Fury powered it now. Fury at being ripped from the nourishment. It had been
so
close to achieving the energy level it wanted. To have that triumph burned away was excruciating. It didn’t care about feeding
again, it didn’t even care about breaking out of the dark continuum. It wanted vengeance.
Erentz jerked into motion again. Pure adrenaline-rush terror overrode her recalcitrant leg muscles. She sprinted for the open
lift door. A gust of buffeting air told her the Orgathé had sprung across the hole behind her. There wasn’t going to be enough
time to fasten the cable straps to her harness.
She slammed into the wall at the side of the lift doors, spinning round to face the Orgathé. It had obscured itself in folds
of darkness again. Only the purposeful ripples slithering across the nebulous surface hinted at the terrible menace contained
within. She fired the laser pistol, simply to see the darkness stiffen around the beam’s impact point. A wavering dawn of
pink light bloomed behind the Orgathé, making a mockery of the weapon.
The flare,
the personality urged.
Fire the flare at the bugger.
Erentz had nothing else left. All there could be now was a jump into the shaft, and hope the fall killed her before the Orgathé
caught her. She brought the slim launcher tube up, pointing it at the centre of the ethereal darkness, and pulled the trigger.
A pathetically small spark of incandescence plunged into the vast Orgathé. It spasmed uncontrollably, appendages writhing
to thrash against the walls and ceiling. Huge splinters of polyp were sent whirling in dangerous cascades from the force of
the blows. Erentz stared at the monster as it bucked about, incredulous that a tiny flare could induce such an awesome result.
The whole vestibule was shaking violently.
Yeah, fascinating,
said the personality.
Now get out of there while it’s distracted.
She snatched the straps from the strut where she’d secured them. Only one was attached to the harness when she yanked down
on the toggle. The power of the rewind made her yip in shock as she went hurtling upwards. Unexpected gee forces tore the
laser pistol and the flare launcher from her hands. The narrow band of the shaft wall illuminated by her lights was a continuous
blur of grey.
Brace yourself,
the personality said.
Abruptly she was in freefall, still rocketing up. Coils of cable floated sedately around her. The lobby door was visible above:
blank white rectangle. It expanded at a frightening rate. Then she was slowing, reaching the top of her arc, level with the
door. The slack loops of cable sped through the pulley just as she started to fall, and she was wrenched to a halt. Hands
reached out to haul her in through the door. She sank down on the black and white marble tiles of the lobby floor, taking
fast gulps of air. Her helmet was removed. Annoying voices buzzed querulously in her ears.
“Where is he?” Tolton demanded. “Where’s Dariat?”
“Down there,” she panted miserably. “He’s still down there.” Her mind sent out a desperate affinity call to the ghost. All
she could perceive in return was a faint incoherent cry of consternation.
A brutal howl of tearing metal and disintegrating polyp reverberated out of the lift shaft’s open doors. The whole group froze,
then looked at the gap as one.
“It’s coming up,” Erentz stammered. “Holy shit, it’s coming after me.”
They scattered, racing for the lobby doors and the trucks outside. Erentz’s exhaustion and bulky suit slowed her to little
more than a hobble. Tolton grabbed her arm and pulled her along.
The Orgathé exploded out of the top of the lift shaft at near-sonic velocity, a comet of anti-light. It punched through the
lobby roof without even slowing down. Big, lethal shards of amber crystal slashed down, shattering on the marble tiles. Erentz
and Tolton both dived for cover under one of the upturned couches as a surf of crystal fragments skittered around them.
The personality watched the visitor curve round and flatten out; perceptive cells strained to keep it in focus. It was a roughly
triangular patch of slippery air, surrounded by black diffraction rainbows similar to a magnified heat shimmer effect. Big
iron-hard hailstones pattered onto the grass below it. A kilometre above the parkland, it started to curve round, heading
back for the Djerba’s lobby. Tolton and Erentz had reached his truck. Both of them were squinting up against the reddish glare
of the axial light-tube, trying to spot the visitor. He squeezed the throttle round as far as it would go, and the wheels
grumbled into life. They trundled towards the wall of shanty huts at less than ten kilometres per hour.
