Emergence (17 page)

Dave threw his hands up, sending a dollop of potatoes at Heath. Thankfully it missed the captain’s ear by a few inches and plopped harmlessly onto the deck.

‘Shit, sorry. But yeah. See, that’s what I mean about you taking me for a crazy man. The Sky Lords. Sounds kind of faggy, but that’s what the Hunn call them. I dunno who or what the fuck they were. But they ruined the party for everyone. Well, for everyone whose idea of a party was biting the heads off screaming village folk.’

‘Village
. . .?’

Dave took a bottle of water from a pack of twelve, drained it in one shot, and shook his head.

‘Don’t suppose you got beer? No, forget it. Anyway, long story short, these things gotta predate what we think of as civilisation. You know, ancient cities, Roman roads, microwave mac and cheese. I can’t tell you by how much.’

He gave it another few moments of thought.

‘They don’t think about time like we do. There’s no calendars or alarm clocks down there.’

He stopped talking with a spoon full of macaroni halfway to his open mouth. When Heath made as if to ask him a question, Dave held up one hand. He concentrated, and Heath let him be, waiting him out.

‘They don’t have any technology as we’d understand it,’ Dave said after a pause. ‘No
. . .
machinery as such. Some forging and smithing, you know; Dark Ages stuff. But even Roman engineering would have been beyond them.’

‘You studied history?’ Heath asked.

Dave shrugged, scooping up some pulled pork from the bottom of the can. He chewed, swallowed, and slid the empty case aside. He was inhaling this stuff. He really ought to slow down and just enjoy it. ‘The history of engineering. For my undergrad, the usual requirements. I think Western Civ was one of the few bullshit courses I enjoyed. Anyway, you asked about them disappearing. I reckon they were gone, banished, before human civilisation really got going.’

‘Maybe it couldn’t get going while they were around,’ Heath thought out aloud. ‘Professor Compton might have an opinion on that.’

Dave couldn’t give two shits about Compton’s opinion on anything. He leaned forward to check another case that held greenish scrambled eggs, ham slices, and hash. He pitched into the eggs, not really caring about the colour. It was probably a herb, and he was still peckish. When he was done searching ‘his’ memory and ready for some hash, he answered Heath.

‘Urgon doesn’t have an opinion on that,’ he said.

‘Urgon? He’s your man now?’

‘My bitch.’ Dave smiled. ‘I made Urgon my monster bitch. Now he has to step and fetch it for me.’

‘So what do they want?’

He didn’t even have to think about that one. It was a question that answered itself. Dave was famous in the crew lounge for his Schwarzenegger, and he drew on it now. ‘Vat is der greatest pleasure? To vanquish your enemies and chase dem before you, to eat der horses and ride der vimmin.’

Heath observed him for a full second.

‘Was that a joke?’

‘No, that was Conan. But it’s not a thousand miles removed from the way our boy Urgon does business. Or did. It’s been a long time since they’ve walked the OverRealms. The Above.’

‘The over
. . .?’

‘This,’ said Dave, waving his spoon around a little more carefully this time. ‘Our turf. And no, I don’t know how they got here. Neither did he. He was just out hunting.’ Dave turned his head to one side as he pulled out the memory. ‘Hunting minion. A lesser demon. Tough meat but good for smoking. If you’re a Hunn. Anyway, he was tracking a nest of them; next thing he knows, he’s swimming up toward the light, which he’s never seen, he’s only ever heard about it. And then he’s climbing the rig, and
. . .’

Dave put his spoon aside for a moment and shut down the recall.

‘And then it was feeding time,’ he said quietly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Heath said. ‘You can
. . .
remember that? As he did?’

‘Yeah,’ Dave said. ‘But I’d prefer to not have the replay running behind my eyeballs if that’s cool with you.’

Heath agreed. He looked about five years older than when Dave first had seen him.

‘This is what the instructors used to call an out-of-context problem,’ said the naval officer, sounding very tired. Dave started in on the ham slices and hash browns. His appetite remained unaffected.

He looked on as a couple of marines who had located the supply room and found a batch of brand-new galvanised-tin mop buckets scooped ice cream and cookies into them. They churned up the mix with a beater fitted to a scavenged power drill. There were excited grins all around as they doled the results into Styrofoam cups. Dave thought maybe a bucket full of that might not be a bad idea. The dairy would make him sleepy.

