The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 20

Corean paced the war room in a frenzy of anger and indecision. Each time she passed the drone’s dead monitor, she gave it a spiteful thump with her fist.

Of course she had expected to find Ruiz Aw again. Of course. Over the past weeks their meetings had taken on a quality of inevitability. But she had never thought he would come to her so soon. And at such a terribly inconvenient time.

The shudder of Roderigan demolition charges had become heavier and more frequent. The Dirms had begun to fall apart under the relentless pressure of Gejas’s cyborgs. Only the Moc’s ferocity stood between Corean and disaster, and the longer it fought, the greater the risk that a lucky shot would kill or injure it, and then she would be in deep trouble. She shook her head. What to do?

Finally she reached a decision, though it was no great comfort to her. What could she do except fall back to a more defensible position? And if her situation deteriorated further, she could broadcast a message to the Lords, offering to trade the enclave and its Machine for her life.

She called the Moc in and summoned the Deltan squad leader, a silent and watchful man named Kroone.

“Kroone,” she said, “set up the killmechs for a harassing rearguard action — we need them to delay the Roderigans in the upper levels for as long as possible. Prepare your squad; infiltrators have penetrated the enclave below. We go to dig them out.”

Kroone nodded. “How many? How armed?”

“Only two,” Corean said. “A famous Dilvermoon slayer named Ruiz Aw, and his companion. Heavily armed, no doubt. He’s a very competent man — but we’ll have the Moc.”

“As you say.” Kroone bowed and would have left, but another thought occurred to Corean.

“Wait,” she said. “Manacle the Pharaohan prisoners and we’ll bring them along. Ruiz Aw values them and I’ll take all the leverage I can get, with that man. And if we don’t need them, I’ll give them to the Gencha.”

Kroone developed a skeptical expression, but went to organize their departure.

Nisa found herself chained to the tram’s platform, along with Dolmaero and the two Pharaohan conjurers. She ignored Molnekh, but gave Flomel a cold nod. “I hadn’t expected to see you again, Master Flomel,” she said. “Are you now a mechanism? Like Molnekh?”

Flomel was hunched over his own chains, examining the lock that fastened him to the platform. He ignored Nisa and probed at the lock with a bit of broomstraw.

Molnekh answered her. “No, I think not,” he said in his customary cheery voice. “In fact, I think Flomel is at last coming around to the late Ruiz Aw’s viewpoint.”

Nisa felt a surge of revulsion. She could not see how Molnekh could act so much like himself, when he had changed so profoundly.

Flomel raised his eyes slowly, and gave Molnekh a look of such deep hatred that Nisa was a little frightened. “Monstrous thing,” said Flomel hoarsely. “Abomination.”

“See?” said Molnekh, and winked at her.

She turned away and looked at the Guildmaster Dolmaero, who stared out over the airy emptiness of the pit.

“And you, Guildmaster? How are you?” He didn’t immediately respond, so she nudged him lightly with her shoulder. “Guildmaster?”

He shook himself and turned his broad face toward her. “Well enough, Noble Lady. But I’m afraid of what may come. There is something of death in the air here, of assassinations and terror and final deeds. Do you smell it?”

Nisa sniffed. “It smells a bit like that creature we saw in Deepheart. The Gench. Do you remember?”

“You’re right,” he said thoughtfully. “But there’s ordinary decay as well.”

A silence fell, and Nisa was left alone with her thoughts. These seemed to center on Ruiz Aw and the time they had been together. She wondered if he had somehow survived.

She hoped so.

After a long while, the doors above crashed open and Corean came striding down the platform toward them, followed by her great insect and a squad of soldiers in black armor.

Nisa looked at the slaver’s perfect face, and saw that it had begun to change, as if the skin had slipped away from the bones just enough to destroy that marvelous symmetry. Corean seemed inhumanly taut; she walked with a manic bounce.

“Crazy as a dustbear in rut,” whispered Dolmaero, wide-eyed.

“Oh yes,” agreed Nisa.

Molnekh’s cadaverous head whipped around. “What?” he said sharply.

Dolmaero shrugged and made no answer, but Nisa was oddly reassured to see this evidence of Molnekh’s changed nature.

The men in black armor arranged themselves around the perimeter of the tram’s platform, and Corean took the driver’s chair; her Moc stood beside the other chair, unable to bend its six-legged insectile body into a shape that would fit the chair’s contours.