“Faster!” Erentz yelled frantically.
Tolton reset the throttle. It made no difference to their speed. Another of the trucks was rocking lazily over the ground
twenty metres away, going even slower than they were. “This is all the juice we’ve got,” Tolton barked.
Erentz was staring at a thin line of wavering silver-black air that was sliding through the sky towards them. Pellucid streamers
were unfurling below it, like long coiling jellyfish tendrils. She knew what they were intended for, and what they were going
to grab. “This is it. Endgame.”
No it’s not,
the personality said.
Get in amongst the shacks. Forget the trucks, and make sure you take all your lasers and flares with you.
With the rest of the personality’s plan expanding into her mind, she shouted: “Come on,” to Tolton.
He braked the truck just short of the first rickety hut of plastic sheeting and lashed-up composite poles. They started running
down the muddy alley between precarious walls. High above them, the Orgathé had started its approach run, a cascade of hail
falling all around it.
Erentz and her relatives started firing their lasers round wildly. “Incinerate it!” she bellowed at Tolton. “Burn it all.”
Bright scarlet beams slashed at walls and roofs, scorching long lines in the plastic. Edges smouldered and started to burn,
curling and dripping. Flames spat along junctions, pumping out jets of black smoke.
The group had congregated in one of the larger open yards between the flimsy buildings. Tolton was shrinking back from the
apparent madness, shielding his face from the heat that the eager, leaping flames were throwing out. “What are you doing?”
he cried.
Erentz started firing her flare launcher at piles of rubbish. There were several spectacular bursts of flame as bundles of
packaging and abandoned containers ignited. Sooty flakes wafted round in the microthermals. “It can’t stand the heat,” she
shouted at the bewildered street poet. “The flames can beat it back. Come on, help us!” Tolton aimed his own laser, adding
to the melee.
The Orgathé was just visible, a lenticular patch of shaded, rippling air, itself distorted by the heat gushing upwards from
the tips of the flames. It held its course, arrowing down towards them, until the last possible moment. The long scrabbling
tendrils hanging from its underbelly parted furiously as they skimmed the flames.
Tolton couldn’t see it anymore. His eyes were smarting from the bitter chemical smog billowing out from the roaring plastic.
Lush ebony smoke was swirling round his legs, obscuring the ground. Heat seared the skin over the back of his hands as he
held them up to defend his face. He could smell singeing hair. A puissant blast of air sent him staggering to his knees, whipping
the smoke round into a blinding cyclone. For a second the heat vanished, replaced by its absolute opposite. Glistening sweat
transmuted into frost right across his body. He thought his blood was going to turn solid inside his veins, the cold was so
frighteningly intense. Then it was gone.
Smoke was rolling itself into vortex spirals as hail stung his face.
“
Yes!
” Erentz shouted up at the retreating Orgathé. “We beat the bastard. It’s frightened.”
It’s repelled,
the personality chided.
There’s a big difference.
Sensitive cells showed her the airborne monster coming round back to the shanty village in a long curve. The flames from the
first buildings they’d fired were shrinking.
Move to a new section,
the personality said.
Let’s hope the bugger gives up before you run out of things to burn.
The Orgathé made another five attempts to assail Erentz and her group before it finally withdrew and flew deeper into the
habitat interior. Over half of the shanty village had been razed by then. Tolton and the others were caked in grime, and retching
badly from the smoke and fumes. Their exposed skin was cracked and bleeding from the heat. Only Erentz, with her suit and
mask, was unaffected.
You’d better start walking towards the caverns,
the personality said.
We’ll have a couple of trucks sent to pick you up.
Erentz slowly surveyed the blackened ruins with their slowly solidifying lakes of molten plastic.
