E-Branch - Invaders Part 47

Well, he's a liar, as we've seen, and he made me take you, too.

But you were the last and it's still taking hold of you. When it does, and when it has fully taken hold - which it will!- then you'll know I was right. So stand aside and let me get on. Or better still, come with me and let's see what we can make of things together.'

As he had spoken, Trennier had stepped to the port side of the boat to cast off a rope. But Manchester had taken the opportunity to pick up a second jerrycan. This time, before he could begin spilling its contents, Trennier s tepped close and knocked it out of his hands. A nd now he trained his weapon dead centre on Manchester's body.

'I've no time for this, Jethro/ he growled. 'You can come with me now, or stay here. You can live or you can die. One way or the other, it's your choice. So what's it to be?'

Manchester took out a cigarette lighter from the pocket of his shorts. He flicked it once - and it failed to spark! Trennier cursed, but he wasn't about to give the older man a second chance. Sending the b.u.t.t of his weapon cras.h.i.+ng to Manchester's face, jostling him to the side of the boat, finally he succeeded in knocking him overboard. And as Manchester swam towards the side of the channel, so Trennier clung to the deck rail, leaned out over the water, and fired his weapon at almost point-blank range.

Which was as far as Jake was willing to let it go. He and Joe Davis acted together. Davis ran in under the far end of the boathouse, firing on the yacht as he came, and Jake ran to meet him, skidding to a halt on his knees to pla y the roaring, searing lance of his flame-thrower on both the vessel and the man on her deck.

Trennier fired another shot, and another - fired blindly, through the s.h.i.+mmering fire that enveloped and ate into him - while the boat literally erupted in flames and he turned into a jet-black, shrieking silhouette, dancing in agony until finally he crumpled down into himself and lay still.

As Jake shut off his lance, there came the sound of feeble splas.h.i.+ng from the channel. It was Manchester. The flesh at the back of his head, his neck and across his shoulders was a livid, liquid red. 'Let me out!' he cried, climbing sunken steps. 'Let me out and finish it then, but not in the water. I lived in the water - lived for the water - so I don't want to die in it.'

And when he was out, and staggering on dry land, Jake told him, 'Mr Manchester, we heard everything. And we're sorry.'

'I know you are,' Manchester nodded his b.l.o.o.d.y head. 'Yes, and I'm glad you came. My family ... is no more, and I... have no reason or right to be here.' With which he held out his arms in the shape of a cross, stood there and closed his feral eyes.

Then Joe Davis gritted his teeth, and cut the old man down with accurate, merciful shooting; the Old Lides ci went in close and used his machete; and finally, making absolutel y sure, Jake finished it with roaring fire. By which time both the yacht and the structure that housed it were a ma.s.s of leaping flames, and the three backed away, leaning on each other while they watched it all burn ...

In a little while Davis's radio crackled, and call-signs be gan asking him was it all over? He told them yes, called down Chopper Two, told everyone they could start mopping up. But as he and his party began to make their way back towards the villa: 'What?3 said Jake, whirling on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. His eyes were wide and darting, searching here and there across the sculpted landscape of the gardens, and his ruddily-lit face was shocked and puzzled. 'Liz?' But then his eyes went wider still, in sudden understanding.

It was Liz he'd heard calling for him, yes, but she wasn't here ...

she was in Xanadu!

Jake! Jake, if you can hear me (her telepathic voice was a tiny, terrified whisper huddling in a corner of his mind), then please, please come and get me out of here!

And behind her sweet voice another - but a loathsome, gurgling thing - like hot tar bubbling in some medieval torturer s 526.

527.

cauldron: Ah, no, my little thought-thief. No one can help you now. You though to use your mentalism against me, but Malinari has used it against you! I have lied to Ben Trask - impossible, but I have done it - and I've located and lost your locator. As for your marvellous precog: le senses nothing but confusion, for the death and destruction that he foresaw was his own and yours and Xanadu's, but never mine! And now there's this Jake -your lover, perhaps? But where is he? Oh, ha ha haaaaaa!

