Pyke gave a bleak smile and set off into the smoky vegetation.
Moments later he realised that Shogrel hadn’t been exaggerating—the place had most certainly been a battleground, and a vicious one at that. The bio luminescent plants had suffered badly but there were enough glowing tubers and berry clusters to light up some grim details. A profusion of dead creatures were scattered everywhere, scorched, riddled with holes, or torn to pieces. Explosions had blown big hollows in the intertwining growth, left charred gouges in both ceiling and deck, often through to the deck’s base material. Some heaps of ripped-aside foliage still smouldered amid the shadows.
Raven and her goons must have been carrying around some fierce amount of heavy firepower, he thought. But they must be out of ammo, otherwise they wouldn’t be holed up. Could be a good sign.
A section of mossy, creeper-patterned wall appeared through a gap in the leafy curtains. Pyke pushed through, turned left around a trunk-like mass of twisted roots and flowering tendrils, and there was a door in the corner, barely visible through a barrier constructed from wall panels, ceiling support struts and deck tiles, all lashed together with vines. The top quarter of the doorway was covered by a double layer of wire mesh, behind which an indistinct figure watched as he drew near. He got to within about three paces when a gruff voice spoke.
“Okay, Pyke, that’s far enough—that’s it, stand there, no closer.”
“That you, Vayne?”
“Certainly is—what’s your business?”
“Ach, you know, I was in the neighbourhood, thought I’d drop by, pay my respects. Raven about?”
No reply for a second or two, then:
“Why, Brannan, that’s a lovely scarf you have there—really brings out the colour of your eyes!”
Dervla would be so pleased, he thought, resolving to leave this part of the exchange out of any subsequent account of this moment.
“Oh, yer too kind,” he said, keeping his voice as affable and nonchalant as he could. “So, how are you doing in there? From outside, kinda looks like you’ve got yourselves into a bit of a fix …”
“Now, Brannan, you of all people should know that appearances can be deceptive. Me and the boys, we’re just getting settled in, doing a few home improvements, choosing ourselves some new carpets and furniture, the usual sort of thing. Soon we’ll have the place looking just the way we like it!”
Someone inside sniggered, and Pyke’s bad-juju instinct began tingling. Raven had as good a line of bravado as anyone Pyke knew, but he could tell when she was and was not putting up a front. And right now she didn’t sound like someone who was playing with a weak hand.
“Ah, right, cooked meals, clean sheets and soft pillows—I never pictured you hankering after home comforts, somehow.”
“Never too late in life to acquire new experiences, as our mutual friend has revealed.”
Pyke grinned without humour. It was that body-jacking piece of evilware called the Legacy that she was referring to.
“Some experiences aren’t worth having, Raven,” he said. “Like the one that’s coming your way very shortly if we can’t reach a sane agreement here …”
“Love it when you talk dirty, Bran, always have.”
“I’ve seen what these forest … minds have in store for you,” he said. “Armies of creatures, insects, and plants and things in between! And I don’t even think you’ve got the ordnance to hold them off this time!”
“I do believe I detected a note of anxiety and concern in your voice, Brannan, dearest!” She laughed. “This is such a crazy place. Who would ever expect to find a fully functioning, self-contained ecology inside a millennia-old spacewreck? It’s a miracle of imagination and engineering, and so delicately balanced! We humans don’t see it or sense it, for the most part, but everything in this place is swimming in a stew of pheromones, y’know, airborne chemical trigger and signifiers …”
“Never knew that eco-biochemistry was yer thing.”
“We struck lucky, dear Bran, received some free advice from a local source, even got sent a care package.”
“Raven, you’re just digging the hole deeper …”
“Ever spent any time in the Glow, Bran?”
He ground his teeth, holding onto patience. “Some—not so much, recently.”
