V 16 - Symphony of Terror

by Somtow Sucharitkul (UC) (epub)

  “Bah! Your gluttony will always betray you, foolish woman. Do you realize the panic that would ensue if you were to walk downstairs with a puppydog’s tail still trailing from your mouth?”

  “There’s no fear of that. I can’t eat solid food for another day or two yet,” she said, “although my tongue is growing back very nicely. But a nice aperitif of chilled, slightly fermented blood might—”

  “Be quiet! You may be my superior officer, but I’m in charge of this operation—and I intend to get all the credit from Diana and Lydia when the time comes. If you behave yourself, 1 may allow you a little reflected glory, though—a nice garrison command. New York, perhaps, or Boston.”

  “Will the papinium labyrinth stretch that far?” said Medea, half mocking, half admiring of her colleague’s diligence.

  “Not at present. But with this fortress as our foothold in the free states, we can start burrowing in all directions. In the basement of this very mall I have had constructed a papinium factory, with over a hundred of the transmuting devices, so that papinium can be constructed by the simple fusion of heavy metal ions within a plasma field.”

  “Such scientific wonders!” Medea said.

  “It’s about time,” Dingwall said. “After all, we are eight hundred years ahead of them. We shouldn’t always fight down at their technological level—although I would agree with our leader that the chase is so much more fun when we restrict ourselves to only a few slight advantages—the lasers, the skyfighters, what have you.”

  “And what of Matt Jones and his ilk?”

  “What can they do to us now? Besides, I have his child at my house, trapped in a forcefield and ready for conversion. I’ll send him to Diana on a silver platter. On second thoughts, maybe I’ll send him back, ostensibly unharmed but with his brain entirely reprogrammed, and have him undermine those meddling Joneses until they are hoist by their own petard.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ah, of course, I forgot; you haven’t made a study of their art and culture as I have.”

  “And the mysterious ninja who sliced off my tongue?”

  “One thing at a time, my dear! You were always so impatient. You must learn to temper ambition with caution.”

  “Look at them down there! Like so many sacrificial animals,” Medea crowed. “For when is the attack set?”

  “Well, I have a little surprise planned ... a little something that Loukas Stourmwitch didn’t write into the score of his Galactic Symphony.”

  “Won’t that twit back planetside be astounded when you discover the uses to which his music has been put!” Medea said.

  “You certainly don’t know anything about our own culture, let alone the culture of these apes, do you?” said Dingwall in annoyance. “The composer was killed in a duel last year . . . someone challenged him for being a secret adept of the preta-na-ma heresy. Thus, I have no qualms about using his music for warlike aims, even though it supposedly was composed in the spirit of interplanetary brotherhood. Anyhow, about ten minutes into the first movement, there’s a cacophonous noise produced by everyone playing at random for about five minutes and the wind instruments blowing as loud as possible. In the fearsome racket, no one will even notice the roar of the papinium tanks as they burst from their secret garages. And I have a skyfighter port in the roof, in case of emergency. It has one vehicle. Of course, our forces are expendable, but we, being important officers, are not. So I thought that a VIP escape route would be a good idea.”

  “You think of everything, don’t you?” Medea said, with a twinge of envy in her voice.

  “If only you had thought of everything in that silly Florida Project debacle,” Dingwall said, “you wouldn’t be stuck in a command post in the middle of a desert. You could have written your own ticket. What a stupendous idea that was—a mutant army that would do all our dirty work, leaving us to the fine art of governing and—”

  “And eating,” Medea sighed.

  CB sat down inconspicuously in one of the back rows. He didn’t want Dingwall or one of the converted kids to see him and give the game away. Tomoko sat three or four rows down. She didn’t turn around to look at him. It worried him, but he knew why she had to look away. Nothing suspicious! Nothing to reveal that the audience was liberally dotted with resistance fighters!

  At the very front, in the VIP section of the audience, the ambassadors were even now seating themselves. The town mayor was there, nervously looking over a speech he had written; CB knew it would be one of those boring talks, a school principal rah-rah type thing. He settled down for a long wait.

