by Ronan Frost
There was so much anger and fear in their responses, as faint as they were. It was primal. Her children would fight for her, whatever the cost.
Please, no … please … it doesn’t have to be this way … please, Rye thought, desperately trying to undo all of the wrongs his loss and grief had twisted up inside him, needing the Vril to understand.
But the Vril wasn’t listening to him.
She had melded with his mind and learned his all-too-human fears and weaknesses and rejected them.
She had learned human nature from him.
She knew that his first instinct had been to destroy the simulacrums she grew. She knew that he was a killer. That those with him were killers. She had seen it all. They had killed her protectors, her loving copies of the first man she had ever trusted.
They would destroy her.
Rye managed to cause a twitch in his left little finger. It was nothing and it was everything. That twitch, like the first involuntary spasm of Parkinson’s, would change the rest of his life, because one twitch became two became more until he had managed to uncurl his fingers from around the arm of the bone chair and, staring down at his hand, willed it to rise.
It didn’t respond at first, but there was no way he was giving up.
Rye gritted his teeth, focusing all of his mental strength on his hand as he forced it to obey him.
It took every ounce of resistance, but he had to reach back to where the Vril’s umbilical cord was rooted into the nape of his neck and close his fist around the slick loop of living tube.
The umbilicus pulsed in his hand as he started to pull at it.
It had burrowed too deeply into his skull to simply fall free, but there was no way he was going to let the Vril pump more of its toxins through his veins a second longer than he had to.
With the distress call of the mothership screaming through his mind, Rye thought of Hannah, and only Hannah, needing to remember just how much he had loved and lost, and pulled desperately at the cord. His nails dug into the weird flesh with such pressure they split tiny half-moons through the cord, which oozed a slick oily lifeblood across his hands.
Revulsion gave him renewed strength.
With one massive heave, he wrenched the umbilicus free.
He felt its teeth tear out of his skin, grating out of the bone coupling it had established, as a blinding wave of black agony ripped through the ladder of his spine.
He cast it aside.
More of that oily black lifeblood greased his hand as Rye reached up to feel his own wound.
He was bleeding, but not so badly that it needed immediate attention.
Without thinking about it, he’d touched his mite-gloved black hand to the wound in his neck.
Immediately, the microscopic healers set to work repairing his skin.
It took them seconds.
Rye pushed himself out of the bone seat.
The umbilicus lashed about on the floor like a dying snake.
He crushed it under his boot.
On the screen behind him, four bright lights flared, single spots of gold across a map of the stars matching the earthly coordinates of the Vril’s children.
The doomsday clock continued its relentless countdown.
Outside of his head, the screams were deep bass chimes sending their signal into the world and using the harmonic qualities of the earth itself to amplify the distress call as it rippled out, farther and farther from the source.
Somewhere, her children heard her pain.
Somewhere, the myths that mankind had grown up with, before they were twisted and sanitized into dull empty versions of themselves, began to stir, ready to teach mankind what it meant to be afraid again.
Somewhere, the root of humanity’s ancient fears crawled through the darkness, never truly conquered.
Somewhere, the nature of the great floods and natural disasters that resonated through every religion found their voices for the first time in this new age of man.
Somewhere, those ancient intelligences that had lain dormant for years beyond counting reached out to find each other, reconnecting in a lattice of low subsonic frequencies that carried the impulses of their thoughts from the remote ice wastes of Antarctica to the blistering heat of the most inhospitable deserts known to man, through the wilds of the Amazon rain forests and the trenches beneath the Atlantic.
Those same low-frequency harmonics answered the pain and fear of their mother and pulsed out the same message over and over: we survive.
The promise underlying it was simple: you will not.
SEVENTY-SIX
Rye reeled.
He needed to get out of there.
The dying ship felt like a tomb.
He backed away from the bone chair, unable to take his eyes from the screen as it continued to flash up images of the Vril’s survival and the cost of it. There was no escaping the fear and horror the ship had endured, it was burned indelibly into the consciousness of the creature and Rye had felt it all.
And it was there in the low frequency distress call rousing her children into action, urging them to rise up, strike back.
He understood fundamentally that while the mothership wanted nothing more than peace and was a nurturing soul, her children were battleships prepared for war.
They came loaded with sicknesses for the planet and the ability to disseminate them within the genetically engineered avatars of biomass-flesh they grew. They were capable, quite literally, of growing plagues within their gestation chambers and walking them out into the world. The realization of what humanity was up against if the four children of this dying god—and that was the only way Rye’s mind could cope with the enormity of what they’d found when they came looking for Shambhala, to think of it as a god fallen from the stars—unleashed the full unholy fury contained within their bodies upon the world: it would be the end on a biblical scale.
He imagined rivers running with blood, swarms of insects infected with strains of alien bacteria our immune systems had no defense against, diseased livestock, and, ultimately, fire in the sky as the world burned and darkness finally fell.
It was all there, a blueprint for Armageddon.
