Be My Enemy (25 page)

“Good save,” Everett said. The steps—they went up forever. Round and round and round, up into the darkness. Then his eyes acclimated to the gloom and he saw that the beams, the braces, the struts, and the framework that held the bells were festooned with thousands of hanging Nahn.

“Just keep counting the steps,” Sharkey said. One turn, two turns. Endless. Everett's thighs ached. Even Sharkey looked out of breath. And Tejendra…he was in pain. He was blinking, puffing, eyes bulging.

“I'm with him,” Lieutenant Kastindis said. “I'm with him all the way.”

And then above them, a bell chimed. A single, small high note. Clear and out of nowhere. An impossible chime.

“Oh my God,” Everett said as the wooden trusses exploded with Nahn. The bells tolled and pealed as the Nahn swarmed around them.

“Arm yourself!” Sharkey yelled. Everett unslung the almost-forgotten shotgun from his shoulder.

“Civilians! Stay close to soldiers!” Lieutenant Kastinidis yelled. “Mr. Sharkey, you remember I said I'd tell you when? This is when.”

Bunched tight as an ancient Greek phalanx, the squad fought its way step by step up the inside of the Queen's Tower. The bells quivered and rang with the impact of flying Nahn shards as the trooper's EM pulses shattered them. Faces. They all had faces. This was a nightmare without end. Step by step. Staircase by staircase.

“Power's low!” Trooper Winkelman yelled. Everett flinched as a Nahn bat swooped at his head. Lieutenant Kastinidis aimed at it. Nothing. It turned in midair and threw itself at the lieutenant. It had the face of an old woman. With one thought and one action, Everett swung the shotgun and fired. The Nahn flew apart and instantly began to re-form itself. LEDs lit up on the back of Lieutenant Kastinidis's gauntlet. Power. She aimed and blew the Nahn out of the sky.

“Good shooting, Mr. Singh.” Then she yelled to her squad, “I'm almost out. Switching to reserves for battle-suit functions. Go go go!” She touched her helmet and it opened and retracted. “At least I can see where I'm going. Dr Singh, are you all right?”

Tejendra had stopped, exhausted, hands on thighs, panting heavily.

“Oh God…Oh God…I can't…”

“‘And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy,’” Sharkey said. There was deep awe and reverence in his voice. Everett turned and looked down. The Nahn bats had all been destroyed, but now long, black tendrils were sprouting from the base of the tower, coiling up the stairs, along the beams, up the walls.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” Lieutenant Kastinidis shouted. “Run!”

Everett ran. His lungs ached and the blood burned in his heart. Run. Run. There was the light of the balcony door, the white light.
Safety was the white light. Hope was the white light.
Everness
and Sen were the white light. Thirty steps. Twenty steps. Ten steps. There. The white light blinded him. The cold wind blew in his face. The soldiers were already filing across the ramp to the ship. Sen was below him, beneath the curve of the hull, but he could see the fans already running in the impeller pods. At a moment's notice, she could go.

“Get in there Everett,” Sharkey shouted. He clung to the parapet with one hand, the other clapped his jaunty hat to his head against the buffeting of the ships engines.

“I have to see…” Everett glanced back into the tower. Tejendra had fallen behind. Lieutenant Kastinidis was with him, trying to get his arm around her bulky shoulder, help him onward, upward. Behind them, the inside of the tower was a writhing mass of tentacles, splitting into finer and finer tendrils.

“Come on!” Everett yelled.

Tejendra gave a weary smile. It froze on his face.

“Oh,” he said very softly. He wore a look of mild surprise. Then a point of blackness appeared in his chest. It opened like origami, then spread over his chest. Spread, kept spreading. The oily liquid black of the Nahn.

“No!” Lieutenant Kastinidis yelled. With the last of her suit power she tore in half the tendril that had pierced clean through him. A dozen tendrils sprouted from the severed ends. “I'm out of power!”

“You know, the funniest thing,” Tejendra said as the blackness wrapped his chest and sent feelers up his neck, around his skull. “It doesn't hurt a bit.”

“There's nothing I can do,” Lieutenant Kastinidis said, and her face was pale, as if she had seen the thing worse than any nightmare. “Nothing.”

“Everett…” Tejendra pleaded. And Everett understood what he was asking, and he had never been asked a more terrible thing. “If
you eat meat, you must be prepared to kill it yourself,” Sharkey had said when they'd gone hunting in the shadow of Aston Hill, and “kill only what needs killing.”

