Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain (6 page)

They showered me with their complaints, but I raised a hand to quiet them.

“As soon as the authorities get here, we’ll discuss an equitable settlement.”

Zala retreated to the shadow of my saucer, and I joined her.

The Atlantese rescue forces reached us. They had a lawyer with them as a matter of protocol. I left it to him to negotiate the two or three dozen settlements while discussing things with Lieutenant Cal.

“My superiors agree, Lord Mollusk, that this is unacceptable.” He paused for effect. “Quite unacceptable. The rampage of this monster has unleashed at least three hundred separate wrongful injury complaints against the military.”

By the end of the day, there would no doubt be several thousand more. Not just for loss of life and property either. If a fleeing citizen stubbed a toe, he was certain to find someone to sue over it. Citizens on the other side of the city would claim mental anguish. Some would sue because the warning horns were too loud, causing possible hearing loss. Others would sue because the horns were too soft, failing to give them ample time to escape. And there was the always popular escape pod–induced whiplash.

Cal wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “The profit margin of this venture has become—”

“Unacceptable?”

“Your frivolous reply doesn’t diminish the situation.”

I leaned down, took a sample of the powdery white substance on the ground. The petrification process was unstable, and the jelligantic was disintegrating. I opened my helmet to rub a tentacle across the powder.

“Who hired you?” I asked Cal.

He balked. “We haven’t even begun negotiations on the terms of that information.”

“I’ll write you a check.”

“I’m not authorized to act without a lawyer present.”

I stood, turned on him. “I will write
you
a check.”

“I, sir, am a member of the distinguished Atlantese army. I have pledged an oath to follow certain regulations—”

My patience was at its end.

“I will write you a check. And your distinguished army another check. And another check for every citizen who survived the attack with a healthy bonus for all their pain and suffering. And one more to rebuild the city. In the end, this won’t cost you a penny.”

Cal relaxed. “That’s very generous of you, Lord Mollusk. Perhaps you would like to discuss the details over dinner?”

“I would not. I’m leaving in twenty minutes.”

“But for a matter this profitable, I must consult with my superiors.”

“Twenty minutes.”

I walked away, leaving him to work out the details.

“Is that wise?” asked Zala. “What if he doesn’t give you the information?”

“He will. Though it doesn’t matter. Whatever the Atlantese know will be unimportant.” I held up my hand, showing the powder on my fingertips. “This was the clue.”

“Then why pay them at all?”

“Because I did destroy their city. None of this would have happened without me.”

She nodded to herself. “For someone claiming not to be interested in reforming, that’s a very responsible thing to do.”

“No, it isn’t. I have unlimited resources at my disposal. Money coming out of my gills.”

“Still, I’m surprised you didn’t just hypnotize them into forgetting the entire affair. Or threaten them with disintegration.”

“Never occurred to me.”

The rescue lawyer handed me a stack of settlements in need of my signature and a pen. I started signing.

“Well, maybe it occurred to me once or twice,” I said with a half smile.

The Atlantese had been hired anonymously. A robot had paid for the assassination attempt with one ton of untraceable gold. The contracts were signed with an
X
. As long as the payment was big enough, the Atlantese were fine with not asking any questions.

I was allowed to watch the security video of the transaction. The robot had arrived in a small craft, alone. Both the robot and the ship were of my own design.

There was nothing else the video could give me, so I turned it off.

“So where are we going now?” asked Zala.

I projected a three-dimensional image of our destination.

“Less than a century ago, the Terra Sapiens discovered atomic energy. Like nearly every sentient race in the system, they immediately started seeing how big an explosion they could make with it. All very fun and a perfectly natural step in their technological growth. One of their tests was on an island in a graviton well-known as the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Are they idiots?”

“They haven’t figured out all the subtleties of gravity yet. In their defense, their development has been sporadic and confusing. They jumped onto geometry and engineering at a very young age, but it took them ages to put the steam engine to good use.”

“What were they doing in the meantime?”

