The IX (60 page)

“So Ayria is still here?”

“Yes. Houston is relaxed in her company, so she was deemed the most suitable person to oversee his relocation.”

At Mac’s invitation, the two men jogged along the passage together.

“Actually, I’m glad I bumped into you,” Mac admitted. “I wasn’t quite sure where I was going before. But I am now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a short while ago I was down in the Archive with Saul Cameron. I was supposed to help escort him to the evacuation point. While I was there, I’m sure I was contacted by the same Horde Master that has shadowed my footsteps throughout every mission I’ve been on. You know? The one who told me,
Pandora
?”

“Contacted? How?”

“I had a waking dream. An honest-to-God vision. I saw your tomahawk floating in the air before me. Without knowing why, I knew I had to get to it. It contains the answers to all our questions. Like I said. Don’t ask me
how
I know, I just do. And what’s even more fantastic is that along with the picture of Heaven’s-Claw, I heard a very clear and distinct word in my mind. Cryptogen.”

“And do you know what
that
means?”

“Haven’t a clue. That’s why I’m so pleased to have run into you. I know exactly where Heaven’s-Claw is now, and therefore, where I’ve got to go. You’re the expert where visions or dream-walks are concerned. Having you there will definitely increase our chances of getting to the bottom of this.”

The warriors entered the final corridor.

“Have you heard how our people fare?” Stained-With-Blood asked. “I’ve been traversing the bowels of this city on my own for quite a while, and have no radio.”

Mac shook his head. “Sorry, can’t help you. I don’t know what the Horde is up to, but all I’ve been getting for the last ten or fifteen minutes is static. I guess we’ll find out when we escort Ayria and Houston to the pad . . . ah, here we are.”

Mac held the door open for the tribal elder, and followed him into the reception area of the psychiatric wing. A sense of excitement was building in the pit of his stomach.

As he crossed the threshold into the main ward, that sensation vanished as an icy chill swept across him. Stained-With-Blood felt it too, for he halted and glanced at Mac.

I know this feeling.

The muted sounds of a TV program droned on from the other end of the unit.

Mac brought his weapon up, and Stained-With-Blood drew a large hunting knife. They crept silently forward.

A piercing scream shocked them into action.

Ayria!

Sprinting hard, Mac made it to the private suite first. He put a boot to the lock and brought his machine gun to the shoulder. The door splintered and swung inward with a crash. Mac swept the room, instantly registering the situation.

Ayria lay on the floor just in front of him, on the nearside of the bed. Obviously in shock, she was transfixed by a monstrous apparition of purple and gold flames standing adjacent to her. The creature, however, had no interest in her. Its entire attention was focused upon the man kneeling in front of it. James Houston.

Houston appeared remarkably relaxed and totally unaware of the danger. With a beatific smile on his face, he extended his hands, inviting the Controller to take hold of Heaven’s-Claw.

The glowing pits of the monster’s eyes flared. With the utmost reverence, it reached for the tomahawk.

Mac racked a grenade into the launcher and took aim. Over his shoulder, he yelled, “Stained-With-Blood! Grab Ayria and drag her out of here. I’ll deal with—”

“Stop!” Houston bellowed.

*

“Whatever they’re doing, it’s working,” Mark yelled above the din of repeated concussions and warped pressure changes. “I’ve managed to restore signal lock. Tell the
Arch of Winter
to resume transporting.”

Sam nodded. “I’m on it.” He hurried across to the command post to relay the update.

The crowd of worried refugees was relieved to hear the good news. They shuffled back to their places in the line.

“Has the problem been solved?” Marcus asked, seeing the queue form up again.

“Yes. We finally sorted it,” Mark replied, “or should I more correctly say,
they
sorted it.” He gestured toward the group of Controllers standing in a tight knot by the fountain.

The subordinate ogres had taken up positions either side of their superior. Extending their arms, they grasped the primary Master by the shoulders and appeared to be channeling vast amounts of energy into him. In turn, the leader was generating a glittering column of power. At over a hundred yards wide, it encompassed most of the First Magister’s courtyard, and extended upward as far as the eye could see.

