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The Battle of Crescent Island
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Jake walked through the airlock toward the frigate's underbelly, the last evacuation ship of many. The entrance was marked by copper seal doors with an ENTER sign in green neon hanging above it. There were four guards, two ahead of him and two behind. There was a tight feeling in his throat. He might attempt to break away now, but the chances with slim. Robert and Lily were ten feet behind and chained up, with another prisoner and his escort wedged between them in the long shaft. The red lights made his head buzz. There was a stink of sour beer.
He moved past the indented plaz of the airlock's walls, sometimes seeing sunlight that peered through cracks and chinks. Should he break for it? Was it only a fool's gambit or a matter of desperation? It was a question of some importance. He gingerly touched the bulge that the smuggled chandler pistol was making in his pants. They hadn't frisked him, for now, but it would only be a matter of time.
There was a shrill, harried scream from outside. A shell blast hit the frigate and suddenly the airlock swung to and fro. Forms lunged. The Association attack was sprung. His reaction was automatic, instantaneous, newly inbred. He whirled on his heels while his hands pulled the gun out, the butt sure and heavy in his hand. The guns beat their heavy, atonal music into the air. The blaster's white laser pulse moved slower than a bullet, but its impact range was far larger. A female guard's mouth flapped and she sagged and the guns fired again. The last expression on her face might have been gratitude. A man's head snapped back. They both fell onto the floor.
The two guards in front of him whirled to see what had happened and went at him with their truncheons. He staggered, fended them off. One blow pounded raggedly through his arm and drew blood. Jake shot one dead and the man thumped down. His false teeth shot out as his chin struck. He let the second guard have it and then turned behind him. In a second the mercenaries that had been guarding the Tercanos and the other prisoner would be within grappling distance. He blasted his way through the middle of them, backstepping as the bodies fell, his hands picking the targets with ease and dreadful accuracy. Two men and a woman went down, and more ran through the hole they left.
His enemies never hesitated or faltered, even though every shot he fired found a vital spot, and they hadn't even known he had a gun.
He reloaded as he went, with a rapidity that had also been trained into his fingers over the past weeks. They shuttled busily between the few energy cylinders in his pockets that he had taken and the pistol's charger chamber. The Eclipse men's faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with bland fire. He shot three more, and the two that followed them. They fell down atop each other, limbs scoured with masses of pink flesh, choking the tunnel.
Robert had gotten the last guard in a headlock with the help of the other prisoner, a rough, nearly bald Kantorim with waxy and yellow skin. Suddenly the guard latched his leg behind Robert's knee and twisted. Robert yelled as the muscle seized up and the guard forced himself free, diving past the Kantorim inmate before banging off the tunnel wall and landing with his legs in a sprawl. He reached for a Poke Ball, and stopped reaching when Jake blew his brains out. Cerebrospinal fluid flew and the mercenary stiffened at last.
Doors opened, behind from the evacuating base and ahead from the frigate. Men and Pokemon and robots charged at them. Jake blasted a sideshot at the plaz wall, blowing it outward and showing the open, green hell of the jungle below, the blue and free sky above, the mountain that the base was buried under to the left, and the black-and-orange frigate hovering to the right, smoking fumes from a huge pitted crater in its side, the trees below shivering wildly in the energy fumes. It was living and tonic. Before looking any further out at his path of escape he turned this way and that, screaming for the others to goddamit-get-on-the-ground. He opened up forward and back. They fell in squats, they fell backward, they tumbled over each other into blood and sickly pink flesh. Their bodies thumped like scarecrows. Blood and brains flew in streamers. They cast no shadows in the deathless red light of the tunnel lamps. He realized he was screaming. He had been screaming all along. His eyes felt like cracked ball bearings. His legs were wood. His ears were iron.
There were fewer of the guards now; he had run through them like a mower's scythe. He thought they would break soon but someone threw a truncheon. The hilt struck him squarely between the eyes and knocked him over. They ran at him in a reaching, vicious clot. He fired his gun empty again, lying in the oil-smell of the laser blasts. His head hurt and he saw large brown circles in front of his eyes. He missed with one shot, downed eleven with the rest. A momentary quiet came then, filling in the space of about a second.
Then the Un-Emrett appeared. Jake saw a silhouette filling the light coming from the frigate doors, eating it up, allowing only chinks of mocking white around the outline of shoulders and the folds of a robe. Jake screamed louder than ever and put laser blast after laser blast into that starving idiot face. It fell away screaming in anger. The white flashes lay bright and branded on their dark retinas, fading only reluctantly. The smell of expended static energy was hot and savage in this frontier of hope between hell behind and hell ahead.
"Go now," said Jake to Robert and Lily. "I'll hold it off." He knew that he could not kill it, not now. Not with the weapons he had.
The Kantorim was already out of the hole and running through the jungle. Robert stood in front of Lily, his body poised. "No, you're coming with us. All of us are getting out today."
"Dammit Robert, be ready to leave me! Get your wife out and GO! Can you do that for me?"
"Yes."
"Then go."
They went, Lily jumping away first and Robert next. He looked at Jake with a steady eye, not passing over, not seeing more than they had to. The young man assumed a bulge of sudden sadness like a burst blister, realizing that Robert was proud of him, as if the man's very love had somehow sprung from his pores to form a shield. Jake realized that he loved Robert and Lily, too. Well, maybe that wasn't quite right. He certainly didn't love Robert in the way Bronze loved him, or Lily did. Maybe the truth was that he had loved Bronze's parents from the first moment he had seen them (as he had with Tess) and was only now allowing himself to recognize the fact. For it was a fact. Then the Tercanons were gone and free and Jake turned back to the Un-Emrett.
