Below her, Axel said, “I’m stuck.”
She looked down past her shoulder at the top of his head. Commas of sweat-soaked dark hair. One grazed, soot-smudged cheek. That was all she could see of him.
“Can you take off your flak vest?” she said.
“Already did.”
“Drop your gun?”
“Already did.” Even his voice sounded squeezed.
“Exhale.”
“I’m stuck.”
“Exhale, Axel. Breathe out. Contract your ribcage.”
He did, and gained another two inches.
“Keep going,” she said, and wormed up to the top of the chimney in a burst of desperate energy. She flopped on lichen-blotched rock in the shelter of an overhanging crag. Betelgeuse poured its light over her. The mindless ecstasy of escape brought tears to her eyes. Then she sat up, ripped her belt out of her jeans, and dangled it down the chimney. “Can you reach it?”
“Little bit more.”
She lowered the top half of her body into the chimney. She was looking down into a rock sandwich with Axel jammed in the middle. She dangled the belt past his face. “Exhale,” she said. “And grab it with your teeth.”
After another half-hour of tortuous breathing exercises, Axel came out of the chimney like a stubborn radish coming out of the ground. Meg fell over backwards. He fell on top of her. Tears carved pale paths through the grime on his face. Both of them were filthy with moss and soot and rock dust. Blood rimmed his teeth. “Thank you. God. Thank you, Meg.” His head came down on her shoulder.
She lay there, feeling his weight on top of her. He was breathing into her neck, each breath hot and ragged, like after sex. She wound her arms around him. Then she lightly thumped his back. “Axel?”
“Yeah?”
“We gotta move.”
They limped over the rocks towards the cliff edge. Every muscle in Meg’s body ached. She became aware of a splitting headache. The white noise may not have been calibrated for humans, but there seemed to be some overlap in the frequency range.
They crawled to the edge of the cliff. A hundred feet below, a sentrienza barge idled by the mouth of the mara’s cave. The shapes of two sentrienza moved behind the reflections on the cabin windshield. Shablag and mara bodies heaped the bed of the barge. As Meg and Axel watched, the Walking Guns dragged out a couple more shablags and threw them on the pile, like rubbish.
“They’re all dead,” Meg breathed.
“Or if they aren’t yet, they soon will be.”
One of the Walking Guns below sat up on its haunches, pointing at the cliff top.
A sentrienza peered out of the cabin of the barge.
A burst of gunfire stammered echoes across the fjord. Meg jerked back as chips of rock flew from the cliff in front of her face.
They staggered back towards the road, while the Walking Guns’ howls echoed off the cliffs behind them. Meg remembered in despair that it was two miles back to town.
*
GHOSTS BOILED OUT OF the shimmering air around the generator. Colm, looking out of the window, counted ten, fifteen, twenty. All of them looked identical from above, down to the manta ray-shaped sweat stains on the backs of their shirts. They carried identical bolt-action rifles. As fast as they materialized, they dashed out of sight.
Some moments later, the shooting started.
Colm leaned against the wall beside the door of the cell, listening. The crack-crack of the Ghosts’ rifles brought back war zones hundreds of light years away. What am I doing? I must be off my trolley ... The reverberant boom of a shotgun answered the rifles. That had come from inside the castle.
“Sounds like the queazels are shooting back,” Dhjerga Lizp said. “They’ll be no match for my lad.”
Only one lad? Colm had seen at least twenty Ghosts. “How many did you fetch?”
“Thirty-one. You couldn’t have done that, could you?”
“No.”
“Practice, practice, practice.”
The door flew open. There stood two of Dhjerga’s identical soldiers. One dragged a dead queazel. The other was gnawing a leg of roast fowl.
A rush of excitement overtook Colm. Freedom was a headier drug than tropodolfin. He squeezed past the soldiers as Dhjerga pelted them with staccato imprecations in some unknown language. One of them mutely held out Colm’s own old .38. Colm snatched it. He barrelled down the stairs, shouting over his shoulder, “We need to question the queazels! Tell them not to kill any more of them!”