“We think they’ve created an eye in the storm,” Mark explained. “It’s cutting through the interference. Because of that, not only have we been able to reestablish communications, but the transporter link along with it.”

He paused to scrutinize his surroundings, a frown etched across his face.

“Problems?”

“Far from it. I’ve just realized we’re not getting pelted by dirt and rock anymore. I think that curtain is preventing the smaller bits of debris from showering down on us. And I for one am glad about that. I was developing a nervous twitch.”

Marcus chuckled.

The legionnaire was forced to catch his balance. A particularly vicious clutch of explosions boomed up from the arcade below, rocking their environs. People were thrown to the floor. An awful, grinding shriek pierced the roar of the blast. It grew in volume, the vibrations somehow managing to burrow their way into the ground beneath their feet.

A chunk of flagstone near the inner portico snapped upward. Fragments of stone split away, zinging through the air like shrapnel. Next to it, a huge chink appeared in the lintel of the ornamental arch. Enlarging, the fracture splintered downward until it met the pavement, whereupon the entire edifice crumbled onto the ruptured boulevard.

“Watch out!” Mark yelled. “The mines are weakening the integrity of the inner wall. The structures here are made from granite, not lydium, so stay away from the edges.”

As if his warning had been heard by the gods, the quadrangle was gripped by an augmented shockwave from a cluster of further detonations. A resonating
crack
pealed through the ether, followed by a deeper rumbling.

Mark watched, aghast, as the balustrade along the outer apron started shaking. It wobbled madly from side to side, like a worm in the beak of a sparrow. A portion of cliff shrugged away from the courtyard and fell, taking the terrace with it. The cleft it left behind widened, working its way toward the teleport pad.

This is getting crazy.

“Marcus, how many now?”

“Two hundred.”

Mark glanced back at the Masters.
I wonder if there’s anything they could do to strengthen the foundations here?

He shuffled toward them.

His leading foot moved down and sideways.

Someone behind him yelled.

Mark tried to right himself, only to discover there was nothing on which to purchase any form of traction. His legs sank deeper into the soil and he toppled. Bracing his knees, he waited for the shock of impact.

It never came.

Mark slithered amid a smothering cascade, tumbling over and over toward the plaza nearly two hundred feet below.

The seething mass of the Horde welcomed him with open arms.

*

“Stop!” Houston bellowed.

His demand was so laced with feeling and desperation that Mac froze, and eased the pressure on the trigger.

The huge beast before Mac seemed to stare into the core of his existence. Without breaking eye contact with it, he edged forward to put Ayria behind him while he spoke to Houston. “Why are you so keen to stop me blowing our friend away?”

“Because that’s what she is.” Rising from his knees, Houston added, “A friend. An ally. And this madness has to stop.”

Bloody hell, he actually sounds lucid for a change. Hang on! She?

Yes,
she
is female. And yes, I’m quite rational at the moment.

Mac couldn’t help but glance at Houston in surprise before catching himself and resuming his scrutiny of the Horde Master. “Did I just . . . ?”

Hear my thoughts?
Houston smiled. “Of course. You appear to be sensitive to this form of communication. That’s doubtless what attracted Angule to your presence.”

“Angule?” Mac nodded toward the Controller. “Is that . . . ?”

No.
A sense of wry amusement laced the alien impulse in his mind.
I am Raum.

He gasped. “She spoke to me.”

Houston moved to stand between them. “Perhaps I had better clarify what is happening.” Placing his hand to his chest, he said, “Although I currently inhabit the body of the one you call Houston, I am not, in fact, him. Now before you start worrying, please relax. Your former captain still resides within, but he is currently . . . sleeping. Once I vacate this shell, his consciousness will resurface.”

“Then who are you, and why are you here in the first place?”

In answer, Houston turned to pick up the TV remote control. Ramping up the volume, he explained, “It’ll be easier if you watch this first.”

A familiar report began to play.

