by T. F. Grant
The huge vul flew over their heads. Tai felt the sting of its talons on his shoulder. Damn, the thing must be nearly twelve feet tall when it stood on its hind legs. But it was heavy, unable to change the direction of its leap with normal vul agility, and slammed into a wall.
Bookworm’s heavy revolver boomed, and blood splattered from the vul’s back.
It staggered, shook itself, and turned back toward them.
“Freck,” Bookworm snarled.
Tai fanned the hammer of his Dorian, pumping five rounds into the vul’s torso. The creature howled a horrible wailing cry that echoed through the dark levels.
Bookworm’s revolver boomed again. Like Tai, he aimed for the center mass. The heavy slugs smashed into the vul’s body. The splashes of blood were yellow through the night-glasses.
So much blood everywhere, and it barely slowed the creature.
It lunged forward again.
Tai threw himself to the side. Bookworm went the other way.
The vul slammed into another wall.
Tai rolled to his feet. Bookworm had opened one of the cases and lifted out the strange-looking shotgun. The vul turned and howled again.
Bookworm aimed the gun and pulled the trigger. The great weapon fired and kept on firing at a rate of about one round a second. The buckshot tore the howling vul apart. Meaty chunks flew off and hit the floor with a wet splat. A blood mist filled the air as Bookworm screamed over the blast.
Finally, it was silent, but the echoes of the blast reverberated through the dark levels and what felt like the insides of Tai’s head.
“What the hell is that thing?” Bookworm yelled.
“That is the biggest damned vul I’ve ever seen,” Tai replied. He removed the cylinder from the Dorian and clicked another fully loaded one in its place.
More howls came from the dark, closer, dozens of them, all with that same deep tone. They’d never be able to fight off that many, and they couldn’t go back to the dock without someone seeing them coming out of Tai’s portal. Despite all his instincts to protect his loot, they had no choice but to go deeper into the dark levels. They’d come back for the books later; they were safe for now. Better to be alive to collect one’s booty.
The howling came from all around them now, stoked up by Bookworm’s shotgun. Bookworm grabbed a crate of ammo and reloaded. There was but one course of action left before they were torn to shreds and turned into vul food.
“Run!”
TWENTY-THREE
Sara backed away from the creature before her. The huge dark shape of Jhang the space dragon. A freaking dragon that presumably flew in space. Without a ship? Could this thing exist in space without a ship? She felt the desperate need to ask Tooize and Kina this, at the moment irrelevant, piece of information. If only to take her mind off the rather more relevant information that this creature was standing in front of her, and that it was huge, and that it was looking right at her.
“Don’t look in its eyes,” Tooize whistled.
Sara jerked her gaze away from Jhang’s eyes. Glowing orbs of gold with red pupils slitted like a cat’s and irises the color of molten jet. Eyes that glittered in the dark, a spiral of light spinning around the pupils, dancing away as if into an impossibly far distance and then spiraling back into the glossy foreground of the golden orbs in an aching rhythmic beat like the beat of Sara’s heart.
The rest of the creature bulked in her vision. Don’t look in the eyes, look somewhere else, anywhere else. Scales with edges like scimitar blades covered Jhang’s body, black as obsidian and just as sharp. They varied in size from scales the size of a human hand around the face and throat—don’t look in the eyes—to scales the size of a full-grown kronac across the shoulders and ribs.
So many ribs, the creature extended back into the darkness beyond the range of Sara’s night-vision goggles. She had a sense of a long sinuous shape coiling and curling. The neck was certainly long enough, snakelike, twisting through the fetid air of the dark levels with supple grace.
The head was, of course, huge, with a mouth that could probably swallow all three of them, Kina, Sara, and the bulky form of Tooize, in a single bite. Fangs jutted down in ragged splendor, a broken cage of ivory, white and glistening against the dark skin of the snout. Don’t look in the eyes. Don’t look in the eyes.
The creature, no, Jhang, had wings curled up tight along the sides of its body. They looked like they were made from a papery thin material that still looked stronger than nanowoven graphene cloth. They were twitching and fluttering in Sara’s gaze, as if gesturing to her, lifting her gaze toward its head and eyes.
