The Nuclear Druid Page 4

  Gil snarled quietly. The re-entry gees pinned him to his couch, but unlike the Marines in their steel battlesuits, he could move. Queazels were very hardy, despite their fragile appearance. He jerked a forepaw upwards in imitation of the human gesture commonly performed with the middle finger.

  Instead of chiding him, Axel laughed. “I guess I might as well tell you. Meg’s pregnant.”

  Gil’s eyes widened. “Congratulations.”

  “I only found out this morning. I feel like a complete goof. She’s had severe morning sickness, but it never crossed my mind …” He was clearly bubbling over with happiness. “Keep it to yourself for now, OK?”

  “Naturally.” Gil sighed inwardly at the thought that he had missed his own chance to have a family. Even if any females would have had him, Gil had always believed it would be wrong to bring kits into a world ruled by the sentrienza. He resolved anew that Meg and Axel’s baby should not live in such a world.

  The Vulture tore through the underside of the clouds and screamed over Noom’s largest continent. The other five Vultures had pierced the clouds at different locations. Defensive installations, bored into jagged mountain peaks, chattered fire. The Duke of Noom always had been a paranoid recluse. Missiles chased the Vultures, accelerating to follow their twists and turns. All six craft were still decelerating hard, heading for the same coordinates. A missile caught up with one of the other Vultures and atomized it. The Marines watched the fireball with no comment, but their fury charged the silence on the shared radio channel.

  Axel jinked the Vulture from side to side, forcing Gil—whose harness did not fit—to dig his claws into the sides of his couch. The sooty, smoggy atmosphere of Noom made energy weapons next to useless, so the Vulture’s charged particle cannon was deadweight. The ship also had a railgun, but they were saving their rounds for their targets. “Hold onto your guts,” Axel said. “We’re heading down to the deck.”

  The Vulture plunged into a dive that left Gil’s stomach high in the troposphere. Levelling out, the ship scudded above a desert sprinkled with rock formations carved into lacy arabesques by the wind, and oases where Noom’s most numerous slave species, the quadrupedal bisshengri, lived. Gil detested the bisshengri, and was pleased to see Axel spray a fragmenting round into a particularly large and ugly oasis. The frag rounds started off as solid metal slugs, but melted from the sheer acceleration the rails imparted to them. A million droplets of recooled metal shredded the flat-leaved trees and towering bisshengri mud nests. The wind instantly whirled the debris away, exposing a peculiarly regular hill … a sentrienza mound.

  The Duke of Noom’s dwelling-place was a closely guarded secret. However, Gil, as a former confidant of the late Queen of Betelgeuse, knew about it.

  The Vulture decelerated at full throttle. As it dropped towards the desert, a number of cylinders, deceptively resembling chimneys, rose from the surface of the mound and opened fire.

  Axel cursed and triggered the expanding foam inside the Vulture’s Whipple shields.

  Slugs thudded into the shields. The ship descended so fast that Gil thought for a melancholy moment the drive had been hit. Then Admiral Hyland said in his helmet, from the bridge of the Unsinkable, “Got you covered. We’re jamming their targeting radar. Get in there before the orbitals counter-jam us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Axel grunted. He dropped the Vulture onto the desert with a bump that threw Gil against his ill-fitting harness. The Marines hurtled out of their seats and deplaned in combat order. Gil got just a taste of the particulate-heavy air blowing in through the open airlock before he snapped his visor shut. He undulated to the top of the steps.

  The semi-sentient guns popped out of the ground like so many corks out of bottles. They shot high in the air and came down, optically guided, heading for the Marines. One of the Marines did not dodge in time. The gun’s tonnage crushed his battlesuit like a hammer cracking a nut. Standing on the bleeding mass of metal and electronics, the gun spat a revolving stream of lead at the other Marines. They returned fire with their combis, alternating grenades and rifle bursts. The GIMP team took cover behind a drift of fragmented tree trunks and poured ammo through the crew-served machine-gun. The Vulture aimed its turret-mounted Gauss cannon at the other guns that had landed here and there among the advancing Marines. The last gun landed on top of the Vulture itself, with such exuberance that it sank six inches into the fuselage.

