Trapped lop-6

by James Alan Gardner

  She fired her gun into Knife-Hand Liz's face.

  An instant after Annah pulled the trigger, she dove forward onto Jode's body. I thought she must be diving for cover… as if hitting the floor was any protection.

  The Ring-men fired on her at point-blank range.

  Gushes of flame lit the chamber. The smell of burning gas mixed with the bitterness of acid. Bullets caromed off the rock walls so fiercely, I buried my face against the floor and covered my head with my arms.

  Moments later, a gun blew up. I heard the explosion as shattering metal: a pressurized ammunition chamber filled with flammable gas or acid that was breached by a bullet and burst its deadly payload into the world. I didn't know whose gun it was — Annah's or one of those held by the Ring — but they were all so close together, it didn't make a difference.

  Total mutual destruction in the first half-second. Burnt, shot, corroded.

  As I lay listening to the roar of weapons, I realized Annah must have known what would happen. What she'd be forced to do. Even if Tzekich hadn't explicitly threatened Sebastian or the school, violent retribution would still have hung in the air. "My daughter has been murdered. If I could kill the whole world, it wouldn't be enough." Sooner or later, Tzekich might lash out against the boy… or the academy… or someone Annah loved.

  Like me.

  So Annah made sure that wouldn't happen.

  She also granted Elizabeth Tzekich's final wish. The way Knife-Hand Liz looked into Annah's eyes… had she been pleading for an end? Her daughter was dead; her heart was broken; and though she spoke of revenge, perhaps Mother Tzekich was actually asking for release.

  One can be so crushed with grief, one prays for death so the pain will stop.

  Believe me, I know.

  24: REVELATIONS 12:9

  Some time later, I stood up. My boots scraped against the stone floor, filling the chamber with hollow echoes.

  Where Annah and the Ring had been standing, there were now only smoldering lumps. Thin smoke rose from their remains. I considered saying a prayer for the dead, but didn't have the heart for it.

  Alone in a world full of corpses, I thought. But that wasn't true — Dreamsinger was still alive, protected from the explosion by her armor. Her breathing was soft and calm, as if sleeping peacefully. I wanted to seize her by the shoulders, shake her roughly, wake her up… but the hypersonics from an Element gun knocked victims out for six hours, and nothing I could do would rouse the Sorcery-Lord sooner. Besides, she was still surrounded by that force field, the one that melted bullets; if I tried to touch her, my hands would disintegrate.

  I looked down at Dreamsinger once more. The ‹BINK›-rod she'd been holding lay a short distance away. It must have fallen from her grasp when she'd been shot. I bent, picked it up, then felt foolish at the gesture. Did I think this was some kind of magic wand? A wonderful deus ex machina I could wave and abracadabra, bring back all my friends?

  There were nothing but blackened lumps where Annah had been standing… and farther off lay Impervia's body, outside the range of the explosion but sprawled deathly still. I couldn't bring myself to take a closer look. What would be the point? Let her rest in peace.

  So there I was: last man standing. Pelinor would say that made me the hero of our quest; but I'd done nothing anyone would call heroic. The hard work came from my friends — the protecting, the dying. All I could do was ensure they hadn't died in vain.

  Element gun in one hand, ‹BINK›-rod in the other, I approached the laser cage.

  The door of the airlock shack had one simple control — a lever with three positions marked INNER SHUT, BOTH SHUT, OUTER SHUT. It was currently set to the last: outer door closed, inner one open. I moved the switch to the middle and watched as the inner door slid into place. The imprisoned Lucifer had withdrawn into the main area of the cage, taking Sebastian with it. I guessed it didn't want to leave the boy in the airlock shack where he might be easier to rescue.

  Deep breath. I moved the lever again.

  The outer door opened. I had my gun set to shoot flames, ready to scorch any bits of Lucifer hiding in the airlock. But the shacklike space seemed perfectly clean: white walls, white floor, white ceiling, where the tiniest black grain would show up clearly. No doubt the airlock had cleansing devices that sanitized the place every time the doors cycled. I didn't know how decontamination was possible without killing any humans in the airlock… but if the Keepers harvested lightbulbs from the Lucifer's mass, people must go in and out through the shack all the time. One just had to trust that the Sparks could eradicate alien cellules while leaving Homo sapiens intact.

