Keenan did not move, did not rush to the edge.
Raze fell in silence and was gone, dead and gone.
Emerald staggered up, lifted something to her face. Energy crackled, in the air, along her limbs, and Keenan turned, frowning, as energy moved out from Emerald’s crumpled body in tiny fluttering arcs, discharging across the bridge, and lifting Kotinevitch, bearing her broken body across the ground, and lowering her gently onto a silver disc embedded in the dark steel. Keenan blinked. There were two more discs, the three forming a triangle.
“Emerald?” he said.
Slowly, she heaved and dragged her wounded body into a swaying stance. The energy still poured from her, crackling and fizzing, and with a yelp Keenan dropped his MPK as it bit him.
“Stand on the discs,” said Emerald, her voice a dry croak.
As if in a trance, Pippa moved to stand on the silver circle. Keenan eyed the third and felt the pull the need the want the lust. It was more powerful than sex, more needy than lust and, every emotion within him fired him. He knew that the revenge he sought would happen: was a certainty. If he stood on that disc his dreams would be fulfilled and his emptiness and hollowness would fill with purity and love, and everything would be perfect again in a perfect beautiful world.
Keenan moved to the disc.
“No,” croaked Vitch.
Keenan felt it, a discord, something shattering the harmony. But he could not move. He was locked, imprisoned without chains, incarcerated without bars. He glanced at Pippa. She was crying mercury tears. Vitch was twitching spasmodically on the ground as if in a fit. Then he stared at Emerald, who moved, severely wounded, leaking oil-blood, to the centre of the three inset discs.
She forced herself to stand tall, then lifted two limbs into the air. Everything crackled. Black sparks ran along the metal of the bridge in waves of screaming energy. A wind blew, thick with the stench of metal. And Keenan knew, knew with a sudden, terrible and certain dread that he had killed the wrong Kahirrim.
Emerald was not a saviour.
Raze had been, as Vitch insisted, a Protector.
Of what? His mind whirled, filled with fallout: Leviathan? The Dead One? The GodRace?
His eyes lowered, and met Vitch’s. She smiled at him, and he realised that she had wanted him assassinated, not out of some personal vendetta, or for some petty financial gain; she had simply sought to stop this moment coming to fruition. Her motives, no matter what he thought, had been good. She understood the bigger picture. While he...
He smiled sardonically.
Why, he’d just been thinking of petty revenge.
“You must stop this,” said Vitch. Keenan did not hear the words, but could read her smashed lips.
He tried to move, and could not. He tried to reach his bombs, but could not.
“I am trapped,” he mouthed.
Emerald whirled on him, black electric arcs spearing out and smashing him with an agony he would never have dreamed possible. Energy ran in coursing rivers down his arms and legs, rippling through his neck and face, brain and heart. He could not scream, could not fall, could not die. His mind became a useless thing; a template of emptiness.
Emerald was speaking in an alien language. Her head lifted. She stared up into the vaults of darkness high above. The world seemed to glow black.
And Keenan became aware of a presence.
He forced his head around, teeth gritted, pain searing him, every nerve on fire with a billion volts of electricity. And there, at the edge of the bridge, stood a man.
He was of medium build, with oiled jet black hair tied back in a bun. His face was plump, cheeks an unhealthy red, and he wore a long black drooping moustache. He looked normal, inconsequential, but Keenan scowled and his face became a broiling pit of seething fury.
“Akeez,” he forced between twitching lips.
Akeez nodded, as if acknowledging Keenan’s presence at some private dignitaries’ function. Then he lifted his dark glittering eyes to a place above Emerald.
Keenan followed his gaze.
Black air was swirling, shimmering, black on black, on black, in different layers of darkness. A roar rushed up from deep below the bridge and blasted into the sky, coalescing and swirling, and glittering with pinpricks of white.
“Leviathan!” screamed Emerald, as spears of black lightning connected her to the resurrection of the Dark God... Leviathan the Eater: the Devourer of Worlds.