Corean buckled her harness and strapped a big-bore ruptor to her left arm. She looked toward the blast doors that led to the stronghold; a Dirm stood there, the slump of its alien body betraying an almost human despair. “Hold fast; we’ll be back soon,” Corean called to it, and it waved slowly as the doors closed.

“So,” said Corean. “We’re off.” Her lunatic gaze fell on Nisa, and seemed to grow hotter. “Ah,” she said cheerfully. “The Pharaohan slut. Nisa, isn’t it? Well, you’ll be pleased to know that we’re going to see your lover again.”

At first Nisa didn’t know what the slaver was talking about, but then it sank in and she understood.

Corean laughed, an ugly dirty sound. “Oh, don’t look quite so bright-eyed. If I have my way, you won’t see him until I’m done with him. And I’ll have my way; of that you may be certain.”

Corean released the tram’s brake. They began to slide downward into the great pit.

Nisa shut her eyes, so that she wouldn’t have to look down into that terrible gulf, but she was strangely happy. Perhaps Corean’s words were simply a manifestation of her madness, but perhaps not. Perhaps Ruiz Aw was still alive, after all.

Even though she knew she was doing a dangerous thing, she couldn’t keep a small smile from reaching her mouth.

When the sump at the bottom of the pit appeared through the steams that cloaked it, Ruiz gagged. The stench overwhelmed his suit filters, making his eyes water. He had to control an impulse to close his faceplate and go on internal atmosphere — but his supply of clean oxygen was limited, and prudence dictated that he save it until he was deeper in the hallucinatory caverns of the Gencha.

Apparently the current master of Yubere’s stronghold was disposing of battle casualties by dumping them into the pit. Armored human forms lay half-dissolved in the sump’s pink slime, and here and there the dark glistening purple of a decaying Dirm bondguard broke the surface.

When he was still a hundred meters above the sump, he noticed several moving figures along the far edge of the sump.

He slapped at the safety of his ruptor and began to slow his fall along the rail. He saw that he had left it too long, and that he was perilously close to the concrete platform above the sump, where the rail ended. He wrenched at the brake, so that deceleration tore at him, and his vision grayed. The rider whined, a sound that ran down the scale as he began to slow.

From the corner of his eye he saw the figures at the far end of the sump resolve into vaguely human forms, which began to run toward the platform, raising an odd thin ululation.

The platform was rushing up at him, and his eyes were drawn irresistibly toward the bumper at the end of the rail, which extended energy-absorbing arms designed to engage the edge of a runaway tram and then collapse slowly.

The arms would punch right through him if he hit them with enough speed.

He hauled desperately on the brake lever. It made a dreadful shrieking sound as the lining burned away.

But finally he stopped, halfway down the platform.

He hung there, swaying. It took a moment for his vision to clear, but then he slapped the rider’s release and dropped to the platform with an echoing crash.

He glanced back and saw Junior gliding in behind him, under perfect control. He felt a stab of envy for his younger self, as he ran along the edge of the platform. He knelt behind a low parapet and heard the clatter of Junior’s armored boots.

“You’re a wild man,” said his clone.

“Ah… it wasn’t even close,” Ruiz said, trying to catch his breath.

“If you say so,” said Junior, clearly amused. He crouched beside Ruiz and looked at the creatures who ran toward them, waving an odd assortment of weapons.

“What are they?” said Junior.

“The Gencha keep human servants,” Ruiz explained, though he found the creatures as amazing as Junior apparently did.

They seemed only marginally human. They trotted along a narrow causeway that spanned the sump, and as they came into clearer view, Ruiz felt his stomach twist. The creatures had once been ordinary men and women, perhaps — now their almost naked bodies were encrusted by exceedingly strange adornments. From every patch of skin, some piece of human anatomy sprouted. In the lead was a man whose hairless skull was decorated with a triple ridge of grafted-on noses. The useless nostrils flared in sympathy with the man’s real ones as he pounded toward them, brandishing an antique punchgun. His arms were dotted with circular scalp grafts, each trailing a plume of different-colored hair.

Behind him ran a woman wearing a necklace of grafted fingers, which curled about her neck with a slow spasmodic movement. Tiny toes fringed each ear, and on her knees little mouths shouted silently. Her chest was covered from collarbones to navel with a number of breasts, all different shapes and sizes. She held some sort of obsolete energy weapon; it had a bell-shaped muzzle and an elaborate green plastic stock. Ruiz wondered if it even worked.

