I awoke to Leslie leaning over me, her hand on my shoulder.
“Now you’ve got me all agitated about getting back to Earth,” she said. “And look at you. At this rate, it’ll be July when we get back. I’ve got to …”
Outside, despite the early hour the crowd of hihyaghi was starting to gather for the day. I went out to join them, working hard to remember names, and harder to pronounce them. Suddenly someone was shouting my name.
“Nate, get your ass back here.”
Tobias was halfway up the gangway to LOAD/EVAC. He was wearing an ancient full-length overcoat, and carrying a leather shoulder bag – as well as one of the Lee-Enfield carbines from the LOAD/EVAC locker.
I waved to my crowd of fans; clearly, at last it was time to go. I managed to recognize Vince – Vintsahka akh Chyurgh – but then I stopped. There seemed to be something special, in this culture, about saying a hihyaghi’s name for the first time. This was something you had to take seriously.
Instead, I simply pointed at Tobias. “I have to leave. We’ve got to go back. That man, there, I must speak …”
The crowd of hihyaghi was thicker than ever. I heard the clatter of the main gangway being rolled back through the loading door, but didn’t think to look. Then I heard my name being called.
Tobias was holding up the sliding door with one hand and with the other arm, wildly gesturing for me to join him.
With many apologies, and a lot of physical effort – hihyaghi are heavy and strong, and this crowd was particular huggy and touchy – I pushed through the crowd. Having dumped ballast and sucked helium out of its gasbags in order to remain stable, Sorcerer was now refilling its gasbags from the tanks in the pressure room; the airship swelled above us like a magic mountain materializing out of the cloud-filled sky.
I reached Sorcerer, but the loading ramp was withdrawn, and the side entrance was at least a hundred feet away. I jumped, caught onto the loading door and managed to swing myself up over the threshold into LOAD/EVAC. Tobias put down his gear and helped me to my feet.
“Help Vince.”
I followed his eyes and saw that the hihyaghi I’d just been speaking to, Vintsahka, had followed me through the crowd. One tentacle was already gripping the door frame, another followed it. I grabbed another and pulled, allowing the hihyaghi to wobble past me into the ship.
“What’s going on?”
“Come here,” Tobias said. I followed him and Vintsahka out of LOAD/EVAC, keeping close to them in the hope that none of the crew would grab me to help them with something. Soon we reached the showers I’d used after my initiation with the vulsetchi; next to it was sick bay, where Max perched on the edge of a cot’s shiny aluminum frame, leaning over painfully to put his socks on.
“Dammit, Max,” Tobias grouched. “Out of those clothes, back to bed.”
“Too much to do.”
Max was looking better, if still a bit dazed from his ordeal in the crèche. Even his famous colossal intelligence was failing him, as he held up a wool sock and squinted at it curiously. “I forget if socks are right or left, like shoes, or if they’re non-foot-specific.”
“Forget your damn socks. Tell Nate and Vince what you told me.”
“Of course. About Yog-Sothoth” – Max put down his socks – “and the bridge-recoil effect. The Great Old Ones have figured out how to manipulate continuum thresholds: a trick, a sleight of hand, a way of applying … dammit, Wie kann ich erklären? It’s basic Newton’s third law: just as every action has an equal but opposite reaction, every transition through the continuum threshold generates a recoil, like shooting a gun. If you can figure out how to use this recoil – and they have – it can facilitate a transition in the opposite direction, a weaker but effective counter-threshold. I call it the bridge-recoil effect. We’ve been stuck here for months; last week, when Yog-Sothoth was able to open a continuum to Earth, Sorcerer was able, finally, to restart the Raumspalter and hitch a ride. In fact, using a jet of flaming hydrogen, we elbowed him aside and took his place …”
I realized that when Max said “last week” he was talking about the date of Sorcerer’s last passage to Earth. Last week to him; to us, last October and I was afraid that by now, it would be June or July back home.
“You didn’t take his place; we did, while you stayed behind,” Tobias said. “We made this trip for you. Pissed off as I am, I’m still –”
“… and now he’s got his revenge. While we’ve been gone, Yog-Sothoth and his minions have learned more about the bridge-recoil effect. They’ve studied it and when you came to rescue me, they used what they’d learned. As soon as Sorcerer came through, they homed in on the threshold, took advantage of the bridge-recoil phenomenon and made the passage.”
“Made the passage.” During our last moments in the continuum threshold, a crash like thunder had shaken the airship. “What the hell was that?” Tobias had said; clearly it was something he’d never run into, and he’d been through a threshold more than once. Maybe it was this bridge-recoil effect.
“In fact, the confusion of his departure,” Max said, “is probably the only reason we’re all alive. If Yog-Sothoth had been in charge, the shoggoths would have shredded us.”
I looked at my phone and groaned. Forty-seven hours since we’d entered the threshold on Earth.
“But that was two days ago,” I said. “That means Yog-Sothoth has been on Earth for almost three months. We’ve got to get home.”
I looked around at the four of us. As far as I could tell, power was what Yog-Sothoth was about – the power to feed off people’s fears, the power to control them, the power to enslave, exploit and then spit them out like garbage. Whatever was happening back home, I hoped there’d been resistance – that this strange little alliance of persons from different places and different times on board Sorcerer wouldn’t come back to a hideously changed world. No one said it, but that’s what we were all thinking. I kept talking to fill their stunned silence.
“Yog-Sothoth is on Earth and what’s worse, so is Nyarlathotep. We faced that thing when Howard and my granddad harpooned it. Then Sorcerer hauled it out of the ocean, across the galaxy and dumped it on its home planet. We thought we had defeated it but we hadn’t. We freed it. As soon as we released it from the wreckage of the Mary Maquinna.”
“I seem to recall that Howard, and Sidney, did warn us about that,” Tobias said.
“That thing you say is Nyarlathotep,” Max pointed out, “is definitely dead. We saw it torn to piece by its own shoggoths.”
“Howard told me that Nyarlathotep had the ability … hmm … to constantly change its appearance, to constantly deceive.” I was on a roll here, nervous at being the centre of attention, but terrified that people weren’t taking me seriously. “So if I understand what you guys are saying, the creature we dumped onto the surface here was just a discarded shell of Nyarlathotep; an empty snakeskin. Seemingly come to life, but actually running on fumes. The shoggoths attacked it because, to them, it wasn’t really Nyarlathotep, and because it wasn’t really Nyarlathotep, it couldn’t fend them off, or take charge.
“What really happened is Nyarlathotep killed Eadric, and hid his body in LOAD/EVAC, and somehow split off part of itself … took on his form. Nyarlathotep kept that monster’s carcass going long enough to get its new body – its Eadric-body – off the ship and back onto the Earth’s surface. Then the monster, the thing we called Magnus, ran out of juice and died.”
Sure enough, this was news Max didn’t want to get. He frowned at Tobias, shaken. “How does this young man know all this?”
“Dammit, Max. Sit down.” Tobias held onto Max’s arm, guided him back onto the cot.
Max winced. “This young man – Nate – he knows Howard?”
“It doesn’t matter, Max.” Tobias knelt by the cot with his hand on Max’s shoulder. “Shut up. Stay still.” He reached under the cot and pulled out a scuffed leather strap, reached over Max to find another. “I’m strapping you in.”
Max tried a weak laugh. “Afraid I’m losing it?”
“Afraid you’ll get thrown out of bed and look even worse than you already do.” Tobias buckled Max in and stood back. “We’re firing up the Raumspalter, and heading back to Earth.”