Read A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Online
Authors: Ron Miller
A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (26 page)
Gyven stood over her, surprise and wonder on his face. “My stars, Rykkla,” he said, “what’s happened to your clothes?”
She looked down at herself.
The rotten little insect didn’t bother to restore my clothes!
“What’s that you have there?” she asked.
Gyven looked at his fist, between the fingers of which protruded long, crumpled dragonfly wings, like shreds of cellophane. He wiped the mess onto the grass. “You should have seen the size of the bug that was about to bite you,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NEARLY THE END
The earthquake hit the island like a hammer; it rang from end to end like a steel plate on an anvil. All of the furnishings in Bronwyn’s room, in the whole house for that matter, leaped into the air as though suddenly startled, falling to the floor as rubble. She rushed into Wittenoom’s room, where she found the man sitting on the floor, pen still in hand.
“Professor! It’s an earthquake! We’ve got to get outside!”
“A very good idea,” he agreed as he allowed her to help him to his feet. Shock after shock pummelled the house that shuddered like a punchdrunk boxer and the two clambered and fell down the stairs as the building began to disintegrate around them. They burst from the front door just as the ceiling collapsed in an explosion of dust and splinters.
“Get away from the house,” she said, “or the roof tiles might fall on you, or glass from the windows.” And that she was quite correct was proven as the latter exploded, showering the ground with bright, sharp shards like tiny knives. All around them the other houses and buildings were shaking like a tableful of blanc manges; one by one they collapsed like sandcastles or props in a magic show. Everywhere, people were rushing about like ants whose colony has just been stirred with a stick, screaming, falling to the ground. The earth bucked like a horse, throwing Bronwyn and the professor into the air. Fountains of dust were exploding like geysers and the floor of the caldera began to crack and splinter like a china plate. The tremors then calmed, and a weird silence filled the air, like that heavy atmosphere immediately preceding a tempest. Bronwyn lay in the dirt, breathing heavily, thankful that nothing personal seemed broken.
“Princeth!” someone shouted. “Princeth Bronwyn! Profethor!”
She looked and saw a grey-clad figure rushing toward them. It took her still-rattled eyes a second to align and recognize Captain Wow. He rushed up to the princess and the professor and immediately grasped Bronwyn by an arm, pulling up her from the dirt.
“Come on! We’ve got to hurry! There’th only a few momentth!”
“Left? Left to what?” she asked.
“I can’t exthplain now, there ithn’t time. You’ve jutht got to come with me!”
“But . . .” Her question was interrupted by a deep-throated explosion, as rumbling and prolonged as summer thunder. Behind her, the smoldering cinder cone had erupted in a spray of incandescent rock, a fountain of lava that splashed hundreds of feet into the air as a thick, boiling cloud of black ash rolled and boiled above it. As she watched, the black sides of the cone split open as orange rivers of lava poured down the slopes.
The captain’s yellow eyes were as large as grade A egg yolks and his whiskers as stiff as wires, vibrating as though a powerful current were flowing through them. “Let’th go! let’th go! let’th go!” he urged frantically. Bronwyn could see nothing else to do but agree. The doctor’s experiment was doomed, and that, of course, was all that mattered. But . . .
“No,” she said to the horrified cat, “I’ve got to see that he’s really finished for good.”
“What?
No!
You mutht come now! Everythingth all arranged!”
“Not until I see that Tudela’s finished, once and for all,” she reiterated even more stubbornly. Ignoring vehement entreaties from both the professor and Captain Wow, who wrung his paws pathetically, she turned and began running for the stone building, where she was certain she’d find Tudela.
The laboratory was apparently unharmed, its massive stone walls seemingly impervious to the violence of even such a terrible earthquake. The only effect of the tremor that she could detect was that its few windows were glassless. Behind the building the black, faceted sphere of the doctor’s projector also seemed to be unharmed, much to her disappointment. The dust that surrounded it seemed to be swirling in an ever-accelerating helix, corkscrewing into the lowering clouds.
When she reached the building, she found the massive door sprung from its frame and dangling by only one of its hinges. Steam poured from the opening. Inside was darkness, the electric lighting inoperative, most of the ceiling globes shattered. The air was filled with a strangely discordant, irregular thumping in addition to sibilant hisses of various pitches, as though Bronwyn faced a gloomy pit of inharmonious snakes. She wasn’t certain where she’d find Tudela, though she was convinced that he had to be in the laboratory somewhere. Her first and best guess was that he’d be at the great switchboard that controlled the disbursement of the electricity. This was located on an iron-railed gallery that ran around the perimeter of the engine room that was reached by way of a single iron staircase. There was a door that opened from the gallery, at the rear wall of the building, that gave access, via a bridge, to the projector itself.