Oh, those glorious eyes.
Sara lost herself in those orbs of golden light spiraling into her gaze, into her mind, pulling her forward into the dark.
Huge shapes twisted in effervescent light. Stars glistened in the background. The light of a sun shined along the dark scales of the flight of space dragons. Coldness clenched around Sara’s body. No not her body, something else, some other creature’s body.
Jhang?
“I show you this. This is where I came from. So far away now. I cannot find it anymore. The gate closed around me, pulled me here, made me its prisoner.”
No breath passed in or out of Jhang’s lungs. Sara could feel the tranquility of the creature as it flew through the dark reaches of space with its flock… pack… family around it, not it, him. He flew. He rolled and played. He…
Sara could not help but note the stars around her disembodied mind. She could not help but catalog them. They were different from the stars she knew. Larger and more numerous, piling light upon light. It wasn’t a place she knew. Not a place she had ever seen. Not in the universe she had left.
“We lie parallel,” Jhang said in her mind.
Parallel? Sara looked again and saw the spinning disk of the gate. A network of gates spanned this universe and allowed the dragons…
“Draconi.”
… allowed the Draconi to fly from system to system. Sara adjusted her worldview, noted the shapes of the stars, their colors, their configurations. The twist of her mind, the thing that gave her utterly reliable spatial awareness, understood this place.
She could find it again.
“You could find it?” Excitement surged through Jhang’s mental voice. “You could find my way home?”
No sound in space. But a vibration, like the beating of wings, like the beating of insect wings, pulsed through Jhang’s remembered body.
“Oh, here they come again. Here they come.” The Draconi family split apart, each taking a different path through space as Jhang’s remembered dream became a nightmare of memory.
Sara twitched. Sharp pains spiked into her small body. Small compared to the vast bulk of Jhang. Creatures bit at her. They were like insects, like…
A flare of white light bloomed as Jhang, in desperate need, shifted out of his space and time and found himself here, alone, in Hollow Space, unable to find his way back to his home, to his family, trapped behind the broken gate.
Pity flooded through Sara.
Then a small, warm body slammed into her human form, pushed her back against the corridor wall in the dark levels. A hot wet mouth pressed against hers. A tongue curled around hers in whispered desire. Hands groped in her hair. Need pulsed through Sara and broke the connection with Jhang.
Kina lifted her mouth from Sara’s and whispered, “We have to find some downtime soon, you and I.” She gave her an intense look and left Sara gasping against the wall. Then Kina slapped her, hard. “Don’t look in the frecking thing’s eyes.”
“You’ve spent too long around Tai,” Tooize whistled.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Kina said. “Passion to break the mind-link, and pain to keep the damn thing broken.”
“You,” Jhang’s voice roared in the dark. “You can find my way home, to my family.” The Draconi slithered forward, its vast bulk brushing against the confines of the corridor. “You can find it. The place, the gap b
etween places, the way home.”
“Uh-oh,” Kina said.
“Indeed,” Tooize whistled.
“I must eat your mind,” Jhang roared. “Eat your mind. Eat your gift. Make it mine. You are mine!”
“No,” Sara yelled. “I am not yours.”
“Ah, but you soon will be.” Jhang’s head reared back, the mouth agape. The smell of sulfur, of brimstone rolled out as he exhaled and then inhaled—a powerful wind pulling at Sara, her hair lashing across her face.
“No. I am not anybody’s.”
“This,” Tooize whistled carefully. “Is a fifty-mil auto-cannon. It is loaded with saboted piercer rounds that will cut through your hide and find their way to your heart. Heavy rounds, made from core metal with diamond points. We have come here, to this place, in search of a friend, an AI, that you were given by a foul-hearted human. We come here to deal in peace, but we will fight if we must.” His prepared speech ended with, “What say you, Jhangeloshkoshvosheksich?”
“Mine,” Jhang said, his voice strangled as if he was holding his breath.
“Deal or die,” Kina yelled. She turned to Tooize. “You can kill this thing, right?”
