Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 73: Taking the Piss (Patreon)

Ghaurzakh stayed silent for a whole day. He was evidently busy hunting down those to blame for a failure he had provoked himself with his hasty decision. But once all the culprits had been executed or, perhaps, pardoned (with a shortage of personnel, that happens even among demons), he replied, and he did it just as loudly as Novak had: through a video online.

Ghaurzakh wasn’t sitting in an armchair or drinking tea. He was standing. Without armour, like Novak, but his red clothes were a completely different style. The gold embroidery resembled a xeltar’s robe, but the short sleeves and knee-length hem of the outer garment were unlike anything familiar.

He had a panoramic window too.

It was hard to compete with a view of majestic mountains, but a view from space stood a chance.

Beyond the window lay Earth. Vast and blue, with white streaks of cloud, the dark green patch of the Amazon, and the mountain range running along South America's western coast.

Ghaurzakh pointed at the grey-brown smudge of a city on a plateau between the mountains.

“I am told this is called Bogota,” he said. “Seventeen million mortals.” He looked into the camera. “You wanted a meeting? You shall have it — the South Pole. You have one hour. If you are not there by the end of that time, there…” He pointed at Earth again. “…will be no more Bogota.”

The message reached Novak within five minutes. He almost immediately sent the Queen to the South Pole, then dragged me out of bed. Yes, at that critical moment, I was asleep. I’d barely managed to drop off an hour earlier, trying to calm my mind and not burn out. The decision to die is fairly easy to make in the moment, but the longer you have to go on living, the more arguments pile up against dying. My instincts were taking over and screaming that I was an idiot, and that could lead to indecision at the last moment.

It took another five minutes to get me back to normal without stimulants. Then came the armour fitting and testing: ten minutes. Meanwhile, Novak sent Pascal with the receiving portals to Outer Oort No. 1, and straight after the fitting, he called Aoran to check how ready we were.

He had to go through all those tedious identification procedures again, which ate up another few minutes. This time there were two of us in the office, and Novak put the call on speaker in case I needed to say something. I was, after all, the one who’d designed the portals.

“What about the drugs?” the Master asked straight away.

“They’re ready.” Aoran didn’t even try to hide his weariness. “Two doses, loaded into ampoules in a format compatible with your armour. But I only have one firing team ready. In the time remaining, I can scrape together a group of officers and diplomats, but I can’t guarantee the quality of the shot.”

Judging by the way he said it, Aoran already knew about the big bad’s video.

“You offered this yourself,” Novak said. “We could have put together at least one team ourselves.”

“And it would have been far worse than what I can scrape together!” Aoran snapped, losing his usual self-control.

“Then scrape it together,” Novak said. “I don’t think the meeting will actually take place at the appointed hour. But don’t drag it out.”

“Have you provoked them again?”

“I sent my personal yacht to the meeting place. It’s a convenient target, but if they destroy it, I’ll have an excuse for a few extra minutes.

“My portal technician should already be at the base. Install the portals, organise the teams, do whatever you think necessary.”

“The portals are already installed,” Aoran said. “The only problem is people. I’m afraid we won’t be ready with the second cannon. And when I say that, I mean a quality of shot I’d be satisfied with.”

“We’ll have to go into battle with what we’ve got…” Novak said, then froze and winced as if he had toothache. “They’ve destroyed the Queen. I’ll miss her, but it buys us a little more time.

“Master, I have to respond. I’ll be waiting for the courier with the stimulants. Speak soon.”

“Respond how?” Aoran asked.

“With another slap across his horned face, so he doesn’t dare make threats again.”

“That’s not an answer!” Aoran said indignantly.

“You’ll see!” Novak grinned viciously. “Speak soon!”

His right hand darted across his interface, and Novak gave an order to someone else. “Inform Ghaurzakh that if he doesn’t contact me on a secure channel within ten minutes, in my next video I’ll piss on his son’s head.”

Novak swiped a finger through the air and ended the call.

“Would you really do it?” I asked him.

“He destroyed the Queen! Not that I didn’t expect it, but it still hurts,” Novak said with open anger, but then he got it under control and answered more coldly. “We’ve already seen that he makes mistakes when he’s emotional. So I’ll do everything I can to throw him off balance.”

The courier, a fleet commander, arrived at the base five minutes later, but he refused to hand the ampoules to anyone except Novak. Novak had to collect them in person, then hand them to me in front of the offended officer.

I took them to Alan so he could load them into the auto-injector’s magazine. For some reason, I was afraid to slot them into place through my spatial pocket, even though I’d done that before.

When I got back to Novak’s office, he was already changing for another shoot.

Ghaurzakh didn’t call back in time. But he did call before Novak had finished checking the cufflinks on his brilliant-white shirt. He was adjusting the cufflink on his right sleeve when he froze, let go, then moved his right hand a few centimetres forward to press an invisible button on his interface.

“Yes?” he asked. “Excellent! Give Jake audio and connect us… Jake Sullivan, my disciple!.. No, audio only. I’ll do the talking myself… He can wait.”

