For a moment, all I could think was: Where the hell did Doctor Delirium get so many people, to dose with his augmented Acceleration Drug? And then I remembered what the dosed people he’d left behind had done, at his secret base, and my stomach clenched hard, sickened at the thought of thousands of homicidal supermen running wild in the rooms and corridors of Drood Hall . . . I armoured up, and went to face the Accelerated Men with cold and brutal determination in my heart.
The grounds at Drood Hall stretched away for miles in every direction, or the Hall would have been overrun by now. As it was, the Accelerated Men had a lot of ground to cover. They charged forward at impossible speed—all strength and no grace, forced on by the Drug’s terrible imperatives. They spread out in a massive dark wave, crossing the open lawns . . . but my trained mind had already noticed there was no sense of unity to them, no discipline in their movements or advance. They were a crowd of individuals, not a trained army, and a swift sense of relief ran through me. Suddenly, the family had a chance, because Droods are trained. Every one of us.
No one had launched a full-scale assault on the Hall for centuries; the outer defences see to that. First, you can’t find us, and second, even if you could, the outer defences would track you down and kill you in any number of appalling ways. But somehow Doctor Delirium had found a way past all those layers of protection, by opening his dimensional door inside them. Which should have been impossible. The gateway was a large glowing circle, a good thirty feet or more in diameter, shining brighter than the sun, surrounded by crackling energies where one reality butted up against another. This was high-end tech, state-of-the-art, not just a brute rip in Space and Time. Almost Drood-level tech . . . and that was just plain wrong. There was no way Doctor Delirium should have access to anything like this. And even with that kind of tech, he still shouldn’t have been able to open a door inside our grounds, within reach of the Hall. Not unless someone inside the family had given him the information necessary to bypass all our defences. Perhaps the same traitor who’d made the attack on the Heart possible . . .
Could it be that Tiger Tim wasn’t the Doctor’s only partner . . . ?
The Merlin Glass had sent me straight from Amazonian midday to early morning in England. The sun was barely up, the sky still streaked with red, and a delicate ground mist wafted across the grassy lawns. Through the mist came the Accelerated Men, running desperately with flailing arms and maddened eyes. Like nightmares broken out of dreams and into reality, from the deepest part of the night into the breaking day. And the only advantage I had was that the Glass had brought me here only a few moments after the Accelerated Men had arrived. I ran towards them with my hands clenched into golden fists. I was only one man against an overwhelming force, but I was a Drood, and sometimes that’s enough.
Sometimes.
Part of me was wondering if the family even knew they were under attack, but almost immediately I was answered when the automatic ground defences started up. Huge robot guns and energy weapons rose smoothly up through the lawns from their underground bunkers, and opened fire on the intruders. The early morning air was full of the roar of guns, and the fierce flares of energy beams, but the Accelerated Men were just too fast for them. They could run and dodge faster than the computerised tracking systems could come to bear, and within moments they were upon the gun positions and overrunning them. The guns swayed back and forth, laying down a murderous range of fire, and superhuman men were shot down and blown apart by the dozen, but they just kept coming, leaping over the bodies of their own dead to get at the guns. They ripped them out of their positions by sheer brute force, and smashed the more delicate energy guns with repeated blows from their bare hands. Hundreds died, running into the barrels of the gun emplacements, but there were thousands of Accelerated Men, and more arriving all the time.
The next level of protection kicked in, as twenty living scarecrows appeared out of nowhere. Old enemies who had died at Drood hands, resurrected as scarecrows, so they could atone for their crimes by defending the family—for as long as they lasted. Neither truly living nor dead, they were impossibly strong and mer ciless opponents. If you listen in on the right frequencies, you can hear them screaming. Forever. Individually, the Accelerated Men would be no match for them, but there were only twenty scarecrows, and thousands of superhumans.
