Simon Green - Daemons Are Forever

And then Molly leaned right out over her side of the cab, stabbed a single finger at the dragon, and pronounced several very unpleasant Words of Power. The awful sound of the Words seemed to echo endlessly on the quiet, and the dragon suddenly didn’t seem quite so big or imposing. In sharp jerks and shudders, it shrank rapidly in size, becoming smaller and smaller, until by the time it reached Ivor’s cab it was no bigger than an insect. It fluttered around our heads, buzzing angrily, until Molly reached out and crushed it between two fingertips. And that was that.

Molly wiped her hand on her hip and smiled sweetly at me. “You should have remembered,” she said. “In space, all size is relative.”

“You scare me sometimes,” I said.

We carried on, through the space that wasn’t space, and saw many strange and wondrous things. Planets came and went all around us. One planet opened like an eye and stared at us coldly as we passed. Another had a dozen rings spinning around it, all circling madly at different speeds and in different directions. It looked like a great clockwork toy set in motion at the beginning of the universe, slowly winding down. Another planet suddenly opened up like a flower, and hundreds of long tentacles burst out of it, groping and grasping at Ivor, trying to lock on and pull us in. Tony sent Ivor plunging this way and that, with judicial use of his long steel levers, and skillfully evaded every tentacle that tried to curl around us. A few slapped harmlessly against Ivor’s sides, and Ivor seemed to shudder at the touch. But we soon left the planet behind, and it closed slowly up again, sulkily pulling its feeding tentacles back inside.

Another planet disappeared entirely as we approached, only reappearing after we were safely past.

I couldn’t tell you how long the journey took. There were sights and incidents enough to mark the passing of time, but there was no real sense of duration. It might have been minutes or days or weeks. I never felt tired or hungry or bored. But finally the stars ahead of us began to dance and swirl, churning around us in complicated patterns, finally coalescing into a giant rainbow below us, of such rich and vivid colours that they dazzled the eye. There were even hues and shades that had no counterpart in the dull and ordinary everyday world. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Molly and I clung together for comfort in the face of something so inhumanly glorious, while Tony clung to Ivor.

“What is it?” Molly said finally, breathlessly.

“It’s the Starbow,” said Tony, his voice faint and awed. “I read about it in grandfather’s journal, but I never imagined…”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said, “but never expected to ever see it. They say you can follow it to the end of the universe, and maybe even to your heart’s desire.”

“Oh Eddie,” said Molly. “Could we…”

“Yes,” I said. “We could. But we have somewhere else we have to be. We have duties, and responsibilities.”

“Yes,” said Molly, not looking away from the Starbow. “If only…”

“If only,” I said. “Always the cruellest words. Tony, get us out of here.”

He poured on the speed, and slowly we left the Starbow behind us. And sometimes I think that was the hardest thing I ever had to do.

Finally Merlin’s Glass reappeared before us and we roared through it, and just like that we were back in the reality we knew, back in the future I’d seen before. The Time Train seemed to drop like a stone for a long moment, and then a great icy plain rose up beneath us, and the next moment Ivor was churning along through thick snow. Molly and Tony and I were thrown this way and that as Ivor’s speed cut back in vicious shocks and jerks. Tony wrestled his controls with both hands, shouting and cursing, and finally the Time Train slammed to a halt.

It was suddenly very cold, our breath steaming thickly on the air before us. My bare face and hands smarted from the sudden exposure, and I peered out the side of the cab, looking for familiar details. We were actually on the alien world this time, with its pink sky and three fiercely shining suns. The snowy wastes stretched away as far as I could see in every direction. Thin twists of mist turned this way and that on the freezing air.

“You bring me to the nicest places, Eddie,” said Molly, beating her frozen hands together and blowing on them.

“Hey, this is a whole new alien world!” I said.

“You couldn’t have picked a warmer one?”

“Well, we’re in the right place,” I said.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I recognise the bodies,” I said.

They were just as I remembered them, dozens of dead men and women, scattered across the bloodstained snow.

“Giles Deathstalker’s work,” I said. “He’s a hell of a fighter.”

“Could be a hell of a mass murderer, for all you know,” said Molly. “Where is he, anyway?”

I looked around, but there was no sign of the future warrior. I had to wonder just how accurate Ivor and Merlin’s Glass could hope to be. We’d come a long way, and just a few day’s difference after…who knew how many centuries, was only to be expected. A lot could happen to a man on the run in just a few days, most of it bad. But…Ivor and the Glass were all I had, so I was in no position to complain. Molly and I climbed down from the cab and strode out across the blindingly white plain, our feet sinking deep into the thick snow with every step. It was bitterly cold, almost unbearable, away from the protection of Ivor’s cab, but the sheer effort involved in forcing my way through the snow soon had me sweating. Every breath seared my lungs, and my forehead ached like someone had punched it.

But it was still an alien world, with three suns burning bright in the garish pink sky. I pointed this out to Molly, but she just grunted, unimpressed, and hugged herself tightly, as though to keep any warmth from leaking out. I waved cheerfully at Tony in the cab, and he waved back, but showed no sign of wanting to leave his beloved engine.

I trudged through the snow towards the dead bodies. They were everywhere, hundreds of them, lying sprawled in awkward poses in the blood-soaked snow. Some were missing limbs, some were missing heads. Some had been gutted, hacked open. But up close, it soon became clear that my earlier identification had been wrong. These weren’t men in futuristic armour; their armour was a part of them. These people were some kind of cyborg. Man/machine composites. Steel cables and jagged pieces of technology projected from dead white flesh. Cameras in eye sockets, guns built right into the hand. No two of the bodies were exactly the same, but they were all clearly the result of the same process. They looked ugly as sin. Whoever had put them together had valued function over aesthetic. The faces seemed human enough, and the blood was all too familiar.

“Nasty injuries,” said Molly, lurching to a halt beside me. She leaned over one body for a better look, careful not to touch. “But no bullet wounds. These poor bastards have been hacked to pieces. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Mr. Stab had beaten us here.”

“Giles does seem to prefer the sword, believe it or not,” I said. “He was carrying a bloody big one the last time I saw him.”

“They’re using swords in the future?” said Molly incredulously. “When they have the technology to produce cyborgs like these?”

I shrugged. “Who knows what’s normal around here?”

I spotted a discarded gun lying in the snow, and bent down to pick it up. The gun was eerily light in my hand, for all its bulky size. It was mostly a dull green metal, crusted with glowing crystals and blinking coloured readout lights. But it had a barrel, and a trigger, so I aimed it out across the plain and fired. A searing bolt of energy blasted from the gun and blew a massive crater out of the snow a good hundred yards away. The ground shook under our feet for a moment, and Molly grabbed at my arm. All the snow above the crater had been vaporised, leaving thick spirals of mist twisting in the air.