Once or twice, he thought he heard Meg’s voice, faint and distant. But he knew that was just his mind playing cruel games with him. And when he stopped to listen, all he heard was the blood sighing in his ears.
He had swum down to the deepest point of Loch Ness. The lake’s floor was absolutely smooth, like a bathtub. The sides were continuations of the steep slopes above. He’d used his suit’s environmental imaging function to find the cave entrance. Then he’d swum in and up until he popped into the air. It was good air, to his surprise, indicating that there must be vents to the surface. Loch Ness lay on the Great Glen Fault, an area of ancient seismic slippage. The granite around here must be riddled with cracks and chimneys.
As he struggled upwards on hands and knees, he found himself remembering that fjordside cave on Juradis, and the rock chimney he and Meg had climbed to escape the Walking Guns. She’d saved his life that day, not for the first time. She had said she loved him but she’d been lying. Thinking about that made him want to sit down and die. But—Nicky.
He climbed on, and after a while the tunnel kinked like a bendy straw, and he was climbing downwards again.
There could’ve been other caves. Other tunnels. He might not be anywhere near the right place.
But what could he do except keep going? Lowering himself from one angled shelf to the next, he pressed on until the tunnel narrowed once again, and this time it stayed narrow. He could either go feet first or head first. He opted for gun first. He soon regretted it as the blood rushed to his head. Gravity was pulling him downwards, while the rocks digging into his body held him back. The planet seemed to be closing around him like a fist.
He grunted, gave a metaphorical middle finger to the Great Glen Fault, and squirmed downwards, shoving the combi in front of him like a blind man’s stick, until suddenly it met no resistance.
He tumbled out of the crevice headfirst onto smooth rock. The echoes of his combi clattering told him it was a big cavern. He picked the combi up, picked himself up. Heart racing, he shone his headlamp around.
“Nicky?” His voice echoed back to him, mocking him. “Nicky!”
Water splashed.
Something slithered on rock.
Axel swung around, flipping up the laser scope of his combi, auto-syncing it with his infocals.
The specter in his cross-hairs challenged his sanity.
A serpent humped up out of a black pool at the end of the cave. It was as long as a bus and it hadn’t even come all the way out of the water yet. Instead of a head it had a spiky club, and all the spikes wavered towards Axel like the feelers of a sea urchin when food appears.
“Holy crap,” Axel whispered.
The Loch Ness Monster was real.
And it was slithering towards him.
*
“Where’d you go?” Dhjerga said.
Meg, in the lead, said, “Right here.”
“I can’t see you.”
“Yeah, you should have fetched a flashlight while you were at it.”
“I did not know it would be so dark.”
“Feel down and to your left.”
His fingers brushed her ankle. “I’ll never fit in there.”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way.” She dug her fingers into the rock, hauling herself on and down. Fingernails, who needs ‘em? She could mute the damage signals from her prosthetic hand, so it didn’t hurt, but the whole arm still felt funny. Tingly. The roof of the tunnel pressed the Gauss into her spine.
Damn, this was a tight squeeze.
“Axel can’t have come this way,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Axel.” She’d thought he might have come this way, after she saw the battlesuit. It had sure looked like his. Now she had changed her mind. “He couldn’t handle this. He’s no good with enclosed spaces. Especially underground.”
“He fought like a demon on Atletis, and that was all underground.”
“But that wasn’t him—”
“But he knows what they knew.”
“Oh, your damn magic.” She hauled herself over a sharp shelf, so she was hanging almost upside-down, and the strap of the Gauss got caught on a protrusion in the tunnel roof. “Shit.”
“Are you stuck?”
“No …” She tried to jack-knife her body back up again, but her weight was now hanging from the strap and she couldn’t get either arm around behind her back to free it. “Yes. Strap’s caught.”
“Hang on.”
Somehow or other, Dhjerga crawled forward until he was lying alongside her in the tunnel. He reached up and freed the strap. Meg flopped down into the lower part of the tunnel.
“Axel’s a good man,” Dhjerga said. “One of the best.”
