The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  “Now you see it,” Gil said.

  “So why not help us fight them, instead of stabbing us in the back?!?”

  “It’s called backing the strong horse.”

  “That’s daft. When they’ve finished us off, they’ll come for you.”

  “The sentrienza believe the Ghosts have a specific war aim: the capture and occupation of Earth. Once they achieve that, an armistice can be negotiated. So the sentrienza think.”

  “They’re dreaming.”

  “I agree.”

  “They’re a sandwich short of an alien picnic.”

  “Quite.”

  Colm started to laugh. After days of punitive isolation, the drink and the talk had lowered his guard. He laughed, and Gil laughed in barking yelps. Colm lay down on his back on the floor. The world looked interesting from queazel height. It looked bigger.

  He reached out and idly lifted the lid off the larger dish Gil had brought. “What’s in here? I suppose it’d be too much to hope for a decent curry ... Huh?”

  The dish contained a pack of cards, a few coins, five juggling balls, a polka-dotted silk handkerchief, and several plastic vials of pills. It was these last that caught Colm’s eye.

  “Just a little present for you,” Gil said.

  Colm’s hand went out of its own accord and picked up one of the vials. He shook it. The pills looked like the military-grade tropodolfin he used to take, but they could be anything.

  “It’s good stuff,” Gil said. He took one of the other vials, unscrewed it with his clever little paws, and licked out a single pill. Crunch, crunch.

  Colm felt a twitch of nostalgic desire. But he shook his head. “I’m clean now.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t touched that stuff since I was on Gna.” He scratched the greasy hair on the side of his head where his esthesia implant abided, inert and half-forgotten. “I only ever used because I was in agony from this.”

  That was the truth, but it was also true that he had gone a few rounds with his inner junkie. Some of the mercs on the Constantinople did pills, blow, injectables, whatever. It had taken a lot of willpower for Colm not to fall back into using. But he hadn’t, and now he tossed the vial of tropodolfin back into the dish.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “The other things are for you, too.”

  “Cards, coins?”

  “You used to do magic tricks, didn’t you?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It might help to pass the time.”

  “All I want is out of here.”

  Gil uncurled. He bounced peppily onto his feet. The tropodolfin was already working on his hardy queazel physiology. Rivizolla stood up on his hind legs, keeping his shotgun aimed at Colm. “I’ll come back soon,” Gil promised.

  “Fuck you! Why? Why are you keeping me here?”

  “I told you. I want you to become your best self.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  Gil laughed like a fox, tongue lolling. “Figure it out.” He slithered out into the corridor.

  Colm picked up the large dish and hurled it at the closing door. “You want me to be a miserable, shut-in junkie like you?”

  The dish hit the door. Its contents scattered and rolled around the cell.

  The bolt outside slammed home, and the padlock snicked shut.

  *

  AFTER A WHILE, COLM picked everything up.

  After a longer while, he took one of the tropodolfin pills.

  And then another.

  It was better than staring out the six-inch window at the sky, wishing it were the blue sky of Earth.

  CHAPTER 41

  MEG LAY ON HER stomach behind a granite outcropping, gazing through binoculars at the castle belonging to the ancient clan of Nulth.

  Asking around in Kevesingod, she and Axel had learned that the Nulth clan had owned one of the generation ships that carried the queazels into exile on Juradis, after some mysterious calamity devastated their homeworld. Nulths had acted as go-betweens for the queazel community and their sentrienza hosts ever since. They owned huge tracts of the grain-producing cropland that covered the interiors of both polar continents, north and south. But the clan had declined and shrunk. Local townsfolk, queazel and human alike, spoke of its local representative, Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth, with an odd mixture of pity and fear.

  The castle looked tiny from Meg’s vantage point on the mountainside. As if she could reach out and push it into the fjord with the tip of her finger. But each of the blocks making up its high curtain wall—irregularly shaped, artfully fitted together, like the drystone walls of old Japanese castles—was a ten-ton chunk of granite. The gates would be the weak points, but firing slits overlooked both the main gate and the postern. A moat increased the difficulty of approaching the wall.