  Andrescu was chatting with the former president. Poor man! Reduced from governing the greatest nat ion on Earth to appearing at the opening of a

  new shopping mall. What a bummer.

  CB waited.

  Matt and the blue ninja sneaked off unnoticed to see what they could find. The mall was cruciform, with the concert area at the junction of four hallways. Three were full of the usual boutiques and department stores, most of which were not yet open; a concession stand or two were the only things doing a brisk business.

  A passing kid commented on the ninja’s clothes.

  “It’s the latest New Wave fashion,” the ninja said calmly, and the kid laughed. Matt heard him chattering excitedly to some friend, explaining how metallic ninja suits were in now; he’d just seen someone wearing one.

  The fourth corridor was cordoned off: a sign read “still under construction.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Matt said.

  The ninja cut the cordon with a deft flick of his katana, and they crossed over into the secret zone.

  Chapter 25

  Dingwall raised his baton. The first few pieces the orchestra played were harmless enough: a little Haydn divertimento, followed by a cute medley of popular songs of the ‘80s. The music was charming, Tomoko thought. She would have to beware of being seduced by its inane bounciness into forgetting the business at hand.

  Doubtless the music had been planned that way to lull the audience. The mood was festive; after the mayor’s upbeat speech, everyone had been delighted. This wasn’t an evening of platitudes and stiff upper lips. When Tomoko looked around her she saw that the faces were happy. No one wanted to think of lizards this evening. No one wanted ever to think of lizards again. All right, so they’d give up the southern sector of the country, they’d scratch out a living with the meager, blighted resources of the war-ravaged north . . . just so long as they didn’t have to think about the lizards anymore. A fatalistic apathy had set in.

  Was it worth fighting it? she asked herself.

  Time now for the new piece: the Galactic Symphony.

  She leafed through her program notes and gleaned a few facts about the alien who had composed this music. The notes seemed more pretentious even than one of the academic papers she’d had to plow her way through when she was taking her anthropology degree. They talked learnedly of “retrograde inversions” and “sonic palindromes,” of “chrono-reversal” and “semi-aleatory pseudo-textural polyphony.” When the music began, however, she realized that all the verbiage of the program notes served little purpose save to disguise the fact that this alien music sounded more or less like the soundtrack to a B-grade sci-fi movie—with a few moments from a mad slasher flick thrown in. The children in the orchestra seemed to be playing their parts with relish, whether it meant tapping their violins with their bows or blowing through the wrong ends of their wind instruments. Tomoko noted, from the program notes, that the music had been adapted to suit the capacity of Earthly instruments and the technical capabilities of a youth orchestra. The final paragraph discussed the composer’s dissident views at some length, explaining that he was an adept of the banned preta-na-ma philosophy and that his music was under interdict on the home planet.

  How ironic, she thought, that the lizards would be using this banned music as the cover-up for an invasion—something of which the peace-loving Stourmwitch would have neve
r approved!

  The music welled up. Some of the members of the audience were really getting into the bizarre sound effects, others were mystified. Some were even holding their hands over their ears.

  Ten minutes of a particularly weird, repetitive passage now, in which everyone seemed to be playing entirely at random . . . she was wondering whether she too should hold her ears when she was aware of another sound.

  A faint hum. A trembling in the ground.

  Was she imagining it?

  Matt and the ninja slipped into a shadowed doorway. There was a passageway-that led to a stairwell that climbed up to the top of the shopping mall.

  “What do you think?” he said to the ninja.

  “I’d say probably a concealed skyport. Perhaps there’s even a skyfighter there. Visiting dignitaries, maybe.” They started to ascend. They were now level with the mail’s upper story, and the stairs continued. They reached a catwalk that seemed to be a part of a network that spread out over the entire ceiling of the mall. Cables wound overhead. They walked out over it. The sound of alien music filled the air. From his vantage point, Matt could see that Dingwall was conducting in the pit below.