“Culture,” I said. “Poetry, music, plays, philosophy. They’re really good at that sort of thing.”

I pushed a button and various images scrolled across the screen. Triumphs of architecture, art, and creative expression. It wasn’t that the other races of the system were devoid of arts. But none spent nearly as much time on it as the Terrans did.

“They’ve produced a tremendous variety of the stuff,” I said. “They argue over it, obsess over it, fight wars over it. They declare some of it all important and other bits of it to be stupid and pointless. And the most interesting thing about it is that they can’t seem to agree on which bits are which.”

Zala studied the images. “How do they get anything important done?”

“Don’t judge them too harshly,” I said. “I don’t really get it either, but it seems to make them happy.”

She shook her head. “How did they manage to remain unconquered for so long?”

“Tenacity.” I smiled. “They’re a very stubborn race. Also, lucky. The atomic blast interacted with the gravitons in a one-in-a-million way. Instead of blowing up their planet, it formed a space-time anomaly, a singular phenomenon in the system. Possibly the galaxy.”

Zala said, “Its many and varied life-forms, its strange ability to defy every reasonable expectation of extinction, its ridiculous inhabitants. I’m beginning to see why this world captivates you.”

“It is full of challenges. The anomaly was very near collapsing on itself, possibly destroying Terra, until I found a way to stabilize it.”

“More of that Terran luck,” she said.

I gave her a view of the island. “The anomaly sits on this landmass existing in a state of quantum flux, sporadically accessible, usually by accident. Or with the help of a quantum synchronizer.”

“I wasn’t aware such technology existed in the system.”

“I invented it. The relative stability of the Terran anomaly made it easier to crack the problem. Although it was made considerably easier by my preliminary studies in space-time. I got a commendation for my work on wormhole theory. Primitive stuff, but not bad for a preschooler.”

“Do you ever get tired of remarking upon your own brilliance, Emperor?” she asked.

“I’d remark upon it less if it wasn’t such a frequent topic of conversation.”

I pulled up a map of the island.

“The anomaly has allowed fauna and flora from Terra’s past to slip into the present. The radiation has caused mutation to run rampant. I call the place Dinosaur Island.”

She smirked. “Very creative of you.”

“I’m an evil genius, not a cartographer.”

Zala sat back in her chair. “I think I can guess the rest. You located a secret laboratory or storehouse or whatever on this island on the egotistical assumption that no one would be able to unlock entry to it.”

She’d hit the word
egotistical
a little hard, but she wasn’t wrong. I had made a mistake, and that mistake had unleashed consequences on Atlantis.

“No pithy response?” asked Zala.

“No pithy response.”

I activated the synchronizer and transmitted instructions to our Venusian escort. A doughnut-shaped island materialized in the ocean below as all around the air took on an emerald hue. A volcano at the northern tip belched plumes of blue-black smoke.

The thick jungle hid most of the island’s many dangers, though a family of speckled apatosauruses was visible on the closest beach, and a flock of pterodactyls soared nearby. Another flock flew in from the east. And another appeared from seemingly out of nowhere to surround our ships. Radar was unreliable on Dinosaur Island.

“They’re just curious,” I said. “Nothing to be concerned about.”

My saucer’s sensors beeped a warning.

“We’ve lost shields.”

The pterodactyls’ eyes flashed as they projected dozens of lasers at our craft. The armor plating held its integrity. One of the great winged reptiles collided with the saucer. It scrabbled for a perch, but its claws slipped across the alloy. The saucer’s rotation flung the pterodactyl away.

The Venusian scoutship had eight or nine new passengers. Without its shields, the attacking beasts were already burning and tearing their way inside.

I activated the starboard blasters, picking off the onslaught. The background radiation confused advanced sensors, forcing me to manually zap the reptiles. My defense of the Venusians was stifled by a sky darkened by attackers. I lost their craft in the living cloud.

Sensors screeched another warning.

Zala scanned the monitor. “Multiple incoming projectiles of indeterminate type.”

“Now that’s something to be concerned about,” I said.