About forty seconds later, I got a notification about joining an audio channel and confirmed the connection, after which the operator asked Novak once more whether he was ready to talk.

“Yes!” Novak said.

“At last!” the demon’s angry voice thundered in my ears. “I will kill you, Earthling!”

Novak burst out laughing and shot the demon a sarcastic remark.

“Of course you will. It’s not as if you flew here for peace and love.”

That caught the demon off guard. He was evidently used to his threats being taken far more seriously.

“Your death,” he said, pronouncing every word separately, as if hammering in nails, “will be extraordinarily painful.”

“Of course!” Novak agreed easily. “At the appointed hour, at the South Pole?

“Only, you destroyed my transport. The yacht was carrying the ring I was supposed to use to get there. So you’ll have to arrange a new one for me. We still have the captured portal from my mountain base. You’ll put the portal back on the network and give us the coordinates of its pair, which you’ll set up at the meeting place. I’ll arrive straight there.

“And I’ll send someone through first to check the transit, so don’t overdo it. If I don’t like something, there’ll be no meeting.”

“Coward!” Ghaurzakh tried to needle him.

Novak just sighed.

“Have you spent your whole life dealing only with idiots?” he asked. “Not used to talking to someone with a brain?”

“You will not survive this meeting,” the demon said. “You must understand that, if you are so clever. So the only reason to meet is to try to kill me.”

“Of course,” Novak said. “And since we’re on the subject of cowards, you have to be at the meeting in person. If you hide behind other people’s backs again, the way you hid behind a city of seventeen million, I’ll put your son’s head in a jar, and the whole base will take turns pissing in it.”

“You have twenty-one minutes,” Ghaurzakh said. He seemed to have pulled himself together. “We will unlock the portal; you will receive the dialling address in a few minutes. And do not count on a nuke, as you did with my son. I will take measures.”

He disconnected without waiting for an answer.

Novak breathed out, dropped into his armchair and leaned his head back against the headrest, then sprang up again.

“I need to call Aoran.” He rushed to the null-link station, but stopped and dialled the contact through his interface instead. “I need a jar big enough to hold Trazgul’s head, and a few litres of lager. The jar has to be strong enough that I needn’t worry about dropping it, but the glass must shatter when I want it to. The beer has to look like urine!” he ordered.

“So the whole base won’t be taking turns pissing in it?” I joked.

“It would be bad for your health down there,” he played along.

“I’m sure we’d find enough men willing to risk it. Women too.”

Novak smiled and shook his head. “Unfortunately, we don’t have time for that.” He went through that infuriating verification procedure again and immediately put Aoran on speaker.

“It looks as though the meeting will go ahead as agreed after all, but I have a few new concerns and one request.”

“Another mad idea?” Aoran sighed.

“Possibly,” Novak conceded. “Ghaurzakh is showing far too much caution. I’ve wound him up as much as I could, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Two things worry me: his protection and his identity. He could shield himself behind a powerful barrier, and he could use a double.”

“And you’ve only just thought of that?”

“You didn’t think of it either!” Novak said.

“I took it into account from the start!” Aoran barked. “That’s exactly what I meant when I talked about the quality of the shot!”

“And the double?” Novak asked.

Aoran didn’t answer.

“I have a solution to that problem,” Novak said carefully.

“And, judging by your tone, I won’t like it,” Aoran grumbled.

“You’ll have to look through the portal with your third eye.”

“My eye can’t see through a membrane.”

“You’ll have to put it into the portal.”

I recalled the shape of his head and mentally set it against the schematic of the entry portal. We’d slapped a fairly thick ring on it. The portal’s diameter was small; wouldn’t the ring get in the way? Even if Aoran managed it, it would be a matter of a few millimetres.

Well, there wasn’t any more room under the breastplate.

“Are you mocking me?” Aoran asked, just as I considered the possibility of the portal collapsing with the eye inside it. I doubted Aoran could protect it…

“It only sounds crazy!” Novak said in his own defence.

“It is crazy!”

“But it improves our chances! I’ll send Jake first, supposedly to check that everything’s fine. I warned Ghaurzakh I’d send someone, so he won’t attack straight away and scare me off. You’ll have a few safe minutes.”

For the first time since I’d known him, Aoran actually growled. I hadn’t thought refined xeltars were even capable of that sound.

“It needs testing,” he agreed.

We tested it.

Aoran’s eye was literally pressing against the metal surrounding the portal, but the idea worked. So twenty minutes later, I was standing in the stone box of a filtration chamber, its Earth formations reinforced, with our portal behind me and the demonic one in front.

The technicians had set up the link so Aoran could keep it open with me through my interface. The portal on my chest, under the armour, was inactive. You can’t carry a portal through a portal. So Aoran was biding his time.

The demonic portal in front of me activated.

I commanded my armour to inject the Keystone Heart into my bloodstream, then took a few steps forward, peering out without leaving the portal.

O-o-oh shit!