She entered the cavernous engine room at the level of the main floor, where the ungoverned generators were now running wild. The huge black machines were slumped at odd angles, screaming like wounded elephants and rhinoceri, and the concrete floor was broken into irregular slabs, like the spring breakup of a frozen river. Jets of live steam were shrieking from burst pipes and valves and she had to thread her way through a gauntlet of superheated gas that threatened to strip the meat from her bones as cleanly as that of an overboiled chicken. Heavy clouds of vapor obscured the already murky atmosphere, though dim, slanting shafts of light came through the tall, narrow, glassless windows. The scent of sulfur was nauseating and choking. With some difficulty, she found the spiral stairs that led to the upper gallery. The staircase wobbled distressingly as she mounted it, groaning and creaking like an elderly and badly put-upon boa constrictor; the earthquake had obviously loosened its moorings. Bronwyn swallowed hard and, grasping the handrail desperately, helixed to the top as quickly as she could. Wiping damp hair from her face, she looked for the switchboard and found it, not a dozen yards to her right, with Tudela also there, one hand on a knife switch and other grasping a large revolver. “I should have been expecting you,” he said. “Perhaps I was, since I thought of providing myself with this.” He waved the pistol threateningly, but not so much as to take it far away from the volume of space she occupied.
“I think you’re finished,” she pointed out, “though that, of course, is just my opinion.”
“I should have disposed of you when I had the chance,” he replied. “But instead I had to succumb to my own vanity. I wish that Hughenden had done his job properly, the little weasel. Whatever happened to him, anyway? I’ve never thought to ask you that.”
“I never doubted that you were behind Hughenden. Rest assured, he got what he deserved. If it would please you to know the details, then too bad.”
The building rattled again and through even its thick walls came the continuous rumbling of the activated volcano. Bronwyn had to brace herself by grasping the railing at her side, but Tudela seemed to be supported sufficiently by his grip on the switch handle and the gun barely wavered.
“Don’t think that this geological nonsense is going to have any effect on my plans, because it won’t. The moon needs but one more boost, which will occur in just another few seconds, and its fall will be inevitable. My balloons are ready, my escape is assured.”
“Oh yes?” Bronwyn said, and charged, her heels clanging on the metal grating.
Taken completely by surprise, not expecting anyone whom he considered remotely intelligent to do something so completely irrational, Tudela did nothing until it was too late. What he did do then was as irrational as Bronwyn’s charge: instead of immediately pulling the trigger, he swung the weapon at her, club--like, and the barrel caught her on the temple. Although stunned, momentum alone continued to carry her as she plummeted like a sandbag into the scientist’s chest. His hand was torn from the switch and they both fell against the railing. Half blinded by the pain and the blood that poured into right eye, Bronwyn clung to Tudela’s chest, her only thought to keep the gun away from her. She scrabbled for his wrist as his free hand grasped her hair and pulled her head back. Forced to release the doctor’s gun hand, Bronwyn settled for jamming her knee as hard as she was able into his groin. This made him drop the gun. In addition, he fell to his knees, his face as white and brittle-looking as an eggshell. The princess stepped back a pace, pressing a hand against her throbbing temple, trying to stanch the flow of blood from the ragged wound there. The doctor staggered to his feet, his face distorted with rage, and without hesitation punched the girl full in her chest with a clenched fist; then, before she could recover, hit her again below her left ear. Her heart felt as though it had burst like a squashed bug and her vision was filled with flashing meteors. She flailed out with her long arms in a frantic attempt to ward off further blows. One of these caught the doctor stingingly against his own face and she followed this assault, pressing her attack, forcing the man to keep his guard up. Fortunately, the scientist was even less experienced at hand-to-hand fighting than was the princess. Having no choice but to retreat, the doctor stepped backward onto a length of chain that turned under his heel. He stumbled and fell to the grating, Bronwyn instantly atop him, hands at his throat. She felt her thumbs sinking gratifyingly deep into his larynx, in spite of the effort involved in keeping her face clear of the scrabbling fingers that sought out her eyes and tore at her cheeks and lips. To discourage this, she bounced his head against the iron grating a few times. That seemed to work and also made a very nice noise. Syncopating the rhythm of that beat, the building began vibrating once more, this time more violently and directly than before. The catwalk lurched, its supports and braces sprang from the floor and walls, and it warped and twisted like a ribbon. Bronwyn was forced to abandon her grip on Tudela’s throat in order to keep from being thrown to the heaving floor twenty feet below. The gallery was tilted from the wall at a steep angle as she lay precariously against the twisted railing. Beneath her, the concrete was rolling like a stormy sea, the bulky, black machines tossing like doomed ships. As she watched, with the little attention that she could spare, the floor suddenly gaped like a whirlpool, revealing a seemingly bottomless, funnel-shaped pit at the bottom of which vague shadows stirred in a lurid, smoky light.
