ceiling as he collapsed. The ricochet whizzed by Avery’s neck.

  The third guard had just unearthed himself from beneath the second one when Avery shot him in the face, taking off the back of his skull.

  The shouts of more guards throughout the building echoed down the halls, which trembled and quaked all around. Avery knew he could not fight them all. And there was something he needed to do anyway.

  Breathless, he crossed to the console at one end of the room, studied it for a moment, puzzling at the Octunggen military abbreviations, then began flipping switches. Within moments he was rewarded by the metallic popping sound of bolts sliding from their homes.

  The cell doors swung partway open.

  Avery approached the nearest one and opened the door all the way. Peering in, he saw a confused-looking woman who had to be in agony. Ropy, slimy tentacles grew through the skin along half her body. They weren’t proper tentacles, not in the way Avery usually saw them on someone who’d accepted the Sacrament. These actually bore through the skin, leaving ragged, festering red rings around the bases of each one. The black, cancerous growths writhed mindlessly, and the woman’s eyes were pools of despair.

  “Come along,” Avery told her. “You’re free.”

  She emerged, blinking in the stronger light of the corridor. Other prisoners were coming out, too. Most looked as pained as the woman. One man had a jaw so crammed with rows of sharp teeth that he could not close his mouth, and he had apparently severed his own tongue, as Avery could not see it. Another man had crab claws dangling uselessly from chest and arms, even a small one on his cheek that snapped languidly. Some of the prisoners were absolute horrors, huge and muscled, with great grinning barracuda faces, or lithe and dagger-like, with poison stingers at the end of their fingers, but most were misshapen wretches barely able to move, and some were actually immobile.

  “Grab the guns,” Avery said, gesturing to the corpses of the guards, and several did.

  “We’re free,” said the man with the dangling crab claws. “We’re free ...”

  “Go,” Avery said. “Free the others. I have to get out of here, fast. I advise all of you to do the same, quickly as you can. Steal a ship and get out of the Over-City. But take the others with you. Oh, and tell them not to kill the man with the backpack.”

  With new zeal, they poured from the concourse and spread through the facility. Avery heard screams, the pops of guns, and cell doors banging open. The growls of former prisoners echoed down the halls. Avery had gone with the first wave, but they moved faster than he did, and he let them. Soon chaos engulfed the whole building. He only had to defend himself against two more guards on the way to the entrance, and these were distracted and easy targets.

  Avery burst from the door of the building and ran across the bridge, panting and trembling with nerves. Wind shrieked up from the abyss. He knew his eyes were wild and what hair he had slick with sweat. The hat had long since fallen off. The smell of the sea was much stronger now.

  Carrying the lightning rod in one hand and the gun in the other, he made his way toward the elevator.

  Before he’d gone ten steps, a terrible roar rose up behind him. Panicked, he jerked around. The roar, half bellow and half whale song, came again, more deeply this time.

  “Shit,” he said.

  It was Uthua. It had to be. The near-Elder had finished with Sartrand and was coming for the Device. Like Layanna, he could probably sense it.

  The ground shook with some new phenomenon, and Avery knew it was Uthua barreling through the facility, tearing apart anything in his path. Avery prayed the prisoners knew better than to try and stop him.

  Avery fled.

  He reached the lift and mashed the buttons, frantic. Once, twice, a third time. The rumbling in the floor grew more violent. Closer.

  Impatient, Avery glanced upward. Saw the lift. It was jammed five stories up. Smoke billowed from its mechanism. No, please no. For a moment his legs felt weak.

  He gathered himself and launched himself up the nearby stairs. The Device dragged at him with every step, threatening to haul him backward down the stairs, but he plowed forward. Upward. Sweat stung his eyes. His heart beat so fast his vision blurred. His stomach twisted, and nausea threatened to make him ill. He forced himself on. His knees creaked. The Device grew heavier.

  A great roar and rattle below. A psychic blast hit him, and Avery staggered, fell against the grate wall, clutching at it for support. Something throbbed in his skull. Another mind-wave reached him, and he felt invisible claws sink into his brain—sink, tear and squeeze. His whole world filled with fire.

  Dimly he felt the vibrations getting closer, and even through his agony he knew Uthua was nearing, tearing his way up through the staircase tube, a great oozing mass of pseudopods and roiling, tar-like flesh, propelling himself like a great worm toward the Device.

  Shaking off the psychic assault as best he could, Avery staggered up the next flight of stairs. He had to get off the staircase. Uthua was too fast. At the next landing, he lurched out of the stairwell and blundered down a corridor, reeling with every step, flooded by continual psychic assaults.