“That’s when his implant is enabled. Thinking back, I actually fell in love with an implant, not a man.” As she spoke, she heard something from below her. A clattering noise. “Ssh! Listen!”
Silence.
“Did you hear something?”
A sudden storm of echoes bounced up the tunnel.
“Fuck,” Meg gasped.
She’d know that noise anywhere. It was a combi firing on auto.
She fought onwards faster, no more time to talk, no time even to think. Smaller and lither than Dhjerga, she left him behind. She practically slid down the last, steepest, narrowest bit of the tunnel. It suddenly opened up. Muzzle flashes split the darkness. Half sliding, half falling, she braked her descent with her prosthetic hand and let her feet fall over her head, so she landed right way up, amidst the racket of gunfire. She went prone with the Gauss.
She could hardly make sense of what she was seeing. Gleaming black coils whipped across the floor of the cave. Pale in night-vision green, Axel stood with his back to the wall, firing into a mass of smaller tentacles. Between one breath and the next he ran out of ammo. There was an instant’s ringing silence, broken by the slither of the monster’s wet sides on the stone floor, and then Axel reversed his combi and struck out at the small tentacles, but there were too many of them, they spasmed around Axel’s arms, and he let out a scream of pain—
Meg fired into the nearest coil. The monster dropped Axel and whisked around, unbelievably fast. The tentacles reached for her. There were thousands of the wiggly arms, getting smaller towards the middle, like a jellyfish’s tentacles, and in the middle gaped a toothed maw.
She dodged. Running and firing at the same time, because the thing was too fucking big to miss, she zigzagged across the cave towards Axel. Behind her, Dhjerga dropped out of the crevice. The deafening pop-pop of rounds going supersonic filled the cave.
Meg slipped in a puddle of sticky ichor and skidded up to Axel. He’d dropped his gun. Was leaning against the wall of the cave, his arms hanging oddly at his sides. She pushed him behind her and poured rounds into the monster’s body. Slime flooded out of its shredded sides. By the time she and Dhjerga stopped shooting, the Gausses had practically torn it in half.
Her ears were ringing but she heard Axel say, “Let me know when you get tired of saving my life, Meg.”
She shook her head, gaping at the dead monster. “What … the fuck … is that?”
“I’m guessing the Loch Ness Monster.”
“It was real.”
“Are you real?”
“We found your battlesuit.” She remembered the suit’s power meter hovering at empty. She and Dhjerga had drained it when they flitted in.
Dhjerga skirted the monster’s still-twitching head, stumbling in the dark. “Hello, Axel,” he called.
“Yo,” Axel said, twitching one arm.
“What’s wrong with your arms?” Meg said sharply.
“Nessie stung me. Numb. I’m hoping it’ll wear off.”
“Poisonous like a jellyfish. Fuck.”
“I think Nessie’s an alien,” Axel said, screwing up his face thoughtfully. Or maybe in pain.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“So how’d she get here?”
“This is
me not caring.” Chewing her lip, Meg watched Dhjerga wander away, using his Gauss’s night scope to see with. The cavern looked to be completely barren and empty. She had told herself she did not really hope to find Nicky at the end of this nightmare caving expedition. But she had been hoping, all the same, and the disappointment bit deep. She detached from it. She had to think about how they were going to get out of here, with Axel Nessie-stung, unable to use his arms, and his battlesuit out of power.
“There’s a tunnel back here,” Dhjerga called.
“Any wider than the other one?”
“Yes.” Pause. “It has a concrete floor.”
CHAPTER 49
THE SENTRIENZA LET LLOYD keep Nicky on his lap during the flight, but the Magus must have told them how to disable a magician, for they put gloves on him. For a while in his younger days he’d gone around in two pairs of Rubbermaids, trying to train himself out of it. Never really worked. But these were not rubber dishwashing gloves. They were made of slinky gold fabric, came up to his elbows, and numbed his gift entirely. It was like losing one of his senses. “Grandpa’s quite the fashion plate,” he said to Nicky. The toddler didn’t smile, but at least he wasn’t crying anymore.
Poor wee lad.
