Horror Show

Arch/Eternal - Chapter Twenty-Four

First thing, real quick…

For the newcomers: Arch/Eternal is a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little Dan Simmons. It’s also an experiment in long-form serialized fiction on Substack.

For the allcomers: If you haven’t read any of the previous chapters, please abandon any feeling of obligation to catch up, and instead just start HERE, with this chapter.

That’s what the short summary below is for.

By the end, you’ll know whether you want to keep following along or not. And I promise to always include an updated summary, so you’ll never have to worry about keeping track of important details.

Two other things (even quicker) —

If you really want to start at the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

I also recommend you check out A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy at some point, for a good ten thousand foot perspective of the world building behind this story.

OK, now the summary:

Earth is a protected (read: ignorant) planet nested within a galactic community known as the Fellowship. In an effort to help Earth attain full citizenship, and to rescue its people from total self-destruction, historian/researcher and secret ambassador Rita Freeman is recruiting talented young people to build a better society, starting with a movement called Cubensia.

By some stroke of fate or fortune, three of them — Jackson, Esther, and Deek — are late to a Cubensian launch party that becomes ground zero of an attack that destroys an entire city block in Boston. Rita scoops them up into her spaceship, then travels through an interstellar gate buried on the dark side of the Moon to a planet called Priezh, where they will receive the Fellowship’s version of basic training.

On the way, Rita explains the galactic drama that has been playing out between the Fellowship and the Confederacy, and the Firstborn, a powerful race of beings at the head of each of them — respectively called archs and eternals. She is suspicious that the attack in Boston was the work of an eternal, and tasks her associate, Callan Tate, with trying to solve the mystery in her absence.

While visiting a dealer of exotic artifacts, he learns of a shady figure who might have known about the attack in advance. In an effort to track this person down, he decides to enlist the help of an old flame in New York named Margaret McEvoy, aka “Marvy,” who manages what is basically a secret hotel in New York for people affiliated with the Fellowship on Earth.

When we last saw Callan, he had left a ciphergram with Marvy, who agreed to do her best to get it into the hands of that shady figure. The ciphergram itself contained a simple message:

An invitation to meet with a Firstborn arch named Sky, at a certain time, in a certain place.

But instead of the shady figure (who Callan is referring to as “Roger”), a bunch of mercenaries show up. While their weapons and getup are mostly terrestrial, they’ve also brought a few non-terrestrial tech surprises, one of which manages to subdue Callan long enough for the mercs to work on penetrating his armor with point-blank machine gun fire to the head…

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Horror Show

Callan spasms awake. 

His training keeps him from panicking while his brain recaptures temporal and spatial continuity. 

Machine guns to the head.

Tangled in a tangler.

Blood. Screaming.

Those last two pieces are really helpful because they’re still going on. 

It the split second it takes to get himself off the floor and into a more defensive posture, he puts everything back together.

The tangler must have lost power just before it breached his armor, which, with all its resources suddenly available again, was able to deliver field treatment for Callan’s concussion and restore consciousness. He had probably only been out for a few seconds. 

In that time, all six mercs at the tunnel entrance had been incapacitated, along with at least six more that had streamed in from the halls. 

It was Marvy.

Callan watches as she deals with another squad entering from the tunnel. Muzzle flares perforate the pitch darkness to reveal her half-cloaked silhouette — it would be a scene of sheer terror to anyone without enhanced optics of some kind. 

At most, the men get one sweep of gunfire before their weapons fell to pieces on the floor, along with pieces of their fingers and hands. If they kept fighting, they lose more.

Hence the screaming.

It would be hard to spot if you didn’t know what you were looking at, but Marvy is using a neutron blade. Callan is fuzzy on the physics, but he knows that the edge is a lattice of electromagnetically inert neutrons, held together by who knows what, and able to cut through pretty much anything with basically zero resistance. 

Not a lot of people have those things. In all his time in the PF, Callan has only seen one in use a handful of times. They are unthinkably difficult to manufacture, and fairly easy to destroy, which makes them altogether less than desirable ordnance in typical battle scenarios.

This, however, is not a typical battle scenario. Roger’s guys have no idea what to do with a neutron blade. She might as well be using a light saber against a bunch of toddlers with nerf guns. 

“Marvy!” he shouts.

“Morning sleepyhead,” she says.

“These guys are gonna bleed to death.”

“Hazards of showing up uninvited.” As the last man standing grabs a pistol with his remaining hand, she flicks the blade up and off comes his leg at the knee. He goes down firing, then adds one more angry growl to the chorus of agony filling the lightless room, pawing at his thigh in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding.

Callan feels sick.

Marvy shouts in the direction the last group came from. “If the rest of you hang back for a minute, we’ll try to keep your buddies alive. Sound good?”

When no one answers, she shrugs at Callan. “You wanna start over there?”

He makes his way across the blood-slicked floor full of writhing bodies to starts with a guy who has half as many limbs as he did when he got here. With direct contact, he can let the armor deliver a combination of heat and micro-sutures to cauterize the stumps. A healing touch. 

Screaming and cursing briefly amplifies as they work, so they switch to direct comms.

“You gonna tell me what you’re doing here?”

“Obviously I followed you,” she says.

“So you knew those guys were on their way. You could have warned me they had a tangler.”

“First off, I didn’t know. I kept my distance. Wanted to see how it would play out. And how was I supposed to know you wouldn’t be able to handle a bunch of unarmored terran goons?”