Keenan saw it, and it was beyond description. It was terrible— a creature, an entity that coalesced and swirled and was organic and fluid and took a form he would never be able to visualise nor comprehend. Leviathan grew. Then, he reached down with a long narrow limb of slick black metal and plucked Emerald from the bridge, lifting her high into the vault of the underground sky. Slowly, it tore her into pieces, plucking at the shreds with a hundred limbs of oiled black claws and absorbed them into the swirling tornado that was the Resurrection.
Keenan dropped to his knees, coughed blood onto the bridge, and then covered his face with his hands.
Pippa, too, staggered, released, falling to one knee. She stared up, in horror, in fear, in a base antediluvian terror at thisGod she could barely comprehend. She could feel him, it, inside her, in her head in her mind in her cunt in her heart in her soul. It was terrifying and uncompromising, and lacking in emotion or morals, or empathy, and she knew, she knewit, and it knewher. It was at one with her. It flowed through her veins and spine, and infused her with a part of every atom. She could taste its memories like cold hydrogen corpses on an eternal beach. Leviathan had existed from the dawn of a brittle Galaxy, and its one controlling, absorbing, consuming energy was...
Hate.
Pippa let out a primal scream. Madness took her mind in its fist, and squeezed.
Keenan snarled at Leviathan, saliva spooling from battered lips. He screamed out in defiance at the entity, which spun and gleamed lazily in the sky above him like oiled gold. There was no face, only an idea that it was watching him, but he knew that it was: with contempt, with amusement, with the patience of the infinite. Keenan did not speak, could not speak, but his rage and raw confrontation, and his contempt for that life-taking devourer filled him, and poured out like a river of anguish.
Leviathan coiled about and within itself.
There was a
boom
, subtle and terrifying.
And the very core of Teller’s World shuddered.
Chapter 20
Leviathan's Song
Keenan seemed to fade from sight. Cam hung, buzzing softly, watching the confusion in the sentinel machines which, having lost their target, milled around. Cam glided lower, surveying the creatures. They looked battered and worn, and not in the best of condition. And he realised they were old, ancient, from another time, another era, from a world when primitive minds had designed machines to be... what? Fearsome? Cam chuckled, revelling in his superiority and with a song in his atomic heart.
Still, the little PopBot was confused. And now, waiting for—hopefully—the return of Keenan and Pippa, he set several spare cores working on the problem of the Shift, which, apparently, he could not make. He journeyed back, over the heads of the whining panting metal sentinels, cruising at speed all the way to the lair of the spidery things, then back, back to the river. Cam paused, staring at the fast-flowing oil. Operations came and went in his tiny casing. He considered the river. What was its purpose? What was oil usually used for? Cooling, but cooling what? Machinery? Machinery used for what?
Cam followed the river, calculating an estimated volume, and increasing his speed until he was a blur. Suddenly the river ended, was funnelled downwards. A huge waterfall was collected at the bottom of a kilometre-deep valley by slick cones leading to thick pipes. Cam considered this. With an internal digital sigh, he dropped like a rock, and was sucked into one of the pipes. Submerged in oil, he checked his seals, and then flowed with the vertical current. The pipes twisted and turned, eventually leading to... a machine: a large machine.
Cam emerged in a shower of oil, punched his way through a sieve of steel mesh, and observed the cooling system stretching off to the horizon. He zoomed, he estimated. The cooling system was six thousand kilometres long by a thousand kilometres wide. More processor cores kicked in. Cam worked, buzzing and vibrating softly, oil dripping from his casing as he calculated and instigated algorithms. He followed the machine, followed the curve that followed the curvature of the planet’s hub. And, halting, Cam saw what he needed to see: the machines that serviced the core of the planet, a core that was not molten rock, but... something else.
Impossible, thought the little PopBot.
It cannot be done.