Couldn’t we just wait here? These guys have been through hell.
Sorry, more bad news. We think the other sections of the visitor are coming up from the Djerba. The last few functioning systems
we’ve got in there are being extinguished floor by floor. It can’t be anything else.
Shit.
She gave the lobby an apprehensive look.
What about Dariat?
Nothing.
Damnit.
We are he. In us he lives on.
He’d argue that.
Yes.
There must have been fifty of those brutes down there.
No,
the personality said.
The glimpse we were given of the visitor without its visual shield was a brief one, but detailed memory analysis of the scene
indicates twelve, at most fifteen, were birthed from the mother creature. We don’t believe they are anything like the size
of the one which has pursued you. Well that’s a real big relief.
They started picking their way through the sulphurous, carbonized wreckage of the buildings, heading for the track that wound
its way across the scrub desert to the northern endcap. Tolton balked until Erentz started explaining the reason for urgency.
“So we can’t get down there to find what happened to him?” he asked.
“Not until we know it’s clear. And then… what do the remnants of a ghost look like? It’s not as if there are going to be any
bones.”
“Yeah,” Tolton gave the lobby a final, remorseful look over his shoulder. “I suppose not.”
______
The Orgathé cruised through the air, scanning the inside of the object for the nearest source of life-energy. The interior
was even worse than the external shell. Here the living layers were protected by many metres of dead matter with just the
thinnest sprinkling of cells smeared on top. Plants, that had a pitiful content of life-energy. No use to the Orgathé, it
needed to regain the true richness which lay beneath. There were several entrances back down to the protruding spindles, which
it ignored. This time it wanted a more secure feeding place.
For a while it scouted round over the pink grasslands before eventually turning towards the strip of liquid. Just above the
beaches and coves of the far side the surface was riddled with large cave entrances, leading deep into the solid mantle of
matter. In there, large currents of the life-energy burned brightly, flowing through vast layers of living cells stacked one
on top of the other. Tunnels of living fluids formed complex warrens, thousands of tributary channels connecting to the town-sized
organs encased within the endcap.
The Orgathé landed on a broad expanse of platinum sand that formed one of the trim little coves. Elaborate filigrees of glacial
frost sprang out from its feet as it clawed its way up to the nearest cave. As soon as it reached the buff, grass and bushes
perished instantly, their leaves turning a rancid brown and freezing into shape. It barely scraped through the cave entrance.
Mock-stalactites snapped off as its hardened carapace brushed against them, shattering as they clattered to the floor. The
Orgathé’s appendages were modified then hardened by further expenditures of energy to help it bulldoze its way past constrictions
and awkward bends. Contact with the hot matter bruised its body, but it was slowly acclimatising to the heat endemic within
the habitat.
After a while it came up against a huge tunnel conveying the living fluid. It broke through the thick wall and eased its entire
body into the driving torrent. For the first time since it had slipped into the dark continuum it knew contentment. With that
came the shiver of expectation.
______
The trucks still hadn’t reached Erentz and the others, though she could just see a small dark speck moving somewhere out there
on the scrub desert ahead of them. Walking had become an automatic trudge while her mind followed the flight of the visitor.
Valisk’s general affinity band was filled with speculation and comment as the personality and Erentz’s relatives discussed
what was to be done next.
Coverage once the Orgathé moved into the cave wasn’t so easy. Tracking its movement was a question of following the null-zone
surrounding it by the trail of dead polyp left in its wake.
The damn thing has definitely broken into the nutrient artery feeding my mineral digestion tract,
the personality said.
It’s creating severe flow pressure problems.
What’s it actually doing to the nutrient fluid?
Erentz asked.
Can you sense any change?
The fluid has been chilled down considerably, which is understandable given what we know of the visitor’s intrinsic capability.
And over ninety per cent of the corpuscles are dead. A strange outcome, the fluid temperature alone is not sufficient to kill
them.