...
The creature could smell his terror, he knew that, but he doubted if terror alone would be enough to motivate it. Jake was, after all, a creature of the light, and whole, wielding a deadly weapon. How it must hate him, he thought. The Un-Emrett scuttled out of the frigate into the airlock, crawling low. With the wind of the jungle and the light of tropical sun on his back he shot it in the head, singing a black divot at the top of its skull. Pseudo-Emrett made a sighing, sobbing noise and began to grin. Its hands were limp and fish-like, dead; the fingers clove to one another like the fingers of a glove long immersed in drying mud. The airlock bucked and Jake flew forward, his arms spinning like windmills. One of pseudo-Emrett's corpse-hands found his booted foot as he flew past it and pulled.
Jake shrieked aloud in the plaz tomb. He shot it again in the chest. It began to slobber through the grin and gripped tighter. He was going off to the side, bruising his shoulder against the plaz. Jake caught his arm and was almost about to balance himself before pseudo-Emrett yanked again. The thing was surprisingly strong, stronger than his hopes that its muscles were withering away had made it to be. He got an opening put another bullet in the creature's head. One hateful eye went out like a candle. He was out of ammo and couldn't reload without risk of getting his hands caught in the vise of its hands. Still it pulled. They engaged in a silent tug of war for his leg for a long time, great sheets of sweat coming down Jake's forehead, the too-bright lights pounding in his eyes and making his head turn sour like vinegar as he tried to keep away the boot from its fanged mouth. The Un-Emrett yanked on him like a wishbone. The wish would undoubtedly be to maim.
He gave a last tremendous yank on his trapped leg and got a casing out of his pcoket. He lost the advantage while focusing on putting the energy cartridge in the chamber and slid ever closer to its fangs, but he managed to reload. He shot it in the belly and then in its pallid forehead. Where its face had been there was now nothing but a churned mess of raw flesh and the black screaming hole of his mouth. For one frozen moment its grip grew even tighter and Jake began to slide toward that black hole with its white fangs. Then the hands loosened, and the Un-Emrett fell on its face, still grinning.
Jake began to crawl, full of adrenaline but hardly ambulatory, moving steadily through the heaps of corpses to the blasted hole, the buckling of the airlock tube picking up speed as he went. He looked into each of the faces of the dead, wondering how remarkably fine and well he felt, (at least until the dreams came) thinking about the various poses they had fallen into, feeling the fresh burns on the tips of his fingers from the gun's hot barrel. The wounded flesh raked against the plaz floor as he went on and spilled out blood. His upper leg was too numb to feel the damage done to it from the long struggle, but his foot felt like a blowtorch. With an outflung hand he grasped the hot and jagged border of the gap, smelling the heavy jungle breeze, seeing no sign of Robert and Lily.
There was a moment where he thought he would make it. Perhaps the Association vessels cresting the mountain gave the impression that he would be rescued. A wriggling arm grabbed him and something tore him on his injured leg, making a deep cut across the bulge of his calf. The revived Un-Emrett put its arms around his thighs and hurled him over its head. Jake saw its white eyes roll around terribly while he passed over it. He landed hard on his back and fired the chandler pistol with burning, aching eyes, stitching his view with red-hot lances of white light that went nowhere. Witch-glow leaped and danced, but not to his help. Hard to see now, that was the worst. Everything was going to vomit and afterimages.
"You think you can harm me?" it said. "Fool. We have drugs and surgeries that can cheat the damage or cure it."
Its boogeyman arms seized him and twisted his wrist. The dull throbbing of pain there became a scream. It struck his crippiled hand and the gun bounced away like a skipping-stone over water. Jake screamed again and turned his good arm to struggle, mashing a knee into its groin. Its face and torso were healing, new layers of flesh covering the skull bones and rack of emaciated ribs, regenerating visible with the encroaching skin glowing black-violet at its borders. He scrabbled for something to throw, a truncheon to bash its head in with, but then it boxed him on the temple. His veins throbbed and turned blue where the blow had struck. He had been defeated, but Robert and Lily were gone, that was still very clear. He fainted with immense satisfaction.
...
Robert and Lily were on the run. They could follow the Kantorim's tracks in the dew-covered grass. Up ahead the grass deepened into a jungle of green willows and mahoganies that was shocking after the sterility of the endless Eclipse fort. But there might be bats in the deeper shadows of the grove, and if they were vampire Pokemon they would not make it out alive.. Robert grunted a cry as he felt his twisted leg singe him. They ducked under the first of the willows, splashed through a shallow spring, and legged up the far bank, skidding in the dampness (even now Robert's body could relish it).
Willow withes slapped at his face. The trees were thicker here, and the sun was blotted out. Tree-trunks rose in lurching shadows. The grass, now kneehigh, caressed him, as if pleading with him to slow down, to enjoy the cool. To enjoy the life. Half-rotted dead branches reached for his shins. They crashed over a deadfall of grass and bramble and downed branches, sprinted through a tunnel of overhanging willow and sumac. Moss struck his shoulders like flabby corpse-hands. Some clung in sighing gray tendrils.
They clawed through a last barricade of willows and came to a clearing that looked up at the sky and the highest peak of the mountain range, gleaming skull-white at an impossible altitude. The Eclipse frigate was shaking as if infused with electricity, the blast crater surrounded by clouds of fix-it drones. They saw the airlock tunnel waver and then break in two. A plasma current burnt the tips of the trees, branches shaking in the wind. A battery of stiff-shelled fruits fell to the jungle floor. Colored birds and butterflies fled. The tall grasses whipped and bent.