'Jesus!' Jake moaned. But he knew what he must do. Korath! he called out into the deadspeak aether. And: About time, said that one. Butjirst tell me, do we have a deal, you and I, as prescribed? Do you wittingly give me access to your mind?

There was no way around it, and no time to argue. And so: Yes! said Jake. Anything! Only show me those numbers.

So be it, said Korath. And Jake's inner being lit up like a lamp, as those impossible numbers scrolled in not-quite-endless progression down the computer screen of his mind. But not quite endlessly, because he instantly recognized a pattern and suddenly, 'instinctively' knew where to freeze it. Then: A door! And: Go! said Korath. And I go with you ...

Jake went - stepped in through the door - vanished from the view of Lardis Lidesci and Joe Davis, and was gone.

'What?' Davis stood stock still, frozen in his amazement. And for a moment even Lardis was lost for words, astonished as ever by this thing. But then he recovered and said: 'Pay no attention. It's a trick he does. Just an optic - er, an optical - er ...'

'An optical illusion?' Davis's jaw hung slack.

'Aye, something like that,' Lardis said, gratefully. 'Er, but we needn't expect him back. He has his own ways of getting about, that one.' And once again, with a knowing, emphatic nod of his grizzled head, 'Aye!' he said ...

In the ultimate, primal darkness of the Mobius Continuum, Jake whirled like a leaf in a gale. 'BUT WHERE TO?' he said, and was nearly deafened as his words gonged like the clappers of a mad, gigantic bell!

The thought itself would appear to be sufficient, Korath told him, awed in his own right. For I sense this place is th e very essence of nothingness, wherefore physical speech - which is something - is forbidden here. But deadspeak, being as nothing, is permissible.

Jake steadied himself- discovered that he could actually steady himself - and repeated, Where to? He could feel the Continuum tugging on him, and believed he knew where it would take him if he gave it the chance: Harry's Room, at E- Branch HQ. But that wasn't where he wanted to go.

Who is it you are concerned for? Korath remained logical.

Liz, of course! She had called out to Jake - asked for his help - and her telepathic voice had been a beacon. Now he remembered it, remembered its coordinates, and went to her.

It was as simple as that. At least the going there was simple, but the rest of it wasn't.

When the door formed, Ja ke didn't know how to make an exit and so simply crashed throug h it. Into a living nightmare!

It was a room, shaft or cavern, but its lighting after the Stygian darkness of the Mobius Continuum was glaring, brilliant, blinding. Overbalanced as gravity returned (by the sudden, unaccustomed weight of the flame-thrower), tripping and flying headlong into a wall, and rebounding, Jake landed on something soft and squirmy ... ... Something that cried its terror, and two seconds later wrapped its arms around him.

'Jake, oh Jake!' Liz gasped, holding tightly to him on the one hand, but wriggling and kicking desperately away from something on the other. Her Baby Browning was clenched in her fist, and she kept aiming it and pulling the trigger - click!

click! click! - as the firing pin fell on blank s.p.a.ce. A pair of empty clips lay on the sandy floor where she'd discharged and discarded them.

It was the strip lighting that had blinded Jake, that and 529.

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his dizzying, head-over-heels emergence from the Mobius Continuum. Now, as his head stopped spinning, he saw what had turned this determined, self-possessed, a.s.sertive woman into a frightened little girl again: weird, morbid motion.

The floor of the place was alive ... or undead!

Jake could scarcely take it in - scarcely believe what he was seeing - but he had to, and quickly.

The cavern was the size of a large room. A planked walkway crossed the centre of the floor and disappeared into tunnels at both ends. On the other side of the walkway, maybe fifteen feet away, the floor was ... different. It was humped, veined, corrugated ... and mobile. And it wasn't the floor!

