Blood Moon, page 14
On the perimeter security screens, he watched the cloud slowly dissipate to reveal the humanoid machines chewed up in spots, smoking and charred, but all still plenty whole enough to continue their advance. Even one cut in half at the torso somehow edged on, its upper body pulling itself over the rocks and stray brush, while its lower half followed toward the entrance to the fortress.
Langston Marsh clearly didn’t know what to say or do. He’d thought himself to be invincible here, especially from whatever effort the ragtag brand of refugees he was hunting might mount. Never, Raiff reasoned, had he expected anything of this magnitude, just like the bully who has no idea how to respond when someone fights back.
“We’re safe down here,” he said, groping for reassurance. “I’m sure of it.”
On one of the screens, now displaying the fortress’s interior, the steel-reinforced blast doors blew open behind a surge from the plasteel soldiers who’d come from Raiff’s world. The camera caught glimpses of Marsh’s mercenaries, members of his personal Fifth Column, rushing in to confront the enemy’s much smaller number, only to be obliterated in waves, cut apart by the relentless fire from the plasma rifles. The force of the blasts obscured much of the picture in splotches, turned the misty sprays of blood and bone into nothing more than flickers of motion.
Raiff remembered he still had the book clutched under his arm in the protective, canvas case Marsh had provided and switched it from his left arm to his right. “Is there an emergency escape route?”
“Yes,” Marsh affirmed, “but not from here. I told you this command center is impregnable. We’ll wait them out until help arrives. We’ll—”
Marsh stopped when the world itself seemed to shake, the heavy steel entry door that led inside the bunker bending inward with each impact.
“You better give me my stick back,” Raiff told him.
45
WALK SOFTLY AND …
DE RAIS CLIMBED THE ridgeline. The once-incessant fire had already slowed, now sporadic at best, concentrated as opposed to wild. He pictured the Companions ferreting out the last of Marsh’s men, and he wanted to reach the scene before the book could be somehow hidden from him again.
His life’s mission was to retrieve it, so close to success now he was swept away by a euphoria that was easily the most powerful emotion he’d ever felt.
Because the book would soon be in his hands.
* * *
The heavy door continued to bend inward, starting to show separation at the seams both top and bottom before the sides started to buckle as well, giving way.
Stick in hand, Raiff watched Marsh’s soldiers take up positions behind whatever cover they could find. The rest of the command center personnel huddled behind toppled desks and counters that stood no chance at all of withstanding plasma rounds.
The door was just about to give when Raiff handed the covered book to Marsh.
“You’re trusting me with it?”
“Because it means I have to protect you and that will keep you from running.”
Marsh shrugged and didn’t argue the point. His features were bled of the cocksure certainty and abrasiveness that had characterized his interrogation of Raiff in his Memory Room. He was just an ordinary man now, stripped of his power and impotent in the face of his fallen defenses.
The door finally gave, blew inward off its mounts behind a final, relentless charge by the soldiers who’d come across the spacebridge in Texas, just after the woman Marsh’s Tracker team had traced.
The woman …
Raiff hadn’t had the opportunity to ponder that further, but he knew who she was, who she must be. Only one woman would risk such a journey, knowing the trip was likely one-way.
Elaina …
But how could that be? When he’d seen her last, presumably for the final time, she had been pushing him into the entrance to the spacebridge after pressing her own baby into his arms. Willing to sacrifice herself to assure her child’s, and her world’s, survival.
Could it be, might it be possible that—
Raiff’s pondering was interrupted when a furious barrage of gunfire from Marsh’s guards greeted the entry of four plasteel soldiers into the command center through the breached security door. It bent all four of them slightly over at the waists, held them still for a time, before they straightened up again and returned the fire in a dizzying wave, the plasma bullets dragging mini-vapor trails in their wake. The plasma rifles generated combustion without a firing pin or typical gunpowder charge, so the fire emerged in a smooth, unbroken stream, flowing through the air like water.
Marsh’s gunmen were standing and then weren’t, the four soldiers spinning in eerie unison, seeming to lock on to Langston Marsh.
That’s when Raiff pounced.
He had remained at the edge of their vision, knowing Marsh would be their primary target and they couldn’t possibly be aware of Raiff’s presence yet. Raiff snapped his stick outward, extending it into a whip snapping and biting at the air.
His first strike wrapped around the neck of the farthest soldier, coiling like a snake in the moment before Raiff jerked and twisted to slam him against the others. The plasteel soldiers ended up in a tight cluster, clumped so close together they couldn’t fire their plasma rifles. That gave Marsh’s remaining guards free rein to fire on them at will. Raiff watched some of the bullets crackling off their shiny skin. Others bullets fired from such close range that they tore off strips of fleshlike polymer from their polished faces. He pulled his whip off the initial soldier he’d targeted and lashed out in a wider motion just as quick. It unfurled and stretched out, looking like a massive tentacle as it wrapped itself around the entire clump of humanoid shapes.