Sensors detected Cam’s sentient presence. They emerged from recessed drawers with tiny
zips
, and spun after him, razors spinning and tiny red eyes glittering but Cam accelerated at an awesome rate, back through the mesh, up the oil collectors, and in a burst and flurry of exploding oil, out over the river, the edges of his case glowing.
Cam paused. If he’d had lungs, he would have panted. Instead, digitally controlled coolers extracted and hissed super-iced air over his case until frost sparkled. Suddenly, the tiny red-eyed bots zipped out through the river and surrounded him. They flickered this way and that, unable to keep still, circling him, darting and moving, weighing up his defences... not realising the systems he carried within his miniature hull.
Cam sighed.
Stupidity!
The ten tiny bots attacked, red eyes glowing, and Cam spun as he fired charges, watching them explode with a
crackle
of rapid succession, like a volley of fireworks. Ten bots fell into the river and bobbed away, dead.
Cam rotated again, his conclusion to the problem of the Shift emerging. Ahh, he thought, that’s what it is, and that’show you do it. He understood Teller’s World, understood it’s great secret, and understood the sudden threat facing Combat K. A threat of which Keenan and Pippa had no idea.
“Oh no,” he said.
Something exploded on the horizon. It was gunfire. Cam focused. Injectors
buzzed,
and he accelerated and spun like a bullet across the metal landscape of the Mekkra Woods. He came to a... battle
.
He could not believe his sensors. It was Betezh... and... Franco?
“I thought you were dead!”
A creature leapt through the air, razor talons nearly disembowelling the small ginger pugilist. He twisted, Kekra roaring in his fist, disintegrating the sentinel, which crumbled around him, huge shards aflame, panels whirring to the ground, buckled and destroyed. He scowled up at Cam.
“No, I’m here, and I could do with some damn bloody help!” More creatures advanced, and Betezh swung at them with the battered ice axe. They circled the two men warily.
This is it, thought Franco. The end!
He scowled in fury. To die in such a way! The shame!
The several hundred strong phalanx of metal sentinels charged, screaming, and the two men, eyes bulging, stood their ground, and began to shoot and swing and growl and curse. Suddenly, above the clearing, a high-pitched noise rattled out a series of wailing and warbling tones, a high-bandwidth transmission of... data.
The sentinels faltered. They stumbled, falling to knees and wings and claws. Franco and Betezh stared at one another in amazement; then clutched one another in a vicious bear-hug.
“That help?”
“What did you do?”
“Random digital noise underplayed with a modest EMP transmission, on an audio frequency. These machines talk to each other via sound. Primitive, I know. I’ve just fed their input systems with shit. That should keep them quiet for a little while.”
Franco and Betezh were dancing a jig.
“Whoo-hoo!” said Franco. “Still alive!”
“Franco! Keenan and Pippa are in grave danger. I’ve worked out what this planet is. How it’s powered. What the hell’s going on. Emerald seeks to resurrect one of the oldest ancient Gods, Leviathan. She was a slave, and he was her master, a million years ago. Leviathan wreaks destruction, dealing death and oblivion to all life. When strong, he will rampage through the Quad-Gal, and those he does not enslave he will consume. He is a parasite, and he was imprisoned.”
“How?” said Franco, still panting from the fight and the bear-hug.
“At the centre of Teller’s World, which, ironically, is not a world, but a prison, a machine, and, at its basic level, a cage.”
“And you worked out how this prison is powered?”
“Yes.” Cam’s case glittered red. His tone was deadly serious, frightened, even. “The core of this machine—in its entirety—is a chained and harnessed Black Hole.”
Keenan forced himself, with brute willpower, to his feet. He staggered across the trembling bridge. Pippa had dropped her sword, and he picked up the blade, brandishing it in defiance at Leviathan. A sound emerged, and Keenan realised that the swirling oil entity was amused
.
“Fuck you,” he screamed, and hurled the sword into the swirling darkness.