The Black Garden: Chapter 20

Tsariel could sense it, and led me unerringly in the right direction. As we grew closer, I could feel it: raw waves of malevolent terror. There was no sensation like it—pure malevolence radiating from something that should not exist. It hated us, hated everything in this reality. It also desired it, all of it. To consume it, to fuck it, to destroy it.

The place where the lanterns had fallen warped and fluxed, jagged ridges of earth clawing toward the sky as the dead trees began to sink. Chunks of unravelling matter were starting to lift and float away, even as a gravity well deepened in the center of the scoured clearing.

[Zero-suit structural integrity compromised: do not enter vacuum. Biopolymer reserves at 23%. Advanced functions unavailable.] My ATLAS fed me the grim diagnostics as I sprinted toward the growing collapse. [Voidsign—ERROR. Abyssal resonance at critical levels.]

“No shit.” I stumbled over a ridge, barely dodging as a root burst from the ground, writhing violently before collapsing into ash.

“Hunter,” Tsariel said, her voice sharp and clear. “The Breaches are unifying. They will soon cascade into an open gateway.”

"I'm working on it." I clutched my sword in my left fist, shielding my face against the freezing radiation beating from the center of the forming Breach. The lanterns had racked themselves open and partially merged, oscillating at impossible speed as they bored a hole through reality. Tendrils of red-black energy licked from the forming core, latching onto anything organic and sucking it dry. The ground around the lanterns pulsed with widening cracks of negative light. Shapes moved inside of them, writhing up against an unseen membrane like a frenzied swarm of eels.

The last QFD was a heavy weight on my belt. I didn’t have a backup plan.

“What happens if I pull the grenade on this?” I squinted past the scrolling lines of error code stuttering down my AR display.

"In theory, the Breach will lose its coordinates and invert," Tsariel replied. “We must be outside the field.”

“Where are the limits of the field?”

“Variable.”

“Ooh. That’s fun.” I pulled the grenade off my rig with my off-hand, and was about to thumb the pin out when the first demon lurched out of the blacklight with a tearing sound I felt in every nerve. The thing was mostly humanoid in shape. Slick, tar-like flesh mimicked the shape and form of Blind Mice who had been absorbed by the forming breach, but its head was an asymmetrical mess, a giant coiling mouth gaped in place of the helmet's visor.

I got the Long Hunt between is as it launched itself at me like a ribbon of shadow, crossing the clearing in seconds. I slashed out at it as it dove to the side, but the momentary impact of its long black claws against the edge of the sword threw me off my feet. The grenade tumbled out of my hand, teetering on the edge of a new split forming in the desiccated earth. I yelped and lunged fir it, narrowly avoiding an arc of dark limbs. They slammed into the ground where I’d fallen, sending ash and clods of dirt flying. The grenade bounced into the air. I snatched it before it could fall, rolling desperately away from the demon as it pounced—and was separated into six different pieces by a flurry of razored metal.

“Now!”  Tsariel’s voice was an oceanic roar.

I yanked the pin from the grenade and hurled it toward the collapsing vortex as I scrambled up to my feet. The QFD accelerated into the breach like a comet. 

WHOMPH.

A rip-tide of gravity dragged me to hands and knees, then down to my face. It crushed the air from my lungs and squeezed my organs and compressed the marrow in my bones. Howls of fury tore the air around me as I clutched at the fractured stone, fighting not to be dragged back into the collapsing hellmouth. There was no light, no heat, like being sucked out of an airlock into space. Then everything wobbled… and I caught a whooping, rattling breath as the distortion began to ebb.

We had won? Kind of. Ideni was no longer a Prime world. I had let a demon cross the threshold, and with its first step into our reality, it had birthed an infinite number of branches radiating out through fifth-dimensional space. The egg had cracked, and in doing so, another front in the War had opened. 

Slowly, I swayed up to my feet, and looked back to see a bizarre effigy of dead, bleached trees, bowed and half pulled toward the same singular point of devastation. Around it was nothing but a broken white field, blanketed by an eerie hush as ash, still crawling with flecks of darklight, continued to rain from the sky. A deep, sinking feeling gripped my chest as I stood there, vaguely aware that I was bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears. What little energy I had left, I turned inward, using it to heal the damage to muscles and organs that had been crushed by the weight of the looming Abyss. I was still working on it when I felt vibration under the soles of my feet. 

