“Don’t do that, Eric!” The threads of light faded from Kayla’s hands. “Jesus, you scared me! You stopped your heart. Are you okay now?”
He nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak. I can just see the headlines in the newspapers—”Bard Commits Suicide Out of Sheer Stupidity.” He took a deep breath. “Let me try that again.”
This time, he moved more carefully into that pool of light, and the light slowly dimmed away, leaving a pool of shadows instead. He opened his eyes again, relieved to see that he was still alive. “Did that work?” he asked.
Kayla closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “Looks good, Bard.” She helped him to his feet, then hesitated. “Oh, almost forgot.” She darted into the kitchen, reappearing a few seconds later. “I left them a note,” she explained. “I’ve told them that we’ve gone out shopping for supplies, and told them to wait for us. Maybe we can be finished with this before they realize where we’ve gone.”
“Yeah, sure.” You’re being very optimistic about this, Kayla, he thought. I’d guess that you’re as scared as I am, but you’re even better at not showing the fear. If you can be this calm once we’re inside the Labs, maybe we’ll survive this after all. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Kory rolled over in bed, then sat up abruptly. Something was wrong, very wrong…
It took him several seconds to figure it out. Nothing was wrong with him, and there were no enemies in sight, nothing more unusual than the sounds of traffic outside the window. Beth was still asleep, curled up in a ball next to him. Eric was…
Eric was missing.
Not just missing, but completely gone. Usually he could just think about Eric and know where he was. The touch of Bardic magic was unmistakable. Even when he had been captive in the tunnels of the Dublin Labs, it had only taken a small effort to reach out and find Eric, to touch him across all the distance of the city and the Bay.
Now he couldn’t sense anything. No Bardic magic, no Eric—He cast out his thoughts in a widening ring, searching…
Nothing.
Kory fought against the cold terror that wrapped itself around his heart. “Don’t panic, don’t panic,” he whispered to himself, and shook Beth awake.
“Wha— Kory?” She blinked, propping herself up on one elbow. “Is something wrong?”
“Do you know where Eric is?”
“He’s not asleep ...?“ She glanced at the alarm clock. “It’s ten a.m. and Eric’s already out of bed? Amazing!”
“He’s gone, Beth. I can’t find him anywhere.”
She sat up. “You mean, you can’t find him magically? Are you sure?”
He nodded. “He is not in the city, as far as I can tell. I should know where he is, but I cannot find him.”
“Is he ...?“ There was a question in her eyes that Kory did not want to answer.
“I—I do not think so. At least, I should feel that, as well. The death of a Bard… we would know it, I am certain of that. It would leave a mark upon the bones of the land.” Unless he was taken far away before they killed him, perhaps to the realm of those shadow-monsters…
“So either someone is hiding him from us, or Eric went AWOL.” Beth was suddenly all business, pulling on her bathrobe and slippers. “If this is Eric Banyon’s idea of a joke, I’m going to kill him. Can you tell where he was last, before he disappeared?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
He concentrated, imagining the Bard’s handsome features, remembering his laughter, the intense look on his face as he played an ancient Irish air… “Downstairs,” he said firmly. “In the hallway, very close to the front door. That’s where Eric vanished.”
“The front room? But that doesn’t make any sense—If someone had come through the front door and attacked him, Eric should’ve made enough noise to awaken everyone in the house.” She was out of bed and running downstairs before Kory could say anything else. He followed her a moment later, to find her standing near the front door, staring at the floor, then she looked up at the row of hooks where they always hung their jackets and coats. “No sign of a scuffle down here. And Eric took his leather jacket. If he’d been kidnapped, he wouldn’t have done that.”
Elizabet, sleepy-eyed, walked out from the kitchen. “Are they back yet?” she asked.
“What?” Kory asked.
“Kayla and Eric. They left a note saying that they were going to get some supplies… Can’t imagine what they’re doing, unless Kayla wanted to get some extra first aid supplies. I thought they might be back by now.”
