The Nuclear Druid Read online

  “We’re meant to understand each other,” Dryjon said with placid confidence. “And I believe you’re meant to help us. Why else would you be here?”

  Because I’m a Christing idiot, Colm thought.

  Because I’ve never made the right decision in my life when I could make a wrong one.

  Because I wanted to stick it to the Rat for fucking with me.

  Because I didn’t want to face Meg.

  But among all the bad reasons he did have one good one. He wiped his mouth and straightened his spine in a vain attempt to look more like a representative of the Fleet. “The fact is we need your help.”

  “Our help?” Dhjerga said.

  “Yeah. They sent me to ask you to come back and help us. Those bloody idiots have started a war on two fronts. Now we’re fighting the sentrienza, too.”

  “The faeries,” Dhjerga explained to his brother and sister.

  Dhjerga had been there when Colm razed a sentrienza customs post on Juradis. In fact, Dhjerga and his reinforcements had done most of the razing. After that, things had got rather out of control. But Colm had started the rebellion against the sentrienza. So he bore at least some of the responsibility for ending it.

  “Right. So now we’re fighting your buddies at home, and the sentrienza in the Betelgeuse system. And they’ve got an empire, whilst we haven’t. So we’re fucked, unless you come back and help.”

  Dhjerga covered his eyes with one hand. “Did you hear that?” he groaned.

  “Yes,” Diejen said. “You’ve been running wild, getting mixed up in other people’s business. Pulling the ears of alien races we have no quarrel with. Isn’t it bad enough to desert from the Mage Corps, without going berserk and making it worse?”

  “In for a lamb, in for a sheep,” Dryjon said, scraping his thumbnail over a piece of hard cheese. “The Magus has already sworn to execute Dhjerga if he gets hold of him.”

  This word, Magus, had no echo behind it. It fell like a stone, and the jolly little fire seemed to shrink and gutter, the tips of the flames breaking blue.

  “Who’s that?” Colm said. “The Magus?”

  Diejen hugged herself. “Don’t speak that name,” she said harshly.

  “You can’t pretend him away,” Dryjon said.

  “No, but he can be killed,” Dhjerga said. His eyes were red-rimmed. “Slay the Magus and the war ends.”

  “So,” Dryjon said to Colm. “Will you help us?”

  At the door, Diejen stiffened. “I hear horses. Damn it, damn it! They’ve found us.”

  CHAPTER 9

  DIEJEN RUSHED TOWARDS THE turbine hall. Dhjerga went the other way. After a moment’s hesitation Colm followed him into the battery room.

  The sun had risen while they were having breakfast. Morning light flooded over the tubs, the cisterns, the sacks of copper sulfate and the stacks of lead plates. The batteries had iced over, as had the puddles on the floor.

  Two men in forest-colored livery stood on either side of the door, aiming their rifles at the tubs.

  They were identical twins, jowly and red-cheeked.

  Copies.

  The Lizps had brought a pair of copies along, and not even bothered to mention it.

  “My lord!” the copies barked at Dhjerga, without taking their eyes off the tubs in the middle of the room.

  “Have to change the solution,” Dhjerga said. “Drain out the clear water.” He paused, one foot off the floor, head raised, as if sniffing the air. “No, no one’s coming this way. Yet.”

  He wheeled and dashed back the way they’d come. Again Colm followed, feeling totally at sea. In the corridor, Dryjon hopped on one foot, weapons sliding out of his arms onto a raised knee. Dhjerga snatched a shotgun. Colm saved the rest of the guns from falling to the floor.

  “Can you shoot?” Dryjon said.

  “Of course he can,” Dhjerga answered for Colm. He grabbed a heavy satchel of ammo from Dryjon’s shoulder. “Where he comes from, they have guns that can shoot hundreds of rounds a minute.”

  In the turbine hall, the air shook to the thunder of water rushing through the intake pipe below. A metal pole barred the front door. Diejen stood on the catwalk that ran around the room at head height, aiming a shotgun out of one of the slit windows. Hralf the caretaker, a short, wiry man in a forest-green cloak, covered the side of the building facing the river. His family huddled under the catwalk. A dumpy, sweet-faced woman. Eight or nine kids, including the two boys Colm had met last night.