Callan’s face goes hot. He swallows back the obvious retort, refusing to take the bait. She has, after all, probably saved his life, and she’s even helping clean up the mess. If they’re lucky, none of these men will die.

Not that they’re making it easy. One guy he approaches can’t stand up for the deep gash in his thigh, but manages to scoot frantically away from Callan on hands that are mostly fingerless. 

“Come on,” Callan says, and grabs the guy’s foot to drag him into a position where he can get a hand on that leg wound. 

Suddenly, the guy’s whole body twitches, then goes still.

Wait. Is he dead? 

That doesn’t make sense — the wound was bad, but there’s no way—

“Uh, Callan?”

Marvy is crouched over another man, also limp under her hands. 

That’s when Callan notices that the room has gone silent. All of the cursing and groaning and heavy breathing, stopped. It would be clear even without the augmented sensory data from the armor — it’s a room full of corpses. 

Callan and Marvy share a brief look, then get up and run through the rest of the halls. Within a minute or two, they meet back up at the tunnel entrance to confirm what they both already suspected. 

“Someone must have thrown a kill switch,” Marvy says.

Callan jams an armored finger into her armored chest. “Is this Fed? Are they here?”

She puts her hands up. “I wasn’t shitting you before, and I’m not shitting you now. I don’t know what the fuck is going on here.”

For now, he believes her. She might be vain and ruthless, but she’s never been liar. Playing double agent would not be her speed. 

“Listen,” she says, “whoever did this has to be close. No way these guys were riding on our network, I would have seen it.”

She’s right. Under hundreds of meters of solid rock, these guys must be using a local system they brought with them.

Marvy leads the way out into the tunnel and toward the base camp Callan had heard them setting up earlier. They don’t make it halfway before they feel, then hear, a series of explosive shocks. 

“Son of a bitch,” Callan says. 

When they get there, the site is a shallow crater in the skin of the tunnel. Nothing bigger than a thimble for a mile. Marvy looks at Callan, who nods.

They head back, past where Callan’s little pod is still hidden, to Marvy’s ride — a silver-shelled bullet about the size of a minivan. Marvy grabs an inset handle and pulls open a hatch. The car is double-walled, like a thermos. In contrast to the mercurial sheen of the outer shell, the inner one is brown with rust. Inside the cabin is all wood and faded textiles, like an ancient train car. 

“Where did you find this thing?” Callan asks.

“It does the job,” Marvy says. 

They figure the top-speed of any terran-made getaway vehicle down here in the tunnel is unlikely to be more than a few hundred miles per hour — a fraction of what their vehicle will be able to manage, with its outer shell designed to interface directly with the tunnel walls, and reduce the drag to near zero.

It takes moments to rocket past the blown up base camp in pursuit of any potential survivors. And then just a few minutes later, they pick up a heat trail, and catch up to a modified humvee hovering along the base of the tunnel.

“Bastard,” Callan says, thinking of all those dead men.

The things turbines are hot enough to scream at the infrared sensors, but other than that the vehicle is dark. 

Marvy brings their bullet up the side of the tunnel wall, all the way up to the top curve, and matches speed right above the other vehicle. 

It’s tricky to keep it steady when Callan opens the hatch, as air whips into the chamber with immense force through the sudden break in the silver surface. Thankfully there’s nothing loose that can go flying around, and Callan’s armor can compensate for the buffeting well enough.

He positions his body so that he can drop down from the hatch, as Marvy pulls forward to correct for the velocity he’ll bleed off to air resistance as soon as he let’s go. 

Whoever is driving doesn’t seem to notice until he drops down onto the crude hovercraft. But as soon as he touches down, it starts jerking wildly, trying to shake him without spinning out of control. 

It’s impossible to shake him, of course. Callan’s armor binds to the metal at every point of contact. 

To get inside, he stiffens his hand, plunges it into the roof, and tears off a chunk like he’s opening a Christmas present. 

Red light gleams upward from the opening, and he can see a man squint up through the sudden fury of wind cutting into the cabin. 

Then, despite the blinding currents of air, the man’s eyes go wide, and he slumps over the controls of the vehicle. 

“No!” Callan shouts, his voice instantly lost in the roar fo wind. 

He worms his way inside as the vehicle lists to the right and drifts up the wall of the tunnel.

Callan gets a hand on the man and confirms he’s dead, just as the humvee’s center of mass crosses the vertical and flips.

The tunnel’s floor instantly pancakes the roof, pinning Callan and the dead man inside the cockpit, then bashes the front, bottom, and sides, over and over, as the full hovering velocity of the vehicle spends itself in an uncontrolled roll. 

The wreck smears half its mass over more than a mile before the ruined lump of metal and rubber and flesh finally comes to rest. 

Callan is fine, of course, thanks to his armor’s compensatory measures of impact deflection, but the remains of the vehicle, along with the other man’s body, have been compressed and tangled around him like pastry dough. Extracting himself is a messy process. 

When he’s clear, he finds Marvy standing outside her bullet car, holding a fist-sized lump of something Callan doesn’t recognize until she tosses it to him.

Oh.

The dodecahedron is heavier than its iridium iron alloy can account for. That’s because inside is a compressed sphere of hyper-dense material that contains one half of a quantum entanglement. 

Callan looks up at Marvy. This is Firstborn tech.

“Are we gonna find an eternal on the other end of that thing?” she asks. 

“I don’t know. Wanna find out?”

“Only on the condition that the answer is no, and then we get to carve up whoever is running this little horror show.”

“Well, we can always hope,” Callan says as he climbs back into her car.  

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