by Platt, Sean
But that, Trevor supposed, was why they were used as peacekeepers in the city. Nothing kept the peace quite like terror.
They arrived at a precinct in chaos. A dozen human city police jockeyed with an equal number of Reptars for the same positions. The precinct only had the one main set of double doors — if the action was inside, they’d bottleneck in confusion. Reptars were supposed to stay out of the precinct. Human and Astral patrols were supposed to do their jobs to the same technical ends, but cops didn’t like the alien creatures any more than the Reptars seemed to care for them.
As Christopher and Trevor neared the precinct, they saw the bottleneck’s heart. Cops and Reptars weren’t shoving to get inside after all. Nobody was getting inside because there was a black man with arms as large as a Titan’s at the double doors, his hands raised and a no-bullshit tenor in his voice: Malcolm Jons, captain of the Heaven’s Veil police force.
“Get out of here, goddammit!” He shooed the enormous, crawling peacekeepers like obnoxious houseflies. “Go back to your fucking posts, and let us handle this!”
One of the creatures lunged toward Jons — the equivalent of an attempted tackle, if the Reptar had been a person. Jons punched the thing in the side of its yawning jaw. He seemed to realize his error immediately and stepped back as the Reptar bellowed its hollow, purring breath and took another pace forward. Then it fell back, apparently chastised.
“You hear me?” Jons yelled, emboldened. “This is a human precinct! You want to take it, then fucking take it, and be done with it all! Go ahead! You want to vaporize my ass and stop pretending we have anything to do with this city’s protection? Do it!”
Several of the massive black Reptars — each the size of a midsize car — prickled at the offer. For a few seconds, Trevor thought the encounter would end in death, but one of the Reptars backed up instead, swishing its head with irritation. It must have sent a psychic command to the others. Soon, they all turned and pawed their way out in an expanding circle, moving away from the building. The human police swiveled away to let the things pass.
Trevor and Christopher did the same as one of the Reptars came directly at them. It paused to assess Trevor. He felt his heart leap into his throat. Its eyes were like a giant serpent’s. It blinked as it took him in, dual sets of eyelids fluttering as the irises underneath shifted from yellow to red to blue to a dazzling emerald green.
“Hey,” said Trevor, watching it, trying to see it as the intelligent being they supposedly were. But he couldn’t get through the single syllable without swallowing, his hand subconsciously raised in surrender.
Unbidden, he felt a thought forced into his mind. This was the way the Reptars “spoke,” such as they ever did. To Trevor, who’d felt it a few times before, the sensation was intrusive, like having a blade’s tip pressed not just to his neck, but through its meat.
The thought came as a series of three bursting images, each lasting a fraction of a second but visible in full detail: a dark place with half walls wet with moisture, a man with black pits for eyes and a ring around his head like a halo, a woman (not Piper) draped in shadow who’d been bisected down the middle and yet remained alive. Trevor got a heavy sense of settling to accompany the blast of images, as if something enormous had sighed its weight upon him.
Then the thing flicked its head away, trailing that guttural, rattling growl they all made while stalking their rounds. The creature was through with him, its cryptic message conveyed.
The precinct’s courtyard drained, becoming just another building surrounded by milling humans. Christopher turned to Trevor.
“What did it say?”
Trevor shook his head, trying to clear it. He closed his eyes, inhaled, then let the breath escape.
“No clue. I hate when they do that. I think I’d rather it bit me.”
“Watch what you wish for, bro,” Christopher said.
“You all,” bellowed Malcolm Jons in front of the doors, waving at the baffled-looking officers. “Get in here. You stay outside wobbling around like you just got your dicks kicked, you make us look like assholes. Except you, Garcia and Niles. You don’t look like you got your dicks kicked, but only because you don’t have ‘em.” His eyes lit on Trevor and Christopher, still near the small group’s back. He nodded to another officer to keep shooing the others inside and walked over.
“What are you two doing here?” Jons asked Christopher with his fathoms-deep voice. “There wasn’t a general alarm.”
“We heard it start to happen,” said Trevor. “Ran down to see what we could see.”
