The Atomic Sea: Omnibus of Volumes Six, Seven and Eight

by Conner, Jack

  In addition to all this, Layanna designed a type of automated drill, similar to that used by oilers, that could be carried by a lightning-rod-protected helicopter or dirigible and deposited on the back of a Starfish. What with all the extradimensional energy surrounding the creature, it would prove virtually impossible for Layanna to set down on its back and bore a hole through it herself. They would depend on the drill to do that for them, and then she would drop through the new-formed cavity in its exoskeleton from the safety of an airship before any of the Starfish’s defenses could kill her. Only then could she administer the poison, assuming one could be fashioned. To that end, once she organized the team to build the drill, she more or less left them on their own while she worked with Avery on developing a substance lethal enough to end the creature.

  More days passed, and meanwhile the oncoming wave of Starfish (most of the papers were calling the creatures that now, independent of Avery, though the yellower periodicals still referred to them as the Things or the Horrors from the Deep) destroyed one island after another. Reports from up and down the coast confirmed the presence of multiple such creatures, wiping out islands in a broad swath along the section of the sea fronting the continents of Consur and Urslin, and all moving toward the mainland. One was said to be coming straight for Hissig. Refugees that had fled to the islands to escape the onslaught of Octung now fled back, and Ghenisa was more overburdened with the homeless and destitute than ever before—people who then, hearing reports of the approaching Starfish, began to pack their bags to flee Ghenisa for parts further inland. More replaced them.

  It was a world of refugees, with camps set up in any available space; charity groups, churches and even the overburdened government tending to them, but it was not enough. Every group had been pushed to its breaking point, not least the refugees. Crime ran rampant. The police went on strike before Prime Minister Denaris forced them back to work.

  Another issue vexed Avery. Early on, he found time to meet with Prime Minister Denaris about finding and keeping an eye on Sheridan in an effort to prevent her from delivering the Atoshan relic to whoever Davic’s contact was, but Sheridan proved elusive, and deadly. Two of Denaris’s agents failed to return from their assigned tailings, and after that the agents tasked with watching her did so too cautiously to produce any appreciable results. Avery was forced to realize that he could not stop Sheridan delivering the relic, and in all likelihood the contact already possessed it. All Avery could do was hope this didn’t prove disastrous.

  On the sixth day of work in the laboratory, he and Layanna were interrupted by an official aide.

  “The Prime Minister wants to meet with you.”

  Avery and Layanna joined the others in the lobby—Janx, Hildra and the Prime Minister.

  “Rest assured, I summoned you here for a worthwhile reason,” Denaris said. “If you recall, I mentioned having another motive for inviting you into my ranks, and that is this: to get your opinion, perhaps advice, on a most particular corpse.”

  “Corpse,” Hildra repeated, and Avery frowned.

  Other than used clothes and a slouching hat, Denaris made no concession toward disguise, but disguised she was. She meant to set forth from behind the walls of her siege. Leading them with some authority and flanked by two casually-dressed guards, she led the group down a staircase and into a system of tunnels, explaining that these had originally been built out by the Drakes (the Parliament Building had been erected on the site of the old Palace, destroyed after the Revolution) to conduct their secret business, and she and her people used it now to get around Haggarty. She would teach Avery’s party how to use them and give them access cards so that they could come and go at will.

  A car waited for them on the street at the termination of one of the halls and they piled in, Janx asking, “Where we goin’?”

  “Why, the morgue, of course.”

  After a drive of perhaps twenty minutes, a guard opened a side door of the city morgue for them. Their footfalls echoed off the stone walls and tile floor as Denaris led them through the institution, seeming to know her way around better than she should. The air grew colder as they entered a frigid, medium-sized room lined with cracked marble on two sides and stainless steel banks of body vaults on the other two. Harsh lights lit long tables, and at one a watery-eyed man in scrubs bent over a partly vivisected infected woman. He glanced up as they entered and pulled down his mask.

  “Prime Minister,” he said, bowing his head in a strangely lopsided gesture. “Good day.”

