Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2) (64 page)

“Excuse me… what did you just say?” asked Savannah.

Raith hadn’t realized she was standing beside him. He’d
warned the Sons against mentioning the expansion, but it was too late to give
the architect a browbeating for it. “Edrie was speaking figuratively,” Raith
told her. “We would never have done that without your consent.”

“It’s all starting to make sense now. This is why you wanted
to bring everyone down here. So you could have your experts take the place
apart with their eyes. So you could make your plan on how you were going to
steal it from me.”

“Savannah, you’re misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I understand you just fine. You show up pretending to be
lost travelers, you live off me for a couple weeks, you pretend to know my
mother so I’ll trust you, and then you take what you
really
came for.
You’re the same as all the other scumbags, only instead of my money and my
livestock you wanted a piece of my property. Property I never knew I had. How
did you find out this place was down here? Huh? You got your own little
Ministry atlas at home that told you where it was?”

“We didn’t,” Raith said. “We didn’t know this place was down
here any more than you did. We honestly were just trying to find a way home.”

“Well you did that, didn’t you? And now you want a lot more.
Please pack your things and go. I don’t want to see you around here again. If I
do, I’m calling Arnie, and I won’t stop him from hurting you this time.”

“Savannah… this is unnecessary. We were never going to take
anything from you without your permission. That isn’t who we are.”

“You have a way home now. Why are you staying?”

“Don’t push us away. It was never our intention to take
advantage of you. We couldn’t be more appreciative of everything you’ve done
for us.”

She was about to speak when a scream from the outer room
interrupted her.

When they emerged from the lab, Peperil Cribbs was kneeling
in the gardens. Blood was spreading across the front of his white linen tunic
where a bony spike jutted from his sternum. He fell face first into the dirt.
Behind him stood a spider-like creature with a scorpion’s exoskeleton and
chitinous spikes instead of legs. Two rear limbs, longer and thicker than the
rest, stood folded behind it, while thin antennae swayed from the front of its
head.
A tachylid
, Raith knew; one of the Aionach’s more dangerous
subterranean denizens.

Tachylids managed to find their way into Decylum from time to
time, through ventilation ducts or waste lines, though they were most often
younger and much smaller than the one standing before them now, which was as
big around as the sewer plate in the room Gregar Holdsaard had just found.
People in Decylum called the things ‘tachies’ and hoped they never woke to find
one looking down on them from the ceiling of their hab unit.

The other Sons across the massive chamber backed away or
ducked behind holding tanks while searching their surroundings for more of the
things. The tachy sprang from its rear legs to land on the wall twenty feet
above Raith’s head. He ignited and felt Gregar do the same. Derrow came running
from across the chamber, also burning brightly. Theodar and Sombit ventured
into the gardens to retrieve Peperil Cribbs and administer first aid, but the
poor man was already dead.

They waited.

The tachylid sat on the wall above them, motionless, doing
whatever creatures of that sort did in moments like these. Before long the
three blackhands had to extinguish themselves. They crossed the raised garden
walkway to be with the others, watching over their shoulders and beneath their
feet as they went.

“What do we do now?” asked Gregar.

“That thing doesn’t look in a hurry to go anywhere,” said
Derrow.

“I say we leave,” said Ernost.

“I left all my tools in the lab,” said Gregar.

“And the documents… they’re in unsealed containers,” Hayden
added. “The damp will ruin them.”

Something thumped against one of the laboratory windows,
startling them all. Another tachylid perched sideways on the glass, the ribbed
chitin of its exoskeletal underside visible from within. Another thump
followed, and a second creature appeared.

“Where are those things coming from?”

“I dunno. They weren’t in the lab a few minutes ago… were
they?”

“The drain,” Raith and Gregar both realized at once.

The sewer plate inside was still uncovered, and the
laboratory doors were cracked open. Through the space between them scuttled a
tachylid larger than any they’d seen yet. It was so big Raith heard the door
squeak on its hinges as the creature brushed it aside. Another one crawled out
just above the door handle.

