Emergence (16 page)

He paused for a second, closing his eyes and searching for the knowledge.

‘They use bone needles and the ink of this sort of squid. Urmin. Rhymes with vermin. But lives on land. And the suckers on its arms all have little razor teeth around them.’

He checked to see if everyone was still following him. They were with rapt, horrified attention.

‘Anyway, a dude with a lot of tats, he has sucked up some real pain to get them. The design tells a story, but you know, blah blah blah. I’m a badass from a line of badasses. We’re all considered very macho.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway. Game stats. The fastest of them can run at about
. . .’
He closed his eyes again and did a quick calculation. ‘About forty miles an hour for short distances. But they get puffed quickly. Like I said, that’s a lot of weight to go hauling around at high speed. Mostly they like to jog around at a slow lope, accelerating when they close with an enemy, or prey. Which to a Hunn is pretty much the same thing anyway.’

He had circled around the top of the dissection table until he stood next to the half-crushed head of the corpse. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.

‘He’s no oil painting, is he? Anyway, more fascinating factoids: they have very poor eyesight, especially in bright sunshine, but their sense of smell is about as good as a hunting dog’s. They can sleep standing up. They can hold their breath for a loooong time. Can go four or five days without water. Ten if they can get some blood to drink. Yeah, I know. Gross. The hide can be up to two inches thick in places.’

He looked up at Heath again. Unlike the brainiacs who seemed happy to defer to his superior knowledge, Heath looked as if Dave had just dropped his pants and mooned the lot of them. Allen was right. He should have found the time to give the captain a heads-up about this.

‘But the hide’s not impenetrable,’ he said, pressing on regardless. ‘These things fight with edged weapons, up close and very personal. When they want to reach out and touch someone at a distance, they’ll throw a spear, or if you’re dealing with the Sliveen, they’ll notch an arrow.’

‘The Sliveen?’ Heath asked. ‘The scout?’ His face was a mask of deep concern, but Dave didn’t care anymore. They had asked him here to do his party trick, and he was going to do it. It felt good to let go of this stuff. A blessed fucking relief. As though giving it up made it somebody else’s problem.

‘One of the six clans,’ he explained. ‘You ever watch those
Lord of the Rings
movies?’

‘Fuck yeah!’ said one of the younger male researchers before blushing with embarrassment.

‘Well, just imagine that movie with orcs pretending to be ninjas.’

‘Awesome,’ the same guy said in a quiet voice.

‘Yeah, the Sliveen think they are. The Hunn disagree. A Sliveen is what hit us on the road last night.’

‘These things have already made it to the mainland?’ someone asked.

‘Not now,’ Heath said. ‘Continue, please, Mr Hooper.’

‘The Sliveen also like to think of themselves as being very sophisticated,’ Dave said, then stopped. ‘Hey. Did this asshole come packing a sword? A really big sucker?’

‘It did,’ a bald man said. He’d just come into the room with the air of someone who liked to make a big entrance. ‘I’ve done some preliminary investigations, but we lack the facilities for metallurgical or linguistic analysis. Aside from the basic facts we could ascertain here – it was made by a tool-using, tool-making culture, designed primarily for combat, with some symbology indicating that it may also demonstrate rank and achievement – we have not been able to learn much about the material culture of this or the other creatures.’

No one said a word. The bald man, who sported a shocking red neckbeard, was a bit short and a bit wide. He looked less of a pirate than he did a pirate’s fat cook. He seemed to waddle when he shuffled about in his biohazard suit. The arms and legs had been taped up to take up some of the slack. A pair of wire-framed glasses sat over the paper mask; behind them lurked a pair of sharp small brown eyes. He could just as easily have been an accountant at Baron’s rattling off numbers concerning dividend payments. Except for the beard, of course. The bean counters always looked about twelve years old to Dave.

‘I think I understood some of that,’ he said to the new guy.

‘Dr Raymond Compton,’ Heath said. ‘Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy. Also, academic resources and special projects chief.’

‘Or to put it another way,’ Dr Compton said, ‘I’m in charge.’

Dave didn’t buy it. The little man didn’t look like he could manage a classroom of frat boys, let alone the military types answering to Heath.

‘No, I take it back,’ Dave said, biting down on a number of possible retorts. ‘I’m confused again. Anyway, it’s a pity the sword was sent away. The swords have stories on them, too.’ He looked directly at Heath, ‘Good intel.’