“Um, I don’t know,” Tooize replied.
“Mine,” Jhang whispered again and breathed out.
Tooize grabbed Sara and Kina and leapt down a side corridor into darkness. Flame belched through the air, filling the corridor behind them. Tooize landed heavily. The floor of the side corridor, old and almost worn through, crumbled under their combined weight, and they tumbled downward into darkness.
Tooize absorbed the impact through his mighty legs. The auto-cannon, swinging free on its strap, swept upward and smashed into Sara’s left forearm. She felt it snap under the impact. Then the pain hit.
“Ah, freck,” she yelled. Tooize cast the two women aside like rag dolls. Kina jumped away, but Sara fell heavily, and pain lashed through her broken arm. “Shit.”
Tooize lifted the auto-cannon and aimed it upward into the broken floor above.
All became quiet.
The pounding in Sara’s head competed with the raging pain in her arm. Her breath hissed in and out. Nausea surged through her, and she vomited. Then Kina was there.
“What?” she asked, her voice soft.
“My arm.” Sara gritted the words through the pain. “It’s broken.”
“Dammit.” Kina’s gentle hands probed Sara’s left arm.
Sara hissed at the pain, holding the scream in, not allowing it to breach the quiet.
“Yup,” Kina said, “that’s busted, all right. Clean break, though. Easy enough to get fixed. But I need to splint it, and that’s going to hurt. Try not to scream.”
“Okay.” Sara breathed out. “What will you use as a splint?”
Kina grinned and dismantled Sara’s shotgun until she had the barrel in her hand.
“Oh,” Sara said. “Isn’t that rather heavy?”
“It’ll do for now.” Kina pulled bandages from her weapons harness. “Can you see it yet, Tooize?”
“No,” Tooize whistled.
“Him,” Sara said. “Jhang is a him.”
“I know. But I call things that are aiming to eat my friend’s minds ‘its.’ It helps to keep things clear in my head.”
“He is lost, alone, in pain and longing.”
Kina shrugged. “Tough. It also eats sentient beings. So freck it.” She placed her hands on Sara’s broken left arm. “This is going to hurt.”
She was right. It did. Sara passed out.
***
Sara came to lying in a dark corner. The stench of explosives hung in the air. Her broken arm did not feel weighed down with the mass of the shotgun barrel. She blinked and used her right hand to turn on her night-vision goggles. They whined in the darkness.
“Shhh,” Kina whispered.
Sara tried to speak, but her mouth was dry. She swallowed, tried again. “My arm. Where’s the splint? It feels lighter.”
“Shhh.” Kina leaned in close. Her breath warmed Sara’s ear. “I found something better,” she murmured.
Sara looked down. A long, gray piece of bone was strapped against her broken arm. It looked like a femur, but not from anything human. She gulped back vomit and tore her eyes away from the grisly sight. The edges of the bone splint looked… gnawed.
An explosion roared from somewhere in the dark.
“Tooize is trying to draw Jhang away.” Kina’s breath tickled Sara’s ear again. “Then we head for its lair and retrieve Telo.”
Sara’s right hand reached up and caressed Kina’s short, spiky hair. She so wanted to kiss her, but not with a mouth that tasted of vomit, so she settled for brushing her lips across Kina’s ear instead.
Kina shivered.
“Can Tooize kill Jhang?” Sara whispered. Kina smelled of oil and sweat and soft undertones of roses.
Kina took a deep shaky breath. “No, he can hurt it. The rounds penetrate, but not far enough.” She rose onto the balls of her feet, crouched in the darkness. “Can you move?”
Sara winced at the pain of her arm, but she managed to get to her feet. “Yes.”
“Can you move fast?”
“We’ll see.”
“Fair enough, because now we go.” Kina headed off into the darkness on quiet feet.
Sara followed her, trying to match her silent movements. The girl had skills. Sara’s arm throbbed painfully in its sling, but she concentrated on the here and now, on what she had to do, and the pain ebbed away.
She could do this, but some analgesics, some very strong analgesics, would be nice.