“Shit. Screw the tools. Screw the documents. Let’s go.
Everyone out.” Gregar led the way up the stairs while Raith stayed behind to
make sure everyone made it.

Mercer and Brence carried Peperil’s body while Savannah and
Sombit carried their torches for them. Raith watched as more tachylids latched
themselves to the laboratory windows and swarmed through the open doors. They
began leaping across the chamber, attaching themselves to walls, holding tanks,
rafters, air ducts.

As soon as his path was clear, Raith began backing up the
steps. He was halfway up the first flight before he looked down to see he’d
left his oil lamp on the lowest stair. Slouching to pick it up, he almost
didn’t see the first tachylid sail toward him. He ignited his shield just as
the creature arrived.

A splash of green mucous and bits of shell doused Raith’s
face and clothes. He stumbled backward up the steps, spitting and wiping goo
from his eyes. His shield would’ve severed the scaffolded stairs with no
trouble. He had nothing left to do but run.

Railings and braces clanged as tachies landed all around him.
He ignited and dashed up the crisscrossed staircase with the benefit of
augmented speed. When he reached the sliding doors at the top, he only managed
to close one before the tachies got there. He had to fall back through the
opening with the other door still ajar.

“They’re coming,” he shouted down the hallway. “Keep moving.”

Raith faced the oncoming swarm with his shield covering him
from head to toe. While the shield wasn’t properly shaped to fill the corners
of the hexagonal corridor, the tachylids were only of moderate intelligence,
and they began to throw themselves at him in a flurry of spikes and antennae.
They ruptured one by one, painting the hallway in front of him yellow-green. He
backed away while shifting his shield into the corners whenever a tachy tried
to squeeze by, often melting through metal and concrete in the process.

It was Gregar who finally came back for him. Raith’s hands
were charred and smoking by then, embered skin peeling away from his fingers.
He turned and sprinted down the corridor past Gregar, who ignited to tear a
huge ceiling panel into the creatures’ path. Both men sprinted down the
corridor and left the tachylids behind.

“High Infernal, those things will be everywhere by
nightfall,” Savannah said when they were all above ground with the hidden door
closed behind them.

“They’ll have plenty of bats to eat down there,” said Tobas
Baern.

“I think they prefer cool dark places to the surface,” said
Raith. “Hopefully they’ll stay put.”

“We can never go back down there now,” Edrie Thronson said.
“The whole place is lost.”

“I’m sure Savannah won’t feel much loss for something she
didn’t know she had in the first place,” Raith said.

“No, I won’t,” Savannah said. “And I’m sorry about earlier. I
got a little carried away. It’s hard to trust people when it seems like
everyone wants something from you.”

“We did come here wanting something from you,” said Raith,
“and I’m sorry that we—that I—pressured you to give it to us. We truly cannot
thank you enough for everything you’ve done for us.”

The Sons agreed.

“We’ll leave you in peace now, like you wanted. There’s time
left in the day. We can gather our things, saddle the horses, and meet Borain
in the scrubs for a night ride. You can’t imagine how fortunate we all feel to
have found a way home, and it’s all thanks to you.”

“Are you really going to show the nomads the way to Decylum?”
Savannah asked.

“Unless the fates provide us with a way out, it seems that’s
our only choice.”

“Good luck to you, then.”

“And to you as well, Savannah Glaive. Be well. And take care
of yourself, will you?”

She smiled, standing on her tiptoes to hug him around the
neck. “Thank you for telling me about my mother. I’ll never forget it.”

Raith and the Sons retrieved their horses from the stables
and found Borain Guaidir where he was camped outside town. The commscreen lay
in Raith’s pack beside the Aionach Atlas and the Decylum documents he’d
retrieved earlier. Once they rescued Ros from Sai Calgoar, they would finally
be on their way home. If only they could find a way to get there without the
master-king and his armies in tow, Decylum might have a fighting chance at a
future without the above-world’s harsh influence.

And so the Sons of Decylum rode on into the wastes. The
wastes swallowed them up, and all the hope of the world was with them.

