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

by Felix R. Savage

  Pills.

  He dumped the entire trove of vials and blister packs in front of the sentrienza girl. “Quick, tell me what this lot is. In English.”

  Hesitantly, she named each drug. “... and this is tropodolfin.”

  Colm ripped open a blister pack, dry-swallowed a double dose. The sentrienza girl stared at him.

  What a rush. It felt like taking the stuff for the first time. He almost forgot that he was inches from death. Colors popped like an enhanced photograph. Energy fizzed through his limbs.

  The Walking Gun growled.

  “Easy,” Colm said. He petted its spined metal head.

  Power surged into his hand, dizzying, like sticking your finger in a socket. He jerked back.

  Little streamers of electricity writhed from the Walking Gun, so bright that the grove looked dark.

  Terror gripped him. Worse than the first time, because now he knew what this meant.

  “Our Father, who are in heaven,” he gabbled. The prayer came out as white puffs in the suddenly freezing air. “... forever and ever amen.”

  The words steadied him. Irrational terror lost ground to the real danger of dying when the Ruddiganmaseve broke up.

  Think.

  If Dhjerga Lizp could fetch reinforcements, and weapons, and rats, from hundreds of light years away, surely Colm could fetch ....

  He thought of his rack on the Unsinkable, and the gunship he’d flown in the Fleet, and then the Shady Lady. His mind filled with a queasy soup of impressions—an empty hangar, barren asphalt, the nasty feeling of stepping on a top step that isn’t there. If any of those ships still existed, they were no longer where he had left them.

  Made sense, really. Spaceships were always moving around. He needed to look somewhere else. Someplace where things stayed the same from one year to the next ...

  No sooner had he thought of it than he was there, in the byre at Tim Jenkins’s croft, a quarter of a mile from his parents’ house.

  He smelled hay, machine oil, and dust.

  Felt the warmth of the autumn sunlight slanting through the open door.

  It was all so real. And there were details that couldn’t come from memory. A parked quad bike that looked new. He could hear a peculiar hissing noise in the farmyard. A marmalade cat walked into the byre and arched its back, tail fluffed out like a bottlebrush.

  “It’s only me,” Colm said. He remembered this cat. Rusty, its name was. “Here, Rusty, here kitty ...”

  The cat scampered out of the byre. Colm came out of his trance of amazement and remembered what he was here for.

  A collection of farm tools hung on the side wall.

  He scanned them, then turned and studied the other walls.

  The environmental hazard suits weren’t there.

  When farmers burned the heather, or worked with agricultural chemicals, they had to wear orange clown suits with their own integrated air supply. It was required by Scottish law. You got fined for failing to comply. Old Tim Jenkins was a law-abiding geezer. Colm had been counting on finding those hazard suits hanging in the same place they had hung for twenty years when not in use.

  Some lumpy sacks hung on the wall next to the tools. Maybe the suits were in there. Colm drifted over to the wall. It felt as if he were floating in freefall, except that he could move with a thought. He passed through the quad bike as if it wasn’t there ... or he wasn’t there. He panicked, wondering if his hands would pass straight through the sacks.

  His fingers snagged on the rough bioplastic.

  He opened one sack, peered inside.

  Candles. Dozens and dozens of lumpy, homemade candles.

  Another sack.

  Cogs, gears, flywheels.

  No hazard suits.

  Distantly, as if from an adjacent radio channel, he heard the sentrienza girl jabbering, really scared now. She wasn’t the only one. Colm flew out of the byre, across the farmyard. Tim Jenkins and three or four neighbors were working on a bizarre vehicle that looked like a hot water boiler mounted on tractor wheels. A jet of steam shot from a valve in the boiler. That was the hissing sound he’d heard. The men leapt back and laughed ruefully. So entranced was Colm by the vehicle (it’s a steam tractor! This is how you get along without powered equipment ...) that it took him a second to notice the denim-clad legs sticking out from under it.

  They looked familiar.

  His breath caught in his chest (and he tasted stale spaceship air). Like the ghost he was, he slid under the steam tractor. Neither Tim Jenkins nor the neighbors noticed anything. But Lloyd Mackenzie, lying on his back under the tractor, tinkering with its valve gear, dropped his wrench and cursed, staring into the dripping shadow beneath the boiler.

