“There are lots of things about me you don’t know,” said Walker.
I had to smile. “None of the openings seem any more used or significant than any of the others. So we might as well choose one at random at ground level and stroll right in. And hope my Sight can lead us to where we need to be.”
“You’re not a great one for forward planning, are you?” said Walker. “Let’s do it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let us descend into the underworld, and show these alien bastards what Hell on Earth is really like.”
The moment I marched through the semicircular entrance and into the mound itself, things stopped making sense. The entrance became a tunnel, suddenly large enough to hold a tube train and full of a shimmering light. The tunnel descended sharply, falling away before me. The walls were slick, moist, the surface slowly sliding towards the floor, which absorbed it. Strange protrusions rose and fell within the walls, indefinable things that might have been machines or organs or something humanity had no name for. The air was thick and foul but still breathable.
I set off down the tunnel with Walker right there at my side. I was glad to have him there, someone I could depend on. As a Drood field agent I’ve seen more than my fair share of weird shit, but this place was seriously creeping me out. There were new gaps or openings in the tunnel every few feet or so, and it rapidly became clear we were in some kind of labyrinth or honeycomb. I kept heading down, following my Sight, towards the dark beating heart of the mound. I could feel its presence far below, like the monster that waits for heroes at the heart of every maze.
The monster that wins more often than the tales like to tell.
This much was familiar, but as Walker and I continued to descend things grew increasingly strange and odd and subtly disturbing. It was hard to judge distances anymore; things seemed to move suddenly forward and then recede, to stretch endlessly away and then suddenly be gone or behind you. There were things in the curved ceiling that looked down on me and turned slowly to watch me pass. The aliens knew we were there, but I still didn’t see one anywhere. The tunnels occasionally widened out into vast chambers whose shape made no sense at all, that actually hurt my eyes if I looked at them too long, even with the protection of my golden sunglasses. I didn’t know how Walker was coping. We didn’t speak at all once we entered the mound, as though human speech simply didn’t belong there.
There were objects in the caverns I couldn’t look at directly, shapes without significance, forms with no function. Shadows flowed across the floor, slowly changing shape like oil on water, and that didn’t react at all as I strode through them. Gravity fluctuated so that sometimes I bobbed along like a balloon on a string . . . and other times it was all I could do to trudge along, as though I was carrying Old Man of the Sea on my back. My sense of direction snapped back and forth, and I would have been hopelessly lost in minutes without my Sight and my torc to guide me. I didn’t always know where I was going, but I always knew which turn or opening to take next. The floors sloped continually down, leading me on into the subterranean heart of the mound. To the place where all bad things were decided. I knew that much, even if I didn’t always recognise the man walking beside me.
It was getting harder to breathe, harder to think. But every time my thoughts began to drift, all I had to do was remember the vision the alien had shown me back at the morgue, and a cold rage would blow the cobwebs from my thoughts and let me think clearly again. I was here to bring the aliens blood and horror, and nothing was going to stop me.
Not even me.
An alien surged forward out of a side tunnel and stopped abruptly to block our way. A great pile of writhing snakes, of twisting tentacles, of thick threads that melted and merged into each other. I stopped and stood very still, looking steadily at the alien. Walker stood beside me. The alien showed no signs of moving or yelling for its security people. I tensed, half expecting the invisible scalpels, and then concentrated on how best to kill the thing. I was reluctant to summon up my full armour; the presence of so much strange matter within the mound might set off any number of alarms. I had my Colt Repeater, but even its many and varied bullets wouldn’t have much effect on a heap of seething tubes.
“Allow me,” said Walker, his words just a breath in my ear.
He took a firm hold on the handle of his umbrella, pulled and twisted, and drew from its hiding place a long slender steel blade. He strode purposefully forward and cut, hacked, and sliced the alien into a hundred pieces with cold, stern ferocity. The steel blade sliced keenly through the writhing tubes, severing and opening them up almost without resistance. The alien seemed more surprised than anything. It made no attempt to defend itself, just slid slowly backwards down the tunnel. Walker went after it, cutting it up with vicious precision, his arm rising and falling tirelessly. No blood flew on the air, just a thick clear ooze that dripped from the severed ends of twitching tentacle pieces as they writhed feebly on the floor of the tunnel. Soon enough the alien stopped moving, because there wasn’t enough left of it to hold together. Walker finished it off, hacking away until there wasn’t a length of alien tissue longer than a foot or two. Even at the end, there were no signs of any organs within the alien, just the endless pulsing tubes.
Walker stopped and lowered his sword. He stood over the last remnants of the alien and looked slowly about him at the scattered pieces. He was breathing harshly, as much from emotion as exertion. He straightened up, flicked a few drops of clear ooze from the tip of his sword, and then slid it neatly back into the spine of his umbrella.
“A sword?” I said finally. “Hidden inside an umbrella?”
“Don’t show your ignorance,” said Walker, his breathing already back to normal. “It’s an old tradition in the British spy game. Mention it to your Armourer; he’ll remember.”
