Filaria - Brent Hayward [49]
Tran so Phengh tried to recall what the disembodied voice had told him, in the underwater lair. Hadn’t it asked him when he’d first washed up on the platform inside the lake god’s house if he was the engineer?
“And I say you can’t take an Ensign prisoner. Not even your damn machines!” Ensign Conway shuddered as he made this outburst. “Some of these giants are totally fucking crazy. Maybe not here, but some of them are, out there.”
“How do you know?” Tran so was being polite; he wanted silence, time to think.
“Because people have been butchered. That’s how I know. Butchered by your dark gods. Despicable attacks. No machine is ever supposed to do that. It ain’t the way the world was designed. People kill people. Not machines. Look at us. Look at me and you! I mean, these guys out there haven’t showed any signs of being too crazy, not yet, but we’re being held prisoner! Without water. They’ve tied us to fucking benches! And listen to that poor guy next door. What do you think they’re doing to him?”
Tran so Phengh was about to ask Ensign Conway to keep his voice down but the sudden burst of anger had ended and the other man thankfully resumed speaking in more reasonable tones:
“I overheard some of them talking after I was captured, about errant individuals. That was the word they used. Errant. Of their own kind. What we do know is that these machines are rounding up people and asking them questions. Asking them if they work here or if they’re just visiting. Which makes no fucking sense. And now they’re also searching for some of their own, renegades that have gone nuts and are out there killing people. I saw some of the bodies, man. I know it’s true.”
“You yourself said earlier: people kill each other. Maybe these gods are more like people than other gods. Maybe we are the same.”
“Whose friggin side are you on, man? Ain’t you been listening to me? Besides, I don’t believe in gods. In no kind of god. Certainly not in machines as god. It’s backward thinking. We tell them what to do.”
“You and I have differing opinions. On, I would imagine, most topics.”
Ensign Conway grunted. Then, after a long pause, perhaps because silence was the last thing he cherished, he said, “You were telling me how you were taken. It might be important.”
“Was I?” Tran so Phengh had not been telling the story of his capture, but nonetheless he complied. “They took me prisoner because I had challenged the god of Lake Seven. I had swum down to where it lives, to confront it about my wife’s illness and the death of my son. I wanted love to return to me. I was tired of living an empty life. I was ambushed there.”
“Your son’s dead? And your wife’s sick? Sorry to hear that, friend . . . Personally, I don’t have time for a wife. Don’t want to be tied down.” Ensign Conway lifted his arms, rattling his chains again, but the irony of his words and predicament were apparently lost on him. “They sure have brought you a long way. A long, long way. They’ve brought all of us from far away, I guess, if you think about it. From all the corners of the world. But we’re gonna find out what they’re up to. You’ll see. We’re gonna stop them.”
Tran so said nothing.
“My story,” the Ensign said, closing his eyes, “is that I was with the Thirty First, which was my division. We was looking for the breach, like I already said. We found a body instead. An old man who had been living by himself in the middle of nowhere had been tortured and killed. And we’d seen wanton destruction of the landscape from the air. But I became separated from the boys, ambushed, and shot at by your dark gods. Some kind of dart. Shot me in the back. When I woke up, I was bound hand and foot and being carried on a travois — ”
What little light coming through the doorway was suddenly eclipsed: one of the giants stood there, though how much it had