  “Dad, it’s me.”

  His father whispered, “Fuck! No! Get away! I’ve done nothing this time, nothing—”

  “Dad! It’s Colm!” Oil dripped from the pistons, into his eyes and through him, to the gravel.

  Lloyd Mackenzie scrabbled out from underneath the tractor. Red-faced, he stood up. “Try her now, Tim,” he said casually, as if he hadn’t just been spitting rage and terror into the shadows. But as the other men clustered around the engine, Lloyd retreated across the yard and sipped, with trembling lips, from a tea mug standing on the windowsill.

  Colm stood in front of him, casting no shadow. “Dad. I know you can see me. I know you can hear me.”

  Lloyd’s teeth chattered on the rim of his mug.

  “Where are the hazard suits?”

  “Get away from me, you bastard,” Lloyd breathed.

  “The environmental hazard suits! Has Tim still got them? Where’s he keeping them now?”

  “Out in the bothy,” Lloyd whispered. “Haven’t you had the run of the countryside for months? Why are you asking me?”

  The venom in his voice lacerated Colm. His father thought he was a Ghost, and there was nothing he could do to correct him. He fled out of the farmyard, flying over the back field and up the hill, soaring into the air like a kite.

  He’d always dreamed of flying like this, with no need of wings or drive. It was utterly quiet. Too quiet. There was no traffic on the A82. Flying higher, he saw no one on the streets of Drumnadrochit, although a few people stood on the parapets of Loch Ness Castle, a former hotel that a rich guy had converted into a fortress some years back.

  Looking west to the loch itself, the impression of abandonment turned upside-down. A flotilla of boats clustered in the middle of the lake. Large boats and small. Yachts, tourist cruisers, ferries, fishing boats. Oh, they’re refugees, Colm thought. My people have become refugees in their own country.

  A lot can happen in a year.

  The Ghosts had come to Earth.

  Reeling from the shock, Colm focused with an effort on his own mission.

  The bothy.

  He knew the place his father meant. Up on the mountainside above the loch, there was an old shepherd’s bothy, used jointly by the few crofters who still kept sheep. It doubled as a refuge for hikers and Loch Ness Monster hunters caught in the rain.

  Colm skimmed up the hill, lower and lower, trailing his toes and fingers through the purple sprays of heather. Its heady scent brought back his childhood. Memory carried him straight to the weathered breezeblock cube standing proud above the loch.

  It was an ugly little building.

  Defensible, though. From up here, you’d be able to see enemies coming from miles around.

  No sooner had that occurred to him than he saw a rifle protruding from the curtains of the bothy’s single window.

  The locals must have manned the place as a sentry post. Good thinking—

  A sentry patrolled around the corner of the bothy.

  It was a Ghost.

  Colm recoiled, and for a moment felt yellow sentrienza grass prickling his face. Then he realized that the Ghost couldn’t see him, any more than the crofters had. It was just a copy.

  He drifted to the open door and went inside.

  The bothy consiste
d of a single room with a fireplace. Despite the bright sunlight outside, it was eerily dark in here. Only the embers smouldering in the hearth gave light. There was a foul whiff of sewer gas.

  A Ghost stood by the window, his top half hidden by the curtains—the rifleman.

  No one else in the room, but in the corner by the fire, the shadows clumped so thick and black they looked like a living thing.

  The firelight gleamed on the uppers of two gigantic muddy boots.

  As if magnetized, Colm drifted towards the hearth.

  The mass of shadow quivered. Wintry blue eyes opened and fixed him.

  A bony finger rose into view. It crooked into a many-knuckled C, beckoning to Colm.

  He made out a mountain of supplies piled in the corner beside the shadow. Sacks and crates, and a wad of orange rubberized fabric that might very well be Tim Jenkins’s hazard suits. But he still could not properly make out the shadow itself. It was blurry at the edges and impenetrable at the center. Only the eyes shone like chips cut from the heart of a blue giant.

  “Come here,” rasped a voice, eerily similar to Dhjerga Lizp’s, but deeper and fainter at the same time, as if it came from a long way away.

