He hefted her again, examining the crusted wedge of the axe head.
She had
. . .
potential.
‘Professor Ashbury?’ Heath asked. ‘You got anything?’
She shook her head.
‘I’m at a complete loss, Michael. I think you might need to get some more professors out here. Scholars of old Icelandic legend perhaps. Or some Beowulf nerds. I’m sure you can find some starving adjuncts who would be willing to take the government’s coin for this project.’
Professor Compton gave Ashbury a look of disapproval before adding his own thoughts. ‘I have some cross-disciplinary experience in anthropology and English mythology.’
‘Okay,’ Heath said. ‘Your theory?’
‘Not so much a theory,’ Compton said. ‘If we were a pre-technological, prescientific culture and we bore witness to this act, we would describe the moment as magical. We would lack any other rational explanation.’
‘Why don’t you just go ahead and quote Arthur C Clarke?’ Ashbury said. ‘You’re most of the way there.’
Compton pushed on, ignoring her. ‘Mr Hooper is in possession of what seems a charmed weapon. The act of killing the creature appears to have given him special powers and privileges. In mythology there would be rituals to attend to. But step back from the process and imagine giving a caveman a handgun. He would feel the same confusion and awe and imagine the need to reach for a magical explanation. Simply because he didn’t understand the process and the technology. He would shroud any understanding in worship and ritual.’
Heath looked at Professor Ashbury.
‘Probably,’ she conceded.
‘Well, the first ritual ought to be to clean her up,’ Dave said.
McInerney reappeared right on cue with a wet cloth that he handed to Dave. ‘Spoken like a marine.’
‘Thanks, man,’ he said before slowly wiping down the length of the dark wood shaft, folding the cloth over, and cleaning the head. It was an imperfect job, but he found that he didn’t mind a few blood spots and impurities. They, too, seemed right. As if they also had potential.
‘So? Can I keep it?’ he asked. It seemed that he should ask permission even though it was Marty’s. Or perhaps because it was Marty’s. There were undoubtedly protocols for dealing with the personal effects of the dead.
‘I don’t know what else we’d do with it,’ Heath admitted. ‘If you dropped it here and walked away, I don’t think it would ever leave the room. I suspect it would be here until the rig rusted and fell apart and it dropped down to the seabed.’
‘We should get back to work, sir,’ McInerney said.
‘Of course, Sergeant. Thank you for your help. I’m sorry to keep you. And you, too, Everding. Thank you.’
‘Wouldn’t have missed it, sir,’ McInerney replied. ‘C’mon, let’s go start some more rumours.’
The marines departed, leaving Dave and the others in the bare, sanitised surrounds of the empty room.
17
T
he thresh remained in darkness while the filthy minion gorged itself on meat that rightly belonged in their gullets. They had been the ones to lay the fear on the prey as the calflings rode along so proudly on their captured beast of burden. Did the minion think it was easy reaching out to the mind of such creatures, travelling at great speed, fast enough by their reckoning to outpace a full grown wulfin?
Short answer, no.
Because minion didn’t think at all. Thinking and minion were as inimical to each other as vampyri and the dawn. Minion were best at charging and biting and tearing the limbs from enemies and prey, none of which required a great deal of thought. Just lots of teeth and claws and fast springy haunches, of which minion had an elegant sufficiency.
They were also, the thresh admitted, not so bad at biting and tearing considerable chunks of hide from unwary thresh that strayed too close to them, especially in the first moments of a feeding frenzy.
Thresh, however, prided themselves on their thinkings and ponderings. And right now these two were pondering how to distract a stupid, puckering sphincter of a minion from its dinner long enough that they might enjoy a nibble of their own. A while longer and this one would be slow and even stupider than normal with the carnage coma their gluttonous kind always suffered. But likewise, in a little while longer that greedy bastard was going to scarf the whole thing! They cautiously scouted the scene, looking for a way in.
The great armoured chariot whence the prey had been pulled looked to be the possession of a mad wizard of immense wealth and power. A throbbing, thumping sound whumped methodically at the humid air around them, a mourning cry for the half-consumed master who lay on the ground in a strange, ceremonial robe thrown asunder. The magick chariot itself was a blaze of gold and sparkles with luscious hide seats of blood red on the inside. Many a magnificent beast must have been slaughtered and drained to provide the opulence for this mode of conveyance that the queen herself would be proud to rest in. Even the wheels were fashioned of pristine silver that reflected the light from a thousand unseen candles.