  Dryjon handed out guns to the caretaker’s wife and the oldest children, and sent them all into the battery room. He, Dhjerga, and Colm climbed up onto the catwalk and joined Diejen at the window.

  Outside, the sun perched on the hill beyond the river. The wind picked up flurries of dry snow from the patio. Footprints criss-crossed the white carpet. Colm saw the winding trail of his own footprints leading to the river and back. He scanned the forested hillsides on either side of the river. Nothing.

  “I hear them,” Dhjerga said.

  The wind carried a faint jingling to their ears. It made Colm think of the spoons, and of Great-Grandpa Mackenzie, and for an instant he saw his mother squinting up into the sky, and then he was back on the catwalk, pressed to the crumbling brick of the wall, close enough behind Diejen that he could smell her hair and see a couple of pimples on her slender neck.

  “Here they come,” she breathed.

  Colm peeked around her shoulder. An army was riding out of the trees.

  Not the twenty-odd soldiers he and Dhjerga had left alive last night. Hundreds of men, it seemed to him in that stunned instant, and half of them were on horseback. And in the middle of them, pushing towards the front as the leaders reached the patio, rode two of the magistrates in their black cloaks. The whole straggling party formed up into a solid mass of flesh and glittering steel. The magistrates rode to the front. Another rider preceded them, holding aloft a tasseled banner like a scroll unrolled vertically, which bore the blood-red symbol of the two-headed eagle.

  Dryjon sagged against the wall as if his legs would not hold him. “Where did this lot spring from?”

  “They had a horse-powered generator,” Dhjerga said. “They must have been running it all night. I wish I’d torched it, but there wasn’t time.”

  “You spend your whole life wishing for things that can’t be,” Diejen said fiercely.

  “Go!” Dhjerga said to her and Dryjon, as the magistrates trotted towards the blockhouse. “Go home! What are you waiting for? They don’t know you’re here. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Diejen snapped. “We’re not leaving you.”

  Colm felt terrible. Dhjerga’s brother and sister wouldn’t leave him behind, and Dhjerga wouldn’t leave Colm. His inability to flit was trapping them all, in the claws of this army. Perhaps after all there were only fifty men. That was still more than enough to slaughter everyone here.

  The magistrates reined in, a stone’s throw from the blockhouse. They were confident. “Hey, you in there!” one of them shouted. “Surrender to the authority of the Magus!”

  “Will I fuck,” Dhjerga yelled. He moved towards the window. He and Dryjon scuffled, as each tried to prevent the other from reaching the window.

  Diejen darted behind them, ran along the catwalk, and pushed the caretaker away from the other window. She leaned out and shouted, “Go away! I am the sister of the Lord Prefect of Lizp, and neither I nor my brother has given you the right of passage through our lands!”

  Dhjerga groaned. “That’s torn it.” Wild-eyed, he shoved Dryjon back against the guard rail of the catwalk. Shotgun shells rolled and tinkled to the floor.

  One of the magistrates shaded his eyes. “Well, hello there. It’s little Diejen Lizp. So you and your twin are sheltering the deserter? I might have known. Don’t worry. He’ll receive lenient treatment, if you surrender the human mage.”

  Colm cupped his hands to his mouth. “I’ll give myself up!”

  The whole
mass of mounted soldiery seemed to sway in the wind as they saw him at the window.

  “Don’t bother.” Wincing and holding his ribs, Dryjon bent for the shotgun he had dropped. “They have just declared war on us. It’s been brewing for a while, to be honest.” He picked up a handful of shells, broke the shotgun open, and fumbled to insert them.

  Dhjerga shoved Diejen out of the way and emptied both barrels of his shotgun out of the window. The two magistrates fell from their horses.

  Colm’s jaw dropped. Dryjon groaned, “Oh, no.” He seemed to be equally shocked by this casual slaughter. Dhjerga was acting like a Marine who’d been at the front too long. They would go berserk at the drop of a hat.

  The horses cantered riderless back to the lines. The flag bearer rode after them. Even before he reached the lines, bullets started crack-thumping.

  Diejen let out a high, crazy laugh and returned fire. Dhjerga reloaded and smoothly took her place as she fell back.

  “Those two,” Dryjon said. “They egg each other on. They always have.” He thrust his shotgun at Colm. “I’m going to fetch some more ammunition. We didn’t bring enough for this kind of thing.”