Raiff twisted his hand so his closed palm was turned upright, picturing the whip wrapping itself firmer, its molecular particles forming and re-forming as it tightened and tightened around the torsos of the four soldiers. Compressing them as narrow as they could go, and then continuing to squeeze until …
Splat!
The soldiers burst apart at their waists, torsos tumbling to the floor, dragging sinews of thick rubbery wire amid a shower of sparks.
“You did it!” Marsh said in disbelief, eyes fastened on Raiff’s whip as he retracted it back into a stick. “You really did it!”
“Not yet. There are still eight of them left.”
* * *
“Press yourself against the cab’s side,” Raiff ordered Marsh as the elevator climbed back toward the surface. “All of you,” he added to the three guards who’d accompanied them. “Out of sight when the door opens.”
The guards and Marsh took positions as Raiff had instructed. The cab coasted to a halt, and the doors slid open to reveal three more of the big matching shapes. Their hands were ready on the triggers of their plasma rifles they never pulled, because Raiff worked his whip to strip them from their grasps.
He lurched from the cab in the next instant, whip lashing across the things’ faces, a blur through the air as it snapped over and over again. Tiny orbs skittered across the floor, and Raiff counted them to make sure he’d gotten all the soldiers’ eyes, blinding them and stealing the primary means of input into their chip-fueled brains. Robbing them of sight forced them off-kilter, causing them to stumble and stagger about. Raiff stooped to retrieve one of the weapons stripped from their grasp, only to have another in their number kick it away again.
“The exit!” Raiff yelled to Marsh. “You’ll have to lead the way!”
And Raiff fell into stride alongside the man who’d been interrogating him just minutes before.
“The front’s the closest,” Marsh managed, heaving for breath.
“The front, then.”
The gunfire still buffeting his ears from other areas of the complex told Raiff that the killing machines from his world were engaged with whatever was left of Marsh’s mercenary force. The gunfire had dwindled to sporadic echoes coming from places Raiff couldn’t identify, but the path was clear to the entrance toward which Marsh was leading the way.
“You need to blow this place up!” Raiff said as they tore toward the light beyond the breached doors. “You need to bury the rest of them in rubble, tons of it!” And when Marsh hesitated, his lips trembling, Raiff continued, “I know you can do it, I know you must have this place wired to self-destruct.”
Marsh slowed, swallowing hard. The three guards from the command center surged outside ahead of them.
Straight into the twin halves of the plasteel soldier that was waiting.
46
ESCAPE
THE THING’S SEVERED TORSO spewed thick veins of rubber. Its lower half tripped one of the emerging mercenaries and began stamping at him, quickly crushing his throat with a heavy tactical boot. One of its hands still held fast to a plasma rifle, its bullets tearing Marsh’s other two men apart.
Raiff shoved Marsh aside, making sure the man kept the canvas bag holding the book tight in his grasp. Outside, Raiff snapped his whip one way and tore the plasma rifle from the upper half’s grasp, then whipped it around and sliced down the lower half’s center. Its two legs fell in opposite directions, spitting sparks and flaming at the tips of its severed inner workings.
Raiff snapped the whip sideways next, slicing off the top portion of the upper half’s skull starting halfway up its forehead. More sparks leaped from the thing’s ruptured brain works, accompanied by a sizzling hiss Raiff felt as well as heard. The thing’s eyes looked up at smoke now rising from the chasm where the top of its skull had been, then down toward the severed portion, before locking up and keeling over face-first.
Wasting no time, Raiff retracted his whip back into its stick form and darted back through the breached entrance to find Langston Marsh trembling on the floor behind a wall’s cover, clutching the canvas bag to his chest as if it were an infant.
“What have I done?” he was muttering, in dazed fashion. “What have I done?”
Raiff hoisted him to his feet. “What matters is what you’ve got to do now!”
Shielding Marsh protectively, he burst back into the light in the same moment a new figure he didn’t recognize emerged from the foliage at the head of the ridge spared the onslaught of the Sentinel guns. The stranger’s eyes bulged in shock.
“You!” he rasped, eyes meeting Raiff’s. “After all these years … You’re dead! You’re dead!”
Raiff yanked out his stick, turning it into a whip again, as the stranger twisted away, disappearing back into the cover of the brush, something square and shiny flashing in his hand.
“Who was that? How did he know you?”
“I have no idea, Marsh. Get ready to bring this place down,” Raiff added, the sounds of gunfire now over.
“I’ll never make it down the mountain on foot,” Marsh gasped, doubling over.
Raiff took the canvas sack containing the book from his grasp and looped his arms through the straps. “I’m not giving you a choice. Let’s go.”
An SUV tore over the last of the ridge and screeched to a spinning halt on the flat stretch of ground between the fortress and the ridgeline. The driver’s window was already down, revealing Alex Chin behind the wheel and Samantha Dixon seated next to him.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Raiff managed.
“Ha-ha,” Alex said, pretending to laugh. “Now, get in.”
* * *
How could it be? de Rais thought, racing down the mountain along the same trail he’d followed the Companions, the remainder of which continued to lay waste to Marsh’s complex.