  “There’s the skyport, I’m sure of it,” the ninja said, pointing to a part of the overhead walkway that branched off and ascended steeply into a doorway in the ceiling.

  “Shall we explore?” Matt said.

  “We’d better keep an eye on the concert below,” said the ninja. “I have the strangest feeling that the action is about to begin soon—”

  Suddenly—

  The familiar rumbling from deep under the shopping mall! At first the audience did not react, assuming it was just another sound effect of the alien symphony. Then the roar grew too loud. People got up from their seats, panicking. From their lofty hiding place Matt and the ninja could see them, scrambling over seats, running hither and thither like rodents—

  “They can’t get out!” Matt said. “They must have the aisles blockaded . . .” He thought of CB and Tomoko. God, he didn’t want them to die.

  He stared down there, desperately trying to discern them in the mob. It was impossible. It was chaos!

  Then the papinium tanks burst through the unfinished floor of the shopping mall.

  Rubble flew! Blocks of concrete were ripped asunder as the vehicles battered their way through the floor. People were screaming now, and the tanks were closing in on them, each one almost filling an entire corridor of the mall.

  Then came a voice, booming through the building, distorted by feedback but recognizable as the voice of the very creature who had pretended to save Matt’s life only the night before.

  “Do not panic! Mr. President—or should 1 say Mr. Ex-president?—distinguished diplomats and other prominent citizens of Washington who have deigned to come to this little soiree ... do not panic! You will not be killed ... not just yet, at least!”

  Consternation . . . then, as Visitors swarmed into the halls and began to shove the humans into the diamond at the junction of the corridors, the panic died down a little and was replaced by a cringing, abject compliance.

  A smiling Dingwall, surrounded by guards armed with laser blasters, continued to speak into a microphone, his voice taking on more and more the metallic rasp of the true saurian voice.

  “For the moment you are all hostages in this impregnable papinium fortress. And what, you may ask, is papinium? It’s our latest technological breakthrough, my friends, and one that will enable us once more to exert control over those rebellious sectors of this country that have so quaintly labelled themselves the ‘free states.’”

  Matt saw another high-level Visitor beside Dingwall now. He recognized her face. “Medea!” he said. “I thought—”

  “Alas,” the blue ninja said, “we have great regenerative powers. Doubtless her tongue will have grown completely back'by now.”

  Medea was strutting back and forth like an empress, haughtily surveying the humans, who huddled in terror of her crimson-eyed fury. Now and then she barked an order to one of the guards, who fired his blaster seemingly at random into the crowd. But they seemed too stunned even to react. Matt said, “We can’t just stay up here on the walkway! We’ve gotta go back down and kick some ass before all our friends buy it!”

  The ninja said softly, “We must wait here. If I know Medea and Dingwall, once the carnage begins, they will not want to stay for it. Their miserable hides are more important to them than anything else . . . even than the cause they are supposedly working for.”

  Matt held his breath.

  “I told you so!” Dingwall turned around and beamed at Medea, who, though mildly miffed at her colleague’s success, did not dare appear too disdainful. Besides, there was a certain pleasure to be gotten from killing humans.

  She was thinking: I'll allow him his moment in the sun. After all, the creature has been cut offfrom all respectable saurian relationships for months, working on this undercover job. Let him relish his few moments of power. She was already considering, of course, how she would unseat him and claim credit for the entire operation. Perhaps a duel to the death, she fantasized, over the control of this rich, new province. It was an ancient custom, sanctioned by centuries of reptilian law, but rarely invoked. But with Dingwall being such a self-righteous wimp, it would be easy to wipe him out. This entire operation might well be just the right stepping stone for her. Considerably cheered by this brief reverie, Medea continued her task of keeping order.

