Daemons Are Forever

Giles worked as fast as he could, but he kept having to leave his work on the bomb to defend himself. His skill with his long sword was enough to keep the drones at arm’s length, but it was clear he was getting tired. For all his skill, he was just a man, without our armour to support him. He was slowing down, missing opportunities, and it was clear from his grim expression that he knew it. And all around him, the Droods were dying.

A few broke, and tried to run. The drones in the town swarmed all over them and dragged them down, holding them to the ground until the armed drones could reach them.

The last half dozen Droods, the six left alive out of the two hundred who had followed the Deathstalker in, formed a tight circle around him, and yelled at him to finish working on the bomb while they held back the drones. Giles nodded reluctantly, sheathed his sword, and knelt down beside the bomb, concentrating on the timer. The Droods fought fiercely, holding the armed drones at bay through sheer strength and speed, but we all knew the armour couldn’t support that level of exertion for long.

“He’s not going to make it,” said the Matriarch. “They’ll get to him before he can finish. Armourer, can we detonate the bomb from here?”

“Of course,” said the Armourer. “But he still has a chance. Don’t write him off yet. We have to give him every chance…”

I started towards the Merlin Glass. This had all been my idea, my plan. I couldn’t leave Giles to die when there was still a chance I could save him. But even as I started moving, Molly sprinted past me and threw herself through the Merlin Glass gateway. I cried out, but she was already gone. She reappeared on the display screens, deep within the New Zealand ghoulville, flying through the bright, unbearable air with dazzling speed. She shot over the town in a moment and dropped out of the overbearing sky like an avenging angel, and the impact of her landing broke apart the ground before the tower. Hundreds of drones fell this way and that. She rose up, lightning swirling and snapping around her hands, and blasted away every drone she could see. They exploded where the lightning touched them, scattering rotting flesh and body parts in a hundred different directions. The beleaguered Droods raised a ragged cheer for her, and she gri

Giles stood up abruptly. “It’s done! We have ten minutes to get the hell out of here.”

“Allow me,” said Molly. She picked up Giles and the six remaining Droods with her magic, and flew them all away through the painfully bright air, towards the Merlin Glass gateway.

Behind them, drones fell upon the bomb and tried to tear it apart, but the Armourer’s work defeated them. They beat at it with their rotting fists, and cut at it with their glowing swords, but the Armourer always did good work. On the top of the box, bright red numbers counted inexorably down to zero.

Molly flew Giles Deathstalker and the six Droods back over the ghoulville, her face a mask of desperate concentration. She dropped down to where the gateway hung unsupported on the open air, and flew them all through and into the War Room. I moved quickly to seal off the gateway to that particular location. Molly touched softly down beside me and looked proudly, almost triumphantly, at me, as though to say, See? I’m still me, still on the side of the angels. You can still trust me. I smiled reassuringly back at her. What else could I do? Even though her time in the ghoulville hadn’t affected her at all. Even though she didn’t even narrow her eyes against the unbearable light, or so much as cough at the unbreathable air.

The communications officer shouted that the bomb had exploded and the Heron’s Reach ghoulville was destroyed, and we all raised some kind of cheer. It didn’t feel like a victory with so many Droods dead.

Doctors and nurses rushed the six survivors away to the waiting emergency wards, to treat them for shock and check them for radiation damage. A couple tried to say they were ready to fight on, in other nests, but you could see their hearts weren’t in it. The Matriarch ordered them to stand down, and I think they were secretly grateful. I knew how they felt. I remembered the carnage on the Nazca Plain. It’s hard to fight an inhuman foe with only human resources.

Of course, I could almost hear Martha say. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and the world wouldn’t need Droods.

Harry Drood and Roger Morningstar took their two hundred armoured Droods and went to Siberia. Tunguska, to be exact, where something crashed into the Earth in 1908. The impact was so devastating it flattened trees for hundreds of miles in every direction, and the light generated by the impact was so bright that Londoners could read a newspaper in the streets at midnight. There are lots of theories about what it was that hit Tunguska all those years ago, everything from a meteor to a crashing alien ship to a miniature black hole…but no one knows anything for sure. Except us. We know. We know everything, remember?

As far as we knew, the Loathly Ones’ presence in Tunguska was just a coincidence. They had no idea what was still sleeping there, deep and deep under the permafrost, and we were all happy for things to stay that way. What if the drones should wake it up by accident? Molly had asked. Then we’d really be in trouble, I said.

The Loathly Ones had taken over a secret Soviet science city, X37, one of the highly classified research communities set up to run the kind of experiments the USSR just knew the rest of the world wouldn’t approve of. That’s why they set this one up in Siberia, so that, if things did go very badly wrong, there’d be hardly anyone around to object. X37 wasn’t on any official map, then or now, and had been pretty much deserted in recent years by the scientists and their families after the funding dried up. When the drones came, there was just a single troop of Russian soldiers, guarding a handful of scientists working on a new kind of food flavouring. They never stood a chance. X37 became a ghoulville, and no one even noticed. Except us.

Harry and Roger and their strike force passed through the Merlin Glass and arrived in a great open square in the middle of the secret city. The surrounding buildings seemed to have evolved, transformed themselves, in disturbingly organic ways. Wires and cables wriggled through the walls, threading through brick and stone like pulsing veins. More cables hung across the streets like spiders’ webs, or exposed nerve structures, pulsing slowly on the bright air. Strange combinations of technology and living things protruded from burst-out doorways and shattered windows, as though the buildings’ insides had grown too big for them. And, everywhere, the stark fierce light, and air so thick with unbreathable elements that it looked like the whole city was underwater. The armour protected Harry and the Droods; Roger didn’t seem to notice it at all.

They could see the tower from where they were, standing tall and grotesque and defiant above the blunt utilitarianism of the old Soviet architecture. Strange energies were crackling up and down the length of the tower, as though it were trying to force itself awake.

Harry and Roger looked quickly about them as a horde of demons came ru