  Left at the window, Colm squeezed off a shot or two. He had not much hope of hitting anything. Bullets sang past him, through the window, and crunched into the ceiling, or struck gong-like notes when they ricocheted off the generator housing, cracking the pretty enamel pictures. He hardly dared to look out of the window long enough to aim. He was no great marksman, anyway. Where he came from, the guns did the shooting for you.

  When he ran out of shells, he edged one eye past the side of the window. The bleeding, torn bodies of men and horses littered the snow. But on the track from the caretaker’s cottage, well out of shotgun range, stood a familiar covered cart. As Colm watched, another soldier slithered down the tailgate, and another. They sprinted forward to join the fray.

  Colm tried to wrap his head around the logistics of a siege where both sides had unlimited access to men and ammo. It could theoretically continue until the enemy advanced to the power house behind breastworks of their dead. Until they climbed to the windows on a rampart of corpses.

  Or until one side fell behind in the desperate race to replenish their assets, giving the enemy time to pounce.

  One of the fallen horses shrieked, kicking in agony while its guts steamed on the snow.

  Another scream pierced through the racket of gunfire. It came from inside the blockhouse.

  Colm turned. Neither Diejen nor Dhjerga had noticed the scream. They were shooting, reloading, shooting.

  Colm jumped down off the catwalk and ran to the passage at the back of the turbine hall.

  One of the smallest children barrelled into him, wailing in terror.

  Shots boomed in the battery room as Colm skidded in. Three soldiers lay bleeding into the blue-tinted puddles. They wore the khaki that Colm now understood to be the uniform of the Magistocracy. The Lizp liverymen and the caretaker’s wife dragged them over to the wall, leaving slug-trails of blood. But how had they got in? This room had no door …

  Dryjon was hauling a satchel of ammunition, too heavy to lift, clear of the icy puddles.

  Colm shouted, “Where’d those guys come from?” But as he spoke, he got it. They were Ghosts. They didn’t need a door. Just a power source. They had come from the batteries.

  Dryjon yelled over the noise of gunfire from outside, “The idea isn’t so much to inflict damage. It’s a tactic to hog the foe’s energy. If they’re sending people through—even if we drop them immediately—we can’t use the power source for our own needs. I managed to grab this much ammo before they keyed in on the batteries. Mind taking it to the others?” The air began to shimmer. “Oh, shit. Here they come again …”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE ENDS OF THE hanging wires spat sparks. The Lizp liverymen levelled their rifles. Clots of unearthly brilliance in the air became mirages of men, and then—

  BOOM. BOOM.

  Two more soldiers dropped to the floor between the battery tubs, stone dead.

  Colm felt like he was losing his mind. He reminded himself that this was only what Axel and the other Marines used to face when they were fighting Ghosts on the surface. But it didn’t help.

  The hanging wires sparked again. There were twenty tubs but Dhjerga and Colm had only hooked up ten of them. The other wires hung free.

  “If there’s anything at all you can do to help, now’s the time,” Dryjon said with a pale attempt at levity.

  Colm stared at the hanging wires.

  That might work.

  He couldn’t do magic, but he knew a few things about electricity.

  “Have you got any spare cable around here?”

  Dryjon stared at him. “You’re hard to understand sometimes.”

  “Cable. Cable. Like that stuff up there, for God’s sake. Wire with insulation on it.”

  “Oh. Lifelines. There are some spares in the storage closet, I think.”

  “Fantastic.”

  Rolling a heavy cable spool back to the battery room, Colm heard more shots from up ahead. He ignored them this time. He kicked the end of the cable behind him. It was insulated, although the insulation just looked like a cloth binding dipped in tar.

  “Throw that out the window of the turbine hall,” he yelled over his shoulder. “And then tell them to stop firing.”

  *

  The roar of shotguns from the blockhouse sputtered into nothing.

  Outside, the last magistrate, observing the battle from the treeline—but visible, in his black cloak, to Colm, who was standing on the stepladder in the battery room, looking out the window—hand-signalled to his troops.

  The khaki soldiers, now numbering more than when they had arrived, despite the dozens of corpses on the snow, ceased fire. For a moment no one moved. Silence returned to the valley.

