Someone howled outside, a human voice in mortal terror. Idris felt vomit rise in his throat, because in some way he was outside too, breeding that terror. It was his fault. Someone else howled, and then it stopped, because a mouth that was half tentacles and half hooked teeth had closed and ripped its target in half – grinding the remains down a gullet lined with backwards-curving blades. Now there were more shouts and shooting – not aimed at the tower this time. Idris was carried along helplessly, linked to the monster he’d found. He moved from victim to victim as his champion took one horrifyingly long stride after another, hunting this intriguing new prey. He didn’t even know the nature of this beast. His connection was from the inside to inside. He just caught flashes of the various horrifying parts of it, without grasping its doubtless equally horrifying whole.
Solace had her back to the wall, waiting for the next opponent, but they’d spotted something else to worry about. Kris caught sight of it first and recoiled from the opening. Later she’d tell Idris about something with a sack of a body suspended on too many tall skeletal legs, stilting along as though jerked with strings. It was high up in the canopy, its leg-span stretching between the trees. And it was plucking up human shapes and shearing them apart, then picking over what was left as though trying to read a future in the entrails.
‘The Joan!’ Solace shouted suddenly. And Idris, sightless within the ruin, was nonetheless aware of the new intruder in the sky. He felt the biosphere bend towards it, a great roaring chorus of EM wash out, only to meet the ship’s gravitic shielding. Olli was flying the vessel without instruments, without anything. She had the hatch open, he realized in horror. Their would-be saviour was sitting in her Scorpion frame at the hatch, looking out, wired into the pilot’s station, flying the whole circus by wire and guesswork. And she couldn’t see them, buried as they were in the jungle.
But she would have a comms channel open, he knew. He’d heard her signalling the dig site, hoping to cut through to reach them. Perhaps she even received brief moments of Robellin swearing at her, telling her that her crew wasn’t at the dig, that they’d . . .
‘I don’t know what’s going on out there, but the mercs won’t hold off forever,’ Solace said. ‘We need to signal the Joan and simply hope she can get low enough for us to get aboard.’
We need to signal. That’s why we came to a signalling station. At this point the thoughts were just sliding about his head like unsecured junk on a ship’s deck. He had no idea what he’d known before coming here, or what he knew now. Communion with the outside world, with the jungle, was eating up all his mental capacity.
A broken, millions-of-years-old signalling station, the bulk of it buried beneath him. Its intricate, shell-like structure extended into the earth for half a kilometre. And it wasn’t dead, because Originator tech couldn’t die. Every part of it cast a shadow outside the real, even the little trinkets and rods the Hegemony carted about and used to claim whole planets. The very construction and substance of this ancient tech pointed to its function and meaning. There was a world locked away inside this stuff that nobody had ever guessed at.
This is a signalling station. So signal. It was such a trivial use of what he’d found, but it was the only thing he actually needed from it. And like any unknowable demon power, it was best not to ask for too much. Be careful what you wish for.
He signalled Olli, flagging their location in the clearest way he possible could. That was all he did. The forest exalted in that moment for a hundred metres in every direction, every monster, tree and buzzing thing shrieking, howling and trumpeting, but that was incidental. The whole EM babble around them became one single message, for just that second: a means to an end, burning their location into the Joan’s flight computer.
The last remaining Voyenni took potshots at the Joan when she came lurching down, veering and hovering clear of the trees while Olli lowered a chain-link ladder. Solace returned fire, burning the last of Mr Punch’s ammo. She stayed groundside until Kris and Trine had scrambled up the ladder. Then she threw Idris over her shoulder and put a foot on the ladder so Olli could retract it. Idris sure as hell wasn’t in any position to climb up on his own.
Kris
‘So,’ Olli yelled as her frame fought with the closing hatch. ‘Idris good to take over for me?’
Kris risked a look at the pilot and saw that his skin was waxy, his face wild-eyed as if he was on a really bad trip. ‘I don’t think Idris is going to be doing anything useful for a while.’