by Wen Spencer
Of the mainland, Ukiah could see nothing. Never in his life had he felt this alone.
Ice and Mouse had trailed out behind him, apparently not afraid he would try to escape. Escape to where?
"How far is it to the mainland?" Ukiah asked them.
Mouse glanced toward Ice. "Too far to swim, really it is."
Rennie had shown Ukiah a map of New England—yesterday? Tuesday? He'd been losing track of days since the cult entered his life. If they were north of Cape Cod, swimming west would get him to the mainland. If they were south of the Cape's peninsula, however, he could swim for days before reaching land.
What should he do?
Ukiah retained enough of Rennie's memories to know that, in his place, Rennie would have tried to kill as many of the cultists as he could before they took him down, snarling and biting. Animal's recent death, however, strengthened Ukiah's abhorrence of killing a human. And even if he wanted to kill the cultists, he wasn't sure he could—so far they were seriously outclassing him in fighting.
What would Max do in his situation? Try as he might, Ukiah couldn't imagine Max ever being mistaken for an angel by homicidal Christians.
Atticus? His brother would pretend to cooperate, gather information, and wait patiently for the chance to put it to use.
Mouse nervously gestured to the kitchen door. "Come. Get some food."
Ukiah's stomach clenched tight on the thought of food, so he let himself be led back into the house to eat. The seating at the table had obviously been carefully planned. Ice took the thronelike chair at the head of the table—angel or not, the new cult leader wasn't giving up his position to Ukiah. Surprisingly, it was quiet Mouse that sat to Ice's right, and Ether to his left. The remaining cultists sat in the ten chairs flanking the table.
The only chair left open for Ukiah was the one at the foot of the table. Ukiah sat, wondering whose place he was filling. Core's? No, he would have been at the head in the throne, with Ice to his right.
"Let us say grace." Ice held out his hands to Mouse and Ether.
The cultists joined in a chain of hands and burly Meta and diminutive Qwerty shyly held out their hands to Ukiah. He eyed them uneasily for traces of Invisible Red and could see no telltale glitter. He reached out and clasped them loosely.
"Our Father, who art in heaven," Ice prayed aloud. The other cultists had closed their eyes, but Ice kept his cold blue stare on Ukiah. "We—your chosen, your holy warriors—give thanks for our daily bread and the new weapon you've put in our hands. Guide us to use him wisely. Watch over us and protect us as we face evil. Amen."
Ukiah silently said his own prayer. Oh, God, help me find the Ae before these idiots do something stupid. Amen.
"Amen," the cultists echoed.
The cult had been taking advantage of the sea and land; the table was laden with lobster bisque, baked cod, late squash, roasted potatoes, and pumpkin bread. For several minutes the food sucked in all his attention. Luckily the soup came first, and after its jolt of creamy calorie richness, he managed to pull his focus back to the cultists.
They'd been watching him with a mix of shy reverence and intense curiosity. Silence reigned at the table, broken only by the chime of silverware on china and the soft slurping of soup.
"So, if you . . . know"—Ukiah almost said "think" but decided that "know" was a safer word—"that I'm an angel, why did you attack me? What is it you want from me?"
"We need your help," Ice said. "Or at least, we hope you can help us. Can you speak the language of the demons?"
"Of course he can." Mouse flinched from the hard look Ice gave him. "Well, he's an angel."
Was it safe to admit he did, or was this another test? "I don't understand. There aren't any demons here."
"We have recordings of their conversations," Ice said. "We knew from the start that it would be suicide to try to take out the demons where they nest. Studying their habits, finding their weaknesses, and exploiting them are the only intelligent methods."
Ukiah nodded at the soundness of this.
"By doing statistical modeling," Mouse said, "we've identified certain patterns in their behavior."
"The number of the beast is six-six-six," Ether said with bright eyes.
"Um, yeah." Mouse was momentarily derailed. "What that means is that the demons usually perform any function in a collective of six."
"Unless a demon is trying to pass as a human—then they go solo," Ether inserted.
Mouse bobbed his head to agree that this was true. "Six of these collectives gather into nests for a total of thirty-six individuals typical for any one nest. And each geographic area will have six nests, arranged in a hexagonal figure."
"So any one occupied area will have two hundred and sixteen demons," Ice said. "And we can't take on that number by ourselves."
This was news to Ukiah. While Hex acknowledged that he was most comfortable as six individuals, Ukiah suspected that the adherence to the multiples of six was totally unconscious. With their memories of the Ontongard, the Pack assumed they knew everything they needed to know about their enemy without realizing there were things that the Ontongard didn't know about themselves. "You mapped the nest locations and noticed a pattern?"
"There seems to be some variation to that which might be caused by geographic anomalies." Mouse rearranged the silverware, stealing some from those near him, to form a six-sided figure of forks and knives. "Normal hexagon." He placed a saltshaker at one point, and then dimpled the lines of that corner. "One with a body of water, highways, or whatnot in the way."
