Roog!
A numbness had spread through him. For three days and three nights, they had dived from the platform, into the depths of the swamp. Dredging, searching, knowing they were getting close. It had been easy to be promoted to the platform. No one survived up there long.
They were unchained, up here. They had to be, to dive and return. Colt had never been so tired. There was no escape from the platform, in the glare of floodlights and the shadows of the ancient pyramids. There was only one way out. Perhaps he had always known that.
He adjusted the mask on his face and dove headfirst into the water, and felt Sharol, a bullet shape beside him. Together they dove deep, their torches illuminating the murky depths. There were others down there, little mechanical submersibles and naked Venusian divers, nets and hooks and rope. And then there were the dead.
They were everywhere. They floated in a thick glow of decomposition and decay, staring at Colt with white, milky eyes. Venusians and Earthmen and Martians, sacrificed each day for the crazed god at the bottom of the swamp, this Roog, and with each death, it had grown stronger and more insane.
It was close.
He could feel it now, feel its relentless, hungry pull. How had it taken so long for them to find it, when it was so obviously there, a beacon calling out, warping minds, infecting their dreams? He dove, deeper and deeper, Sharol’s muscular body moving beside him with fluid, economic grace. A rising shoal of divers, converging on this one place.
There!
In the mud, half-buried, ghostly in the half-light of their lamps. It was an enormous stone statue: a savage face like a ritual mask, eyes gouged deep into the stone, shining with bioluminescence. There was both savagery and beauty etched into that stone idol, a hunger, a desire. It was a thing out of Atlantis or Lemuria, the last remnant of its race, found here in the last place on or off Earth. A little lost god. The divers converged on the idol. Nets engulfed it. Ropes wrapped over it, carefully. Colt watched the first of the divers, a small Venusian woman, reach the idol. Perhaps curious, perhaps, in her tiredness and despair, lacking caution, she reached out a hand and touched it. For a moment, a dreamy look entered her face, palely visible through her mask. Then she simply burst open, like fungal spores or dust, a coalescence of blood and brains, intestines and ovaries. The idol seemed to glow, it sucked in the cloud as if the Venusian had never existed, and it exulted, screaming out in savage joy across all of their minds: I … am … Roog!
Still they heaved and secured, and overhead the giant crane began to pull, and slowly, slowly, the idol was pulled free of the mud. It rose through the water, an inhuman figure and yet, somehow, carved by humans long gone, whose science had become myth and superstition. Colt stared at it in horrified awe and disgust: this was the treasure they had come to find.
And now they were its captives.
He turned his head and saw Sharol looking at him, and a shared thought passed through their minds, and they began to rise, swimming to the surface. On the platform, Van Huisen himself, surrounded by his ReplicAnts, was standing, “Well?” he demanded, “Well, is it here? Is it here?”
He reminded Colt at that moment of an ill-tempered, spoiled child, one who had received too many presents and yet still bullied away those of others. To Van Huisen, the idol was just another toy.
Colt emerged fully out of the water and caught his breath, shuddering with cold and tension. A moment later Sharol, too, rose. He looked ill in the floodlights. Overhead the crane strained against the weight of the idol. Slowly, the line rose. The divers emerged like a dark cloud in the water.
The idol rose. Its great domed head broke the surface of the water. There was a silence all across the swamp and the old ruined temple. Roog. Roog was rising again.
And no one was paying attention to Colt and Sharol.
Again, they exchanged glances. They knew each other’s minds. Quietly, they rose. The idol, pulled entirely out of the water, hung suspended in the air above the swamp. It was magnificent—magnificent and grotesque! The mud and water sluiced off it, hissing from some immense heat emanating from within the stone. The idol whispered of blood sacrifice and dark rituals, of death-magic and the science of pain. Van Huisen’s eyes were shining, he seemed as enraptured as a child.
Colt and Sharol made their way unobtrusively behind the control unit of the crane. On the deck Van Huisen stood with his arms wide open, the waves lapping at his feet. The idol was being lowered toward him. It must have been a weapon, once, Colt thought, the ancient remnants of the wars that had torn Lemuria and Atlantis apart and left their children stranded on this and other planets. What could Van Huisen do, being in control of it?
Colt raised his face to the sky. He missed the stars badly, at that moment. Then, far in the distance, but coming closer—something like dawn, like the sun. He heard a distant explosion. Sharol turned to him, a swift glance. “I’ve been hearing that sound ever since we left Port Smith,” he said. Colt shook his head, pointed: a ReplicAnt had wandered a short way away from the others, was just turning toward them, its gun beginning to rise.
They took it front and back, Sharol grabbing the cyborg’s gun as Colt kicked its legs out from under it and broke its neck, cleanly, with a twist. He lowered the ReplicAnt gently to the ground, leaning it against the control booth’s metal wall. No one had noticed. Their chance of escape was now. Colt liberated a beam pistol from the creature’s armor. They were armed, and, for the moment, they were free. Again, they exchanged looks. The water was near … all they had to do was swim for it.
Colt grinned. Sharol, after a moment, grinned back and hefted his gun. It felt good, Colt thought, to have a gun again. You always knew where you were, with a gun.
“Welcome, Roog of Lemuria, risen again after millennia!” They stepped around the control unit. The idol had been lowered onto the deck. Its eyes had not lost their weird, ethereal glow. In the distance, a false sun, growing closer. Van Huisen spread open his arms. “You who were worshipped as a god,” he said, “will now meet one who has lived as one!” And so saying, he stepped forward, and embraced the monstrous stone statue, placing his lips on the idol’s own in a lustful, obscene kiss.
“Now?” Sharol said.
“Now!” Colt said.
They stepped out in unison and began to fire.
The ReplicAnts were taken by surprise if such creatures can be said to be capable of surprise. The beams hissed through the air, agitating water molecules as they passed. The air filled with steam. ReplicAnts dropped. Others turned, firing. Colt knew they could not win, that this was suicide, yet a savage joy sang through him as he fired, rolled, grabbed a weapon from the hands of a downed cyborg, and continued to mow down Van Huisen’s guard. This was revenge, and revenge was a dish best served with guns.
Van Huisen still had his arms wrapped around the statue. Now he turned his head back, to look at them, an irritated frown crossing his face. That was what Colt always remembered, afterward: that petulant look on the Butcher of Europa’s face, a moment before it changed forever. At first, it was simple confusion, then a nameless terror entered the man’s eyes, and milky clouds began to pour into his retina. His body shuddered, spasming uncontrollably, and he began to scream.
Colt was cornered by two ReplicAnts, his arm and face bleeding and burned: he faced them, ready to die.
But no shot came. Colt stared at the ReplicAnts, but they were unmoving. Just ahead Van Huisen was still screaming, fused into the rock. Colt said, “Sharol?”
“Yes?” came the reply, from the other side of the platform.
“Are you still alive?”
“Yes.” There was a short silence. “You?”
“I … yes?”