Over a hundred and fifty years ago, on the trail of the long-sought book, he’d traced it to that refugee who’d hidden in the guise of a monk at Admont Abbey, a monk whom de Rais recalled as if that had been yesterday.
That’s how he was sure of what was plainly impossible. Because the man he’d just laid eyes on, the man wielding a weapon from his world as opposed to this one, was …
How could it possibly be?
… that monk!
De Rais was still searching his mind and memory for an answer when a rumbling explosion shook the ground, a huge burst of flames sprouting from the ridge above.
* * *
The blast shook the SUV, its tires seeming to leave the ground briefly before thudding back to the uneven surface of the mountain road that snaked from the base to Marsh’s now destroyed fortress.
Marsh was still holding the cell phone he’d used to activate the destruct mechanism, as if wondering what he’d just done.
Next to him in the backseat, Raiff leaned over and scooped the canvas bag containing the book from the floor by Marsh’s feet.
“You’re driving,” he said to Alex.
“I am.”
“But you don’t know how.”
“He knows how to do this too now,” Sam said, from the front seat, showing Raiff the neat bandage stretched across her throat.
“What happened?”
Alex cast a quick glance toward Sam before responding. “Let’s just say Reverend Billy won’t be getting his van back.”
“Pull over,” Raiff said. “I’ll drive.”
“Whatever you say.” Alex frowned, as if his feelings had been hurt.
He jammed the brakes hard and threw their stolen SUV into park. Then he climbed out and exchanged places with Raiff, who tore off before he’d even gotten the driver’s door closed again.
Sam’s eyes locked hatefully on Langston Marsh. “Bet you didn’t think you’d be seeing us again.”
Marsh didn’t acknowledge her, staring blankly at his phone’s screen as if he’d slipped into some kind of trance.
“Is this…” Alex started, sliding the book out from the canvas bag he’d noticed Raiff holding. “This is it, isn’t it?”
“Is what?” Raiff asked him.
“What Reverend Billy told us Marsh had: an object that’s the only thing that can help us win.”
“Close enough, yes.”
“An old book?”
“It’s a lot more than that, believe me.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody’s ever been able to read the language,” Raiff said.
“I can,” Alex told him.
47
RESIDUE
DE RAIS MOVED AS close to the blast zone as the heat, flames, and soot-rich air would allow. The implosion of the structure, the way the layered explosives had collapsed it in upon itself, gave him little hope that any of the Companions had survived. Still, he had to be sure before slinking off himself.
The man he’d glimpsed, the man who might’ve been a twin of the monk he’d chased down in 1865 … How could it be?
De Rais hadn’t managed to snap a picture of that man before he’d fled in a black SUV that had torn onto the flat patch of ground in front of the compound out of nowhere. But he had managed to hold down the button of his phone’s camera and get dozens of shots of the vehicle itself. Those shots would be uploaded to a program powered by software designed by the National Security Agency, capable of tracking any vehicle from its point of origin. It utilized all manner of satellite and security camera footage, in conjunction with complex algorithms that filled in the travel gaps, to pin down a precise location.
The Companions were invincible on this planet, used only for the most extreme purposes where the risk and residue were deemed worth it. But they had failed in their mission thanks to this man, this stranger who was a twin of the monk.
Could it be the same man? No, the monk was dead, having perished in the fire that had consumed much of the abbey. Someone else, then, who must have been an ancestor of some kind.
One of the pictures he’d taken revealed Langston Marsh himself clutching a canvas bag bearing the approximate dimensions of the book de Rais had been pursuing for centuries. Scrolling through the rest of the shots he’d snapped off on his cell phone yielded a pleasant surprise, a positive among a day that had not gone at all as planned. The driver could only be Alex Chin, another escapee from his planet who’d been brought to Earth as a key cog in the Resistance’s ultimate plot. De Rais was not privy to the details beyond that, knew only that capturing the boy had been placed at the top of all priorities, once he’d surfaced after eighteen years on Friday night.
That meant it was still possible to salvage this mission by recovering the book and the boy. De Rais, of course, would not have the Companions to serve him toward that end anymore. That meant he would have to summon another force, a force as deadly and efficient as the Companions, though more difficult to control and at times unpredictable. It was the collateral damage they wrought that made them an option of last resort. That collateral damage was a harmless liability in more ancient times, but an unacceptable one today.
Until now.
SIX
SAVIOR
When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
48
DIAGNOSIS
“I LOVE WHAT YOU’VE done with the place,” Orson Wilder said to Thomas Donati, an Ames visitor’s badge flapping against his chest thanks to the lanyard looped over his head.
“We’ve come a long way since Laboratory Z,” Donati told him, the spiraling corridor before him seeming to have no end and the arched roof giving it the feel of a vast tunnel.
“Apparently not, Thomas. In fact, I’d venture to say quite the opposite is true. Laboratory Z was just the beginning of what we set into motion and what you’ve dragged me back into.”
“The beginning you speak of actually dates back millions of years before that, but no sense in quibbling.”
They reached one of the center’s astrobiology labs, accessible once Donati fit his access card into the appropriate slot and waited until the door clicked open before removing it.
