Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“Do we run?” Rick yelled.

“No,” Greg said. “But it’d be a good idea to stand back against the wall when it comes, no messing.”

“It’s still her?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus.”

“You wanted to come,” her flesh-and-blood self said. There was a ripple of light laughter in her voice that had been missing for quite some time. “Insistent, you were.”

Rick grunted in dismay. They flattened themselves against the passage walls.

Julia’s alien body began to coalesce. The chamber wasn’t going to be big enough to accommodate her; Royan’s disseminator plant had been more extensive than she’d expected -another five of the hemispherical chambers, nearly a kilometre of connecting passageways. She shaped herself into a serpent form a couple of metres in diameter, hardened and roughened her external layer for traction, and surged down the passage.

“My Lord!” Sinclair shouted. “The Beast! The Beast is come.” He fell to his knees, clasping his hands in prayer. “And when they shall have finished their testimony, the Beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.”

“Oh, shut up,” Rick said.

The security hardliners’ rip guns were aimed at her in fear as her questing tip slithered past.

“Down,” her flesh-and-blood self ordered in an iron tone. “Put those guns down. It won’t touch us.”

Not that it mattered even if they did fire. She could absorb the bolts without any real damage, and take their guns away as any mother would from errant children. Yes, Royan had been right to fear the Hexaëmeron. She regarded the knot of cells that held her lover’s slumbering consciousness tenderly. They would be together again one day, and truly free.

Her tip split into two as it emerged into the catacombs, then those tips branched again. She started to probe the fissures and passages of the fault zone. A tide of cohesive oil penetrating every cranny; some of her extremities were thinner than leaves, barely five cells thick.

Caves and passages were observed, oppressively miasmatic in the low infrared band. Rock formations revealed their composition and weaknesses; ores were assayed. She watched freshets coursing through the bleak ragged cavities, several thin waterfalls splattering down isolated clefts, their volume visibly decreasing; and guessed at the lake next to the Celestial Apostles’ village being breached.

She started to siphon the water into herself, opening up a plexus of capillaries to distribute it evenly.

Bodies in muscle-armour suits were lying above the sinking water, jammed into tight rifts, or caught on jutting rock fangs. Little clumps of jetsam bobbed along. In one passage she discovered a dog, its fur badly singed, barbecued flesh peeling away. She sent out a pseudopod, and digested it.

Suzi was floating face down in a crescent-shaped cave where the water had pooled, long scorch gouges down the back and legs of her armour. Rip gun bolts had gouged molten scars in the rock, glassy beads dribbling down the walls like wax from a candle.

Julia ingested the water, then pushed a large lump of herself into the cave, inflating it like a bubble until every square centimetre of the rock’s surface was covered with a thin skin of cells. Four missiles had detonated, she could taste the bitter chemicals of the warheads imprinted on the walls. Minute particles of metalloceramic were detectable, along with composite and plastic fragments. Leol Reiger had been hit.

She retracted her far-flung body from the more distant sections of the fault zone, and concentrated on examining the area around Suzi’s cave.

Footsteps betrayed him, she could hear the crash team blundering about in and around the village cave, but discrimination procedures quickly eliminated them. She heard it then, a monotonous clumping, one foot moving slowly, coming down hard.

She infiltrated the passage behind him, sprouting exploratory tentacles into the wall cracks. They discovered a labyrinth of narrow chinks behind the surface, dislodged ore veins, rock and metal torn apart. Her body oozed in, filling every cranny. The leading edges passed round him in silence, slithering on ahead. Ten metres in front of him, she seeped back out into the passage, forming a solid clot like cold brimstone.

The armour suit was limping, left leg grating loudly at each movement. One infrared helmet beam shone weakly ahead, swaying from side to side. Two of the thermal dump panels on his back were dead, the third glowed strongly in the infrared. Her magnetic-sensitive cells picked up shivers of energy from the muscle bands. Air filter intakes on the helmet growled asthmatically.

Leol Reiger stopped, his rip gun raised to point at the smooth protoplasm barrier. Julia sculpted a relief of her own face, a metre high, and extended it out of the integument. A green laser fan from the suit’s shoulder sensor pod swept over her.

Julia opened her mouth, and used the cells inside as a diaphragm. “I warned you before, Mr Reiger, I would not forget you.”

Leol Reiger’s suit speaker clicked on. “Julia Evans. Gotta hand it to you, this is some stunt. You wanna deal?”

“No. I want you to know it was me.”

“Yeah? Then you’d better be good, rich bitch, you’d better be flicking supreme. Because I told you once already, the only way out now is you and me.”

“Yes, that you did.”

Leol Reiger fired, walking forwards. Rip gun bolts tore into her outsize face, clawing it to cinders. Steam and carbon particles spewed back at him as cells died in their hundreds of billions.

Julia started to expand her cells, filling the cavities around the passage. Osmosis impelled the water through her, bloating every capillary. She felt it as a peristaltic contraction, muscles straining at their limit. The rock screeched in agony as hydrostatic pressure began to close the passage. A violent shudder threw Leol Reiger to his knees. The rip gun clattered away. He rolled on to his back, and stuck his arms up, pushing against the roof as it descended. The metalloceramic armour buckled.

Julia kept on squeezing long after it was necessary, wringing every wisp of air out of the compacted rock.

Greg pressed himself against the rough surface of the passage wall as the alien behemoth squirmed past. He could almost believe nenorhormone abuse had sprained his synapses into hallucinosis, abandoning him in a universe of the mind’s whimsy. In a way he wished it were true, that would mean the alien wasn’t real.

Two metres in diameter, a skin like coarse leather, coloured sable-black, gruesomely supple, and possessing more inertia than a rampant dinosaur. Shadowform thought currents purled along its length, distorted human idiosyncrasies, anything but reassuring in their metamorphosis. Human without humanity.

“A serpent of the night,” Sinclair cried. “Satan incarnate.”

Strong eddies of air whipped past Greg’s face, bringing a scent of corruption, of ripe fruit mouldering on branches. He coughed, eyelids blinking against the acridity.

“Hail Mary, for all me sins I beg your forgiveness,” Sinclair said. His eyes were right shut.

“It won’t hurt you,” Julia said, her voice raised above the rasp of alien skin slithering over rock. Her thought currents had a self-assured tranquillity Greg envied.

“Not this,” Sinclair cried. “I didn’t want this. You’ve let loose the beast. I wanted an end to madness, the start of justice.”

“It’s harmless,” Rick said. “Believe me. That’s what we’ve done, neutered it. You’ll never see it again.”

Sinclair opened one eye, and shivered.

Greg wondered just how big the alien was now. There must have been a lot of disseminator plant to give it this much bulk.