I recognised some of the scarecrows; I’d fought them myself when I broke into the Hall, back when I was a rogue. Laura Lye, still wearing the tatters of a dark evening dress, complete with holed evening gloves. Mad Frankie Phantasm, in the remains of what had once been an expensive Saville Row suit. Bunches of straw stuck out of open wounds in grey flesh. Molly and I had torn them apart, but the family had put them back together again. Because that’s what you do with scarecrows. You make them last. And then my heart lurched as I recognised one particular scarecrow—it was the legendary Independent Agent himself, Alexander King. I could still see the hollow in his chest, from where I’d punched out his heart, in his magnificent secret base at Place Gloria. I hadn’t known they’d brought him here, and made a scarecrow out of him, but I should have known. Droods bear grudges.
The scarecrows hit the first row of the Accelerated Men, and made mincemeat out of them, grabbing at the black-clad supermen with their implacable gloved hands, and tearing them apart with brute inhuman strength. They tore arms out of sockets, stove in chests, and ripped the heads right off people. Blood spilled thickly across the lawns. The Accelerated Men struck out at the scarecrows with their own appalling strength, but the scarecrows’ spongy bodies absorbed every blow, and they felt no pain. Every superhuman intruder they laid hands on died, but in the end their speed was only human, and the Accelerated Men were just so much faster. Once the intruders realised this, they just speeded up enough to avoid the scarecrows and kept going. The scarecrows speeded up too, with all the inhuman pace of their unhuman nature, but even so, they only caught stragglers. The Accelerated Men suddenly changed tactics and swarmed all over the scarecrows, piling onto them in greater and greater numbers, ˚ until they bore the scarecrows down; and once they had them helpless, they ripped the scarecrows to pieces. I saw heads roll across the grass, cloth faces with human eyes, eternally suffering, endlessly hating.
The intruders were almost upon me now, appearing clearly through the thinning mists. I was thinking furiously. Doctor Delirium had cleverly adjusted the dose of the Acceleration Drug. These men were driven by homicidal rage, but they could still think, still plan, still change tactics as necessary. They would not turn on each other.
Some of them ran straight through the old hedge Maze, plunging through the heavy green walls as though they weren’t even there, determined to get to the Hall by the quickest route possible. But those who went in didn’t come out the other side. There weren’t even any screams. The Maze just swallowed them up. Presumably, whatever was still trapped inside that Maze was still hungry.
The Accelerated Men concentrated on me for the first time. They recognised my armour, and a great cry of rage went up. I was the enemy they had been prepared for, and aimed at. For the first time, they produced weapons: all kinds of guns, scientific and magical. Cold blue steel and gleaming crystal. Doctor Delirium had armed them for bear. For all the good that would do. I was smiling behind my featureless golden mask.
The nearest Accelerated Man opened fire on me with incendiary bullets. They exploded harmlessly against my chest and head, thick trails of liquid fire running down my armour to set fire to the ground at my feet. I didn’t feel the force of the explosions, or the heat of the flames. I just kept going, leaving a trail of blazing footprints behind me. More incendiaries slammed into me, bathing me in white hot flames, that just ran away, defeated.
Next they tried specially prepared cursed and blessed ammunition, but the torc protected me from physical and spiritual threats. You could damn me with bell, book and candle, or hit me with a bullet that had been exorcised, and neither of them would touch me. The Accelerated Men ra
ked me with all kinds of bullets, and didn’t even slow me down.
One man stepped forward and pointed a strange apparatus at me: a weird combination of glowing metals that surrounded and enveloped me in a strange glowing field. I knew what it was, the moment it touched my armour: a stasis field. Inside it, Time could not move. They could hold me here, like an insect in amber, and not one moment would pass for me until it was all over. Except, Droods have a similar weapon, and we’ve all been trained in how to deal with it. The strange matter of my new armour, being quite literally not of this world, has a resistance to Space and Time; all I had to do was set the strength of my armour against the field, and push steadily forward. For a long moment nothing happened, strain as I might, and then the glowing energy field coruscated wildly around the golden fist I pushed into it, and the field shattered and was gone. I lurched forward, back in Time again.