  Terror paralyzed Colm. He was being torn in half. One foot in the present, one in the past; one foot on Earth, one in the Betelgeuse system. His consciousness doubled. His resolve frayed.

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “Get off my planet,” Colm gasped.

  “Not your planet, human mage. Ours.”

  Sheer outrage fueled Colm’s strength. He knelt and thrust his hands into the fire. He scrabbled up two handfuls of hot embers. The heat was real. So was the pain. It sickened him, and at the same time sharpened his awareness. Rising on his knees, he smashed the red-hot chunks of wood into the wintry eyes.

  A scream sawed through the bothy. The Ghost at the window whirled. The curtains billowed, tossing sunlight into the room.

  Colm fell forward, into the shadow, into bone-freezing cold, and through it. The shadow shrank away like black snow in the light. Colm landed face-first on the pile of supplies.

  With the last of his strength, he locked his fingers into the environmental hazard suits.

  *

  COLM OPENED HIS EYES in the sentrienza grove, 600 light years away. He lay on the prickly yellow grass, face down, with two SGHSC-compliant hazard suits underneath him.

  The sentrienza girl was shaking him. “Wake up! Wake up!”

  “Fuck,” Colm mumbled. His mind felt like a wet dishrag. Had he hurt the shadowy Ghost? Or merely startled it? He couldn’t hope that he’d killed it, but maybe he had chased it away from Drumnadrochit for a while.

  “You went all blurry!”

  He flexed his fingers. They still hurt, but it was a phantom pain. Esthesia pain. His hands weren’t burned or blistered. He shook himself, reorienting his mind to his surroundings.

  The ceiling had gone black. Dim golden light came from hitherto-unnoticed clusters of insects on the tree branches. The air tasted bad. The hazard suits lay on the grass like floppy corpses. He thrust one of them at the girl. “Put this on.”

  “It smells.”

  “It’s only dusty.” Colm unzipped his own hazard suit and scrambled into it. “These things have airtight seals and integrated oxygen. Look for the mask inside the hood.” He found his own. It seemed awfully flimsy. “Jesus, I hope these have been maintained properly ...”

  “No one’s coming to save us.” Paddling in the oversized suit, the sentrienza girl looked like she had had a fight with an Arctic tent and lost. “And you broke my Walking Gun.”

  “Did I?” Colm glanced at the motionless machine. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. We rely too much on them, anyway.”

  The remaining atmosphere drained away through stress fractures in the internal walls of the sentrienza ship.

  The AG failed.

  They floated in a rapidly cooling vacuum, their lives dependent on the vigilance of faraway Scottish agricultural safety inspectors.

  CHAPTER 55

  “I’M GOING WITH THE Marines,” Axel said to his father. He still wanted to kill him, but he knew he wouldn’t gain anything by that. He sealed his leathers. Checked the battery and oxygen reserves. Confirmed the flechette pistol was in his thigh pocket.

  “I’d actually prefer it if you didn’t go,” Philip K. Best said, “after I came all this way to find you.”

  Axel faked a smile. “But you see, Dad, I don’t particularly care what you think.”

  His father had told him everything. He felt like a teenager again, filled with rage and hate. The only way he could refrain from doing something stupid was to do what he had done before: join the Marines.

  He soared up multiple deck levels at a bound, freefalling towards the flight deck.

  All but one of the Corvettes had gone from the hangar. Axel boarded the last one. He knew the pilot from his previous stint on the Unsinkable, and had asked him to wait. Sure, no problem. Anything for Philip K. Best’s son.

  Axel took a couch in the main cabin. “Prepare for launch,” the pilot bellowed over the PA system.

  A platoon of Marines sat in teak-trimmed wombs on a skating rink of ebony parquet. Gel-plumped satin cushioned their asses. Safety videos played on individual screens. The high-end décor reminded Axel embarrassingly of how he’d pored over the options for the Shady Lady. The Rat had used the same tricks to disguise this Corvette as a luxury yacht. But these ships had been built on a fighter chassis ... and now they were fighters. Engineers working flat out for the last 48 hours had up-armored the fuselages and installed weapons platforms that put Axel’s light railgun to shame.