CHAPTER 51

Descent

On a hot, clear day at long year’s end, Merrick
Bouchard stood before a crowd of thousands on the steps of the Mobile
Operations Headquarters and announced Pilot Wax’s execution with all the
emotion of a man setting the table for supper. He’d waffled over the decision,
only because he kept wondering whether there was more he could learn from the
man who had been Commissar. Wax had tried to kill him, and Merrick understood
why. But he also knew that once he went through with this, he would be ruling
North Belmond alone. The idea scared him, but the thought of letting Wax hang
around to plan his next murder attempt scared him more.

Wax knelt on the topmost step, daylight and dread forming a
dark ring of sweat around his collar. Merrick’s hands hovered on either side of
Wax’s head, ready to take it off with a split-second ignition. Raith had taught
him there was a difference between his healing energies and his destructive
ones; each came from its own unique place within him. All he needed to do was
channel the correct one.

The crowd was quiet, some seething for justice, others
waiting in apprehension. Wax had made a successful run of his time in power,
but like any leader, he had his detractors; those in whose eyes he could do no
right. Those people, Merrick knew, would become his most vehement supporters
when Wax was gone. That was why he’d chosen to make Wax’s execution public
instead of hiding it behind closed doors. For every citizen who hated to see
the Commissar die, there would be another who’d been waiting years for it to
happen.

Merrick’s hands were shaking. He’d killed people before. He’d
shot them with his rifle, stabbed them with knives and bayonets, stoned them
with chunks of loose concrete. As a kid in the city south, he’d beaten some
miscreant with a wrench as the man tried to rob him. He’d dropped bricks on the
heads of unsuspecting muties and broken glass bottles over people’s heads
during bar fights. He’d grown up knowing these were the things he had to do to come
out on top. Wax was no different.

He gritted his teeth. There was a red electric flash, and a
gout of crimson covered his boots and splashed onto his lower pant legs. Wax’s
head rolled down the museum steps.

Cheers.

Boos.

The crowd parted to let the head keep going, until some
jackass with a lame arm snatched it up by the hair and took off with it. A
skirmish broke out.

Merrick felt sick. The city really was his now, and he wasn’t
sure he liked it anymore. His Scarred bodyguards swept him away from the scene
along with the captains and advisors lined up along the colonnade. The escape
route was pre-planned, as always, and he was looking down from the safety of
the Hull Tower before the last of Pilot Wax’s hair had been parted from his
skull in the tug-of-war that ensued.

He was tired, but sleep was the last thing he wanted. He was
too scared to sleep anymore; too paranoid there was someone waiting for him to
shut his eyes. His resonarc was broken, and the Gray Revenants had fled south
after the invasion. The extent of their ambitions did lie in raiding drug dens
and selling gangers to the savages as slaves, after all.

The gangers had followed the Revenants when they discovered
Merrick’s promises of plenty were as empty as North Belmond’s storehouses. The Kilnhurst
Klick, the Rowdies, the Tribe—all had gone back to where they’d come from—back
to the familiarity and territorial dominance of the lives they knew. Lives
which, for them, beat the bullshit promises of an aspiring politician whose
uprising had induced more bloodshed than revolution.

Determined to stay awake, Merrick locked himself inside Wax’s
former office and wandered through the room, searching every drawer and filing
cabinet for something with which to occupy his time. The bottom drawer of Wax’s
desk was empty but for a bottle of old scotch and a crystal glassware set.
There was something not right about the drawer, though.

Merrick removed the items and slid a hand toward the back. He
found a semi-circular notch in the wood, lifted it. A false bottom. The
compartment beneath was lined with baggies of purple clear-cut, some of the
finest-quality zoom he’d ever seen. It was a stash to rival the amounts he’d
encountered at the den inside the Unimart.
Wax was a zoomer?
he
wondered.
A high-functioning one, then
.

A rainbow-colored blown-glass pipe sat atop the stack of
baggies, a dozen matchbooks littered around it. An old steel wick lighter lay
beside the pipe; the refillable flip-top kind. Merrick closed the drawer and
paced the room, trying not to think about the zoom but unable to think of
anything else. Its memory stained him like vision spots from a long stare into
the light-star, eating away until there was only the idea of its sweet acrid
stench to keep him company.