“Why hasn’t the alien’s death set off any alarms?” I said, glaring about me into the painfully sharp light.
“Perhaps they weren’t expecting such a basic response,” said Walker. “There is such a thing as being oversophisticated.”
“And if more aliens do arrive?”
“Let them come,” said Walker. “I feel like killing some more aliens. I want to grind their bodies under my feet and dance in their blood.”
“Good,” I said. “I want that too.”
The centre of operations turned out to be a honeycomb of interlinked tunnels and caverns and what might have been other-dimensional spaces. There were openings and doorways that changed shape as you approached, tunnels that turned back on themselves if you didn’t concentrate on your destination strongly enough, and floating viewscreens that popped on and off, showing glimpses of distressingly inhuman other worlds. It was getting harder and harder to be sure of anything. Just being inside the alien mound distorted my thinking and filled my head with sudden thoughts and impulses that made no sense at all. I’d lost all track of time. My watch didn’t work. But I had to believe there was still time to stop the aliens, or this had all been for nothing.
I entered into a chamber like all the others and stopped dead in my tracks. Walker stopped beside me and swore softly. We weren’t the only people in the mound. The aliens had abducted men and women and even children from the town of Roswell and done things to them. For knowledge, or curiosity, or as a precursor to the experiment they were planning. Or maybe just because they could. For some alien purpose I could never hope to understand or forgive.
Some forty men, women, and children lay scattered across the sticky floor of the great open cavern. More protruded from the walls, half sunk and immersed in the slick wet surfaces. There were no cages, no bars, no force fields. These people had just been . . . worked on, and then dumped here to live or die. Many had died, their broken and distorted bodies unable to accept the terrible things that had been done to them.
Most had not been so lucky. They were still alive, aware, and suffering.
Their bodies had been vivisected: opened up and changed, made use of for surgical ex
periments. Not the brute mutilations I’d seen on the farmer in the morgue, or even in the future vision the alien had shown me. There was purpose to some of what had been done here, even if its end remained unknown. These people had been opened up, had their organs removed . . . and then put back again in different places, set up to work in different ways. Some organs had been replaced with alien substitutes, pulsing organic machines that wrapped themselves around kidneys and lungs and intestines.
I moved slowly forward into the chamber, like walking in a dream, a nightmare from which I wanted so badly to awaken. A man lay on his back, split open from crotch to throat, the sides pinned back with metal staples to reveal he’d been stuffed full of extra human organs. There were others like him, with several lungs, or half a dozen kidneys connected together, or miles of added intestines threaded in and out of his skin, the whole length of his torso. Others had been hollowed out, with nothing left inside them but threads of alien tissues performing unknowable alien functions.
The children were the worst. I couldn’t look at the children.
“Dear God,” said Walker. “What . . . What is this, Eddie? Are the aliens . . . playing with them?”
“I think . . . they’re trying to upgrade us,” I said. “According to their lights. Make us . . . better. More like them.”
“Is that what this is all about?” said Walker. “Forcibly . . . improving us?”
“All for our own good,” I said, and I didn’t recognise my own voice. “That’s what the alien said. Remember?”
“What are we going to do?” said Walker. He sounded lost. “What can we do? I mean, we can’t leave them like this . . .”
“No,” I said. “We can’t. That would be . . . inhuman.”
I armoured up and took on my battle form, covered with razor-sharp blades. And then I went among the suffering people and gave them the only comfort I could. I killed them. I killed them all. I raged back and forth across the great chamber, cutting throats, tearing out hearts, stamping on heads; killing men and women and children as swiftly and mercifully as I could. I cut off heads and stabbed alien organs, running them through and through till they stopped moving. I cut and hacked and stabbed, doing whatever it took to put a stop to this obscenity. It wasn’t easy; the aliens had made their improved people very hard to kill.
Some of them still had voices. I think some of them spoke to me, but I’ve never let myself remember what they said.
I went screaming and howling through the chamber, ripping bodies out of the walls and tearing them apart with brute strength, shouting obscenities and prayers, and blood sprayed across my armour and ran away in thick crimson rivulets. I killed them all, every last one, and when it was over, when I had dispensed the only mercy left to me, I armoured down and stood shaking and crying in the middle of the piled-up bodies. Drood field agents are trained to deal with horrors, to survive acts and decisions no one else could, but there are limits. There have to be limits, or we wouldn’t be human anymore.
Walker had known better than to try to interfere. He came forward, stepping carefully over blood and offal, and put his arms around me and held me as I cried. And just for a moment, it felt like my father was with me again, and I was comforted. After a while I found the strength to stand up straight again, and Walker immediately let go of me and stepped back. He watched silently as I rubbed the drying tears from my face and took a deep steadying breath.
“Damn them,” I said, and my voice was cold, so cold. “Damn the aliens to Hell for making me do that.”
“Yes,” said Walker.
“The aliens have to die,” I said. “They all have to die. No treaties or agreements for them. No mercy. I have to send a message. That no one can be allowed to get away with things like this.”
“I never thought otherwise,” said Walker.