Something tossed and turned - or churned - there.

Something throbbed and gulped and gasped. It was a fleshy, flopping octopus of a thing; an immense doughy pancake of metamorphic flesh, throwing up purple-veined extrusions that groped blindly in the air before collapsing back down into the bulk of... of It! The colour of dead flesh in its main ma.s.s, it squelched, fumed, and stank like gas bubbles bursting in a swamp. And mindlessly, aimlessly, it worked at fas.h.i.+oning its ropy extensions.

Or perhaps not mindlessly. For as Jake sat there cradling Liz, so the thing extruded a tentacle that came whipping across the walkway to rear before them in a questioning, semi-sentient fas.h.i.+on. It pulsed, vibrated, and an eye formed in its tip! The eye was a uniform red, lidless, apparently vacant - yet it must be seeing or sensing something. For as Liz shrilled and started pulling the trigger again - click! click! click! - so a second tentacle emerged and lengthened in their direction.

As it came, a row of greedy, suctorial mouths rippled into metamorphic being along its length. They slob bered and grimaced, those mouths - and they had hu man teeth! But far worse, some of them were reforming, shaping themselves into tumescent, purple-veined p.e.n.i.ses!

Jake felt rooted to the spot, for the moment paralysed. It seemed to him that the whole ma.s.s of the thing beyond the walkway was now on the move, edging towards him - and certainly towards Liz! And that was enough.

He unfroze, fought Liz off, brought up the flame-thrower's nozzle and squeezed the trigger to get its pilot light going - then cursed vividly as nothing happened, and squeezed it again, and again, and yet again, before it lit - then gripped the firing lever and applied a steady, deadly pressure.

First Jake aimed down between his spread legs, aimed at the rearing pseudopods, to drive them back, and his relief was immense as he watched them burst into flames and shrivel in the incandescent, pressured heat of his lance. Then he scrambled to his feet, and with Liz dancing close behind, clutching his combat jacket and urging him on, so he advanced towards the walkway and the bulk of the thing that hissed and steamed and shuddered its agony there.

And as the tentacles writhed, dripped their fluids, blackened and shrank - and as the main body withdrew into itself- there, sprouting in the floor where its bulk had protected them, cl.u.s.t ers of small black mushrooms, dozens of them, were melting in the chemical fire. Their smell was nauseating, but Jake kept on firing; kept cursing, too, as Malinari's 'garden' burned.

But this was vampire stuff, tenacious and defiant.

The shrinking body of the ma.s.s burst open, and a steaming head - a human, or almost-human head, and shoulders - grew out of it. Again Jake felt himself gripped by a paralysis of disbelief. Yet the nightmare was here and undeniably real.

But so was Korath here, and so was he real. And in Jake's mind as the livid vampire head took shape: It is him! Korath's deadspeak voice hissed. Demetrakis Mindsthrall, who was Malinari's lieutenant, second only to myself! Because he had been a vampire for long and long, Malinari used him to make this garden. It must be so, for only the most contaminated flesh could ever have produced a crop such as this! Ah, but just think. If there had been no Demetrakis, then this would be me!

And so it seems I got the better of the bargain after all...

'Whoever it was, it's time he died,' said Jake. And: 531 530.

Aye, Korath agreed. The true death. I know he would thank you for it. And Jake hosed fire on the terrible thing where it mewled and melted, until his torch began to sputter.

Then he eased back on the flamer's lever, to see what damage he'd done, and if he had done enough. The cave steamed and smoked but was mainly still - except in one badly-lit corner.

There was some slight movement there, and Jake advanced across the smoking floor, making sure as he went that he stepped only where there was no sign of contamination.

But as he approached the corner: 'H-help me!' the faintest of whispers reached out to him. 'H-h-help me, pleeeease!'

A single short burst of fire from the flamethrower chased back the shadows, then a longer burst, to allow for confirmation of what Jake had seen. And, indeed, he needed such confirmation.

