by Zachary Adam
The other four points of the star were guarded by the other four ranking members of the enterprise – by Scion, Banker, Prodigal, and Locuna. They stood as witnesses only, and as security should the thing go awry – a possibility, Archangel said, when dealing with anything older than a hundred years or so, in terms of knowledge.
They had all been doubters until the body had collapsed to dust, a bluish-grey powder. Just to remove the possibility of anyone claiming the spectacle was staged, Scion was prepared to suppose, but then, two weeks in the grave surely had taken care of that.
“Y’ai’ng’ngah Yog-Sothoth H’ee-L’geb Fai Throdog Uaaah.” The dust swirled around itself, forming a sort of sideways cyclone there on the stone slab. A dense shape was forming through the haze of moving particles, the dust collapsing into itself, back into a physical form, when with a sudden impact Niles Clayton’s restored body was slammed back down onto the slab by gravity.
His screams were entirely inhuman. Archangel chuckled rather warmly, closing the book he had borne.
“Say what you will about me, detective, but I am a man of my word.” There was a hush throughout the room as Niles fell silent, foam at the mouth and chest heaving heavily. The four other Founders wondered at his very existence, and all the many, many things it implied. There was the strangeness of his murmuring, of a broken voice imparting fever-dreamt tales of twin moons in a sea of black stars.
Niles, thankfully, was already lapsing into the amnesiac properties of acatalepsy, and was unconscious within seconds. Archangel explained this as the others pondered whether or not it was a failure. “The human mind is incapable of understanding certain things. We have known this as long as we have known how to know, as long as there have been questions like ‘explain to me your original face, before your mother and father were born’. That does not, however, prevent them from experiencing these things. The most merciful thing God ever did, if he did in fact do anything, was to grant our brains the ability to break so thoroughly they forget the bad experience. He will be fine in a few days… as you all were, when you underwent similar experiences.”
He looked around the room. Everyone present had had their own private brushes with the supernatural, but none could say they’d been to hell and back.
--
“Ah, Herr Därk, so good to see you. I wasn’t really expecting you back.” Vidcund gave a weary smile. Everyone had been gushing to see him, and what was the worse, his drink didn’t seem to be sitting with him at all well. Too heavy, perhaps, with all the added protein. “Everyone things one little gunshot wound is enough to make me fall to pieces. I expected better from you, Drache.”
“You perforated your Aeorta.” Drache wore a concerned frown, and he was right to do so. That was a grievous wound, and it should have taken more than a few weeks in a fish tank to recover, even with the best technology that Agency had on hand to treat such wounds. Vidcund was, of course, a cold fish about it, plastering a new frown onto his face. “Which is entirely survivable, apparently. Do we have any new information?”
“Actually, yes.” Drache gestured across the table. This, like most of the conference rooms, was equipped with a touch, autostereoscopic interface, creating the illusion of a three-dimensional field for the handling of information and polarized by the standard-issue AR glasses, examples of which were worn by Därk, and a more robust “safety glasses” variant worn by Drache. It was among the more sophisticated interface systems available, and as far as Vidcund knew, it hadn’t yet been released to the public, but that was only a matter of time.
An image of a section of curtain appeared, and Vidcund seized it. Sensors around the room judged the position and orientation of his hands and finger-tips, allowing him to handle the sample as though it was really there, though of course it was entirely intangible and without mass, which required a certain degree of imagination on his part.
“We also finished cross referencing our list of missing persons to the list of students. There was only one name that went un-accounted for.”
“Somebody’s child is missing after a violent attack on a school and they didn’t file a police report?” Vidcund rose an eyebrow, sparing a moment for a skeptic glare. “That’s not the weird part. The girl’s name is Maria Frost. She has a history with the Primary.”
Vidcund considered that. “… Do you suppose it was possible that Creena attacked the school specifically looking for Frost?”
“I would say she probably found her.”
“Oh no,” said Vidcund, showing the curtain to Drache with the triskelion-shaped stain upon its inner surface. “I very much doubt that.”
--The shuddering, inching machine was called Dhole, a joke among its operators. It had the dubious distinction of being one of the smallest tunnel boring machines ever constructed, at a mere diameter of only 2 metres. It had, however, advanced at a rapid and telling pace, and only now broke through into the chamber they were calculated to have entered two weeks ago.
Immediately, as soon as the first gust of air was detected, the machine was shut down, and the final few inches of rubble were removed by hand, with the work crews working as silently as possible. Strictly speaking, they weren’t supposed to be here, even if this was the sort of thing that was pre-ordained by time.
They were a level below the lowest sub-basement of the Terrwald Regional History Museum, in what amounted to a pit thirty-foot deep that had once been much deeper. The pit was vaulted over with brick and mortar construction that none of the tunnelers – experts in such things – particularly trusted. The sole entry – or at least, the formerly unique entry – had been a scaffold-platform drawn down by winches. As a part of the history of the region, this area had been vaulted over and buried, best to be forgotten. Naturally, when the museum had more or less discovered the location by accident, it was
immediately excavated, and furnished with pumping equipment to drain it and keep it that way.