The frigate pulled away. Two more shell bursts struck it on the armor above its engines. Twelve fast-flyer ships flew toward the Association vessels, returning laser fire. Then the gunship changed, began to melt.
They stared up, eyes widening. He could see the fluid pipes under the armor. He could see the coolant through the tubes and tanks, the freezing liquid conforming to a holder that was no longer there. Its internal supports slid, the resistance between them growing less and less, and then they closed against each other. The people, the hull palting, the fuel, the living quarters...all the things which had been in the frigate were gone. The frigate was gone.
Arceus jumped and played the fiddle, thought Robert numbly. The frigate vanished and he was free from it. His eyes flicked up to the patch of empty sky, felt the wind die down. Robert and Lily stood at one end of a great gulf, alive in unassailable freedom, with Jake at the other, draped in shadows. The moment had been huge. He had not though there would be freedom for he and Lily before the end, but Arceus spun fate in a new direction. That was the only thing worth thinking about right now, the only right thing besides survival.
"We'd better go on," said Lily. "Once we're out of the jungle we'll hold much counsel. Just the two of us."
Robert felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his body, one no draft of water or wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of his fingers, and in some instinctual way he strove not to be goaded, knowing in his colder mind that such strife was vain and always would be. In the end there was only Arceus.
Lily began to walk, and after a moment Robert came after. Together they went into the tumbled undergrowth by the steely-grey mountain, and entered into the forest where the next part of their life began. The darkness swallowed them. I imagine that they got friendly that night.
...
On the edge of sleep, Bronze felt that someone was addressing him. He saw faces in the whirling snow, white frost-nymphs, cold-drakes that breathed vitriol instead of fire, the stone giants the Logarians spoke of and feared. The feeling passed, but he felt disturbingly different, washed over by a kind of languid terror. Something was heading his way. He drowsed.
...
It was Gold who first suggested to the men on the ground that they were entering a trap. "Go slow," he had suggested to his drilling crew. "Go slow and safe, if you want to return to your families. There's no telling what surprises we'll find."
"No summer playtime is this!" said Rombur Deschain, a sour-eyed (the eye that was left, at least) commander of the twelfth hazarabam legion for Roria, an ex-Terramist soldier called up to serve the Association in wartime. He and Gold had met after the latter's return to the Association with the Eclipse headquarters's location, became quick comrades, and training the green recruits arm and arm. Rombur oversaw their squad's diamond drill, an expensive and unwieldy machine balanced on the mountainside by durasteel structs. Earlier it had begun to move and push downward through the rock.
Gold checked their strength again, looking at the twenty-something ships above. There was the red-and-white mother gunship, heavy cruisers, troop carryalls, automated bombers, huge rammers, and interdictors, some of them spaceworthy. They had flash-fryers, tubular ships programmed to shoot out red-hot payloads that exploded into fire, robotic guided missiles that followed targets with an accuracy that was thrilling for the Association fighters and dreadful for their enemies. Smaller craft and drones of every conceivable configuration and imaginable function had deployed from the frigate's underhangars. It was the full might of the Association capitol fleet, their great power marshaled and supplied at Crescent Island.
No, Cypress will not boast today, thought Gold. He runs with his army. The last battle will be elsewhere, then.
The Rorian Chairman had flown with them, dressed in an army uniform from the days of his service in the Terramist Wars. The senior officers, the hard-boiled Rorians, respected him for that. They did note how the Chairman had lost weight, how the uniform seemed a size and a half too large, and the thinness of the man's brown skin. His cheekbones were now so prominent that it seemed the skin would tear on them. He was fading fast, and losing the rest of his hair. Yanase and the rest of his advisors prayed he could hold on for a month longer, though his blood pressure made it seem unlikely.
Under the mountain stone, the exterior coating of the base was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been evenly cornered when the facility was new, but which were now at every zigzag, drunken angle. It made the subsurface layer look as if it were inscribed with strange, meandering hieroglyphics. And from the joining of these abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the other side was digging itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity and not the drill itself.
The groaning rose and fell, becoming louder, until the whole mountain face was full of the sound, an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadful effort. The other drill crews asked command if they should pull back.
Command didn't answer immediately. Gold pulled a leather glove onto his right hand. There was a hole as big as a coin in front of him now. He could hear, through the curtain of his own terror, a sub-liuetant's feet pattering as he ran. Then the spill of sand stopped. The groaning ceased, but there was a sound of steady, labored breathing.
"Who are you?" said Gold.
When no answer came Gold spoke again, his voice filling with the old thunder of command. "Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my patience shorter."
"Go slow," a dragging, clotted voice said from within the wall. And Gold felt the dream-like terror deepen and grow almost solid. It was the voice of Spyro, the man he had fought with in the town of Flouruma But he was dead; he had seen him go down himself, guts strewn everywhere and hands weirdly twitching. Fathoms seemed to swim by his eyes, descending. "Go slow past the halls, Pokedex Holder. Watch for the pumps. While you travel with these men, the Djinn has your soul in his pocket."
"What do you mean? Speak on!"
But the breathing was gone. Small chunks of sandstone plazcrete trickled away from the exterior wall, where a long crack had just appeared. A jagged lightning bolt zigzagged across one of the broader bricks, fracturing it. With an involuntary grunt Gold brushed the dust away and got his feet moving. He did not want to do the next thing, but the necessity was strict, inviolable. He went to the hole and punched at it. The sandstone crumbled easily at the edges, and with a bare stiffening of muscles, he thrust his hand through the wall.
And touched something solid, with raised and fretted knobs. He drew it out. He held a jawbone, rotted at the far hinge. The teeth leaned this way and that.