  He took one turn, then another. Where was he going? Layanna and the others were supposed to meet him on a platform several levels up. He didn’t think he could reach them, not with Uthua after him. He would have to hope they could find him. Layanna would sense the Device, and they would come for him when he didn’t show.

  He rounded a bend and nearly ran into a squad of twenty troops. Their captain started to snap a question at him, then saw the backpack and the silver lance. Uthua must have sent psychic word to one of his brethren, and
he, she or it had alerted the soldiers. However it transpired, the captain suddenly barked an order too fast for Avery to understand, and the troops lifted their guns.

  Avery darted down the cross-hall and fled as fast as his legs would carry him. He ran down one hall, swung down another, found a staircase, staggered up it, and stumble-ran down another hall.

  A bullet whined near his head, ricocheted off metal. Something burned his arm, and when he glanced down he saw a red burn where a bullet had whizzed by. The sounds of Octunggen behind him chased him up the halls. And all the while the vibrations grew stronger, and the psychic assault, which had never gone away, stronger too.

  Suddenly Avery realized he was passing through an industrial area, with large processing plants bearing smoke stacks all around, and high walls, loading docks, and immense power lines, but every light was off. Was the section abandoned? That didn’t seem likely.

  He turned down several lanes, half lost, but it was only when he saw the blurring in the air and blue-red energy leaping from one building to another that he understood. This was the haunted quarter. The quarter where the extradimensional processors had torn open time and space.

  He stopped, heart pounding.

  Distantly, he heard the troops pursuing him. They sounded less zealous now, more cautious. Colonel vun Cuvastaq had said they would not enter the so-called haunted zone, but for the Device Avery had to assume they would. I have to keep moving. Where was Uthua? At the moment Avery could not feel him. That worried him as much as anything else.

  He gulped down a breath, then another, and shoved on, into the haunted quarter.

  Not twenty feet in, the air flickered around him, and everything changed.

  * * *

  The first thing he noticed was the air. It was acrid and burning. His lungs ached and his eyes felt like cats were clawing them. The air savaged his nostrils. It even bit into his exposed skin.

  Hacking, doubling over, he stumbled forward, and as he did he realized that the weight was different here. The Device seemed to have increased a hundred pounds. He nearly collapsed to the ground, and he might have if he thought he could breathe the air once he did. But he knew if he stayed he would die.

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. The sound pulsed all around him, shaking the air.

  Blinking, he tried to take in his surroundings. The air was thick and hazy, but it wasn’t so hazy that he couldn’t see, and what he saw chilled him.

  He was on another world.

  The first thing he noticed was the sky. It was purple, laced with lighter, whitish strands and dappled with darker shades that were almost black. Over ten moons of different sizes, shapes and colors rode the weird heavens. The second thing was the ground. It seemed to be composed of some diamond-like material, or perhaps glass, even ice. It was whitish and crystalline, and it had a tendency to thrust up in jags all around so that he could see its glinting facets. Some formed obelisks hundreds, even thousands of feet high. The whole terrain seemed composed of that diamond material, and it rose to great mountains to his right, plunged into a deep canyon on his left, and gave way to endless rolling plains and towers of glittering facets before him. But it was not true ground. It would have been far better if it were.

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP.

  The sound grew louder. Avery’s teeth rattled.

  The diamond material, while hard and steady under his feet, appeared to be only a few inches thick. Beyond that, below that, was nothing. The whole planet was hollow. At least, it was hollow as far as geology was concerned. But it was most certainly not empty. Oh, no. It was quite full.

  Faces pressed to the diamond-like substance beneath Avery’s feet. Cheeks smashed against it. Fists pounded. Some of the beings looked human, or somewhat human. Most looked quite other. He saw people like huge praying mantises crashing their fore-legs against the diamond, saw things like furred salamanders try to melt it with acid ejected from their mouths. Crab-people battered it with their thick exoskeletons, cracking their own shells in their efforts to escape. But most were unclassifiable by him and nonsensical to his eyes. The whole interior of the planet was filled, teaming, with what had to be millions, billions, maybe hundreds of billions, even trillions of intelligent beings, all pressed so tightly against each other they could barely move, limbs and body parts twisted together like some impossible puzzle. And all wanted out.

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP.

  Even louder now.

  As the thumping grew in intensity, the frenzied beating and thrashing of the people inside the planet grew even more violent. They battered the diamond furiously, leaving trails of blood and ichor. Spit flew from mouths. Eyes rolled, mashed up against the diamond. Teeth cracked. Cheeks split. Some faces were shoved so violently against it they broke. Bodies were torn apart, others taking their places. The people must pile so thickly upon each other that the forces involved deeper down would be equivalent to the depths of the sea. There would be layers with so much weight upon them they would simply be crushed. There must be oceans of blood and liquefied flesh at the center of the planet, heated so much by pressure that they boiled.