Next he knew, he found himself sitting at the desk again,
drawer open, baggie in hand. There was tons of the stuff; several months’
supply for even the heaviest addict. He split the plastic seal and took a
sniff.

The smell of zoom was his father. It didn’t just
remind
him of his father. It
was
his father; it was the most distinct
memory-trigger Merrick had of Trent Bouchard. Like the fumes of a summer
campfire: caustic yet comforting.

Trent hadn’t been
all
bad. There were moments—isolated
snapshots between long spans of disharmony—when Merrick’s father had been good
to him. Kind, even. Most of those moments had happened while his mother was
still around, so far back the details were hazy now. He hadn’t heard his
mother’s voice in a long time. So long he’d begun to dismiss those echoes in
his mind as figments of his imagination.

The chemicals took Merrick in their grip the moment he set
the pipe to his lips. They cradled him in the innocence of a childhood
half-remembered, wherein lay the confusing juxtaposition of pain and longing.
Trauma and euphoria.

Zoom had been waiting for him all these years, he realized.
Calling to him, eager to take him back into its delicate stranglehold. But Wax
had outlawed zoom in the city north, and the opportunity had only come now, in
the place where Wax kept that lonely satisfaction to himself.

Like father, like son
, Merrick thought bitterly,
exhaling a breath of purple steam.

Glass to lips. Purple crystals oozing, warm glow, lazy curls
of white smoke.

Merrick was wide awake, and stayed that way all night and
through the next day. He may have lost his mother’s voice, but Toler Glaive’s
rang through him as clear as the scotch-glass crystal he spun compulsively
between his fingers.
When people come clamoring from every corner of the
Aionach seeking your curative powers, you’ll need protection
. Merrick
didn’t need protection, though. Not as much as he needed electrical energy to
facilitate the use of his gift. Not as much as he needed zoom to keep him
going; to help him surmount the sleep of the gifted. With a never-ending supply
of those two things, he’d be able to function for weeks at a time without a
break.

Over the following weeks, Merrick found that not only did the
zoom work better than the resonarc; it amplified his periods of ignition as
well. He did sleep sometimes; at first he only used whenever he needed to take
the edge off. He quickly found that a body able to consume and convert such
huge amounts of energy could handle larger intake levels as well. He’d never
noticed this with alcohol; he got drunk as quickly as any other man with an
average habit of once or twice a week. When he got high, though, he recovered
without the usual lows or hung-over feeling. He bounced back fast after a good
sleep, an indulgence he didn’t allow himself often. Sleeping was difficult. It
felt pointless at times, and it only served to heighten his growing paranoia.

The knock came at his office door two weeks to the day after
Pilot Wax’s death. It was an ominous knock, the kind Merrick knew could bring
only bad news, though that pessimistic prediction might’ve derived from the
fact that he was coming down off his latest high. He tossed pipe and lighter
into the drawer and slid it closed with his foot, then shouted for whoever it
was to open the door and come in.

“Sorry to disturb you,” said Shelder Depliades, slipping
inside and planting himself along the short section of wall between the door
and the wet bar.

“What is it?”

The fat-nosed midget had given Merrick nothing but bad news
all week, and his somber expression made Merrick think he ought to expect more
of it. “There was another fight at the Olney Street border station this
morning.”

“Okay… and?”

“And a rape inside one of the vacant stores in the Covington
Mills strip mall downtown. Last night. We also had an apartment fire that
destroyed four homes, and we’ve yet to apprehend a suspect in the string of
robberies on the west side.”

Merrick tried to focus, but there were three blurry Shelders
spinning around the real one. “What do you want me to do about it?”

Shelder cleared his throat. “The division commanders and I
have been talking—”

“Without me,” Merrick interrupted. “Again. Did you all do
this much yammering behind Wax’s back?”

“You missed yesterday’s meeting. I—”

“No more meetings without me,” Merrick shouted. “If I’m not
there, you should be working to fix these problems instead of clucking around
like a bunch of old hens.”

