Outlanders 42 - Satan's Seed., page 1
Prologue
Gerlachov Peak, Slovakia, 1946
Aleister Crowley waited for the end of his last day in the twentieth century. He hoped he would not live to see the sun set behind the Carpathians again.
He struggled across the wooden ramp to the mouth of the cave and stood on the ledge. shivering in the frigid wind. The thermometer attached to the rock wall showed the temperature as very close to zero—cold for this time of year, even at such an altitude.
The terrain spreading beneath and beyond the wide shelf of rock was a stunning sight. The snow-covered slopes. hell-deep passes and rocky ramparts stretched almost to the limit of Crawley's vision. then dropped away at the border of Moldavia.
The land surrounding the highest mountain peak in the Tatra Range was almost always locked in the embrace of ice and snow. Not even the whalebone-tough Szganys braved the mountain crests, and so Gerlachov Peak made a perfect staging area.
Crowley refused to refer to the cave as a refuge or a hideout or even a sanctuary. Those weak words led to defeatist thoughts, which he did not permit, not in himself nor in any member of the Brotherhood of the Black Sun.
Shielding his eyes with a gloved hand, he scanned the darkening sky. The setting sun peered out from behind the thick fleece of cloud cover, painting a brilliant scarlet streak over the distant thunderheads. Within half an hour, full night would settle over the mountain passes, and the procedure, the ritual, could not be initiated without the presence of Countess Paula von Schiksel and her package.
In the sky he glimpsed the dark dragonfly shape of an autogyro, lancing swiftly toward the broad ledge projecting from the mouth of the cave. Crowley figured the countess was even now radioing in her arrival instructions.
Almost as soon as the thought registered, a contingent of troopers marched up the ramp, passing him without a word as they assumed positions around the edges of the concrete landing pad. The men wore modified SS officers' uniforms, and beneath the peaked caps their faces were completely concealed by tight black balaclavas, their eyes covered by goggles with tinted lenses. Insignia patches sewn on the right sleeves of their jackets displayed a jet-black disk against a blood-red background. Nine thin lines, stylized representations of sun beams, radiated from equidistant points around the disk.
Crowley, resplendent in his voluminous uniform of indigo. bright red and orange silks and a high-crested headpiece, scowled resentfully at the reception committee. He felt the high altitude pulling at his ponderous flesh, exaggerating his massive weight, adding to his many physical woes, not least of which was his gnawing need for another four percent solution of sugar water and heroin.
Seeing the men in the full dress uniform of Black Sun troopers brought to mind a swarm of midnight-colored praying .mantises, poised to pounce on any prey that might come flitting by.
Swallowing a curse, Crowley stamped on the ground, feeling the cold seep into the marrow of his bones and settle in his arthritic joints. Rolls of fat jiggled beneath his tunic. Heavy pendants of flesh drooped on either side of his pockmarked nose. His obsidian eyes, the irises completely surrounded by the red-netted whites, glittered with impatience.
Engine growling, the autogyro hovered over the concrete slab, listing from side to side. The rotor wash churned up snowflakes that eddied in loose, detached clouds. Crowley winced when tiny splinters of ice stung his face. The aircraft slowly settled on the pad, and troopers hurried out to secure the wheels to eyebolts sunk deep into the concrete.
The propeller and the overhead rotor blades stopped spinning. The canopy of the autogyro slid back and the delegation of troopers scurried to arrange themselves in stiff, formal postures. It was obvious from their manner that if a brass band had been present, it would have been playing `God Save the Queen." or more appropriately, Deustchland Uber Alles.
Crowley tried to appear properly respectful despite his physical misery. As the liaison between the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Brotherhood of the Black Sun, he preferred to have other people come to him, letting intermediaries handle menial tasks such as meeting dignitaries. But the intermingled affairs of the OTO and the brotherhood had reached a stage too crucial for the delegating of authority.