‘The marines don’t normally get to eat this well,’ Heath said by way of explaining the ice cream. He seemed almost embarrassed. ‘Not in the field. It would be MREs until they got the kitchen going.’

‘You don’t have to explain. Rig monkeys are animals. You got choir boys there.’

‘The food on your rig was going to waste,’ Heath said, as if it was important. ‘And I don’t think MREs are going to do it for you in the long run. I want to see what the docs have to say about your metabolism.’

That dampened Dave’s enthusiasm for the cookout.

‘Yeah. I been wondering about that. Whether it’s always gonna be like this. I might have to live in a fucking food court.’

*

He was just about to pitch into his mop-bucket-sized chocolate shake when he was interrupted.

‘Do you mind if I join you, gentlemen? I couldn’t sleep.’

Heath stood up as Professor Ashbury approached their patch of deck, forcing Dave to remember his manners as well. Grunts of exertion surrounded them as the marines chose that moment to wind up their meal break and head out on patrol. Once upon a time Dave Hooper might have waddled off in a food coma after them, but now he bounced up onto his feet with no effort at all. Neither bloated nor heavy, he did at last feel as though he could stop shovelling food into his head hole. He was thirsty, however, and fetched himself a Coke from an ice-filled cooler.

He could hear the marines joking about him as they left on their patrol.

It was odd to think of armed soldiers heading out on patrol when all they were doing was walking around his platform. Heath picked up a folding chair newly vacated by one of the jarheads and twirled it around for the professor to sit on. She thanked him and carefully placed a mug of something hot on the fold-up mess table.

‘Doc.’ Dave nodded.

She fixed him with an unreadable expression. Freed of her biohazard suit, she was, he found, quite striking. Not a chick who’d be posing for
Sports Illustrated
anytime soon, but he could see how some men would find her easy on the eyes. Men like Dave, say.

‘You really should refer to me as Professor Ashbury,’ she said. ‘Or Dr Ashbury; either is applicable. My friends call me Emma, but I do not think we will be on a first-name basis.’

‘Wow,’ Dave said, a bit put off. ‘Okay, Professor. Have it your way.’

‘Anything you can tell us?’ Heath asked.

‘Not without lab work, which will have to wait until we get back to the mainland,’ she said, stifling a yawn.

‘Coffee won’t help you sleep, Doc,’ Dave informed her helpfully. ‘Sorry. I meant Prof.’

‘Cocoa,’ she explained. ‘With a nip of rum. Not enough alcohol to disturb my sleep patterns but enough to relax after a hell of a day.’

‘Hey, no need to explain. That’s my type of bedtime drink.’

She sketched a smile but purely for the sake of form, rearranging her features because it was required. Like Heath, she must have been tired and, at a deeper level, unbalanced by the way the rational world had totally tipped off its axis. The three of them found themselves alone. It was a familiar but unsettling scene to Dave Hooper, who could feel the rig around him, the miles of pipes and tons of metal and concrete, floating, creaking, shifting here and there in ways it never had before. The feel of it was wrong. He could hear the dull clang of boots ringing on steel stairways as squads of marines stomped off on patrol. The usual hum and rumble of the drilling machinery was silent, but he could hear generators and even, if he strained, conversations to which both he and the Longreach were unaccustomed. For one disorienting second he managed to filter out a whole snatch of dialogue from an unfamiliar voice somewhere nearby.

‘. . . some shit right out of King Arthur, dude.’

‘. . . fuck you, you’re full of it
. . .’

‘. . . not lovin’ this freak show
. . .’

‘. . . like a fucking slaughterhouse, man. Worse than fucking Baghdad. Way Karsoe tells it
. . .’

He pulled away from it, slightly disturbed at the fidelity of the sound. It was as though he’d dialled in on the conversation the way he might focus on a line of text in a book. But there was nobody nearby to account for the dialogue.

‘Mr Hooper?’

It was Professor Ashbury.

‘Dave,’ he said, coming back to them. ‘Call me Dave.’

‘All right, then; I will call you Dave. Are you okay, Dave? You looked somewhat woebegone.’

