The Burning Man

1

‘This world is a beautiful place.’ Shavi stood at the rail looking out over churning black waves towards a sunset of red and gold against which storm clouds roiled, occasionally throwing out bolts of lightning.

Laura thought how delicately handsome his features looked in the depths of the hood of his bulky parka. The winds across the Baltic were biting. ‘You’ve just done too many drugs,’ she said.

Shavi laughed. They had grown easy in each other’s company as their memories of past times returned. ‘There has been a lot of pain on our journey together, but I would not change any of it.’

‘Not even the old git’s rambling stories about the good old days of the sixties?’

‘We come from such different backgrounds, but events have forged us into a unit. Underneath it all there are bonds of friendship that run so deep they are profound. Who would have thought such people could come together and like each other?’

Hunter lurched out of the door that led to their rough-and-ready quarters alongside the crew. ‘Bloody hate ships,’ he moaned. His words belied the effort to which he had gone to secure their passage after they had only just slipped through the fingers of a Security Service sting while crossing the border into Sweden. There had been roadblocks every mile of their eight-day journey south, forcing them to double-back, abandon vehicles, march miles through the cold and eventually stow away on a river barge before they eventually made their way to the port of Malmo.

‘Where is Church?’ Shavi asked.

‘Sleeping, finally — he was determined to keep going until he dropped. Bit worried about the old guy, though. Something’s eating away at him. But you know what he’s like — he won’t talk about it.’

Laura clutched at the rail as the ship crested a swell. ‘On the bright side, at least when he’s moping he’s not being a pain in the arse.’

‘What are our plans when we reach Germany?’ Shavi asked.

‘Steal a van. We can cut through the country pretty quickly on the autobahns, depending on which route Veitch takes. If we get past security, that is. I thought we’d have more trouble in Sweden.’

‘More trouble?’ Laura said. ‘It was touch and go all the way.’

‘Trust me, we’ve had it easy.’

Laura watched the sunset colours swimming on the ocean. ‘Why didn’t Veitch just kill the guy we were after? That would have stopped us dead in our tracks.’

‘He is unpredictable,’ Shavi said simply.

‘He’s smart and sly, too,’ Hunter added. ‘He’s got some sort of plan.’

Urgent activity broke out amongst the Russian crew further along the deck. They were leaning over the other side, pointing into the water. Far below the surface a dim light was visible, powerful enough that it could pierce several fathoms.

‘Is that one of those deep-sea fish, way off course?’ Laura said. ‘Or a submarine?’

Hunter questioned the sailors in Russian. ‘They’re calling it a USO — unidentified submarine object,’ he said afterwards. ‘They’ve seen one or two on this route.’

‘Wait,’ Shavi said. ‘Is it rising?’

The light grew brighter as it emerged from the depths. The crew shouted anxiously, and one man ran to inform the captain.

‘Let’s get under cover,’ Hunter urged.

In the shadows of a metal staircase, they watched the waters boil as light streamed from below. Something broke the surface, reflecting the sunset and the distant lightning. At first they thought it was a metallic craft, then some mythical sea-beast and finally realised it was a little of both.

Rising up from the swell was some kind of insectile construct, black carapace, extensions that could have been legs, and an overwhelming stink of spoiled meat. Water streamed from it as it lifted into the darkening sky to hang over the ship. They instinctively recognised it as something that had come from the Void, searching for them.

‘Shit, if it attacks here, game over,’ Laura whispered. ‘Five minutes in this water and we’re dead.’

Hunter held her back, but his touch was also calming. He weighed things neither Laura nor Shavi saw. ‘If it was ready to attack, we’d be gone already.’

Lights flared again, eyes levelling, a forensic stare. A beam fell upon the sailors and held them for a moment before moving off across the surface of the ship. Hunter, Shavi and Laura pressed back into the shadows.

When it completed a circuit, the eye winked out and the insect-ship sank slowly back beneath the waves. The crew ran about in relieved excitement, hugging each other.

‘I thought the idea was that the Void didn’t try to break the Mundane Spell,’ Laura said.

‘This’ll just be one of those fish stories that gets told in bars and then forgotten,’ Hunter said. ‘But it’s pushing at the limits of what it can get away with. These kinds of things must be patrolling everywhere, scuttling behind the scenes, trying to find us.’

‘But whatever was in the craft was not wholly intelligent,’ Shavi said. ‘It sensed we were here, you could see, but it could not work out why it could not find us. That is one thing in our favour.’

At the rail, they watched the lights growing dimmer as the vessel sank into the depths.