by Sean Ellis
DESCENDANT
A Mira Raiden Adventure—Book Two of DARK TRINITY
By Sean Ellis
Descendant, Copyright 2014 by Sean Ellis.
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conventions.
Published by Gryphonwood Press
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PROLOGUE: SILENCE
1993
They gathered close, hugging one another, murmuring prayers to shut out the noise of what was coming.
“Behold!” The voice was still strong despite the ordeal that had diminished him, body and soul. A hush fell upon the group, and the man continued speaking, reciting the words from memory. “‘A great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born.’”
He raised his eyes to the group. “The dragon has come to devour us, just as our Heavenly Father warned. But He is stronger than the dragon, and He will carry us away and hide us in the wilderness.”
Whispers of “Amen” arose from the group, barely audible as the noise outside reached a fever pitch.
“‘So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth—’”
There was a loud report and the sound of a window breaking.
He raised his voice higher, shouting over the crackle of flames. “‘Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath—’”
More shots. Panic fractured the group.
“His wrath is great, but we—” He broke off as smoke filled his throat. “We will not fear!”
The infant pressed tight to her mother’s bosom did not understand the words her father was shouting, but she felt his passion and his fear.
And she remembered….
Last year
The damage was catastrophic.
The 9-millimeter bullet, deformed by the ricochet, was already tumbling when it slammed into his eye, smashed through the orbital bone, and burrowed a chaotic path through the temporal lobe of his brain. The shock of the injury left him instantaneously paralyzed, even before the real effects of the wound became manifest.
The specific regions of his brain damaged by the bullet were not critical to life support; with immediate medical treatment, he might even have survived with only limited impairment. However, the secondary effects of the trauma—a hydrostatic shock wave that rippled through the surrounding tissue, the subsequent swelling of his brain that would in short order cause his gray matter to extrude through every orifice—would probably, under the best of circumstances, be fatal to an ordinary human.
He was no ordinary human.
How long he lay there, he could only begin to guess. He gradually became aware of maggots squirming in the ruined flesh of his eye socket, and assimilated them without conscious thought, drawing nutrition from their protein to begin the rebuilding process. It was all he could do; he could not move, he could not breathe. He could only lay in the darkness, trapped in the prison of his own rotting flesh.
They came for him nearly a week later. He was aware of them, felt their presence and thereafter their touch, but they were closed off to him. Their speech reverberated against his eardrums, but the damage to his brain did not allow him to process the nervous impulses into anything meaningful.
Nevertheless, those impulses traveled through him. His brain was listening to his nerves, and soon it would begin restoring the pathways that would allow him to communicate with and begin repairing his decaying corpse.
A setback. Just as his remaining eye began to interpret light—an intense glare filtered through the opaque membrane of his eyelid—the invasion began. His nerves flared with searing pain, then just as quickly were overcome with a chemical numbness. It was, he would later realize, formaldehyde.
He was being embalmed.
The darkness returned with a vengeance.
Yet, the flickering flame of his life would not be extinguished. Even as the transfusion of embalming fluid ended, his body started to repair itself again. The preservative chemicals were broken down at an atomic level, useful molecular components redistributed to nourish the restoration process, toxic elements shunted into the lipid cells that sheathed his torso and extremities.
Time passed and his nerves began to transmit information, but there was no light to guide him. After days, or perhaps weeks, he suddenly felt the impulse to breathe, but his lungs refused to inflate. At some deep intellectual level, he correctly recognized that he had been placed in a vacuum-sealed container—a coffin—but his reactions were purely primal, instinctual. Like a trapped animal, he began to kick and scratch and claw. His hands found the outer limits of his prison. The cushioned silk liner swiftly fell to pieces beneath his clawed fingers, revealing the smooth, unyielding metal of the casket.
Without thinking to do it, he brought his knees up close to his chest and placed his feet flat against the unseen lid of the coffin. Then, with a mighty, silent heave, he flexed his legs and pushed.
It should not have been possible for the aluminum capsule, sealed with lead solder and negatively pressurized, to be opened by human brute force, but then no mere human would have been alive under such conditions to begin with. After a moment of struggle, the metal buckled slightly and that was enough to break the seal. Air whooshed into the cavity and with the equalization of pressure, the thin line of molten lead broke free in several places. The lid, hinged on one side, banged noisily against the outside of the coffin, and then the stillness returned. The darkness remained absolute.
