“It. The Sleeper?”
“Yes. And I’m ending this now.” And she takes a step towards the gate, crossing its threshold before I can shout at her to wait.
So of course I follow her.
WHEN I WAS A KID MY DAD ONCE TOOK ME UP TO THE YORKSHIRE Dales, to go walking and see the limestone pavements around Malham. They’re eerie landscapes, carved by glaciers and corroded by water over thousands of years—on a bright, dry summer afternoon it feels as if the bones of the Earth are poking through the parched skin of a mummified planet.
This place looks well and truly dead at first sight. I take three steps after Persephone and nearly go arse over tit, for with each pace I land too late, too far away. Lower gravity than Earth, but not too low—this planet still has a breathable atmosphere, which suggests something is still putting oxygen into it. Above me the sky is dark, save for a broad sash of bluish glowing dust that crosses the upturned bowl of the heavens—and a sun, angry and red-eyed and much too small. It’s daytime and the milky way (or what passes for the ecliptic of the local galaxy) is visible and the ground underfoot is dry, uneven grit and stone slabs. Mountains rise in the distance, beyond a fencelike series of isolated lumpy posts.
I look away hastily and see Persephone turning, to face the thing behind me.
The gate is a circle of darkness hanging in the air, its bottom edge just brushing the ground. About fifty meters behind it start a flight of steps so wide they seem to reach halfway to the horizon. I look up. Steps, and more steps. And up, and up, vanishing towards a false perspective, a horizon capped by a monstrous pillared building, somewhat like the Parthenon.
“Oh fuck me,” I mumble.
The ground under my feet vibrates, as if a heavy truck has just driven past. Earthquake is not a natural thought to crawl into an English brain, but it’s an understandable one when there’s not a truck in sight, nor one within a thousand lightyears for that matter.
“Huh. So this is the Sleeper’s plateau?” Persephone observes with bright-eyed interest. “Because it’s smaller than I expected—”
There’s a scritching in my shoulder bag: the complaints department is enthusiastically pointing the way ahead—right up the side of the pyramid.
“If it’s okay by you I’d rather not hang around here: the locals aren’t terribly friendly. We have a job to do—close this gate, open the next. Right?”
The next couple of minutes pass me by because I’m in the zone. Persephone, it turns out, is not carrying any high explosives or banishment rounds, so the job falls to me. “Hold this,” I say, passing her the camera. “If anything comes at us, take a portrait.”
I rummage through my bag, pull out the wire-wrap board and breakout box and my phone, and go to work. The gate is straightforward. Schiller didn’t try to booby-trap it; all you have to do to close the thing is toss a coil of wire through it and hit it with a signal at the gate’s resonant frequency—
(Memo to self: do not degauss interdimensional portals at close range without ear protection in future.)
“Bob. What do you see?” My work done, I look up: Persephone has been trying to get my attention, waving and pointing across the plain.
I have a premonition, so I look at the fence. Then I look at it again with my eyelids screwed shut. I open my eyes. “We should start climbing. Now.”
Persephone heads for the steps. I follow her. She’s walking, not running. “What can they do?” she asks as I pass her. “What are their capabilities? You’re the expert…”
“The fence wasn’t put here to keep the Sleeper in, it’s not strong enough to do that. It’s to keep people who might want to wake the Sleeper out.” (I can feel them waking up all around us, hanging on their stakes like nests of sleeping hornets. We’ve got their undivided attention because we’re the only moving things for a hundred kilometers around. They’re curious about the still-living: I think they see us as a mistake.) “And, if someone is stupid enough to open a gate inside the fence and stick around for a picnic, they’re supposed to deal with that, too. Fuck knows how Schiller managed it…” I put one foot in front of the other with careful determination, not so fast I’m going to run out of breath before I reach the top, but not too slowly either. “They’re vessels for the feeders in the night. You don’t want to be here when they arrive.”
Persephone glances behind me. “I agree.” She hurries to catch up, bounding gracefully up the steps two at a time on the tips of her toes—for the steps are shallow and the gravity low. “I might be able to hold some of them…”
“Me too, for a while.” Step. Step. (I have a history with the feeders—it’s possible I can even control them.) Step. “But.” Step. “Don’t want to weaken.” Step. Step. Step. “The defenses.” (And my contractors are another matter.) Step. Step. There are at least a hundred, possibly two hundred steps to the top of the pyramid, and the air here is as thin as in Denver: I’m already beginning to feel my heart pounding. I feel light-headed too, but not from too little oxygen—there’s something about this place that makes me feel as if my skull’s too thin and the universe is trying to leak in.
“What. Do you expect. To find up there?” Persephone asks.
“Big temple.” Step. Step. “Sarcophagus.” Step. “The Sleeper—” I misstep as the next flagstone under my foot abruptly isn’t there, then bashes into my sole hard, then drops away. “Shit!”
“Quake! Drop.” Persephone pancakes across three steps and I land hard beside her, taking the impact on one buttock. I gasp and wheeze in the thin air as dust devils rise across the plain and the steps groan and wail beneath us, stone grinding on stone. For a moment I’m terrified that the temple will fall on us: but no, it’s stood here for many thousands of years. In fact, the designers will have picked this plateau precisely because it was tectonically stable, so why is it shaking now? Don’t think about that Bob, you wouldn’t like the answer.
The tremors continue for almost a minute. I lie on my back, then as they begin to die away and the groaning and moaning stops I sit up and look down the slope of the pyramid.
One by one, the mummified corpses are helping each other down from the stakes upon which they were impaled. Limping and wobbling and rattling, they shuffle and lurch towards us across the dusty plain, still wearing the scraps of Russian civil war uniforms they wore when they were murdered. Many of them are fully skeletonized, but they’re still articulated, and they carry knives and rusty cavalry sabers. They don’t have working lungs or larynx with which to hiss brains, but you don’t need to have seen many Romero flicks to know what they’ve got in mind.
I catch a flash of light in the corner of my left eye and begin to turn just in time to see Persephone standing, camera before her face, taking aim at the lead zombie before I can tell her not to.
There is a concussive blue-white flare of light from the vicinity of the eater: it’s so painfully bright it brings tears and leaves a green-purple haze in my eye. About half a second later the crump! of the explosion reaches us.
“Woo-hoo!” Persephone bounces straight up in the air, lands a step higher up behind me. “That was fun!”
“Give me that back.”
“Why?”
(It’s a Basilisk gun. When you point and shoot one, about a tenth of one percent of all the carbon nuclei in whatever it’s locked onto are spontaneously replaced by silicon. There is a slight insufficiency of electrons to go around: the result looks a lot like an explosion, and what it leaves behind is more like concrete than flesh. Red hot concrete full of short half-life gamma emitters.)