“They say they’ve already deaded the lot,” Dhjerga shouted after him.
But they had not ‘deaded’ Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth. He came out from behind the potted plants in the conservatory in response to Colm’s urgent shouts.
The smell of gore overlaid the fragrance of the Uzzizellan plants. Gil checked at the sight of Rivizolla, dead on the tiles, his little body torn almost in half.
“Oh, my friend,” he said.
He looked up at Colm, who was standing between two Ghosts. If Colm had ever wondered whether a queazel’s face could express grief and shock, he had his answer now.
Colm hardened his heart. He spun his .38 by the trigger guard, breaking every rule of firearm safety at once. “So how does it feel when it’s your planet?”
“This is not our planet.”
“Right. It’s ours now.”
“You are making a terrible mistake.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Thanks for the tropodolfin, by the way.”
“The implant only works when certain neural pathways are activated. That was an accidental discovery, but a crucial one.”
“It’s such an honor to be a guinea pig. Well, at least I’m a live guinea pig, unlike the others.”
“I believed from the start that you were the best candidate. I wanted you to save your species.”
“At least I can avenge them.”
Gil rose on his hind legs. The guns of the Ghosts tracked him. “You are making a mistake,” he repeated desperately.
“No, you’re the one who made a mistake.” Colm turned away, looking for something to tie Gil up with. “Genocide by proxy? I hope the sentrienza paid you well.”
Dhjerga was examining Rivizolla’s body. “Are these good to eat?”
“No. And I don’t want anyone eating Gil, either,” Colm added, just in case.
“Why?”
Colm shrugged. He found some twine that had been used to tie up the potted plants, and bound Gil’s paws in four sets of two.
Dhjerga went to oversee the ransacking of the castle for food and weapons. Colm questioned Gil about the sentrienza presence in Kevesingod. He learnt that there was a fortified customs post out on the headland. Somewhere between eighty and a hundred sentrienza worked there. It served as a choke point to control shipping in and out of the continent. They had barges, speedboats, and off-road vehicles. Naturally, they also had Walking Guns.
The really bad news—or the good news, depending on how you looked at it—was that the customs post also had a landing pad and fuel depot for spacecraft. If the alarm went up, reinforcements could arrive in a matter of hours.
“What about surveillance and comms?” Colm said. “I assume there are sats tracking everything bigger than a fly.”
“Of course there are.” Gil lay full length on the couch, his bound feet sticking out in front of him. He said in a muffled whine, “They’ll obliterate you.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Colm picked Gil’s computer off the table. “Now, call your people in town.”
“What people?”
“The other queazels. Whoever you usually talk to.”
“They fear me. They do not love me.”
“Fear will do today. Order them to help us any way they can. Tell them they don’t work for the sentrienza anymore.”
“The sentrienza hold us in the palm of their hand. They will kill us all.”
“Tell them we’ll need vehicles and power sources. If you don’t do it, now, I’m
taking all the pills and booze with me when we leave.”
CHAPTER 44
MEG STOOD NEXT TO a carousel display of extension cords, fingers spread to make a small gap in the venetian blinds of the hardware store.
The sentrienza’s satellite coverage, she assumed, was good enough to run facial recognition software off the product. The only reason Meg and Axel were still alive was that the sentrienza didn’t have the assets on the ground, up here in the far north, to match their space-based intelligence capabilities. Walking Guns were scary, but they couldn’t climb vertical cliffs. Meg and Axel had made it back to town on foot. On the point of collapse from sheer fatigue, they’d taken refuge in the hardware store where Meg had bought her gun.
The shablag owner had given them food and drink, but he didn’t want them here. “Please leave,” he begged, as the faint howls of the Walking Guns came nearer.
“It’ll be OK,” Meg said, not taking her eyes off the empty street.