"All right," he said softly. He crushed the bone to dust. "Keep drilling."
...
Other guards and members of the Rorian Legions were making their own breaches, with excited shouts ringing out, high-pitched and strident, in counterpoint to yet another explosion from below the earth. From far below came the hubbub of an angry mob, so distant it sounded like a deep murmur. Then Gold made out the buzzing hum of lasbeam fire.
Are they fighting amongst themselves? Gold wondered.
The diamond drill went through the weak sandstone before hitting reinforced durasteel. Another two minutes of pushing and breaking muscles widened a small gap larger enough for someone to send a Ditto's Poke Ball through. The armor-plate buckled once, twice, and then burst inward. They could send whole men now into the walkway tube. "Keep waiting a few more seconds and send a drone down there," said Gold. "And get some damn linkage with the other teams!"
"Ready in a minute, sir," said a relay boy.
"I'm a volunteer, not your sir," said Gold with a strong laugh. "How fresh are you conscripts, anyway?"
"We'd never thought we'd have to fight right now..."
"Damn!" Gold ran a hand through his hair. "Rombur, what's happened to the military since we were born?"
"Lack of use, I'll warrant," the commander said. "You know as well as me that we've gotten flabby. I fought in the Terramist campaigns as much as the next vetran, but nothing large-scale has gone on for two decades. There was that Unova thing that collapsed when Ghetsis got taken out and the Team Flare riot. Nothing like this. Rebels? Explosions? Planned frigate evacuations? The Alliance is too sophisticated. How could they have ordered such a massive and coordinated assault on every continent and region since Anthien? Where did they get the eyes and ears? Where did they get the resources?"
"Neglect on your part to contain them," said Gold, watching the drone footage, and his eyes bulged, at risk of falling out of their tired sockets. "Vermillion hell! They got combat mechs and acid hoses."
"Do you think we're going to win this war?" Rombur said, speaking so that the men wouldn't hear.
"Maybe," said Gold softly, "if the Alliance doesn't use their sorcery to destroy the world first. The Association forces have proven to be incapable in dealing with this. But I've met the only person who I trust to have a good solution for all this. As long as he's still alive, we have a chance of something unexpected going our way. I can't say what, though."
"Who would this be?"
"I'll tell you and the other officers more, depending on how this battle goes. All I can say now is that Roria is a fuck-ton of dynamite, and the Association and Alliance are dropping matches left and right."
"And what is it you want to do now?" said Gold, turning to the men, and his voice seemed distant to his own ears. He felt full of fever, but what was happening to him now was the onset of a different fever than sickness, one which was all too familiar. It was the fever that had overtaken him in the Mystri Ruins. It was battle-fire, hazing all thought, leaving only the need to stop thinking and start shooting.
"We want to go to war!" a private cried.
"You don't know what you're talking about," said Gold, "but you are going to find out. When we go through the breach, Rombur's company will go left. I'll go right. Plug up the hoses."
Rombur nodded and they went to their war.
...
They moved through the breaches and fired at their foes in the hall. Gold moved the pump-action on the scatter-blaster twice. The electric gun was almost as loud as Rombur's revolver, but did not make neat holes in the wall against which their robot enemies crouched; the slugs smashed gaping wounds in the plasteel to either side of a bot's head. White light from a bathroom shone through the holes in ragged rays. The recoil did not drive him back through the hole, but it did snap his arm up in a savage arc that jerked all the tendons under his arm. Some of the shells hit a Typhlosion's hide, not piercing it but first heating and then scorching the fur as the friction built.
The revolver in Rombur's hand crashed. Even through their headgear it was deafening. Gold had urged him to use something more orthodox, but Rombur said he shot so well with his own gun that he only needed a single bullet for every head. After showing his prowess at the range Gold believed his claim.
"Oh!" an android screamed in a strangled, breathy voice. It was a wonder it could scream at all. Its white metal chest suddenly caved in, as if someone had swung a sledgehammer at a barrel. His metal began to turn yellowish in patchs, as if dandelions were blooming on it. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" Then it only whispered in a faint trickling voice as the yellow fluid dripped from its lips.
This bot was followed by a larger mech, its fellow. They had been waiting in the bathroom a little to the left of the breach's line of sight and burst out of the wall, leaving nothing but durasteel clinging to rebar points. Gold realized that these were no security bots he had ever faced before: they were cyborg gunmasters, specially programmed with organic tissue, brain matter grown from the Alliance's cloning vats, to be unpredictable and dangerous. The smaller one had an automatic in each hand; the large mech shotgun sawed off so short that it looked like a derringer with a case of the mumps; in its other hand was a huge rifle that Cobalion, gifted with a comprehensive knowledge of extrauniversal culture, would have called a Rambo gun.
They began to fire at once with all their weapons. I'm dead, Gold thought, and then Rombur and soldiers from the breachholes to the left and right fired. The small cyborg was propelled backwards in a cloud of its own synthetic blood and tubing. The automatics flew from its hands and slid across the bathroom floor. They thumped to the carpet amid a flutter of shredded toilet paper. Most of its guts hit the wall a second before its body caught up with them.
One of the big mech's optical sensors had been shot out and its firing was disjoined, but there was a boom like a grenade as it fired the sawed-off. Gold rolled into the hall as the blast tore a hundred tiny holes in the walls. He heard a man go down screaming. His kevlar-coated skin was seared by shot in several places, and Gold understood that if the bot had been closer, where the thing's pattern was tight, he would have been vaporized.