  Her eye wandered through the crowd as the humans cringed and whimpered in terror. Old men, many of these VIPs, she thought. Not good to eat—stringy. But the children of the youth orchestra, whom Dingwall had already gone to the trouble of converting, they didn’t look bad at all. Except that they were a bit scrawny and undernourished. It was true that conversion often sapped these people’s will to live so much that they would hardly eat at all—as a result, their flesh tasted bitter, tainted as it was with ketone bodies.

  Food

  There, in the crowd . . . that one looked good. A young boy with his hair standing on end, defiant looking ... ah, he must have spirit.

  “What are you thinking, Medea?” Dingwall asked.

  “About my favorite subject,” she said. She pointed to the boy she’d just noticed. “Dinner?” Dingwall followed the languorous crook of her arm and saw ... no. He had slipped into the crowd, lightning fast! “It’s almost as though he knows us,” she said. She stalked into the throng, followed by two guards. The people parted in terror, revealing the boy standing there—

  She recognized him suddenly. Dingwall did at the same time.

  “Catch him!” she shrieked. And then, turning on Dingwall, “You told me he was in suspension—in a cellar of your house, you incompetent!”

  The guards rushed the boy, who did a cartwheel and landed on the other side of Medea, and dodged back into the crowd. “I want him alive,” Medea panted, “I want to tear him limb from limb my-selfT

  The boy emerged again on the far side of the conductor’s dais. Someone in the crowd shouted out, “If a kid can fight these bastards, so can I!” and ran out, fists upraised, to attack Dingwall. A laser sliced him in two. The crowd was maddened now, out of control. They started to move in towards Medea and Dingwall—

  “Tanks!” Dingwall screamed into the microphone so that the operatives could hear. “Mow these humans down now!”

  Roaring from all sides as the papinium tanks began to edge the people in—they were going to be crushed, as though between the blades of a monstrous food processor! Medea thought gleefully.

  Just then, an ancient man stumbled out of the crowd and heaved a small missile at the nearest tank, and—

  The papinium layer—what was happening?

  The tank’s outer shell was melting before their very eyes . . . and within, the two lizards who had been manning it were suddenly exposed! Before they had a chance to escape, the crowd was moving in towards them and they were being dragged in by a dozen angry people, and their la
ser pistols had been yanked from them and—

  “No!” Dingwall cried. “The one thing I never dreamed would happen—they’ve discovered some substance that breaks down the molecular structure of the papinium layer!”

  Others were brandishing the little projectiles now. Medea gasped. Could they be what she thought they were, little glass dishes full of a gelatinous blue substance? What could such a harmless-looking thing possibly do to a tank made out of the newly discovered heavy metal?

  “If they get to the walls,” she gasped, “then the outside atmosphere will get in and the air within, which we’ve carefully cleansed of any remnant of the red dust—will become contaminated!” She felt in her uniform, nervously making sure she still had the two ampoules of antitoxin that she had brought with her in case what she had already taken wore out.

  No sooner had she spoken when she heard a monstrous collective shout from the throats of all the humans . . . there was a rift in the metallic blue wall of the nearest corridor, and some of the aliens were beginning to claw at their faces and fall, flesh frothing, to the floor!

  “No!” she shouted. “We must escape, Dingwall!” she grabbed the other alien’s hand, pulled a laser blaster out of the hands of a guard who was gasping, dying at her very feet, and began firing wildly to clear a pathway to the secret entrance to the skyport.

  At first Dingwall didn’t move, but stared at the spectacle about him. “My vision in ruins!” he was saying. “My grand, magnificent vision of a new invasion of the north—”

  “Stop making speeches, and come on!” Medea screeched at him, tugging at his arm so hard that a wad of pseudoskin came off in her hand. She tossed

  it angrily at the crowd and pulled him away.

  They ran toward the unfinished section of the mall.

  “The cordon—it’s been cut!” Dingwall groaned.

  “No time to think of that now ... we must escape!”

  The old man who had thrown the first of the bombs was shambling after them. There was no time to shoot. They could outrun him easily. Medea shoved Dingwall roughly into the concealed passageway and propelled him up the steps as the sounds of chaos crescendoed in the background.