The sensor interference meant my navicomp’s evasion protocols were hit-or-miss. The dozens upon dozens of obscuring pterodactyls made manual avoidance impossible. I punched in a standard evasive maneuver. Whoever was shooting at us had to be relying on unassisted targeting so it was worth trying.

A projectile zipped by the cockpit. Too fast to identify. Several more made contact with the pterodactyls and exploded. The craft trembled with the concussions. The swarm dispersed, clearing an opening in the sky big enough to see the several hundred missiles speeding toward us from the island below.

“Crude, but effective,” I remarked to myself.

“For someone who claims to be a genius,” said Zala with a scowl. “You certainly do make glorious mistakes.”

“That’s how genius works,” I replied.

Several missiles hit my saucer, and we fell from the sky.

The computer informed us with cool indifference.

“Brace for impact.”

Zala sat in her rolling chair, realizing it wasn’t going to do her much good in a crash. I left her to her own devices, locking my exoskeleton in its crash brackets.

The crash wasn’t so bad. At least, not in the cockpit, which had its own inertia dampener, a stabilizing gyroscope, and an emergency ejection system. At the moment of impact, we were catapulted a safe distance away. Our silver sphere rolled several hundred feet, propelled by the force unleashed, tearing a path through the jungle. The systems worked, keeping everything so smooth that to the passengers inside, it wasn’t any more upsetting than riding a rough ocean wave. It took me a few seconds to notice we’d stopped rolling.

I disconnected from the brackets and checked exo functionality.

“You could’ve warned me that would happen,” said Zala.

“Warned you about what?” I asked. “That my escape pod would work just as designed and that there was nothing to be concerned about?”

“Then why did you secure yourself?”

“I’m confident in my designs,” I replied, “but I’m not stupid.”

I performed a few scans of the outside environment. The radiation interfered with the pod sensors. The peculiar waves of Dinosaur Island made precise readings all but impossible. Right now, all I was getting were dozens of life-forms, but the readings were inexact, unreliable. The jungles were teeming with organisms, and there was no way to know what was out there without taking a look firsthand.

I pushed a button and the pod walls went transparent. Our ejection had torn a gash through the jungle. We’d crushed trees and flattened foliage, and seeing it after the fact gave me a certain pride in how well my design had worked. There were indications that we’d bounced several hundred feet without so much as a bruise to show for it. Aside from our path, we were enclosed by an impenetrable wall of green. The luminescent emerald skies above were clear, what little we could see through gaps in the canopy.

“Why aren’t they pressing their advantage?” asked Zala, ever the strategist. “We’re vulnerable.”

“I don’t know, but we can’t wait here for my man to rescue us.”

“You have someone stationed here?”

“Not really. He was already here when I set up shop, but I still rely on him. He knows the island better than anyone. Under normal circumstances, I’d say stick around and wait, but like you said, whoever attacked us probably isn’t going to give up now.”

“Tell me, Mollusk. Do you ever get tired of walking into ambushes?”

“It’s becoming a bad habit,” I replied, “but you have to admire their style, whoever they are. The real question we have to ask ourselves is whether they keep missing or whether they aren’t really trying yet.”

“Why would they be trying
not
to kill you?”

“Another good question. One I haven’t figured out. Yet.”

She noticed my smile.

“You’re enjoying this, Mollusk.”

“Some of it.”

I remembered the devastation my monster, in the wrong hands, had unleashed upon Atlantis. It was at least partially my fault. I remembered Paris blazing as Saturnite warships littered her streets. I remembered Saturn.

Those were the memories I could do without, the things I no longer wanted any part of. I’d considered erasing them. More than once. But deleting past mistakes didn’t undo them. Some things needed to be remembered.

I opened the emergency supplies compartment and handed Zala a few weapons.

“I’m already armed,” she said.

“You’ll want something bigger.” I gave her the rifle. “The wildlife isn’t going to be deterred by a sword and a pistol. You’ll want this as well, to counter the radiation.”

She took the shielding field bracelet and slipped it on. I had one already built into the suit.