Almost immediately after that, they ran out of money for the further repairs needed, the re-engineering required to shore up the weight of the ceiling (now that it had a museum on top of it, though at least half of that new weight was shared by the surrounding, solid earth), the installation of proper ventilation, and the purging of a probably-deadly species of mould that was growing on most of the available surfaces, and was now sporing thanks to the changes in humidity.
The diggers, of course, were prepared for such things. They wore industrial-grade filtration masks, Tyvek jumpsuits and bore with them all manner of protective equipment in addition to their various tools.
One of which, the most hastily deployed, was a highpressure system on a portable framework. Once assembled, it would allow a single worker to operate a boom-arm that would allow him to apply a thick coating of sprayed concrete to the area of the hatch through which the Museum’s elevator would descend.
Once this was done, the leader extracted from an aluminum-sided, crashproof case, a singular item. It could only have been antique, though a casual observer saw in it no civilization’s usual tropes – it was instead a sculpture of odd angles and carvings, surmounted with a short shaft at the end of which was fixed with a single red jewel, the rest of the body wrought out of what seemed to be, more or less, solid brass, at least from what the man could see of it as he assembled the few pieces in which it was transported.
As he had been taught, and had done countless times before, he touched one of the strange symbols carved into a surface of the device, and the red gem at the apex began to glow with a dim light. He busied himself with a technician’s attempts to get a connection with a wireless transmitter that had been placed in the museum basement the night before, which would have given them some degree of observation and control of the Museum’s various security systems.
Presently, the light of the jewel flared and resolved itself into a life-sized, immaculately detailed bust of the group’s patron.
“What is it, Elder Brother Peaslee?”
The expedition lead
er turned. “Brother Kline. Forgive me, I did not expect such a quick connection.”
“We can spare the niceties,” Kline said. There was no hint of annoyance in his voice, but an unusually serious masque suggested the call had been an interruption. Peaslee grinned the lopsided grin of a scoundrel past. “We have found the door.”
Kline gave a slow, well-earned smile. “… I have the Key.”
05 – Escapist
“I have been wrong before, and will be wrong again-“
Kline glanced coolly up from behind the mound of mouldering old volumes that, in their careful
arrangement, were helping him to decipher the writings on the Wellstone that was buried beneath the museum. Assisting him in the matter was a small pile of
photographs, as well. “It can be better to be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”
His younger associate would not be dissuaded so easily. “Misquoted Twain aside, Professor Kline, I am surprised we are not sharing this information with the authorities.”
Kline forced himself to look up from his references again, a slight frown cracking the otherwise perfect mask of polite detachment. “You yourself have said, Professor Derrida, that there is no relevant, governmental authority with jurisdiction in these matters.”
“Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear,” James Derrida responded diplomatically, to the limit of all possibility. He was, compared to Kline, both young and brash, but being as he was into his late thirties, he had seen enough of the worst the elder had to offer to know better than to deliberately antagonize Kline. Worse, he had some inkling of what Kline was, or at least what he aspired to be, and had no desire to speed along his remembrance or apotheosis, whichever it was. “Just because we aren’t set up to deal with this doesn’t mean we should rob society at large of the ability to at least attempt to defend itself.”
“The chief reason I am not sharing this information, Professor Derrida, is because it means the beginning of the end of Agency Division. I would think, given your, shall we say, extracurricular activities, that would be more boon than bane.” Kline offered a slow, wry smirk, which suggested he knew even more than was let on.
Derrida accepted this rebuke coolly, with a half a smile tugging at the far corner of his mouth. “It puts the cart before the horse, but yes.”
Adopting this sort of cocksure, uncaring attitude helped to stem the tide of nervousness welling up in the back of the younger man’s mind.
--
He could see them. The Others came to his eyes as faint and off-focus stars in a sea of inky black, punctuated with the dimmest suggestion of structure from the firmament that was the isolation tank. Vidcund knew they were the Others, because he could still feel them – that myriad of toomany limbs, freshly resolved into entire bodies composed in full. They gnawed with their individual hungers, each too hot or too cool, un-comfortable, over-tired, or jittery with artificial stimulation.
This should have jarred him, as it surely would have jarred anyone else, but the sharpening sense of extrabodily proprioception was met with a strong feeling of memory. He had come to think of the senses as not so much being discovered, but rather returning, as though some accident had numbed them. They had now persisted, in sensory flickers, even outside of the tank, for hours at a stretch after he emerged from his daily float.
Seeing this starry sea of them was new. One was particularly bright, as if it was much, much closer, and directly in front of him, more or less above his head. He found it difficult to move away, and after a few moments of feeling uncomfortable, he extended his arm reflexively, connecting with the release pad for the door of his tank, which hissed upward automatically on pneumatic tubes.
The lighting in his stateroom was dim and subdued, but brighter than the usual pitch dark he kept the outer lighting at. He could navigate in the almost total absence of light, these days, and preferred the gradual adjustment for his eyes over the sharp glare of emerging into a lit room.