‘I believe I told you that, did I not, Captain?’ Dr Compton said with a look on his face that Dave recognised. The look of a man whom no one ever listened to and who resented the hell out of it. Of course, Dave had his own experience in that area. Without a PhD he’d made do with boyish charm and bullshitting. Compton, having a PhD and that big important title, looked as if he hadn’t learned the trick. Oh, yeah. Dave knew this sort. He had to be right, and he had to have the last word.

Always.

The less I have to deal with this asshole
, Dave thought,
the better
.

A few steps carried him down the table to where the Hunn’s massive arm lay. He picked it up. It had three
. . .
fingers, he guessed you could call them. And a thumb. He remembered opposable thumbs from school. They were important. ‘What do you call those animals with these kind of fingers and toes, like horns?’ he asked nobody in particular, assuming that a roomful of pointy heads would be able to provide the answer.

‘Ungulates,’ Ashbury said. She appeared to be in her late thirties with a look that used to be described as handsome on the ladies of a bygone age. She was pretty, he supposed, but strong-featured. Dave could see two spots of high colour on her cheeks over the top of the paper mask.

‘So what are you guys, the monster squad or something?’

‘I’m an MD with supplementary degrees in anthropology and forensics,’ Professor Ashbury said. ‘I have also published several papers on exobiology. Dr Compton’s speciality is –’

‘Anthropology,’ he said, as if that trumped exobiology with maximum prejudice. ‘During the war I did a lot of work on the US Army’s Human Terrain System. Before that I had some passing contact with the exobiologist community and their love of imaginary xenomorphs.’

He said that as if it should mean something to Dave.

‘Xenu the alien? Like Tom Cruise worships?’ Dave said, genuinely confused.

‘No,’ Ashbury said, not amused. ‘Exobiologists study extreme habitats and the life-forms that occupy them here on earth, and we make educated guesses about the way xenomorphs – aliens – might evolve on other planets.’

‘These things aren’t aliens,’ Dave said, flicking Urgon on the side of the skull. ‘Well, I guess they’re not from this world, strictly speaking. But they’re definitely not from Klingon, either. Although, looking at him
. . .’

Heath stepped in to bring him back on topic.

‘Professor Ashbury and her staff are all security cleared for government work at the highest level,’ he said. ‘Nobody thinks these things arrived here from outer space.’

‘But unless you want to bring in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a consultant,’ Ashbury said, ‘then exobiology is your go-to reference group.’

Compton had traded his poker face for a much more dissatisfied expression. He was a barrel-shaped man who didn’t seem to have much actual strength to him. Dave wondered what his hands were like, probably smooth, soft, without a day’s worth of honest work on them. All his achievements came through teaching instead of doing.

‘How is it you came into possession of this knowledge, Mr
. . .
Cooper?’ he asked, stumbling slightly over Dave’s last name.

‘That’s Hooper to you, Grizzly Adams.’

‘How, Mr
Hooper
, did you come to know all this?’ Compton repeated. ‘It seems a preposterous suggestion that you have taken it in by osmosis.’

‘I’d like to know that, too, Dave,’ Heath said quietly. ‘You said you knew a bit about these things, but nothing like that.’

‘Better explain yourself, Hooper,’ Ashbury said with a twinkle in her eye. ‘These guys are such uptight arses at the best of times that I don’t even notice it. But I’m sensing a lot of extra pucker in the room right now.’

Some of the scientists tensed. The
Lord of the Rings
kid, who appeared to be in his early twenties and way too young to be doing secret government experiments on alien life-forms, looked like he might wet himself.

Dave folded his arms and fought the old familiar urge to lie and distract.

‘Look. I’ll be fucked if I know,’ he said to Heath. ‘A couple of days ago I couldn’t have told you any of this stuff. But a couple of days ago this ugly motherfucker –’ He smacked the Hunn with the back of his hand. ‘– hadn’t crawled onto my rig and bitten the head off one of my best friends. There’s a fuckin’ preposterous suggestion for you right there, Doc. I hadn’t discovered my previously unknown ability to juggle refrigerators and small cars at the same time. Another preposterous suggestion. And I hadn’t put a hammer through old Urgon’s skull here and apparently downloaded all of his nasty fucking hopes and dreams.’