He heard the ceiling moving, and then saw a gatling turret descend from the roof of the tunnel. Its scopes focused on him and fired with a defeating clack-clack-clack while the big mech opened up with the Rambo gun. The heavy thunder of machine-gun fire filled the tunnel. The first result of this barrage was for Typhlosion to move to save its trainer's life. The turret had drawn a bead on him, but before it could correct its line of fire, an arc of fire cut it in half.
The second was for the mech to keep firing. Gold rolled past the broken wall and into the bathroom while his eardrums shook. Rombur's company and Gold's own soldiers stayed in the breaches, pinned down by a second turret that had descended. The gunner mech couldn't stop, or wouldn't stop. As rubbersteel lips pulled back from plaz teeth to reveal a huge shark's grin, it followed Gold's roll and raked the bathroom from one end to the other, blowing two of the sinks to dust, turning framed photographs (the same kind of art in the Objective Room) into clouds of flying glass fragments, hammering the yet-unharmed bathroom door off its hinges. The frosted glass of the shower stalls exploded. A Most Productive Worker trophy a grunt had gotten the year before bonged like a bell as a slug drove through it.
In the movies, people actually kill other people with hand-held rapid-fire weapons. In real life, this rarely happens. If it does, it happens with the first four or five slugs fired or a ricochet shot. After the first four or five, two things happen to a man or mech, even a powerful one, trying to control such a weapon. The muzzle begins to rise, and the shooter himself begins to turn either right or left, depending on which unfortunate shoulder he has decided to bludgeon with the weapon's recoil. In short, only a moron or a movie star would attempt the use of such a gun; it was like trying to shoot someone with a pneumatic drill. The Djinn had absolutely no knowledge about firearm physics and the handpicked designers for the mech's guns generally were advised that bigger was better.
Gold saw this for a moment, then aimed the scatter-blaster and vaporized the huge mech from the artificial smile up. Judging from the bot's erratic behavior, this did not matter a great deal. His next round of shot blew the rest of its head and its shoulder away. The Rambo gun went flying, rolling like a ninepin, before Rombur ended its wild firing with a well-aimed and wide-hitting laser round: it struck the gun's firing cylinder, causing an explosion that both ended the gunfire and tore off the the back of the gun.
As the second turret continued to go ker-blam-ker-blam in the main hall, Gold narrowed the scatter-blaster's spread range by working the pump-action, ejecting the fat red cartridges onto the rubble-filled floor, and then loaded up some laser rounds. He lifted it up and disintegrated the turret in a hurricane of white energy. The pieces flew backward in a sparkling cloud.
The advancing did not resume till Gold's Typhlosion and Sudowoodo had plugged up or managed all the acid launchers on the walls. Whatever dark mainframe that operated the automated defenses was waiting for the main bulk of the breaching parties to enter the tunnels before loosing their gallons of corrosive, reeking chemicals. Gold wondered what the point of it all was: good men to die for useless footholds in stone labyrinths that had already been burned out, all valuable people and data long removed. By the time the compromised sprinkler system was disabled and the fluid pipes clogged, his Pokemon were covered with accidental discharges of clear, poisonous slime, wincing as it scarred their flesh.
He moved on from the bathroom and into another hall, then pulled back when another turret sent a laser blast at him. He heard splintering cracks and distant explosions from down the hall. Rombur's men were moving through from the breach, slightly bent over as they took enemy positions, still groggy-headed from the earsplitting firefight. "We've got to get a Porygon into whatever system's making these turrets work," Gold radioed. "Otherwise we'll be here for weeks."
...
A pipe exploded with a sound of tearing felt and out of it came a quick stream of acid that slowed. The turret fire became duller, a chanting, mechanical sound. His battle-rush seemed to be fading, and he was left with a sense of deep malaise and impending doom. He looked about him and realized with sudden horror that he was standing in the shadow of the Dark Lord. No, not just standing in it; buried alive in it...
He cried out but his cry was lost in the golden blast of some tremendous horn. It came from the deeps and seemed to fill the world. As that note of warning held and drew out over the place where he stood, blackness welled from the pipes and lights in the tunnel. It overspilled them and spread across the walkways in flaggy streams which came together and formed a growing blotch of darkness. It did not look like a cloud; it looked like a tumor charging toward him. He fled back to the breach, and saw that the sky was blotted out. And, he saw, it was not a cloud or a tumor but a shape, some tenebrous, cyclopean shape racing toward the place where he stood. It would do no good to run from that beast coalescing in the sky above the mountain; it would catch him, clutch him, and bear him away. Into the power of the Dark Lord it would bear him, and the world of light would see him no more.
Rombur's men were shouting but he did not heed them. Rents formed in the darkness and terrible inhuman eyes, each easily the size of frigates that had already been swallowed by the darkness, peered down at him. They were red-violet, purple as magic smoke, red as blood.
"...SHUTTING DOWN! SHUTDOWN WILL BE COMPLETE IN ONE MINUTE AND TWO SECONDS!"
In his vision, Gold threw his hands up to shield his eyes …
… and came to, standing upright upright inside the breach tunnel. The eyes were gone. He was looking at the world from between his own spread fingers. And still that voice rolled on and on, the voice of some heartless squad commander bellowing through a bullhorn.
"THERE IS DANGER! REPEAT, THERE IS DANGER! FIVE SUBNUCLEAR CELLS ARE DORMANT, TWO SUBNUCLEAR CELLS ARE NOW IN SHUTDOWN PHASE, ONE SUBNUCLEAR CELL IS OPERATING AT TWO PERCENT CAPACITY. THESE CELLS ARE IRRECOVERABLE! REPEAT, THESE CELLS ARE IRRECOVERABLE! THIS FACILITY IS SHUTTING DOWN! SHUTDOWN WILL BE COMPLETE IN FORTY-FIVE SECONDS! THERE IS DANGER! REPEAT..."
