The Gun Golems (Approaching Infinity Book 2) Page 5

  There were doors on either side of the corridor as he proceeded, and he got into the habit of simply tearing them from their jambs and taking a quick look around each room before continuing. He found, among other things, a storage closet, a washroom, a short divergent hall leading to what he supposed was the environmental control equipment, and a suite of offices. With this last he took his time.

  Skeletons in various poses were everywhere throughout the offices: some sprawled on the floor, some propped up against doors, some leaning back in their chairs as if taking a short, lunchtime nap—he could almost hear them snoring. On the floor and on several of the desks he found small, metal cubes which looked like unmarked dice. He held on to them, and checking with Kalkin and Vays, he discovered that they, too, had found some.

  “You think they’re money?” Jav asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kalkin answered, “but just in case they are, find all you can and we’ll be rich!”

  “I’ve only found one,” Vays said.

  “I’ve got three,” Kalkin said. “How about you, Jav?”

  “I’ve got you both beat with six.”

  “Lucky!” Kalkin barked, feigning disgust. “Well, hold on to them, boys, and keep looking.”

  The last of the offices was the biggest, most luxuriously furnished. A skeleton sat in a chair that was probably plush once, but now was just as much a skeleton as its occupant. The chair was before a great desk and the skeleton’s arms were stretched out upon its surface, while its skull stared up at the ceiling, twisted a hundred and eighty degrees in the wrong direction. In one boney hand was another cube, which Jav took. Just beyond the reach of the sharp, white fingers was a shattered view screen. There were other screens, all ruined, on other desks, but this one was barely recognizable. Jav wondered what the man had been doing when he died. He considered animating the skeleton, but somehow knew that it would do him no good, that even if the skeleton could speak, its life prior to the animating force of the Kaiser Bones would be gone, wiped clean and forever lost.

  Finishing with the offices, Jav continued. He soon came upon an indoor loading dock that opened into a spacious garage and which may have doubled as a hangar. Most of the vehicles were big trucks, with giant, oversized knobby tires. These were parked in neat lines, covered in ages of dust, and called to mind some old, forgotten showroom, the pride of an unknown salesman. Skeletons were lying sprawled on the garage floor, sitting against the big truck tires, and one was even hanging half out of the high left cab window of one of the vehicles.

  More cubes. He didn’t think they were money, but something about them insisted to him that they were important. He kept the one he found in the big office separate and put the rest in an emptied toolbox he found in the garage. As he was getting ready to move on, Kalkin’s voice came through.

  “I haven’t been able to find much of anything. How about you two?”

  “I found some barracks, some storage facilities, and two separate armories,” Vays said.

  “Oh?” Kalkin said.

  “Some of the handguns look cosmetically similar to those the Gun Golems use, but these are all pretty sophisticated by comparison; nothing too advanced, though. Mostly projectile, but some energy weapons with their charges long dead.”

  “No Gun Golems in any of the ordnance lockers?” Kalkin asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “I found some offices and the motor pool,” Jav said.

  “Okay. I’m sure you both saw the tower at the back of the facility. It’s height and the way it’s built both suggest that it might have been a command center of sorts, either for military operations, or for flight traffic control. Let’s try to make our way there and once we’ve had a look, we’ll decide what to do: keep looking or head back.”

  The two acknowledged and continued onward.

  A few minutes after the communication, Jav pushed through a series of impact resistant glass doors and found himself in an infirmary or makeshift morgue. Dingy metal tables—beds?—were arranged in rows and many were occupied. The skeletons on most of the tables were of the straighter, less primitive variety. He came up to one table, though, that held a skeleton that matched those he had sensed in the ground. His first close look startled him. Its features, though largely human, had a distinct animal cast that could not be classified as merely primitive.

  Above each table was a hood containing a view screen and a cluster of protruding lenses that looked like gun barrels. Attached to the right side of each table was a compact console, which Jav thought might be used to control the above apparatus. He pushed some of the buttons and the screen flashed for an instant before going black again.