He snorted in between gulps of the chocolate thickshake.

‘Woebegone? My grandma used to say that.’

‘Mr Hooper
. . .
Dave
. . .
is having a few adjustment issues,’ Heath explained. ‘We all are.’

Ashbury raised an eyebrow. ‘Indeed.’

She wrapped both hands around the chipped enamel mug and took a pull on her cocoa. When the mug came away, it left a small frothy moustache that she licked at like a child. Dave found himself smiling at the sight. And then he found himself having to adjust his posture because of the erection that started to strain at his pants.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

There had been a bad time a year back when he’d seriously thought about seeing his doctor about getting a script for some Viagra. Then he’d thought about just ordering some on the net. Then that crisis had passed thanks to a Waffle House waitress. She’d smothered, covered, and chunked him all the way to recovery. But this
. . .
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This fucking rail spike in the pants was new and not entirely welcome. He tried to hide it behind the ice cream bucket in his lap.

The prof was a good-looking lady but not his type, and he knew for a certainty that he wasn’t hers. She was too smart.

Annie had taught him the dangers of smart women. Annie and her goddamned college crush lawyer, Vietch.

‘Thirsty,’ he said, draining the bottom half of the Coke he’d fetched. It was icy cold, and he was hoping it might put out the fire or at least give him a cold spike headache to chill things down a little. He kept hold of the makeshift ice cream bucket.

It didn’t help. He was uncomfortably aware of Ashbury’s scent and the bow of her lips and . . .

‘Dave?’

Annoyed, he slammed the galvanised-tin mop bucket down with a sound like a gunshot. Everyone jumped, including him, and the big can tipped over, spilling the last of its contents. It was crushed in the middle, the way he’d crush an empty can of Bud during the Super Bowl.

‘Oh, man
. . .
sorry
. . .’

Heath mopped up the spill with a napkin, which made Dave feel bad because the captain had to get down on his robot leg to do it, and Ashbury offered rote assurance that he had nothing for which to apologise, which was demonstrably fucking untrue given the one-legged man swabbing the deck in front of him. Heath finished and dropped the sodden napkin into the ruined bucket.

‘You’ve been through an extraordinary ordeal, Dave,’ Ashbury said. ‘Quite literally. People use “literally” nowadays as an inappropriate modifier. But in your case it is apt. Your experience was outside the ordinary realm. You’re still going through it. It’s natural that it would unsettle you.’

He thanked her and shifted his position again, finding that by throwing one leg over the other, ankle on his knee, he could open up a little wiggle room for the old persuader. He sighed audibly with the relief.

‘Thanks, Prof,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t complain. This is just
. . .’
He threw a look across at Captain Heath. ‘What was that you called it all? Out of context?’

Heath nodded, and Dave waved one hand around to take in the rig. Then he gently picked up the crushed bucket. ‘There is no context for any of this. Not outside of the SyFy Channel. I mean, you guys? Maybe you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before?’

His look was hopeful, but Heath gave him nothing.

‘I was the available JSOC asset in theatre, Mr Hooper. I was down here supervising a completely routine training exercise.’

Professor Ashbury looked like she was searching for something encouraging to say. In the end all she could come up with was vague conversational filler.

‘I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, by which I mean we, not you, Dave. We spend our professional lives imaging the extreme. Trying to quantify it. Establish parameters. We –’

‘So you haven’t been to Area 51? Either of you?’

No, they hadn’t.

‘Captain Heath has been very good about all this, you know,’ she said, throwing the officer an encouraging glance. ‘He’s been very good about you.’

‘Professor,’
Heath said in a warning tone.

‘Oh, come on. The man has been to hell and back. And he obviously doesn’t have the emotional or intellectual skills with which to cope.’

‘Hey!’

‘Captain Heath,’ she continued, favouring Dave with a significant glance, ‘has probably saved you from extraordinary rendition
. . .’

‘Professor!’

‘No. It’s important he understands. There was a chance, Dave, that you could have ended up in a cell somewhere, sedated and chained down. I know Captain Heath argued very strongly against that, and to be honest, I think he saved a few lives doing so. I’ve only skimmed the briefing on the changes you’ve undergone since first contact, but it’s enough to know that containment would have been the wrong option. Practically and morally.’