A hand grabbed the shotgun. Sharkey wrestled it from Everett's fingers.

“Go Mr. Singh.”

“Tejendra…”

“Everett. Go.”

He saw Tejendra, his brown face vanishing second by second under the devouring black. He saw his eyes. The eyes said,
I understand.
Everett turned and walked into the light. There was no rebel yell, no cry of “Dundee, Atlanta, and Sweet St. Pio.” He heard Sharkey say, “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee.” Two shots. Nothing more.

Sharkey was last from the tower. The ramp retracted as he ran down it. His face was like the storm of God. He did not look at Everett; he did not look at Lieutenant Kastinidis or any of her squad in the out dock. He went down to the bridge and took his place at the communications desk without a word. Everett and the lieutenant followed him.

Sen was already pulling
Everness
away from the Queen's Tower. Black tendrils erupted from the door, from the skylights in the dome, coiling around the dome like snakes.

“Do you have it?” asked the Agister of Caiaphas College in her fine robes of silk.

“I have it. It works,” Everett said.

“And Dr. Singh?”

Lieutenant Kastinidis shook her head.

“Full reverse, Sen,” Captain Anastasia said. Her voice was ice. “Get my ship the hell away from that thing.”

Everness
backed away from the tower. The tendrils had burst the dome, showering heavy chunks of masonry into the courtyard below.
They coiled together, higher and higher. Everett watched the blackness swallow the tower as it had swallowed Tejendra. It was the opposite of everything: of life, and also of death. It was un-death. Everett loathed it. He loathed it with every cell in his body. His hands shook with helpless rage.

Kill only what needs killing. The cards had spelt it out. The cards didn't care whether Everett Singh believed in them or not.
Bubbles of Earth.
Enemies press close and there is no clear way to victory. The all-seeing spire of
Andromeda Heights.
The dark tunnel that was about to swallow the
Jaunter
on his train. The hideous half-human crawling children of
Spiderbabies
. The world-swallowing darkness of
Season of the Wolf.
The bird in the endless storm, striving for the unreachable light of
Shining Path.

Shining Path.
The beam of light that pierced the darkest storm. The light from over the horizon. The light. The sun. The
sun.
Everett opened a channel on the palari-pipe to engineering.

“Mr. Mchynlyth, have we enough power to open a Heisenberg Gate?”

The Queen's Tower looked like a vile flower about to blossom. Tendrils reached out for
Everness
, coiling and twining, splitting into finer and finer tendrils. Sen leaned on the thrust levers. Slowly, so slowly, the huge ship picked up speed.

“Aye. Just about. Are you thinking of jumping us out of here? That's a bona thing to think.”

“No, Mr. Mchynlyth, I'm not thinking that at all.” Everett understood. Everett understood how his alter could want to kill him. Everett understood what it felt like to have every part of your life taken by someone else's hands and twisted out of shape. He understood because he had found that emotion in himself. Everett Singh understood hate. Hate was a fist of glowing iron in his chest. And Everett understood that most people are powerless in their hate, but when people have power to act out that hate, it is a terrible thing. The most terrible thing. And he had power. He had all power. He
flicked up the Infundibulum. It was easy. Dr. Quantum filled with the slow-turning veils of the Panoply. He found the coordinates. It was easy. The calculations, they were easy. The transforms: simple, instinctive, right. In point, out point. Aperture. Duration. The Infundibulum spat out a solution. Easy. He slid the code into the Jump Controller.

The tendrils opened like jaws. Their tips, flat like squid palps, dissolved into a storm of flying shapes.
Everness
backed away under full thrust: the Royal College of Music, the Royal Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial, the tree-scattered white of Kensington Gardens slid out from under the hull. The Nahn storm whirled into a dark tornado, leaning toward the airship.

The board lit green.

“Close your eyes!” Everett shouted. “Cover your face! Turn your back! Do not look at the light!”

He hit the jump button. A jump gate opened twenty meters above the Queen's Tower. The other side of the gate opened in the heart of a sun. The lock, the override, the place those who tried to jump into or out of Earth 1 were sent to dance for a single, searing moment in destroying light. It worked both ways. Everett could find it and turn it into a weapon.