If the chronoscopic trans-temporal dilator actually accomplished what both Lam and the Third Reich's scientists claimed, then it was worth losing a few extremities to frostbite to ensure continued cooperation. Before climbing out of the autogyro, Countess Paula von Schiksel handed down a blanket-wrapped bundle to one of the black-vizaged troopers. Cradling it in his arms. the soldier hurried past Crowley into the cave. He heard a faint whimper from beneath the folds of fabric and caught an errant whiff of chloroform. The other troopers thrust out their stiff right arms in the old Nazi salute.
The countess stood upon the wing, deliberately striking a pose with one hand planted against an ample hip as if she were the subject of a cover story for Look magazine.
She wore a leather aviator's cap, the smoke-gray lenses of the goggles concealing her hard blue eyes. She was tall, at least five feet ten inches and the fur-collared flight jacket did little to conceal her voluptuous figure, nor did the tight red slacks tucked into calf-high boots. Lithely, she leaped down from the wing and strode across the landing pad, walking with a she-tiger's arrogance that stopped just short of being a swagger. She was the kind of woman whose every movement evoked male fascination.
As the countess approached Crowley, she stripped off the aviator's cap, shaking loose her heavy wheat-white hair. From her belt she removed a two-foot-long riding crop, which she tapped against her right leg as she walked. The small whip should have looked like a ridiculously superfluous accessory, but it didn't and Crowley wasn't sure why. Perhaps the confidence, the complete self-assurance the countess exuded as she walked across the landing pad had something to do with it.
Crowley felt a tiny quiver in his throat and elsewhere at her proximity. Rarely had he seen a woman more beautiful, yet he knew she was untouchable, a creature of great power, remote from the touch of men. Crowley inclined his head toward her. "Countess. You're late."
A darkness clouded the woman's Viking eyes, her bright red lips pursing in disapproval. Crowley had spoken in English, and she replied in the same language, made Nish and metallic by her Teutonic pronunciation. "Have you never traveled with a child, even one who is drugged? It is no pleasure cruise along the Danube, let me assure you."
Recalling the cross-country trips taken with his own children. Crowley declined to address her comment. "The power reserves are down by eight percent. If they drop by twelve—"
"Then we recharge the batteries." she interrupted sharply, stalking past him into the cave.
"According to Rukh, that would take three months."
The countess snorted. He is a nervous old biddy." As she passed a trooper, she took from him an offered Gestapo cap with silver officer's braid and a skull and cross-bone insignia positioned over the hard black visor. She paused to settle it on her head at a rakish angle, then shrugged out of her leather jacket, handing it to the soldier. Beneath it she wore a tight tunic of blood-red satin tailored to conform to the thrust of her full breasts. It was cinched tight at the waist by a knotted black sash.
The countess continued walking and Crowley hurried to catch up to her, grimacing at the needles of pain stabbing through his arthritic ankles.
"He has every reason to be nervous," he declared angrily. 'This is a totally new kind of technology we're dealing with."
“Ja," she said dismissively. "A mixture of science and your so-called magic. I've heard it all before, Herr Crowley, back when you were working for both the Allies and the reich, hoping to arrange world affairs so they would destroy each other, leaving you sitting in, as the Americans say, the fabled catbird seat." Crowley decided to drop the subject. Just being in such close proximity to the Scarlet Queen caused him to shake with a tremor. She was radiantly, exquisitely beautiful. Looking at her, he found it hard to believe she was capable of the most inhuman, cold-blooded acts. But he knew from experience that her capacity for cruelty was beyond all dimension. A lust for power ruled Countess Paula von Schiksel, a lust she had satiated all during the war with her personal information network, gaining information by torture, blackmail and murder. Crowley worshiped her.
A low-ceiling stone passageway stretched out before them. Naked light bulbs inset into the roof shed a cold illumination that glinted off frost-coated mineral deposits imbedded in the rough walls. Broken chunks of ice littered the path and proved hazardous to walking. The tunnel did not feel appreciably warmer than the ledge, but once away from the frigid bite of the wind, the pain in Crowley's joints began to ease.
