Secret Histories 10: Dr. DOA

by Simon R. Green

  “We have to get in there and take a look,” said Molly. “I mean, it’s practically our duty.”

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” I said.

  “Damned right,” said Molly.

  I armoured up my right hand, and sent a series of golden filaments sneaking into the lock, to work out its secrets and open it up. But the lock’s workings were so complicated, and so alien, my armour couldn’t seem to make any sense of them. I tried to see the insides of the lock through my armour, but it was like looking into a series of distorted fairground mirrors. In the end, I just gave up and pulled the filaments back into my glove.

  “That,” I said, “has never happened to me before.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,” said Molly.

  I gave her a look. “You think you can do better?”

  Molly sniffed at the lock. “If I had my magics, I’d be making that thing sit up and beg by now.”

  “How long before you recharge?” I said.

  “I am not a battery! It’ll take as long as it takes.”

  “Now who’s getting testy?” I said.

  “Don’t push your luck, Drood.”

  I armoured down my hand, and retrieved the Merlin Glass from its pocket dimension. The silver-backed mirror settled comfortably into my hand, showing me my own scowling reflection. Molly put a gentle hand on my arm.

  “You sure this is a good idea, Eddie?”

  “No,” I said. “But I didn’t come this far to be beaten by a locked door.”

  I tried to get the Merlin Glass to show me a view of what lay on the other side of the door, but the Glass refused to cooperate. It stubbornly remained just a mirror, showing me nothing but myself. I tried to shake it out to Door size, so it could transport us past the locked door, but it stayed the same size no matter how hard I shook it. In the end, I lost my temper and went to smash the Glass against the door. Molly cried out and grabbed my arm with both hands, stopping the mirror just a few inches short of the door. I tried to pull free, but she wouldn’t let me. I started to shout at her, and she stopped me with a serious look.

  “This is Merlin’s work, remember? Who knows what breaking the Glass might let loose?”

  I went cold all over as I realised what I’d almost done. I stopped fighting Molly, and she slowly let go of my arm. Watching me closely, in case I lost control again. I breathed steadily, trying to slow my racing heart. What the hell had I been thinking? I never lose my temper that easily; I just don’t. All Droods are trained from an early age, in all the rigours of self-control. Because our armour can kill with the slightest thoughtless act. I felt like I’d just had a really narrow escape, as though Molly had pulled me back from the edge of an extremely long drop. I nodded shakily to her.

  “Thanks.”

  “Eddie? What just happened? That wasn’t like you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I got too close to the alien tech. Maybe the Glass messed with my head. And maybe . . . Dr DOA’s poison isn’t just a threat to my body.” I smiled humourlessly. “Like we don’t have enough problems. If I start losing control, Molly, losing my mind . . . you have to get me home. Whatever it takes. My family has protocols in place to deal with Droods who can’t control themselves, and their armour.”

  “I often wondered what happens to a Drood with Alzheimer’s,” said Molly, trying for a light touch and failing.

  “We put them to sleep,” I said flatly. “It’s the kindest way. For them and for us.”

  “What?” Molly stepped back from me. She looked genuinely shocked. “You kill them? Why not just take their torcs away?”

  “Because they wouldn’t cooperate. And taking the torc by force would kill them anyway,” I said. “God knows how many I killed when I took my family’s torcs away the first time. I never asked, and the Matriarch was kind enough never to tell me.”

  “Eddie . . . I never knew. You never told me . . .”

  “It’s not something we talk about. But we all know the risks. We know our duty, to the family and the world. A Drood in his armour is scary enough when he knows what he’s doing. A mad or wandering mind, in Drood armour . . . doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “I can’t take you back to your family so your relatives can just put you to sleep!”

  I looked at her steadily. “If I get to that stage, it would be the last kindness you could do for me.”

  “I won’t do that, Eddie. I can’t.”

  “Yes you can,” I said. “And you will. Because you know all the alternatives would be worse.”

  I slipped the Merlin Glass carefully back into my pocket dimension, armoured up, and hit the steel door as hard as I could. I had a lot of frustration in me, and I put everything I had into that punch. My golden fist slammed to a halt, jarring my shoulder, and the steel door sounded loudly, like a struck bell. But when I brought back my hand, I’d barely dented the metal. I hit it again and again, hammering away at the steel slab until it jumped and shuddered in its frame. The metal dented and even buckled in places, but the steel wouldn’t break and the door wouldn’t budge. In the end, I was forced to stop, and just stood there, breathing hard.

  “That is not steel,” I said after a while. “I’ve ripped steel like paper with my armoured hands. This is just something that’s been made to look like steel. As alien as the lock.”

  “Maybe the Caretaker’s got a key?” said Molly.

  “If he had, would he tell us?”

  I hit the door with my golden shoulder, throwing myself at it again and again. In the end, the door didn’t give, but the hinges did. They sheared clean through, and the door tore itself away, blasted inwards to measure its length on the floor beyond. It made a hell of a racket as it landed, and the echoes took a long time to die away. I looked back up the stairs to see if the noise had attracted the Caretaker’s attention, but apparently not. I armoured down, and stepped cautiously forward to peer through the new opening.