"How long has this been going on?" he radioed to Rombur.
"About ten minutes! You were dead to the world..." Rombur broke off. "Man, you sound terrible! Did they get you with something?"
"No. Just a bad vision. Get your guys out and spread the word. This place isn't going to last much longer."
...
The evacuation was hardly completed when the mountain imploded. For a moment after the countdown ended it only lay there, a white relic bent in a ghostly half-dome. Then suddenly its summit blazed red, washing the snow away with dazzling scarlet light. Gold and Rombur cried out and threw their hands up to shield their eyes from that burning shape. The stone began to change. Not to melt, but to change. Fires leaped from the hills and melted together into roaring towers. The mountain-top drew inward with a boom, concentrating itself into bright, overlapping teeth of stone and folds as dark as a moonless summer midnight. For a moment Gold though saw a rose, a triumphant rose that might have bloomed in the dawn of this world's first day, a thing of depthless, timeless beauty.
His eye saw, and his heart was opened. It was as if all love and life had suddenly risen from the dying base; it was there in the mountain-fire, burning out in triumph and some wonderful, inchoate defiance, declaring that despair was a mirage and death a dream.
The rose! he thought incoherently. First the fire, then the rose! Behold! Behold the opening of the way to the Dark Lord's realm!
There was a thick cough from the fire. A fan of sparks twisted outwards for thousands of paces. Rombur yelled and rolled away, beating at the orange flecks that were falling on his power-caked gear as the flames gushed upward toward the sky. Gold didn't move. He sat transfixed in his vision, held in a cradle of wonder that was both gorgeous and terrible, unmindful of the sparks that danced across his skin. Then the flames sank back and with a great roaring and booming the mountain's cone collapsed into a slurry of internal tumults. Ash emitted in bursts from the breaches and settled on the scrubby grass outside.
Then the sides of the mountain collapsed inward in a final blast. Their headgear hardly even deadened the blast of sound. Something deep below the dormant volcano was moving upwards and devouring the base's interior. Gold finally shook off the chill memory of his vision and straightened up, standing with Rombur and the others. wondering how many years it had been since that announcement, programmed to broadcast only in the event of a total system breakdown, had been recorded. Something, something far away, had ordered the self-destruct, a disabling of the magnetic field that held the subterranean fires at bay.
At last the mountain groaned, shook a final time, and died. Nothing was left but a smoking caldera. Molten flows ran down its sides and cooled into obsidian flecks as thin and jam-packed as eyelashes over an iris. The last aftertremors died and they heard no more.
.
.
.
The next day Robert awoke to see the ruined mountain and the Association ships disappearing into the north. He remembered Jake, digesting what he had done with a feeling of ugly betrayal, a brief feeling as if he had not been helpless to save the other after all. After making love, he and Lily had slept through the implosion's clamor. He found some fruits to eat, remembering his army training of what was poison and what might save you. After leaving some of the meal for Lily, he sat on a log at the edge of a clearing, letting his mind run free.
Yes, pleasure was coming harder now, faster. The grass screamed green at him; it seemed that if he bent over and rubbed his hands in it he would stand up with green paint all over his fingers and palms. He resisted an urge to try the experiment. A sense of triumph and unconquerable joy had filled his chest and was beating along with heart so that he staggered a little, worried his ribs might burst. If that was to be his end, he would die of an overabundance of vitality. But still his mind felt fairly calm. That was good.
In the clearing he saw a ring of black standing stones which looked like some sort of surreal animal-trap in the moonlight. In the center was a table of stone or an altar. It seemed Late Logarian, and very old, rising out of the ground on a thick arm of basalt. Robert felt it touch him: whatever spirit dwelt there. His loins were suddenly filled with light, a light that was soft yet hard. He felt his head twisting, his tongue thickening and becoming sensitive to even the spittle that coated it.
He heard no demon's voice and went to the altar, stood beside it for a moment. Coherent thought was now almost impossible. His teeth felt strange in his head, tiny tombstones set in pink moist earth. The world held too much light. He climbed up on the altar and lay back. His mind was becoming a jungle full of strange thought-plants that he had never seen or suspected before, a willow-jungle that had grown up around a spring. The sky was water and he hung suspended over it. The thought gave him a vertigo that seemed far away and unimportant.
The trees which overhung the altar contained faces. He watched them with abstracted fascination: Here was a dragon, green and twitching, here a wood-nymph with beckoning branch arms, here a living skull overgrown with slime. Faces. Faces.
I come. I come.
He was aroused by what he least expected, the sound of a human voice. Emerging from his reverie he saw that the jungle gnats had deserted him, thank God. His head was swimming feebly: and there a few yards away in the morning shadow of a pillar, crawling slowly towards him, was the Un-Cypress. It sat hugging itself, its eyes almost shut up with bruises, dressed in on of its old black suits, its flesh the color of liver, its leg apparently broken, its mouth twisted with pain.
It's just an illusion, thought Robert, but from what he had seen of the Un-Cypress in captivity, it looked very real, and very maimed. He let his mind coil out at it, the antithesis of emotion. The body that was making its way over to him froze and seemed to scream. There was a brief, vicious tug-of-war between his temples; his mind was the rope, gray and fibrous. For long moments there was no sound but the quiet hush of his breathing and the faint breeze which made the green faces in the trees shift, wink, and grimace. No bird sang.
Then the thing's psychic hold loosened. Some shade this thing was, some memory, tethered to a place that held great significance to the flayed soul of Cypress. The body dragged itself away and rested next to a standing stone, contorting in a tortured pattern. "Robert," it said feebly.