Countess von Schiksel halted before a heavy metal slab of a door. She rapped on it sharply and the panel quivered, then slid aside with a prolonged squeal. Beyond it. over the threshold, stretched a long white corridor bathed in pale blue light. A faint resonance, a thready pulse of vibration tickled Crowley's eardrums. A steady. high-pitched drone underscored the heavy throb of machinery and the roar of turbines. They smelled the astringent odor of hot metal and the nostril-stinging reek of burning oil. A cadaverous man stood in the doorway. An upstanding shock of stiff gray hair rose above his gaunt face. He wore a white laboratory smock, the collar buttoned high on his wattled neck. His rheumy blue eyes appeared huge, magnified behind the thick lenses of round-rimmed spectacles. Crowley thought the man looked absurd, like Boris Karloff from The invisible Ray.
In his hands, thick
The countess ignored him, creeping past the man into the corridor. Crowley followed, squeezing his bulk through the narrow doorway. Apparently not offended by the woman's show of contempt, Rukh addressed Crowley.
“You realize, of course," the scientist said, "that once we open the portal, there can be no delay. We have no idea how long the power grid can maintain the event horizon, so we must be prepared to move swiftly and decisively. The troops must be ready."
Countess von Schiksel cast a scornful glance over her shoulder. "My troops are not the ones who will have problems moving swiftly. They are not arthritic or fat old drug addicts."
"I'm thinking of the girl," Rukh snapped.
The countess kept striding along the corridor, her boot heels clacking loudly against the concrete floor. "I will make sure Tshaya moves with the proper alacrity at the proper tone, Dr. Rukh. Make no mistake about that."
The corridor ended in a vast space, but it seemed small because it was filled with the dark bulk of huge machines, every piece of which seemed to rattle, clank and roar—grinding gear wheels, arcs of electricity and whistling jets of steam. Convection currents danced like translucent, crackling veils from the forks of tall, Y-shaped induction pylons.
The mechanical cacophony assaulted their ears, and the stench of hot diesel fuel was cloying. Even over the deafening racket and machine rumble, they felt rather than heard a rhythmic wave of invisible energy, like a subsonic drumbeat throbbing to the marrow of their bones.
Positioned between two of the machines was a massive generator. More than twelve feet tall, it resembled two solid black cubes, a slightly smaller one balanced atop the other. The top cube rotated slowly, producing a steady drone.
A dozen yards opposite the generator, the floor dropped away, forming a vast pit of absolute, impenetrable blackness. The pool of darkness stretched from wall to wall, measuring at least a hundred yards in diameter. The domed roof formed a cap over the perfectly round hole that fell away to unguessable depths. The pit looked like a disk of solid obsidian, reflecting no hg ht whatsoever cast by the bright halogen tripod- mounted spotlights around the rim.
The pit was blacker than anything in Crowley's experience, so black that his eyes refused to encompass it except as an utter emptiness.
Gazing at the yawning black abyss, Crowley quoted Friedrich Nietzsche under his breath: "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
The abyss and the double-tiered generator had been inside the mountain for many thousands of years, the source of legends and myths among the Slovaks, the Roma and the local Szganys. Their purpose had remained a mystery until a year ago, shortly after Germany's surrender.
Lam had imparted the true nature of the Schwarze Sonne to Crowley but only a handful of the reich's scientists understood the basic principles of the generator, each less the operating mechanics of the power systems. Janos Rukh was one of the few, a fact he had no reservations about flaunting.
Rukh strode toward the control console chairs. Tshaya and her brother, Heranda, reclined in them. Even if Crowley hadn't known the pair of eight-year- old children were twins, their jet-black hair and bold-nosed features were almost identical.
A metal cage-like framework enclosed Heranda's head, needle-pointed electrodes piercing his skull to stimulate different areas of his brain. His face was completely blank, eyes taped shut, mouth slightly open. Tshaya lay in the chair beside him clasping his right hand. Her eyes were open, although Crowley wished they weren't. They were the most disquieting pair of eyes he had ever looked into, colored like moonstone, milkily translucent. They were blind eyes but their magnetic stare held him nonetheless. Both children wore simple sleeveless shifts of white fabric and slippers.
Rukh glanced toward a machine behind the boy's chair, squinted at the lines inscribed on graph paper and grunted. "Good. His sister's presence seems to have calmed him. He is entering an alpha state. We can begin.''