  “Don’t you think you should keep your armour on?” Molly said tentatively.

  “No telling what its presence might trigger once we get in there,” I said. “God alone knows what kind of booby traps Black Heir will have left in place. I can always call it back in an emergency.”

  “Famous last words,” said Molly.

  I stepped cautiously through the doorway, and Molly was right behind me.

  Lights slammed on the moment we entered. I froze where I was, but nothing else happened. Just automatic systems, triggered by our entrance. Molly eased in beside me.

  “Where are the lights coming from?”

  “All around,” I said. “Everywhere . . .”

  “There’s something wrong with this light, Eddie. It’s like looking at everything through dirty water.”

  “Maybe whatever they’ve got here needs alien light.”

  I moved slowly forward. As my eyes adapted to the fierce lights, I realised the open space before us was much bigger than it had any right to be. It was huge, massive. At first I thought we’d entered some giant cavern, hollowed out of the heart of the hill . . . but the curving walls and high ceiling were both made from the same strange metal. Nothing I’d ever seen before. It had a dull purple-green sheen, actually uncomfortable to human eyes. I moved forward very cautiously, refusing to let Molly hurry me.

  We’d emerged along a narrow extended walkway, attached to the far wall on one side, and just a frighteningly long drop on the other. Weird machinery bulged out of the metal wall. It was made up of sweeping organic curves, melding and even melting into one another. As though someone had turned up the heat at the last moment. Weird lights flared and subsided inside them. There was a constant sense of being watched, by unseen, unfriendly eyes.

  Some of the machines were barely waist high; others towered high above us. I had no idea what any of them were, or what they were for. Nothing
I was looking at made any sense. There were things like stalagmites and stalactites; silicon coral rising up and hanging down, streaked with uneasy colours and deeply etched with what might have been circuits, or instructions, or something else entirely. Strange structures made out of metal rods twisted and turned around one another, in patterns it hurt my mind to look at. Shapes that seemed to slide away from my gaze, resisting interpretation. And more, still more . . .

  It was like the places we walk through in dreams, packed with things beyond understanding, full of awful significance. The whole setting seemed more and more dreamlike the farther I ventured into it. But was this my dream, or an alien’s? I felt lost, disorientated, divorced from the world I knew and understood.

  “You know what this is, don’t you?” Molly said quietly. “What this has to be?”

  “We’re moving through the remains of a crashed alien starship,” I said quietly. “The house must have been built over the crash site to conceal it.”

  “How long ago?”

  “God knows.”

  “Is it safe to go on?” said Molly.

  “There can’t be anything too dangerous down here,” I said, trying hard to convince myself. “Black Heir’s people would have shut down anything that posed a threat, so they could work here safely.”

  “This is all just so . . . fascinating,” Molly said breathlessly. “Wonderful . . . I’ve never been inside a real alien spaceship before.”

  “Not many have,” I said. “Despite what you hear on chat shows.”

  Molly reached out a hand to touch something that sparkled invitingly. I moved quickly to intercept her hand.

  “Don’t touch anything!”

  “Why not?” Molly said immediately. “You said it was safe!”

  “If you know what you’re doing,” I said.

  “And you do?”

  “You’ll notice I’m not touching anything,” I said.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” said Molly. She sniffed disdainfully, but kept her hands to herself as she looked around. “Do you recognise anything? Like what species would have a ship like this?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” I said. “I really should have paid more attention in class when they were teaching us about aliens.”

  “How could you be bored by aliens?”

  “You didn’t know our teacher.” I craned my head right back, looking up and out to try to get some sense of the scale of the ship. “I’ll have to contact the family to have a proper investigative team sent in. If we haven’t encountered this species before . . .”

  “Aren’t you sure?”

  “I’m not as sure about a lot of things as I was before I came in here,” I said. “Something about this structure, this technology, interferes with human thinking. Undermines it. We don’t belong here.”

  “It feels like we’re not on Earth any longer,” said Molly. “Like none of the usual rules apply here.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “That’s aliens for you.”

  “Look at the size of this ship . . . It’s huge! You could throw cathedrals around in here. How could anything this big crash on Earth, and no one notice?”

  “Really good shields?” I shrugged. “It depends on how long ago it was. It’s always possible something really important was happening, and my family got distracted. It does happen. We can’t watch everything.”

  “I always thought being inside an alien ship would be . . . inspiring,” Molly said slowly. “Or frightening. But I can’t seem to get a feel for any of this. It’s all just too . . . different, for anything I feel to have any meaning. I don’t know what to make of any of this.”

  “A common reaction,” I said. “I’d like to say you get over it, but . . . Aliens are never what you expect. That’s sort of the point.”