With the connection broken, there was no easy way of showing the dying ship that he wasn’t a threat, that there was no need to be afraid of him, or humanity. That it was a mistake. That grief did not define him. That he was more than the sum of his regret and rage.
But the truth was, he knew there was every reason to be afraid of his people.
It didn’t matter if they came like Rask, dressed up as dreamers looking for knowledge and hope, or like businessmen looking to strip the land. Humanity’s voracious appetite for consumption and destruction was worthy of fear, especially for an ancient alien intelligence like her. They would tear her apart, test her to death trying to understand her nature, how she could live and breathe and think and remember, how she could feel and yet travel through space like Apollo or Challenger, and ultimately murder her with their need to know.
And the Vril had learned all of that from Rye when they shared a mind.
Rye ran out of the room and didn’t stop running as huge tremors rippled through the bone cages of the Vril mothership’s corridors, searching desperately for a way out of there.
The membranous walls pulsed around him, seeming to cave in as he raced through them.
He didn’t dare touch a thing.
He rushed down narrow passageways that all looked the same, the cage of bone and blood offering no obvious escape, and feared for one desperate moment that he wasn’t going to find a way out of this place. He ran blindly through the passageways, following the bubbling loops of intestinal tubing as it fed biomass through the body of the ship, thinking there had to be a vent or somewhere it discharged its bodily waste.
Head up, he ran after the churning bubbles, chasing them down the tubes.
But the tubes seemed to go on forever, like a network of veins. The veins, arteries, and capillaries in his own body stretched
out for one hundred thousand miles. He couldn’t shake the idea he could follow the tube forever as it looped around and around the Vril’s body in an endless circuit.
There was no obvious way out.
No hatch or doorway.
No valve or vent.
He could run around blindly for hours, days even, without stumbling across the waste hatch, assuming the ship even vented its waste and didn’t simply feed off the biodegraded mulch and continue the process all over again without ever purging itself. There was no reason for its biology to work the way he expected it to.
Rye stopped dead.
He knew what he needed to do, and knew that doing it would make him the threat that the Vril believed him to be, but he had no choice if he was going to get back to the others.
He reached up, tearing one of the bones free of the cage that supported the wall, and as biomass wept out through the wound, swung the jagged splinter, burying it in the bloody substance, and did it again and again, determined to fight his way through muscle and membrane, hacking his way out with the shattered bone; it was as simple and horrific as that.
Rye swung the bone again.
And again, ignoring the Vril’s screams of pain.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
He emerged from the belly of the ship covered in oily ichor, gagging on the stuff that spilled into his mouth as he struggled to hold his breath.
The wound in the hull of the Vril ship oozed with the leviathan’s blood.
It smeared across Rye’s coat as he forced his way out.
It got in his hair and face.
The hull felt exactly like what it was: meat, muscle, fat, blood.
The ship’s anguished lament was a keening wail that filled the vault of the cavern.
Rye stood on a ledge, confronted by a sheer wall that seemed to rise forever.
The lichen, he saw, wasn’t lichen at all, but rather some kind of festering decay that grew out of the ship and spread upward and outward. The stench down here was far worse than even a few hundred feet above.
There was no escaping the all-pervading reek of death down here in this darkness.
That death oozed out of the ship, spreading across the interior of the immense cavern network.
He’d seen the effect from above; it gave the impression of life where there was only creeping death.
Rye found a handhold and lifted himself onto the rock, beginning the climb.
The ascent quickly funneled into a rock chimney.
His wounded hand felt fine—better than fine; the grip in his fingers had never felt stronger.
He traversed a few feet, looking for new handholds to take his weight, up to the temple, several hundred feet above. The cavern fell away beneath him, darkness offering no indication of just how deep the drop was.
Rye scaled the first ten feet slowly as the chimney narrowed enough to enable him to brace himself, taking his weight on his feet.
He used a technique called thrutching to push himself up; it was a physically demanding move that sapped strength and energy from the whole body.
He repeated the same wedge, move, wedge ascent, pushing off with one foot, his back pressed against the wall of the chimney and using his other foot to brace against the wall allowing him to use his hands to thrutch his back upward into another slightly higher seating position to wedge himself in place.
He repeated the thrutching move over and over, but within twenty feet his thighs, arms, and lower back were burning, and he was forced to rest, sitting inside the chimney.
The climb was claustrophobic and unforgiving.
The next ten feet were harder than the last.
The ten after that harder still.
The hardest part was that he simply couldn’t see his hands or feet and was forced to work from memory and feel for holds that might work, relying upon improvisation and pure rugged determination to rise.
He reached a corner, and palmed off, using his feet to pivot around his hands, and for a long sickening moment hung out there over nothing.
But he didn’t fall.
Rye continued to climb, hearing the sounds of confrontation up above him.
Another twenty feet.
Twenty more.
Legs on fire.
Muscles in his arms rippling.
Every brace harder to hold.
Every foothold harder to push away from.