The countess eyed Crowley haughtily. "I have little faith in this procedure...but I trust you are aware of the price of failure?"
"Tshaya and Heranda were the best candidates Mengele and the Abnenurbe Foundation could find in the camps," Crowley retorted defiantly. They are descended from a long line of mystics and seers." Countess von Schiksel's lips worked as if she were on the verge of spitting. "Gypsy trash, that's all they are." "Perhaps so," Crowley conceded. "But among their own tribe, their pedigree is impeccable, despite their physical disabilities."
The tests were inconclusive," the countess argued, her voice rising. "We're operating strictly on guess-work, everything based on simulations."
Rukh said defensively, "We can't risk the children, the entire activation process in another test. The part of their brains that act as interfaces with the chronoscope's focus conformals could be damaged."
He waved toward the generator. "That's why it is so important to act now, while the power reserves are at optimum."
The tall woman heaved a sigh seasoned with a German obscenity. From a jacket pocket she withdrew a silver whistle attached to a tiny chain. Placing it between her lips, she blew a long, shrill note that cut through even the mechanical racket.
With a loud tramping of boots and clinking of metal, four dozen Black Sun troopers jogged up the aisle between two machines. They arranged themselves in a semicircle at the rim of the pit. Unlike the soldiers who had met the countess outside, these troopers wore coal- scuttle helmets atop their masked, goggled heads. They wore black jumpsuits, and thick flak vests encased their upper bodies. All of them carried long-barreled Schmeisser submachine guns at twenty-five-degree angles across their chests. Walther P-39 pistols were snugged into flapped holsters on their hips, and grenades hung from wide Sam Browne belts that crossed their torsos. Hard blue eyes shining like those of a raptorial bird, Countess von Schiksel turned toward Rukh. "Begin!" The white-haired scientist stepped to the control console and flipped a pair of toggle switches. Heranda stiffened in his chair as if he had received a jolt of electrical current. Tiny skeins of blue lightning played over the metal framework encasing his head.
The droning whine of the generator changed in pitch. Crowley felt his heart begin to pound painfully within his chest and for a wild instant he feared he was suffering another infarction. Resisting the impulse to grope for his nitroglycerin pills in his pocket, he turned his face to the pit of darkness. A tingling sensation began at the base of his spine and he realized his increased heart rate was due to the energy field spreading up from the black pool. Two of the tripod-mounted spotlights exploded in a blaze of blue sparks.
The impenetrable surface of the pit seemed to shift and said. It suddenly formed an elaborate mosaic pattern of black and white. Eyes wide and mouth dry, he watched as a grid tracing, like white shadows against a black background, stretched from edge to edge. "Prima Materia," Crowley husked out hoarsely. "It does exist."
Rukh shouted jubilantly, "Interface established! We must act now! Crowley, get the girl! Crowley!" With great effort, Crowley tore his gaze away from the pool and strode quickly to the chair in which Tshaya reclined. Carefully, he pried her small fingers away from the hand of her brother and tugged her to her feet. The girl did not resist, although she uttered a faint whimper when separated from Heranda.
Holding her by the wrist, Crowley led Tshaya to the rim of the pit and halted. He bent down and whispered in her ear, even though he knew she was deaf, "Let your instincts guide you on this journey, sweetness. Do what thou wilt.'
For a long moment, Tshaya did not move. Then, tentatively, as if she were testing the temperature of bath water, she extended one foot and touched a glowing white square with her toes.
A stream of fierce energy poured into Crowley's body through the child's hand. Crying out in alarm and pain, he released her, stumbling back a pace. Once free of his grasp, Tshaya did not hesitate. She stepped forward and down, crossing the white tracery of the pattern, walking with a graceful, single-minded deliberation to the center of the swirling mosaic.
Shaking his stinging fingers, Crowley stared as the undulating pattern seeped up over the little girl, adhering to the shape of her body like a layer of than fabric. She stood motionless, laced with alternating snipes of deep black and coruscating white. The entire center of the grid bulged up and swirled around her. When it receded, Tshaya was gone; as if with the movement of the mosaic, she had shifted out of one world and into another.