Robert held his tongue, not wanting it to start any game. He might find good information here, as long as the haunt stayed subdued.
"Robert," it said again in a broken voice, "for God's sake speak to me." He glanced at it in surprise. Tears were on its cheeks.
"Robert, don't cold-shoulder me," it said. "Tell me what has happened. What have they done to us? You...you're all filthy. My leg's broken..." its voice died away in a whimper.
"Who are you?" he asked sharply.
"Oh, don't pretend you don't know me," mumbled Cypress's voice. "I'm Cypress. You're Robert, Robert Anshan Tercano of Mitis Town, Roria. We've had our quarrels, I know. I'm sorry. I dare say I've been in the wrong. Robert, you'll not leave me to die in this horrible place, will you?"
"What's the last thing you remember?"
"I had just broken that bottle, and it went inside me. Then...no! I can't bear it!"
"Why did the Djinn let you come here?" said Robert, keeping his eyes on the other.
"Djinn?" said Cypress in a dying voice. "I don't know what you're talking about. It's not much of a game to make fun of a dying man."
"But are you really Cypress?" said Robert, for he began to think that this was an iteration of Cypress which was the real deal, a man that had escaped by his own power and returned to the light.
"Who else should I be?" came the answer, with a burst of weak temper, on the verge of tears.
"Where have you been? How did you get here?" asked Robert. Cypress, if it was Cypress, shuddered.
"Where are we right now?" he asked presently.
"Somewhere in the jungle," said Robert. "That smoldering volcano over there," (he pointed to the mountain) "is part of a chain that I think looks rather like the Achorian Mountains. That means we're on Crescent Island, northeast of the Rorian mainland.
"Have you found any other people?"
"I never saw anything so far," said Robert, not wanting to mention Lily. "And I've no idea where civilization could be now: a couple of hundred miles away for all I know."
"You mean we're trapped?" said Cypress, almost in a scream. Robert said nothing and the other bowed his head and cried like a baby.
"Come on," said Robert at last, "there's no good taking it like that. What the hell, you'd not be much better off if you were anywhere else on Earth. You remember they're having a war there. The Eclipse Alliance might be bombing cities to bits at this very moment, even without you to run it. And you aren't exactly the most popular fellow with the Rorians right now. You'd get torn apart..." Then seeing the creature still crying, he added, "Get up, Cypress. It's only death, all said and done. We all have to die someday, you know. Your prison cells and that goblin Emrett taught me as much. We don't lack water, and hunger without thirst isn't too bad. I've found some berry trees, if you ever get hungry. As for being attacked and eaten...well, drowning, or cancer, would be worse."
"You mean to say you're going to leave me," said Cypress.
"I couldn't even if I wanted to," said Robert, gesturing around. "Don't you see I'm in the same position as you?"
"You'll promise not to go and leave me all alone?" said Cypress.
"All right, I'll promise if you like. Where could I go to?"
Cypress looked very slowly all around. He lurched forward, getting close to Robert. "Where is… it?" he asked in a whisper. "You know," and he made meaningless gestures.
"What are you talking about?" said Robert.
"Me?" said Cypress. His face was, in one way and another, so disfigured that it was hard to be sure of its expression.
"Have you any idea of what's been happening to you and what you've done for the last few months?" said Robert. Cypress once more looked all around him uneasily.
"It's all true, you know," he said at last.
"What's all true?" said Robert.
Suddenly Cypress turned on him with a snarl of rage. It (for now the creature seemed like an it) grabbed his wrist, the grip feeble but surely flesh-and-blood. He could feel the other man's heartbeat through his scraped skin. "It's all very well for you," said Cypress. "Death doesn't hurt and it's bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense. What do you know about death? It's all true, I tell you."
"What are you talking about, again?"
"I've been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense all my life," said Cypress. "Trying to persuade myself that it matters what happens to the human race, trying to believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable. It's all rot, do you see?"
"Definitely that's true about the stuff that you've been swallowing," said Robert. "But there's something truer than this life."
"Yes," said Cypress, and then was silent for a long time. Then: "I'll tell you what's true."
"What?"
"A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody's looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother's dead body is laid out, and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand."
"What do you mean by saying that's truer?"
"I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide."
Robert said nothing.
"Lots of things," said Cypress. "Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups. People in medieval Alola doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night, and missionaries and civil servants say it's all superstition. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Nimbasa City frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You'd say they are unenlightened. They're not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn't. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. That's what it all means."
"I'm not clear," began Robert, when Cypress interrupted him.
"That's why it's so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now, a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then, the real universe forever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimeter, to live one week, one day, one-half hour longer: that's the only thing that matters. Of course you don't know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say 'What difference does a short reprieve make?' What difference!"
"But nobody needs to go there," said Robert. "Nobody needs to experience the worst of all."
"I know that's what you believe," said Cypress. "But you're wrong. It's only a small parcel of civilized people who think that. Humanity as a whole knows better. It knows (the ancients knew) that all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying. Bogeymen. Every savage knows that all ghosts hate the living who are still enjoying the rind: just as old women hate girls who still have their good looks. It's quite right to be afraid of the ghosts. You're going to be one all the same."
"You don't believe in Arceus as God," said Robert.