  She lowered her binoculars, frustrated, and chewed on a strip of dried fish. The sun warmed her back. The weather was nice this far north. The farms lay further inland, but this barren coastal strip supported more life than it appeared at first glance. She and Axel lay in a crevice between two rocks. It was a tiny sweet-smelling world of mosses, lichens, insects, and butterflies.

  “We could always just walk up to the front door and knock,” she said.

  “And say what?” Axel said. “Hello, we’d like to discuss the conspiracy against humanity?”

  Meg chuckled. “On second thoughts, maybe not.”

  Azel rolled onto his back and closed his eyes against the low-angled sun. “Helicopter? Rappel down into the keep ...”

  “We don’t have a helicopter.”

  “Good point.”

  “And you can’t rappel faster than a bullet,” she added.

  Axel opened one eye with a half-smile. “What would I do without you, Meg?”

  She took a mock swipe at him. They had been getting along better since they reached the north pole. Out here in the fresh air, with a mission to focus on, she didn’t have to wonder about what she felt for him, or worry that he was blaming himself for everything. After all, nothing had gone wrong yet ...

  “Place your hands on your heads,” said a thin, dangerous voice. “Slowly.”

  On instinct, Meg reached for the gun she’d set beside her on the rock—a scarred old .38, purchased in Kevesingod from a shablag who sold illegal weapons under the counter of his hardware store.

  A large green hand closed on her wrist and twisted it, wrenching a yelp of pain from her throat.

  “Do that again and I will shoot you,” said the thin voice of a mara.

  “OK, got it,” Meg gasped.

  The mara let go of her wrist. It pulled itself over the rocks, staying low, out of sight from the castle. It snatched Meg’s gun and jammed it into the waistband of its flapping patchwork trousers. Meg and Axel lay on their backs, hands on their heads. The mara patted them down. When it had satisfied itself that they had no other weapons on them, it moved back, with the frightening speed and agility of a lizard. It squatted facing them. It carried an AK knockoff. Same type of weapon Meg used to carry in the Kuiper Belt. It looked like a toy in the mara’s hands.

  “You followed us,” Axel snarled.

  “It’s not the same one,” Meg said. This mara was smaller than the one they had met on Skaldaffi, and it had a squarer face.

  “The Organization is everywhere,” the mara said in its thin voice, like wind blowing through a crack.

  “This is about Emile Zaragoza,” Meg guessed.

  Axel said, “I’m going to sit up. All right?” He did, keeping his hands on his head. “I did not kill Dr. Zaragoza. I respected him immensely, as a thinker and a human being. But he made some bad choices. And I guess he knew that. He killed himself because he thought he was responsible for the fall of Earth. He wasn’t, though. For one thing, Earth hasn’t fallen yet.”

  “But it will,” the mara said. “It will fall, as our homeworld fell, as the homeworlds of the shablags and queazels fell. Because that is the sentrienza way.�
��

  “Yup,” Axel said. “They give gifts, and then they collect payment.”

  “Yessss.” The mara hissed the word like a snake. “After they ruined our homeworld, they gave us refuge in their empire, and we are still paying them for their kindnesssss.”

  Axel nodded. “I’ve heard what happened to your world. It was a pandemic, right?”

  “Sssso. And the shablags’ world was destroyed by a rock from the sky.”

  “They must have played the same trick on the queazels,” Axel said to Meg, who was thinking about her contract with Emnl ki-Sharongat, and feeling sick. “Of course, they’d have blamed it on the indiscriminate cruelty of the universe.”

  “And when Earth falls,” the mara said, “they will blame it on the indiscriminate cruelty of the Ghosts. Are these Ghosts a kind of pandemic?”

  Meg yelped a laugh. “Yeah, you could say that. They’re a pandemic with rifles. But I’m starting to get the impression that the sentrienza are worse.” She was still thinking about Sakassarib. Despising herself for falling for Emnl’s sweetly reasonable act. “They’re opportunists, aren’t they? The alligators of the galaxy. Anything that comes along ...”