From the heck up the thing in the corner was a man ...

and from there on down it had been a man. But now the eyes in that purple, once-arrogant, once-querulous face were bulging, staring, terrified - and they were filled with such agony as Jake could only imagine.

As for the 'body' of this thing: that was a slumped, naked heap of limbless, alien flesh similar to the composition of the monstrous guardian of Malinari's garden. And Jake couldn't stop his gorge rising - felt sick to his stomach - as it dawned on him in a sudden burst of loathing that this mutated abnormality had once been a man, and that it or he had been converted into live nourishment for the garden and its guardian!

Finger-thick, pulsing, translucent arteries - like fleshy worms - even now connected the two forms, and towards the centre of the cave where Jake's fire had seared and split the guardian open, spurts of yellow and crimson plasma went to waste, fountaining uselessly in the smoky air.

All of which was bad enough, but worse by far was the fact that Jake knew who this travesty of a human being had been.

That Peter Miller 'lived' in his condition - if this could be called life - and that he was capable of realizing his fate and asking for help, was a miracle in itself. But it was also a curse that Jake would wish on no man, not even on his worst enemy.

For this was worse than any death, compared to which death would be a blessing. And when Miller found strength to ask once more, 'Please ... please help me!' then Jake was happy to grant his request. It didn't take long, but it used up the last dregs of the flamer's fuel.

When it was over, Jake steadied himself and turned to Liz. But still his face was ashen as he asked, 'Where now?'

'You can actually do it?' Almost back in possession of herself, still Liz clutched his jacket. 'The Mobius Continuum?'

'Yes,' he told her. 'We ... I mean I, can do it.'

'The bubble dome,' she told him. 'Ben is up there. There's something I have to tell him. We walked right into a trap, Jake, all of us, and I think that we're still in danger.

Malinari was in my mind, imitating Ben! But at the end - just before he left me in this place - then for a moment I was in his mind! Telepathy is a two-way thing, but my forte is as a receiver. And Malinari... he was oh-so-sure of himself! I think that maybe he's sabotaged this place! I sensed it there, in his mind.'

'When you called out to me,' Jake answered, 'I heard something of what he said to you. You're right: he seemed very sure of himself. Perhaps too sure.'

And Liz nodded and repeated, 'The dome, on top of the casino.

Take us there.'

'Hold on to me,' Jake told her, for he had flown over Xanadu and knew the coordinates. And Korath knew the numbers ...

In his vantage point in the cliff, Malinari allowed his fingers to drift over the array of switches and pondered his choice. By now the girl was being absorbed into his garden, and that was a shame ... that he hadn't been able to stay with her, within her mind, to explain what was happening to her and feel her terror; but no, for he had other things to do.

His mist was up; it lay knee deep, swirling through Xanadu 533.

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I from one end of the resort to the other. It was like a spider's web, that mist, carrying every faintest tremor back to its master and maker. A medium for his probes, it allowed him to touch the human flies who were 'trapped' within it; he knew the location of every man in Xanadu. But there were those for whom no mist was needed.

The locator for one: injured, holding his head, he sat inside that car down there ... such a pity the area wasn't mined. Then there was the so-called precog, and Ben Trask, together in the bubble. At this close range their talents were like magnets drawing Malinari's attention to the topmost dome; he could feel the m there! But the bubble was mined; all it wanted was a touch on a certain switch in his array.

And again his hand hovered tantalizingly over that central switch ... But no, he must stick to the original plan, let them know the error of their ways before they died. First the perimeter, to let them see how truly he had trapped them, and then he would work inwards, leaving the bubble itself until the last.

And now his fingers were sure and fast, as one by one they tripped the outer ring of switches ...

Through the wound-down window of the car, the locator was suddenly aware of a strange figure approaching out of the mist.

The mist was very bad here, drifting over the car and obscuring his vision. But Chung had been in far worse places, and he was equipped with a machine-pistol.

