Fiddleback Trilogy 1 - A Gathering Evil

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  Crowley bent down and hauled Nero Loring to his feet. When Loring resisted, Crowley slapped him once, hard, then clawed his hands away from the girl's body. "Let her go!"

  "No, she is my daughter!"

  "She was your daughter. You said you encoded a pattern in the software driving the maglev circuit's functions, right?"

  "Nerys!"

  Crowley slapped him again and lifted him by his shirt-front until Loring's feet left the floor. "Listen to me, Nero Loring. They have your daughter's brain. They will use it to trigger the circuit. Can you stop them?"

  "I don't know." The man shook his head while tears streamed down his face. "I think so, but I don't know."

  Holding him there with one hand, Crowley turned and pointed at Jytte. "You, you're Coyote's computer empath. Can you stop the machine?"

  "If I am able to obtain access, possibly."

  "You'll have access. Caine, come here." Before I could take a single step forward, a thunderous click and the sound of tearing fabric echoed from the doorway. I spun, bringing my carbine up instantly. Discarding the rest of the room's seal with a shake of its head was the biggest antlike creature I'd ever seen. Chocolate-brown in color, I made it just slightly smaller than a bull of the nearly extinct elephant species of Africa.

  Instinctively my finger tightened on the carbine's trigger. Flame shot a full foot from the muzzle while the stream of duplex bullets slashed a dozen holes across the thing's face. They snapped off one of the huge mandibles, and it clattered to the ground like a black ivory tusk. The creature reeled back and slammed into the opposite side of the corridor, then scrabbled back up to its six legs before Bat's broadside burst blew a hole the size of a pumpkin through its thorax.

  I had expected some sort of death scream, but the creature had remained silent. Instead a brutally pungent scent flooded the room. The first wave of it made my head spin. Marit dropped to her knees and retched. I started to collapse but caught myself on a table. Crowley let Loring fall to the floor, then staggered over to me as the air began to clear.

  "Listen to me. You've got to get Nero and Jytte into Lorica. You have to stop Nerys and Fiddleback." He raised his right hand to my forehead and touched me. As he did so I saw a vision of the opalescent control panel for the dimensional gateway flash into my head. "Control sequence is Roy G. Biv—each time you touch a light it will shift to the next color in the mix. The pattern I projected to you will get you to the base of the Lorica Tower. I know it works. I've been there before."

  "When you helped Coyote get Nero out of there, right?"

  Crowley's head came up, and he looked at me. I could almost see his eyes through the shadow. "You are very perceptive, Caine, but we do not have time for this. Go. Go back the way you came. Use the dimension device to get to the tower. I hope you're in time."

  "You must come with us."

  He shook his head. "Can't. Fiddleback's outthought us here."

  Bat shouldered his rifle and fired two bursts down the corridor. "They're massing, Caine."

  "Go, take Loring. There is a chance he can still get through to her." He glanced over at the body. "I've got to see if there is another way out of this."

  "You'll be okay?"

  I heard Crowley laugh lightly. "I'm an old man, but Fiddleback and I haven't filled up our dance cards yet."

  "Okay, let's go." I reached back and pulled one of the plastique explosive packets from my pouch and armed it. I hunkered down next to the opening on the side opposite Bat. "How far?"

  "Thirty feet. It's a low ceiling, be careful."

  "I have a better idea." I reseated my earpiece, then pressed the plastique into a little ball with the detonator in the middle. "I don't know if I used to bowl or not, but . . ."

  I stepped out through the doorway and rolled the ball down the middle of the corridor. The circular tunnel's concave floor kept the bomblet sailing right down the center. The little, blue LED blinked on and off as the ball rolled deeper and deeper down the corridor. When it got as far as I thought safe, I pressed my earpiece to my ear and said "Bluegill."

  The bomblet detonated right beneath one of the Plutonians, vaporizing its thorax. The creature's abdomen cartwheeled back over a line of the creatures, spraying them with its vital fluids. The head crashed to the ground, with the antennae still twitching in a search pattern and the mandibles clicking together.

  Bat stepped into the corridor and triggered off two more bursts. "Clear, move it."

  I let Natch and Loring head out and sent Marit and Jytte after them. I waved Bat forward and heard more shooting. I turned around to wish Crowley luck, but I found myself alone in the room. "Good luck to you anyway, old man. I hope like hell Fiddleback doesn't get either one of us."

  The brilliant backlight of the muzzle flash from Bat's carbine made him a marble statue at the juncture of the short corridor and the large gallery. He stood in the center of the passage and sprayed the gallery with gunfire while the others ducked behind him and secured the slant tube down. "Move it, Caine."

  I reached back and pulled out another bomblet. "Go, Bat. I'm following close. Guard your eyes when I give the word." I sprinted forward, guided by the light from his gun as he fired in bursts and retreated. As I reached the mouth of the corridor, I hunkered down beside one of the dying creatures and saw two of our people at the slant corridor's mouth open up.

  Giving myself a second to size up the situation in the light of their gunfire, I noticed that the Plutonian protecting me was not really a giant insect. A thick, leathery flesh covered over bony armor plates making it much more like an armadillo than anything else. It felt warm to the touch and a thick tuft of hairs ran along its spine. If a rhinoceros had been formed in the image of an ant, it would be a Plutonian.