Zala nodded to Snarg. “What about her?”

“Radiation just makes her hungry.”

Snarg snapped her mandibles and uttered a low-pitched purr.

My exo had built-in defenses, but I slung a wave cannon over my shoulder. For good measure, I attached a protonic disentanglement pistol to my arm. There was a spare rocketpack in the store but flying was probably a bad idea with the pterodactyls on the loose. Better safe than sorry though, so I plugged it into my back.

We exited the pod. Zala, retaining her bodyguard role, insisted on being the first one out and telling me to wait until she signaled it was safe. I humored her, but what she failed to understand was that Dinosaur Island was never a safe place.

I trusted Snarg’s senses more than anything else. The ultrapede scanned the jungle and gave the squeal that meant danger, but nothing imminent.

Something roared. The echoes made it difficult to place.

I squeaked a command to Snarg to scout ahead, then followed after her.

“I would feel better taking point,” said Zala.

“Trust me. If Snarg doesn’t see it, we won’t see it until it’s too late. You can take rear guard, if it makes you feel productive. I’m sure there are all manner of deadly mutants stalking up behind us as we speak.”

I smiled as if I was joking, but the foliage rustled. A pair of red eyes stared out from the shadows and a tail (or possibly a tentacle) whipped into view as the creature darted away.

Zala attempted to contact her battleguard, but radiation rendered her comm system inoperable. The best she could manage was a few garbled sounds that might have been words. Or possibly just static.

“We should assume they are dead,” I said. “If the pterodactyls and crash didn’t kill them, the island will.”

“We Venusians are sturdier than that. One can’t even become part of the Protectorate until we’ve survived, naked and unarmed, in the harshest jungles of Venus. Only after a warrior crawls into civilization wearing the pelt of the fearsome screeching five-horned fiend do they pass the test.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “Then they can take care of themselves. Just as long as they don’t do anything stupid like leave their crash site. Or drink the water. Or make too much noise.”

“Standard protocol is to attempt to rendezvous with the leadership,” said Zala.

“So I’ll stick to my dead assumption then. In the unlikely event that they’re not, we won’t be doing them much good if we die trying to find them. At my compound, I have equipment and supplies for a proper rescue mission. If they’re not dead, which they most certainly are.”

We reached the crash site of my saucer. My hope, albeit slim, was that the craft would be salvageable or at least give us access to better equipment. But the pterodactyls swarmed over the wreckage, tearing it to pieces with their claws, beaks, and eye beams. There was no way to get to it without meeting the same fate.

“Didn’t you know about those things?” asked Zala.

“They’re not normally so aggressive, although the fauna mutates at such an advanced rate that there’s no way to stay on top of it. But in this case, I think they were triggered.” I pointed to a device, a small missile lodged in the side of the saucer. “That must be what shorted the force field. It’s probably equipped with some kind of signal generator that gets the pterodactyls frenzied. Clever. The sensor interference makes the small device almost undetectable, and once the field is down, the reptiles do the rest.”

“Don’t tell me you made that too.”

“I’d experimented with frequency sensitivity in the wildlife but hadn’t done anything with the research. Someone must’ve carried it forward to practical application.”

“Is there nothing you’ve touched that can’t be made into a weapon?”

“Everything is a weapon,” I replied. “It’s just a matter of being creative enough.”

Zala took aim with her rifle. “I’ll destroy the device. The creatures should leave, and we might be able to salvage something of worth from the saucer.”

“That could backfire on us. We don’t know how the pterodactyls will react.”

“No, but we do know that trekking through the forest with what we have is probably inadequate for our survival.”

She made sense, but in a situation like this, it paid to weigh the variables. While I was pondering, she fired her rifle from the hip. The shot was dead on. The missile blew to bits. The pterodactyls responded with shrieks and a few lasers blasted in random directions. One came dangerously close to slicing off Zala’s head. Another reflected off Snarg’s thick armor. The ricochet killed a reptile. The pterodactyls took to the sky in a chorus of caws and screeches.