She heard clambering sounds above her, glanced up and saw Tudela, now unable to reach his switchboard, climbing toward the door that opened onto the bridge that led to the projector, at the moment the only escape from the ruined catwalk.
“Tudela!” she called, but he only turned, snarled, and threw a wrench at her. She instinctively ducked, loosened her grip and, no doubt to the doctor’s satisfaction, dropped through the railing and out of his sight.
She gave a short scream that was truncated by landing unexpectedly in a pair of powerful arms. She looked to see who their owner might be.
“Thud!” she cried, then, looking to see who the other shadows were: “Gyven! Rykkla!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MERMAIDS & MERMEN
The quartet of newly reunited friends found the frantic catman and distraught Wittenoom waiting for them when they left the crumbling laboratory.
“Why, hello Thud,” said the professor. “And hello to you too, Rykkla, Gyven.”
“Pleathe, pleathe, pleathe,” begged Captain Wow, wringing his paws as tears of panic and frustration poured down his cheeks, matting the fur, “we mutht go!”
“All right,” said Bronwyn, “we’re ready to go now.”
“Thank Muthrum! Hurry then, follow me!”
The four refugees followed the catman across the heaving floor of the caldera and up the treacherous inner wall, where they ducked landslides and flying boulders large enough to have squashed all of them like peas mashed by a recalcitrant child.
“Look!” cried Bronwyn, as they reached the crumbling rim. As the others turned their faces toward the caldera, they saw what at first looked like the huge black globe of the projector lifting ponderously from the earth. It was not, of course: it was an enormous balloon.
“It’s Tudela!” she said.
“Is he going to get away?”
“I hope not, but I don’t know what we can do now.”
“Look at that!” cried Wittenoom. “The craven has taken only one balloon! He’s abandoned everyone else.”
“The only thing we thould worry about, your Highneth,” said Captain Wow, “ith getting off the island.”
“He’s right,” Bronwyn said, but remained where she was, fascinated by the terrible sight of lava dribbling over the opposite rim of the caldera, like red oatmeal overflowing its pot. The volcano looked like it had been painted in blood, as though it were some huge sore, newly opened; the nearest flank of the cinder cone had collapsed, releasing a flood of thick, pasty molten rock that flowed like spilled house paint toward the caldera, as though the latter were a floor drain. The doctor’s little village was in the center of the crater, still a considerable distance, perhaps a mile or more, from the lavafall, but, to Bronwyn’s mind at least, clearly doomed. Almost all of the frame buildings had collapsed or were on fire; black smoke was even pouring from the windows of the power plant which, as she watched, suddenly, with an almost supersonic roar, disintegrated in a column of live steam that rose in a solid cylinder several hundred feet before billowing out in thick, white cauliflower masses. The domed projector twisted on its base, its protective covering shredding like tissue paper, gouts of violet and green light shooting from its interior like a holiday firework.
The earth heaved again, like someone violently ill who is having difficulty vomiting. Relunctant to take their eyes away from the spectacle in the caldera, the refugees forced themselves to descend the gentle exterior slope. They followed the path that Bronwyn and the professor had so often taken. The princess was amazed at the transformation that had taken place in the landscape: she would never have believed that the island could ever have become more desolate. A steady drizzle of ash had been falling and already the ground was covered with a fine, flaky grey coating. Falling now, too, were gritty particles that got in her mouth and ground between her teeth like sand, and long threads of glass that covered her in a coat of brittle, hairy fibers. By the time the sextet reached the sea cliffs, they were covered with the talcum--like powder and choking on it as well. Bronwyn’s tongue and palate were coated with a thick paste that made her mouth taste like an ashtray. She and Rykkla had tied kerchiefs over their mouths and noses, which helped a little, and the others did as best as they could likewise; but the ash and grit stung their eyes and there was nothing that could be done about that.