Would it be OK? She didn’t see how. Damn their stupid Organization. If it was her organization, she’d have organized it better. She wouldn’t have involved the shablags, for a start.
The shopkeeper hid behind the counter, nothing showing but the woolly purple top of his head, his trembling nose, and his button eyes.
Axel stood by the door, holding an AK from the shopkeeper’s illicit inventory.
Meg had selected one of those homemade Gauss jobs. The electromagnetic coil launching system allowed for an impressive rate of fire, making up for a smaller projectile size. You didn’t need magnum rounds to take out robots the size of beagles, anyway. At least that was her theory.
The eerie howling came closer.
Doors slammed down the street. Glass shattered.
The Walking Guns were going door to door. Meg abandoned her faint hope that they wouldn’t come in here. She backed away from the window, late afternoon sun striping her filthy jeans and t-shirt.
Axel set his AK to his shoulder.
The shopkeeper squealed despairingly and fled through the low door at the back of the shop.
Someone knocked on the front door.
Meg pressed her back to the counter, aiming at the small shadow outside the frosted glass.
The door rattled.
“Sorry, we’re closed,” Axel shouted.
The lock exploded. Axel stepped back as the door burst inwards.
A Walking Gun scampered into the shop—
—straight into point-blank enfilade fire.
Ricochets shattered the display window. Meg mentally apologized to the shablag for wrecking his store.
The Walking Gun froze in the hail of bullets. Incredibly, it was still in one piece. Its face began to fold apart like metal origami.
Meg yelled, “Get in the back.” She couldn’t hear herself. Couldn’t hear a fucking thing. Which meant Axel couldn’t hear her, either. She grabbed the back of his shirt, shoved him around the end of the counter. The mag of her Gauss was empty, the coil housing so hot that she had to wrap her sleeve around her hand. She dived after Axel.
The Walking Gun vomited a swarm of tiny flechettes. No bigger than wasps, they flocked above the counter.
Heatseeking flechettes.
Oh, you sneaky bastards.
Meg flung the Gauss—its barrel hot enough to give you a third-degree burn—over the counter. The flechettes changed direction to follow it.
She and Axel scrambled through the half-height hatch into the storeroom at the back of the shop. A couple of flechettes buzzed in after them, their wee electric turbines whirring.
A low rumble shook the storeroom. She glimpsed the shablag shopkeeper disappearing through a curtain. A window.
She and Axel tumbled out onto weeds smelling of cat piss, a moment before the building collapsed. Broken slates fell like missiles.
The shablag grinned weakly and thumbed his chest, taking credit for the explosion. Holy crap. He had had his own shop wired to blow. Talk about commitment. Maybe the Organization was more than just a futile fantasy, after all ...
Meg and Axel ran along a narrow strip of waste ground between the backs of houses. Behind them, dust clouded into the air from the settling husk of the hardware shop. Only the outer walls remained standing. The roof had caved in and taken everything else down with it. Hopefully the Walking Gun was buried under that mess. But it wouldn’t take long for its cohorts to arrive.
Axel body-slammed a back door, shouldered inside. Meg followed him into a warm, cozy kitchen full of queazels.
Axel had hung onto his AK. He wheeled, finger on the trigger, eyes wild. The queazels cowered.
Meg clamped her hand on Axel’s gun arm. “They’re civilians!”
“They’re the sentrienza’s useful idiots.” He shook her off and backed towards the door, covering the queazels.
Meg leaned against the wall. On a stove no higher than her knee, stew was cooking, filling the kitchen with a rich savory scent. She was done. Stick a fork in her. She couldn’t run another step.
One of the smallest queazels stood up on its hind legs. It squeaked in English, “You hide from Walking Guns?”
Meg said gaily, “Just sightseeing.” She ran her hands through her filthy hair. Wondered if she’d meet her mother again on the other side.
The queazels chittered to each other. Then the small one said, “You stay here! Hide. We hide you.”
“You’ll call the sentrienza, turn us in,” Axel snarled.