Kina led the way, ghosting upward on a rickety stairway, almost rusted through, that wobbled and creaked with every step. Another explosion erupted in the darkness.
“That’s number twelve,” Kina whispered. “Tooize has three rounds left.”
“Then what?”
“Then things get interesting.” Kina reached the corridor above. “Step where I step. Jhang has sentries.”
“Sentries?”
“It eats the minds of some creatures and leaves the bodies alive and slaved to it. It is really not a very nice creature at all.” Kina turned and looked at Sara; her eyes were hidden under the jutting protuberances of her goggles. “It is what it would have done to Telo once it had found a way to activate him.”
Sara’s pity for Jhang’s predicament was swallowed by her revulsion.
Another explosion roared, but further away now. Attenuated by distance.
“Thirteen,” Kina said. “Two rounds left.”
Sara followed Kina through the dark levels, taking narrow stairways upward, avoiding open space, sliding through corridors and access shafts almost too narrow for them. Her arm ached constantly and flared into blinding pain whenever she jarred it. But she bit back the screams, kept her silence, and crept onward.
While they were climbing upward along an even worse stair, the sound of Tooize’s cannon boomed again and then again.
“Shit,” Sara hissed.
“Yup,” Kina agreed. “No more ammo.”
They skulked along a corridor into a large open space. In the green light of the night vision, Sara saw a huge pile of things—things that glittered, things that seemed to absorb darkness, things that oozed foul-smelling fluids. The deck beneath her feet was slippery, and Sara almost stumbled, but Kina’s strong hand held her upright.
“This is the lair,” she hissed in Sara’s ear. “Jhang’s a messy eater.” Kina’s gaze swept back and forth across the mound of treasure and broken, half-digested flesh. “We need to find Telo and get the hell out of here. We don’t have much time. We need to split up. Be careful. There’ll be sentry zombies here. Don’t touch anything. Fetch me, and I’ll deal with it.”
Sara nodded and, with careful steps, slipped and slid across the deck. Kina went one way, and Sara the other. She wanted to raise her hand to cover her nose against the stink, but she needed it for balance.
“Telo,” Sara whispered, li
ke a prayer. “I’m here to save you.”
Step by slippery step she moved around the mound in the center of Jhang’s lair. She didn’t want to look at what it was made from, but she had no choice. Flesh and treasure tumbled together in one oozing mess. The stench of rotting corpses invaded her nose, her mouth, lay on her skin like a perfume. She would pay whatever was needed on this nothing-is-free station for a long hot shower—and still she felt the miasma would cling to her forever.
As would the broken memories Jhang had shared with her.
What were those biting insects? Where had they come from? What kind of creature hunted Draconi?
A blue light glimmered in the dark.
“Telo,” Sara whispered. She slipped forward carefully. Telo’s matrix was cradled in the hands of an almost complete chyros corpse like a gift placed in the hands of a lover.
Heedless of Kina’s words, Sara reached forward with her one good hand and pulled Telo to her. “Oh, Telo,” she sobbed.
The chyros corpse opened its eyes, and Jhang’s roar echoed through the dark levels.
TWENTY-FOUR
Tai sprinted down the dark corridors, using his right hand as a guide, tracing the edge of the wall. Bookworm, despite carrying his automatic shotgun and a box of ammo, had no problem keeping up. The lad had some serious athletic skills beneath his lazy book-reading persona.
The howls of the vuls chasing them grew louder and more numerous. Tai thought he could make out at least a dozen of the overgrown bastards, possibly more.
“Do you even know where we’re going?” Bookworm said, no hint of breathlessness from him as they sprinted on.
“Kinda, sorta, important thing right now, Dylan, my man, is distance. Lots of it.”
“What’s up with those freckers, anyway? How’d they get so damned big?”
“Beats me. If anything, looks like gen-modding. Been rumors the Blackmarks have been using a biocomputer to freck about with this. Here.” Tai skidded to a stop as they came to a junction. Tai reached into his coat and pulled out a small blacklight. The UV ray illuminated a series of symbols on the wall.
