The Otherworld Rebellion (War of Alien Aggression #9)

by A. D. Bloom

  Next, he held the pencil out at arms length and held it over the tallest Freezt he'd used for measurement and used the angle of the pencil to imitate the shifting, canted lean of its body and understand the way it moved between two different stances, either to left or right, always slowly. He found the angles he needed from them and moved the pencil over the paper while maintaining the angle long enough to see it on the page and draw it. In this way, he found the basic shape of the entire thatch of them, huddled close, leaning between one side and the next. The marks he made then teased the shapes of the shadows with small ticks and feints until he began to see the shape of the light on them and commit to drawing it. General to specific was the rule for him so what he found first and hatched out with faint lines of acknowledgment was the most basic of jagged-edged shadows, the broadest planes of light and dark that defined the form for the eye.

  "If you want to make it look like someone, don't draw the eyes and nose and mouth," his teacher had said. "Draw the shapes of the shadows and light on the skull and the face..... It's all made of shadow and light. That's all it is. The closer you look, the more you'll see."

  Working from general to specific, he held his pencil and thumb up and measured the proportions and found the greater complexities in the light and form and added the information to the drawing, hatching off broad areas of midtones across the membranes and then going back in to find the shapes of the plunging shadows between them that told the eye how far the branches were from the alien's central trunk will much more visual efficiency than if he'd tried to define the edge of the limb itself.

  The Freezt all shifted to the left and began to drum more loudly. It began to rumble his stomach uncomfortably as the first licks of Scilla's shouting finally reached his ears. "Samhain! Get out! Go! Get out of there!"

  He heard her. He understood. It just didn't feel like he should be afraid. And he wasn't. Until he spotted the shadows skating across the ground in his peripheral vision. The floodlight from camp had beaten the night back leaving only streaks of it behind, but these shadows glided over the pebble scrub and dirt like oil slicks sucking up all the light you threw at them.

  The Freezt beat out a frenzied storm and Scilla and Hank screamed more, but by the time Samhain realized the Weirdlings themselves had arrived, it was too late to run. They came from all around him until they met at his feet like a pooling void. They crept over him together, up his legs and pelvis and chest, chilling his skin through the wool of his suit as if they'd soaked in. Samhain tried to close his mouth before they reached his face.

  The darkness he fell into was far from infinite. The edges of it trembled and shook with a call, a beckoning cry to him from outside, a wordless will that he break through the boundaries that confined him and join them.

  He reached out and found the invisible boundary of that lightless place, and the minute he touched it, he recognized it. On the other side would be the place where he woke up after Pavic knocked him out, the place where he didn't know who or what he was other than a question. Out there, were the singing spheres in the darkness, rumbling the void with an impossible chorus.

  His hands tore at the sack that held him in darkness and he tried to bite at the leathery wall, desperate to reach to voices there calling to him, "Join us, join us!"

  "I'm coming!" he shouted as it began to tear. A cold nothingness rushed in and what was Martin Samhain rushed out into the void to diffuse.

  "No!" Scilla's voice shook everything around him. "Get away! Get away from him!" It was like the bark of a vicious and terrifying dog. The sound reverberated inside his prison and outside and when she screamed, "Begone!" the word flashed like lightning. By its lux he saw the Weirdling shadows as they fled his mind.

  *

  He knew they'd layed him back in the shelter. Even before his eyes opened, he'd straddled the line between sleep and waking and through closed lids had seen Scilla standing over him like a thundercloud. His mind's eye glimpsed the cup of coffee in her hands, lukewarm. "You're an arrogant, foolish, reckless little man," she said.

  The rouge of the Otherworld dawn blushed through the panels behind her as he opened his eyes, sat up, and then immediately lay back down after it all spun around him. "Here," she said putting the base of the ceramic coffee cup on his belly. "Don't spill it."

  "Thank you." He held it with both hands and suddenly became aware that he now twitched with tremors.

