Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 68: Hot Trophy (Patreon)

“The strike is cancelled,” Kaluya told the operator in the tone people use to announce a relative's death.

The operator evidently started making excuses.

“Oh, give it a rest!” Kaluya said. “I don’t need your miserable arse, but so that you know, we let a Seven slip away because of you…

“Fine, because of the captain, then. He’ll be the one to blame if we lose the war, not you. That’s it, piss off.” Kaluya cut the connection and looked at Novak. “My reputation at headquarters wasn’t great to begin with, and you’ve just killed it.”

“I’m not the one who keeps threatening operators with a naked landing party,” Novak said. “Queen, how long until the fallout?”

“The cloud is moving away from us, sir. If you mean the place where the head landed, four minutes. The forecast is imprecise.”

“Lower the ramp,” Novak told the Queen, then got up and put on his armour, black to match the Queen. He didn’t bother with a platform; he materialised it on his body, pulling it from his spatial pocket, as everyone did these days. Of course, he did it slowly and elegantly, in motion. He didn’t need to freeze for the armour to adjust to his figure.

Then again, I could do that too.

“Need a hand?” Kaluya asked.

“I’ll manage,” Novak replied, tapping his breastplate. “I’ve got good radiation shielding.”

“Well, mine’s no worse,” Kaluya grumbled, but didn’t object when Novak jumped out of the ship. For a brief moment, I got another notification about elevated radiation levels.

The Queen showed us the external-camera feed: a small black figure flying toward the ridge. Then the nearest drone took over the image.

Novak took less than a minute to cross the ridge and another minute to reach the first ring; the broken one was knocked to the ground. He slowed down but didn’t stop. Instead, he flashily flipped his jetboard upside down, hung off it and touched the ring with his hand in flight.

The portal ring vanished into his spatial pocket, and he flipped the board right side up again. At the next ring, still standing upright, he just slowed for picking, then dived down the slope to where the head should have been.

The first snow began drifting past the drones’ cameras. Not the icy sand the shock wave had flung about, but real, fluffy snow. Its colour was a slightly strange shade, not quite white, but not as grey either. Pearl maybe? Tonnes of snow the blast had vaporised had risen several kilometres into the air, frozen there again, and were now slowly coming back down with the radiation, multiplying background levels and making these mountains, or at least this part of them, unfit for private residences anymore.

I didn’t know how the ski resort would fare.

“Queen? Will the cloud reach the ski resort?”

“If the wind doesn’t change, the cloud will pass ten kilometres to the north.”

“Is there any point warning anyone?” I asked Lina.

She waved me off.

“You think anyone missed a nuclear blast and mass avalanches?”

I shrugged so I wouldn't look like an idiot and went back to watching Novak. Snowflakes were already drifting around him, but he was already by the head. No acrobatics this time. He jumped off his board and nudged the head with his foot, as if checking whether it was safe to touch.

It must have been giving off a fair amount of radiation, considering how close Trazgul had been to the epicentre of the nuclear blast. But we didn’t know exactly how close. How far away the body had ended up meant he’d tried to escape in the last few seconds.

Novak bent down, put the head away in his spatial pocket, jumped back on his board and raced back.

The snow was getting heavier. Novak began to look like a car in snowy weather. A white mass with a grey, glossy tint started sticking to him like snow on a windscreen. Several times, he used my trick, the one I used to get rid of sand stuck to my body after training: he coated his armour in Fist Qi and detonated it, sending the fresh radioactive crust flying.

The drones, for all their shielding and bells and whistles, had no such protection. Snow stuck to their casings, and the radiation began interfering with the picture, which had mostly turned into shots of falling snow with nothing visible behind it anyway.

According to the Queen, the background radiation at the epicentre under the fallout was sixty-two times higher than normal. Fortunately, beyond the ridge where we were, only the odd snowflake drifted past, and the front was moving away from us. We had a brief spike in the background level when Novak returned and lowered the ramp, but it dropped once he took off his armour. It didn’t return to its previous level, though.

“Queen, relocation protocol with data deletion,” Novak ordered, making a few gestures in his interface. “Then set course for Bureau Landing Pad Four.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Vaclav,” Kaluya asked, “what do you need that horned trophy for? You can’t hang it on the wall; it’s so hot no amount of decontamination will help.”

“It’s not a trophy,” Novak said with a smile I already knew. It was the cold smile of pure calculation. “It’s a hook.”

The portal activated, and Novak gestured impatiently.

“We’re short on time!” he said.

Kaluya went through the portal first, Novak last. We all found ourselves in a stone filtration chamber with two portals. The operator declared decontamination required, but Novak said it could wait and gave a code, and Kaluya looked him up and down.

We were let straight into the facility… Beta-Beta-Pi, I suspected. Nobody argued; the guards just ran their eyes over us, but what could they have done against two Sixes anyway? They didn’t even make us go through decontamination.

Kaluya continued the interrogation once we were in the lift.

“You can’t keep me in the dark!”

“I wasn’t going to,” Novak replied, striding briskly in a direction unknown to me and working his interface with one hand. We, his disciples, trailed along behind the two Sixes, all ears. He went on, “What’s more, I want to do this as publicly as possible. I want to show this head to the whole planet!”

Kaluya fell out of step, processing his words.

“Have you gone mad, or do you have a plan? You want to hand Vezhkar over to his uncle so that he can’t wriggle out of it?”