“No! We no work for sentrienza anymore!”
A few hours later, Meg woke on the floor of the queazel family’s linen closet. Someone was shaking her. She blinked sleep out of her eyes and looked into Colm’s face.
*
“UP AND AT ‘EM, GUNNY,” Colm said. When she stood up, he pulled her into a hug. “God, it’s good to see you.”
She rubbed her face on his t-shirt. His heart thumped under her cheek. He stank, but so did she, probably. He was solid and warm and alive. She briefly remembered embracing Axel earlier—it felt like a lifetime ago. Now she knew with overwhelming certainty that that had just been a substitute for this. That was complicated, confusing, often uncomfortable; this was simply ... right.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” she said with an unaccustomed wobble in her voice.
“All this time I’ve been wondering what happened to you.”
“I was teaching karate for a while, and then we got involved in a plot to overthrow the sentrienza.”
A shadow blocked the door of the linen closet, which was only four feet high. Axel’s face looked in, sideways.
Colm stepped away from Meg.
Axel said, “Have you seen what’s in the kitchen?” He backed away.
Meg crawled out, feeling guilty, and resenting Axel for making her feel guilty. But her heart bubbled over with joy, and a grin stuck to her face.
“Where’ve you been, Collie Mack?”
“Somewhere I didn’t want to be,” Colm said, crawling out of the closet. “I got out earlier, with a little help from the guys you’re about to meet. Don’t freak out. I promise you they’re all right.”
She went downstairs behind him, stooping beneath the low lintels of the queazel home. Her grin dropped off her face when she saw who was in the kitchen.
Or rather, what.
Two Ghosts stood by the stove, eating stew straight from the pot. Axel sat on one of the foot-high benches at the two-foot kitchen table. Another Ghost stood behind him, pointing its rifle at his head. “As you see, we came too late,” Axel said to Meg.
She didn’t understand why Axel wasn’t dead yet. Why she and Colm weren’t. Why the queazel family were whisking around, chittering excitedly, instead of lying in a sea of blood on the floor.
One of the Ghosts eating stew looked different from the others. Older, more intelligent. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared beadily at Meg. “Is she an original?”
“Huh?” Colm said. “Yeah, I would say Meg is fairly original.”
“They all talk,” Colm said. “But the others only talk in their own language. Their rules of engagement forbid talking around us. So we never knew they could.”
“What about him?” the same Ghost said, pointing at Axel. “Original?”
“Definitely.” Colm grinned at Axel, apparently oblivious to Axel’s thunderous demeanor. Colm was shifting his weight from foot to foot, picking things up and putting them down again, holding a mug of tea but not drinking from it. Meg had a sad revelation. He was high. “We don’t have time to screw around. We’re going to hit the customs post. Neutralize the sentrienza before they figure out what’s happening. Do you want to come? Or stay here?”
Meg said, “Hell yeah, I’m coming.” The world had turned upside-down. Colm alone seemed to have a handle on the weirdness. Anyway, now that she’d found him again, she wasn’t losing him a second time.
“Brilliant,” Colm said. “Axel?”
One of the queazel children bounced up and down. “Me! Me! I come with!”
Colm picked the cat-sized creature up and playfully tickled it. “Sorry. No kids.” He put the protesting child down. “What about it, Axel?”
“You’re planning an assault on the customs post?” Axel said.
“That’s right.”
“You and whose army?”
“Mine,” said the English-speaking Ghost. His chilly smile made Meg edge closer to Colm. “Lots of juice in this town.”
“So this is how it ends?” Axel said to Colm. “In surrender?”
The Ghost said in a cold, level voice, “The Tegression never surrender.”
“That’s what they call themselves,” Colm said. “The Tegression.” He was red in the face. “This is our only chance of getting off this planet alive.”
Meg said, “They’re the enemy.” But she was remembering Emnl ki-Sharongat’s contract.
Axel said to the Ghost, “The sentrienza will wipe you out.”
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 27
