The Nuclear Druid Page 2

  “I hope you can ride,” Dhjerga said.

  “Where is this place?”

  “It’s the middle of fucking nowhere, obviously. This forest belongs to my family, although we’ve got no use for it. I want to stay away from power sources for the moment.” Dhjerga shouldered in between the horses. “Don’t want them following me home.”

  The horses stamped their feet and shied. Some looked like pack animals. A few of the larger, shiny-coated mounts still had their saddles and bridles on. Dhjerga pointed at a large gray mare. “You take that one.” He clucked and cooed at a sorrel gelding and swung up onto his back.

  Colm hadn’t ridden a horse since he was seven. He wedged one foot into a stirrup and scrambled into the mare’s saddle. “I don’t even know what planet I’m on,” he grunted.

  “Kisperet. My homeworld. It’s a nice planet, when people aren’t trying to kill you.” Dhjerga kicked his own horse. When he realized Colm wasn’t following, he circled back and grabbed Colm’s bridle.

  Gunfire crackled around them. The Ghosts were shooting into the forest, aiming at any shadow that moved. Dhjerga guided the horses away from the fire at a walking pace—all they could manage in the trees.

  A cloaked figure rose up almost under their hooves. Moonlight glinted on a pistol barrel.

  Dhjerga let out a wild cry and rode the man down. The horses, Colm realized with a feeling of sick recognition, were trained like their riders. Trained for war. Steel-shod hooves trampled the man’s flesh. Colm’s horse plunged forward of its own accord and bit the poor bastard’s upflung arm. Colm dragged on the reins, nearly pulling his arms out.

  Dhjerga swivelled all the way out of his saddle and snatched the man’s pistol.

  The snow had stopped. Moonlight shone between the trees. Blood glistened on the mutilated thing twitching in the snow.

  “They’re just copies, right?” Colm yelled at Dhjerga. “It doesn’t matter about killing them. They’re not really people! Right?”

  Dhjerga’s teeth flashed. “It can be hard to tell the difference!” he said.

  The moonlight now shone full on Colm. The man on the ground twitched. His eyes found Colm. “You … were in the cart.”

  “Yes,” Colm said.

  “Where … do you come from?”

  “Earth,” Colm said.

  “Earth.” The man coughed up blood. “Impossible. There are no mages … on Earth.”

  “Believe me now, arsewipe?” Dhjerga said. He shot the man in the head.

  “Was he a copy?” Colm said angrily.

  “No,” Dhjerga said. He jumped down, ripped the blood-sodden cloak off the corpse, and tossed it at Colm as he clambered back onto his horse. “Hide your hair. None of us have red hair. That’s how he knew you weren’t from here. Also, your uniform.”

  Wordlessly, Colm wrapped the cloak around his upper body. It might help to keep out the cold. The wind cut like a knife, although the sky was mostly clear.

  Dhjerga led the horses on a circuitous path through the trees. By the time they reached the road again, they had left the camp-site far behind.

  There was something off about the shadows on the snow. They seemed to be faintly doubled … tripled. Colm looked up for the first time—and gasped in astonishment.

  Two moons.

  One small, green-speckled crescent.

  And one bright beige pearl that spanned a full quarter of the sky.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Huh?” Dhjerga looked where he was pointing. “Oh, that’s Cerriwan. It’s one of those, you know, the big planets that are made of clouds.”

  “A gas giant,” Colm translated.

  “If you say so.”

  “Wait. This planet—Kisperet?—is actually a moon?”

  “Well, we have got our own moon. Look, it’s right there.”

  “I can see it.”

  Colm could also see a very bright star at the horizon. To outshine a moon and a gas giant, it had to be incredibly luminous, or else incredibly close.

  “What’s that?” he asked, without much hope. The Ghosts were so uninterested in astrophysics that it seemed unlikely they bothered to name stars.

  But Dhjerga surprised him. “Oh, you can actually see that from the Kuiper Belt.” Colm and Dhjerga had met for the second time in the Kuiper Belt, two years ago. “I thought it looked familiar, so I asked your encyclopedia thing.”

  “The net.”