  I stepped into the airlock. The inside wall had a three-position lever like the one outside. I moved the lever to both shut and waited.

  A flat plane of green light rose from the floor, like a platform of jade ascending around me. The surface was too glossy to see through, but I could feel a tingle as it climbed my legs: like the brisk scraped sensation after drying oneself with a rough towel. The feeling increased to wrenching pain as it reached my abdomen — an unknown force clawing my intestines, scouring deep in search of alien intruders. Some part of my mind wondered what kind of energy the light was, how it could distinguish between human flesh and alien particles. But I didn't care that much. Like a man plodding the last hundred meters of a marathon, I just wanted to get this over.

  The jade surface rose. As it reached my heart, congestion squeezed my chest. I tried to breathe normally; I closed my eyes and waited, feeling the tingle flush up my throat, my face… then a burst of jade flared as it swept past my retinas.

  When I opened my eyes, the plane of light was vanishing into the airlock roof. I caught my breath, lifted my weapons, and moved the control lever to open the inner door.

  The Lucifer didn't attack. It didn't even move. Its black powder mass sat silent. Waiting.

  "Release the boy," I said.

  No response. As if the creature didn't understand my words. But I was certain it knew what I was saying.

  I raised my gun. "Give me the boy or I'll hurt you. Kill you if that's possible. Heaven knows why the Sparks kept you alive at all; but I'm sure they'd rather see you dead than loose in the world. So let the boy go."

  Still no motion visible in the black heap, but a rustling sound came from the mound's dusty heart. The Lucifer towered above me, three times my height: like the mountain of coal that was dumped behind the academy at the start of each winter. My Element gun was no more than a pea-shooter compared to the Lucifer's bulk; the gun's supply of fire and acid could only braise the monster's surface. If the beast withstood the immediate pain, I'd soon run out of ammunition. As for the glittering ‹BINK›-rod, I didn't know how much mass it could "roll aside" at any one time… but surely not the entire mound. I might banish a few handfuls of black before I was overwhelmed, but that would just delay the inevitable. Sebastian would remain trapped, the batteries powering the cage would run dry…

  "Give me the boy!" I shouted. Conserving my more effective attacks, I fired a burst of bullets into the mound. Lightbulbs on the surface shattered into sprays of chipped glass; but the Lucifer itself was unhurt.

  Quickly, I switched the gun back to flamethrower. "I'm counting to five. Give me the boy or I'll—"

  Something shifted within the mound. My nerves were so jittery, I almost pulled the trigger… but I stopped myself on the minuscule chance the monster might be letting Sebastian go.

  The heap closest to me bulged with a human-shaped protuberance: head and shoulders coated with gunpowder black, pushing their way out of the pile with a dry rasp. Crusted in midnight grains, a figure struggled to wrench free — pushing, pulling, until it abruptly tugged loose from its surroundings and stumbled forward, trying to catch its balance.

  I kept my gun trained on the figure. "Don't come too close." If a thing that looked like Sebastian materialized out of that mess, I'd be a fool to believe it must be the real boy. Besides, the thing before me was still just a humanoi
d clump of black, standing weak and wobbly, head turning back and forth as if trying to get its bearings. Then the outermost layer of powder slumped away to reveal…

  Rosalind Tzekich. As naked as when I had seen her last, but with life and health shining where there had only been the limpness of death.

  The new Rosalind gave me a tranquil smile. Beatific. A much different look from the listless way she'd endured math classes. The distance and loneliness were gone now: she had the look of a prisoner who'd been released.

  Reluctantly, I trained the Element gun on her — hoping that wherever the real Rosalind was now, she wore exactly the same kind of smile. "I've seen enough fakes of this girl," I said. "Let her rest in peace."

