The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “That explains your lack of social skills,” Colm said, still talking just to talk. Generator, generator. “Jesus, it’s cold in here.”

  “It’s colder in Norway.”

  “Why do they clear-cut the forest?”

  “We had to do something after the oil ran out.”

  “Ha, ha.” Here it was. He’d been looking for a squat steel cabinet. Instead the generator was an anodized red torpedo, mounted on shocks, with its own set of computer controls. These colonists had had everything. Except the common sense it would have taken to save their own lives. As he bent over the display, it lit the fog of his breath green. Why was it so cold?

  “I’m just kidding,” Bekkelund said. “The clear-cutting is to eliminate sitka spruce. An invasive species. After they finish, it looks like a bombed-out whorehouse. But it’s not like they cut down everything. They have to leave enough trees for the woodpeckers.”

  “There’s twenty-five kilowatts coming out of here,” Colm said. “But where’s it going?”

  If the generator was running, the lights should be on, at a bare minimum. So why were they still in the dark?

  Colm suddenly smelled sulfur.

  “Oh,” Bekkelund said.

  A wave of cold washed over Colm’s face.

  Sparks wriggled from the generator. Colm drew back sharply. It looked like the generator had turned into a Tesla coil, but instead of one large streamer, fifteen or twenty little streamers snaked through the air, spitting off fractal spikes.

  When you lay your hand on the outside of a vacuum chamber with a Tesla coil in it, the streamers jump to your hand.

  But these streamers were not jumping to Colm. They converged on a point between him and the biodiesel intake pipe feeding the generator, where the shadows were deeper and darker than anywhere else in the room.

  The intake pipe rippled.

  No, the air in front of it was rippling, as if he were looking at jet engine exhaust, but it wasn’t hot. It was icy cold, and he was back in the sitting-room of his childhood home at Drumnadrochit, hiding behind the settee, petrified with fear.

  The rippling turned into shimmering. The shimmering shadow got denser, sucking up the streamers of electricity. And this dense dark shimmer, this cold hole in the air, this impossibility, congealed into a shape.

  The shape of a person.

  The streamers died, leaving a faint glow that outlined a ghostly man.

  About Colm’s height, about his age.

  Stark-ass naked.

  Except for a jaunty forage cap with the earflaps hanging down.

  Brown hair stuck out under the forage cap. Gold insignia glinted on the cap, too blurry to read.

  And the eyes ... thank God, the eyes in the knobbly-chinned, big-nosed face were not the electric blue Colm remembered. They were brown, sparkling with humor and curiosity.

  Frozen, Colm stared ... and the man smiled at him.

  Solidity spread outwards from that smile, ghostly extremities resolving into pale flesh, arms and neck marked by farmer’s tan lines.

  “Sir,” Bekkelund gasped.

  His voice broke the spell.

  This was not a man.

  Or a memory.

  It was a Ghost.

  Colm lunged to the generator controls, slapped the power switch.

  The Ghost moved. Colm ducked—pure reflex. A steel blade crunched into the computer display, shattering the screen into pixelated mud. The Ghost had a sword, where there had been nothing in his hands before, and he was lunging at Colm, raising the blade overhand to stab—

  Colm threw himself backwards off the platform. It was not a planned move, just panic. He managed to twist in the air so he struck the floor with his left hand and knee. His other hand was already reaching for his holstered pistol.

  The Ghost jumped off the platform. By the time he hit the floor, he was no longer naked. He wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers. His boots were covered with dust. Not the moist red earth of Majriti IV, but whiter, drier stuff. The sole of one boot flapped like a tongue. An undecorated leather scabbard slapped his thigh. Colm noticed these details as he made the split-second judgement that he didn’t have time to draw and fire. He sprinted away, around the platform.

  The Ghost pursued him, the loose sole of his boot slapping on the floor: thud-slap, thud-slap.

  Bekkelund was trying to push himself to his feet. He brought his pistol up, his eyes like saucers.

  Colm tripped on the corpse of another Ghost, fell, rolled. Bekkelund’s rounds passed over his head, eviscerating the air. Echoes piled on top of each other.