Beth shook her head, a thoughtful frown on her face. “I think I’ve figured this out—they took off early, leaving a note so we wouldn’t worry about them, and Eric makes sure that we can’t track him magically… where do you think they are right now, Elizabet?”
The older woman smiled wryly, her white teeth very bright against her dark skin. “Kayla isn’t someone who’d run away from a fight, so I know they didn’t just run for the hills—I’d guess they’re on their way across the Bay to the Dublin Labs right now, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s what I think, too.” Rage smoldered in her eyes. “Damn it, Eric Banyon, you are such a twit! How could he do this?”
“Perhaps because he did not wish any of us to risk our lives,” Kory said. Beth and Elizabet both turned to look at him. “I had thought about doing something similar,” he confessed, “but decided that I would probably not be able to succeed on my own.”
“And Eric, on the other hand, thinks he can do anything!” Beth clenched her hands into fists. “Okay, okay. Here’s what we do. I’ll call the psychic team, get them to head over to Mount Tam and start ASAP. The rest of us, and the elven assault team, will head over to the Labs and save Eric from his own stupidity. I can’t believe he dragged Kayla into this, too!”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Elizabet said. “You don’t know Kayla quite as well as I do. By the way, has anyone seen Susan this morning?”
Maybe this isn’t the best idea I’ve had in a long time, Susan thought. But I’m not going to be a bystander anymore. This is my project that some insane nut is trying to pervert into a killing machine, and maybe I can stop this without anyone getting killed—crazy human witches, elves or whatever other refugees from fantasy they can drag in.
It was that thought that had sparked her flight from the house on Broderick Street: the image of Melisande, lying dead with several .45 auto bullets in her, her blood soaking the white linoleum floors of the Dublin Labs. Not if I have anything to say about it.
As she expected, the traffic driving east along the Bay Bridge wasn’t too bad at this hour of morning. In the other direction, she could still see the “parking lot” of cars, inching their way into the city. It was a beautiful morning, with the last of the fog already burned away by the bright sun shine. She navigated the freeway interchange through Oakland, glancing involuntarily at the cleared area off to the right that had once been the double-decker Nimitz Freeway. This is what I’m going to prevent, she vowed silently. That’s why I fought to do the Poseidon Project, so that this would never happen again. Now I’m going to stop the inhuman bastard who wants to use my project for destruction.
It was a simple plan, what she was going to do. If she could get to Colonel Steve without being intercepted by Blair or any of his people, she knew she could convince him. Steve was ethical, no matter what Blair was. No amount of double-talking would get Blair out of this. Just the physical evidence, the fact that Blair was moving the probes and recalibrating the equipment to trigger a major quake—five minutes in the lab, explaining what was going on to the colonel, and all of this would be over. Lab security would arrest Blair, she’d deactivate the machinery, and that would be the end of it.
The only tricky part was getting to Steve without alerting Blair. But she had a plan for that, too…
With luck this would work, because she had no intention of trusting that flaky dark-haired boy and his neurotic girlfriend. The e
lves she trusted, of course, but she couldn’t understand the overwhelming belief they had in their “Bard.” He screwed things up royally before, didn’t he? No, what she was doing was risky, but safer than the other options. And she wouldn’t have to watch Sandy die.
She turned on the radio, and punched the button to bring up the local talk radio channel. The station announcer was talking about the morning’s earthquake, and another very minor one that had hit ten minutes ago— right while I was driving across the Bridge, she thought. Terrific. But the announcer assured everyone that there was nothing to worry about, the seismologists at Cal Tech had said that the faults were just releasing a little pressure, there was no chance of a major quake.
She smiled humorlessly at that, and drove a little faster.
A half hour later, she braked to a stop at the guard gate at the Labs, flashing her I.D. to the security officer. She parked in the underground lot, leaving the car doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. She knew she didn’t have to worry about car thieves, not in this complex. And there was a high possibility she might want to leave in a hurry.