  “Everyone, meet Dr. Donnel Gehyme. Donnel, everyone.”

  “Hello,” he said. “You’ve come to see ... him, I suppose?”

  “We have. May we?”

  Donnel bobbed his wrinkled, balding head, washed his hands and crossed to one of the banks of body cabinets, moving directly to a certain storage unit, then pausing, as if reluctant for some reason to open it. Was it fear that made him hesitate, or showmanship?

  “Is it a pre-human?” Avery asked.

  “No,” Denaris said. “It’s human enough, though infected.”

  “Is it a particularly odd mutation, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  “Then why ... ?”

  She nodded to Donnel, and he opened the drawer with a flourish—it had been showmanship—and grinned down at the body on the slab. Avery gasped. The body was that of a man in his fifties, badly mutated, with gills on one side of his neck, his nose almost vanished, lips rubbery and large, and webs between the fingers of his right hand—his only hand.

  Less than half of the man remained. Everything below his navel was gone, a ragged, strangely melted-looking truncation, and the slash—or wound, or whatever it was—angled up to include his left arm as well, so that all that was left of him was most of a torso, a head and a right arm that had been broken in several places. His whole body, what was left of it, seemed floppy and shrunken. Boneless. As if he had been hurled so hard against something that every bone in his body had shattered. Fish or the like had been at the body, and it had evidently been submerged in water some time, as it was a gnawed and shriveled thing, seemingly about to fall apart. A foul odor rose from it.

  “Hells,” Janx said. “What did this?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me,” Denaris said. Then, to Layanna: “More specifically, you.”

  Layanna stared at the corpse, seemingly unable to speak. An odd expression had entered her features; Avery couldn’t place it.

  “It is a medical mystery,” Donnel said. “Nothing in my experience, even the pre-human races that I know of, could have caused such a death. I’ve analyzed where the body was severed and I believe it was done by some sort of corrosive acid.”

  “Acid,” Denaris repeated, as if that were significant. She watched Layanna. “What do you think? Don’t worry, you can speak in front of Donnel.”

  Layanna still did not answer, and the Prime Minister frowned.

  “Where was the body found?” Avery said. “It looks as though fish have been nibbling on it. Possibly more than fish. And that smell …”

  “Near one of the sewer settlements,” Denaris said.

  “Sewer settlements?” Avery said, giving Janx a look. “I know you mentioned them before, but, surely … they’re an urban myth.”

  “The body was found down there, washed in from a tunnel, drifting on the tide,” the Prime Minister declared flatly, then added, “One of many. Layanna, you still don’t want to say what did this?”

  Gazing at the body, that expression only deepened on Layanna’s face—something like sadness, but not, Avery thought, for the dead man.

  “The condition of the body closely matches that of several of the corpses found in Janx’s apartment the night you escaped from Fort Brunt,” Denaris said. “Torn apart and melted by acid, hurled with great force. Other bodies were charred, as if electrocuted. More were filled with a type of poison never seen before. I’ve had other doctors than Donnel take a look at this body, and scientists,
too. No one can determine what did this.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Layanna said.

  “I didn’t imagine it was,” Denaris said. “It was found while you were away. But do you agree that it bears all the hallmarks of someone slain by one of your kind?”

  Janx shared a long, hard look with Avery, who nodded.

  “Yes,” Layanna said. “Though the body is badly deteriorated, it was most likely one of my kind that slew this man.” To Avery, she added, “We have one more problem to contend with, then.”

  There was something peculiar in her voice as she said this. It was not worry, he thought, nor fear. It was, once again, sadness. Perhaps even longing.

  * * *

  “Great, another R’loth in the city,” Janx said, sipping on a fine glass of wine. They were in a study of the Parliament Building, just having dined with Prime Minister Denaris and her family—comprised of two lovely daughters somewhat older than Ani and an unnaturally handsome, bland and fit husband, Michael.