It was probably for the best that he didn’t know what was coming.
Nor did Lloyd but he knew it was going to be bad, so he didn’t relax when the sentrienza spaceship touched down on the system’s single planet and them still alive and unhurt. They disembarked on a stony gray desert and stumbled between hydrocarbon seeps like little craters full of black soup. Sand blew in the air, hazing out the horizon. Lloyd, carrying Nicky, covered the boy’s face with his duster. The occasional feeble sprig of purple vegetation pushed between the stones. Otherwise there was no sign of life whatsoever, until a steel chimney rose out of the ground and opened into curved petals. Their sentrienza escorts pushed them inside.
It was a lift. Down they went, fans whirring the dust out of the air. Lloyd coughed and hacked phlegm onto the floor. “Jesus, the air was foul up there. What did you do to this poor planet?” His ears popped.
Nicky, riding on Lloyd’s hip, rubbed his eyes red. “Go?” he said hopefully.
That was Nicky’s way of saying he wanted to go home. You and me both, laddie. Lloyd should’ve flitted when he had the chance, even if it meant abandoning Colm. He should’ve taken his chances against the Magus.
Where was the Magus?
The lift dumped them into a dark and slimy corridor with fist-sized mushrooms growing out of the walls. The mushrooms glowed, providing a dim bluish light. As he struggled to balance Nicky on his hip, Lloyd glanced back and saw a shadow oozing around the corner behind them.
There he was.
Clearly the Magus wasn’t going to let Nicky out of his sight until he saw how this shook out.
The sentrienza glanced back, buzzed to each other, and swayed along faster. Lloyd studied them and decided they didn’t know what to do about the Magus exactly. They could not get close enough to put gloves on him. He had the knack of the glamor, wrapping spacetime around himself like a shield and cloak in one. You’d never even see his face if he didn’t want you to. He could do the scrying, too, and probably other tricks besides, according to Lloyd’s father, who had tried several times to have a proper conversation with him but always got lost in the Magus’s enigmatic, old-timey way of talking. As for Lloyd, he would have jumped in the Minch before he’d have conversed with the Magus, before today.
But maybe the Magus was not the evilest being in the universe after all.
The corridor ended abruptly in a grove of gray trees and yellow grass. The boughs of the trees creaked, hung with red …
Lloyd crushed Nicky’s face into his shoulder as he realized what he was seeing. His gorge rose. Bodies hung from the trees, flayed, dismembered, connected to tubes and wires … they were still living! It was a torture garden. All he saw for the first seconds was red, red, red, and then his brain reluctantly identified the bodies as sentrienza and alien. No humans.
Yet.
He could practically feel the agony of the prisoners. It puzzled him that they made no sound until he saw that their mouths were sewn shut.
“Put the child down,” said a sweet, high, buzzing voice.
“No,” Lloyd said. “Don’t make him look at this. It’ll traumatize him for life. Please.”
Buzzing laughter. “‘Life’? What is this state we call life? It is a question I have explored for centuries, yet am none the wiser. Here you see a few of my ongoing experiments. I used to think that experience was the enemy of ignorance; now I know it is its handmaiden. Each experience further sweetens the fine wine of unknowing. Put the child down.”
The battlesuited sentrienza wrenched Nicky out of Lloyd’s arms and set him on his feet. Nicky immediately wailed and buried his face in Lloyd’s legs.
“So you are Homo sapiens,” the voice said. “I have heard so much about you. A promising species—but troublesome. In fact, I distinctly remember signing off on something … yes, an extinction protocol. One does not forget that easily.”
“And yet here we are,” Lloyd said.
“Yes. How did you get here? Don’t tell me; you are another of these magicians.”
“Got it in one. Not gonnae offer us a drink? I thought faerie hospitality would be better than this.”
More laughter. Trilling voices multiplied. A gust of air touched Lloyd’s face. Before his eyes, the tortured prisoners vanished off the trees, and sentrienza in fancy dress appeared beneath them, seated at long tables groaning with food and drink. Strings of faerie lights in the branches replaced the overhead glare. Lyrical music played. Lloyd rubbed his eyes like a rube. He knew it was just an illusion, probably managed with screens and holo projectors, but it was disorienting. Nicky peeped in awe.
