Elder Race(32)

Not a house. Beyond that I hit the realm of guesswork almost immediately.

The actual spread of infection here is surprisingly localised, no more than half a kilometre across, thinnest at the edges, then making a dense and riotous ring of growth about midway in, and then flattening out towards the centre again. But then I’ve already worked out that the “demon” is not about holding ground for territory’s sake.

In the centre there is something that the drone’s inadequate sensors say might be a crash site, or might be some other form of intrusion. The ground is rippled and distorted, and at its heart something has grown. This isn’t just some pre-existing structure layered over with the growth we have seen elsewhere. This is a novel eruption, a battery of twining tendrils or cables, thicker about than a human body, knotted and tangled around one another in a way that my mind insists is not random, though no rational pattern can be seen. The whole visceral assemblage arcs out and up and back to a height of perhaps ten metres or so, where it meets its opposite number and meshes with it in an ugly, knotted lump, the capstone to the arch thus formed. And I am making my analysis as clinical and calm as possible, and leaning heavily on my DCS, because the arch is a door to somewhere else. It is not the demon’s house, but its gate.

The inadequate senses of the drone do not, I suspect, do the sight justice. It cannot process what there is to see, within the confines of the arch. I think there is a landscape through there, but I cannot analyse it in terms of perspective and distance. I feel that I am trying to process something not intended to be trapped in the customary number of dimensions. The drone has given colours to the view, and though the colours are horrible and clash, they are also merely artificial labels because it cannot reproduce what it is seeing. I can make nothing of it.

And yet this is the source of the signal. Every pulse resonates through the arch so that the drone picks it up. And yet, draw the drone back a little and there is nothing; the signal itself does not travel out through any detectable space. I can see it sent there, received here, but to make the journey it slips through some void that does not exist for me, and should not exist at all.

The demon is not interested in claiming territory with its mark. Its spires and twisted corpses and other infestations are relays. They are the surfacing points for the signal that enters the world through this door, like a seal rising to a hole in the ice for air, before ducking under once more. And that terrifies me because nowhere in all the science I ever knew did we ever think there was anything under the ice, and now there is a boundless dark sea down there, and things dwell in it.

And I do not know what they want. As I told Lynesse, my brief interrogation revealed no lust to devour, no malice, not even a mere need to reproduce, and yet a definite drive. Less comprehensible in viewpoint than a virus.

The demon’s influence, to whatever alien end, is spreading as it intrudes into the world at point after point, but it all springs from this door. There is a physical anchor here that it is dependent on. I must focus on what I can understand.

I call the worker robot. It is a poor tool, leaking battery life and in a wretched state. Now I have asserted authority over it, though, it is desperate to help, following the tattered ends of its original programming. It bombards me with demands for a job queue. I only have the one job, and it would forget anything more anyway.

To Lyn and the others, I am just sitting down, resting my eyes. They hear the worker as it clatters overhead, trailing its broken limbs and shuddering in the air when its repulsor fields falter. But there’s still just enough life in the robot for what I need.

It is a construction unit. It has a nice set of diamond teeth. And, if all else fails, I’ll blow the battery and hope the explosion will do the job.

I have to rely on my drone, because the robot’s own sensor feed is corrupted. I send it in, recklessly fast, so that it almost vanishes into the great anomaly that is the portal itself. Instead, it ends up clinging to the frame with its three working legs.

Sample with extreme prejudice, I instruct it, and its drilling mandibles whirr to life, sheeting dust and rust, dipping towards the arch.

My thinking is based on the conduct of the entity so far—if “entity” is even the correct word. Admittedly it did tear me a new bodily orifice, but other than that our progress through the trees has been uncontested. It has no free-moving parts patrolling the interior; everything it has touched seems to have ended up as part of its relay structures, spreading the signal—which may itself be the demon, a thing of no physical substance but that can cause catastrophic changes in living matter. I am proceeding on the basis that, now my field has isolated us from its influence, we do not exist to it.

The worker robot has a very temporary field of a similar nature, created by overclocking its remaining components quite severely. It is the perfect assassin. I have it begin dismantling the fibrous substance of the arch.

I have a certain amount of science behind this, and beyond that I have what Lyn said, about the nature of demons. The science is that my drone’s instruments detect a great deal of warped electromagnetic activity about the arch, and even its sensors show that all the usual components of the energy spectrum are being affected as though the arch itself had a gravitational footprint that it, frankly, does not. The impression is of something being unnaturally held into shape by pressure exerted along an axis I cannot perceive. Sever the arch, and where does the space it constrains go? It ceases to be, and my theory is that the signal, the demon, the infection, however I salve my credulity, will cease along with it.