There was little to be seen any longer of the center of the island except for the thick column of roiling black ash that mushroomed to the zenith, where it was now spreading over the sky in every direction. Lightning now and again crackled, lacing the black cloud with violet stitches. The sun seen through the veil was burly and bloated. Only occasional ruddy flashes that glowed luridly through the veil of steam, smoke and ash marked the location of the volcano and what little, no doubt, was left of Tudela’s Great Project.
At Captain Wow’s urging, they clambered down the cliff face, finally reaching that same broad, flat rock that Wittenoom had been standing upon when Bronwyn had first found him. The sea was disturbed and nervous-looking, the dark olive-grey waves breaking over the plateau without rhythm or order.
The catman immediately began stripping off his clothing. Bronwyn was amused and interested to see that his body was not only covered with a fine, grey down, but that it showed faint black stripes as well. When he turned away, there was also, she was surprised to see, a tail that he must have had tucked down one leg of his trousers.
How adorable,
she thought irrelevantly.
When Captain Wow saw that the others were not emulating his example, he urged them to do so without wasting even another second.
“Why?” asked Rykkla. “Where have we got to go? I thought that we were going to find a boat here or something.”
“I think that I know what’s going to happen,” replied Bronwyn. “But he’s right, there’s no time to waste. Just trust him and do what he says.”
“I suppose I’ll trust him if you do,” said Rykkla, a little doubtfully. “But I can’t imagine what either of you have in mind.”
They were all of them in any case virtually soaked to the skin from the flying spray and spindrift. A strong wind had come up, an ambitious wind that was giving every sign of bettering itself. Wild-looking breakers were beating against the ineffectual barrier reef with a kind of desperate frenzy and their roar drowned out that of the volcano. Wet in any case, they all threw their sodden clothing to the rocks and stood shivering in the gusting, spray-filled air. With only a single, satisfied look over his shoulder, Captain Wow dived from the edge of the rock, slipping into the surging water like a needle into cloth. Bronwyn followed him as far as the brink, then turned to her friends. “You’ve got to trust me,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. It’s the only thing that we can do and I could never explain it to you in time.”
“Hell,” said Rykkla, who strode up to where the princess stood, posed neatly and dived into the sea like the practiced athlete she was. Thud followed immediately, jumping off the brink gracelessly and hitting the water like a bomb. Wittenoom held his nose and hopped off feet first, then Gyven stood beside the princess.
“I thought that I’d never see you again,” he said.
“And I didn’t think that I wanted to see you again. Where the hell have you been?”
“I can explain . . . ”
“The hell you think you can!” she said, kissed him full on the lips, then broke away suddenly and dived off the rock with almost the same grace demonstrated by Rykkla. She didn’t look back to see whether Gyven followed or not.
The water was cold and dark. The others were hovering near the princess, imbedded in the murky green like insects in amber, if there were amber the color of bottle glass; circling around them, like a sheepdog herding its charges, was an enormous fish with bulging eyes and dangling tendrils surrounding its wide, sad-looking mouth. Bronwyn knew immediately, perhaps by the evident sense of relief in the fish’s soulful expression, that this was Captain Wow in his natural state.
She was amazed, if not entirely surprised, to see that the others were already equipped with the same sort of slender, sinuous tails that she herself had possessed so recently. So was she again, she realized, without having been aware of any transition.
Sithcundman is becoming quite practiced at this.
Showing off, she shot through the cluster of neomerpeople like a barracuda, like a swallow teasing a flock of lumbering pigeons, like a torpedo through a fleet of dinghies. Captain Wow suddenly appeared before her face, bringing her to an abrupt and clumsy halt, his dour face glowering at her disapprovingly before turning toward the dark obscurity that marked the presence of the reef. Bronwyn followed the big fish docilely, with the others not far behind. She was glad that she was ahead of the group; her exhibition and the silent remonstrance that had followed embarrassed her and she knew that if she faced her friends that she would have to cover up with indignation and perhaps even anger.
The catfish led the others through the convoluted passageways within the reef, finally emerging into the open sea beyond. Still the catfish continued, driving an unswerving course away from the island.
An hour or more passed and Bronwyn was exhausted; even the easy, semiautomatic propulsion had finally sapped her reserves of energy, both physical and psychic. The catfish had not paused for rest or consultation since leaving the reef, nor had Bronwyn noticed even so much as a minnow, krill or diatom; the ocean seemed devoid of life.
Just as the princess had decided to take a rest, regardless of whether the others continued or not, she saw a vague shadow in the olive murkiness ahead.