Behind the first two were another dozen horrors, all shrieking in thin piping voices. It struck Ruiz that the sounds they were making were somewhat reminiscent of the sounds that the Gencha made.

The voice of Nisa’s clone whispered in his ear. “Oh. Oh, how awful. How can such things be?”

“What do you think they want?” asked Junior, whose air of detached confidence seemed to have frayed slightly.

“To kill us,” said Ruiz impatiently. “And then they’ll want to enhance their collections with our leftover parts, I suppose.”

“Looks that way,” said Junior. “Don’t they know we’re dangerous?”

“Probably not,” said Ruiz. “They may associate the tram with legitimate visitors — those who have business with their masters. Everyone else they see has fallen into the sump… dead, or too severely injured to offer any resistance.”

“Not very bright, then, are they?” The clone set his pinbeam on the parapet and sighted through its scope.

“Brightness hasn’t much to do with it,” Ruiz said. “They’ve lived with the mindfire — for generations.”

“End of the line,” said Junior, and fired his pinbeam.

It burned through the forehead of the lead man, and he went down, plowing through the viscous fluid at the side of the causeway, a loose bundle of limbs.

Junior shifted his aim, put the beam through the middle of the following woman’s breast collection. She tumbled forward, rolling along the dusty path, but continued to shriek and writhe for a minute before dying, curled around her wound.

Junior shifted aim again and would have killed the next grotesque in the pack — but Ruiz put a hand on his arm. “Wait,” Ruiz said. He found himself disturbed by his clone’s callous efficiency — though of course there was no other reasonable course of action under the circumstances, no other way of reliably discouraging the sad creatures.

But now the surviving monsters had turned and were running away with as much alacrity as they had run to attack, still shrieking.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to let them get away?” Junior asked. “Won’t they warn the Gencha?”

“Maybe,” said Ruiz. “Though if I understand the mindfire, the Gencha already know about us. But you saw them. What could they do against us?”

Junior shrugged. “Who knows? I guess we’ll find out. Do you think this will be easy?” His clone looked at Ruiz with a disturbing degree of speculation, as if wondering if Ruiz had lost all his violent judgment.

“I’m sure it won’t be easy,” said Ruiz. He looked up the tram rail and wondered if anyone was following them yet. He turned to tell his clone to check the rail, but Junior was already back at the rail, touching the metal with a slender probe.

“We’ve got activity, Dad,” said the clone. “Someone coming down fast.”

Ruiz looked across the sump at the low cavern mouths that gaped along the far side of the pit.

“Time to go,” he said, to his clone and to Nisa’s.

Nisa shifted, trying to find a comfortable way to sit as the tram spiraled downward into the murk. The manacles chafed her wrists, and the hot foul air blew past her face, like the breath of some decayed but not quite dead monster.

She glanced back at Corean, who wore a keen predatory smile on her lovely mouth.

Nisa’s thoughts wandered, and after a while it occurred to her that there was a bond between Corean the slaver and Nisa the dirtworld princess. Both of them were looking forward to seeing Ruiz Aw, one more time.

The idea was tragically funny, and she laughed, too low to be heard by anyone.

Ruiz and his clone ran along the causeway as fast as they could run, loaded as they were with heavy armor, weapons, and sensor gear. The nearest cavern mouth loomed before them, illuminated by the same dull red glow that lit the pit. But inside the entrance the light was a little brighter, which created an illusion of fires burning within.

Something stood up within the cavern and threw something, then ducked down.

The object spun toward them. Both Ruiz and his clone, assuming that it was a grenade, leaped off the causeway into the knee-deep slime, prepared to dive into it.

“Wait,” said Junior. The object fell to the causeway, and Ruiz saw that it was a newly severed hand. On each finger, bound with a silver cord, was a different fetish: a bird’s skull, a scrap of blue cloth, a rusty spring, a tiny vial of some opalescent fluid. To the thumb was tied a tiny plastic model of a man in black armor.

“They’re trying magic,” said Ruiz, feeling a sourceless pity. “Back on the path!”

The two of them charged onward, causing a chorus of thin despairing shrieks from within the cavern, and then the patter of retreating bare feet.