“No offense, son,” Jons said, “but I don’t need any help. We’re still cops.”
“There was one of those things on viceroy’s property.” Christopher nodded toward the departed Reptars.
Jons’s large jaw worked, considering. “You’re Apex Guard. I suppose you should have been alerted anyway. They were, after all.” He nodded toward the absent peacekeepers.
“Alerted to what?”
“There was some sort of security breach. Looks like it was in the house itself.”
“What kind of security breach?”
“No idea. But we’re already on alert, and now there’s this blast of instructions to fan out and await further orders.”
“Await further orders on what?”
“Fuck if I know, Christopher! I’m just some gumshoe motherfucker who pretends to be in charge of keeping order around here. I’m sure they know exactly what they’re after, but we’re on a need-to-know basis.” The big cop affected a servile voice. “Yes, sir, tell us what to do, Mr. Alien Overlord!”
“So what was all this? Why did they come to the precinct?” Christopher gestured at the courtyard. The situation had been quickly devolving before Jons flushed the Reptars — or until they’d been called back.
“It’s a computer thing. The city backups are here.”
“Here?” Trevor looked at Christopher. “I thought Raj kept that stuff up on the—”
“Our backups,” Jons clarified. “One of the downsides of the Astrals letting us get about our business is that we have our own brains and don’t always play it exactly as they would. But until they want to drop the act and wipe us out, then yes, we still have our own records. Surveillance plus a hard backup of the local network.”
“They don’t have access to our network without you letting them in?” Trevor asked.
“Oh, sure they do. That’s where they’re off to now, I’m sure. Or maybe they don’t need to actually go anywhere. They just talk right on up to the ships or the shuttle or whatever the fuck with their scary ESP — or, hell, just rape it right out of our minds with their magnet rocks, I don’t know. But that’s my whole point. That’s why it’s so fucking obnoxious, the way their first reaction was to come here. ‘Hey, it’s just the humans. It’s just their only fucking farce of privacy. The one fucking place they pretend to actually be doing anything.’ But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to open the doors and let some spider panther things paw around my files. Shit, like they could even use a touch screen or a keyboard!”
Trevor wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a joke, so he kept his mouth shut.
“Anything we can do?” Trevor asked.
Jons gave Trevor a patronizing look. He wasn’t trying to be disrespectful, but Trevor felt it just the same. Kid of privilege, good only by virtue of sharing half his famous father’s genetic code. Maybe not even then. “I’m sure we can handle it,” he said.
“But a security breach involving the house …” Christopher trailed off.
“Well, sure Apex Guard would have to be involved.” Jons deferred to Christopher’s position as quickly as he’d dismissed Trevor’s. But that wasn’t fair — Trevor had been the one to come over earlier about all of this, to inform Jons that his father wanted to double the peacemaker presence. Although now that he thought about it, Trevor realized that was maybe why Jons didn’t want to talk to him, or hear what he had to say. There would always be power struggles, and
the debate between those who made public proclamations (Trevor’s father) and those who had to live with and enforce the consequences (the human police force) was one of the oldest among them.
“Trevor’s part of my team,” Christopher said.
For a half second, Jons looked like he’d bitten into a lemon. Then he reluctantly softened, and Trevor throttled his gut reaction: It wasn’t Trevor who was on Christopher’s team; Christopher was on Trevor’s. He let it go. They were all ultimately on the same team — Team Humanity, which was supposed to oppose any ill intentions by Team Astrals — but played along because it was easier.
“All right. Look. Like I said, I don’t really know anything other than there’s some sort of problem they care about, which means it’s not a bar brawl. They let us handle human on human, even if it’s a riot. If the cats are all worked up, I’d guess it’s something on the order of an info leak. Gun to head, if I really had to guess, my gut says they’ve got ideas about an insider helping with the recent attack. Whatever it was centers around or in the viceroy’s mansion, so I’m sure we’ll need your eyes. But right now, I don’t know what to tell you, other than hang tight.”
Christopher nodded.