  Thud-slap.

  The sword whistled down, through the space Colm had vacated a microsecond before. The long, deathly-sharp blade bit into the Ghost corpse Colm had tripped on.

  More shots from Bekkelund, and then a curse and a shout, “I’m out!” Colm raised his head to see Bekkelund frantically ejecting his magazine.

  Thud-slap.

  Colm rolled onto his back, drawing his pistol in the same motion. He fired and missed. Yes, you can miss at point-blank range, when the target is moving, when the target is a Ghost with a freaking longsword, a new twist on the madness that’s scrambled humanity’s understanding of the universe. We thought we had it all figured out, and then the Ghosts showed up.

  The shock of seeing his nightmare come to life, the same but different, undermined Colm’s confidence and dulled his reflexes. He fired again. Missed again, and then had time to scramble to his feet, because the Ghost was charging past him.

  Heading for Bekkelund.

  “No, you fucker,” Colm screamed. He levelled his pistol, but he was scared of hitting his copilot.

  The sword rose and fell.

  It met Bekkelund’s neck. Bekkelund’s head fell off. it bounced on his thigh and rolled across the floor. Blood gouted from the stump of his neck, spraying the Ghost, turning its homely face into a horror mask.

  Colm howled like an animal. He emptied his magazine at the Ghost, then bounded to Bekkelund’s body. The last he saw of the Ghost, it was crawling away on hands and knees, taking cover behind the platform of the TDP plant. Colm hoped he’d fatally wounded the fucker but he did not have time to chase it down and make sure. He had the idea that he might be able to save Bekkelund if he reattached his head right away. You could do that with limbs, provided you had a dose of regrowth accelerator on you, which Colm did, a single-use syringe in his belt pouch. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that of course that wouldn’t work with someone’s head.

  Holding the gory, slack-jawed thing in his hands, he let out a scream of rage and despair.

  A long, fluffy length of carpet wriggled out from behind Bekkelund’s seated body and dragged itself onto Colm’s knees.

  “What the mortal fuck?” Colm said. He dropped Bekkelund’s head.

  “Help,” the carpet murmured.

  “Now I know I’m going mad,” Colm said.

  In that surreal moment, his training took over. His hands reached for Bekkelund’s body, lifted the dog tags from around Bekkelund’s neck stump, stuffed them in his pocket. He checked Bekkelund’s belt for spare magazines and dropped them into his own ammo pouch. Then he stood up and started for the door.

  The talking carpet had wrapped itself around his hips. It was awkward, so he uncoiled it and hung it around his neck like a scarf.

  As he reached the door, the grinder started up again behind him.

  CHAPTER 5

  COLM LIMPED DOWN THE passage. He had done something to his left knee back there. He hadn’t felt it at the time but now it hurt like hell and it kept buckling. He couldn’t put his weight on it, so he had to hop along, supporting himself on the wall.

  The lights came on.

  It was worse than he’d imagined. Colonists lay motionless in pathetic little huddles. Some had been beheaded like Bekkelund. Others had bled out from gunshot wounds. Men, women, children. Red, red, red. Gore splattered the walls and even the ceiling. Pitiless LED fixture
s doubled in Colm’s swimming vision. There were pictures on the walls, not holos but actual 2D paintings, skilful evocations of farm life, now soiled red, red, red.

  The horrific scene scarcely had time to sink in. Half a dozen Ghosts charged out of the TDP plant. One had already multiplied into six. They sprinted down the passage, swords out.

  Colm set his back against the wall and squeezed the trigger of his machine pistol. This time he didn’t miss, not through any particular feat of skill but because he’d accidentally flipped the selector to auto. He got the three in front, which forced the others to slow down. But that left him stuck in the same plight that had killed Bekkelund, fumbling for a fresh magazine with seconds between him and death.

  “Elevator,” whispered the talking carpet draped around his neck. “On your left.”

  “Huh?”

  One end of the carpet lashed out feebly and struck a metal plate on the wall.

  Elevator doors sighed open.

  Colm toppled in. He slammed the topmost button, marked ROOF.