Shelder gulped, lips parting onto a dry mouth. “We think you
should close the borders, sir.”

“Close the borders? Are you insane? We need to give it time.
People will mellow out once we’ve filled more jobs, boosted factory production,
and increased trade.”

“Our factories are nothing more than glorified sweatshops,”
Shelder insisted. “The laborers work with hand tools and wood fires. There’s no
automation in the system—no machines to help them with the work.”

“So speed up research on the power station,” Merrick said.

Shelder grimaced. “We’ve had to approach that project with
care. We can’t move too rapidly without overtaxing ourselves, resources being
what they are.”

“The whole point of all this shit is to expand our
resources.”

“That’s become harder with the recent influx in population.
Thanks to all the people coming across the border, we’ve burned through our
last few months’ supply in a matter of weeks.”

“Don’t blame me for this,” Merrick shouted. “Don’t act like
this is my fault. Wax wanted to
take over
the city south. I’m doing the
same thing, only I’m trying to be nice about it. Let people come in, instead of
getting pushed out of their neighborhoods while the north expands.”

“It’s not the geographical territory that makes the
difference. It’s the number of people we’re being forced to support. Again… Wax
wanted to expand at a measured pace. Little by little, over a period of many
years. That would’ve allowed us to achieve growth at a sustainable rate,
without these sudden, dramatic increases in population.”

“All we’re doing is fast-tracking the process. There are
going to be hiccups at the beginning. Once we can generate enough power to
start feeding it to locations around the city, we can push the factories into
overdrive. We should be sending every spare dway we can find to work on that
power plant. Do that; I want it done. And I want two more border stations
opened up. One on each end of the Row. Let’s get this moving. We’re not going
to stimulate growth by being pussies about it. We gotta be all-in on this or we
might as well give up now.”

Shelder rubbed the back of his neck. “Sir… there’s something
else. Unless we get about three new trade caravans in the next few days, we’re
going to have to start rationing food.”

Merrick’s eyes found reason to focus then. “Rationing,” he
said, as if uttering some dread curse. “If we’re that short on food, why
haven’t we started rationing it already?”

“Commissar Wax was adamant about keeping up the appearance of
affluence even in times of difficulty. He was thrifty, to a certain extent.
Never wasteful… but he hardly lived the lifestyle of a pauper, either.
Belt-tightening was never something he did well. He didn’t believe the nomad
crusade could go on forever. He thought it would break before things got to
this point. All those extra people, though, have—”

“Yeah, I heard you the first thirty times. We’ve got too many
people. Alright. Shut up for a second and let me think.” Merrick went to the
couch and sat, elbows on knees, palms on forehead.

The north was on the verge of devolving into the same human
garbage heap the south had been for decades. People would stop caring about his
gift if they were hungry. What could a city full of healthy, starving people
accomplish? Then another voice popped into his head. It wasn’t Toler’s. It
wasn’t his dad’s voice, or even his mom’s. It was Pilot Wax.
Every time
we’ve grown our borders before, it’s only served to make us more prosperous.
There’s a huge area of this city that we don’t control. There are resources we
need for this power station. Places we can rebuild.
His speech outside the
barracks, which Merrick had witnessed while wearing a cheap floral hospital
gown.

A huge area of this city that we don’t control… resources
we need
. There were hidden resources all over the city south. The Gray
Revenants knew that, as Wax had known it then. Secret places where the
Ministry, planning for the worst, had stashed its most prized possessions. Who
knew what undiscovered treasures they’d socked away and lost forever when the
Heat came?

Merrick stood up suddenly. “Okay, you win. Close the
borders.”

Shelder glanced around as if expecting some trick.
“Completely?”

“Shut down the Olney Street border station. Turn it into a
normal barricade like it used to be, but make it twice as strong this time.
We’re going to reopen it someday. But you’re right—we can’t afford to right
now. Not yet. Not until the trains start coming again. I want to unite this
city, but I’m not going to watch the north starve while the southers attach
themselves to us like leeches. We need to stabilize our way of life before we
start inviting them into it. Call the division commanders. Time for a meeting.”