  “Yes, the glowy window that you talk into. We call that star the Spearhead, but you call it Rho Cass … something.”

  “Rho Cassiopeiae.”

  “That was it.”

  Rho Cassiopeiae was a hypergiant. This world, Kisperet, must lie very close to it: the goddamn thing was casting shadows.

  Colm felt dizzy. He clutched his horse’s reins in white-knuckled hands.

  Rho Cassiopeiae lay 8,000 light years from Earth.

  Dhjerga suddenly twisted around in his saddle. “Shit!”

  “What?” Colm said dully. He was mentally reeling. He’d come eight thousand light years from home. And it had taken him no time at all.

  “The bastards are chasing us, aren’t they?” Now Colm heard the distant drumming of hooves. “Why couldn’t you have brought some of those great rapid-firing weapons you Earth people have? I’d have deaded them all in one go.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t expect to land in the middle of yet another bloody war.”

  Dhjerga did not notice the irony. “This isn’t a war yet. But it will be, at this rate.” He reached over and slapped Colm’s horse on the rump, before kicking his own steed. “Ride for your life!” he shouted over his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 3

  COLM COULD NOT REALLY ride. He’d bumped along a few pony trails as a child. That was more than 99% of human beings had done. So at least he had a dim idea of how not to fall off. But he couldn’t ride like Dhjerga—glued in the saddle, moving with the horse as if he were surgically attached to it. He bounced and slid around, while Dhjerga alternately laughed and yelled at him.

  Behind them, the thudding hooves drew closer. Dhjerga stopped laughing and pushed his horse into a flat-out gallop. Thankfully, this made Colm’s mare think it was a race. She stretched out her neck and thundered after her stable-mate. When Dhjerga jerked his horse’s head around and careened down a much narrower trail, Colm’s mount followed without any input from him.

  They half-cantered and half-slid downhill between the snow-laden trees. At this point Colm was merely clinging on, his hands locked on the pommel. The moonlight glimmered between the trees on black water, flowing fast between banks fringed with sheet ice. They turned and rode upstream. Colm sagged over his horse’s neck. Dhjerga said, “By Scota’s grave, that was close. I think we’ve lost them. There isn’t officially a road here at all.”

  “Won’t they see the hoof prints?”

  “Not at the speed they were going; and they don’t know the area. By the time they turn around and come back, the trail’ll be all mucked up with their own prints.”

  Firelight shone from the windows of a cottage. A man appeared at the door, carrying one of the ubiquitous Ghost rifles.

  “It’s me!” Dhjerga leapt off his horse and embraced the man. They spoke in low tones. Dhjerga waved at Colm to dismount. “This is Hralf. He’ ll look after the horses. Come on.”

  Colm patted his mare’s sweaty neck. “Thanks for the ride,” he whispered. Even if she was a vicious brute, she’d saved his life. He wondered what the hell the Ghosts were doing with horses, 8,000 light years from Earth.

  “Hurry up!” Dhjerga said.

  The cottage looked warm and cozy and safe. But Dhjerga ploughed on past it, past the outbuildings, along a narrow trail shovelled out of the snow. The trees straggled away. On the far side of an open field, a dam blocked the river, walling off the head of the valley. Snow coated brick spillways. The river flowed fast and black out from under a patio covered with a pristine white carpet. On the patio stood a grim blockhouse with unl
it windows.

  The door of the blockhouse was not locked. Colm followed Dhjerga into a cavernous hall, which nevertheless felt cramped, because most of it was taken up by the massive turbine shaft descending into a pit in the middle of the hall, and the generator mounted above it.

  “A hydroelectric plant!” Colm exclaimed. At last, something familiar.

  *

  “I’m going to open the intake gates,” Dhjerga called up from the dark, mouldy-smelling shaft.

  “Roger,” Colm yelled. He leapt up the steps to the catwalk that ran around the room at head height. Leaning over the rail to reach the generator, he threw the lever that released the rotor.

  The roar of rushing water echoed up from the pit. Dhjerga clambered out of the shaft, caked with moss and rust.