A sentrienza girl sashayed up to them with her knees bending in the wrong direction, and offered Lloyd a tray. On it stood a sippy cup of orange juice and a pint of dark beer with a creamy head.
Lloyd had never been so tempted by a drink. Not only had he travelled thousands of light years and seen horrors beyond his imagining, he’d been unwillingly sober for years. He could practically taste the hops and feel the foam coating his lips. A little moment of relief to make this game of living easier.
But suspicion sounded a shrill alarm in his head, backed up the memory of his grandfather’s voice:
“These days they call them sentrienza and people grab their gifts with both hands. But I’m telling you, my lad, never take anything a faerie offers you.”
Truer words never said, and yet the beer was stronger than Lloyd. He reached out for it.
Mickle scrabbled out of his pocket, clawed her way up his duster to his shoulder, and leapt onto the tray, knocking the beer and the orange juice to the ground. She bounded clear, hissing.
The sentrienza girl shrieked and turned into a prisoner with a flayed face, one arm missing, propelled on her grotesque mission by a remote control box crudely implanted in her skull. Nicky burst into heart-rending sobs.
Lloyd dropped to his knees, gathering the child in. “Good kitty,” he said fervently to Mickle. She’d saved him. No doubt the drinks had been drugged. “No more of your fucking games!” he shouted at the sentrienza nobles carousing under the trees. “What do you want?”
The illusory banquet vanished. In the harsh clinical lighting, the tortured puppet wobbled back to her place, and another sentrienza body fell from the tree nearest Lloyd. This one was in better shape: it had all its skin. However, deep cuts scored its limbs, and bruises marred the pale gray skin of its throat. Its abundant gold hair was so matted with blood that it stuck together in a single big dreadlock. As it approached, its reek seared Lloyd’s nose.
“That’s simple,” it said. “I want to know how to do magic. You will teach me. If not, the child will.”
“You’re never the Gray Emperor?”
The hideously wounded sentrienza laughed the same b
uzzing laugh as before. “I prefer the title Emperor of Experience.”
Lloyd’s neck prickled. The light seemed to dim, and he knew the Magus was behind him.
“You will keep your promise, Your Imperial Majesty,” the Magus said in his slushy whisper. “Give me Earth.”
“But of course,” the emperor said carelessly. “The promise is already made. And as you know, we sentrienza never lie.”
CHAPTER 50
COLM STOPPED FLITTING. HE was wrung out, his heart racing, his eyes popping out of his head. Every time he jumped around the Elphame system, from one heimdall to the next, the Shihoka had seemed to get heavier. The Walking Guns had stayed with him all the way, and not for a second had they paused in their work of destruction. They were dismantling the ship around him. His sensor eyes had gone blind, and he’d had to mute all the esthesia feedback from his implant, because it felt like they were flaying him alive. A few minutes ago they’d got through the hull in the cargo hold. His internal camera eyes saw a pack of them floating in there, training their laser eyes on the pressure door that led to the main cabin. Vaporizing metal glowed red-hot. It wouldn’t be long until they broke through.
Anticipating depressurization, Colm already had his helmet on. He checked the seals of his leathers, grabbed his gun and his Nessie mug, and flitted out of the ship. He had to see how much damage they’d done.
Huh?
He could not see the Shihoka at all. He was floating in empty space, facing away from the sun, having instinctively put it at his back. All he saw was blackness, studded with the bright dots of heimdalls.
The blackness heaved and sparkled.
Colm grunted in disgust. He saw them now, with his eyes and esthesia. Walking Guns. Hundreds of them. They’d literally buried the Shihoka, like ants on the corpse of a bird. One wing-tip stuck forlornly out of the seething mass of metal.
The sight filled Colm with rage and guilt. That beautiful ship had deserved better than this.
The Walking Guns spotted him. A dozen of them broke away from the ship and powered towards him, spurting fiery tailfeathers.
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