  A sword slashed through the gap between the closing doors. Colm hit it with the butt of his pistol. The elevator doors closed. The blade withdrew inch by inch, metal squealing.

  The elevator was big enough to take a jeep, its floor strewn with chaff and stray grains of wheat. It rose slowly. Colm ejected the empty magazine, inserted one of the ones he’d taken from Bekkelund’s body.

  Vike’s dead. Dead!

  He shuddered as it hit him all over again, and the carpet draped around his neck twitched, reminding him of his existence.

  It was fox-colored, reddish-brown, with black tufts along one side. Heavier than it looked. Limp and warm. The fur tickled his neck above the cowled-down helmet of his leathers. He considered addressing it, then decided he did not have the mental bandwidth for that right now.

  The doors opened on a plaza carved out of the cliff top, levelled smooth. Trees and scrub overhung the plaza on three sides. A stone balustrade fenced off the drop to the farmyard on the fourth side.

  With a rush of relief, Colm recognized the view from the field sergeant’s helmet camera. He had thought the sergeant was standing on a narrow balcony, but this was actually ...

  Yes!

  A helicopter pad.

  Of course, living in this remote spot, the colonists would have had to have a chopper. It was nice to think they might have evacuated some of the children and old people before the shit hit the fan.

  Dead bodies lay here and there. In the blue light of the gas giant, Colm identified a dozen Ghosts and half as many Marines. He now reckoned that all the Marines he had come to evacuate were dead.

  He hop-limped out of the elevator, then leaned back in, holding onto the door, and shot the control panel. The noise stabbed his eardrums. A shard of plastic sliced through his right eyebrow. Blood dripped into his eye. Well, hopefully that would deny the Ghosts the use of the elevator.

  Wiping his eyes, he hopped a few more steps, and then found it was easier to crawl. On hands and knees, he dragged himself towards the dark vista of fields and forest.

  There was the beautiful delta-winged form of the gunship, sitting in that field a couple of klicks away. The helicopter pad was 50 meters across, max. The gunship measured 46.5 meters from nose to tail. Could Colm set it down here? He didn’t know, but he was going to find out.

  Now that he was no longer inside a mountain, he could use his comms implant, with the radio in his helmet to boost his signal. He initiated contact with the gunship and waited for it to verify his voiceprint and password phrase.

  ACCESS DENIED.

  What?

  He tried again.

  ACCESS DENIED.

  Well, fuck.

  He dropped his head and laid his cheek on the cool, dusty rock. Not giving up, mind you. Just having a think.

  “Sir?”

  “Smythe! Where are you?” Colm pulled himself up on the balustrade. Her voice had lacked the crispy quality of a radio transmission. He had heard it with his ears.

  “Over here. Here.”

  He finally saw her, lying in the shadow of the cliff that rose up behind the helipad. One armored hand twitched, signalling him. He crawled over to her, fearing the worst. She was lying on her back. He saw himself reflected in the visor of her battlesuit, and then it slid away into her helmet. Her face looked pale and drained, but at least it wasn’t a red mess like the faces of the other Marines on the cliff top.

  “All right, Gunny?”

  “If this clusterfuck falls anywhere on the spectrum of all right? Then yeah, I’m dandy. Where’s Vike?”

  “He was a real Viking after all. Died like a fucking hero.” Avoiding her stricken face, Colm’s gaze travelled down her battlesuit ...

  ... to a door in the sheer rock behind her.

  Shit.

  With his own eyes he had seen that poor sergeant climbing a flight of spiral stairs.

  “Gunny, get up.”

  “My suit’s out of juice. I can’t even operate the radio. I’ve been lying here for ... I dunno; feels like hours.”

  “Ghosts’re about to come through that door.”

  “They’re all dead.”

  “For them, that’s just a temporary setback.” Colm levered himself upright, leaning on the cliff next to the door. His good leg felt like overcooked spaghetti.

  “I got halfway up the stairs,” Smythe said, “and my suit started to fail. The power drained away like the fuel cell was a bucket with a hole in it. And you’re not gonna believe this, but I saw it going. It was like these weird tendrils of lightning—”

  “Like a Tesla coil, but instead of one main streamer, there were a whole lot of smaller ones. And then a Ghost appeared.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It started off all blurry, but then it got solid. And attacked you with a sword.”