Some of the Accelerated Men had weapons that were clearly the product of alien technology. Energy weapons, distortion field generators, and other less familiar things. Weird energies hit me from a dozen different directions at once, crackling and crawling all over my armour, searching for a weak spot and a way in, before finally falling away defeated. One Accelerated Man appeared out of nowhere, right in front of me, and fired something at me, at point-blank range. He had a teleport gun, powerful enough to blast an enemy through Time and Space to somewhere else. He really shouldn’t have used it against my armour. The energies rebounded straight back at him, and a moment later the air was rushing in to fill the vacuum where he’d been standing.
Another Accelerated Man appeared before me, with a new kind of gun. I stepped forward and punched him in the face before he could use it. The blow ripped the head right off his shoulders, and sent it rolling a dozen feet away. The body crumpled to its knees, blood spurting from the ragged stump ˚ of its neck. I kicked it out of the way, and ran on. Some blood had sprayed across my armour, but it quickly fell away.
I like to think of myself as an agent, rather than an assassin, but I have been trained to do what’s necessary, when I have to. And no one attacks the Droods where we live, and survives to boast of it.
But all the time I was thinking, Where the hell did they get all these amazing weapons? Doctor Delirium? Tiger Tim? The Immortals?
I grabbed up a machine gun that had been torn from its mounting in the ground, and sprayed bullets around me. Accelerated Men were thrown this way and that by the impact of the bullets, but the grounds were wide and open, and the Accelerated Men seemed to be everywhere at once. They were crossing the lawns at superhuman speed, but most of them were still a long way short of the Hall itself. I kept firing till I ran out of bullets, and then tossed the gun aside. There were dead men lying everywhere, blood soaking into the ground, but I hadn’t even opened up any holes in the advancing waves of superhumans. They just kept coming, thousands of them, more and more arriving all the time, and they didn’t care how many of them died. They were riding the Acceleration Drug, raging with the dark joy of being more than human, focusing only on the enemy they’d been aimed at, and the need in their poisoned minds to hunt and hurt and kill, and glory in it. For as long as it lasted.
They came at me with glowing battle-axes, that shattered against my armour. They hit me with gloves made out of shimmering metals, and the gloves shattered and fell apart. I didn’t feel the blows at all. I grew golden blades from my hands, and cut down anyone who came within reach, with vicious brutal blows. Accelerated Men threw themselves upon me bodily, clinging with desperate strength to my armoured arms and legs, struggling to pull me down. They piled up on me, trying to force me to my knees through sheer strength of numbers. But I stood firm, and would not fall.
I threw them off, one by one, grabbing them with hands so strong they cracked and broke the bones of my enemies, throwing the Accelerated Men long distances before they hit the ground hard, and did not rise again. I punched in chests, stove in heads, and broke arms and legs and necks. I stabbed and cut and hacked. I threw them down and trampled them underfoot. I killed and killed until there was no one left to kill, and then I moved forward again. And felt nothing but a cold focused rage. No mercy, no quarter, for the Accelerated Men. This was where Droods lived, and they should not have come here.
I’d been back for only a few minutes, but with everything that had happened, it felt like hours. And I hadn’t really achieved anything. For all the Accelerated Men I’d killed, thousands more were streaming past me on all sides now, heading for the Hall with murder in their hearts. I looked back, wondering whether I should fall back and raise the alarm, and to my relief I saw the main entrance doors slam open, and a great force of Droods came out to defend the family home, led by the Armourer and the Sarjeant-at-Arms.
I knew them immediately, even though they were fully armoured, by the awful weapons the Armourer and the Sarjeant were carrying. Hundreds of armoured Droods came pouring out after them, because when an enemy comes, everyone fights. Every man and woman, no matter what they normally do. All Droods are trained to be warriors from an early age, because we all know that the day may come when everyone has to fight. For the family.