I should have remembered!
she chided herself. It’
s the little islet where I met the mermaids.
And it was indeed that very same pile of rocks. She swam with the others up to its black flanks and pushed her head above the black, surging waves, circling the islet until she found the place where she could pull herself out of the water. This she did with considerable less clumsiness than before and mounted the rock high enough to allow the others room to clamber and flop behind her.
They were all as obviously as exhausted as she was, and collapsed, panting, like fish out of water.
They make splendid-looking merpeople,
she thought charitably,
even Wittenoom,
whose elongated wiriness made him resemble an iron-grey moray eel. Rykkla’s caudal appendage was like blued steel with pewter-colored fins. Bronwyn admired, if a little ruefully, the girl’s lean, sleekly-muscled body that rippled like a bundle of ropes even as she lay there exhausted, supported by one arm while the other brushed her black hair from where it plastered her lean face.
Thud, as always, amazed her. She had never grown accustomed to his continuing transformation and stared at her old friend with astonishment and admiration. His once amorphously spherical body was still massive, but was now as firm and landscaped with muscle as a young planet. Water trickled in tentative rivulets through and across the plains, mountains and valleys of that virgin world. From where she was positioned, his round head looked like a glistening moon rising above the planet’s horizon. He had a relatively short tail, a light blue-grey in color, with thick, broad flukes and looked, if anything, more like a walrus or manatee than a fish.
Gyven as always was an enigma. She had never loved anyone so much, nor had been disappointed by anyone so deeply. She had felt that disappointment developing into hatred; worse, it was transmogrifying into disinterest. In fact, she had been trying to achieve that emotional transformation herself, whether or not she would ever overtly admit to it, which of course she would not. But hating Gyven would have put the burden of responsibility and, if she ever permitted it, reparation squarely on his broad shoulders. But what had been Gyven’s greatest fault? It was that he had not lived up to the expectations she had set for him. She had decided, arbitrarily enough, that he was her best friend, she had decided that he was her lover, her confidant, her companion, her husband-to-be . . . but Gyven himself had made few, if any, of these promises to her, or had done little to warrant the attachment of these ideals. In reality, she had made him the instrumentality if not the victim of her own needs, desires and feelings. She had felt the deepest yearnings for his companionship and because his company was all-important to her she called him her best friend, even though she was doing little else than transposing her own emotions. Still, the fiction, the illusion it created, the sound of it when she told herself, or told others, “He’s my best friend,” or “He’s my lover,” was a necessary reinforcement. Unfortunately, the more often she said such things, the more she came to believe in their instrinsic, independent truth. When the inevitable time came when Gyven had to do something that was not what a best friend or lover would have done, she blamed him for not being the Gyven she had created. It wasn’t entirely fair, some responsible part of her brain argued, to fault people for not living up to the standards and expectations we’ve arbitrarily set for them. So what? the rest of her brain would reply.
But was he, all that time, in truth her friend and lover? Perhaps. Perhaps what Bronwyn thought could happen by decree had in fact happened as it should have, naturally and in the course of time. Perhaps not.
Whatever animosities she had felt about him in the past months, or had convinced herself she had felt, she saw dissolving as she watched his long, hard body pulling itself up onto the glistening black rocks. All of the prison--like pallor of the first year she had known him was gone; he was as brown as a terra cotta sculpture, his muscles looking like flexible slabs of clay thrown onto his framework by a daring and impatient artist, having all the power, vitality and potential of the preliminary sketch before it suffers under the blurring imposition of afterthoughts and refinement. His long tail was silver on the lower side and almost black on the upper, the fins as long and sharp as a pair of shears.
He pushed his hair away from his face and looked up at the princess with eyes like black pearls. His face looked as though it had been sliced from a block of red clay with only a dozen daring strokes of that insane artist’s knife.
Whatever Bronwyn had resolved to say to him, she found melting away, as elusive of her grasp as the water that streamed from her hair.
I can’t lose him,
she decided.
Whatever I do, however I feel, whatever I want to say, whatever he’s done or I think he’s done, I cannot lose him. I’ll forgive him anything, I’ll forgive myself, just so I don’t lose him, not again.
“Look!” cried Wittenoom, and all of their heads turned in time to see the island erupt. It blossomed like some vast, black flower, splitting open, unfolding, its somber petals revealing the brilliant red that had been hidden inside. A few seconds later the sound of the explosion reached them: a subsonic thump that was more a visceral blow than a sound.