Her first stop was the cafeteria on the second floor. There was a small dining room off the main area, which had a telephone in it. She strolled past the security officers, staying away from the elevators that descended into the underground laboratories. At this hour, the hallways were mostly deserted. Still, she breathed a sigh of relief when she walked through the cafeteria doors.
The cafeteria was empty. She guessed that all the personnel were in the kitchen, preparing for the lunch crowd. A few seconds later, she was standing next to the telephone. She dialed Steve’s extension and listened to the ringing tone. Come on, Steve, pick up your phone!
A click, then she heard his voice. “Colonel O’Neill, Poseidon Project.”
“Steve, this is me. Are you alone?”
“Susan, where are you? Are you all right?” His voice sounded concerned.
“I’m okay. Listen, we have to talk, right now. Where’s Warden Blair? Is he in the lab?”
“No, he’s organizing the cleanup on Level Thirteen. Where have you been, Susan? Security said you never went home, you’ve been missing for twenty-four hours…“
“I’ll explain later. Meet me in my lab, in five minutes. And please, don’t tell Blair or any of his people, all right?”
She waited, wondering how that security-overconscious mind was taking what she’d just said.
“Okay. I’ll be there ASAP, Susan.”
She hung up the phone, and hurried to the closest stairs. Ten minutes later, she was in her lab.
For a moment, as she stepped through the doorway, it felt as though all of the events of the last two days had been only a nightmare. Maybe, if she wished for it hard enough, Frank and Dave would walk back in the door, ready to help her set up the next test run. But no, there was the oscilloscope she’d thrown at the monster, broken and dented; someone had placed it back upon the worktable.
No time for funk, not now. She moved quickly, making sure that the computer workstation was up and running, then loaded the Poseidon simulation program. She set it to run a simulation based on current test run parameters, and waited impatiently as the numbers scrolled past on the screen. The screen cleared, then began to build the three-dimensional fractal landscape of the Bay Area, pinpointing the exact trigger point of the quake and the widening circles of area of effect and potential energy release levels.
“Son of a bitch!”
Until now, I wasn’t certain. It could’ve just been an evil fantasy, a delusion that Warden Blair wanted to destroy the city.
Now it’s laid out in front of me in full-color graphics…
As she’d guessed from the elven scouts’ reports, the Poseidon device was aimed at the San Andreas fault, directly beneath Hollister. And the potential energy readings were off the scales, somewhere beyond 10.0 on the Richter.
He’ll wipe the entire Bay Area off the map. Hell, the effects would destroy the Labs as well! How did he plan on surviving it?
The answer came to her a moment later, in a memory of the shadow-monsters drifting through the hallways of the Labs. Shadow-monsters that wouldn’t care if the complex crumpled in on itself, burying level upon level in rumbling death. She remembered the alien intelligence behind Blair’s eyes. He looks human, but he isn’t.
“Susan?”
She turned quickly, to see Colonel Steve walking toward her. “Steve, thank God! Listen, we probably don’t have much time… Blair is planning to use the project as a weapon, with San Francisco as his first test case. I have proof of this—he’s moved the probes off our test run coordinates and set them to trigger a major quake. Let me show you the computer simulation… it displays exactly where he was going to trigger the quake.”
He smiled. “It’s okay, Susan. I know.”
Shock froze her mind and her body—but her mouth kept going.
“But you haven’t arrested Blair yet?” Surely this was just a sting. Surely Steve had something planned.
He didn’t answer, only standing there, looking at her. There was something strange about Steve’s face. She hadn’t seen it at first, but now it was visible to her… lines of tension that hadn’t been there before. No, not just the lines in his face… it was in his eyes, a cold blankness, an alien intelligence that was staring back at her…
If she’d seen this before she’d met the elves, the musician, she’d have assumed she was the crazy one. Not now.