  Colm hurried back along the catwalk to the little black-start generator mounted on the wall. It hummed as water poured through a 2-inch iron feedstock pipe, spinning its rotor. The stator was equipped with permanent magnets. That created enough power to induce an electrical field in the rotor windings of the big generator. The Ghosts knew about electromagnets. But the plant produced only DC current—Colm had had a peek inside the generator housing and seen that there was a commutator on the windings. They hadn’t even discovered alternating current. There were pretty pictures of deer and girls enameled on the generator’s bell-shaped housing.

  “No such thing as a transformer?” he said as he came down off the catwalk. “No regulator? No wires?" Actually, he could see some cabling coming out of the top of the generator. It hung in swags between ceiling brackets thick with cobwebs.

  “I don’t understand half the things you say,” Dhjerga said. “Come on, quick.” He grabbed the kerosene lantern and hurried along a dark hall, into another large room. Colm followed, stiff and aching, but hopeful. He reckoned that if the hydro plant generated a sufficient load, he could use it to return to the Unsinkable. He was done with this miserable, snowbound planet. He would have a talk with Dhjerga, so he could say he’d tried, and then go.

  “These are the batteries,” Dhjerga said. “They’re a bit small, I know. You probably have much bigger ones on Earth.”

  A row of wooden tubs marched down the center of the hall. Each tub was ten feet long and four feet high, and filled to the brim with water.

  “Ah,” Colm said. “The type of battery you can take a bath in. Yeah, I’ve got one of those at home, too.” He was starting to wonder if he and Dhjerga were really speaking English. Sometimes he could hear a strange echo behind their voices. And what Dhjerga had just said was complete gibberish. These were not batteries.

  “You wouldn’t want to have a bath in this stuff,” Dhjerga said. “Quick, let’s assemble them. The faster we’re done, the faster we can get out of here.”

  A clatter made Colm jump. In the far corner of the room, two small boys, dressed in stiff trousers and hand-knitted sweaters, were lifting a metal disc as wide as they were tall off a stack of identical discs. They staggered with it over to a tub and rolled it into the rack on top of the tub, so the disc sank vertically into the water. Some of it sloshed onto their shoes.

  Starting to understand, Colm peered into the tub. Dhjerga shouldered him aside and dumped another two discs into the rack, splashing droplets onto Colm’s hands. Wooden spacers separated the discs. Colm sucked a wet knuckle, tasted metal. Aha. “What are the discs made of? Lead?”

  “Right. One plain, one webbed, one plain,” Dhjerga yelled at the children. “Don’t get them mixed up.” He added to Colm, “It should be one lead, one copper, one lead. But there’s a copper shortage. So we web half the cells with copper wire, and let the copper solution do the rest.”

  Basic electrochemistry. The water wasn’t plain old H2O. It had copper sulfate dissolved in it. When charged with power from the generator, the CuS solution would deposit copper on the webbed discs. Hey presto, one ten-foot battery.

  Actually, twenty of them.

  “Are you going to help, or just stand there with your thumb up your arse?” Dhjerga said, lugging three discs at once.

  Colm looked up at the naked ends of the wires dangling from the ceiling. He looked down at the puddles on the floor. This was about to be the most dangerous place he’d ever been in, including war zones. “Can you not at least send those kids away?”

  Dhjerga dumped the discs into the tub. “Why? They work for my family. They’re not copies.” There was an odd, bitter edge to the last words.

  As he spoke, one of the little boys dragged a step-ladder over to the tub and climbed it to grab the end of a wire, leaning dangerously out over the acidic, corrosive solution. Colm shut his mouth. He wasn’t here to debate the morality of child labor in alien civilizations.

  But were the Ghosts an alien civilization? It kept niggling at him. Horses, Leyden jars, hydroelectric plants … 8,000 light years from Earth.

  When they had assembled half a dozen batteries. Dhjerga called a halt. The turbine in the other room thundered, shoving current into the cells. Colm estimated the output of the plant at about one megawatt, and the batteries must hold at least a kilovolt, given the size of the things. But he couldn’t feel it the way he had felt the esthesia feedback from the Leyden jar. In fact, he had a familiar feeling of lethargy and sadness, although it was hard to disentangle the sensations from saddle-soreness and all-around exhaustion.