At the edge of the sump were a row of pipes, which rose from the pink slime and ran to a pumping station just inside the cavern mouth. As they ran past the pumping station, Junior slapped a limpet mine on the casing. When they were fifty meters inside the rapidly narrowing cave, the charge detonated.

“Give the Gencha something to worry about besides us,” said the clone when they paused to crouch behind a heap of broken stalagmites. “Besides, if they can’t get their nutrient fluid piped to them, eventually they’ll have to leave the caverns — either to fix the pump, or to feed directly in the sump.”

“Good idea,” said Ruiz.

“Your turn, now,” said Junior.

“What?”

“To give us a good idea. How do we find this Orpheus Machine? It occurs to me that I should have asked more questions before I got involved in all this.” But the clone’s voice was easy and relaxed, not at all accusing. It struck Ruiz that he had spent his whole life leaping into dangerous situations and then relying on luck and ruthlessness to carry him through. He resolved that if by some miracle he survived, he would adopt a much more thoughtful style.

Ruiz looked about. The cave seemed to function as a trash pit and thoroughfare — the rubbish heaps along the walls left a clear path down the center of the tunnel. The rubbish consisted of the detritus of the sump — all those items of clothing and gear that the slime failed to digest, periodically raked from the sump and dumped here. An archaeologist could probably read the history of Sook in these remnants. Ruiz shook his head; his attention was wandering from the task at hand.

He got out the small dataslate into which he had transcribed his memories of Somnire’s directions. He strapped it to his wrist and consulted the pattern of glowing lines.

“I think we’re here,” he said, with incomplete assurance. He pointed to a magenta squiggle. “Third cave from the north, right?”

“I think so,” said the clone.

“All right,” said Ruiz. “You go first. Take the second left-hand tunnel down. And keep your sensors twitching. According to Somnire, the defenses are mainly topological. We don’t want to spend the rest of our lives wandering around in here, hallucinating our heads off.”

Junior rose cautiously and peered over the barricade. “No. We don’t. By the way — Somnire’s information was very old, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Ruiz.

They met the official welcoming party before they reached the first junction.

First Ruiz heard the shuffle of bare feet, and then the whisper of incomprehensible voices.

The two of them crouched behind a pile of rubble so ancient that it had lost its stink. “What now?” said Junior.

Ruiz shrugged and made sure his ruptor was charged.

A procession came around an angle in the tunnel — a dozen of the semi-human dwellers and three Gencha. The Gencha moved in the midst of the humans, a loose formation that had a ritually protective quality. The humans kept no particular order, seeming to circulate randomly around the Gencha. Ruiz watched for a moment before he realized that the humans were moving in a pattern similar to the movement of the eye spots on the Gencha’s squashy skulls.

Ruiz sank down, trying to be invisible.

The leading human carried a staff, a long sharp-pointed bar of silvery metal, topped with a gilded carving of a Gench. He stopped and planted his staff before him. The procession straggled to a halt behind him.

“Unauthorized visitors!” he said sternly, and then giggled madly. His gaze twitched back and forth, unfocused. His forehead was shingled with eyelids, in three parallel horizontal rows. These opened, fluttering their lashes, but there were no eyes beneath, just shallow pits. “Unauthorized visitors,” he said again. “Come out — you cannot hide from us! Your smell distends our nostrils; our nasal cavities ache with the pressure of your presence.”

Junior gave a low laugh.

“Come out!” the spokesman demanded. When Ruiz and his clone stayed put, the spokesman turned toward the largest of the Gencha, a gesture so like that of a confused dog that Ruiz felt a pang of pitying anger.

The Gench made a low chirping sound at the man, who turned back with renewed confidence. “Come out; we will refrain from tearing your flesh from your bones and will even treat you as guests.”

“Bighearted bunch,” said Junior, and raised his pinbeam. Ruiz looked at his clone and thought, Are my teeth really so long and sharp? Do I look quite so much like a rabid wolf? He shook his head violently, trying to clear his vision.

“No, wait,” said Ruiz. He considered the situation as carefully as the moment allowed and then said, “Stay down. If they attack me, then chop them up.”

He stood slowly, holding his ruptor ready.

“Ah!” said the spokesman, looking at Ruiz as if surprised to see him. “You display the rudiments of mannerly behavior. Your companion is crippled in the legs, yes? So that he cannot stand? No matter. We ask you: Why are you here? Without the tram, without prisoners for the Soulstealer, without the scent of authorization?”