His voice grew louder as his temper got the better of him, and he finished by slapping an open palm down on the chest of the dead demon. It sounded like a rifle shot and brought the two marine guards running in from outside with their weapons up. It also collapsed the monster’s chest cavity like an old paper light shade.

Ashbury jumped back a little in fright. Somebody swore.

‘Easy, Marines,’ Heath said, calm and cool, without raising his voice. He put his hand on the top of the closer marine’s rifle and lowered it back to the floor. ‘We’re fine. Stand down.’

Everyone was looking at the body and at Dave.

‘Sorry,’ he said at last. ‘Still don’t know my own strength.’

‘Okay,’ Heath said in a soothing tone. ‘Let’s get back on track, shall we? And, you remind me, Mr Hooper, I want to talk to you about that hammer later.’

He sounded like Dave’s old man right then, making an appointment to take him out to the woodshed.

14

T
he impromptu lecture wrapped up after two hours. Once Dave started talking, there seemed to be no obvious place to stop. Heath’s expression went from surprised to incredulous to angry before settling back into his usual blank mask. As much as Heath and the scientists were unbalanced by the performance, their surprise was mild next to Dave’s own. In the end he kept talking because it was easier than stopping to consider the implications of what he’d already said.

‘The Horde are like an army,’ he explained as his voice grew hoarse. ‘No, scratch that. They
are
an army. But we’re not their enemy. We’re their food. Their rations. There are other armies. Real enemies. More like them,’ he frowned.

‘Noted,’ said Heath. ‘But let’s stay on topic for now. The Horde.’

There was so much more he could have told them. He’d barely started in on the Fangr, but it was getting very late and the researchers had been working all day. Dave felt himself getting hungry, too, and rather than run down his store of energy bars, Captain Heath, looking hollow-eyed and subdued, decided after consulting with Compton that they could reconvene at 0600. He suggested that the doctors and professors and their assistants might like to consider some questions to ask Dave rather than having him simply ramble on with whatever came to mind.

That would be better, Dave thought as they moved outside onto the deck of the platform. A fresh southerly breeze blew across the rig, giving him a chance to clear his mind a bit. He found that he didn’t know what he knew until he decided to think about it. It would be a whole hell of a lot easier to just answer whatever questions they fired at him, although he’d already disappointed Professor Ashbury with his inability to get into any physiological detail beyond the obvious. As he tried to explain, he didn’t much understand human anatomy beyond the basics, either, but he left the makeshift morgue with the impression that Compton thought he was some sort of bullshit artist.

He’d add it to the long list of things he didn’t give a fuck about.

Dave had flown out to the platform with Allen’s SEALs, but the other military personnel on the rig seemed to be mostly marines. Some of them had set up guard posts equipped with machine guns. When he gave some thought to it, he realised that these guys seemed to understand the rig nearly as well as he did. They’d put those meat grinders exactly where you would expect trouble to rear its ugly, snarling head if it came up from below looking for a snack. Other marines were at work patrolling the Longreach. Still more were busy clearing away the debris and damage and getting some basic systems running again. They were all armed and wearing vests that made them look like his boys’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures. Heath had told him how many marines and SEALs and sailors were on the rig and how they were organised, but that military stuff about platoons and squads and whatnot went in one ear and out the other. More important than how many platoons went into a company and how many companies could sink a battleship, they were changing shift – or ‘watch’, Dave supposed – when he finished telling his monster stories and went looking for a feed.

Although the crew lounge where Marty had died was still sealed off, Longreach’s kitchen was undamaged. A few sailors from a nearby ship had cross-decked to cook some chow, using the platform’s own stores. Heath said something about the corps eventually getting their own cooks in, which was neither here nor there to Dave. He was just looking to get fed. A temporary mess station sat up near the helipad in a windbreak created by two shipping containers converted to offices. A heavy tarpaulin offered some overhead protection, and four long folding tables provided a makeshift serving space. Marines and sailors lined up to get their trays filled with whatever came out of a series of heavy green plastic cases.

Dave stepped up and looked inside one, finding a stainless steel tray full of food.

‘Dave?’ Heath gestured him over to a spot, pointing to a stack of similar containers each marked with his name. ‘I have yours over here. And I got you this.’

Heath produced a large metal spoon from his pocket.

‘And we need to talk,’ he said.

‘You’re breaking up with me?’ Dave asked as he sat down in front of the first food container and waited for Heath to do the same.