Nevertheless, that first breath of fresh air—that first moment of true life—worked wonders for his cognitive faculties. His memories were still a mosaic of fractured recollections, which was to be expected when one’s brain held several millennia of life experience. He knew enough to recognize that his casket lay in some kind of crypt, and that when he found the exit to his tomb he would emerge once more into the light. He did not hesitate to begin groping for the walls of the enclosure, and after a few minutes picked out what felt like a doorway, blocked by slab of cool stone. Another violent shove broke the marble loose from the portal.
Even as the barrier tumbled down the ornate steps leading from the crypt, light filled his world. An overcast sky blocked out the stars, but after months in absolute inky blackness, the brilliance of the orange-hued ambient glow—the lights of a distant city reflected in the low clouds—stung his eyes. Both eyes. No trace of his maiming remained.
In spite of the discomfort, as the chemicals were purged from his body, he felt stronger, more alive. He barely recognized his own flesh. The skin of his fingers, which had once been as plump as sausages, the result of centuries of unashamedly living well, now hung in slack folds over bone and sinew.
I have lived too soft for too long, he thought. That changes now.
His sensitive eyes detected movement, an undulation of light and shadow; someone was coming. Animal instinct prompted him to shrink back into the darkness of his crypt, but his wiry muscles tensed in preparation as the approaching figure came into view. It was a single individual wielding only a flashlight; a caretaker, no doubt coming to investigate the tumult. He waited until the silhouette paused to examine the cracked marble slab at the base of the steps, and then struck with the swiftness of a wild predator.
The smell of terror enveloped the caretaker like a miasma of poisonous smoke in the instant his throat was torn open, but he did not cry out or struggle; he was dead before his conscious mind knew what was happening.
Later, as the first gleams of predawn twilight began illuminating the sky, the man who had emerged from the crypt pushed away the remains of his repast. His heightened metabolism had sped the nutrients of his meal to every part of his body, restoring both the full functionality of his organs and muscles and his overall sense of vitality. His memories were returning, and with them his sense of purpose.
He pawed through the torn and stained remains of the caretakers clothing, finding a wallet with a few small bills and more importantly, a slim cellular phone. He flipped open the latter item and punched in a sequence of digits.
“This is Wallace Vaught.” The voice that answered was more alert than he would have expected given the hour, which could only mean that his contact was in a different time zone, further to the east.
“It’s me.” His vocal cords were tight from disuse and his voice gravelly and all but unrecognizable.
“Who is this?”
He was not used to having to explain himself to underlings, but it was evident that Vaught, a simpering sycophant, useful as an aide, but in every other way an intolerable presence, would not be able to connect the dots based on a mysterious early-morning phone call.
“I’m going to give you a bank account number, a number that only you and one other man know about.” He rattled off a sequence. “That should tell you who I am. I need you to withdraw…take it all. We’re going to need it. Then come and get me.”
There was a long silence at the other end, then finally, “Can it be?”
He ignored the question. “I need to know if the Trinity is safe.”
“The Trin…my God, of course you wouldn’t know. It was stolen.”
“Stolen?” His voice cracked with rage. “Who?”
“No one is sure. It only just happened. It was on display with the other artifacts, but someone switched it for a replica. Mira Raiden is looking for it.”
Mira. The very thought of the woman amplified his wrath exponentially, but the anticipation of revenge tempered his response and his steely calm returned. “Come and get me Wallace. Hurry.”
“Where are you, sir?”
He turned in a circle, gazing at his surroundings for some hint of his location in the landscape, but saw only his crypt, a squat marble structure modeled after the Roman temple of Vesta at Tivoli, set on a perfectly manicured lawn in the midst of a grove of cherry trees that were already giving up their leaves to autumn. His eyes finally came to rest on the inscription above the door of the crypt. Two simple words in perfectly executed block letters, no date, no explanations:
Marquand Atlas.
“I’m right where you left me.”
Mira Raiden sped through the darkness, fleeing the pursuing yeti and the icy grip of hypothermia. There was a chance she might escape the former peril, but in doing so she had all but sealed her fate by the latter. She was lost now, and her intuition told her that every conceivable path led to failure.
Her gun was gone, not that it would have made much difference. She couldn’t have pulled the trigger anyway. At some point during the night, as the cold stole the feeling from her nerves, the sheer weight of the pistol had ripped it from her grasp, tearing chunks of frozen skin from her fingertips.
Dazed she staggered onward because there was simply no other alternative.
Mira.