Huge, dark, alien shapes raced through the trees toward me. Khememmu. Their lean Warform bodies were the color of a deep blue oil slick, covered in a coat of long, barbed quills each as long as a javelin. Each one carried six riders, who hung onto their flanks with their rifles braced. As the Khem closed in on the irradiated wasteland, they slowed just enough to let everyone jump to the ground, then charged fearlessly into the corrupted circle of enervation ahead of me. The quills turned into tentacles that flung out in a fine, plasma-like web, followed by the rest of the Khememmu's bodies as they abandoned their solid shapes and began to feed on the negative energy soaking the clearing.

“Goddammit, Z! You were supposed to leave some for us!” Gaius boomed through his helmet’s amplifier as he jogged toward me, the long antennae of his combat controller pack swaying over his head. Ratty, Blackie and Lilia were right behind him. The other eight riding with them were all Taga: seven Axuma Anti-Abyssal Marines, plus one giant, all-too-familiar pain in my ass.

An eerie humanoid figure half a head taller than the Axuma strode past us without so much as glancing at me. He was roughly eight feet tall, muscled like a colossus, with a long fall of tentacles pulled back from a square, skull-like sculpted mask of a face. Unusually for a Khem, this one often manifested eyes. Right now he had eight of them, symmetrically arranged. As he moved, his flawless woodland camouflage vanished, revealing the same inky blue-black coloration of the others of his species who were gorging on the corrupted matter left behind by the momentary breach. Like them, he reverted to his liquid form and began to help them mop up.

His name was Hura, and he was the strangest and least pleasant Khememmu I had ever met. He was also one of the single best Hunters in the entire Confluence.

“I tried.” I numbly stood in place as the rest of my team gathered around, letting Ratcatcher wave a wand across me. My mind felt like it was running several seconds behind the rest of reality. “What’s the… uhh… prognosis?”

“Death, within an hour, if you are not decontaminated.” She shook her head ruefully and clipped the wand back to her rig.

“Really? I feel-” I was about to say ‘okay’, but then another bolus of blood welled up in my throat. I coughed out the last word, painting the inside of my helmet scarlet.

“Get him out of here.” Lilia made a sharp gesture to Ratcatcher and Blackie. “Ratty, can you detox him?”

“Probably. If I can’t sponge it all, one of the Khem can finish him off.”

Always nice when someone finishes you off. I couldn’t really see anything through the haze of blood and my glitched visor, but I felt Ratcatcher scoop my arm up over her shoulders.

“Second time in two weeks you’ve gotten yourself fucked up, Z.” Blackie swaggered along behind us while Ratty and I limped toward the edge of the blast zone. “Starting to think it’s deliberate.”

I tried to speak aloud, and couldn’t, so I instinctively tried to speak via my ATLAS, but it was completely on the fritz. I also found myself unable to resist gravity as Ratty crouched down and lay my back against one of the surviving trees. The distance between my thoughts and reactions was growing wider.

“He’s starting to decohere.” Ratty pulled her helmet free, shaking her braided hair into the open, then reached out to work on mine. As it came away from the collar of the Z-suit, dry, parched air flooded into my lungs and I coughed again. More blood, which was confusing. I was sure I’d fixed the internal bleeding before…

I was trying to mumble this as Ratty as she leaned in. As she switched off the very powerful wards inscribed into her armor, skin and wetwear and tuned into her very unusual brand of ReMa, her flat black eyes turned deep, almost hypnotic. Blackie took a big step back, clutching his rifle protectively to his chest.