‘That little tutorial you gave back there, Dave; you surprised me.’

‘Me too, man,’ he said, distracted by the smell of hot food as he opened the first meal case. Ignoring Heath, he removed the lid and used the overlarge spoon to work his way through the warm fried chicken and rice inside, stripping the meat and sucking the juice out of each bone before opening a second case to attack the mashed potatoes. A quick glance into the third revealed mac and cheese, or whatever the navy used for cheese. It was agreeably thick and gooey. The navy officer frowned and contented himself with a hard-boiled egg.

‘Living large there, Cap’n,’ Dave said, happy to be eating again with no sign of the buffet running low.

Heath peeled the egg and ate it, washing it down with a metal mug of black sugarless coffee.

‘I don’t eat a large meal in the evening,’ he said. ‘I have to watch my calories very closely.’

‘No five-mile runs anymore, eh?’ Dave said without thinking. ‘D’oh. Sorry,’ he added quickly. ‘That was my inner asshole talking. It’s gotta be hard, your line of work with that injury.’

He waved his spoon at the artificial leg.

Heath shrugged.

‘There’s many with worse. Much worse. I’m lucky.’ Heath fixed him with a level stare, like a butterfly chaser pinning a new catch to a board. ‘You weren’t exactly square with me, were you, Dave? About how much you knew, or know, about these creatures. You seem to know a hell of a lot more than you let on at first.’

A dozen marines gathered nearby with their trays. A few of them pointed and gawked as Dave put away thousands of calories without stopping to draw breath. Some looked envious, some horrified.

Dave shovelled the food into his mouth partly to fuel up but also to give himself time to think.

‘Look, I’m sorry about that,’ he said at last after cleaning out another meal case of mac and cheese. ‘But you gotta cut me some slack, man. I’m just getting used to all this. Between you and me, I wasn’t in the best of shape when I choppered back out here. You know, before it all went down. I woke up in that hospital thinking I was having some kind of bad acid flashback.’

‘You took acid?’

Heath sounded as horrified as a man with his emotional distance could be. Dave laughed out loud and almost lost a mouthful of macaroni.

‘Nah, not for years.’

And thanks for not asking about all the lines of blow I vacuumed up back in that motel.

‘But yeah, when I get off the platform, I like to play hard. I’m not gonna apologise for that. I spent most of my marriage apologising for shit I really shouldn’ta had to. At least, not at first. But I got to admit there was a part of me thought I was fucked up on something or having some kind of breakdown. You know, like having bugs coming out from under your skin, ’cept these critters were seven foot high.’

He stopped talking to shotgun a bottle of water down, then opened another foil-covered food tray. Pineapple and pork with some sort of thick yellow noodles.

‘I thought I was going nuts,’ he said as he looked around for a fork to wind up the noodles. His spoon wasn’t going to be much use. Heath produced a plastic fork from the discarded food packages. ‘And if you heard some of the shit running through my head when we first met,’ he said, ‘you’d have thought the same thing.’

‘What shit, Dave?’

Heath was remarkably patient.

Hooper shrugged.

‘All that stuff I was telling the eggheads. I didn’t even know it was there until I started looking for it. I mean, what sort of things do you know, Heath?’

He waved his cheap plastic fork at the man’s head. A strand of noodle flew off and landed on Heath’s arm.

‘Shit. My bad.’

Heath flicked the sticky yellow strand onto the metal grillwork of the deck.

He didn’t seem inclined to make anything of it, so Dave carried on.

‘You think about it. You got a lifetime worth of learning up there in your head. But a lot of it, most of it, is filed away. You couldn’t get through the day if it wasn’t.’

‘True,’ Heath said. ‘But you could have told me. Command is going to want to debrief you properly. They’ll want to know everything.’

He emphasised the last word.

‘And they’re going to blame you for not letting them in on it earlier?’ Dave asked.

Heath frowned.

‘I don’t care about that. I care about knowing as much as possible about any potential hostile. That knowledge could save lives. Like the ones we lost on the road,’ he added pointedly.

Hooper stopped eating and put down his meal case of pork and noodles.

‘Dude, you gotta believe me: that was as big a surprise to me as it was to you. There’s nothing I could have done to warn you about that. I didn’t know the Sliveen was out there.’

‘But you knew the Sliveen existed. And that they’re scouts. You even said as much to Chief Allen. You said they do his job.’