The thresh knew the minion could hear them as they manoeuvred through the ruins of the calfling village, around the edge of the kill, careful never to stray into the burning light of the carrier beast’s enormous eyes. But the minion could not hear them as they conversed and plotted, for thresh made no noise at all when doing that. Instead, the thresh remained within the shelter of a brick structure possessed of a red metal roof that held the distant memory of meat, spice, and calfling musk. A fallen temple, perhaps, given its size and complexity. They stayed away from the glaring yellow light of another calfling temple where dead flesh was burning, filling the air with a stale, nasty, oily odour that clashed violently with the sweet, delicate scent of the fresh kill.
They spoke into one another’s minds with nary a whisper on the cool night air to give away their communication. Indeed, that was how they had brought down the prey in the first place. Forcing, with great difficulty, a mirage into the mind of the rider who held the odd reins of the golden chariot. The constant drumbeat –
whumpety-whump-whump-whump
– pounding from the chariot made it difficult to penetrate the comparatively feeble mind of the wagon’s driver.
Surely not a wizard or sorcerer; this mind had been cluttered, addled with drunkenness and some toxin the thresh could not quite puzzle out for they were both immature and lacked the thinkings of a full grown Thresh or Threshrend. Nonetheless, little did it matter as they shivered and hopped in hungry frustration while other calflings stayed under the protection of great candle lights that burned everywhere. Those calflings screamed in fear and anger while holding up charms and glowing amulets as if to ward away thresh and minion alike.
Futile, of course.
So no, it had not been at all easy reaching out into the mind of the chariot master, and the effort had left them exhausted, which was why that minion really was drinking the
urmin
piss, slouching out there in plain view, gobbling down their dinner. After a good while circling and stalking about in the dark, the same thought occurred to both thresh at the same time, as such things often did.
Why did they not flinch from the light of the carrier beast’s eyes? So bright was it that their own eyestalks should have shrivelled and burned black from the intense glare. The two shadow creatures exchanged a significant look. Slowly, and as quietly as possible, they crept upon the feeding scene. They could sense the fevered terror of nearby calflings, but they paid them no further heed. For one, the filthy minion was dining magnificently on the repast that was rightly theirs. And for two, there was the troubling truth of the second minion, or rather its carcass, brought down by some dark magick a calfling wizard had unleashed before the minion overwhelmed the cattle.
They remembered and looked at the crowd of calflings as they emerged slowly, cautiously into the light, all the while keeping an eye on the remaining minion. One calfling wizard-warrior, braver than the rest, stood a little forward of the mewling pack. He had long locks of dark hair and wore white robes cut to display his own tattoos. That gold chain might mean something. The strange headdress with a flat, tongue-like protrusion was surely significant. A strange, indecipherable rune stood out on it, a sign of the human wizard’s magickal order. In consulting the memory of the thresh, they found nothing to aid in their considerations. None of the magick amulets or boxes the calflings held spoke the word of death or gave the sign of flame that attended it. That was a relief. Wizards and amulets seemed in copious abundance in this realm.
That, the thresh agreed, was the only explanation for the vexing problem of how calfling prey had brought down a single minion at all. Best to ponder such things at leisure, however, after eating.
The thresh hopped out of the shadows and onto the road. They stalked around the wreck of another magick chariot, fearful that at any moment a stray shaft of light might fall upon their oozing hides and flay them off in a bright phosphorescent burst of white fire and pain. But even as they crept closer and felt the familiar and disagreeable tingle of strong moonlight on their backs, they sensed no threat from the blazing eyes of the carrier beast or the tall candle pyres that threw their own weak glow over the village ruins. It was as though the chariot beast’s eyes were alight and yet dead at the same time, possessed of none of the malevolent puissance that attended illuminations here in the Above.
Perhaps the stories were wrong, they exchanged in silence. Perhaps it had been so long since anything had hunted in the realm of men that myth and legend had replaced true thinkings and ponderings about the Above.
The thresh crouched closest to the greedy minion suddenly started in a panic when an eyestalk dipped and noticed a thin red point of light lying across its forearm. The opalescent pus that ran from its pores should have ignited. But instead it merely glistened in the cold, harmless fire of the light. The thresh skinned back their thin lipless mouths, exposing rows of serrated teeth as a scheme passed between them in a glimmering of quickthinkings.