“I never could get the point of cyberreality, y’know?” she said. “Wirelife lacks reality’s meaty risk, but I have seen all the glories of its flesh and spectacle. And I was always fascinated at how the Glow’s social trend ecology reacts to new databombs tailored to the psyche-profiles of the key flock leaders—it’s incredible, they leap in and everyone else swarms in after them, it’s a sight, I tell ya …”
A horrible suspicion was starting to form in Pyke’s thoughts.
“What are you planning, Raven? What are you up to?”
“Planning is done, complete, Bran, and it’s happening right now—listen!”
There, as they both fell silent, he heard a hum that was growing louder and sharper. He snarled.
“You’re right out of your mind, Raven! Why do this to yourself?”
“Better run, Brannan—you don’t want to be around when rage meets rage!”
He glanced over his shoulder—the buzzing was loud and angry and the advance wave of yellow and red insects surged into view. No more time. He lunged away from the barricaded door, panic driving him on a mad search for a way out. Through half-burned foliage he fought to another corner of this overgrown death trap, actually stumbling into a shadowy passage half hidden by bushes. That was when Pyke heard the first explosion, a deep and definite thud that made him pause and glance back. Something whined through the bushy screen and found him then, something tiny that stung him in the face. He cursed loudly and batted wildly around him, then resumed his speedy retreat. But less than a minute later he could feel a tingling lethargy starting to steal through his legs and arms, as if he was struggling to move through clinging treacle. His vision started to lose definition, objects left trails of blurred images and the edges of his sight became grey and murky.
The second explosion was by far the loudest, a thunderous crash that was accompanied by a bright flash, which made his already feeble vision swim. The deck shook underfoot and Pyke nearly lost his frail balance. Holy crap, there must have been a lot more charges on that barricade than I saw from the outside. No one could live through that.
Eager to evade any stragglers, he kept staggering along the darkened corridor, following his wavering instinct for seeking the spot furthest from the chaos. But there was no escaping the chemical turbulence riptiding through his mind.
When he came to a side passage and found Van Graes standing there, drinking from a delicate teacup, Pyke knew that his brain had become a playpen for hallucinogens.
“I’m a man of considerable patience, Captain,” said Van Graes. “But these delays and pavane-sidetracks simply will not do. Only the tarantella will carry you onto the crux of it all …”
“Mr. Van G, you must excuse me but …”
“Or perhaps a bolero would suffice …” Van Graes’ eyes widened as Pyke stumbled past. “Of course!—it’s actually an eightsome reel!”
Assailed by waves of dizziness, he carried on down the corridor of shadows, his own low laughter sounding like the stretched-out, echoing groans of something trapped at the bottom of an ocean. At some point he paused to sit and rest near another side passage. He opened his eyes and saw the Construct drone Rensik hovering there, a boxy rhomboid shape floating about four feet off the deck.
“My standing advice to new recruits at the Garden of the Machines is this—you can always rely on sweaty organics to screw a situation into previously untheorised levels of utter mayhem.”
“You’re just a snarking bucket of bolts,” Pyke said. “What the frack do you know about real damn living, eh?”
The drone made a noise halfway between contempt and hilarity and glided off down the side corridor. Angered by this, Pyke leaned back agai
nst the wall as he strove to get to his feet, but once he’d made it he didn’t feel like chasing after the obnoxious drone, so he staggered on.
It was his own face that awaited him at the next corridor junction—well, half of it was his face while the other half was a nightmare fusion of something demonic and a profusion of embedded mech parts, rods and gears. The body was indistinctly human and swathed in black folds that shifted and dissolved and reappeared.
The Legacy. Had to be.
Pyke halted and braced himself against the corridor corner, then leaned in close to that horrible amalgam and said, “Boo!”
That merged face regarded him casually, a deranged grin married to a reptilian jaw full of shiny fangs.
“I’m having such fun with the other you,” the Legacy said. “I provide the maze and he obligingly scurries through it. It’s delightful …”
“Everyone should have a hobby,” said Pyke. He knew that these visions were no more than fanciful mirages released from his inner mind by the venomous insect bite. But there was something unsettlingly visceral about them, as if tenuous dream glimpses had been given a kind of will and presence all their own.