  Gil flattened himself to the floor of the airlock chamber and prepared to die.

  A steel-booted foot came down beside his helmet. Axel picked him up by the midsection. Gil spat and clawed—uselessly, as his teeth and claws were encased in his spacesuit.

  “Stop that,” Axel said. “You’re coming. You’re the only one who knows the way.”

  The sentrienza guns’ charge had left their holes empty.

  The Marines skirmished towards them.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON THE BRIDGE OF the Unsinkable, Meg watched the Rat do his thing. Chewing up ships and crews like they were made of cardboard. Noom’s mountaintop defences had taken out three of the Vultures. Axel’s ship and two others had made it to the mound. After an intense firefight, 46 Marines, including Axel, and one queazel, had vanished underground.

  Now they were out of radio contact.

  Meg dug her fingernails into the heels of her hands. She fiddled with the end of her sash. She fought queasiness. She listened, and tried not to scream, as the Rat bantered with the Duke of Noom about the technological conundrums of empire in a finite but very large universe. The cool-as-a-cucumber admiral was on the radio with his enemy at the same time as their troops were fighting to the death.

  So far, the Duke had explained that multiverse theory was a wish-fulfilment fantasy, that wormholes did not exist, and that you really could hear bluebells ringing if you were doing the right kind of psychotropic drugs. He had dropped more nuggets of technological wisdom in half an hour than humanity had got out of the sentrienza in three centuries. But he had not said where his fleet was.

  The Rat rocked on his heels, thumbs hooked in his belt, the picture of confidence. Admiral Hyland was a lean, sinewy man who looked younger than his sixty-something years. He had a crisp English accent, very different from Colm’s soft Scots burr. He stood in front of the command station, against a backdrop of desks arranged in concentric horseshoes. Wall screens displaying sensor data panned and scrolled. Staff officers, heads bent to their holo displays, appeared to be hard at work, but Meg knew they were all listening intently. She herself stood out of the camera’s field of vision, leaning against a door with a hand-lettered sign on it.

  The alien on the big screen facing the Rat looked enviably relaxed. Sentrienza were naturally thin but the Duke of Noom was emaciated, with his pale green hair braided into a crown so large it seemed his toothpick neck should not be able to support it. He reclined on a padded throne that appeared to be upholstered with zebra hide, in a room with a low bulgy ceiling; the hollows among the bulges shed a cold subterranean light. Sentrienza, human, and mara slaves attended him. Meg remembered—she could never forget—the Queen of Betelgeuse’s audience room on her flagship. It had been spartan, dominated by a pyramidal throne of skulls. The Duke clearly had a different idea of luxury. But Meg had killed the queen on her throne, and she would kill the duke too, without a second thought, if she were there. She wished she had gone instead of Axel, or with him. She wished she hadn’t lied to him about the baby.

  A mara in a bronze bikini brought the Duke a drink. He launched into a disquisition on the nature of dark energy.

  The Rat waited politely until he paused for breath, and then said, “You’d really better surrender.”

  “Surrender to a slave race?” The Duke let out a high chittering cackle. Meg winced.

  “Otherwise, I’ll nuke you in your hole. Humans don’t mess about, you know. No pansy airbursts for us.”

  “Your bombs could not penetrate my mound.” The Duke’s voice was the typical sentrienza kazoo
-like buzz. “Try it and see.”

  Unfortunately, he was correct. According to Gil, the complex below the mound went down half a mile. The sentrienza’s preference for living underground had a practical side.

  “What strange, wilful creatures you are,” the Duke said, “to imagine that you could defy the greatest empire in the galaxy!”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” the Rat said. “Your lot have been nosing around Earth for long enough; ever since we were building stone circles, and you came and danced in them by the light of the moon to give us a fright. Rings of toadstools, sour milk, sick cows, the evil eye—that was your first contact strategy. And you call us strange?”

  Everyone on the bridge laughed, even Meg, in an explosive release of tension. It was not widely known on Earth that the sentrienza were the very same beings humanity used to dread under the name of faeries, yokai, or whatever. Scratch that, it wasn’t known at all. Textbooks instructed children that the sentrienza were the good guys protecting us against the dangers of the galaxy, despite the obvious fact that the sentrienza hadn’t protected us against the Ghosts—because it suited them for us to be weakened, so that we would make better slaves.