“That was the awful moment when the
Shivan-Estre
met her end. For reasons as yet unknown, her navigational beacon malfunctioned. Appearing from rip-space only seventy decans from the city wall, its pilots were helpless to prevent the inevitable catastrophe.

As with all such vessels, the
Shivan-Estre
was constructed of super-dense lydium. If not for the fact that Rhomane’s own precincts are made of that same fermionic matter, the results would have been far worse than the death of the two crewmen on board and a bright light in the sky. We are going live now to . . . ”

“That was my ship,” Houston stated, so matter-of-factly Mac thought he hadn’t heard him right. “The
Shivan-Estre
. The catalyst for the ensuing downfall of Arden. In our ignorance, we thought there was nothing we couldn’t achieve. Rip-space technology was just one of many achievements that glorified our ingenuity and massaged our egos. The folding of the very fabric of spacetime. Had we thought to be more cautious of the consequences, we would have seen the hidden dangers.”

“And you?”

“My name is Permian Hasanem, captain of the
Shivan-Estre
.”

“How the hell did you wind up here? That report said everyone on board died.”

“In a sense, we did. Unbeknown to us, continual use of the tear-drives creates a warp in the structure of reality.” Houston glanced at Raum. “That distortion transmutes biological matter, twists it at a molecular level into something else. We were the first to undergo the change.”

“We?”

“My co-pilot, Neran DeCoin, and I. As the stardrive exploded, we metamorphosed into . . .” His voice trailed away as he relived the horror in his mind.

Despite his better judgment, Mac was captivated. “What happened? Do you remember any of it?”

“Bits and pieces. The transition strips the mind of all cogency. You don’t know who or what you are, and are reduced to a state where you are unable to express the simplest thought. Imagine, if you can, being incapable of grasping the fact that you even exist. That you are a valid, vital, living force. Time has no meaning. All you
can
comprehend is the fact that you suffer.” Houston snorted and lowered his gaze. “Of course, we were driven to the edge of sanity. Beyond it . . .”

“But you’re not like them.” Mac gestured at Raum.

“The lydium walls froze the process. As you know, fermionic matter is incredibly dense. In a way, you could say we were lucky. Although our physical forms were stripped away, that’s as far as it went. We became trapped in limbo.”

Houston’s eyes took on a faraway look again. “It was . . . horrific. We didn’t know what had happened, only that there was something urgent, vital, we needed to say. But every time we tried to seize that thought, to evaluate just what it was we had to do, reality fractured off in a million different directions, and we soon lost the urge to even try.”

“So you couldn’t warn the others of the danger?”

“No. And sure enough, Arden continued to develop and test the technology.” He smiled at Raum. “And this is what happened. The transmogrification began to convert us, at the molecular level, into something entirely different.”

Mac frowned. “But there are differences, aren’t there? I know I’m new here, but I’ve been up against the Horde on a number of occasions. For the most part, they’re mindlessly savage. Raum, and this Angule you mentioned, are something else.”

“Ah yes. I see what you mean.” Houston took a seat on the end of his bed. “Like the others, the beings who eventually became Raum and Angule underwent the full transmutation. Reduced to insensible lust, they became oblivious, numb. Unthinking. Driven only to fulfill their most basic needs. To fight and ensure they lived to see another day. To answer the endless craving for sustenance. Round and round; an endless spiral of self loathing and greed.

“Unfortunately, the mutated condition requires vast amounts of energy to sustain it. Without such vitality, the Kresh remain at a lower level of consciousness, and begin to hibernate in an almost vegetative state.”

“Kresh?”

“Those whom you call the Horde. All are Kresh individually, and part of the Kresh as a collective. Those few who feast sufficiently gain the strength of will to reclaim a measure of balance. They are able to fight their way free from the stagnation of endless id, and attain a measure of ego. As stability returns, so do echoes of their former selves, along with memories. Some, such as Raum, achieve sufficient equilibrium to establish a state of enlightened bliss. They realize what has befallen them, and what needs to be done.”

“And what is that?”