Biological weapons: part 2
The rapid response team is put to the test
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: Barely a year ago London was ravaged by a creature from another dimension called a ‘kengto’. Rapidly evolving, it begins in larvae form before growing to the size of a bus. Previously, London was not prepared. This time will be different…
Early shift
On duty: Sgt William Golding and squad
London.
1974. March.
An alarm rang. A new sound, one that none of them had heard before. Across the office, DC Clarke stood up and shouted something that couldn’t be heard above the din. There was evident confusion among the detectives.
Sergeant William ‘Bill’ Golding recognised the warning immediately and was signalling his squad to be on their feet. He saw that Robin was already on the telephone, even as she was keying in a combination to silence the klaxon. The woman was good: knew her job, paid attention to details, understood more than was strictly necessary given her position. Exactly the sort of solid support that Golding liked to have backing him up. Civilian or not, Robin always got the job done.
“Get down to the armoury,” he ordered Scarra, Jones and Pensthorpe. “Full load-out, be ready for anything. I’ll see if I can get more details.” There were no questions, the others immediately dropping what they were doing - a game of pool in Jones and Pensthorpe’s case - and headed for the stairs.
Golding waited half a minute for Robin to finish her conversation. She put the telephone down and turned to him, looking pale and clearly hiding some fear. “You need to get to the portal station,” she said, swallowing. “Megafauna breach. Multiple kengto.”
Golding felt his gut tighten. He wasn’t a man who scared easily - that impulse had been trained out of him years ago - but that didn’t mean he was an idiot. He started heading towards the stairwell. “What development stage?”
“Unconfirmed,” Robin said, holding her arms up apologetically. “But the report was that they’re small.”
“Let’s hope so.”
The garage and armoury were on the floor below. The others were already kitted out in the specially designed white and blue armour, which resembled typical police riot gear with specific customisations. Reinforced for withstanding a punch from a koth, for example.
“Full collars,” he said as he entered the room, grabbing his own gear. He pulled on the armoured jacket and attached the high collar, which would seal off the last of his visible skin once his helmet was on.
“What we got, boss?” asked Pensthorpe, as she clipped on her own collar.
“Kengto outbreak.” He assessed each of their reactions. Surprise, concern, but no panic. Good. “Sounds like they’re small, but that’s unconfirmed. We’ve all studied the reports from last year and the recommendations provided by the mercenary group. We’re prepared for this. But you know as well as I do that we need to move fast. Good news is that it’s going down at the portal station.”
“Kengto,” Scarra said, opening a tall locker on the other side of the room, “didn’t think I’d be getting to go at one of those so soon. I missed out the last time one was in town.”
“Boss said more than one,” Jones said, “is that right?”
“Exact numbers unconfirmed, but more than one, yes.”
“We’ll each want one of these, then, especially if they’re early stage.” Scarra removed long, slender swords from the locker and handed them out, before clipping one of his own to his belt.
“Let’s not forget these,” Jones said, opening another cabinet.
There was an executive elevator connecting the Joint Council tower to the portal station, making it easier for the politicians to go about their business an enabling visitors from the other dimensions to attend Joint Council business without needing to formally transit through customs and passport control.
The elevator doors opened and the SDC response squad stepped out onto the concourse. Alarms were sounding and the place was deserted, having already been evacuated.
“Fast and careful,” Golding ordered.
The two black portals loomed huge at either end of the concourse, unconcerned by the situation. Always present, always open. No matter the apparatus built around it in the form of the portal station, it was all illusory - if something wanted to come through the void, there was no real way to stop it.
“Body,” Jones reported, indicating an acid-burned corpse lying near the entrance to a concourse restaurant.
“Check it out.”
Three of them continued on while Jones detoured to peer beneath the tables of the restaurant. “All clear. The body looks like it’s melted. Matches kengto reports from last year. Largely intact, though.”
Golding nodded. “That could be a good sign. If it isn’t dismembering, there’s a chance it’s still at larvae stage.”
There was a groaning sound: another body, human, lying near the Max-Earth portal. A young man sprawled on the floor in Palinese dress, with two gelatinous, writhing creatures attached to him: one on his right leg, another on his left arm. The man wasn’t exactly conscious, and Golding could see that the larvae had already caused significant damage to his body.
He held up a hand. “You two, make the noise. Jones on the left, Pensthorpe to the right. I’ve got these.” He drew his sword, the silvery blade shimmering in the midday sun from the skylights.
An obnoxiously loud noise came from the air horns wielded by Scarra and Pensthorpe, who positioned themselves opposite each other with the body in the middle. The larvae stretched and shivered, rolling away from the body. Ignoring the wounds on the man’s limbs, Golding moved in with his blade and sliced the heads from the larvae. He made several more incisions to the severed heads, to ensure no possibility of them causing further trouble.