God, no. Not Steve. Please, this can’t be happening, this can’t be real…
She had to get out of here, before this insanity consumed her as well. That was her one thought, that if Blair could do—whatever it was that he’d done—to Steve, it was only a matter of time until she was changed into something like him: a walking and talking human being with an alien’s thoughts peering out from within her eyes…
But Steve was between her and the door. And Steve had a gun.
“This goes too fast,” she whispered, sitting down on one of the wooden lab stools with a thump.
I am stuck. If he has Steve, and Steve has me—he has me. It’s over. “So, Steve, what happens now?” she asked conversationally, looking up at him.
He seemed momentarily taken aback. “I—I don’t know,” he said uncertainly. “I’m supposed to keep you here, until Blair tells me what to do. I wish—I wish you hadn’t come back, Susan. For a little while, I thought you were safe, safely far away from this.”
“I could’ve been, if I’d had any brains.” What’s going on inside his head?she wondered. “Steve, can’t you just let me walk out of here?”
“Can’t—can’t do that.” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “He won’t let me.” His hand twitched next to the pistol holster on his hip.
“I see.” Her glance fell upon the broken oscilloscope on the table next to her. The thought occurred to her that while the oscilloscope had been useless against a nightmare creature, it might be significantly more applicable against a human being. Especially if she swung it hard enough. “Steve, is that Blair out in the hall?”
Steve’s glance swung toward the open door. “No, I can feel where he is, he’s still on the thirteenth—”
The oscilloscope crashed into his chest. Steve made an odd choking sound, and stumbled backwards into another lab table. A split-second later, Susan was out the door and running down the corridor.
She heard Steve’s voice from behind her, furious. “Susan! Stop or I’ll shoot!”
He won’t shoot me, she thought, any more than I could’ve hit him in the head with the ‘scope. I couldn’t kill him, and I know he won’t—
The noise of the gun firing was very loud in the narrow corridor.
Something slammed into her back, a sudden pain like her body had been set on fire. The shock threw her forward against the wall; a second shock, a moment later, as she landed hard on the floor. Everything was very bright, very white… she tried to move, to get up and run, but somehow nothing
seemed to be working right in her body anymore, everything was numb with pain and her legs just wouldn’t move at all.
She heard footsteps approaching, and Steve’s voice whispering, “I’m sorry, Susan…“
I can’t forgive you, Steve, she wanted to whisper back to him, but the whiteness engulfed her before she could say a word.
* * *
CHAPTER 16:
Soldier’s Joy
“So, Eric, what’s the plan?” Kayla asked, looking at the gate of the Dublin Laboratories, a hundred yards ahead of them.
He shook his head, frowning. “I’m still trying to figure it out. Give me a minute, okay?”
He’d been thinking about this during the motorcycle ride across the Bay, and still couldn’t think of a good plan that included both of them surviving this experience. “All right, here’s what we do. I’m going to cast a spell over both of us, so that we’ll be nearly invisible. I’ll do myself first, so you can tell me whether or not it’s working. Then we’ll just walk in there, take a crowbar to Dr. Sheffield’s machine, and walk back out again.”
Kayla tilted her head to one side. “Susan will hate you for that, Eric.”
He snorted. “Well, tough for her. Better that than watching all of San Francisco slide into the ocean. And after that, we can take our time dealing with Warden Blair. I was thinking that we could follow him home later, and find out whether he’s a man or—or a demon wearing someone’s body like a set of clothing.”
Kayla shivered. “I know this sounds crazy, but I hope he really is a Nightflyer. Then maybe you can just banish the Nightflyer, and we won’t have to kill him. I don’t want to kill anybody,” she concluded, wistfully.
“I don’t want to either, kid,” Eric said seriously. He brought his flute to his lips, playing an experimental scale. Next to them, the parked motorcycle made an odd sound, almost a horse’s whinny. Kayla stepped back from it hastily.
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