“Looks like you were right”—Zala snapped her fingers—“there was nothing to worry about.”

Something fell from the sky, landing just a few feet away from us. The metallic polyhedral embedded itself in the soil. We remained still, waiting for more to fall.

“Another weapon?” asked Zala. “A bomb perhaps?”

Snarg extended the spikes along her back. She only did that when especially tense. My exo detected an ultrasonic whine signal.

“Destroy it,” I said.

Zala fired several bolts into the device. They only blackened its shell without damage. The frequency remained, and Snarg clawed the ground and twitched.

The island rumbled. The roar of charging nodosaurids was much too close and getting closer. The canopy made direction impossible to figure, but we had only a few seconds before they would be upon us.

I grabbed Zala, activated my rocketpack. We flew upward just as the two-headed nodosaurids came crashing through the jungle, knocking down trees and crushing everything in their way. We hung suspended while underneath my ship was pulverized by the rampaging herd. The creatures’ extra heads didn’t make them smarter, only more likely to panic. And several hundred tons of panicked, armor-plated dinosaurs were enough to finish my saucer off. The nodos smashed it with their tails and butted it back and forth like a giant Frisbee.

It was several minutes before the device that had triggered their rage stopped emitting. Whether some stubborn nodo stepped on it or someone just cut the signal, the dinosaurs calmed. The herd milled about in the clearing and wreckage they’d created.

I’d hovered close to the canopy to avoid detection by any zealous pterodactyls, but it was only a matter of time before they spotted something smaller than them to blast from the sky. I landed, set Zala down. The nodos brayed, gave us some room but otherwise ignored us.

“Oh, Emperor.” Zala nodded toward Snarg, trampled into the ground. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Snarg raised her head and spit out some dirt. She crawled out of the hole and coiled up at my side.

“By the Seventh,” said Zala. “What does it take to kill that thing?”

“More than a few enraged nodosaurids.” I bent down and picked out a piece of scrap I couldn’t identify. Just junk now.

“We should get moving,” I said.

We’d both seen the plume of smoke where the Venusians had crashed. They’d come down closer to the compound, but it was still faster to continue on our own. Zala didn’t like it, but she had to admit it made more sense than trying to search a teeming wilderness.

The journey was slow, but it was better to keep moving on the island. Standing still usually meant death. If not from the assassins after me then from the irradiated monsters that called this place home. Moving wasn’t really safer, but it felt more active, gave us the illusion of having some control over our fate. I’d never been very good at inaction. I liked to initiate. If we were going to stumble across something large and hungry, I’d prefer we were the ones doing the stumbling rather than being stumbled upon. Either way, we were likely to perish on the island, but I still found the former more satisfying than the latter.

Zala questioned me. I didn’t mind. In point of fact, I rather liked being questioned. It was refreshing, a nice change of pace.

“Your compound’s security has been compromised,” she said.

“True.”

“Someone is trying to kill you.”

“Also true.”

“And yet you continue to act exactly how they want you to.”

“I don’t see any alternative. We’re unlikely to survive the night if we don’t try. Unless my operative finds us first. In the meantime, it’s better to keep moving.”

A small predator jumped out of the jungle. Zala smashed it across the jaw with the butt of her rifle, and it retreated. She didn’t lose a step.

“What if this ally of yours is in league with our mystery puppet master?”

“I sincerely doubt it. Although it’s an interesting possibility.”

“Your definition of
interesting
continues to elude me.”

We stopped while Snarg sniffed the air. Her antennae twitched nervously.

“If he’s not a traitor, then he could be dead,” said Zala.

I chuckled. “If Dinosaur Island hasn’t killed him yet, then it is safe to say he is nigh unkillable.”

Snarg chirped a warning. Zala didn’t have to be told to ready her weapon.

An obsidian boulder flew from the underbrush and came crashing at our feet. Zala swept the jungle with her rifle.

“Put it down,” I said.

“But…”

“Put it down before they kill you where you stand.”

“What kills me?” she demanded.