  “Looks that way,” Avery agreed, staring out a window. Lights twinkled in the nighttime city. Far away, Fort Brunt loomed, sinister and hulking, and he wondered if Sheridan were staring out one of its windows toward him, the city between them, like players over a chessboard. Like Idris and Ajaun. The Voryses … Ani …

  “Guess he’s a Collossum, right?” Hildra said. “I mean, a R’loth changed to look human? He wouldn’t be ... unchanged?”

  “Most likely a Collossum,” Avery agreed.

  “So he could be anyone. You go pokin’ around in the sewers, keep that in mind.”

  “You, too. I intend to take you with me if I go.”

  “Fuck that.”

  Avery shook his head. “I still can’t believe there are mutants living in the sewers.”

  “Believe it,” Janx said.

  Avery tried to picture such a settlement and failed. Moving on, he said, “How long has the Collossum been here, I wonder?”

  “You don’t think he just showed up?”

  “There’s no reason to think so. Layanna did not feel his—or her—or its—presence when we entered the city, so there’s no reason to think she would have before. The Collossum could have been here for years.”

  “Decades,” Hildra said.

  “So, then, the question is why now is it exerting itself? Why is it killing people, or at least allowing their bodies to be found? It must have been killing since its arrival. That’s how these creatures live, how they sustain their extradimensional capabilities, eating intelligent beings with the sea in their blood. It could be that’s why it’s chosen the sewers, if it has. A large population of infected live there, so you say, disenfranchised and unlikely or unable to go to the authorities for help.”

  “So we’ll investigate?”

  “I would like to,” Avery said. “Ideally we would find the Collossum. That’s where she will have taken it—Sheridan. That’s where she’ll have taken the relic. That’s why Davic sent her here. I had thought he must mean her to take it to Haggarty, but no. He meant for her to take it to this Collossum, I’m certain of it.”

  “Why does the Collie need it?”

  “No idea. Davic said his contact here had the right machines for the job, whatever that is. In any case, I assume Sheridan will deliver the relic to him, if she hasn’t already, possibly through Gaescruhd, if what I suspect is true.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Remember that night we spied on him and Sheridan?” he asked Hildra.

  “I’ll never forget it.”

  “Gaescruhd had to make a phone call to get permission from someone to kill Layanna. He couldn’t make the decision to kill a Collossum himself. I believe this Collossum, the one committing the murders, is that individual—Gaescruhd’s link to the R’loth. It was this individual that approached him initially, or one of its underlings, and contracted him to their service. They needed a powerful underworld figure, and Gaescruhd was it. Meanwhile they set about seizing control of the upper-world, too, through Sheridan and Haggarty.”

  “Okay, but what are the machines for?” Janx said.

  “I don’t know. Apparently he or she, whatever the Collossum is, intends to do something with the artifact taken from the Atoshan monastery. Activate it, perhaps. Perhaps it’s a beacon to signal the Starfish, to draw it here. Or ... well, it could be anything. We must find out what the artifact is and, very likely, stop the Collossum from using it.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Hildra said.

  “From what Gwen told us, apparently the man who found the body—and many others—a man named Jeffers—is a hard fellow to track down. She has agents out combing the sewers for him, but until he can be located and is able to show Denaris’s people where the bodies originated from—and Jeffers is the only one to have reported them—until then we can’t know where the Collossum is. Or, at least, where it killed those people.”

  “Figures,” Janx said.

  “Won’t see me complaining,” Hildra said. “Last thing I wanna do is fight a Collie.”

  “In any case, we must let it go for now,” Avery said. “Maybe we can confront the Collossum later, when Denaris is able to locate Jeffers. Until then, we have a different priority. Nothing is more important than dealing with the Starfish.”

  Leaving them, Avery entered the suite Ani and Layanna had been given. Layanna had not elected to join them for drinks, as she’d been tense and moody all day since viewing the body. He didn’t see her in the living room of the suite, and Ani barely looked up as he shut the door.