  No power. But then the walls rattled and shook. As the vibrations settled, subsiding into a steady, almost imperceptible murmur, lights began to shine dimly, like dawn occurring in miniature all throughout the infirmary, and a number of other machines came to tired life. The screen above him flickered with a monotony of static.

  Jav examined the small console again and noticed that one of the “buttons”, separate from the rest, was identical to the cubes he had been collecting. He tugged at the cube and found that it was just sitting slightly off-kilter in a tiny cradle, but as he pulled it free the screen above him went black. Okay. He put the cube back in its cradle and was pleased with the results. With perfect clarity the view screen showed the table at which Jav stood, but instead of a skeleton, there was a living, breathing primitive human about to undergo a series of cruel and invasive experiments.

  “Hey! I think I found something.”

  It took about twenty minutes for Kalkin and Vays to find Jav. Once they were all together again, they watched the recording from beginning to end.

  With sufficient input, the Emperor’s Artifacts rendered all ordered forms of communication intelligible. What the three heard first was gibberish. Then familiar words began to pop up with greater frequency until finally only the medical terminology posed any sort of problem, but even those words became comprehensible.

  Through the doctor’s narrative they learned that the experiment on the table turned into a postmortem examination halfway through. Before dying, however, the “specimen”, already riddled with twelve heavy slugs, kicked and thrashed and fought even as it was split open. It eventually expired, spilling all or most of its blood on the floor. Among other things, the doctor’s commentary revealed that this planet was Secrei, that the dead thing on the table was a native of this planet—suggesting that he himself was not—and that the specimen, like nearly all his fellows, was a devotee of Rasthain.

  “. . .This specimen is unlike previous ones in many respects,” the doctor said. “Morphological discrepancies are evident of course, but muscle and bone composition also appear to have undergone some kind of transformation. Muscle fiber is coarse and tough, indicating enhanced strength, which would be consistent with recent eyewitness accounts. Bone mass, too, appears to be increased and of altered cellular alignment and structure. It almost appears to resemble some vegetable structures, but I’ll have to confirm with Dr. Timbra. If there are more of them like this, then we have grossly misjudged the security of our position here.”

  In the recording a klaxon began to sound, giving the doctor—and the three Shades as well—a start. He tried to continue with his work but was too preoccupied as uncountable pairs of dark, unshod feet stole into the periphery of the screen. There were shouts from about the room, and the doctor himself was soon engaged in a wordless scuffle that climaxed with a sharp, whistling cry. By the accompanying sound, they could all imagine something long and irregularly shaped being driven through him.

  Kalkin, thick purple-blue arms folded across his broad chest, sighed. “That was gruesome. Well, we know a little more than we did before, but still nothing about the Gun Golems.”

  “Let’s try some of the other cubes,” Jav said.

  Kalkin nodded. He and Vays placed those they had found on the table next to the misshapen skull.

  “I
found this one still in the hand of someone who may have been an administrator. Could be important.”

  The others shrugged.

  Jav placed the new cube into the cradle. A fat man with thick brown hair, a bushy mustache, and hanging jowls—an administrator if ever he saw one—filled the screen and began talking.

  “Faina, I haven’t got much time. The major will skin me when he discovers I’ve made this recording. I just hope that I can follow after transmitting, but it’s not looking good.” The man tapped the tips of his pudgy fingers together, and his eyes shifted constantly, as if he were looking past the viewers instead of at them. “I wanted to tell you. . . that I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. What I did to you and Chami is unforgivable—you must know that I believe that. Everything is so different here. So cut off. Not just from Bahahmei, but even right here from each other. This planet isn’t like the rest. There’s something. . . wrong with it. Maybe I’ll have a chance to apologize in person and if so, I hope after seeing this, that you won’t turn me away. But the situation here gets worse every day and is becoming desperate. The major is forcing me to alter my reports. That could only be possible on a planet like this, but it speaks volumes about the true state of affairs. I think it’s just a matter of days now—”

  And then everything flashed white as the facility blew apart around them. Before Jav, everything—the screen, the tables, the distinctive outlines of Kalkin and Vays—was reduced to dark line shadows, swallowed by the expanding, paper-white glare of destruction.