  Scilla stood closer so it was easier to see her. She smelled like Hank. "What the hell did you think you were doing?" She lowered her voice to a whisper. "We're not here for the Weirdlings. What the hell made you think you'd be the one guy out of god knows how many idiots to actually survive a conversation with them?"

  "I didn't get much choice."

  "I know where you were, Martin Samhain. I know where you were and I know where you were trying to get to. You're damn lucky I got there when I did and stopped you."

  "I...I..."

  "Shut up. Don't go out there. Don't leave your little bubble; you're not strong enough. You'll get lost and not come back. Samhain, you are you. I, he, she, me. Stick with that. If you'd got out just a little further, all those concepts would have disappeared and I wouldn't have been able to save you." Those next moments she looked down at him, the absent look in her eye told him she was thinking and playing something out in her head. She leaned down close to his ear and whispered on hot breath. "I think we should tell them you can't find it their Weirdling artifact because the Weirdlings obviously don't want you to. It's a fine excuse and for all we know that might have been why they came to you last night - to stop you. If we tell the rebels that, then we can stop wasting our time down here and get to Ram Devlin. That's our mission, remember?" Before he could speak, she raised her voice to full volume so it could be heard outside the shelter and said, "Martin Samhain get up off your lazy ass." She then spun on her heels and stepped out the shelter's hatch.

  He didn't get up right away. The instant she'd left he'd been swept into reverie as if remembering a dream for the first time. Only it wasn't the first time. He remembered the leathery, membranous sack that confined him and separated him from the chorus in the void. He remembered breaching it before. Inside it, he'd be safe, but outside... He knew what outside was and what was there. It was full of living things and he could reach out and touch them. The darkness thumped with all their heartbeats and they shone with song. Out there was where the Weirdlings had wanted to meet him - out there where there was only mind. There, he might understand them if he tried harder. If he didn't die.

  Scilla and Hank didn't watch anyone but each other so it was surprisingly easy for Samhain to sneak away from camp. The two Shediri, Tsk and Zi'vt, had picked up a dice habit and since the daylight offered little in the way of danger, the two bugs lounged after their breakfast and chatter-clacked up a storm at each other with that keening noise every now and then like they were swapping jokes. The sound covered his footsteps out the back of their camp and towards the volcanic columns where the Weirdlings had found him the first time.

  The desiccated body of the leatherwing bird still lay in a heap between the jutting hexagonal columns. It had flipped over sometime in its previous fit and now, the bony maw of it gaped up at the sky. The jaws in the center of its body, between the grasping claws, could have taken off his leg with ease. The ten-jointed jawbones of its mouth stabbed and serrated to the inside with rows of triangular teeth. The outside edges of the jaws were almost visible. The flesh had withdrawn so much that they would have been bare if not for the knobby posts of bone that lined the outside edges and the strands of dried, high-density fibrous muscle that refused to let go of the bone.

  The longer Samhain stared at it, the more he expected the gaping mouth to snap shut as if it had been when alive. He expected the broken wings and their torn membranes might flop or the spine might twist, but none of these things happened. So he sat in the shade and drew it.

  This time, he held his pencil out and measured and found
the angles and got all the proportions right and it looked like nothing recognizable. At first, he blamed his subject thinking that the problem was that it didn't look like anything to begin with. It was all dark shapes in the shadows. The darkest of them were an odd set of cascading triangles, where the wing had collapsed and the skin now draped like a thick velvet, supple even in desiccated death. The darkness was like a liquid there, flowing downwards in tiered falls. He'd drawn the shape of all seven pools he could see and how they intersected and how that defined the surface and the inside of the thing, but what it defined was nothing his eye could name. On the page, it just looked like a bunch of shapes clawed out of the white page in a jagged mass.

  Even when he'd rendered around it and a hatched an analog to the rough of its volcanic niche that filled out the rest of the page it still didn't look like what he saw. The jaws were the only thing that seemed anything like the alien corpse in front of him. So he followed other good advice his teacher had given him. "If you're getting nowhere and you don't know what to do, then get rid of the part of the picture you feel the best about. Now, you can get down to business."