He didn’t need to look around long to find out what had happened with the lights. Sergeant Drache was standing not four feet ahead of him, holding out a towel. “I’ve been trying to wake you for three minutes.”
“The hull’s soundproof. You’ve got to lift the lid.” Vidcund accepted the towel gladly, and was quick to use it to cover himself up. “What is it?”
“Class 2A Site Emergency.” Severe risk of Discovery. “You’re the ranking agent on deck. Administration’s out for the night.”
Vidcund snarled slightly, and began towelling off at once. So much for modesty. “Who’s the lead Enforcement op?” “You’re looking at him. I ordered the secondary and ternary access routes sealed. Whoever’s in is in, and whoever’s out is out. Local PD was on-site when the riot started so I can’t exactly do anything about the primary.”
Vidcund considered that for a long while. The Abject Facility, Agency’s hub underneath the H.R. Abject Institute for the Criminally Insane, had as its primary entrance a cargo lift that was in the Institute itself. This was mostly used for bringing down prisoners whose tale would, for obvious reasons, otherwise go unbelieved. It was the only link between the two, and the logical route for the rioters above to take. “Lock out the down-shaft receiving area.”
“Naturally, I already have. I don’t consider the riot to be a threat to either operational or physical security. I’m merely required to report to you.”
Vidcund smiled, easing into his pants, which as a matter of course always went on after his shirt. His weapons harness would come next. “I have to say, Drache, in you I find my equal in terms of professionalism. Always a pleasure.”
“Pleasure’s mine, Vidcund.”
As the lights plunged the pair into darkness, and the hum of the isolation tank’s filtration pump was replaced by the dull silence of a failed electrical system, the silence and surprise was punctuated by a dull “huh” from each of the men. Vidcund set his jaw, removing his augmentedreality glasses from his face, while Drache uneasily shifted his submachine gun to a more comfortable – and ready – position.
“Well,” Drache supplied, optimistically, “at least there’s a backup system.”
--
“Are you trying to tell me that those sunglasses of yours have light intensification?” Vidcund had stopped again. His and Drache’s progress through the powerless Abject Facility had been slow and steady – a constant game of groping in subterranean darkness, reaching locked doors, and each waiting for the other to perform their role in bypassing the lock. He leaned on the doorframe, waiting for the digital lock to launch off of the portable power pack that was part of Drache’s equipment. The device had to self-diagnose, load a defaulted list of credentials, verify the list was proper, and then, and only then, would it be ready to match against their respective identification. “Not exactly. They have a few filters for various spectra to translate them to the visual. It works particularly well for sensing certain objects. Living things, in particular, but also certain resonances.”
For Drache, it was all so much greek. Clever as he was in his own right, his considerable mental faculties were directed to the best, cleanest, and most expedient means of dealing with a small handful of practical matters. The technician to Därk’s engineer, if you like. “Ah. Is that how you keyed on the weird symbol at the High School?” “No, that was actually a combination of luck and intuition.”
The lock beeped, and the door opened, and the two could finally get inside the security office. It was dimly lit – a vast improvement over the all-but-total darkness of the corridors themselves. The door re-locked itself as Drache brought his power supply in with him. It was just too useful a piece of kit not to have. He looked up to the emergency lighting with some slight satisfaction on his face. “Hey, at least something works.”
“Waste of half an hour if the computers aren’t, too.” Vidcund said bitterly, and moved to check just that. Neither Agent nor Enforcer had expected much functionality out of the computers, an
d in that respect they were not to be disappointed. Abject, like most such facilities, had triply-redundant power systems, at least for some sections of the base. The first two redundancies were shared by the entire structure – mains power diverted from their surface cover operation, in this case the Abject Institute itself, and Diesel Electric Generators capable of outputting, as a rule, 110% average power load for three weeks with the fuel supplied. The fact that the security was working on battery-backed UPS instead of the diesel generators implied something must have gone wrong in that respect.
Drache probed around the one working computer terminal to squeeze as much useful information out of it as he could before the battery system failed – which admittedly should have been a couple of hours down the road. “Does it bother you that we haven’t actually run into anyone yet?”
“No. I’m pretty much the only person who spends the night ever since the two other gates were added.” Vidund was tapping the “sweet spot” of the left temple of his glasses, cycling through the various available filter methods until he had expended them all. There wasn’t much to see – the thick walls of the facility had been specifically reinforced against most such imaging methods anyway. “Besides,” he intoned, “Lockdown procedure is to sit tight and wait to be relieved by competent authority.”
While he was at it, Vidcund activated the Bluetooth on his phone. The base network was down, which limited a lot of his technological toys, including the simple ability to dial out, but at least here in the office he could steal data back and forth from the computers that had it available. “Try and find an on-base headcount. As current as you can.” “I’m already uploading it to your phone. It should have self-updated at the moment of the power failure, so that’s about as current as we can hope for.” Drache switched over to another window. “I’m into the power monitor, but I’m not sure it’s working.”