One hungry, surly minion might well pull the big thinking head of an unwary thresh clean off. Well, maybe not so clean. But one bloated, blood-drunk fool of a minion, engorged with man meat and dizzy with the marrow spins, was almost certainly not a match for two of the quickest, thinkingest thresh the nest of il-Aron had ever hatched.
Their fangs, glinting in the harmless light, began to move along the gum track in their distended mouths, building up such speed that they soon blurred into a single cutting edge, super-hard, razor-sharp, and positively humming as they burst from concealment and fell upon the hapless minion.
In the distance, a strange howling sound filled the air, rushing toward them. Perhaps another creature was feeding tonight.
18
N
either Dave nor Professor Ashbury was tired, but Captain Heath was as good as his word and took himself off to his cot, with Professor Compton worrying at his heels the whole way. Once they dropped out of sight, Dave turned to Ashbury and sketched a formal bow.
‘Walk you around the grounds, Prof?’ he asked in his best imitation of Good Dave. ‘A stroll can sometimes clear the head and put a fella in the mood for bed.’
‘That sounds like a well-worn family aphorism,’ she said.
‘A what?’
‘A saying.’
‘Ah, then you’re right. My grandma used to say it all the time. Believed it, too. She came to live with us after the old man took off. To help out, you know.’
He took the splitting maul along with him, not because he expected any trouble on a platform full of marines and navy SEALs but because it felt like he should. Like it was his responsibility.
‘Lucille,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘BB King named all of his guitars Lucille. I’m thinking of naming this baby here. Lucille would work.’
‘Why, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘I like BB King.’
‘No, why must you name it?’
Dave paused for a moment. The storms of the last few days had broken up, and out here, where they walked around the southern terrace, the sky was densely speckled with twinkling points of light. A day of rain and wind had sucked most of the warmth from the air, and he was glad of the new hoodie he wore, this one a thick grey woollen number from the Naval Academy. The prof was buttoned up inside a Burton ski jacket.
‘Would you believe me if I said I had to? That I didn’t have a choice? Just like when I get hungry.’
He held the maul up between them, gripping it with one hand just below the head. Moonlight glinted on the axe blade.
‘It’s like
. . .
I dunno
. . .’
‘You birthed it?’
Dave searched her expression for a sign that she was being sarcastic, but the professor seemed more intrigued than anything.
‘No. Not birthed it.’
God, that sounded like something Annie would say: ‘I birthed these children for you, Dave. I birthed them.’
‘No,’ he said, starting to walk again. ‘But it feels like I have to. Like leaving it nameless would be wrong.’
‘Okay, then. I suppose you had best name her. Lucille is good. I have an aunt by that name. A genuine 1960s hippie. She was groovy, in the dictionary definition of the word. Beads and everything.’
Dave held the head of Marty’s splitting maul up at eye level. He spoke to it as though it were a child.
‘Lucille, I’m glad to make your acquaintance.’
He meant it playfully, but as he addressed the maul, it seemed to grow lighter in his hand. His grip became surer, and a strange, not entirely pleasant shiver ran down his arm and through his body, into the deck beneath his feet.
‘Whoa.’
‘Is there a problem?’ Professor Ashbury asked. She had stopped walking, and her eyes were alive with concern. ‘Are you okay, Dave? You look like you just got a shock. An actual shock.’
She was right. He was covered in goose bumps. They faded quickly, but he hefted the maul, examining it closely.
Lucille did feel lighter. A hell of a lot lighter.
‘Well, that was strange,’ he said. ‘Not the strangest thing to happen today but weird enough.’ He let the hammer drop, careful not to hit or even touch Emma with it. ‘I think she likes her name.’
These are their names, and the dead shall know them well.
He shivered and stepped off, eager to be on the way again.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s a nice terrace out of the wind on the far side of the rig.’ They walked in silence for a few minutes, exchanging a few ‘good evenings’ with a squad of marines they passed under the communications shack. Marines, Dave had been surprised to discover, were all about good manners. Clouds passed over the moon at one point when they were traversing an unlit walkway. Professor Ashbury found herself unable to proceed in the darkness, but Dave’s night vision adjusted without his even being aware of the change. He noticed her difficulty and reached out a hand, gently taking her by the arm. She gasped.