  Eyes stared at Avery, pleading. Fists and pincers struck the glass.

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP

  Shaking, unable to understand what he was seeing, Avery realized the thumping noise was coming from behind him.

  Above him.

  Slowly, afraid of what he would see, but unable to help it, he turned.

  His jaw fell open. All the strength left him. He fell to his knees.

  And stared.

  It was something like a heart, a beating, red-purple, glistening organ, but completely alien and strange, filling half the sky. It was a massive, floating thing that could not possibly exist. It rolled in like a thunderhead, contracted, then expanded. Beating. Beating. As if it pumped blood or fluid for some being larger still, though there was no such being in evidence. The heart, insane and illogical as it was, was the being.

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP

  Like a cloud, but much larger, it rolled in, moving generally in Avery’s direction. He could see the striations of fat in it, the cleanly incised O’s that were the ends of its arteries and ventricles, which tangled or waved like thick, rubbery tentacles. Things flew in and out of them. In fact, they swarmed all over the great heart, forming a ring around it like some planets had. Thousands of yards long and something like tapeworms out of some nightmare in appearance, the white creatures swam in and out of the heart, perhaps feeding off of it, perhaps feeding it, perhaps worshipping it. Were they parasites? Priests? Parasitic priests?

  The heart rolled on. Beating, beating.

  Where it went, the ground erupted beneath it. The legions of the doomed, driven into a frenzy by the heart’s proximity, burst through the diamond-hard surface, even though it killed hundreds or thousands of them at a time. Even as the heart’s shadow swept over them, showers of blood and bone fountained like geysers from the eruptions. As soon as the heart passed by, the outbreaks died down and the surface sealed over like ice.

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP

  The heart was very close to Avery now. Almost over him. He could smell it, a great, acrid, fleshy smell. The tapeworm things swarmed.

  The damned beneath him pounded the glass. Fountains of blood and mucus and other matter sprayed across the inner surface. Others pounded in the dead ones’ places and were quickly smashed to pieces. More took their places.

  Cracks split the surface. It bucked beneath Avery. If he didn’t move, he would be in the midst of an eruption and die. The thought of being in the Thing’s shadow chased all the paralysis from him.

  He lurched to his feet and fled. Heart thumping, sweat pouring, he ran and ran, breathing in the caustic air with each inhalation.

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP.

  All around him now. All around—

  Just a little bit more—

  Cracks beneath him. Chasing him. The bucking of sheets of diamond. Face
s smashing beneath him, bones and bodies breaking—

  Voices chanted.

  “Us’gu’thun! Us’gu’thun!”

  BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP. BU-THUMP!

  The air ahead of him blurred. He aimed toward it.

  BU-THUMP! BU-THUMP! BU-THUMP!

  A crack at his feet widened, widened—

  He threw himself into the blur—

  * * *

  Gasping, he hurtled down a passageway of the Over-City, lost his footing and fell. He struck on his chest and slid. The lightning rod scraped the floor, showering sparks. He was careful not to let it touch him. The floor skinned his other hand.

  Covered in dust, his lungs aching from the atmosphere on that other world, he turned and peered back at the hallway he had just traversed.

  The air blurred a bit, and there was a flicker, but otherwise it looked normal.

  Dear gods, what was that? His mind spun. Without warning, he vomited, having just enough time to lean to the side so that he didn’t get it all over himself. He heaved and heaved, his stomach spasming.

  When he could, he wiped his mouth and stood, if a bit shakily.

  Shouts down the hallway. The Octunggen troops rounded the bend. They saw him and ran toward him, some lifting their guns as they went. Avery coiled himself to roll out of the line of fire, but before he could the lead Octunggen simply disappeared. Vanished from sight. The others disappeared as well, all in a line. Taken to that same world? Another?

  The three that had been able to stop in time looked around in shock, then saw Avery. Taking out their fear on him, they raised their weapons and fired.

  He didn’t bother to discover whether the bullets passed through the rippled air or not. It could very well be that the soldiers had unknowingly just shot their brothers in arms on some distant world or dimension. In any case, Avery rolled across the ground until he’d put a wall between him and the soldiers, picked himself up and moved down the corridor. One, then another. He knew they wouldn’t be able to chase him, at least not directly. There would be other ways around, though. He saw a stairway to his left, a long corridor to his right. The sound of wind hissing drew him forward.