  Then harness and buckles jingled. The Magistocracy troops formed up into a wedge, with the surviving cavalry in the lead.

  Colm turned from the window. A length of cable trailed over the sill beside him. His hand hovered above a switch improvised from two planks and Dryjon’s bayonet. He hissed, “Is everyone standing on the table?”

  “Yes,” Dhjerga said, standing on one of the wooden stools in the doorway, eyes wide with curiosity. “Or on something else made of wood, like you said.”

  But the two liverymen were not standing on anything except the icy floor. They remained at their posts, ready to take out the next intruders. “Get them out of here,” Colm begged.

  The magistrate lowered his arm sharply.

  The cavalrymen began to trot.

  The footsoldiers jogged behind them.

  Onto the patio, where the snow had been churned up into wet pink slush.

  In that slush lay the end of Colm’s cable, and another one dangling from the window of the turbine hall, which stretched through the power house to the battery room.

  The riders picked up speed.

  A volley of bullets slammed into the blockhouse.

  They were all on the patio now.

  They’re just copies, Colm reminded himself. Just copies, just copies, just copies! But oh, the poor horses—

  He threw the switch. Vicious sparks popped as the circuit closed.

  The horses foundered as if their legs had been cut out from under them.

  The riders dropped their weapons, slid from their saddles.

  The infantry collapsed, and Colm hid his face in his hands. He had connected the batteries in series, maximizing the voltage of the generator’s output … and hence the differential between the wet snow on the patio, a conductor, and the foe’s feet. All that power was now coursing through the people out there, stopping their hearts and charring their flesh.

  “Oh fuck,” Dhjerga yelled. Colm turned to see the two liverymen staggering, jerking. As he had feared, the circuit ran through the battery room, too. Wet outside, wet inside. Their shoes offered no protection.

  Just copi
es, just copies—

  He threw the switch to break the circuit, half a second before Dhjerga leapt off the stool, forgetting Colm’s warnings.

  Dhjerga shoved Colm aside and clambered to the top of the ladder. “Amazing,” he breathed, staring out of the window.

  Dryjon and Diejen crashed into the room. Diejen brushed past Colm and climbed the ladder, squeezing around Dhjerga to see out. “They’re all dead,” she said in wonder.

  “Including ours,” Dryjon said, glancing at the liverymen. “So you can do magic, after all.” His gaze rested coolly on Colm.

  “That wasn’t magic,” Colm said. He wrapped rags around his hands for extra protection, as he didn’t really trust the insulation on the cables. He hurried from tub to tub, disconnecting the batteries before anyone else managed to electrocute themselves. “It was electrical engineering 101.”

  “I don’t care what it was,” Dryjon said. “You saved our lives and ended the Magistocracy’s illegal incursion into Lizp Province. But if they broke the law once, they’ll break it again. So I would like you to teach us that spell, and any others you know.”

  Colm had to step over one of the dead liverymen to reach the last battery tub. “Wouldn’t you rather have streetlights? Trains? Telephones?”

  The faces of the three siblings were blank. Diejen whispered to Dhjerga, “What’s he talking about now?”

  “Faerie machines,” Dhjerga muttered.

  “Oh, yes,” Diejen said. “I know about those. Machines that do the work of people. Sorry, but we don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

  “Well …” Dhjerga said.

  “No, never mind that stuff,” Dryjon said. “It’s this power spell I’m interested in. Naturally, we’ll compensate you for your help.”

  Colm climbed on the stepladder to hook the wires out of the way. “Wouldn’t you rather have spaceships?”

  “Ships for flying between worlds,” Dhjerga murmured to the others.

  “You’ve never flown,” Colm said. “You’ve never seen your homeworld from space. It changes your life. You see how small and precious everything is.” They stared at him blankly. “Flying! Flying!” he said impatiently, stretching out his arms like a kid playing airplane, to show them what he meant. His body ached for the esthesia prickle of the vacuum, the kiss of re-entry heat, all the sensations of speed and freedom. He had spent his whole adult life flying, first light planes and then jets and then spaceships. It had been about getting away. From home, from Earth, from his father. Now he’d got further away than he ever imagined … and he would never fly again. He jumped off the stepladder. “Anyway, I’m fucking scunnered wi’ this,” he said, picking up the ladder. “I’ll not be helping you anymore.”