  The Plutonians had arrayed themselves in a staggered line and were advancing steadily toward my companions. A blast in their midst could disorganize them. Crowley had called them a hive mind, so I looked for one with longer antennae in a vain attempt to locate the mobile equivalent of a comcenter.

  "No such luck." I rolled the Semitek into a ball and armed the chip. The LED glowed with a yellow light. Steadying myself with my left hand pressed against the Plutonian carcass, I arced the bomb at the highest point of light I could see in the main gallery. "Cover!" I waited a second, then added the mnemonic trigger for the blast. "Yellowtail."

  The bomblet exploded fairly close to the ceiling with considerable force. A number of the large, lumbering Plutonians crashed to the gallery floor, their six legs splayed out as if they were roadkill. Others blundered into their compatriots and began fighting them, locking these elephantine ant-things in mortal combat. A few whose antennae had been broken in the blast just spun and spun where they stood.

  The explosion ignited the cocoonish web covering the upper part of the ceiling. Starting at the point of the blast, the flaming fabric peeled down from the roof and blanketed the Plutonians with fire. The sticky material clung to them like a second flesh and roasted them alive. The choking death scent combined with smoke and burning flesh to fill the gallery with a venomous fog.

  The roaring inferno made vision much easier than before. Pushing off the corpse, I ran to the slant-tube and shot past Jytte and Marit. They triggered off two more bursts, then ran after me as we sprinted down. We caught Natch and Loring at the turn, then saw Bat waving us through the doorway into the gateway room.

  When we were all in, I nodded to Bat and he said, "Red snapper." The floor jolted as the first explosives we'd set detonated and blocked the passage we'd run down. I pointed to the dimensional gate and told everyone to sit on the edge. "I'll get this set. Reload now because we'll probably be going in hot."

  I ran over to the control console set near the hexagonal gate. The controls had no buttons or knobs, but seemed to be divided into a 10-by-10 grid that, at the moment, had a few reds, blues and greens amid a sea of white. All of the colors were pastels, yet they flashed with light much as colors shift within an opal.

 
; I touched the very first panel in the grid. It went from white to red and, at the same time, I caught a light, airy scent. This made sense, as the Plutonians seemed to work more from olfactory stimulus than visual clues. I hit the panel again and the light became orange along with another sweet scent being offered as a clue.

  I quickly discovered that after violet came white again—with no scent—so I set about changing the colors to match those of the image Crowley had implanted in my mind. As I hit the finished pattern, the gateway began to display the static pattern, with it flowing inward instead of out.

  "Go!" I pulled a Semitek packet from my pouch, armed it, and pressed it to the console. Standing on the edge of the gateway I said, "Count five, green sword." I stepped off into the static and felt the numbness swallow me alive.

  Coming out on the other side, I fell face-first into a viscous, sticky fluid. It felt cold and gelatinous on my hands and face, but as I pushed myself upright, it popped free of my cheek without leaving a residue. Getting my feet under me I stood slowly and found the mucus-like substance clung to the walls and, while somewhat elastic, snapped back in place when stretched beyond a foot or so.

  "Where are we?" I saw, obviously, that my companions and I had come through into a huge cylinder. The flooring beneath the slime vibrated slightly, and I heard muted rasping sounds that seemed to rush toward us, then recede away again. I matched my mental image of the control panel with the one Crowley had given me, and they were identical. "Either we're in Lorica, or Crowley made a big mistake."

  I turned around and started betting on the latter possibility because Bat stood on the ceiling of the tunnel and shrugged. Halfway between the two of us, Nero Loring knelt on one knee and pressed a hand down through the slime to the concrete below it. The rest of us, like spokes on a wheel, stood on the interior of the cylinder with no proper regard to the orientation of gravity.

  "I think, Caine, we're in the central cylinder around which the main elevators in the Lorica Citadel are built." Loring pulled his hand free of the muck and stood. "I had envisioned a private elevator in here just for me. With this space 20 feet in diameter I could have driven in and been brought all the way up to the penthouse."

  He pointed back over his shoulder. "In a conventional sense, that's down and we're facing up. I don't know how gravity is being manipulated here, but it seems to be concentrated by the slime, perhaps as a mechanism to make food fall toward it. As long as we're careful and this stuff goes all the way up, we've got roughly a third of a kilometer between us and the imposter."

  A distant and loud boom caused all of us to drop down on our bellies. "An attack?"

  Natch shook her head. "Thunder. It always sounds like that in Eclipse."

  "Thunder? I thought the storms don't start until evening, when the city cools enough to let the clouds drift in."

  "They don't." Marit looked at her watch. "Hold on, this is weird."

  As she spoke, I glanced at my own watch. The analog dial read 9:15 A.M., which felt right for the amount of time I've been awake so far. The digital said 8:30 P.M., which was about the time the storms would be starting. "Time moves very slowly in Plutonia, it seems."

  Loring pointed up. "It doesn't matter what time it is, there is a storm brewing. We must stop the Witch."