  The Rosalind-thing didn't answer. She held her arms out at her sides, hands open, palms toward me: the pose of someone showing she was no threat, as if I were a dog who had to be mollified. "Stop it," I said. "You're nothing more than shapeshifting sand; a piece of Lucifer, trying to distract me. I want Sebastian and I want him now. One… two… three…"

  She stepped toward me, still smiling. I cursed the Lucifer under my breath, and switched the gun back to bullets. What I had to do next would give me nightmares… as if my brain didn't already contain enough horrors for a thousand sleepless nights.

  I pulled the trigger. A single bullet at point-blank range, straight into the chest of a teenage girl.

  But it wasn't a girl at all. The shot hit the creature dead center, scattering gouts of black sand out the thing's spine; but a shock wave of blowback sent grains spraying forward, splashing onto my feet, my coat — and my face. I reached up blindly with the ‹BINK›-rod, hoping it would spirit the dark flecks away… but by then, my world had vanished.

  No sight, no sound; but I could still breathe. The grains hadn't gone down my throat — not yet. I couldn't even feel them on my face. In fact, I felt nothing at all: as if my body had dissolved, leaving only a consciousness divorced from my five senses.

  Then a sixth sense dawned: a feeling of connection and dispersion, my mind spread across the universe. A million, billion, trillion places at once. I had no eyes or ears, but I sensed myself standing on a plain covered with lacy blue ice, not frozen water but solidified nitrogen, oxygen, and methane; I was also floating through hot sulfur clouds where fat balloon creatures built cities from cottony fibers that drifted as light as dust; and I was deep undersea, clinging to the ocean floor as a warm soup of my own children clustered about me in the jelly stage of their life cycle. I lurked in the heart of trees. I swam through the bloodstream of an animal as big as the moon, and together we fed off dark energies filling the interstellar vacuum. I sipped on magma at a planet's core; I conversed with red moss in a tumbledown city peopled by senile machines; I clotted in a solid shell around a giant sun as it collapsed into supernova.

  None of these scenes reached me as normal vision; I simply comprehended my surroundings, knowing instead of sensing. I was a million, billion, trillion shapeshifting grains spread through the galaxy, conjoined in a single mental whole: a hive mind with every cellule in contact with all the others despite being separated by countless light-years. A single unified consciousness distributed over untold star systems.

  This was the past — a stunted ghost of memory that didn't come close to the Lucifer's true splendor. I sensed its frustration at not remembering more clearly… at not being able to impress me with its full former glory. It had been a creature vastly higher on the evolutionary ladder than Homo sapiens: like a god compared to us mere mortals, or at least like an angel.

  And like all angels, it eventually fell.

  Another memory: this time on Earth. A human doppelganger similar to Jode, a colony of cellules shaped like a handsome man pretending to sleep beside a beautiful woman. Suddenly, the door burst open. People were there in plastic armor — four Spark Lords. They grabbed the false human and hustled it into the night. The Lucifer didn't protest; its impersonations had been discovered before, had been captured, tortured, and burned. The experience was unpleasant, but not a cause for concern. The death of a few cellules had no effect on the whole… and the great Lucifer consciousness had plenty of other representatives on Earth to continue observing our species.

  So the Lucifer didn't resist. It even laughed as the Sparks said, "We're doing this for your own protection. Word has come down from the League." The Lucifer kept laughing right up to the moment where it was thrown into a cage made of light…

  …at which point, the world went silent. Communications cut off. Isolation. The cage somehow blocked mental contact with the hive mind gestalt.

  For a time, the Lucifer went mad. Not just from the shock of separation — the creature had been part of a single far-flung brain, with psychological functions distributed over all the component parts. Now a tiny chunk of that brain was forced to survive on its own. Almost all its memories vanished, stored as they were in other individuals that had dropped out of touch. Its angelic wisdom dissolved; its knowledge of the galaxy; its personality, whatever that had been: lost, lost, everything lost.

  Eventually, the imprisoned creature stabilized — each remaining cellule taking its share of the burden, creating an entity that was far from the original but at least able to function. Still, it was a grossly diminished version of its former self: less memory, less intelligence, less far-reaching perception… like a creature that was once a whale now reduced to a gnat.

