A Gathering Evil

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Loring charged his carbine. "What are we waiting for? Let's go."

  Crowley held up a hand. "A moment." His other hand came up, and his fingers splayed out. I saw them tremble as he moved them around. The gold ring glinted on his right hand as Crowley worked through a series of eerie and complicated gestures. Finally he lowered his hands and pointed toward the doorway. "We're two levels below where she is. Up a slant corridor, first hard right, then second left. She's in the third room on the left."

  Marit frowned at him. "How do you know?"

  "Nero gave me a locket his daughter used to wear. I matched the emanations from it to those I feel above. We have to hurry. Something is wrong."

  Bat and I took up the lead and moved out into the corridor. Starting at the doorway's round frame, glistening lines of mucus ran along the walls and ceiling of the circular tunnel. In the darkness I could not make out any difference between them, but as I got close I noticed a heavy mixture of scents, almost as bad as being caught in a bar during perfume wars between the women nearby. For a half second I wondered if they were some sort of biomechanical circuitry, then dismissed them as bizarre decoration.

  Jytte touched one of the lines. "Scent marking. These are the same as painted lines along the walls of a hospital. I would guess this thick central one leads to something important, like food or the queen."

  I crouched a bit further up the corridor and took a plastic-bomblet from my pack. "Bat, set a red one opposite me here on the wall." I pressed mine against the rough stone and flipped the small switch, arming it. A small, red LED came on to let me know it was ready to go.

  The hard right turn Crowley had mentioned took us from one upward-slanting corridor to another, then leveled off into a large gallery. Going forward slowly I could see little more than patches of green luminescence floating in an ocean of darkness. In the distance I could hear some chittering and clicking that sounded like drumsticks being hammered against each other by a very agitated musician.

  "Caine, stop!" the radio hissed in my ear

  At Crowley's warning I came to a full stop. I felt the breeze from something moving past from right to left. Clicks and pops sounded closer, then stopped. I heard a creaking sound, like old leather being stretched. Two sharp clicks, like rocks being struck together to make a spark, exploded above my head. I started, then refroze.

  Crowley's voice sounded in my earpiece. "Easy, Caine, easy. The one near you is only a worker. You won't smell like food to him, so don't worry. Stay calm. Don't shoot."

  Like a ventriloquist, I subvocalized, which the earmike picked up with ease. "You can see these things? You can see in the dark?"

  "It is a skill you can develop if you survive this. Stay still."

  I drew a quiet breath in through clenched teeth. A thick, bitterly sweet odor like that of dead flowers washed over me and grew as the clicking became closer. I heard the sound again and again from up above me and to the right, but as I tried to see what it was, all I could make out was a shadow eclipsing distant patches of green moss.

  A bead of sweat started at my right temple and slowly started to crawl down the side of my face. My right bicep started to quiver as the weight of the carbine began to vampirize its strength. The bulletproof vest I had on became clammy, and I found myself starting to overheat. More sweat appeared on my brow and one droplet coursed down between my eyebrows, along the edge of my nose, to sting my right eye.

  The way my heart pounded, I felt certain the thing must have heard it. Because of Bat's remark, I imagined it as some huge ant, just waiting to catch me in its mandibles. Two huge scythe-blades mounted on its jaws would snap me in half. Not the way I expected to go at all. I knew if I could just shift the carbine's muzzle around I could pop the thing.

  Then, suddenly, in a series of clicks and crunches, the thing went away. I let my breath out slowly. "Crowley, what the hell was that?"

  "A Plutonian, I would imagine." His voice stopped for a moment and, in that pause, lost all the whimsy it had contained. "I don't like this. Forward 12 steps, turn left."

  I followed his instructions to the letter and found myself close enough to another corridor that the mosslight let me see my team as they came in. "Crowley, what don't you like?"

  The green light did not reflect from his black form.

  "That worker was in a classic search pattern with its antennae, but it backed off before it touched you."

  "Our luck."

  "Or something called it away." He pointed further down the tunnel.

  Marit took over the point position and led us to the third opening on the left. She produced a knife from a boot-sheath and started digging away at the wax-covered web-fiber panel blocking the hole. "It's six inches thick. It's like carving clay. There's some light, real light, on the other side."

  Bat pulled a knife of his own and stabbed the eight-inch blade in at shoulder-height. Wrapping both hands around the hilt, he started tugging backwards and walking from one side of the hole to the other. The wax-web peeled down like whale blubber being flayed from a humpback. Natch pulled the thick membrane back and Nero Loring ducked into the room first.

  He wailed so loudly that I tore my earpiece out of my ear. I stooped below the cut Bat had made and found myself in a tiny chamber. Candles stood in a number of alcoves around the room, filling it with a normal golden light. If not for the room's irregular shape, the furnishings, which included two bookcases full of novels, would have caused me to believe it was a rather spartan dorm room at some paramilitary private school. It hardly seemed a horrible prison and, dozing on the bed with a novel on her stomach, Nerys Loring hardly seemed in distress.

  But then, from where I was standing, I could not see what had driven her father to his knees. He reached out for her and pulled her to him. Because she did not react when her father screamed, I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe she had been drugged, but when Nero reached out and hugged her 14-year-old body to him tightly, I saw and understood his anguish.

  Like a bad toupee, her black scalp flopped back to hang at her neck like a hood on a jacket. The whole back of her skull had been ripped away and her brain had been stolen.

  "No, no! She's not dead. Her body is still warm," her father moaned.

  I turned toward Crowley and pointed at the bed. "This isn't possible. She had her brain removed and there's no blood? Can't be done."

  "Of course it can." He snatched the knife from Bat's hand and grabbed my right wrist. In a slashing motion he drew the blade across the back of my hand, and I felt the sting of the blade. Looking down I saw the cut. It wasn't deep and wasn't particularly long, but it wasn't bleeding either.

  "How?"

  "I told you, this room, this area is special. Look at the candles." He pointed at one, then went close and tried to blow it out. The flame wouldn't even flicker. "They burn without being consumed. It is an aspect of this place."

  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 out-thought 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 deathscent 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 mucuslike substance clung to the walls and, while somewhat elastic, snapped ba
ck 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."