The voice did not surprise her. In the context of her situation, it seemed perfectly reasonable that she would hear disembodied voices. But, after hearing it again and again, she began to wonder to whom the voice belonged. It wasn’t DiLorenzo. It certainly wasn’t Tarrant, the man she had always known as Walter Aimes. She didn’t believe in God, Jesus or guardian angels. So who did that leave?
Mira, this way! Hurry!
The voice was not truly audible; it would be impossible for her to hear speech. Even the howls of the yeti were indistinguishable from the shriek of the wind. Yet the words were nevertheless distinct; she could even tell from which direction they came, and altered her meandering course ever so slightly in order to heed its call. His call, she thought. I know this voice….
Then she saw him, standing before her, perfectly visible despite the gloom of night and the impenetrable shroud of blowing snow. His arms spread in welcome, beckoning her onward. Mira. Come to me.
“Curtis.” The gale snatched away the whisper and, for a fleeting instant, she felt a profound sadness. Her dead had come for her, which could only mean…. Well, it was a good ride.
Through the haze of her despair, she felt his firm grip as he pulled her into his warm embrace, and her fear fled away.
Rest now, Mira, she heard him whisper. You have begun to accomplish the will of the Wise Father, but there is much yet to do in the Great Work.
But then, as she slid toward the darkness of final release, the specter evaporated, revealing a different visage, one she did not immediately remember.
“Mira.” The man had to shout over the tempest. “Things ended badly between us last time. I hope we can make a fresh start.”
The sardonic voice, like the face, was unfamiliar, but she knew immediately who he was. A cry ripped past her frozen lips as the darkness mercifully claimed her.
PART ONE: WHISPER
1.
Above the Mediterranean Sea—four months later
Captain Eric Collier was not a happy man.
He should have been happy; as the commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare Group 2, he had long ago resigned himself to the idea that he would do most of his work from behind a desk, so any opportunity to lead his men from the front was a welcome change. But, as he looked at the faces of his shooters—sixteen men who would willingly, even eagerly, follow him through the gates of Hell—he knew with a terrible certainty that some of them, perhaps all of them, would not be coming back.
That was not a pessimistic assessment.
“I won’t bullshit you,” Rear Admiral Pentecost had told them at the briefing, only twelve hours earlier. “The odds of operational success are extremely low.”
That the man in charge of Naval Special Warfare Command was personally conducting the pre-op meeting was an indication of just how serious the mission was, and that played no small part in Collier’s decision to personally lead SEAL Team Eight’s second platoon on the operation.
That, and one last chance for a little glory. It was tough for SEAL operators to make flag rank; leading men into combat—leading from the front—was something that would distinguish him from the “good ol’ boy” network of ship drivers who were lined up ahead of him, waiting for their stars. Still, that didn’t mean he was eager to rush headlong into danger.
“Respectfully, sir
, those odds would improve astronomically if you gave us forty-eight hours to rehearse and gather more intel.”
Pentecost made little effort to hide his chagrin. “We don’t have forty-eight hours, son. This has to happen now or never.
“Whether you succeed or fail—” Collier knew that the admiral had chosen those contrasting outcomes carefully as an implicit dare, “—approximately fourteen hours from now a B2 bomber will obliterate the target facility in what will probably be interpreted as an act of war. It’s that serious.”
The admiral gestured to the projected image of a generic looking industrial campus, situated in an equally austere desert environment. Pentecost must have sensed the unasked question, for he continued, “The reason that we are putting you men in harm’s way is this.”
The image on the wall changed to what appeared to be a file photograph of a silvery metal circlet with a two hexagonal crystals situated at diametrically opposed points along its orbit.
“This is your objective, men. We want it back and that’s why we’re sending you, but if we can’t get it, we’ll destroy it at any cost. Every minute is critical. Every minute that this object is in the possession of our enemy....” Pentecost trailed off, perhaps unable to articulate just how dire such an eventuality would be. “Here’s what we know.”
The image changed again, this time to reveal what looked like a security camera video feed. The grainy footage showed a non-descript corridor and for a few seconds it appeared that nothing was happening. It took Collier a moment to realize that what he first thought to be ghost images—digital static—were in fact human forms moving down the hall. As if to verify this conclusion, the secure door at the far end was abruptly framed in a puff of smoke as it burst outward.
“Three days ago the National Laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico were penetrated by a team of intruders utilizing very advanced equipment and weapons. And when I say advanced, I mean that they were using equipment that is still on the drawing board at DARPA. Adaptive camouflage that is virtually invisible to video surveillance, and according to eyewitness accounts, damn difficult to see up close and in person….”