He saw a flash more brilliant that anything he had ever seen before. Then he threw himself to the deck, hands clapped over his face. He could see the bones in his hands. He could smell skin and hair burning. Then Everett rolled his back to the great window.

Everett had punched a hundred-meter-diameter circle into the heart of the sun. Five million degrees of heat and light blasted down on Imperial University and the Nahn that that had engulfed the university's buildings. Imperial didn't explode. It was flashed into a ball of plasma. It ceased to exist. Nothing can survive even one second in the heart of the sun. For five seconds Everett Singh blasted sun stuff on South Kensington, then the Heisenberg Gate closed. The light went out. There was no Queen's Tower, no lawn, and no faculty
buildings. There was a circular pit of glowing lava. Of the Nahn, not an atom. Museums, concert halls, monuments, all the grand Victorian architecture of South Kensington had shattered and flown to pieces under the blast. Dead cars were scattered like leaves. The Natural History, the Victoria and Albert, the science museums were smoking shells. The Royal Albert Hall was a broken skull. Firestorms raged out from the sun strike. A mushroom cloud of superheated gas and smoke boiled upward from the blast zone, insane with lightning. Two thousand, three thousand, four thousand meters. Then the shockwave picked
Everness
up like a toy and slung it across the sky. Everett rolled across the deck, hooked an arm around a control desk. Sharkey gripped the arms of his seat with white knuckles. Brigadier and Agister went reeling. Lieutenant Kastinidis's power armor kept her upright with the last of its energy reserves. Sen clawed her way across the bucking floor to her post, hauled herself up to the controls. Felled trees, snowy Hyde Park, the wall of fire now spreading across South Kensington, spinning past the great window. Sen's hands hesitated over the levers. Too heavy a touch would tear the impeller pods from their mountings, but she had to keep
Everness
from flipping nose over tail. The ship's nanocarbon skeleton was strong, but a one-hundred-and-eighty degree somersault would snap her spine and spill her crew into the winter air.

“I don't know what to do!”

Captain Anastasia picked herself up from the floor and dived for the piloting station. She swung herself into the controls.
Everness
creaked and shrieked in her every strut and spar.

“We have to run with this!” Captain Anastasia shouted. “I'm going to turn her tail in.”

“She'll tumble!” Sen cried. Mighty buffets hit the ship like fists.

“Trust me!” Captain Anastasia yelled back over the sound of her dying airship. “On my word, full power to the impellers. I'm waiting for a lull in the wind.”

Everness
screamed like a living thing, but Captain Anastasia clung to the desk, listening to the wind, feeling the vibration of the sun storm across the hull, sensing in three dimensions. Her sky sense reached out. And in the heart of the hurricane, it touched something.

“Starboard impellers, forward!” Captain Anastasia ordered. “Port, set to reverse. Full power. Now!” Sen slammed one set of thrust levers to the full length of their travel, pulled the others back. Engines sobbed. Vibrations shook Everett to the roots of his teeth. Captain Anastasia heaved the steering yoke. Everett felt the deck tilt beneath him as
Everness
went side-on to the blast wave. The deck tilted: twenty degrees, thirty degrees. Could the ship survive a three-sixty roll?
Everness
rolled,
Everness
yawed, but the huge ship turned on her axis. “Come on my lover!” The tendons strained in Captain Anastasia's neck, her eyes bulging as she wrestled the steering yoke. Then the storm caught the edge of
Everness
's steering surfaces and spun her around, tail into the gale, and she ran sweet and straight and true before the wind from hell. Behind her Knightsbridge and South Kensington blazed, the flames leaping a hundred meters into the sky. Hyde Park was scorched bare; the snow vaporized; the fallen, smoking trees pointing to the center of the blast. The mushroom cloud had topped out into a layer of dark cloud, still flickering with electrical discharges. Sooty rain fell from the cloud layer, freezing into black snow.

“I have the con, Miss Sixsmyth.” Captain Anastasia pulled down a palari-pipe. “Status, Mr. Mchynlyth.”

“We're still airship-shape,” Mchynlyth said. “By all that's high and holy, we shouldnae be, but we are, thank the Dear. Tell Mr. Singh he's burned out every single forward-facing camera and we've lost most of the paintjob from the nose. But we are here, and them unholy beasties aren't, so overall, it's a result. Oh, and I wouldnae hang around too long in the neighborhood. We took a pretty hefty dose of radiation there—those of you still have plans for your gonads.”