The strangely lumbering, mist-wreathed figure came closer, and the sights of Chung's weapon were centred upon it. Then he saw the blaze of a reflective patch, sighed and allowed himself to slump a little. It was a soldier - an NCO, carrying another soldier in the fireman's-lift position, which accounted for the many-armed, monstrous silhouette. As that fact dawned, so Chung was out of the vehicle, calling out: 'Over here! Bring him to the car.' Then, behind the two, a third figure came weaving, on his feet but barely so. Recognizing 534.

the staggering loner as Warrant Officer 'Red' Bygraves, the locator went to meet him. 'Are you okay?' He got under the other's left arm, took his weight. 'Can I help you?'

'I'll live,' Bygraves growled. And then, seeing the eagerness, the urgency in the locator's eyes: 'What is it?'

'Your radio,' Chung said. 'Is it working, and can you call the chopper down? I know where the b.a.s.t.a.r.d is! I know where Malinari's hiding!'

Bygraves's eyes lit up with a fierce, fighting light. Gritting his teeth, and flicking his face mike with a fingernail to get Chopper One's attention, he told the locator, 'Oh, I'll get him down okay. Just tell me where you want him to lay down his fire, that's all...'

From what little Trask, Goodly, and the SAS Major could see of the interior of the bubble dome, it was a sumptuously- appointed split-level affair of marble, chrome, and tan- coloured leather. Five marble-clad stanchion s surrounded the single elevator tube and supported the high ceiling. The elevator opened into a central well, with concentric steps climbing to the living or work area. The place was lit, however dimly, by a sprinkling of tiny blue lights which formed, against the ceiling's jet-black back-drop, miniature constellations in a fair imitation of the night sky. Blue-tinged, the dusky velvet atmosphere reminded Trask of nothing so much as a Starside night, which made the bubble seem even more an aerie.

That, however, was the extent of Trask's and his colleagues'

knowledge of the place; for from the moment of their arrival when the elevator doors had hissed open, they had been under fire and pinned down. In fact their exit from the elevator cage - which in any event had been planned as a rapid deployment - had been hastened by a volley of shots that had sounded as soon as the doors were fully open, and a spray of bullets that chipped splinters from the marble columns where the three had taken shelter. All of which had felt very wrong to Trask.

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i He and the others had made such ideal targets in the elevator's confined s.p.a.ce, he just couldn't imagine anyone missing his aim ... especially someone who had been waiting for them to emerge from that precise spot! Yet no one had been hit, though for several nerve -racking minutes now they had been obliged to keep their heads down to avoid sporadic single shots.

Thus, deep down ins ide Trask sensed (or his talent advised him) that he and his colleagues were being played with; or that they were simply being played, reeled in, like so many sardines on a singl e lin e. And he knew they daren't allow this stalemate to continue to the enemy's prearranged conclusion.

Now, as he glanced across the well of curving steps at the dark figures of the precog and the Major crouching behind their individual columns, he wondered what to do next.

As for the sniper (if anyone so inept was worthy of such a t.i.tle), it seemed that he must be a man or a vampire alone. All of his weapon's muzzle-flashes had been sighted in just the one location on the higher level, and there had been no other sound or movement from anywhere else. And Trask sensed, he just knew, that whoever this was it wasn't Malinari.

But then it came to him that indeed there had been another sound: muted, repet.i.tious music that came from one glowing spot, an antique jukebox, in the velvet darkness of the higher level. And the music - a plaintive song - was only repet.i.tious in that it had been playing when first they'd arrived, had played again while t hey were pinned down, and was now into its second encore, curtain call, or whatever.

But curtain call? A farewell? Some kind of message, maybe?

And for the first time Trask listened to the song. A moderately fast-paced and yet bluesy ballad, it was sung by Ray Charles, a favourite from Trask's youth: 'Suns.h.i.+ne, you may find my window but you won't find me ...'