  5. ANOTHER APPROACH

  10,688.051.1047

  The war room seemed empty now with only three occupants. Mont Cranden, dressed somewhat more functionally than usual, stood beside a man who was wrapped entirely in strips of gray cloth. Wil Parish, one of the legendary two first Shades, had arrived. A gap in the cloth where his eyes should have been revealed a sickly purple light, which was cast by his Artifact, the Unstable Amethyst.

  “Upon arriving at the third planet from the sun, all five probes were destroyed,” Witchlan said. “Two of the probes, however, managed to transmit most of their data beforehand.” Witchlan regarded one of five small screens floating before them. In one, the slightly blurred image of a Gun Golem aimed what must have been its pistol at the viewers and fired, blanking the screen. “As you can see, there can be no doubt as to the identity of the attackers, and further, there is no doubt as to the threat they pose to all of us.

  “Since you both are adept at concealment and are able to more than adequately defend yourselves, you two are ideally suited for what we require. We want you to go to the third planet, which is populated with sentient life.”

  Though obscured somewhat by mist or fog, two of the screens showed bustling city life, with people going about their daily routines, ignorant of the prying eyes upon them.

  “Professor Cranden, we want you to rob from any mind you can information regarding the Gun Golems, the source of their power, and the means of their destruction.”

  “Yes, Minister Witchlan,” Cranden said.

  “We want you, Mr. Parish, to see that Professor Cranden is unmolested in his task and to carry out the means of the Gun Golems’ destruction. . . if possible.”

  Parish snorted. “Yes, sir.”

  “Minister, how are we to get to the third planet?” Cranden asked.

  Parish cocked his head, but remembered that of course Cranden couldn’t go under his own power.

  “You will go by tether launch. Both of you. Recent modifications have been made to the system to make it undetectable, or so we hope. Mr. Parish, I know your feelings about relying on external objects and tools, but we would appreciate your indulgence. Tether launch will be faster and will make your transport invisible, where using your own power, even hidden, will make your Artifact stand out dangerously. If the system fails, you always have your own powers to resort to.”

  Cranden swallowed hard. If the system fails?

  Witchlan directed them to the small jump deck and within seconds the three were stepping down into an open bay, high up on the Root Palace. The rocky red terrain of Planet 1398 was spread out before them, dotted with cold, lonely shadows.

  “These men will outfit you with the appropriate gear,” Witchlan said, referring to a number of approaching technicians.

  The technicians fixed what looked like watches to the Shades’ left wrists, explaining that, in addition to controlling the recall function of the tether, the devices would allow them to communicate with the Root Palace.

  The Shades were then taken to a row of open-faced, cylindrical tanks set towards the back of the bay and opposite the open bay doors. Though the sturdy tanks stood four meters tall, they were dwarfed by the massive pseudo machine behind them. A tangle of pipes and thick trunks of vine connected the tanks to the plant machine, which itself simply merged with the back wall, fused with the fiber of the Root Palace and powered by all the resources of the Vine.

  Parish stepped into one tank and Cranden into another. They were instructed to stand facing the open portion of the tanks and to raise their arms. Once in this position, animate Vine matter shot out liquidly from nozzles behind them and wrapped around their torsos securely. The technicians had them lower their arms and checked the settings on the watches.

  “You’re free to engage whatever methods you wish to achieve concealment,” the head technician said.

  “Really?” Parish said incredulously.

  “Yes, sir. The tethers have been attuned to your Artifacts. You can check the status of the connection here,” he said, indicating a meter on the watch face.

  Parish shrugged and became dim, almost completely invisible. He checked the Vine wrapped around his chest, looked at the device on his wrist, and gave a thumbs up.

  An outline coffin of yellow light appeared about Cranden and then he was gone.