"Well, now, that's another point," said Cypress. "I've been to church as well as you when I was a boy. There's more sense in parts of the Coda than you religious people know. Doesn't it say Arceus is the God of the living, not of the dead? That's just it. Perhaps your God does exist, but it makes no difference whether He does or not. No, of course you wouldn't see it; but one day you will. I don't think you've got the idea of the rind, the thin outer skin which we call life, really clear. Picture the universe as an infinite glove with this very thin crust on the outside. But remember its thickness is a thickness of time. It's about a hundred thick in the best places. We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we've got all the way through then we are what's called Dead: we've got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists. He's not in the globe: He's outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn't follow us in. You would express it by saying He's not in time, which you think comforting! In other words He stays put: out in the light and air, outside. But we are in time. We 'move with the times'. That is, from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was. He may be there in what you call 'Life', or He may not. What difference does it make? We're not going to be there for long!"
"That could hardly be the whole story," said Robert. "If the whole universe were like that, then we, being parts of it, would feel at home in such a universe. The very fact that it strikes us as monstrous..."
"Yes," interrupted Cypress, "that would be all very well if it wasn't that reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe. Even the ordinary scientists, like what I used to be myself, are beginning to find that out. Haven't you see the real meaning of all this modem stuff about the dangers of extrapolation and bent space and the indeterminacy of the atom? They don't say it in so many words, of course, but what they're getting to, even before they die nowadays, is what all men get to when they're dead: the knowledge that reality is neither rational nor consistent nor anything else. In a sense you might say it isn't there. 'Real' and 'Unreal', 'true' and 'false?' They're all only on the surface. They give way the moment you press them."
"If all this were true," said Robert, "what would be the point of saying it?"
"Or of anything else?" replied Cypress. "The only point in anything is that there isn't any point. Why do ghosts want to frighten? Because they are ghosts. What else is there to do?"
"I get the idea," said Robert. "That the account a man gives of the universe, or of any other building, depends very much on where he is standing."
"But specially," said Cypress, "on whether he's inside or out. All the things you like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own, for instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colors and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink." The wind had picked up and some ashes from the mountain were making headway to the jungle.
"Of course you don't care," said Cypress. "What do you people in the rind care about us? You haven't been pulled down yet. It's like a dream I once had, though I didn't know then how true it was. I dreamed I was lying dead: you know, nicely laid out in the ward in a nursing home with my face settled by the undertaker and big lilies in the room. And then a sort of a person who was all falling to bits, like a tramp, you know, only it was himself not his clothes that was coming to pieces, came and stood at the foot of the bed, just hating me. 'All right,' he said, 'all right. You think you're mighty fine with your clean sheet and your shiny coffin being got ready. I began like that. We all did. Just wait and see what you come down to in the end.' "
"Really," said Robert, "I think you might just as well shut the hell up."
"Then there's Spiritualism," said Cypress, ignoring this suggestion. "I used to think it all nonsense. But it isn't. It's all true. You've noticed that all pleasant accounts of the dead are traditional or philosophical? What actual experiment discovers is quite different. Ectoplasm, slimy films coming out of a medium's belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish."
"Are you Cypress?" said Robert, suddenly turning upon; his companion. The persistent mumbling voice, so articulate that you had to listen to it and yet so inarticulate that you had to strain your ears to follow what it said, was beginning to madden him. "This makes no sense. You can't be him."
"Don't be angry," said the voice. "There's no good being angry with me. I thought you might be sorry. My God, Robert, it's awful. You don't understand; Right down under layers and layers. Buried alive. You try to connect things and can't. They take your head off...and you can't even look back on what life was like in the rind, because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning."
"What are you?" cried Robert. "How do you know what death is like? God knows, I'd help you if I could. But give me the facts. Where have you been these few weeks?"
"Oh, my God!" cried Cypress, flinging out his arms and collapsing again, as if overwhelmed by the extent of the jungle. "Oh, Robert, Robert! We shall be killed. Killed and put back under the rind. Robert, you promised to help me. Don't let them get me again."
"Shut up," said Robert in disgust, for the creature was wailing and blubbering so that he could hear nothing else: and he wanted very much to identify the deeper note that had mingled with the piping wind.
"Here it comes," said Cypress, "here it comes, you fool! Can't you hear? There's a country over there! There's a rocky coast. Look there...no, to your right. We shall be smashed into a jelly. It's coming! Look...O God, here comes the dark!"
And the dark came. Horror of death such as he had never known, horror of the terrified creature at his side, descended upon Robert: finally, horror with no definite object. In a few minutes he could see through the jet-black darkness over his eyes a luminous cloud overhead, like a swab of foam. Invisible birds, with a shriek and flurry, passed low overhead.
"Are you there, Cypress?" he shouted. "What's coming? Pull yourself together. All that stuff you've been talking about is insane. Say a child's prayer if you can't say a man's. Repent your sins. Take my hand. There are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death this moment, including my own son. We'll do very well if we stick together." His hand was clutched in the darkness, rather more firmly than he wished.
"I can't bear it, I can't bear it," came Cypress's voice. A wind like an October spring draught had come into Robert's nostrils.
"Hold now. None of that," he shouted back, for Cypress had suddenly gripped his arm with both hands.
"I can't bear it," came the voice again, with a note of absolute surety. "Cease, Robert. Strike your camp and turn northwest. In the northwest there is a need for you."
...
The shadow swung over him, enfolded him. There was sudden ecstasy broken only by a galaxy of pain, as faint and bright as ancient stars gone red with collapse. Faces came to him unbidden. He pushed Cypress away violently. He made his drunken way to the perimeter of the circle. He staggered through, feeling a huge weight fall from his shoulders. He drew a shuddering, weeping breath. As he went away he felt the other standing at the bars of its prison, watching him go from it. He wondered how long it might be before someone else crossed the jungle and found this remnant of a soul, hungry and alone. For a moment he felt dwarfed by the possibilities of time.
But he had learned enough. Going back to Lily and finding her laying in the position of their coupling, he set up watch and began to plan.