Dave stopped for a moment to ponder that. He resented the implication that the ambush was somehow his fault. But he resented even more the idea that Heath might be right.

‘But I didn’t know,’ he protested, not liking the whiny tone creeping into his voice.

Heath didn’t escalate the issue. He merely fixed Dave with the same level stare.

‘But if I knew that you had much greater knowledge of these things, I could have asked you the questions that needed to be asked. There’s no avoiding it, Dave. The ambush wasn’t your fault, but you had a responsibility to tell me what you knew, or at least to tell me that you possibly knew something about this enemy that I could have used.’

‘But I didn’t know about the ambush, or about the Sliveen
. . .’

‘You didn’t know about the ambush or about that particular scout. But what can you tell me about the Sliveen now?’

Dave tamped down his frustration and mounting anger and took a moment to focus on the question. What did he know about the Sliveen?

A lot, as it happened.

He sighed and started to talk.

‘The Sliveen are like, I dunno, the ninjas of the Horde. Or the SEALs, or whatever. They’re a small clan, and they consider themselves superior in skills to even the Grymm.’

‘The Grim?’ Heath frowned.

Dave sighed.

‘See. This is a fucking rabbit hole, man. Or you know, what do they call those things, those patterns? A fractal. Does that sound right? It just goes on and on, deeper and more fucking complicated the more I look into it.’

Heath shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly right, but go on. Skip the Grim. We can come back to them later. We’ll come back to all of this later. Just tell me what you know about the Sliveen, off the top of your head. Right now, without thinking too much about it.’

Dave swapped his small plastic fork for the spoon he’d been using and chased the last pieces of pork and pineapple.

‘The Sliveen are the scouts,’ he said. ‘They cover long distances, alone or in small groups. They’re not brawlers like the Hunn, but they’re savage in a stand-up fight. Prefer to snipe at you from a distance with a
. . .
a war bow. Like our boy last night. Or a sort of crossbow thing. Smaller, but easier to carry.’

‘Do you think there’ll be more of them spooking about back on the mainland?’

‘No idea. Honest Injun.’ Dave held up one hand.

‘Please don’t be needlessly offensive,’ Heath said before putting his coffee mug down, empty. ‘Nobody has asked you the obvious question,’ he added before Dave could be offended by the implied criticism.

‘Which is?’

‘What are they doing here?’

Alternating between multiple trays, Dave shovelled another spoonful of mac and cheese into his mouth and thought about it for a moment or two as he chewed. He couldn’t remember enjoying the taste of a meal so much as he did this one. ‘They had no fucking idea what they were doing here,’ he said at last, staring into the distance, out across the darkened sea. ‘Besides feeding.’

Another spoonful of mashed potatoes. He closed his eyes and thought about it some more as he swallowed the creamy, buttery spuds. They were surprisingly good. Much better than the lumpy, watery mess he was used to on the rig. It reminded him of some of the epic pig-outs he’d indulged in at college many years ago, after a couple of bongs brought on the munchies.

‘They’ve been down there, in the UnderRealms they call it, for a long time. Long enough that they remember us as nothing more than cattle, wandering the fields, you know, grazing, waiting to be eaten. They call us
. . .
calflings, I guess would be closest. Like veal. Extra tender ’n’ tasty,’ he said, scraping the last bits of mac and cheese out of the tray.

Dave focused again, following what he now thought of as the Hunn’s race memory back through the millennia.

‘I don’t know that they even think of us as being civilised. It’s possible they disappeared before civilisation got going.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘You seen any around before yesterday?’ He paused to follow the thought wherever it might go.

‘They were driven into the UnderRealms,’ he said. ‘Or their myths tell them so.’

He carefully set the first three cases aside and dragged over the second round. Inspecting the contents, he placed the pulled pork in front of him, more mashed potatoes to his right, and the green beans to his left. The lack of a fresh crusty bread roll for the pork was a bummer, but he pitched in anyway, grinning in spite of it all. It was a hell of a thing, being able to eat whatever the hell he felt like without guilt or consequence.

‘A bit like us being driven from the Garden of Eden,’ he said around a mouthful of pork. ‘Everything’s hookers and blow, and then you’ve been kicked out on your bleeding ass in the dark and the rain.’

‘By whom?’

Another pause.

‘The Sky Lords.’

‘Oh, come on, no.’