  The technicians backed away, clearing the space between the tanks and the open bay. The machine behind the tanks began to cycle up, filling the bay with a louder and louder drone. The Vines, or rather the tethers, floating within the two tanks became pure energy, like lightning waiting to be set free.

  Checking a gauge, the head technician began an inaudible countdown from ten. On zero, he pulled a heavy lever, releasing the contents of the tanks. Two lightning bolts flashed from the bay, racing, each taking the lead in turn, and bounding through space, through the wormhole, past Secrei and on to the third planet.

  Over a hundred million kilometers away, the people of Ransalah, the capital of Bahahmei, had the peace of their afternoon interrupted by the freak occurrence of twin lightning strikes touching down in the middle of a public square on an otherwise perfectly clear day.

  6. SECOND ENCOUNTER

  10,688.051.1523

  Clad in the Kaiser Bones, Jav rose up from beneath several tons of rubble. The building they had been in was now a blasted shell. He looked around and saw Kalkin throwing off a chunk of concrete that had been a corner piece of some part of the building. Looking around further for Vays, Jav instead saw two silvery figures—Gun Golems—close to the ground and still fairly distant, but approaching fast.

  “Vays?” Jav called. Before an answer could come, though, Jav finally caught sight of him.

  Vays was standing about a hundred meters away, heaving with rage and pointing his sword at the sky. Something was different about him. His every angle was black with shadow and venting gouts of steam. Between and behind the jets, red and green pinpoint lights gleamed, blinking in some pattern that hinted of secret significance.

  “First, my father,” Vays said hoarsely. “Now this!” He stood up straight, held his sword in both hands, and cried out as he traced a pattern into the ether.

  Both Jav and Kalkin watched as Vays flipped his sword around and pulled at the hilt so that it came partially apart, sliding along an inner track. A hammer and trigger snapped into place and, clapping the hilt back together, Vays aimed the butt of the crooked hilt like a gun at the sky, the sword blade po
inted downward. Without pause he fanned the hammer and pulled the trigger, and up in the sky six raucous explosions in succession lit the terrain below like a fireworks finale.

  A dark shape was uprooted from its place in the sky and began to fall.

  Since the debris would limit their mobility more than it would provide cover, all three Shades leapt clear of the ruined facility as the two approaching Gun Golems began firing their pistols. Jav glanced at Vays and noticed that the steam venting had ceased, the dark shadows were gone, and the winking lights no longer shone; Vays was back to normal again. There was no time to dwell on the change, though. The Gun Golems advanced, their pistols barked, and as they came within range, their face guns added to the chaos.

  “I’ll take one,” Kalkin shouted. “You two work on the other!”

  “Right!” Vays launched himself into the right-hand Gun Golem, his sword dancing in an intricate pattern across its metal surface, but leaving not a mark.

  Jav followed up, using AI to close the distance and power his kick to the Gun Golem’s head. His kick connected with a satisfying crunch and the Gun Golem was sent flying backwards with face gun fire spraying up into empty space. The Kaiser Kick, Jav thought and grinned. It wasn’t without its drawbacks, though: head-on, he was completely open and had to depend on his speed to outdo his opponent. Unfortunately, he couldn’t outdo the face guns; he was bleeding from three or four small wounds, which weren’t serious.

  Vays renewed his attack, releasing his pent up fury on the fallen Gun Golem. The double crack of the pistol and its impact startled Jav as Vays staggered, clutching at his stomach with his let hand, and fell over backwards gracelessly.

  Jav rushed in and kicked the Gun Golem’s gun hand, flinging its arm up and away. He drove the steely figure to the ground, pinning its gun arm under his right foot, turned the Gun Golem’s head over, so that it faced away from him, and struck savagely, straight downward into the side of its head with the heel of his palm. Like a piston, his arm rose and fell, driving the Gun Golem’s head incrementally further into the rock beneath it. Though the face gun could not hit him or any of the others in its current position, it began to fire nonetheless, sending up chips of sharp, broken rock like deadly shrapnel and forcing Jav to give up his position. He had damaged it, though; cracks had spread through its head and down its neck.