“Just breathe, Z.” Her flat voice sounded like it was echoing from somewhere very far away as she pressed her lips to my forehead. They were ice-cold, plucking at the life in my body and siphoning at it. Only for a moment, before she redirected her powerful Entropic aura toward purging the Abyssal radiation that had saturated my body with a million micro-fractures, not unlike the bacterial slime I’d used to jank the wraithsuits. I grunted, then grit my teeth as an awful crawling sensation started up in my muscles and bones. It started out slow, but after a few seconds I was panting, bathed in sweat as I writhed from the pain of my Abyssal scars. All ReMa users had them. Mine were skeletal, in my feet and the lower bones of my legs. A long time ago, I had been a double amputee from the knees down: my knees, shins, ankles and feet were now artificial. But the scars were metaphysical ones inflicted across every potential incarnation of me in every universe, and as they activated, I and every one of those possible ‘me’ felt like they were being cooked from the waist down.

All around us, the plants began to slither and hiss: seeds sprouted, twirling up into maturity before collapsing to rot, while rotten matter seethed and jittered into bizarre snowflake-like shapes. I could feel my cells aging, the skin under Ratty’s lips the first to wither as my DNA threatened to unravel… and then it was over, and I lay slumped against the tree weak, gasping, feeling fifty years older but ninety percent less sick.

“Not a full clean. Best I can do for now.” Ratty pulled my filthy helmet back over my head, leaving vague afterimages of herself in the air as she moved. Her entropic resonance was immensely powerful, so powerful that she could not control it. Left unshielded, machines and bodies would break down and rot around her; computers and entire networks could fail, and the immediate reality around her would begin to deterministically collapse. She managed her abilities via wards created by some of the best ReMatics in CEIDR. As she reenabled them, the afterimages stopped, and the creeping, cancerous, almost Abyssal aura around her turned into little more than an icy haze rising from the shell of her armor. “You need to fuel up and repair your telomeres before I can do any more. Or one of the Khem could finish the job.”

I could feel the skin of my face had sagged, now heavily wrinkled and as fine as crepe tissue. I now felt—and probably looked—a lot closer to my real age of a hundred and twenty-two.

“Twink death catches up with us all in the end,” I croaked. “Thanks for the save.”

“Ol’ man Zealot.” Blackie chuckled, and threw me two packs of matte-brown energy gel: ninety grams of pure carbohydrates, mostly maltodextrin, a little less than four hundred calories per pack. “Here you go, grandpa.”

“Pah. No respect for your elders,” I squinted at the printed code on the packet. “Wait, no. These are strawberry flavored. I take it back, you do love me.”

“Strawberry and blue raspberry’s the only flavors worth packin’.” He handed Ratcatcher her rifle after she had pulled her helmet on and thumped it down into place. 

I fumbled with the twist cap of the first gel pack and stuck the straw into my helmet’s intake port, which was fortunately still working. Then I sucked it down like a starving mosquito, opening the second before I’d quite finished drinking. Two minutes and eight hundred calories later, I lay back against the tree and focused on repairing my DNA, reversing the damage done both by the negative energy and Ratty’s sin-eating. My squaddies stood guard, fingers resting easily by their triggers while they watched the three Khemmemu do what Ratty had just done for me, on a larger scale.

“That guy over there is pissed,” Blackie remarked. “The shrimpy Khem. The Taga wanted to raid tonight, but we got called out here to back you up.”

“Well, I’m not saying I did a great job, but at least the Breach opened out here and not in the city or in the encampment. It only had a couple of dead guys and trees to feed on. If there had been more people around, we’d be ordering an orbital strike on Ideni instead of me throwing a QFD at it and shutting it down.” Once I had my DNA working to reknit itself, it was a matter of letting it do its thing while not getting carried away. There was a very fine line between reversing cellular aging and creating immortal, exponentially-reproductive cancers. “And Hura is always pissed. As soon as he’s finished stuffing his many eldritch orifices, he’s going to come over here and bitch me out.”

“You know him?” Blackie’s head turned toward me.

I made a face. “Unfortunately.”

“Ex-boyfriend?”

I made a face. “Eww. No.”

Ratcatcher snorted. Blackie let out a harsh bark of laughter. “Look, this is you we’re talkin’ about. It’s a reasonable question.”

As if on cue, the Khem began to disperse, reassembling themselves into their warfoms. The two bigger ones had the more ‘traditional’ shapes, huge six-legged predators that mimicked the demons they hunted for sustenance. But Hura was a shrimp by Khem standards, with the Napoleon complex to match. He loathed humans for some reason, yet he assumed a shape that was passingly similar to one. I was sure there was a story there. If he was less of a terminal asshole, I might even find sympathy for it.