  Working our way up along the cylinder felt very strange, especially with Bat persisting in what looked like, from my vantage point, his hanging by his feet from the ceiling. We advanced slowly and cautiously, but saw no opposition. Nowhere did the slime break or fail to secure us.

  At the far end of the cylinder a smaller passage opened up. It was about half the diameter of the main tube and there the slime grew only on the sides and floor of the tunnel. It spiraled out and down from the main tube, but because of the twist in it, I could only guess at its length. It seemed, as nearly as I could determine, to be a transition point through which the tube's gravity could be aligned with that of the external world.

  Loring said he knew nothing about it, but confirmed my suspicions on its purpose. "This is new construction as far as I know, but it should come out in the penthouse."

  "I'll go first and signal when it's clear." I put a new clip into the carbine, then started down the tributary tunnel. I started on a side wall but found myself channeled onto a narrow pathway. By the time the slime ran out, the passage had been squared off and opened into the white silk world of Nerys Loring.

  I paused in the doorway and looked both ways, but with the shifting walls billowing and snapping, seeing anything was impossible. "Looks clear, I think," I whispered into my radio. "Come up slowly in case I'm wrong."

  One step through the doorway, and I found out how very wrong I was. Two feet hit me in the right shoulder as someone jumped me from above the doorway. I rolled beneath the impact, but before I could come up and turn around, a solid kick in the ribs sent me flying even further. My carbine went skittering across the floor and sunk in one of the streamlets off to my left while I came up short against a low wall and smashed into it with my shoulders.

  Mr. Leich, dressed head to toe in black, stood in the middle of the floor and laughed mildly. He rubbed his hands on his thighs, then balled them into fists. Behind him, like squashed bugs on the pristine white of the walls, I saw twin slime handprints above the door, which explained how he had hung there until I arrived.

  "Hope I didn't leave you hanging too long, Mr. Leich."

  His dark RayBan sunglasses hid his eyes, but I imagined no mirth in them, nor did I hear any in his voice. "You've been a very bad boy, Mr. Caine. I owe you, and she said I could have you." He licked his lips lasciviously, then smiled and showed me his fangs.

  I gathered my feet beneath me and stood. "If you want me, come get me." I dropped a hand to the Wildey Wolf's butt.

  He shook his head. "You still don't understand, do you, human? You've shot me four times. You've caused my flesh to be scraped off in a skid. When you hit me with your car you fractured my leg in eight places. The paramedic said I'd never walk again, then I drank his blood and danced away from the accident site. You can no more fight me than cattle can fight against the slaughterhouse."

  Leich pointed at my pistol. "Go ahead. Take your best shot. You've learned nothing."

  I pulled the Wildey and snapped it off safety. "On the contrary, Mr. Leich, I have learned a great deal."

  The first shot I triggered hit him in the right shoulder with enough of a punch that his sunglasses bounced off his face. Leich twisted his torso back toward me to show he could take everything I could dish out. Then his head turned to the right as he suddenly realized that the thing lying on the floor back beyond him was, in fact, his right arm.

  "Don't go to pieces over this, Mr. Leich," I chided him, "or should I call you 'Lefty'?"

  Pure suprahuman loathing blazed in his eyes as he turned back to me. He started to snarl something, but my second shot pinned the words in his throat and blew his larynx back out through his spine. Blood splashed over the silk sheets snapping like sails in a gale. His body flopped back into the watery grave that took my carbine while his head did a triple somersault in the air, then hit the ground. It bounced once and rolled back off his nose. Lying on his ear, Leich gnawed at the air for the next five seconds, then he lay still in a pool of blood.

  Bat and Jytte appeared at the doorway with their carbines at the ready. "Trouble?"

  "No, Bat, it's under control." I holstered the pistol. Behind him Natch and Loring caught up and Marit played rear guard. "He's the only one she had waiting. Either she's very stupid or . . ."

  ". . . or there is nothing you can do to stop me!"

  I heard her voice echo throughout the penthouse and a thunder strike punctuated her statement. I spun around to face deeper into her domain, dreading the effort necessary to hunt her down in her silken labyrinth. She is a spider in her web.

  The bloody splotches on the sheets to my left slowly began to expand and grow. They spread out until they consumed the whole white cloth, then th
ey infected the next sheet and the next. Those silken curtains filled with blood, and it dripped over marble, staining it, then down into the streams. The streams themselves began to overflow, washing across the floor and whirling Leich's carcass away.

  The liquid soaked through my boots and felt warm and sticky just the way blood should.

  Then, suddenly, every sheet ignited in a stark burst of magnesium light like they were made of a magician's flash paper. I shielded my eyes as best I could and coughed as the acrid smoke choked me. Heat spiked in the room, and I waited for the nauseating scent of singed hair and boiling flesh, but the sensation passed in an instant.

  I opened my eyes to a new world. What had been white before was now black, as if it had absorbed the soot or the heat had seared it. Now that the sheets were gone, I could see countless little alcoves. All their furnishings looked intact except for the change in color from the other evening when I saw them. The lights had dropped from bright to dim, taking the penthouse down into darkness and, by contrast, allowing one thing to attract our attention.