Ruiz considered the proper response to these questions. Guile was often of no use with a madman, unless one exactly understood the nature of his madness. But what could he do but try? “We come to see the Soulstealer, as it is accounted to be one of the wonders of the universe.”

“Rude visitors!” shouted the man. “Tourists who kill the locals as their first act of admiration? I think not. No, no — it’s plain now you’re here to take the Soulstealer for your own. Plain, plain — Yubere warned us that men would come, in hard shells and bearing terrible weapons. To steal our glory, the means by which we will remake the universe. To steal our future — what crime is more terrible? But now we know you and your evil!” He raised his staff and threw it point first toward Ruiz.

Ruiz dodged to the side and the staff flew harmlessly past. Junior rose up and put beams through the spokesman and the largest Gench.

The rest of the procession wavered and then was gone, like switched-off lamps.

Only one body lay on the littered floor of the tunnel — the man with the eyelids on his forehead.

Ruiz and his clone approached the body carefully, but the man was dead.

Junior nudged him with a toe. “What’s going on?”

“We’re starting to see things. It’ll get worse the deeper we go.” He looked again at his clone’s glittering ferocity and thought, It’s just an hallucination. I don’t really look like that.

“How long will we be here?”

Ruiz shrugged. “As long as it takes, I guess.” He switched to Nisa’s clone’s channel. “Nisa? What did you see?”

“A deformed man harangued you, threw a stick at you. Then your clone killed him.” Her voice had a muted, repulsed quality.

“I see.” Ruiz had not expected the mindfire to begin so soon. He closed his faceplate and vents. He had to hope that they would find the Orpheus Machine before they ran out of oxygen and had to open their vents. Junior started to do the same, but Ruiz made a gesture of negation. “Wait,” he said.

He came to a decision. “Nisa? Time to transmit this channel to SeaStack.”

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Oh, yes.” He turned to Junior. “You have the speech? Good. Take off your helmet.”

Gejas felt a sweet warmth where his heart had once been, before the slayer Ruiz Aw had torn it out. The stronghold was all but his; in a few minutes the scattered resistance would be wiped clean.

At first he ignored the presence of the destroyer’s commander, who stood at the door, waiting to be recognized. Gejas sensed some unpleasant knowledge in the commander, knowledge which he was for the moment unwilling to accept.

But after a minute the commander stepped in uninvited and spoke. “Gejas Tongue: a development.” The commander stepped to an auxiliary screen, tapped at its data-slate. “This was received in a general broadcast just a few minutes ago.” He cued the screen.

Gejas saw Ruiz Aw, wearing armor, holding his helmet under his arm. It was Ruiz Aw, but somehow different, smooth-faced and confident, miraculously untouched by the pain Roderigo had given him. It was unnerving, as if the man was invulnerable, unstoppable. The slayer stood in a dark-walled tunnel, lit by a dim red light. At his feet was a grotesque corpse. “It surely must be him,” whispered Gejas. “All the signs are there.”

“Folk of SeaStack,” said Ruiz Aw. “I’m making this broadcast from far beneath the fortress of the late Alonzo Yubere. Down here, their presence unsuspected by most of Sook, dwell a great number of Gencha and their formerly human servants. I’m here because of a treasure called the Orpheus Machine — a device for performing mass deconstructions, formerly under the control of Alonzo Yubere and Publius the monster maker. I, Ruiz Aw, intend to destroy it.” Ruiz Aw paused and smiled a humorless smile. “I’ll report my progress at appropriate intervals.”

Ruiz Aw replaced his helmet and latched down the seals. Just before he closed the faceplate, he winked at Gejas.

He unslung a pinbeam and moved away down the tunnel, and the camera followed him for a moment before the transmission ended.

Gejas felt his mouth drop open. He had found the treasure Roderigo had sent him to find. He had found the creature who had slain The Yellowleaf. He opened his mouth wider, to laugh.

But before he could make the first joyful sound, he felt the lust of a million greedy souls, and realized that all over SeaStack fighters would be loading into assault craft, preparing to attack the stronghold he had just won.

“Oh,” he groaned. “Oh, no.”

“Exactly,” said the commander. “Roderigo commands you to defend the fortress until they can get reinforcements to us. Prevent any other force from gaining control. No matter what it costs.”