They were turning around to head back when something prickled at the back of Trevor’s head. “Captain Jons.”
The big man turned.
“My father wanted me to check in with you anyway.”
Jons looked ready to roll his tired eyes. “What about?”
“One of the officers was mentioning problems with surveillance feeds,” Trevor lied. Christopher looked over, confused.
Jons’s eyes scrunched down. He looked perplexed then seemed to maybe recall something barely worth mentioning — a minor distraction that had taken a back seat to the current chaos. Which was expected because Trevor hadn’t heard anything about surveillance from his father at all, and had been anticipating a no.
Instead, Jons said, “Yeah. We did have a glitch. But it was just this morning. Like, a minute before those fucking things swarmed the station. How did you even hear about it?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Trevor puffed his chest. “Just get it fixed, okay?”
“Sure,” said Jons, mystified. And ordinarily, Trevor would have been mystified too, except that one of the images forced into his mind by the passing Reptar had looked an awful lot like an alien mind might see Terrence: dark sunglasses looking like deep eye pits, his head surrounded by a wide halo of giant black hair.
The Reptars had been to see Terrence today — and if Trevor could trust the feeling behind the impression, they didn’t quite believe whatever he’d told them.
Disturbing camera feeds to bury the truth sounded exactly like the kind of thing Terrence might do after being questioned by Astrals — Terrence, whom Trevor had been suspecting for months, was up to something.
“Which feed has been glitchy?” Trevor tried turning the question into an afterthought.
“Northeast, at the border.” The captain pointed, and Trevor knew what was coming — what Terrence had been trying to hide from prying eyes.
“Near the church,” he added.
Chapter Eleven
“Here.”
Benjamin looked up. Charlie was above him, having made his delivery of important information with all of Charlie’s trademark tact. The bug-eyed scientist was standing beside him, his hand still planted on the colorful printouts he’d slapped onto Benjamin’s desk, his brown-gray beard a tidy mess. His bespectacled eyes were meeting Benjamin’s as if in accusation.
“You run these by Ivan?” Benjamin asked.
Charlie shook his head. “Ivan would try to find nukes if he were smart enough to understand what you said — and didn’t say — about Thor’s Hammer. There are plenty of nukes left out there even after Black Monday, and if anyone knows how to launch them, it’s a guy like Ivan.”
“You don’t like him, do you, Charlie?”
“This used to be a place of research and knowledge, not war.”
Benjamin shrugged. Through the office window, on the main laboratory floor, Danika was watching them. Benjamin gave her a slight nod, telling her it was okay to come over and see what they were discussing — but as Charlie had indicated, not to inform Ivan. Between the three of them, “don’t tell Ivan” was the default.
“It’s still a place of research,” Benjamin said.
Charlie sat like a mannequin, or possibly someone whose bones had been replaced by rods. “I don’t want Ivan seeing those maps.”
Danika arrived. She closed the office door behind her, intuiting the room’s mood.
“What maps?”
“Charlie got these off of GeoSurvey.” Benjamin tapped the stack of documents. “Topological, but also seismics and a handful of others.”
Danika picked up the stack and leafed through the maps. All were of Heaven’s Veil and the surrounding mountains where Meyer Dempsey’s Axis Mundi had once stood.
“Who don’t you want to see them? Ivan?”
Benjamin nodded.
“Are they what I think they are?”
“You see what they are.”
Danika looked at Charlie, annoyed. “I meant, are they for what I think they’re for?”
“Maybe you could propose what you think they’re for instead of playing guessing games?”
“Shut up, Charlie.”
“Some scientist you are.”
“Shut up, Charlie!”
“Yes, Danika,” Benjamin said, eyes on Charlie. “I wanted them so we could get an idea what’s underground at Heaven’s Veil. And as you indicated, we don’t have Ivan here because—”
“Because he’ll nuke the mountain.”
“Right.”