  He scribbled out the carefully drawn and rendered, ten-jointed jaws and the spearpoint teeth with hard and dark strokes, an assault, really. The first mark fell and then the second, cleaving the brightest area of the drawing in half with strokes that broke the grain of the paper. The second fell parallel to the first, bisecting that area of brightness a second time with another violent line that shone and reflected the glow of the Otherworld sky. He didn't see the way the first two lines gleamed until the third stroke had fallen, below the other two. The brightness of the sky surprised him so much that the third stroke bounced as a broken line. The rhythm those wound-like marks made in the page drummed on his eye with a meter that matched the cascading of the deeper shadows surrounding it. But not quite. It needed. It wanted. Why, it didn't say, but it clearly spoke then, and it clearly told him it wanted marks, hopping sort of marks that documented the meter as he marked it out it stabbing strokes in response to what his eye took in not looking at one part of the drawing and the next, but instead, seeing it all at once.

  His eye followed his hand to be sure, but what his eye apprehended was too complex to take in consciously and still maintain the rhythm of the dance he'd begun with the thing in front of him. He looked up then for more information, for the corpse of the leatherwing to show him more of its meter so he could dance with that, too. But as he looked back to the page and his pencil tip slashed short hatches somehow finding the shape of a the teeth again, he heard the first terrible wheeze from those punctured bagpipe lungs.

  He heard it. He saw it move, but he couldn't stop the dance.

  The dust coughed by the leatherwing corpse caught the shaft of light that had pressed its thin ray between the volcanic columns and it lit up like a billowing curtain. The motes blew innumerable, glittering before his eyes as they tumbled like endless stars caught in a flood, showing him the shape of the breath itself. He cut the curving lines into the page with the edge of his eraser like bright ribs across the darkest heart.

  Only when the shadows of the Weirdlings came bubbling up in pools of rippling pitch around him did he first inklings of fear begin to rise. He didn't stop. He didn't stop drawing even as their chill ran up over his legs and chest and closed his throat with the cold. What drove his hand then, he didn't know, and as the daylight world around him ripped open like a torn womb, he fell into the shining dark.

  *

  The energy transferred from the slapping palm found its way inside to make a bright flash inside his head. "You found it, didn't you?" It was Hank Devlin's voice "This is it right here isn't it? Wake up!"

  The lurid blue of the Otherworld sky was all Samhain saw at first. Then, the blurry phantasm before him resolved into the familiar figure. Hank Devlin stood over him, holding up the last pages of his sketchbook on which he'd drawn something he didn't recognize. It was a perfect sphere of open space underground surrounding what appeared to be an object of some kind, but represented in his drawing as nothing more than a patterned repetition of light and dark. It reminded him of the cascading shadows he's seen in the broken leatherwing, like waterfalls of liquid dim flowing into each other by some physics which he couldn't yet understand.

  "What is this you drew? Here, in the open space underground. Is this the Weirdling artifact?"

  "I don't know." The places on the page where his heavy hand had broken the texture of the paper shined in a dizzying way with the color of the sky, and for a moment, he thought he'd vomit on Hank Devlin's boots. He was almost disappointed when all he did was gag.

  Hank Devlin stepped back, but continued to hold the pages before him. "Whatever it is, you know where it is."

  "I don't."

  "You do. This is a map." Hank pointed to the four corners of the page where what appeared to be landmarks of some kind had been crudely drawn with lines between them that intersected over the thing in the sphere of open space and the object underground. "What are these?" Samhain watched Hank's finger stab at them in a kind of horrified stupor as he began to recognize them. "This....this here...This shape matches the shape of the ark protruding from the crust." The scribble wasn't one Samhain remembered making, but Captain Hank was right. It did look like the artificial mountain on the horizon.

  He froze then, as if any action at all would doom him. He even stopped breathing and Hank was quick to notice. "You know I'm perfectly willing to torture you, don't you, Mr. Samhain?" The voice in his ears sounded tinny and far away and irrelevant. "Don't deny me my prize," said his captor. Hank closed the book then and held it in one hand while he reached down to grasp the collar of Samhain's shirt and jacket so he could hold him fast while hitting him with it.