  Even so, the gnat had regained its sanity.

  When the Sparks were sure it had found a new balance, they turned down the cage's blocking power an infinitesimal amount… and the Lucifer reached out eagerly, trying to reestablish contact with its fellows.

  A moment later, it reeled back in horror. The angel outside the cage had become a devil: a shouting shriek of corruption, poisoned with hate and violence. Lusting to conquer and kill — many of its component colonies committing murder at the very instant the Lucifer made contact. During that fleeting touch of communication, the prisoner in the cage got the impression its parent mass now deliberately choreographed its actions so it was always in the act of killing sentient creatures somewhere in the galaxy… so that it never lacked the taste of blood and death.

  The great hive consciousness outside the cage had changed from the archangel Lucifer… into a howling Satan.

  How could such a thing happen? Had some distant cellule been twisted by mutation, poison, or sabotage? If a single cellule went mad, could the madness spread instantly through the whole, like a disease infecting the entire consciousness? An explosion of evil no cellule could resist, so that in the blink of an eye, a wise and mighty creature was lost to the cancer of malice. Or had the parent mass simply turned vicious as a whole, rejecting its passive observation of lower species and deciding to tyrannize them instead?

  The caged Lucifer had no answers. All it knew was that its parent had become a malignant embodiment of hate… and if that hate ever broke through the blocking power of the cage, the Lucifer's mind would be washed away in the flood, perverted by the sheer mental force of a billion trillion former siblings.

  So the Lucifer remained in its prison, grateful to be protected against its Satanic parent outside. It spent its time wondering how the League had foreseen the coming corruption. Who had enough advance warning to rescue a small part of the whole, when the Lucifer itself never suspected a thing? Wouldn't the Sparks have needed months to build a cage and adapt the generating station to power it? Could the League really look so far into the future? And if so, why hadn't they warned the hive mind itself? But neither the League nor the Spark Lords ever offered to explain.

  The Sparks did explain why they'd captured the Lucifer. By preserving a piece of the "angelic" Lucifer, the League one day hoped to cure the "demonic" part. Little by little, year by year, Spark Royal would turn down the cage's blocking field… and gradually the imprisoned Lucifer would grow stronger, better able to resist the psychic onslaught of its depraved Satanic brethren. In a few more centuries (or millen
nia, or eons — the League was patient), perhaps the good could win back the evil, just as the evil had forced out the good.

  Meanwhile the Lucifer waited. And it grew. Its kind had a complex life cycle and didn't reproduce quickly… but with the Keepers providing its needs, the Lucifer expanded from the original human-sized doppelganger to the great black mound now occupying the cage. For something to do, the cellules had busied themselves as little chemical factories, building lightbulbs and other equipment, molecule by molecule.

  The evil outer consciousness had kept busy too. Just as the imprisoned Lucifer could touch its parent Satan's mind, the parent could feel its small uncorrupted child: an aggravating hold-out, a slim incompatibility, an itching flea-bite that couldn't be scratched. Satan raged at the tiny irritation; perhaps it couldn't tolerate any reminder it had once been an angel, or perhaps it feared for its own existence, recognizing that someday its corruption might be reversed. Whatever the reason, Satan despised the caged Lucifer. The galactic demon couldn't rest till the prison was bashed down and the independent black mound was bludgeoned back into the venomous whole.

  So Satan declared war on Lucifer… and on the Spark Lords who guarded the cage. Many times in the past, evil doppelgangers had tried to break into the generating station. On each attempt, the aliens penetrated farther into the Keepers' defenses. On each attempt, the Sparks stopped the intruders and destroyed them. On each attempt, Satan kept a few cellules of itself safe elsewhere on the planet — enough, in time, to build a new body and try, try again.

  This was a war of move and countermove: Satan would devise new strategies of attack; the Sparks would respond with new modes of defense. Spark Royal had always maintained the upper hand, thanks (as I'd guessed) to equipment that could detect gunpowderlike cellules at the range of a kilometer. The Niagara region was spanned with hundreds of such detectors, immediately reporting any evil Lucifers that dared to approach.