Space Eldritch II: The Haunted Stars, page 39
I see them, two and a half stories below me, deep inside the plant. They’re out of reach, but I can see that one of them is fading.
Somebody is dying.
I check my rune shield. It’s still up, and so is my cloak. I don’t know how Groberg saw me, but hopefully—
There is a pulse of magic, and then something is inside my chest. It startles me, and I release my grip on my shield, my strength, and my soul hook all at once. I feel Groberg slip away from me.
Okay, now he’s really dead. Glad I didn’t have to decide.
Now, this thing inside my chest... no, not inside. Inside out. There, and not there. Without my soulbone I doubt I’d be able to feel it at all, but there is something affixed to me, connected to me but not yet fully material.
Well, damn.
“Surprise, Captain.” Nguyen’s voice comes over a loudspeaker system. “You didn’t think I could see you? Captain, I can see everything now. Everything.”
The pig-iron bullet has its own aura. I can feel the runes on the sliver of bone that has not yet materialized in my chest. They are a killing word, a word that will be “spoken” by my own blood spilling into that rune the moment the round materializes.
I am a dead woman walking.
Except Nguyen hasn’t killed me yet. Maybe I can talk my way out of this. Sweet-talk him, sane-talk him, do that negotiator thing, except Groberg was our guy for that. But I’ve got to give it a shot, so I turn on my headset and try for friendly.
“Fuck, Nguyen. You shot me. What’d you do that for?”
Pretty good, pretty good.
“Come down here. Bring Groberg.”
“Groberg’s dead. Sorry.”
“He knew he was going to die. We all are, unless we can bring it back, so you bring him to me, because I need his blood. We all need it. Blood to power!”
Ngyuen has lost it, clearly. One common symptom of hemisphere breach is a passion for messy murder. Killing and spilling. I’m feeling a little bit of that myself, but at least I’ve got it in check.
“I’m on my way.”
“Don’t you swing that magic sword at me. If I fall, even if I just fall asleep, you will die instantly.”
I carry Groberg across a catwalk and down a flight of metal stairs into the belly of the power plant. Heavy steel frames support vertical slabs of inscribed stone, their rows arranged like magnetic field lines, a cardioid pattern whose sweeping strokes are themselves a ductile rune, a rune which draws my eye from the distant bank of turbines to a central altar. There is a blur to all the runes, because only my right eye can see them completely. My goggles are working correctly now, protecting my brain from the power ripping through this room.
Nguyen stands next to that altar, his naked face distorted by raw emotion.
Naked face. He’s not wearing his goggles. He’s drinking this all in, then.
Lieutenant White hangs upside down over the altar, his boots tied together and strung over a hook typically used for hanging cattle. His pale arms hang down, spread wide, wrists slit in a pair of long strokes that run clear up to his elbows. He is bleeding to death onto a rune-bank usually powered by common cattle.
The bank is running very hot, all the turbines are spinning, and the direct-effect runes are pouring their magic into the earth and the sky. The fire out there might sweep across the fields, but this power could restore the grass by nightfall. Human blood is far more potent than animal blood, but even so, the blood of one man shouldn’t be enough to turn all these turbines like—
There is a pile of corpses next to the altar. I can see the insignia for Whiskey and Bravo teams on a few shoulders. Nguyen has been busy.
“God, Nguyen, what are you doing?”
“Restoring power. Trying to bring it back. We have to bring it back, Captain.”
“Lieutenant, this is not how we are supposed to—”
“Seal the breach? Oh yes we are! And what a breach! A few lambs for the sake of the flock, lambs to the slaughter, little lambs eat ivy! We have to bring it back! And you, you and your bloody bone must be here, here where it started. Here where the power runs hot!”
I can still feel that sliver of instant death waiting to manifest in my heart, tied to my aura. It pulses as if alive, with an aura of its own, drawing life into itself along a faint tendril, a magical umbilical connecting it to the ebony plate in Nguyen’s helmet that’s pressed against the skin of his forehead.