  “Gods, that feels good,” Dhjerga said. “Let’s flit.” He held out a hand to Colm.

  Colm stayed where he was, with his wet, cold feet planted on a dry bit of the floor. Think about Earth, Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth the queazel had advised him. Think about the places you know, the people you love. He thought about Drumnadrochit. Heather and gorse on the hillsides, rain slapping the windows when you’re cozy indoors. The last time he’d seen it, the place was crawling with Ghosts. He thought of his mother and his younger sister Bridget. Not his father, no. Love was just another four-letter word where Lloyd Mackenzie was concerned. Colm could see Mam and Bridget’s faces in his mind’s eye … but the images were just memories, no more real than the faces of the niece and nephew he’d only ever seen in holos—he even had to struggle to remember their names. Morag and Ivan? No, Ivor. He remembered Mam saying that Bridget had moved up north, but he couldn’t remember where …

  Oh, it’s no use, is it?

  The kerosene lantern reddened his eyelids. He opened his eyes, and found both little boys standing right in front of him, staring curiously, as if wondering what this weirdo was doing.

  They looked so damn human.

  They scuffled away, giggling in embarrassment. Colm watched them go, not even able to muster a smile.

  “Are you ready?” Dhjerga said impatiently. He reached for Colm’s right hand and laced his fingers through Colm’s. The gesture felt too intimate, and at the same time childish, as if they were little boys about to play a game, instead of grown men in a world rife with murder and magic. “Wait until you see Dam Lizp Hol. I guarantee you’ll be impressed.”

  Sparks twisted around their joined hands. A weak static shock pulsed up Colm’s arm. Startled, he tried to pull away.

  “Hold on!” Dhjerga’s voice already seemed to come from a long way off. His face and body shimmered, and for an instant the darkness in the battery hall seemed to thin into something unbreathable.

  Then the taut, stretched feeling in the air faded. Dhjerga dropped Colm’s hand.

  “What the fuck?” His expression of astonishment would have been comical at any other time. “Why can’t you flit? You are a mage. You’ve got to be one, or you couldn’t’ve come here in the first place!”

  “I’m not a mage like you’re a mage,” Colm said. His voice was low. He was furious with himself. “My father’s a conjuror who does kids’ birthday parties. The old bastard never taught me anything useful, so they supplemented my natural abilities with technology. Without asking first, mind you. But even the fucking technology doesn’t work as advertised.”

  Human DNA is 99.8% id
entical to Ghost DNA. That’s what Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth had said.

  The rest is chemical, so Gil and the other geniuses behind the CHEMICAL MAGE project had arranged for a new esthesia implant to be installed, without Colm’s knowledge, in his head.

  But even with the implant, he still couldn’t access his genetic heritage … unless he was also using hard drugs. He just came from a world too hostile to magic, was his theory. He needed to be in an altered state of consciousness to make anything happen. No wonder his father was a hopeless drunk. But alcohol isn’t as potent as the compounds magicked up by modern chemistry. When Colm made his ‘flit’ to Kisperet, 8,000 light years from the Unsinkable, he’d been juiced to the gills on tropodolfin, a painkiller commonly used off-label as a stimulant.

  But it had been hours since he crashed to the floor of that cart, and the stuff had completely worn off.

  His implant was dead, his stomach hollow, despite the megawatts building up around them.

  “So no, I won’t be flitting anywhere. Sorry.”

  “Fuck,” Dhjerga said blankly.

  “Go without me.” Colm made an indifferent gesture. He honestly did not care whether Dhjerga went or stayed. He was low, exhausted, hungry, and stuck on a planet that felt corrupted to the core by the Ghosts’ vileness.

  All the same he expected Dhjerga to stay, so it shocked him when Dhjerga said, “Right. I’ll be back later.”

  He faded into thin air, and was gone.

  CHAPTER 4

  MEGUMI SMYTHE WOKE IN her berth on the Unsinkable with her stomach tying itself in knots. She swung her feet to the floor and stumbled barefoot to the head. She vomited as quietly as possible, but when she unlocked the door, Axel Best was standing there.

  “Are you OK?” Axel said.