  Scilla's voice rang out from behind him. "Oh, leave him alone, Hank. The drawings mean nothing. He just does that. We gave him the sketchbook for therapy. That's all it is."

  "No," Hank said. "You're lying. The location of the artifact is here. It's all here!" He held the book up high as he finished the sentence and brought it down on top of Samhain's head so hard it scrambled thoughts. "Tell me!"

  Samhain knew the second she'd done it. Something about the air smelled different when Scilla reached out to Hank then. It was more than just a thought projected, for the faintest moment, Samhain saw her will in Hank's eyes. Hank let go of him and stood up and said, "Maybe I was wrong." He wore her doubt like an ill-fitting dress.

  He felt like he'd just witnessed a crime. She must have heard that thought. He made no attempt to mask it. It came too fast to be controlled, just like the words that leaped from his mouth. "You're right. It's a map," he said.

  "Shut up, Samhain." She tried to reach in and make him. It felt like a hand muffling his thoughts and his words came out only with difficulty.

  He tensed every muscle at once just trying to speak. "It's...a...ma-." His limbs trembled with all the force it took to say it through Scilla's will.

  "He's insane," she said and she leaned on his mind with all her weight, but all she did was squeeze his words out of his mouth.

  "Underground.....Weirdling artifact..."

  "Oh. Well then. Jolly good." Once the truth was out, she smiled at the news as if Hank's finding the artifact was a good thing, as if this was what she'd wanted for him all along. It was all a projection, of course. Samhain thought maybe even Hank could feel the anger rumbling beneath the surface of her mind then like an earthquake's first tremors.

  *

  "He projected a map of the area over your drawing until he found a satisfactory match," she said. "Hank's quite sure he's found a signal under the dirt out there. It fades in and out, but he's convinced. There's no dissuading him now..."

  Samhain and Scilla set up a small shelter for shade while the tour boat hovered low and chased the signal back and forth across an increasingly narrow area until the craft settled over an otherwise unremarkable bit of badlands. The two of them watched from almost a hundred
meters out while the boat held station a meter over the spot. Dust swirled up around it in the null-gee field.

  "If they take any longer, we might just get spotted by the authorities and taken for an illegal mining op."

  "We're close to the volcanically active region," she said, thumbing over the dusty shoulder of his suit. "Heat and plumes won't look so strange unless they look closely. I'm sure that makes you happy." She refused to look right at him, staring at the yellow needle and hammerhead hull of the tour boat as the keelside bay opened and her luggage fell out over the spot they were about to dig with a plasma drill.

  "I guess Captain Hank suspects you now. Since you tried to tell him I was nuts."

  "I'm not done with Hank Devlin yet," she said.

  He wasn't sure what she meant by that and he knew if he asked, she wouldn't say. "How are they going to dig it up?" His voice trailed off, knowing she wouldn't respond, but once he saw the tip of the plasma drill and the derrick descending from the bay he had his answer. "That's a clever place to hide it," he said. "The authorities wouldn't even suspect that stupid tour boat had real mining capabilities. Of course, something else would have to come along and pick up the ore. Not much hauling sp-"

  "Shut up, Samhain."

  "I'm just sayi-"

  "Shut up."

  The size of the magnetically-focused plasma drill bit increased with the amount of juice they shunted to it from the boat's reactor and as they powered up to begin the dig, the bit reached out to touch the ground, blindingly bright and lurid pink. The first thing to burn was Scilla's luggage. All nine pieces skittered in the dirt and then sublimed in a green flash that stained the badlands around it before the rose color of the plasma drill itself was all that could be seen behind the clouds of steam and smoke. Exploding rock fragments hit the underside of the tour boat's hull in endless staccato as rock melted and exploded and sublimed.

  She said, "I could scramble your fucking brains you know."

  "I know you could."