He nodded.
“But building for what? You said before that you thought there might be a controlling intelligence at work? What if the city is its home? Sitting there and sending out an army to drag the plastics back, to build ever bigger?”
Suzie was getting increasingly excited as he spoke.
“If that’s the case—we know where its brain is. We can strike at it.”
Noble laughed bitterly.
“Yes. All we have to do now is convince the powers that be that we’ve got telepathic, intelligent, killer seaweed on our hands. One that’s building a city out of recycled plastic for its god or gods and that we know where this city is, because a bit of burnt weed told us so.”
Suzie returned the laughter.
“I won’t make the same mistake I made with the Minister. I have a cunning plan.”
July 24th - Weymouth
Noble was surprised to see thin sunlight through the windows as they made their way up through the fort.
I’ve slept all night.
Now that he considered it, he did in fact feel somewhat rested and his leg wound no longer pounded pain in time with his heartbeat. He stomped on a step. There was no answering jar of complaint, just a dull throb.
It seems I’m better.
Suzie was in a hurry and he had to up his pace to keep up, but his leg was up to the job and he wasn’t even breathing heavily when they arrived in the conference room.
Suzie strode ahead, determination showing on her face, but stopped dead in the doorway. There was a meeting in progress and the lights were dimmed, a video being shown on the big screen. From their place in the doorway, they could just about hear the commentary, but the pictures told their own story.
The first scene was an overhead tracking shot along the Thames. On either side, buildings lay in smoking ruin. Bodies, and parts of bodies, were piled high on the Embankment and military vehicles were the only traffic on roads strewn with abandoned cars, cabs and buses.
The Colonel stood at the front addressing a seated crowd of about twenty, all of whom looked military. There was no sign of any of the local politicians they’d met the last time.
“A mass evacuation of Central London is under way,” he said. “Last night our boys managed to hold this blasted weed back at the Thames Barrier, but it was a hard fight and we lost a lot of good men before the tide turned again and the threat receded. Plans are underway to nuke the Thames Estuary if it comes back. But it seems the kelp itself is not even the worst menace we face, for although it seems to stay near the water courses, the contagion it brings with it has been spreading far and wide.”
The scene on the screen changed to a street in the City of London, outside the Bank of England. The place was usually full of people in business suits going about their business industriously, oiling the wheels of the country. Not today. Today the whole street was packed from side to side with shuffling, wailing victims of what looked like a plague. Black flesh sloughed away from bone and fell steaming to the ground. Others scratched and tore at wet lesions, drawing blood, but unable to remove the traces of blackness from their skin.
Suzie whispered at his side and it took him a second or two to recognise the quote from the Inquisitor General.
“No man is to touch any part of it, under pain of himself being subjected to ordeal by fire.”
She’d been right about the fire. On screen, he saw that teams of people dressed in full HAZMAT suits were at the far end of the street, all armed with flame-throwers, all burning what looked like piles of bodies that had been hastily tossed on pyres. Smoke and small pieces of ash rose in the air and were dispersed by the wind.
Suzie whispered again.
“They’re just making it worse.”
The Colonel echoed her words.
“We discovered, too late, that these tactics were only making matters worse. It seems the best defence against this thing is concentrated Hydrochloric Acid. All stocks from all over the country are being shipped to the coast and a call has gone out world-wide for aid, but it will be some time in coming. In the meantime, we are at the whim of fate, with no way of telling where or when the next strike may come, nor indeed where it came from in the first place.”
Suzie chose that moment to speak up.
“I may be able to help with that.”
The Colonel saw her and gave her a thin smile.
“Our expert, Ms Jukes, is just lately returned from London where she was briefing the Minister. Maybe she can give us a report on her meeting.”
And maybe she can’t. Noble thought, but kept his mouth shut as Suzie moved to the front beside the Colonel.
What followed was as clever a piece of misdirection as Noble had ever seen. She didn’t lie to them. Not quite. Neither did she quite tell the truth. But by the end of half an hour she had them convinced that she had a possible answer at hand, and that, if she could be given a chopper and a backup team of marines, she might be able to find and halt the source of the menace. When she finished, the room was quiet, but Noble felt like giving her a round of applause.
The Colonel looked like a man with a renewed mission.
“It’ll take a couple of hours to get a crew prepped and supplied,” he said. “Will you be in the lab?”
She nodded.
“I have one last experiment I want to perform on the sample, then we’ll be ready to go.”
One last experiment?
Noble’s heart sank.
That can’t be good news.
When they returned to the lab and she told him what she intended to do, he was even more concerned.
“But I have to,” she said. “I believe there’s some kind of psychic link between this sample and the main—brain, if that’s what we call it. If I can put it under enough stress, I may be able to piggyback on that link, to dream its dreams and trace the source back. Don’t you see? We can find out exactly where to hit it.”
Noble nodded.
“Yes. I see. What’s that?” he asked and pointed into the corner of the room. As she moved to look, he turned and focussed on the sample jar.
“You idiot,” Suzie shouted, but her voice was pulled away, as if by a strong wind. The grip in his mind took hold again. A tide took him, a swell that lifted and transported him, faster than thought.
Massive towers and turrets rose high above the sea and gargantuan black shapes rolled through cavernous streets.
The grip on his mind tightened.
He pushed back, hard, and strained to see inside the buildings. His gaze seemed to be drawn to a spot where the dark Shoggoths were at their most numerous, slithering and rolling over sheets of plastic, melting and forming it into new strange and wondrous shapes that towered high above the ocean. And there was something else, just visible beneath many layers of material, something long and red… the rusted keel of an old cargo ship.
He probed, seeking to look deeper.
Deep in the rusted keep, something stirred and Noble suddenly felt fear, a loosening of the bowels and weakening of the knees.
He pushed one last time and thought of the warmth of the lab, of Suzie’s smile.
When he opened his eyes he was looking into her concerned face. The sample in the jar smoked and bubbled and Suzie had a jug in her hand, emptying acid over the material.
“I had to destroy it,” she said softly. “It was taking you.”
At first, her voice sounded soft, as if coming from a great distance. Someone started pounding a hammer inside his skull. But slowly, the lab started to fill in around him. There was an acrid tickling at his nostrils caused by the acid eating away at the sample in the jar.