  “Going to escape in a puff of smoke?” the Rat added, rubbing it in. Everyone laughed again, but not Meg, this time. She was remembering Colm in the pharmacy, her hands sinking through his flesh as if it were made of smoke. The sentrienza could not really work magic. But one ginger-haired Scotsman could.

  The Duke of Noom smiled. It was a horrible sight, as the sentrienza had lots of pointed teeth. “Not necessary,” he said, and snapped his fingers.

  The sensors officer on the bridge of the Unsinkable shouted, “Craft detected. Altitude 400 klicks. 350. Two—five—seven of them!”

  Immune to the panic sweeping through the bridge, the Rat raised an eyebrow. “Bit risky, coming out of the zero-gravity field that near a planet.”

  The Duke of Noom grinned. “Our ships are superior to yours, as we are superior to you.”

  The Unsinkable’s tactical officer grunted, “They’re targeting us, sir.” Screens flashed urgent warnings.

  The Duke said, “Your childish ruse did not fool me. I knew that you, Admiral Hyland, would never abandon your fellow humans, or the lesser sapients you risked so much to liberate. Therefore, I instructed my fleet to enter a flexible holding pattern in the zero-gravity field. Now, as you see, they are back.”

  Meg stared at the screen where composite imaging had acquired optics of the sentrienza ships. They looked like dead twigs, or pieces of coral, symmetrical from one perspective, asymmetrical from another, like those pictures that could be a face or a vase depending on how you looked at them. They made her head hurt. She remembered her time as a captive on the Ruddiganmaseve, and knew she’d rather die than repeat that experience.

  Well, she wasn’t likely to get the choice. Thorny protrusions turned into bristling guns. Targeting lasers pinned the Unsinkable from multiple directions. Noom lay too close to Betelgeuse for the old carrier to go FTL. There was no escape.

  The Rat hesitated.

  “Three. Two,” the Duke taunted them.

  Suddenly, a commotion erupted in the Duke’s lair, deep below the surface of Noom. Smoke and dust clouded the screen. The slaves dived for cover. Muzzle flash sparkled. Part of the ceiling descended behind the throne like a gently shaken quilt, spraying debris across the carpet. The Duke turned on his zebra-hide throne.

  A Walking Gun scuttled out from underneath the throne—and suddenly catapulted backwards, gripping a live grenade in its jaws. It reached the corner of the screen before it exploded. A shard of metal raked a bright track down the Duke of Noom’s cheek. The Duke touched the cut and stared blankly at his fingers.

  A human being in a battlesuit, dripping with filth, charged out of the dust cloud and jammed a combi against the Duke’s braid-wrapped head.

  “Surrender or die, you minion of the Gray Emperor, deceiver of peoples and destroyer of worlds!” squealed the silver sausage clinging to the Marine’s shoulders.

  The Rat smiled broadly. “The queazel has just taken the words out of my mouth.”

  Everyone on the bridge leapt up cheering, except for Meg. Horror paralyzed her. One Marine? One survivor out of 46 who had gone below ground? Who was it? Filth obscured his or her visor …

  With supreme self-control, the Duke turned his slender neck until he was staring straight into the barrel of the combi. “So,” he buzzed. “You may slay me. But if you do, my ships will atomize your primitive rustbucket. Then they will proceed to Juradis to liquidate your friends.”

  “At least we’re at if,” the Rat said.

  The Marine popped his faceplate. Relief flooded through Meg. Thank God, thank God. It was Axel.

  His clean, pale face contrasted with his damaged and dirty battlesuit … but his wild-eyed snarl made the Duke recoil. “You’re in no position to negotiate,” he yelled.

  “But I am,” the Duke said. “If you shoot me, my ships will open fire.” He turned back to the camera. “Admiral Hyland, you know your history. So let us play a game that men and faeries often played in the old days. I shall pose three riddles. If you answer them all correctly, I will surrender. If you answer wrong, my ships will atomize you, as previously discussed.”

  “You’re dead either fucking way,” Axel shouted.