“The power that organic minds have to delude themselves is satisfyingly multifaceted,” said the Legacy. “And there are so many controls, triggers, buttons, levers—control the stage, control the lighting, control the mood, control the script. Oh, how you will caper for me in the end, when the tide comes in!”
Glistening rods and cogs worked away in the dark side of that face as it grinned abominably, ichor lubricating movements within gashes in reptilian skin. It was ghastly and hideous and nauseating …
Just a second, I’ve never seen this before. It’s nothing but a gaudy, hammy boogieman dredged up from some wretched corner of the old brainbox with the aim of giving me a fit of the horrors! Well, screw that!
Pyke sneered at the apparition, sidestepped and stumbled past it, heading down the side passage.
“Be seeing you, Bran!” sang out the thing that wasn’t there.
“Not if I see you first, ya festering skagmonger!” he muttered.
No more illusions crawled out to pester him but his senses felt no more inclined to return to normal. Past curtains of webby moss and hanging masses of springy, rusty coils he tripped, trudged and toiled. He then realised that there were glowing lights shining through the creeper-webbed wall to his left. Seeing what looked like a patch of something transparent, Pyke started tearing aside foliage and viny growth, uncovering a broad if stained and streaked window. On the other side, much of the view was obscured by a cluster of pipes and cables that went from deck to ceiling and by stacks of containers. But there was a two-foot gap which gave him an unimpeded view of the room beyond and its depressingly familiar occupants.
Tall panels of dusty readouts lined the back wall, arrays of curious screens showing icons glowing orange and yellow. In the middle of the room was an oblong dais with a control station and a tall, heavy, bolted-down frame: the frame had a strange eye-like crosspiece about a metre wide. Two of Raven’s goons were working on the back-wall instrumentation while Raven herself was bent over the dais control station, adjusting, comparing, tweaking. Then she straightened and said something to her lackeys—they reached up to higher ranks of controls and flipped a series of switches. At once many of the glowing readouts brightened then their hues began changing, reds to orange to yellow, yellows into green.
At the same time, a faint nimbus appeared around the framework, gauzy and flickering. As the wall indicators turned green in greater numbers the nimbus strengthened and brightened, especially around the eye-shaped crosspiece. Suddenly the eye was filled with a silvery radiance that flowed downwards like a curtain. A moment later the lids of the eye parted, one half rising, one descending, till the flowing silver radiance stretched the full length of the frame. With a jolt, Pyke realised he was looking at a portal of some kind. What was it Shogrel had said? There was a gate that led to the ship’s bridge, and something about a mosaic?
He felt powerless as Raven and her underlings gathered on the dais and moved in a line towards the radiant portal, with Raven bringing up the rear. The first approached the silvery doorway, stepped through and a moment later returned. There was some nodding of heads and happy smiles then, after some punching of keys on the control panel, they lined up again.
A test run, Pyke thought, leaning heavily on the window, feeling a wave of shivering and cold sweat. Anger and frustration spiked as Raven approached the portal. He slammed his fist against the window. It was made of some thick, heavy-duty material which barely quivered under the impact but the noise of it was enough to catch Raven’s attention. She was less than a yard from the silvery portal when she looked round and saw Pyke glaring at her. She smiled, nodded and laughed, all in silence. For a moment they just looked at each other, then she took out a small object like an eyepiece attached to a small box the size of his thumb and held it up—and he realised that it had to be the Angular Eye. He mimed that he had his unwavering gaze on her. She put away the device, shook her fist at him in mock rage, then extended her middle finger, still laughing. Then she turned back to the portal, stepped through and was gone.
Pyke stared at the now vacant room, emotions swinging between burning animosity and a sneaking, undeniable admiration. Crazier than a bag o’ cats but, damn, that was an exit!