  “Is she asleep?” he asked. Ani was watching a boxy television set, black and white images flickering across her pretty, scarred face. Ani had never had a television all to herself before, unless it happened in Octung when he hadn’t been around, and it seemed to transfix her utterly.

  “Huh?” she said. “Oh. Yeah. She’s not in a good mood. She didn’t want to watch the show with me. Neither did Kara or Willi.” These were Denaris’s two daughters. They had acted polite toward Ani over dinner, but they had seemed a bit stand-offish, too, perhaps afraid of this strange girl with her strange scars, brought back from the dead and hunted by gods. Their attitude had seemed to get Ani down, and Avery wasn’t surprised to see her shutting herself away, but it didn’t please him.

  “Hey, will you?” she added. “Watch it with me?”

  On the screen a man in an obvious rubber suit, some sort of monster, attacked an actor who shot it with a prop gun. Little puffs of white smoke exploded from the gun, and the monster, which looked like some sort of mutant vegetable, gave a very un-vegetable-like groan but kept going. The image switched to a beautiful woman crying out, then back to the bold hero, clicking on an empty chamber just as the monster arrived.

  The program cut to a commercial. The host of the show, wearing bad make-up supposed to make him look scaled, held up a box of detergent, extolling its virtues, then the show cut to local ads.

  “Maybe I’ll watch it with you after I check on Layanna,” Avery said, and made for her room.

  “Wait!” Ani leaned forward, turning the volume knob up. “Watch! It’s for a movie.”

  “That’s nice, but—”

  “Watch!”

  The newest advertisement was indeed a preview of a coming attraction—Vengeance from the Grave, starring some actors Avery had never heard of. Like the one Ani was currently watching, this one was a low-budget B horror movie, though the one advertised appeared slightly more artistic. The main character was a man who died only to have a witch bring him back to life in order to wreak vengeance on the men that killed him, as they were her enemies, too. But the man did not enjoy being her puppet and had to fight her as well as the gangsters, pitting one party against the other.

  “Doesn’t it sound great?” Ani said, turning to Avery expectantly once the advertisement was over. Her eyes shone, and he could almost feel her urgency. “I wanna see it. I really wanna. Please, Papa, please say yes. It opens this weekend.”

  “I don�
��t know, honey. When did you become so interested in monsters and things? I don’t remember you liking them ... before.”

  Some of her enthusiasm faded. “I don’t know. I just do.” Summoning her eagerness again, she made a sad, puppy-dog face. “Please Papa please. It can be my birthday present.”

  A man brought back from the dead, he thought. That’s why she wants to see it. Well. Maybe it can help her work some of her issues out. But what if the man was called a monster by the townspeople, was persecuted and despised and got killed in the end for real? What would that do to her? Of course, growing up was painful. Wasn’t that what growing up was, really? And Ani certainly had issues to deal with. If she could identify with the man in the movie, and if seeing how he handled his problems helped her handle hers ...

  “Sure, sweetie,” he said. “You can see it.”

  “Woo-hoo!” She hopped up and hugged him, and he ruffled her hair. “Will you come with me?”

  “Well, I’m not sending you alone.”

  He left her just in time to hear the volume rise and the host announce the next act. On the host’s ghoulish laughter, Avery entered Layanna’s bedroom suite.

  Where’s my movie? he thought, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Where’s the movie for a man whose daughter was killed and brought back to life years later? He would most certainly like to see how that man handled his problems. Avery felt like he was shooting in the dark.

  He was in the dark. Layanna had turned off the lights and, he saw after some blinking, curled up on her bed against the wall.

  “May I ... ?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Concerned, he left the switch alone and sank to the bed, giving her a little space but letting her know he was there. She said nothing.

  “Are you communing?” That’s what he called it when she reached out her mind to the other R’loth.

  “No.” Her voice was very low, somehow choked. Had she been crying?

  He risked squeezing a shoulder. She stiffened. Then, to his relief, she leaned into his hand, scooted over and wrapped her arms about him. He felt wetness against his chest and realized she had been crying. Strange.