The centre of operations wasn’t far away. My Sight led me straight to it. Just another cavern, perhaps a little larger than the others, the slick curving walls almost buried under extruded alien machinery and some things that looked to be at least half alive, studded with metal protrusions and lights like staring eyes. Long silvery tendrils hung down from the high ceiling, twisting and turning and twitching in response to unfelt breezes or perhaps just the passing of unknowable thoughts and impulses. And there were aliens, whole bunches of them, working at unrecognisable tasks, lurching across the smooth floor like tangles of knotted ropes. They operated the unnatural technology with limbs or manipulators formed for each specific purpose and spouting sensory organs as needed in the shapes of eyes or flowering things or rippled sucking orifices.
They all stopped at the same moment, and then three of them rolled together to melt and merge into one great pile over eight feet high, hundreds of dripping tentacles piled on top of each other. Disturbingly human eyeballs formed on the end of bobbing tendrils, all aimed at me and Walker. A bright pink speaking trumpet extruded from beneath the eyes, flushing with rhythmic crimson pulses.
“Welcome,” it said. “Be calm. You will not be killed; you are useful. Of use to us. You have demonstrated impressive capabilities. Your value will be incorporated into us, and when you have been improved we will send you back out into your world to prepare the way for us. You shall be our voice, our messengers and prophets.”
“I wouldn’t put money on it,” I said.
“Their language skills are improving,” said Walker.
“Practice makes perfect,” I said.
Parts of the greater alien reached out to manipulate semi-organic machines that rose up out of the floor. The eyeballs still looked steadily in our direction. Creamy white eyeballs without any veins and pure black irises.
“I destroyed your discarded experiments,” I said. “The people you ruined and threw away. They’re all dead now.”
“They were failures,” said the alien. “Of no further use to us. You will be of use to us. There is much that we can do with you.”
“I’ll die first,” said Walker. “Better yet, you’ll die first.”
“I represent the Droods,” I said, raising my voice so all of them could hear. “No visiting alien species goes anywhere or does anything on our world without our consent. We exist to protect humanity from things like you. You should have come to us first. We could have worked something out. Prevented all this.”
“No,” said the alien. “This is necessary. You are small, limited, incapable of understanding what is best for you. We know. We are experienced in changing, upgrading species.”
“You’ve done this before?” said Walker. “On other worlds?”
“On many other worlds,” said the alien. “You must be changed; your species is inefficient. It will not survive the future that is coming. You are wasteful of your potential, but you can be made better. Remade. You must not try to interfere. That is wasteful, of time and energy and resources. We are doing important work here. You will thank us later. This is our work. Our responsibility. Our joy. We make things better.”
“Not here,” I said. “Not to us. We decide our own destiny. The experiment you’re planning is an abomination, and we will not allow it to happen.”
“You can’t stop it,” said the alien. “It is already in motion. Humans. You think so small. So petty. Even your language is barely adequate for communication. You do not even see us clearly. We are not what you look at. This body. You talk with an extension. You are inside our body.”
“The mound,” said Walker. “The whole damned mound is the alien . . . One massive organism. That changes things.”
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t suppose you have any explosives about you?”
“Nothing big enough.”
“You will be remade,” said the alien speaker. “Improved, made speakers of our purpose. You will convince others to do what is necessary. Conflict is wasteful. You will observe the results of our experiment, the greater things we will make out of those who survive. You will tell your world to cooperate, that it is all for the best.”
“
We’ll never work for you,” said Walker. “No one on this world will do anything but fight you to the last breath in their bodies.”
“You won’t fight us,” said the alien. “After a point, you won’t want to. You will become greater. And it starts now.”
Dozens of aliens appeared in the chamber: rising up out of the floor, sliding out of walls, dropping from the ceiling. They blocked all the entrances to the chamber. More and more of them, too many to count, surrounding Walker and me as we moved quickly to stand back-to-back. He had his sword blade in his hand again. I called up my armour and took on my battle form, bristling with weapons. Holding its form was a strain, but I was too angry to care. The aliens filled the chamber around us, packing the place from wall to wall, piles of slimy ropes sliding in and out of each other.
“Bad odds,” said Walker, his voice as calm and cool as always.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said.
“Really?”
“Actually, yes. Of course, I had reinforcements then.”
“Terrific,” said Walker. “How powerful are those energy weapons protruding from your armour?”
“The blades are sharp enough to cut through a loud noise,” I said. “Everything else . . . is just for show.”
“No energy weapons?”
“No. I don’t normally need them.”
“Well,” said Walker. “When there’s nothing left to do but die, die well. And take as many of your enemies as possible down to Hell with you. Get out of here, Eddie.”
“What?”
“I’ll hold their attention while you make for the surface. Don’t worry; you’re not the only one with a few tricks up his sleeve. You get the hell out of here and do whatever’s necessary to stop them. I’ll buy you time. Go, Eddie. It’s all up to you now.”
“I can’t leave you here! Not with them; they’ll—”
“No, they won’t. I’ll make them kill me first.”
The Spy Who Haunted Me sh-3 Page 35