  “Huh? No, just with its hands.”

  Colm nodded. That made sense, if—a big if—any of this made sense to begin with. The generator at the TDP plant had a bunch more power than a battlesuit.

  More power than an electric fire in a cottage in Drumnadrochit.

  “So I killed it,” Smythe said. “But by that time I was running on fumes. My big accomplishment tonight: crawling the rest of the way up those fucking stairs.” Her voice trembled with exasperation.

  Colm knew that Smythe sucked at coping with failure. She held herself to unrealistic standards. Under normal circumstances he would have teased her until she snapped out of it.

  “Bad news,” he said. No point sugarcoating it. “The ship’s locked me out. I’m assuming they reset the presumed-dead timer without bothering to inform us. Used to be you could leave your ship for up to six hours. Now, I suppose they figure if you’ve been away for more than ... how long have we been out here? Two, three hours ... you’re dead.”

  “Not a completely unrealistic assumption,” Smythe said, lips thin, gazing up at the waning gas giant. “Or maybe the Ghosts are screwing with the ship.”

  “The Ghosts couldn’t break two-factor authentication on a bloody moped,” Colm scoffed, without conviction. If Ghosts could materialize out of thin air and go Culloden on your ass, anything might be possible.

  “Ah, but you’re forgetting something,” Smythe said. “What if these Ghosts are transitioning to Stage Three?”

  “That’s when they learn to talk, and all this unpleasantness turns out to be a big misunderstanding, yeah?” In fact no one knew what Stage Three Ghosts looked like. Their existence was just a rumor.

  “Stop it,” Smythe said. “We’ve been losing a ton of ships, if you noticed. No way have they all been destroyed. They’re getting stolen.”

  Colm decided he had let this go far enough. “Anyway, I want to try to reach the ship on foot and see if it’ll accept my voiceprint once I’m within implant range. It might just be a problem with my suit radio.” He glanced up at the scrub overhanging the top of the cliff. It was low enough to climb. “You’ll need to ditch the armo
r.”

  “Yeah, but ...”

  She felt safe in the battlesuit. Colm understood that. But right now, the suit was not a solution. It was 70 kgs of steel pinning her to the rooftop. It was a death trap.

  “Ditch the suit, Gunny!”

  He made his voice the bark of a senior lieutenant, and gunnery sergeant Megumi Smythe obeyed with a robotic “Yes, sir.” Manual releases snicked, the suit cracked open down one side, and the thin-legged, black-haired Smythe struggled out like a hermit crab leaving its shell. She picked up her combi, shivering in her undies. “Ta-da,” she said with a weak smile. “And you didn’t even have to buy me a drink.”

  “I’ll buy you one when we’re safely out of this,” Colm said, relieved that she could still banter. “Now come and give me an assist. I think I’ve dislocated my kneecap.”

  She did more than that. She found him a dead Marine’s combi to use as a crutch.

  Shame it was out of ammo, as they could have used twice as much firepower when the Ghosts reached the helipad.

  By that time Smythe had climbed up to the cliff top via the balustrade. She was reaching down to help Colm, dangling upside-down, knees wrapped around a small tree. Colm balanced on one haunch atop the narrow balustrade, his bad leg hanging down on one side, a sixty-meter drop on the other.

  The Ghosts charged out of the stairs, twenty of them if there was one, bayonets glittering.

  Smythe let go of Colm’s hand. She flipped herself right way up and landed in a crouch on the cliff top, behind the combi she had set up on its fold-out tripod in readiness. Hunkering behind the sights, she shot at the Ghosts. First the grenade thrower, then the rifle, then the grenade thrower again. Her shots were perfectly placed. Ghosts blew apart in a hail of gore.

  Colm knew he could add nothing to her consummate prowess. He concentrated on getting himself off the balustrade, grabbing the vines that hung down, testing their strength, deciding to risk it. Hand over hand, shoulders burning, he hauled himself up to the overhang. Why couldn’t Majriti IV have been a low-gravity world?