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In the firing range, half a dozen armoured forms were taking it in turn to test new guns on each other. The armour soaked up all kinds of punishment from projectile guns, curse throwers, and handheld grenade launchers. The noise in the confined space was appalling.
I still remembered the time the Armourer created a gun that fired miniature black holes. It took six people to wrestle him to the ground and sit on him, and then prize the damned thing out of his hand before he could demonstrate it.
One young lady was trying out the latest version of a teleportation gun. I stopped to watch. The family’s been trying to get the bugs out of that for years. Basic idea is very simple; you point the gun at something and it disappears. In practice, it tended to backfire a lot, and we lost a lot of interns. This particular intern was chained firmly to a bolt in the floor as she fired her gun at a target dummy. The dummy’s left leg disappeared and it fell over sideways. The intern whooped in triumph, did a little victory dance, and then the leg reappeared, flying straight at her with some force. Wherever the teleport gun had sent the leg, they clearly hadn’t wanted it.
Someone else was trying to get an invisibility cloak to work, but all it was doing was making the wearer partially transparent, so we could see all his insides working. Beauty really is only skin deep. A large explosion sent half a dozen armoured figures flying through the air. No one looked around. Two of the braver or perhaps more suicidally minded, interns were duelling with atomic nunchaku behind a portable radiation shield. Rather them than me. And one guy with a third eye in the middle of his forehead was flipping urgently through his notes trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
Business as usual, in the Armoury.
I found Molly talking with the Armourer at his usual workstation. Or at least, Molly was listening while the Armourer talked. Apparently Uncle Jack was taking it very badly that his test to uncover drones in the family had failed. He broke off to glower at me as I joined them.
“About time you got back. I warned you; nothing good ever came of messing about with time travel.”
“I brought you back an energy gun,” I said.
He sniffed loudly. “I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish. I’ve dreamed up more destructive things during my tea break. And I don’t care what anyone says; my test was perfectly competent!”
“How did it work?” I said patiently.
He sniffed again, even more disparagingly. “Oh, like you’d understand, even if I explained it to you in words of one syllable, accompanied by a slide show.”
“Try me.”
“It checked, very thoroughly, for the presence of other-dimensional energies in the test subject. Basically, looking for anything that didn’t belong in our reality.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that should have worked.”
The Armourer scowled, fiddling absently with an oversized grenade on the table before him, until I took it away from him.
“We’ll just have to run everyone through the test again,” he said unhappily. “And this time, make allowances for the new torcs! Being other-dimensional things themselves, I should have realised they could be used to hide or distort the results…” He shook his head slowly. “I must be getting old. I never used to miss things like that.”
“You still build the best toys in the world, Uncle Jack,” I assured him.
He smiled briefly. “So, did you get a chance to try out my new teleport bracelet, this time?”
“Ah…” I said.
“It’s not fair!” the Armourer said bitterly. “I work every hour God sends, and a few he doesn’t know about, creating weapons and devices for this family, and then no one can be bothered to give them a decent bloody field test!”
“Look, I’ve been busy, all right?” I said. “There were an awful lot of people trying to kill me in the future.”
“Good,” said the Armourer.
“The important thing,” I said quickly, before he could slide into one of his sulks, “is why didn’t Sebastian’s torc protect him from the Loathly One in the first place? Even if it happened before he received his new torc, it should still have detected the infection within him and worked to destroy it. Instead, it seems Sebastian was able to use the torc to hide his infection from your test and the rest of the family.”
“Don’t look at me,” the Armourer said stiffly. “The family armour has always been a mystery. No one’s ever been too sure exactly how it does all the things it does. The old or the new. The Heart wouldn’t talk about it. Maybe Strange would… You should ask him, Eddie.”
“I already did,” I said. “He wasn’t much help.”
“Hmmm.” The Armourer leant back in his chair, scowling thoughtfully. “Well, theoretically… The infection by a Loathly One is as much mental and spiritual as it is physical. The mind is changed, reprogrammed if you like, and the body adapts to accommodate the changed mind’s needs. The torcs have always protected us from telepathic attack, and demonic possession…but this is something else. The Loathly Ones are, after all, merely the three-dimensional protrusions into our reality of much more powerful entities. The Many-Angled Ones, or Hungry Gods, come from a place where the rules of reality are very different…perhaps even superior to ours. If the Loathly Ones really are from a higher reality, so to speak, their presence might be enough to actually overwrite our natural laws with their own, though of course only in a limited way. You could see each new infection as a beachhead into our reality; every new drone helping to weaken local laws in favour of their own… Hmmm. Yes. A very worrying thought, that. But it does give me some new ideas I can add to my test. Now I know what to look for.”
“We don’t have much time, Uncle Jack,” I said.
“I know, I know! You always expect me to work miracles to an impossible deadline! It’s a wonder I’ve got any hair left at all. I’d have an ulcer, if I only had the time. You’ll have the new test by the end of the day. Now go away and bother someone else.”
“Actually,” said Strange, his voice booming suddenly out of somewhere close at hand, “now that I know what to look for, I can perform the test for you.”
“Jesus, Strange, don’t do that!” I said, as we all jumped. “Have you been listening in again? Even after we had that long chat about human concepts like privacy, good ma
“But this is important, Eddie, really it is! I promise! I’ve already checked your whole family and its guests, and identified a number of infected drones.”
“How many?” I said, a sudden premonition sending a chill ru
“Twenty-seven,” said Strange.
Molly and I looked at each other, and then at the Armourer. He seemed to shrink in on himself. “That can’t be possible,” he said numbly. “I couldn’t have missed that many.”
“Are you sure, Strange?” I said. “You have to be really sure about this.”
“It’s not something I can be wrong about,” Strange said sadly. “The other-dimensional impact is really quite distinct. My torcs couldn’t protect you because the Hungry Gods come from a higher reality than mine. They scare me, Eddie. They could eat me up like a party treat.”
“Will everyone please stop panicking?” I said. “It’s very u