  “Yeah.” Axel faced the mara. “But we don’t have to lie down and take it anymore. Humanity is still in the fight.” Out here in the sun and the wind of Juradis, it seemed like a thin claim. But Axel’s voice carried the intensity of conviction. And the mara was no longer pointing its AK at them. “When they picked on Homo sapiens, they picked on the wrong species.” Axel pointed his chin at Castle Nulth. “And if we can get into that castle, we can start fighting back.”

  “That is the home of Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth,” the mara said.

  “Yep,” Axel said. Sweat circles were spreading under his arms. “Nulth picked Dr. Zaragoza’s brains, stole his research for the sentrienza ... and then abandoned him to live with the guilt. He owes us, big-time. But as you see, there are only two of us. So we could use some help kicking his furry ass back to the smouldering ruins of Uzzizel.”

  The mara lowered its AK until the barrel was pointing at the ground. “We are a solitary species. But I know of four other mara living in these parts. There are also the shablags, of course, but they are useless in a fight.”

  Meg smiled joyfully. “If the other mara are anything like you, we’ll do just fine.”

  *

  COLM HAD MADE AN INTERESTING discovery. He was better at magic when he was high.

  Left alone with a supply of pills, he’d fallen face-first into an epic binge. It was a lot like what his father had done, the time Dad and Mam had briefly separated when Colm was sixteen. Colm had gone to see his father in his bedsit in Inverness, and found him surrounded by a plastic fortress of empties. The only difference between Lloyd Mackenzie then and Colm Mackenzie now was that Colm’s fortress was built of tropodolfin vials. If his father could see him, he’d get to feel superior that Colm had plunged further down the slippery slope of substance abuse.

  Colm’s new routine went like this: Binge. Crash. Sleep for fourteen, sixteen hours. Wake up. Force down some bread and fruit, so his body didn’t totally give out on him. Repeat.

  Lloyd Mackenzie had escaped his solitary hell when Daisy took pity on him and went to fetch him home in the Hyundai. Colm had no one, apart from Gil, who seemed intent on encouraging him to destroy himself.

  As if to incentivize him, Gil had given him some new luxuries. A clock. A mirror. An electric fan. But the queazel flatly refused to give him a computer, or even a book to read. So he had to entertain himself with conjuring tricks.

  High as a satellite, he sat crosslegged in front of the mirror, practicing the old levitation effect. Dad had taught him this one in that Inverness bedsit, over the course of a boozy afternoon. Hold the deck of cards in the left hand, nudge the desired card out of the deck with the knuckle of the left thumb, while holding the right palm flat above the deck. It looks like you’re lifting the card by magic. His father had lifted the card right out of the deck and made it float around, seemingly dangling from his right palm by an invisible string. Colm had never got the hang of it to that extent. The best he’d been able to do was suspend the card from his right palm for a few seconds.

  But now, on his fiftieth attempt, the card followed his right hand as he moved it away from the deck. It wobbled in the breeze from the fan, but did not fall.

  A smile spread over his face. “How’s that, Dad?” he murmured. “Still think hard drugs are the devil?”

  The door opened, breaking his concentration. The card fluttered to the floor. Gil slithered in and picked it up.

  “Very nicely done. You’re getting better at that.”

  “You’ve been watching me?”

  Gil pointed a claw at the mirror. “There is a camera concealed in the frame.”

  Colm gritted his jaw in annoyance. “Remind me to turn the mirror to the wall next time I jerk off.”

  “I’ve seen you doing that,” Gil said.

  “You sodding voyeur.”

  “It is not as interesting as this.” Gil returned the card.

  Colm made it vanish in his hand. He used not to be able to do this with anything bigger than a coin, but now he could fold an entire playing card into the pocket between his thumb and palm. He returned it to the deck. Gil’s eyes followed his hand, flicked to and fro, trying to see what he’d missed. Colm smiled. “My dad used to be able to vanish all kinds of shit. Hats, toys, Mars bars. It was a huge crowd pleaser.”

