“You might be able to,” said Savi, her face close to one of the tanks. “Or perhaps not. The fax is coded for the body in the tank. The faxing machinery might not recognize your codes and might just . . . flush you.”
Colored fluids flowed into the tank with the new corpse. Clusters of tiny blue worms appeared from an aperture, swam to the dead man, and burrowed into his battered skull and into his bloated, white flesh.
“Still want your extra tank time?” Savi asked Harman.
Harman only rubbed his chin and squinted down the multiple rows of glowing tanks. Suddenly he pointed. “Holy Christ,” he said.
The three approached slowly, half walking, half floating in the low but no longer negligible gravity. Daeman simply did not believe what he was seeing.
A third of the tanks at this end were filled with fluid but empty of human bodies. But there were bodies—parts of bodies—on every available surface here: the floor, the tables, the tops of servitor consoles, on top of disabled servitors themselves. At first glance, Daeman thought—hoped—that these were more mummified remains of the posts, as horrible as that was, but these were no mummies. Nor were they the remains of post-humans.
The firmary was something’s smorgasbord.
Lying on the long table ahead of them were human body parts—white, pink, red, moist, bloody, fresh. A dozen forms on that table, male and female, seemingly still wet from the tanks, lay eviscerated—organs scooped out, meat gnawed off bloody ribs. A human head lay under the table, blue eyes staring up in what might have been a second of shock as something or someone ate the body to which it had been attached. A small pile of hands lay in front of a tall-backed swivel chair turned away from the table.
Before any of them could speak to each other on the commline, the chair swiveled around. For a second, Daeman thought it was another human body propped up in the chair, but this one was greenish, intact, and breathing. Yellow eyes blinked. Impossibly long forearms and clawed fingers unfolded. A lizardy tongue flicked out over long teeth.
“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as theyself,” said what Daeman realized had to be the real Caliban. “Thou thoughtest wrong.”
Savi and Harman grabbed Daeman as they kick-flew their way up the length of the firmary, Daeman screaming into the comm the same way he’d screamed on the way up in the chair. They hit the white wall dead on, passed through it without pause—feeling the thermskins clutch them tighter as they hit the freezing near-vacuum outside the firmary—and then kicked strongly off the clear wall as they dove toward the ground three hundred feet below.
Savi and Harman released Daeman’s arms as they paused on a platform sixty feet above the city floor. He had time to notice the floating mummies all around, bits of their throats and bellies bitten away with the same bite radius as the humans inside the firmary, realized that he was about to vomit into his breathing mask, and then the two on either side of him found something solid to kick from and swam toward the darkness ahead.
Daeman tugged up his mask in desperation and vomited into near-vacuum and stinking, cold air. He felt his eardrums bursting and his eyes swelling, but he tugged the mask back in place—smelling his own vomit and fear—and kicked off after Savi and Harman. He didn’t want to run. He just wanted to curl up, float in a tight ball, and throw up again. But even Daeman realized that he didn’t have that choice. Flailing wildly, looking over his shoulder at the glow of the firmary, Daeman swam and ran and kicked for his life.
Caliban caught them in the darkest corner of the city, where the wild-kelp beds swayed to the coriolis of the slowly turning asteroid. All of the glass walls of the city here were clear, showing them the cloud-whitened earth floating by for several minutes and then several minutes of darkness broken only by the cold stars. It was in the darkness that Caliban came.
The three huddled together in the darkness there.
“Did you see him come out of the firmary?” gasped Savi.
“No.”
“I didn’t see anything after we ran,” gasped Harman.
“Was it a calibani?” gasped Daeman, realizing that he was weeping, not caring that he was. He asked the question with his last reservoir of hope.
“No,” said Savi over the comm, her tone dashing Daeman’s last hopes. “It was Caliban himself.”
“Those bodies . . .” began Harman. “Fifth Twenties?”
“It looked like younger ones, too,” whispered Savi. She had the black gun in her hand and was swiveling, peering into the darkness between the strands of swaying kelp.
“Maybe the thing used to harvest just the Fifth Twenties,” whispered Harman over the comm. “But it’s gotten bolder. Impatient. Hungrier.”
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” hissed Daeman. It was the oldest invocation known to humankind, even if they didn’t know what it meant. His teeth were chattering
“Still hungry?” asked Savi. Perhaps she was attempting to calm Daeman down with some dark approximation of humor. “I’m not,” she said.
“I am,” said Caliban over their radio frequencies. The monster floated out of the kelp, cast his net over the three of them, batted the gun out of Savi’s hand, and gathered them in like fish.
44
Olympus Mons
It felt strange to Mahnmut not to have Orphu in tightbeam range. He hoped his friend was safe.
The gods burst into the room a second after the human, who had never identified himself, quantum teleported out. Mahnmut didn’t believe in invisibility other than good stealth material, but he was obviously invisible to the tall gods and goddesses who crowded into the room and knelt around Hera. Mahnmut slipped out between the bronzed legs and white togas and began retracing his way through the labyrinth of corridors. He discovered that it was very hard to walk as a biped when one is invisible—he kept checking to see where his feet were and they were nowhere—so he dropped to all fours and padded silently along the halls.
Because Orphu had slowed down the gods escorting him to his cell, Mahnmut had seen where they’d stored the transmitter and Device. The room had been down a side corridor three right turns away from the corridor where he and Orphu had been incarcerated.
When Mahnmut reached the storage room, the hallway was empty—although gods passed through the adjoining hallways and intersections frequently—and Mahnmut activated his low-wattage wrist laser to cut through the door. Even while he was cutting he realized how odd this would look to any divinity turning into this hallway—no moravec in sight, but a twenty-centimeter red beam floating by itself, slowly burning a circle into the lock mechanism of the huge door.
The laser could never have cut through the entire door, but it cut a nice five-centimeter circle above the lock—Mahnmut’s hearing could detect the solid-state mechanism shifting up through subsonic frequencies—and the door swung inward. Mahnmut closed it behind him when he stepped in, hearing footsteps coming down his corridor only a few seconds later. They passed by. He tugged off the leather Hades Helmet cowl the better to see his hands and feet.
This was no empty holding cell. The room was at least two hundred meters long, half that high, and filled with bars of gold, heaps of coins, chests of precious stones, small mountains of polished bronze artifacts, marble statues of gods and men, great seashells spilling pearls onto the polished floor, dismantled gold chariots, glass columns filled with lapis lazuli, and a hundred other treasures, all gleaming from the reflected light from flames flickering in a score of gold fire tripods.
Mahnmut ignored the wealth and ran to the dull-metal squirt transmitter and slightly smaller Device. There was no way that Mahnmut could carry both things out of here—invisibility didn’t keep one inconspicuous when two metal devices could be seen floating down the hallway—and he knew that he only had seconds in which to act, so he dragged the Device out of the way, found the correct jackpatch on the communicator, and triggered it with a standard low-voltage command.