But he kept climbing, knowing that he had no choice.
It was that or never get out of this place.
And as incredible as Shambhala was, it wasn’t where he was going to die.
Rye leaned back against the chimney wall, getting a good look at the next span of rock and realizing he was within touching distance of the mantle.
It was the toughest move of the lot, given how bone-tired he was, and how little strength he had left in his muscles: the transition from vertical to horizontal wasn’t natural. Some climbers called it the swimming pool maneuver. He felt out with his foot for a good hold, then pressed up as he lifted his heel over the edge, and turned his opposite hand toward the foot, rotating it palm down, followed by pushing down off his palm until his center of gravity was above his heel, and stepping up his other foot to stand.
Rye stood on a pedestal of rock at the center of several stone bridges, the lichen slick beneath his feet, and saw Vic and Carter with their backs to him silhouetted through the arch of the temple door.
The pair faced the unmistakable figure of Tenzin Dawa, the last of the Asuras, which weren’t demons in the traditional sense at all, but biomass-bred clones that the Vril had sent out into the world to protect her secrets.
Demons didn’t need horns or cloven hooves or other very Christian traits to be demonic, all they needed was to be alien in nature, and the Asuras were that and so much more.
Knowing what he knew, having seen them being hot-housed in the grow tanks within the dying ship, it was hard to look at Tenzin Dawa and see a man.
He was like the Mexican axolotl—a salamander capable of regenerating missing limbs, parts of its brain and heart, and incredibly, able to forge new neural pathways in its brain to support the regenerated body parts.
Dawa’s relationship with the ship was the same.
It was his brain.
Killing this one wouldn’t stop more from coming.
Not as long as the Vril ship was capable of gestating more of them and giving life to them.
What could be more inherently demonic than that?
Everything Rask had said was true, but not in any of the ways the billionaire had imagined them.
Rye crept toward the doorway, placing his feet with exaggerated care. He didn’t want to spook the assassin and make him lash out. For all that he was merely organic biomass sharing a brain, he was still a ruthless killing machine. That hadn’t changed.
Seeing him now, Rye knew it had been the assassin’s eyes he’d felt on him as they’d walked through the abandoned homes of Shambhala. Dawa had tracked them under the mountain, across the balconies and viaducts and through the maze of homes that filled the enormous caverns, simply watching, biding his time to make his attack when they were at their most vulnerable.
Rye made it halfway to the temple door.
He could see the open petals of the weird lotus flower hatch he’d deciphered, still open, or open again.
Iskra Zima was nowhere to be seen.
Rye could only assume she’d either found her way down into the belly of the dying ship or Dawa had already taken the Russian out.
The assassin closed the gap between him and his friends. Moving with shocking speed Dawa launched a blistering attack Carter could barely fend off. The thief was battered back, five blows landing hard even as he managed to block four more aimed at his body and throat. The sheer ferocity of it was staggering. Carter took three hits to the side of the face, snapping his head back, and two hammer blows to his gut that doubled him up for a final crunching knee to the face that sent him spinning, unconscious before he
hit the ground.
Rye heard bones break.
Carter lay there unmoving.
Facing Vic, Tenzin Dawa stooped to recover a weapon he had lost before Rye had made it back up over the mantle.
It wasn’t like any gun he had ever seen.
Even from this distance, he could tell that it resembled the innards of the ship that had grown it: part bone, part membranous tissue. It was the epitome of alien, a fusion of flesh and technology that was both familiar and utterly wrong in its nature.
The assassin leveled it at Vic wordlessly.
The big man breathed deeply; Rye could hear the sound of it through his flaring nostrils in the second before he threw himself forward, launching a huge linebacker-challenge at the assassin in a desperate attempt to sack him before he got the shot off.
Vic had no chance.
Rye ran beneath the arch, arriving in that frozen second when Vic still hadn’t fallen from the barbed bone “bullet” in his heart.
The shot was louder than all of the dying ship’s screams combined, the brutality of the retort echoing throughout the cavernous depths, folding in upon itself over and over until that one note became deafening.
Rye saw the white barb of bone punch through Vic’s rib cage, opening him up.
It was like some harpoon plunging through the layers of parka down, flesh, and bone, the barbs making it impossible to pull out without rending the meat and ripping apart Vic’s heart.
Somehow, incredibly, Vic managed another three faltering paces before his legs betrayed him and he sank to his knees.
He looked at Rye, his blood spilling out of the chest wound, hands clamped around the bone barb slick with the blood pulsing out and spilling across the down padding of his heavy coat as a bloodred rose blossomed around his hands. It looked like he was lost in prayer.
The truth was blunter than that.
He was just lost.
The blood stopped pumping as Vic’s heart stopped beating.
He wasn’t getting up again.
He pitched forward, face hitting the ground.
The sound of the impact was sickening, like meat being tenderized.
The blood spread around his head, seeping slowly into a wider and wider pool, and thinning out as it did so.