That aura is spun from twisting runes, runes I can read as I follow the connection from Nguyen’s soul to mine. He’s right. If I break that link, break the rune plate in his helmet, do anything to sever his connection to the bullet bound to my soul, it will finish its interplanar journey and end me.
But he hasn’t killed me yet. Why not? I’m standing next to his pile of corpses... did they all wait like this?
I killed Groberg. Dammit, that was me who did that. He was my friend. I could have clubbed him, could have swept his feet...
I have to stop this. Too much killing.
“White is dying, Nguyen. The truck is right outside. We can still save him, but you have to let me go.”
“Save? SAVE? Nothing is saved without every drop! And everything is lost without you!”
“Then why do you have a bullet in my chest, Nguyen?”
“You’re fast. Too fast. Had to explain. Had to make you see. Captain, look up and see!”
I glance up. The ceiling is three stories above me, and quite opaque.
A call buzzes in my ear. Oh, that’s right. I reactivated my comm. I answer the call while still obediently staring at the girders and struts of the ceiling.
“Surinam.”
“Captain Surinam! It’s Barry Jensen, NTSB! We scrambled more drones and found that patch of remains. It’s thin, but it’s there, right where you said it might be—twelve thousand meters up, moving south-southwest, and making good time. It’s not over Utah anymore.”
“Do you see it, Captain?” asks Nguyen insistently.
“No, and I’m taking a call. This is important!” Dammit, this is why I have a communications officer. If Milholland were here I wouldn’t be trying to have two conversations at—
My head snaps back as Nguyen rips my helmet and goggles from my head.
There’s no time to close my eyes. By the time that thought crosses my mind, there’s no point. It’s too late. The sweeping lines suggested by the rune plates here in plant A are now flowing with writhing runes, sigils sliding over and under one another, shifting meaning as the shifting script cycles through the syntax of sucking power from human blood. And I can read it all.
I’m dizzy, overcome by vertigo, and it feels like my feet are a thousand feet away. I remember this sensation, remember the sundering of all barriers in my mind. The doors, the windows, and some of the walls of the house in my head have been thrown open or torn down, and all four seasons are ripping through at once. I can taste autumn, smell spring, touch winter, and hear summer.
I look up. Up and south.
The ceiling is still there, but I can see through it. I can see through everything, once I set my mind to seeing. The walls vanish from before me. That ring of runes we saw from the crash site is lower in the sky and more distant, closer to the horizon. Hanging from it I see a long, tapering tentacle, segmented like a centipede, terminating in a mass of writhing appendages, and studded along its entire length with waving filaments.
The scale of this... the appendages at the tip are bigger than entire city blocks, and those “filaments” are wider than the largest of the old freeways. This thing is twenty kilometers wide and ninety-five kilometers long, and the entire length is inscribed with shimmering runes. I can only read a few of the larger ones from here so I can’t possibly divine the full meaning of the inscriptions, but I’m catching a sense of them. A desperate hunger washes over me.
“NOW do you see it?”
“Oh, God.”
“Then you know what I’m doing! We have to bring it back!”
I do know what he’s doing. Nguyen is using the energy from this plant as bait. It makes sense, all this death and blood on stone, and for just a moment I wish I’d been here to help because there’s something really tasty in the look and the touch and the smell of—
My wrist stings under my bracelet, and as a cool feeling rushes up my arm, I realize just how far gone I’ve been. How much medication can this bracelet dispense? I suppose if it’s concentrated, instead of in solution, and—hang on, that’s not the issue here! The issue is that Nguyen’s well-meaning, murder-fueled plan has a problem.
That sense I got from the monster.
“Nguyen, this isn’t going to work. Have you felt it? The intent? The ravenous, all-consuming hunger?”
“It hungers for power, not flesh! POWER! I’ve severed the relays so the turbines are just spinning power back in on themselves, banking blood magic. We stand in the hottest spot on the planet right now! When that thing comes back, when it returns to drink this in, you take your soulbone, and you fight it!”