“Well done,” he said. “Turns out the Gabreith tactic does work. I wasn’t convinced.”
Jones caught up to them. “Nothing back there.” He looked down at the injured man. “Jesus. These things really make a mess.”
“See what you can do for him,” Golding said. “Nobody touch to the remains of the creatures. This armour’s good, but I’d rather not test it against whatever those things excrete.”
“Boss, I’ve got three hatched eggs, here,” called Scarra, who was closer to the Max-Earth portal and the still moving walkway. “Not to mention two more bodies. I think this guy used to be portal security.”
There was a flash of movement and a white shape, about the size of a forearm, jumped from behind the portal walkway control kiosk onto Scarra’s faceplate. “Shit!” he exclaimed, stumbling backwards as the larvae tried to find an entrance through the armour.
Scarra’s footing slipped as he stepped on the walkway and he tumbled to the ground, the walkway pulling him towards the portal.
Golding, Jones and Pensthorpe were up and moving, but the walkway was moving Scarra further away even as they closed the distance. The helmet armour wouldn’t hold for long.
The portal surface shimmered almost imperceptibly and two figures appeared: human in appearance, but towering and bulked up. They wore much lighter armour and upon arrival immediately assessed the situation. One of them, androgynous and expressionless, approached Scarra, crouched and tore the larvae away from the man’s helmet.
Arching itself into a twisting shape, the larvae wrapped itself around the rescuer’s forearm. They didn’t show any pain or concern - perhaps slight annoyance. They must both be AI hosts, Golding recognised.
Loud, undulating sounds burst from the host’s body and the larvae fell to the floor, still writhing but incapacitated. Scarra was already back on his feet, the faceplate of his helmet a melted mess. He unclipped it and threw it aside, then drew his own sword and sliced the head from the larvae’s body. He was breathing heavily.
Jones had moved to the walkway’s controls and switched off its movement. “That should be all of them, right?”
“Thanks for the assist,” Golding said, extending a hand. The uninjured host shook it with surprising lightness.
“Our pleasure. We have neutralised another three larvae on the other side of the portal. This incident is now contained.”
They turned back towards the portal.
“I’m going to need a name for the report,” Golding said.
“We are shards of Could Kill. It has been some time since we visited your dimension. This was fun.”
The portal swallowed them up.
Jones was already on the radio calling for medical assistance.
“Disaster averted,” Pensthorpe said.
“I like swords,” Scarra noted. “Not sure how to clean this, mind you.”
“Good work, everyone,” Golding said. “Let’s hope the boys upstairs can figure out how this was able to happen in the first place.”
Thanks for reading!
Easter holidays this week, which has meant some time off to spend with the family. In theory this means more writing time as well, but in practice it rarely turns out like that. As such it’s been a very relaxing week, but has also crunched up the timeline for today’s chapter.
I think it turned out OK, though? Plus I got to have a bit of fun with the illustration. Quite pleased with this one:
As noted recently, I’ve decided to stop using MidJourney for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that it was resulting in me doing less of my own illustrations. My skills don’t extend to the elaborate, photoreal technicalities of AI generation, but the image is mine. It’s much more me. I think that’s a fair trade-off.
Before I dive into some notes on the chapter, here’s a few time-limited book giveaways which I’m taking part in and which might be of interest:
Author notes
A year ago I wrote ‘The creature’, which was an epic 11-part adventure involving a single kengto, a team of monster hunters from Palinor and a proper kaiju romp around London. Check it out:
One of my favourite storytelling tricks is when the difficulty or danger of a single enemy is shown, followed by hundreds of the buggers showing up. That’s the draw of Aliens, having just watched a film in which a single xenomorph was almost impossible to kill. It’s why Starship Troopers shows the marines encountering a single bug before having an entire army scuttle over the horizon.
This story has been me doing a bit of that. We know how dangerous a kengto is, so having six of them show up is immediately, evidently bad news. In this case it runs the opposite way, with the new SDC response squad proving more than up to the task.
An interesting quirk is that I had a bit of trouble remembering the details of ‘The Creature’. I wrote those chapters over a year ago, after all. Writing this chapter required me re-reading my own work from last year, which seemed slightly silly. I guess my memory isn’t what it used to be. Still, using the sound trick from the climax of ‘The creature’ but on a smaller scale here I found quite satisfying.
Meanwhile, we also get a glimpse of a different sort of AI host, and piloted for the first time by Could Kill - a megaship which clearly enjoys blowing shit up. I do need to follow-up on Max-Earth since the bombing of the space elevator, which is what brought Could Kill in from its usual outer orbit.
Always lots of spinning plates with Triverse.
Right, hope you enjoyed. Let me know in the comments. :)
Definitely a successful chapter!
My pleasure.