  The Rat and his cronies—Axel’s father foremost among them—had planned a military takeover of the Betelgeuse system before they left Gna. They had come prepared, while keeping to the letter of the demilitarization pact.

  Their surprise assault had destroyed all eight sentrienza ships in Juradis orbit. Score one for human audacity. But it didn’t feel like a victory to Axel.

  The Corvette burned away from the Unsinkable, thrusting ahead of the carrier. It rose up to a higher, slower orbit, jinking through a debris field that used to be a sentrienza ship. The Marines got up and prowled around the cabin.

  It felt to Axel like they’d just thrown a stone into an electrified fence. The sentrienza undoubtedly had more assets at Noom and Barjoltan. They would counter-attack as rapidly as STL transit times allowed.

  These guys had boners for the action to come. They couldn’t wait to get back in the alien-stomping game.

  Axel stared at the ceiling and thought about Meg.

  He’d had to sit in the Rat’s office on the engineering deck and watch the Ruddiganmaseve dismantled, hull plate by hull plate.

  The Corvette’s radar picked up bits of sentrienza ship debris. The gunner tried out his new charged particle cannons on them. He wasn’t just screwing around: the debris had to be cleared away, or it would turn low orbit into a minefield. The Marines cheered the explosions. Axel gritted his teeth.

  “What’s that?” he said suddenly. A larger piece of debris drifted across the darkness, infrared-crimson.

  “What we’re looking for, could be,” the pilot said. “Maneuvering to intercept now.”

  The piece of debris was in a lower orbit, where the Ruddiganmaseve would have been. As it caught up with the Corvette, the pilot burned to dump speed and drop down on top of it.

  The sentrienza constructed their FTL ships on a modular, snap-together template. When whole, they resembled the pieces of dead coral Axel used to find as a child on the beach outside his family’s vacation house in Maui. This module, torn away from the Ruddiganmaseve, looked more like a fossilized vertebra. It was twenty times the size of the Corvette. It did not react in any way as they approached.

  The pilot stood off, taking an age to synchronize the Corvette’s pitch and yaw with the slowly tumbling module. Axel dug his gloved fingers into the ar
mrests in impatience. He himself could have done this better and faster. The pilot had had his esthesia implant removed as a condition of demilitarization. Axel still had his ... no, but he wasn’t switching it on again. He wanted nothing to do with anything that came from his father.

  Soft dock complete, the Marines checked each other’s seals. They disembarked in combat order. Two by two, they cannoned out of the airlock and clamped onto the gritty, greasy steel of the sentrienza module. Then began the ball-shrivelling task of crawling over the surface, looking for a way in.

  In the end, they blew a pressure door. No air rushed out. The module had already depressurized. Could anyone possibly be alive in here?

  No lights.

  No power.

  No gravity.

  The Marines spread out in four-man fire teams. Their cold-gas mobility rockets pushed them along the corridors. Radio comms were curt, professional. The active night vision filter on Axel’s faceplate illuminated twisting passages in shades of green. Stalactites thorned the ceiling. They could have been underground instead of 200 klicks above Juradis.

  Axel dropped back and waited for the rest of his team to vanish around a corner. They let him go—he wasn’t one of them.

  Then he went the other way. He had a roughly sketched map on his infocals. If this really was a fragment of the Ruddiganmaseve, the hangar ought to be ...

  Here.

  But there was no hangar.

  The corridor dead-ended in a ragged cliff. Beyond, nothing but empty space. The Marines needn’t have blown that pressure door. The whole end of the module had sheared off.

  Axel turned and made his way back up the corridor. He had failed. He punched the wall in frustration.

  It sagged open.

  Huh?

  Faint golden light shone out through the slit in the wall. Axel wrenched the valve wider, straining against hydraulics that were now deadweight.

  He squeezed into an enchanted garden. Golden lights like candles ornamented the branches of frozen trees. Dead leaves drifted against his faceplate.

  Caught in the branches of the trees, two orange humanoid forms hung motionless.

  Axel’s flesh goosepimpled. He cautiously approached the smaller person. It was a sentrienza. Her lips moved, but the suit she was wearing obviously had no radio functionality. He moved on to the larger one.