I dispensed with feigned humility a long time ago. I can open a number-ten can of whupass when my soulbone drinks my blood, but I know my limitations.
“Nguyen, I don’t think you understand. This bone, it’s mine, but it’s outside my body, and it’s only forty-six centimeters of inscription. That thing in the sky has a hundred kilometers of inscriptions, carved right into its own carapace. Anything I can do, it can do better. I may have the sharpest knife in the world, but I’d still be bringing a knife to a gunfight. Besides,” I point at the distant monster, “it’s still going south. Your bait just isn’t tempting enough.”
“More wood on the fire!” Nguyen hauls Groberg’s body to the altar and heaves our dead friend into place under White’s dangling arms. He draws his service knife, a razor-sharp, never-dulled blade with an ebony grip. With three strokes he cuts Groberg’s armor free, and with three more he opens the man wide, letting gravity do what Groberg’s unbeating heart can’t. Killing and spilling. Blood and entrails rush onto the altar, mingling with the last of White’s blood, which has now stopped flowing. My head spins from the massive pulse of power, all sound and color and tasty touch with stench and all the letters of every alphabet.
I’m completely immersed in this power, but it’s not enough. The monster grows more distant, and I can see why. Las Vegas teems with humanity. Nguyen has spilled a lot of blood into this generator, but the inscribed monster can bathe in a thousand times that much blood, activating a million times as many runes up and down its segmented length. I don’t know the physics of it, but I’m suddenly quite sure that’s how this thing has planned its next repast. It doesn’t hunger for flesh, but the meal it does hunger for has flesh in the recipe.
Why did it start here? Perhaps the power generated in Delta was brighter, more readily seen from across the void? And maybe once the hungry monster arrived, only then could it make out the fainter glow of stored potential in our cities.
Then again, it could just be really pissed off about that crash, so after it smote the crippled craft into the forest, it traced the runecraft’s path of origin and headed for Vegas in search of a grisly revenge.
Or fuck, maybe this is the beginning of the rapture, and the noodly appendage of God is here to draw the faithful into the sky. Obviously it’s starting in Sin City to warm up, lifting a light set of Vegas’s remaining righteous before heading north to draw up the mob of self-proclaimed saints surrounding the Great Salt Lake.
I laugh aloud. Nguyen turns toward me. He has taken his armor off and is stripping out of his uniform.
“Together! Keep it together!” He points at me as he shouts.
“Rapture of the Noodly Appendage!” I shout back, tasting a moment’s delight in the absurdity of the concept and the delectable roll of the concatenated syllables. They have color, too, and a sweet smell. I laugh again, and it feels so good, my head spinning, my diaphragm spasming, my heart—
The aura of the pig-iron bullet in my heart vanishes. Nguyen has willed it away.
“Tams! It has to be you! Only you!” He has cut the last of his clothing away and stands atop the altar, stark naked except for his knife, his rope bracelet, and a determined grimace. His Vietnamese heritage has teamed up with our rigorous PT regimen to present a deliciously fit, smooth-skinned model of a man. He’d be attractive, really attractive, except for that look on his face.
He stands on Groberg’s body, one bare foot in the empty abdomen, and reaches up to cut White’s bootlaces free. White’s limp body drops to the altar and then rolls clear. Nguyen slips the cattle hook between his own wrist and the rope bracelet and pulls down, cinching it in place. Then he reaches down with the knife in his other hand and with a single stroke opens his left inner thigh, his femoral artery suddenly spurting blood on the altar.
Through it all he doesn’t scream, doesn’t groan, doesn’t even acknowledge the ruin he’s made of his flesh. He just grimaces, like he’s in ecstasy, or perhaps on it. He looks at me, and I can see the life quickly ebbing from behind his eyes, as if through sheer force of personality he can pour himself out in mere seconds. His legs go limp, and he hangs above the altar from that bracelet, the bound hand outstretched and completely white.
“It has to come back,” he says weakly. “Or you have to go. But it has to be you, you brain-breached, soulboned badass.”