  I stood on the edge of the walkway and looked down. The immense open space just dropped away, beyond any point I could see. Not because it was dark, but because it was just so far. The buried starship consisted of level upon level, plunging away into the earth, far beyond any human scale. But here and there, very human-looking ladders had been set in place to connect the various levels. All the way down, into the depths. Black Heir’s work, so its people could get around. Like insects crawling through some great and intricate clockwork mechanism. Too small even to make out the shape of the pieces, let alone understand the overall purpose.

  I went over to the nearest ladder, grabbed hold of the top, and gave it a good tug. It seemed solid and sturdy enough.

  “What’s holding that ladder in place?” Molly said dubiously.

  “Looks to me like it’s been glued,” I said. “Maybe nothing else would take . . .”

  “Glued? Are you kidding me?” Molly said loudly. “I’m not trusting myself to superglue!”

  “It’s probably not any earthly glue,” I said.

  “Is that supposed to reassure me?”

  “Apparently not. Look, I’ll go first.”

  “Damned right you will,” said Molly. “You’ve got armour. You’ll probably bounce.”

  I climbed down the first few rungs, stopped, and bounced up and down a few times. “See? Perfectly safe.”

  “This had better be worth it,” Molly growled. And scrambled down after me, light as a feather.

  I went down two more levels, just to see if there was any difference, but it all appeared the same. Weird technology, disturbing sights, and enigmatic vistas. I looked over the edge again and couldn’t see any point in going farther. Just more and more levels, with no end in sight. And I didn’t want to get too far from the entry point, and our only way out. Molly peered into the depths.

  “Do you suppose the engines are still down there? Somewhere?”

  “I doubt even Black Heir has the expertise to safely remove an alien stardrive,” I said. “More likely it would sell the entire ship, after stripping it of everything it thought there was a market for, and then the engine would be part of the deal for the ship.”

  “You sound like you’ve had some experience of this,” said Molly.

  “My family has acquired its fair share of alien tech,” I said. “Our Armourers can’t invent everything we need. And we have to keep up with everyone else.”

  I pulled armour out of my torc to make a face mask so I could use its augmented Sight to study the deepest parts of the ship. But something in the depths turned my gaze away, even when I tried infrared and ultraviolet. I sent the armour back into the torc. Molly punched my arm.

  “Next time, give me some warning! That expressionless face freaks me out.”

  “That’s sort of the point,” I said, rubbing my arm. “Any of your magics come back yet? Anything that might help?”

  “No. Just a few tingles. I’ve been working it hard today. And stop asking me! You can’t hurry it. I’ll tell you when I’ve got something!”

  “Don’t shout at me when I’m dying,” I said. “I feel very strongly that I should be excused shouting.”

  “Okay,” said Molly. “You’re taking advantage now.”

  We shared a smile.

  I moved along the new level, looking closely at everything and keeping my hands to myself. Molly moved along with me, unusually quiet.

  “There are gaps here,” she said finally. “In between the tech. What could make gaps like that?”

  “Black Heir,” I said. “See the tool marks? Human tools. Things have been removed . . .”

  “Salvage,” said Molly. “Buried treasure.”

  “Black Heir’s people kept the existence of this ship to themselves,” I said, “because they didn’t want to share.”

  “No wonder they didn’t want to sell the house.”

  “But the Caretaker did talk about Black Heir being ready to blow it up . . . You think he knows about this?”

  “He’s the Caretaker,” said
Molly. “Who knows what he knows.”

  We finally came to a row of tall transparent tubes, each one big enough to hold two or three people. It was full of a strange glow that seemed to swirl slowly, like a fog made of light. Looking directly at it was actually painful, but when I concentrated, I could just make out a dark form in each tube, half-concealed in the light. What I could see made me glad I couldn’t see more. They were all twice the size of anything human, ugly and distorted, without even a nod to human ideas of symmetry or aesthetics. Alien. Not of this earth. The fierce light seemed to curl protectively around the dark shapes.

  “Damn,” said Molly. “Look at the teeth on that. Have you ever seen a species like this before? Aliens aren’t my field. I’ve always been more into demons.”

  “I had noticed,” I said. “No, I’ve never seen anything like this. They look . . . seriously dangerous. But you never can tell, with aliens. Beauty is in the sense organs of the beholder.”

  “Don’t get too close!” said Molly as I leaned in for a better look.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “These are stasis tubes. To protect and preserve the bodies.”

  “Bodies?” said Molly. “They’re dead? Are you sure?”

  “I seem to feel it,” I said slowly. “Can’t you feel it?”

  Molly shook her head uneasily. “Maybe.”

  “Dead so long, they’re almost mummified, despite everything the tubes could do to preserve them,” I said. “The original crew. Killed in the crash, I would think.”

  “Not by Black Heir?”

  “No. The bodies have been here too long for that. The ship was here before the house.”

  “So how did Black Heir’s people find out about the ship?” said Molly.

  “Good question,” I said. “Someone must have told them. I’m going to have to talk to my family about this. It would appear someone has been keeping secrets from us, and we can’t have that. Secrets are our business, and we don’t like competitors.”