‘It’s cool. I got you,’ he said. ‘Just walk forward.’
He led her across the gantry. Small, shuffling baby steps for her and longer, more confident strides for him. But slowly, like a dancer, so she could keep up.
When they reached the other side, a Coleman lamp spilled a wedge of light onto the deck from around the corner of a prefab unit that had housed crew before it had been burned.
‘Thanks,’ she said, genuinely shaken. ‘I don’t like heights or the dark.’
Dave waited a beat before laughing.
‘And so you thought you’d seek your career in outer space?’
‘Not exactly. No. It’s just
. . .
oh, shut up, you.’
She backhanded him, which didn’t hurt at all. The moon came back out, and they made it to the terrace without any further problems.
‘You think there’s anything up there? Really?’ Dave asked, pointing at the sky with the maul. The dense steel head blotted out some of the star field. When she answered, her voice was tired. She still sounded a little nervous.
‘My scientific scepticism took a beating today. I don’t feel like I know much of anything anymore.’
The boots of a marine patrol clanged on the metal runway above them, fading as the men tromped around to the western side of the platform. The running lights of a couple of USN destroyers blinked in the haze to the south, enforcing the exclusion zone around the Longreach. They bobbed and ducked on the swell churned up by the earlier storms, a chaotic drumbeat that sent waves crashing against the pylons below in an unpredictable, arrhythmic dance.
The pylons and the drill shaft were all being monitored by newly emplaced security cams. Infrared and something called ‘lamps’, according to Heath, which apparently weren’t lamps at all.
Emmeline, who confessed herself too wired and anxious to sleep, let Dave lead on their stroll around the platform. He was familiar with late nights spent walking off his worries. On any given night this last month he could have chosen to lose sleep to worry about his mounting stack of credit card bills; his unfiled tax returns; how to pay for the boys’ school fees, which were about to double when his wife enrolled them in some new joint –
not flying in a couple of top-shelf hookers might have helped with that
; how to keep a little back for himself so that Annie’s lawyer boyfriend didn’t get everything; the drill of course, which was operating way outside its specs; the bosses in Houston who’d forced that situation on him; the way his car guzzled coolant at about a hundred times the rate it should have; the way he seemed to really
need
a drink these days instead of just wanting one; a new sore, which looked just like the old ones, which he’d finally decided to pay attention to about a month after it had appeared on his chest and refused to heal – to all of these worries and more he could add his new ones.
And take at least one away.
The small red sore on his chest, which had almost certainly been another basal cell carcinoma, was gone.
Woo fucking hoo.
‘Something funny, Dave?’
‘Just trying to get some perspective,’ he said as they climbed the stairwell on the southwestern corner, stopping on the platform just below the helipad, which afforded them a view all the way over to Thunder Horse. The Longreach’s sister platform had its own small flotilla of coast guard vessels and warships, four of them that he could make out, dancing a complicated waltz with the destroyers currently guarding the Longreach, although how exactly a guided missile destroyer was supposed to guard against something like Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn turning up in your media lounge he wasn’t sure.
Emmeline Ashbury leaned against the safety rail protecting her from a long fall to the waters swirling against the massive concrete pylons beneath them and rubbed her hands together. ‘Cold,’ she said.
Dave could feel the chill in the air right enough, but tonight it wasn’t cutting into him the way it might normally.
‘Seriously,’ he said, looking up at the stars again. ‘Did you ever expect to find anything up there?’
‘Expect? No. A good scholar never expects or anticipates anything. You theorise. You test. You wait for the results. But it’s poor form to expect anything. Publicly at least.’
‘So why do it?’
Her eyes lit up with a smile that started at the corner of her mouth, highlighted her cheekbones, and crinkled the corners of her eyes.
‘You got me.’ She put up her hands in mock surrender. ‘Guilty of expectations.’
Dave’s return smile was queered by the effort of ignoring the rush of sexual imagery that flowed into his mind’s eye when he saw her impossibly white teeth in the moonlight. Annoyed with himself now, he kept a pleasant expression on his face as he jammed one hand into his pocket, pretending to warm it when he actually was trying to disguise the return of his boner.
Despite what Annie thought, he wasn’t seventeen years old. He knew the difference between appropriate and inappropriate boners. Turning at an angle to shield himself further, he pretended to be fascinated by the flight of a chopper from the rear deck of one of the destroyers.