Doesn’t he see that it’s impossible? Knife to a gunfight is the wrong metaphor. I’m facing a column of armored cavalry, and I’m hoping to win by inflicting a paper cut.
Is that what I tell a dying man?
Is that how I face the death of a city?
“Fine. I’m going. But if I see you on the other side, I’m going to fuck you up for this.”
He doesn’t respond. His eyes are already glassy, his whole body hanging limp from his upstretched arm.
The room throbs with energy, power sufficient to carry the entire building across the stars if the right runes were written on this altar and the surrounding planes—all of it wasted if the beast doesn’t return. I’m swimming in it, but I can’t store it. I can draw it through my soulbone and burn it for whatever purpose I choose, but I can’t do that from a distance.
Unless there’s a connection. Something attached to my soul, with an anchor here.
I bleed on my bone and leap out to the truck.
Milholland and Betts are still asleep. I grab Betts, sling her over my shoulder, and haul her into the belly of the power plant. With a telekinetic sweep I clear the altar and the space around it, ripping Nguyen free of the hook and throwing him, Groberg, and White into a heap with the poor sods from Whiskey and Bravo.
Gently I lay Betts down on the altar and pull her goggles off over her helmet. Then I crack a stim pack open and stab Betts in the neck.
Her eyes shoot wide open and she howls.
She’s going to need to soak this in for a bit. I’ve been soaking it in, my bracelet keeping the worst of the crazy at bay, and I still feel like screaming with Betts, creating a harmony whose scent might chase away the smoldering sweetness of Groberg’s entrails.
Her scream warbles, and in my enhanced sight I can see, actually see, the power in this room course through her brain, carving new, high-speed neural paths like a low-bid mass-transit contractor with unlimited eminent domain. “Hemisphere breach” is what the doctors call it, but it’s far more complicated, and ever so much more wonderful, than that. Betts’s senses are expanded, her understanding infinitely enlarged, and her sanity... well, sanity is just consensus of perception. If she and I perceive the same things, then we are, by definition, both sane.
Like me and Nguyen, and we got along great just now.
She stops screaming and sucks in a deep breath, which she then holds. She looks around, the writhing runes no doubt reading themselves to her the way they are for me. Then she looks south, and a little up. Her mouth opens and then snaps shut.
“Oh god god god there it is again—it’s REAL!” she says through clenched teeth. She puts her hands over her eyes and sobs. “It’s not going away!” She pulls her hands down from her face and looks at me. “Tams, what have you done?”
“Nguyen started it.”
Betts frowns at me, glaring through tears, and I realize that sounds more like an excuse than I wanted it to.
“Betts, you see the monster again, right?”
“I see it. I can’t not see it.”
Consensus of perception. We are sane together, having some nice, rational clusterfuck.
“It’s headed for Las Vegas. I need more power if I’m going to fight it.”
She stares.
“You can feel the power in here, can’t you? Nguyen killed everyone, killed them all right on this altar. The turbines are wound up, banking that blood and power, raw and ready, but I can’t take it with me. It’s useless to me unless I can tap it somehow.”
Betts draws in a ragged breath, her eyes darting left and right. Then she locks her gaze on me, and I feel a thrill of power surging behind those eyes.
“Tap it? WE ARE FUCKING DROWNING IN IT, YOU STUPID BITCH!”
I bite back an angry response. I very much need Lieutenant Betts to not be murderously angry at me right now, and if I get angry at her I’ll just gut her and cut her and shut her up, and that’s not the plan. I need to get a grip. Oh, wait... I almost forgot the second part of this.
I jab Betts in the leg with another hypo. She’s got stimulants; now she needs to be able to ride out the crazy without hurting anybody. Her pupils go wide and then draw back to pinpricks. I think that means it’s working.
“Ohhhh... thank you.”
Definitely working.
“Betts,” I say softly, “I want you to shoot me with your pig iron.”
Her jaw drops, and then she snaps her mouth shut. She looks around the room and then back at me.