  The Duke shrugged. “Well? Will you play?”

  On the external imaging screens, the sentrienza ships drifted closer to the Unsinkable, turning broadside on. A targeting laser drowned one of the screens in a wash of icy blue.

  The Rat glanced around at the mutely pleading faces that lined the bridge. Meg knew before he spoke that he was going to choose the hundreds of people on the Unsinkable over Axel. “OK, we’ll play.”

  He paused the transmission and pointed at her.

  “Smythe, you’re up. Get me the answers. I needn’t remind you that Major Best’s life depends on it.”

  She sealed her lips tightly on her rage. She saluted and opened the door behind her. The sign on it said FAERIELAND. She walked inside.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SERVOMOTORS AND HYDRAULICS of Axel’s battlesuit held his combi rock-steady, six inches from the Duke of Noom’s head. Just as well he still had juice in his suit, because he had none left in his muscles.

  On his shoulders, Gil snapped and swore at the slaves cringing on the floor. The queazel held three pistols, taken from the bodies of dead Marines. Two full platoons had died so that Axel could stand here, in the heart of the Duke of Noom’s mound, not shooting him. It was Majriti IV all over again. Despair and battle-sickness swirled in his mind, telling him he was the worst officer in human history.

  The Duke, eyes fixed on the camera, said in a low voice, “Did you meet my Walking Guns?”

  “Yes,” Axel said.

  “Did you see my Living Garden, where I keep the slaves who have displeased me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet you did not turn back. Amazing. You smell as if you had fallen down the garbage chute, where they throw the bodies.”

  “I crawled down that garbage chute,” Axel said. “I left half my men in your torture garden. But now I’m here. And only one of us will be leaving this room alive.”

  *

  FAERIELAND. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

  The staff officers had put that sign on the door to make themselves feel better about what was on the other side of it … or rather, who.

  Princess Emnl ki-Sharongat, the sole survivor of the royal family of Betelgeuse.

  Meg closed the door behind her, hearing the snick as it automatically locked. She was unarmed, but she didn’t need to be armed; the sentrienza were physically weak, and Meg was a karate black belt.

  The sentrienza princess squatted on the floor with her upper body canted forward over her toes. Her knees bent backwards, like a dog’s knees. Meg never had got used to that. “Hello, Emnl,” she said. She settled cross-legged in front of the princess,
deliberately adopting an unladylike pose. Petty, but Emnl made her behave in petty ways.

  They had originally furnished this room with some potted plants, and a decorative carpet sourced from a sentrienza ruin on Juradis, to try to make it into a prison cell fit for a princess. Emnl had peed on the carpet, eaten one of the potted plants, and ripped the others to shreds. She was not upset about Meg’s having killed her parents. She was upset that she hadn’t gotten to take her mother’s place as Queen of Betelgeuse. She was fine with the killing bit, she had explained, and actually held Meg in high esteem for having pulled it off … which was why Meg was the only human being she would talk to.

  That was the reason she had given the Rat, anyway.

  “You’re looking well, Meg-sensei,” she piped. “You’re practically glowing.” Her gaze rested for an instant on Meg’s stomach.

  Why, why had Meg told her? For spite, she supposed. Emnl forced her to confront the least pleasant aspects of her own character. Meg had wanted Emnl to know that she did not give a good goddamn about any previous agreement they might have had.

  But now their lives depended on the odious little princess’s cooperation.

  “You’ve got to be bored,” she said, shakily. “How about playing a game?”

  “What sort of a game?” Emnl piped.

  “Riddles.”

  “I have a better idea. I’ll pee on the floor again, and make you clean it up.”

  To hell with being nice. Meg no longer cared that the Rat was listening. “Heads up, you freaky bitch. The Duke of Noom is threatening to slag this ship and murder everyone on board. That includes you. If you don’t want to die, answer his goddamn riddles.”

  “Oh,” Emnl said. “That horrid old pervert. He always did like the riddle game. All right. What’s the first one?”

  The Rat fed Meg the Duke’s first riddle through her comms implant. She repeated, “What has no legs, and yet runs?”

  “Blood, of course.” Emnl yawned. “He must be losing his touch.”

  *