  “So it runs in the blood,” Gil said.

  “He was a great entertainer. A 24-carat bastard, but the best magician in Scotland. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps. I wonder have the Ghosts got him and my mother yet?” Colm shook his head, angry with himself for showing emotion.

  “Earth is still holding out,” Gil said.

  “That was a year ago.”

  “You can help your parents. Your country. Your planet.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You are the best magician alive. Actually, you may be the only magician alive.”

  Colm guffawed. “That’s fucking brilliant. We’ll entertain the Ghosts to death. That’ll show them.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Up your arse wi’ it.”

  Gil got to his feet. Despite his slovenly clothing, unwashed fur, and the reek of booze that came off him, he managed to give an impression of dignity. “Then you can spend the rest of your life wondering if you could have saved Earth when you had a chance.”

  “How? With card tricks?”

  “Think about Earth. Think about your family. The places you used to go, the places you love.”

  Colm thought about the Free Church Manse. “I was going to buy a house and convert it into a castle.”

  “I advise against it,” Gil said. “No good comes of hiding in castles. Just look at me.”

  “You’d be a junkie wherever you were,” Colm said, suddenly moved to pity for the little creature.

  “I do not think so. I indulge in my vices because I am alone.”

  “Ah, you’re not alone. Rivizolla and the rest are here. I’m here, though I’d much rather not be.”

  Gil snarled at him.

  Colm folded his arms. Harshly, he said, “The problem is you’re weak, that’s all. I didn’t touch the stuff for two years, and it’s not like I didn’t have the opportunity.”

  Gil lifted the front half of his body off the floor to push the door open. He looked back at Colm. “Think about that. You didn’t indulge for two years. What else did not happen during that time?”

  He went out. Colm glimpsed Rivizolla in the passage outside. The door shut. The bolt thudded and the padlock snicked.

  What else hadn’t happened in the last two years?

  Colm didn’t want to think about Gil’s question, but one possible answer kept intruding into his mind. He took another pill. It was time, anyway. The rush derailed the unwanted train of thought.

  Unable to sit still, he decided to
practice juggling.

  Gil had given him five balls, squashy and iridescent. When he came here, he’d only been able to juggle three balls, but with nothing else to do, he’d worked his way up to four and then five. Each one seemed to hang for a long moment at the apex of its trajectory, catching the sunlight from the window and scattering prisms over the walls of the tower room.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE MARA LIVED IN a cave in the cliff overlooking the fjord. It had summoned the other mara in the area to meet with Meg and Axel. To Meg’s dismay, about a hundred shablags had also turned up. No—she reconsidered, glancing into the depths of the cave—more like two hundred. All of them armed.

  The cave ran straight back into the cliff from an opening just a short scramble above the water. Reflections from the fjord played on the bare rock ceiling. It was plenty light inside, not too cold, but the mara had a fire going in the central pit, anyway. The smoke bent towards the back of the cave. There must be a crevice, some way for it to escape.

  Beyond the fire, the shablags crouched on the stone floor, hugging a wild variety of firearms—everything from revolvers to homemade Gauss guns. They were small people, three to four feet tall, their limbs covered with woolly hair in shades of purple and maroon. Their dark brown faces sported long wobbly noses, almost probosces. They murmured to each other in their clicking, squeaking language. Every deepset, amethyst eye was fixed on Meg and Axel.

  Their mara acquaintance droned on to the other three mara in their own language, evidently explaining the plan they had come up with for assaulting Castle Nulth. Meg nudged Axel. “I’m worried this is going to get out of control. Do the shablags think they’re coming with us?”

  “They might be useful,” Axel murmured. “If they can shoot straight.”

  “And of course two hundred armed shablags won’t draw unwanted attention from the sentrienza.”

  The sentrienza were rarely seen in these parts, but they did have a local presence. A fortified compound on a headland overlooking the mouth of the fjord served as a customs post for Kevesingod. There might be hundreds of sentrienza in there for all Meg knew. Even if there were only a handful, a ‘secret’ gathering this large presented a definite risk.