Benjamin had already sifted through a similar set of maps and was reasonably sure of what he’d see. But he’d wanted to be thorough. And per the typical scientific investigation, thorough meant boring. Movies made it look like science was filled with the flash and dazzle of discovery, but Benjamin had been doing this for his entire life, usually with Charlie by his side. Most of the time was spent eliminating dead ends and verifying things they already knew rather than finding new information. It was like searching for your car keys by checking everywhere in the world you were sure you couldn’t have left them, just to be sure.
Not surprisingly, the new maps were as unhelpful as the previous ones.
“There’s nothing here,” Danika said.
Benjamin nodded. Across from him in the chair, seeming snug in his discomfort, Charlie did and said nothing.
“Right,” Benjamin answered. “Because why would anyone do more than the most rudimentary survey on an area with nothing special about it? You can find all sorts of sonic soundings and blast analysis on the world’s buried cities, but who scopes a random mountain? A mountain in the middle of a bunch of hoity-toity real estate?” Benjamin set the maps on the desk. “So we’re still at zero.”
“But you’re sure it’s there. A buried temple or something,” said Danika.
“Of course I’m not sure. Charlie, are you sure that Thor’s Hammer is hidden at Vail?”
“I have neither confirmed nor rejected a single null hypothesis.”
Benjamin gestured at Charlie as if his eloquent answer said it all. “But they’re digging. You know they’re digging.”
“The footage Terrence’s people sent us shows excavated soil and rocks leaving the Apex.”
“But does that mean they’re looking for Thor’s Hammer?”
“What else would they be looking for?”
“Point of consideration though,” said Charlie. “This is the race that built the pyramids. Not the new ones. The old ones. Are we really to believe they need to get in there with shovels and hunt around like nineteenth century coal miners?”
“Maybe it’s delicate,” Danika suggested.
“Maybe there’s interference or something,” Benjamin said. “Maybe they’re working blind.”
Charlie slapped a hand on the
table. “Oh, come on. Humans can set up explosives and observe the echoes to see what’s down there. These beings travel through space in ships that defy conventional physics. We can’t even imagine how what they do is possible — or why, when they can fly so fast, they took so much time to arrive in the first place. I have a hard time believing that if they want to find something under Vail, they can’t just look through that mountain as if it were glass.”
“Maybe they know where it is but need time or precision to reach it.”
Benjamin ignored Danika and spoke to Charlie. “Come on, Charlie. You of all people know you can’t make an assumption like that. We’ve seen extensive evidence of a doomsday weapon throughout the historical records, and those are just the records that survived. The Library of Alexandria, when it burned, surely contained a lot of documents detailing what humanity knew then but will never know now. Even without more evidence of a Thor’s Hammer, what we have is clear enough. The pattern’s been the same forever: They come, they build, maybe they teach. There’s a brief period of maturity, sufficient that later cultures don’t understand how the growth could even be possible. Then, all at once, there’s a reset. Those advanced cultures — Egyptians, Mayans, and on and on — vanish, leaving a handful of dumb ancestors who grow up able to do none of what the old cultures could.” He raised a hand and ticked off points. “Not just the megaliths, but monuments like the Nazca lines, Sanskrit texts describing Vimanas and other obviously flying craft, the writings in the Zohar of the manna machine, the list goes on. Maybe past visitors have just wiped memories and destroyed records to erase all this knowledge instead of invoking a mass extinction, but then why do we sometimes hear the Ark of the Covenant described as if it were a radiation weapon?”
“Your point?” Charlie said.
Benjamin tapped around on his computer, displaying images of blue faux-glass monoliths in the nine worldwide capitals.
“They come. They build.” He tapped the under-construction megastructures, all similar to the Heaven’s Veil Apex. “And based on some of the new tech blips coming from the cities, sufficient that we can get them, I’d say they’re teaching. But what’s next? Maybe there’s nothing under Vail, fine. But we can’t just dismiss the possibility because it seems unlikely based on, ‘Well, they’d just use The Force to get at it if something was there.’ Every one of these eight other spots, investigators have already known there’s been alien contact. Every one of the modern capitals other than Vail is a place we know they’ve visited before. So doesn’t it make sense — not as proof, but as a reason to not give up and say it probably isn’t so — that there might be something at Vail, too?”