Many of the emerging Droods had transformed their armour into strange and terrifying shapes, to scare the intruders, but they couldn’t concentrate long enough to sustain them, in the face of such an immediate threat. And besides, the intruders were so lost in the embrace of the Acceleration Drug they didn’t care who or what they fought.
The Sarjeant-at-Arms was carrying two really big guns, a Colt automatic repeater in each hand. Massive pistols that could fire endless series of bullets, and never run out, and never miss. Their bullets exploded inside human flesh. Only the Sarjeant was authorised to use them, and only then in direct defence of the family. His bullets blew off arms and legs, punched through guts and chests, and exploded heads. Accelerated Men fell by the dozen, but the others kept coming. I didn’t know whether they were brave, or determined, or whether enough of them was left to feel such things. They ran right over the bodies of their own dead to close with us.
The Armourer had chosen a really appalling weapon: the Kirlian gun. I winced when I saw it. The Armourer had never authorised its use in the field, not least because it was almost as dangerous to the user as to the people he aimed it at. Every living thing has its own energy field: the Kirlian aura. The gun explodes that aura. The Armourer aimed the Kirlian gun at the Accelerated Men, and they exploded into messy bloody gobbets as the aura that held their bodies together was suddenly removed. The Armourer trained the Kirlian gun back and forth, and suddenly whole sections of the lawns became bloody butcher’s shops, with offal lying steaming in the early morning mists.
The two forces finally came together, as hundreds of armoured Droods slammed into the first ranks of the Accelerated Men, and stopped them dead in their tracks. They crashed into the golden armour and were immediately thrown back. Others were savagely clubbed down, or cut open with golden blades, or just thrown aside with such force that they died of it. Even a Drugged-up superhuman is no match for a Drood in armour. But . . . there were just so many of them, and for every Accelerated Man we struck down, more came racing forward to take their place. They moved so terribly fast, shooting past us, sweeping in and out of our ranks, come and gone before we could even lay hands on them, most of the time. Some Droods used their armour to boost their speed, to meet and match that of the intruders, but the Droods couldn’t maintain it for long. Use up too much energy, and the armour automatically reverted to basic, to preserve itself and the Drood within. So for a while there was a stalemate, as blurred figures warred up and down the lawns, dead and dying men appearing out of nowhere to bleed out on the soaking ground. And then one by one the Droods reappeared, falling back to only human speed. They struck out viciously at every enemy who came within reach, but far too many of the Accelerated Men just raced straight past them, too fast to be touched.
And more and more came through the glowing circle, in a dark endle
ss tide.
So the Droods nearest the Hall fell back, and linked arms, and made a golden wall between the main entrance and the approaching enemy. More Droods fell back to reinforce the wall, until it was four ranks deep, of Droods standing firm, ready to take on all comers and not be moved. They shall not pass . . . The first Accelerated Men came howling out of the mists at incredible speed and ran straight into the wall, as though they thought they could crash right through it. The golden line didn’t budge an inch, the armour protecting the men and women within from the impact. The Accelerated Men had no such protection and were thrown back, dead or damaged. Bones cracked and splintered, organs were torn loose, or crushed through abrupt compression. Some kept their feet, even as blood flew from their mouths and eyes, and the Droods struck them down.
The enemy coming up behind saw what had happened, and were forced to slow their speed to nearly human levels. They threw themselves at the golden wall, and the Droods stood their ground and killed everyone who came within reach of the deadly golden blades protruding from their hands. They cut and hacked, and the Accelerated Men fell before them, but there were always more, pressing forward.
The Accelerated Men took on a new tactic, and used their superhuman strength to leap right over the Droods in the wall. But the Droods in the rear just jumped up to meet them, and cut them out of midair. The Droods threw the dead bodies aside, so they wouldn’t get in the way of the fighting, and took their place at the rear again. And that was the end of that tactic.