“Greetings, Hura,” I said once he was within earshot. “My regards to you and your team. Appreciate the backup.”

"Ah. The surgeon-whore. Do not thank us for correcting your errors.” Like all Khem who cared to vocalize, Hura didn't speak through his mouth. The bared black teeth of his jaws stayed firmly locked, while his sonorous voice piped out through half a dozen spiracles to either side of his heavy neck. His speech was slow and deliberate, deep enough to make my eardrums vibrate. "We must reassess our mission due to your interference. The mercenary encampment is on alert.”

"Nice to see you again too, Hura. Did you know these fuckers had portable breaches?" My voice was sugary and venomous as I glared up at him. "Because if not, you're in the same boat as CEIDR. And if you DID, and you didn't share that intel with the command working group, then who the fuck's 'error' is this?"

Hura’s skin rippled with blunt spines, like liquid iron when exposed to a magnet. “We will discuss this with your Actual. In our opinion, the decision to dispatch you to the city was unwise.”

“With all due respect, you can craft yourself a second ass where your face currently is, then go shove your fist down it,” I said.

Blackie let out another of his dry, raven-caw laughs.

“Such is the extent of human wit.” Hura’s oil-slick coloration fluidly shifted back into camouflage while we watched, his long tentacle ponytail flickering and darting behind him like a bundle of snakes. “Perhaps we will yet retain some element of surprise. Perhaps not. We raid the PMC base camp at four-hundred hours. This one will be ready, or he will be left behind.”

“I’ll discuss it with your Actual and get caught up.” My eyes narrowed. “Real nice to see you again, Hura. But let’s keep to the mission focus before our duly-elected commanders decide we need to spend some time in mediation together.”

“The mission is our priority. It cannot be compromised,” Hura rumbled. “Though it is now too late for this planet. Ideni will now be the site of future breaches because of your actions. It is a responsibility you bear.”

“Yeah no, you fuckin’ lay off, cunt.” Blackie stepped up on him. I couldn’t see his expression through his helmet from the side, but I knew it would be wolfish. “If the Taga knew these bastards could create a portal to Hell and you sat on your arses watchin’ the camp for days instead of gettin’ the fuck on with it-!”

“Thomas Black.” Lilia called out his full name, firmly. 

Blackie’s lean body had turned taut with growing rage, but he eased down at the sound of our commander’s voice. Ratty clapped him on the shoulder. 

The drama didn’t leave me feeling anything else but tired. I rolled my head toward Hura. ““I’m still contaminated. Can you ask one of your buddies to finish the de-con? Ratty siphoned enough to keep me from dying, but my ATLAS still isn’t fixing itself and my ReMa is real sluggish.”

Hura regarded me in stony silence for several moments. “They must concentrate on fortifying and purifying the Breach site to prevent recurrence. We do not have sufficient mass to be as capable at this task. We will do it.”

I let out a short, almost startled laugh. My first instinct was to tell him to keep his pseudopods to himself. But my ass was still full of metal, I was still too physically aged to be capable of another combat run, I was still disconnected from the Noosphere and from COMMs. The area just above my knees, where living bone connected to ceramic composite, ached whenever I shifted my legs. I felt… old. Old and tired.

“Fine. Take me to this safehouse and let’s get it done,” I said. “It’s what, twenty-hundred hours? Scrub me down and yank out the flechettes I caught, and I’ll get some sleep and be ready to roll.”

Ratty and Blackie both looked over at me in surprise.

“Before then, you need to take me back up to the road.” I struggled to pick myself up, accepting Ratty’s hand when she offered it. “There’s a car up there that’s packed with data that could help the mission. Assuming Mert wasn’t in it, and hasn’t driven it off or remotely recalled it.”

Ratty cocked her head as she communicated with the orbital. “COMMs has the car on satellite. He says it's still there.”

“Well let’s go and grab it before the bad guys do.” I leaned against her. “One of the New Warder government officials used that vehicle on the daily. I bet it’s full of all sorts of goodies.”