“No,” Novak admitted. “I don’t want to hand Vezhkar over. And no, I don’t have a plan. But events won’t wait for me to get ready. We have a chance, and I’m going to squeeze everything I can out of it.

“I’m not kidding myself that Ghaurzakh was a loving father who’ll be destroyed by grief at losing his son, but it should wound his ego. Narcissistic egotists act rashly on emotion. But emotions burn out quickly, so I’m going to pour oil on the fire. I’m going to spit in his face in front of the whole planet. And then I’ll offer him a one-on-one meeting, if he’s not scared.”

Kaluya immediately understood the purpose, but he had doubts.

“And how are we going to kill him? He’s an Eight! We couldn’t even kill a Seven with a nuke. Besides, we wouldn’t survive the blast ourselves.”

Novak turned to Kaluya and pointed to his ear.

“Artem, I need a room fully shielded against radiation, done up as an office. The interior doesn’t matter, but put in a panoramic window looking out onto snowy mountains, so it looks majestic…”

Artem evidently started asking questions, and Novak answered them.

“It’s for recording a video…” he said as the lift doors opened and he set off. “I’ve got a highly radioactive object with me that has to be in shot…

“Yes…

“I’ll be without armour, so have anti-radiation drugs and force fields ready…

“Five minutes!..

“Ten at most!” Novak made the gesture that meant ending the call, walked to his office door, and turned to Kaluya. “There’s no need for two Sixes to be there. I’m enough on my own. Especially if it’s a one-way trip. But I have my doubts about how reliable nuclear bombs are too. That trick won’t work a second time.”

Novak opened the door, and I could tell for sure this was Beta-Beta-Pi. I’d been in this tiny room before, which lacked the usual grandeur, but it held something I hadn’t known about: a standalone null-link station hidden in a cupboard. And this lump of reinforced steel and electronics didn’t accept shortcuts. Novak had to go through several stages of identification and scanning and answer a couple of simple questions. For example, what his favourite juice was.

Pomegranate, as it turned out.

What’s more, Kaluya hadn’t known about this station.

He asked, “What the hell is that?”

Novak pointed to his ear again and dropped into his chair. Wearily, he leaned his head back against the headrest and even closed his eyes, yet he kept up a polite, fairly energetic tone.

“Greetings, Master! Do you remember we had a theoretical conversation about what to do if I had a chance to meet Ghaurzakh?..

“The question is moving from the theoretical to the practical. Now I need to know how I can, if not kill him, then at least wound him mortally…

“No, I’m absolutely serious…

“Where do I start! Vezhkar killed Trazgul, Jake killed a Six…”

Adam jabbed a finger at his own chest, making sure everyone, except Novak, who had his eyes closed, saw it, but didn’t butt in.

“Not now. Perhaps in an hour,” Novak went on. “Agreed.” He gestured for me to hang up, opened his eyes, looked at me, and announced that we had to be at Outer Oort Base No. 1 in an hour.

Artem didn’t manage it in ten minutes, but what he did manage in half an hour was impressive.

For filming, they chose a glass laboratory box on the third level, stripped out all the equipment, and attached a mobile decontamination chamber, creating a small airlock with transparent walls. The glass wasn’t ordinary, but to be sure, they added force fields to hold back radiation more reliably. Then they covered one wall with thin stone slabs, hastily grown by cultivators, and turned another into a panoramic window overlooking the mountains, removing any obvious signs that the window was fake.

The ‘office’ was furnished from the corner where those two walls met. A heavy dark-wood desk sat against the stone wall, with paintings of a waterfall and horses in the snow on the wall.

Where on earth had they found that sort of stuff on a military base?

A tea table and leather armchairs by the ‘window’.

Novak was to sit in one of them, not at the desk. And there had to be hot tea on the table. They hid two force-field generators, a medical box, and a dosimeter behind his armchair.

Novak changed out of his combat jumpsuit into classic clothes: patent leather shoes, navy trousers with sharp creases, a navy waistcoat and a brilliant-white shirt with cufflinks. He left the top two buttons undone, which made him look more relaxed without sacrificing his elegance.

The Great One waited for a fresh pot of tea, but didn’t drink it. He had half a dozen other drugs meant to protect him from radiation. He started with those. Then he threw everyone out of the box and took Trazgul’s head out. The medic watching the dosimeter readings grimaced as if he’d bitten into a lemon, but Novak paid no attention; he turned the head over in his hands, looking for its balance.

An oversight became apparent at once. The helmet was scorched and dirty, and Novak’s hands got smeared with soot and grime. One horn brushed his sleeve, leaving a black streak on the fabric.

“Have a few spare shirts and a packet of wet wipes ready,” Novak said, then set the head on the tip of a melted horn, balancing it on the index finger of his left hand.

The head wobbled and slid sideways. He caught it with his right hand, put it back in the starting position and tried again.

The second attempt went a little better, the third worse, and he gave up on balancing it on the horns, finding a point on the crown between them instead. He only had to keep his forearm vertical so the horns wouldn’t catch on it as it spun. Novak spun it on his finger like a basketball. He made it look easy, except that a basketball was twenty to twenty-five times lighter.

He put the head back in his pocket, went to the airlock, took the wipes, wiped his hands, and put the packet back in his pocket. He had to wait for them to fetch him a new shirt; only then did he sit down, pour some tea, and nod to the cameraman.

“Let’s begin.”