‘You think they’ll keep you on this gig, Prof? Seeing as how it’s not aliens or anything?’
‘For a while. We’re here, we’re cleared, the president will want his own eyes on this. That makes us more useful than someone who might have a clue.’
He snorted at that, the weary response of a guy worn down by years of having other people’s idea of compromise forced on him.
‘Yeah. I can see that. All the baby scientists and your guy Compton, are they all likely to stay on? I don’t think he’s a fan of old Dave.’
It was her turn to snort.
‘It’s not you, it’s him. He really didn’t want to come down here. On the other hand, when you are partly responsible for the creation of the Human Terrain Team program, your prospects for giving TED talks in Seattle are slim indeed. He has a knack for organising and running things.’
‘A bureaucrat,’ Dave said.
‘By necessity,’ she said.
‘So he’s the boss?’
‘He oversees the office. Micromanages quite a bit when he’s not talking at people. He wouldn’t appreciate being lectured about your monsters.’
Dave almost protested that they weren’t his, but of course they were. Neither of them would be standing here if he hadn’t lost his shit and brained the Hunn when it was plastered on
. . .
His train of thought nearly jumped the tracks at that point.
When it was drunk on Marty’s blood
.
‘But isn’t this like the discovery of a lifetime? Monsters among us?’ Dave asked. ‘Plenty of juicy research grants out of this. Better than the global warming scam.’
‘Don’t be a fucking idiot,’ she said quite severely to that. ‘It’s unbecoming and unnecessary.’ Ashbury seemed to gather herself with a deep breath, which she let out in a heavy sigh. ‘We’re cleared because we’re locked down by non-disclosure agreements. The whole world could be talking about this tomorrow, but we won’t be allowed to. Not in public.’
The navy chopper passed out of view around the bulk of Thunderhorse at the same moment the faint sound of its rotor chop reached them on a vagary of the breeze. A commercial airliner passed high above, away to the south, probably headed for Little Rock or Memphis. He’d had an app on his iPhone that could have told him just by pointing it at the lights in the sky, but of course that was gone now, too. He hadn’t had a chance to get online and check if it was still alive somewhere. The freshening wind carried the scent of the platform away, replacing the industrial smells of oil and chemicals with clean salt air and brine and traces of rainwater.
None of which Dave cared about.
He just wanted to find a way to either hide or get rid of a large, inconvenient erection that was jutting halfway out to Cuba. He found that by placing one foot on the guardrail, he could more easily cover up. It wasn’t funny. If anything, it was kind of painful, and he wondered if he’d actually gotten his money’s worth from the Nevada hookers because at his age he should have been good for a few more days.
‘What do you think’s gonna happen, Doc?’ he asked, hoping to distract himself.
‘You’re not going to stop calling me that, are you?’
She was leaning back against the safety rail now, which only served to emphasise the line of her breasts, even through the heavy ski jacket.
‘I forget things,’ he said. ‘But come on. Seriously. You’re the expert. What’s gonna happen?’
‘To you? I don’t know. But I was not feeding you a line before. There were people higher up the food chain than Heath who wanted to drop you in a hole until they were sure you weren’t dangerous. You’ll want to keep that in mind, no matter what happens.’
He frowned.
‘And they gave you a security clearance?’
‘I see you know how this works,’ she said. ‘Yes. They did. But I like to think that was for the autopsy on ET and keeping quiet about how the pod people took over the Republicans. For stuff I have issues with, I keep my fingers crossed. And throwing honest citizens in a hole for no good reason, that I don’t agree with.’
She jutted her chin at Hooper, as if challenging him to come back at her. But he didn’t.
‘Wait,’ he said as if he meant to challenge her. ‘ET’s dead?’
‘Deader than disco.’
She smiled and reached into her jacket and produced a fifth of Pendleton whiskey.
‘You take a shot, Dave? You look the kind of man, if you don’t mind me saying so. And I think we earned it today.’
She unscrewed the cap and downed a slug before passing over the bottle. He got a strong scent of whatever perfume she wore as she handed him the whiskey. When he put the glass to his mouth, the taste of her lipstick was strong. It didn’t help much with his boner problem, which was made worse yet by how different she seemed now from the ball-buster he’d met earlier. What the fuck had gotten into this woman?
He passed back the bottle.