A wave of dizziness struck, making him lean heavily against the window while it passed. And now Raven had skipped away, still in possession of the Angular Eye, and was therefore almost certainly close to tracking down Van Graes’ treasure hoard. He had to find the others and guide them back to this bloody room—only he had no clue where he or the others actually were, and the mind-bending venom still pumping around his veins was not helping in the least. He glanced at his wrists and the bracelets of blue flowers gifted to him by Shogrel. After Raven set off that pheromone bomb (if that’s what it was) the bracelets and the circlet seemed to lose their protective qualities so perhaps a more direct method was required.
All the tiny blue flowers—each and every one of them—still had his face, eyes closed and smiling, each and every one. Which just adds another layer of weird to this whole crazy carnival, he thought as he raised his wrists to his nose and strenuously inhaled.
Ten minutes later he was creeping along a blue-green corridor hung with broad, dark leaves whose undersides gave off a warm golden glow. Having backtracked from the portal room window, he had gone searching for any passage that might lead him back to where the whole business with the alliance had started. It was a task he now felt equal to—the hefty snort from the blue flowers had swiftly cleared his head, heightened his senses and kicked up his metabolism. He was ready for action and impatient to find the others.
The corridor reached a crossroads—the passages ahead and to either side were all brighter and more open, glows pulsing out amber and rose tints. He was about to cross over to the opening directly ahead when he heard a hiss then a voice calling his name in a hoarse whisper. Turning, he saw Ancil’s head poking out from a mass of vegetation.
“Chief! Found you at last—quick, this way.”
Ancil beckoned, moving backwards into shadows as Pyke approached. Behind the screen of foliage was a door that led into a long, narrow space, like a tunnel through stacks of ancient containers overgrown and almost buried by layers of roots and tendrils. It was humid and dark, apart from a few clusters of glowing tubers, crusty looking lumps giving off yellow and blue radiance.
“Down here, Chief.”
Ancil was at the tunnel’s end, sitting with legs dangling inside an open hatch in the deck.
“What happened after I went off to waste my time yacking with Raven?” Pyke asked as he followed Ancil down into a cramped maintenance conduit lit by small recessed lamps.
“Even now I’m not sure,” Ancil said. “We heard a sound like the angriest bees ever, then those root-suits opened up and let us go—they were so itchy! I wanted to scratch j
ust about everywhere, then Dervla and Kref showed up with the weird weavey, twiggy woman who said we had to move out of the area due to a sneak scent attack, I think is what she said … so we were hurrying off and Derv was explaining that you’d gone to negotiate with that psycho Raven, when we heard something detonate …”
“The first bomb,” said Pyke. “She must have used some of their charges to blow a hole in the cabin wall or deck so that they were out and away when the second one went off—but how did they know where to place those charges?”
The maintenance conduit sloped down and turned to the right. Ancil pointed out a couple of jutting, severed pipes as he sidled past them.
“Yeah, so the first bomb explodes, me and Kref look at each other then we turned and started running back to where we saw you walking, before, then round a coupla corners, dodged a squadron of those big insects zooming past us. There was an unholy racket of buzzing and snarling going on somewhere in that big hall when we got there, although there was too much foliage and bushes to see. And that was when the second bomb went off—whoa, made the first look like a firecracker! Big orange flash, then a deafening crash. Shockwave knocked us both down, I was on the ground, my ears were ringing, smoke and fire right across the hall, and we started coughing. Everything was blown apart and burning—insects, creatures, the forest, it was all on fire.
“Next thing, Dervla was there, Kref, too, dragging us both away, which was lucky ’cos I was out of it. We met up with the others and followed the friendly twig-lady to a corridor that was as green as those flares I used to have. Derv talked it over with Shogrel—that’s her name! Well, she was really arguing—Shogrel said it was too dangerous to wait for you, and Derv said buggered if we were gonna bail on you like that! So they decided that keeping eyes on the main junctions was the best use of the crew, and here we are!”
Splintered Suns Page 26