"Mouse, I'm sure he knows all this," Ice said.
Apparently there were some drawbacks to pretending to be a perfect being.
"Well, I just want to make sure all our assumptions are sound," Mouse said. "This has all been guesswork."
Ice sighed and waved his hand, inviting Mouse to continue.
"Well, we experimented on burning them out of a nest to see how they chose nest sites." Mouse removed the saltshaker and reformed the hexagon. "We discovered that we could predict where they move to. Their movement is very simple and organic, and we created a computer program to mimic it. If you burn one nest, they'll abandon all the surviving nests except one to maintain the hexagonal shape and yet avoid the area of the destroyed nest." Mouse shifted the hexagon around the point that once held the saltshaker. "They always keep the nest farthest from the burn, rotating it in this manner."
Ice made a noise of disgust. "Destroying them would have been faster if we could have done a full assault on the nests."
"Their senses are very keen, so laying traps for them once they're settled in is nearly impossible," Mouse said. "Also there's the slight problem of getting into a nest after they establish it. But by being able to predict where they'll move to, we can prep a nest, bugging all the rooms and wiretapping the phones."
"The bugging devices are useless," Ice said. "They don't talk to one another. We think they have some type of telepathy that allows them to act as units without premeditating their actions."
"They do," Ukiah said.
"But they do use the phone," Mouse said. "We think there's a limited range to their telepathy, which the nests fall within. The only time they use the phone is to communicate with demons not at one of the nests."
"When we firebombed one nest, the other five nests reacted instantly," Ice said. "We did a hit-and-run operation and still barely escaped. They definitely have some type of ranged telepathy going on."
"They're very insectlike," one cultist noted. "Like bees in a hive making honeycombs, they exhibit the same behavioral patterns again and again. I'm not even sure that you could term them intelligent in the same manner that we classify humans."
"Let's not get into the intelligence fight," Ice snapped.
"They don't spend a lot of time talking on the phone," Mouse continued. "When they do, it's in a mix of English and demon tongue. What seems to happen is that they need to talk about something that doesn't have the equivalen
t English word available, and they switch into demon tongue until an English word will yank them back out. Because of their switching back and forth, we've been able to create a dictionary of sorts."
"But the conversations are cryptic," Ice complained. "It's more like they're dictating notes to themselves than having actual dialogue. Never any chitchat: How's the kids, what's the weather like."
Because in truth,Ukiah thought, the telephone acts more like an artificial neuron, connecting two halves of the same brain, than a device that two very different people use to communicate.
Schrцdinger Five chose that moment to climb up his leg, all needle-sharp claws extended.
"Ow! Schrцdinger!" Ukiah caught the kitten before he could wreak more havoc. "What? Are you hungry? Here." Ukiah offered a bit of his baked cod to the kitten, which it needed to sniff cautiously for a full minute before deciding it was fit to eat.
The cultists had gone silent. He looked up to find them watching him with nervous intent. Letting him live, he suddenly realized, was a supreme act of faith and courage for them—they knew what a Get was capable of. His existence had balanced completely on the well-being of the kitten. They watched now—with bated breath—to see if they'd been wrong.
Blissfully ignorant of his importance, Schrцdinger rumbled into a tiny, contented purr.
"I'm not one of them." Ukiah carefully selected another bite of fish for the kitten.
"You are too gentle to be one of them." Ice was a man whose vision was limited by his belief. He knew evil, recognized it at a distance. But his universe contained only two types of good: human and angel. He had seen Ukiah as wholly human until proved otherwise—but that left only angel. Apparently, though, common sense was warring with his beliefs; he sounded dubious even as he confirmed that Ukiah wasn't a "demon."
"You recorded their conversations." Ukiah distracted him back to the Ontongard.
"Yes." Ice delayed saying more by taking a bite of his cod and chewing it thoroughly. After carefully choosing his words, he continued. "The conversation gives us glimpses of their plans, but it's like a large jigsaw puzzle, flung out onto the ground and then partially obscured. We've been picking up the pieces, turning them this way and that, trying to fit them together and usually failing."
"Actually, part of the problem is that there are several puzzles all mixed together." Mouse seized the analogy.
"We think." Ice cautioned Mouse with a look, "for example, they suddenly moved a seed nest to Buffalo. We saw it as an opportunity to learn more, and followed. The demons there did extensive land surveys, apparently testing the stability of the area. They killed several key employees of the local electric company. They infiltrated a truck dealership. They secured warehouses in the middle of nowhere and shipped in extensive supplies of cable and wire. There were only thirty-six demons, and we raided the nest when we knew it was practically empty. We were hoping for written plans, records, anything that would give us an idea what they were planning. Nothing."
Because the Ontongard's ability to pass on perfect memories negated the need for written plans.
"They referred to Buffalo with a word we haven't been able to translate," Mouse said, and then he cleared his throat and attempted the word, a rough guttural bark.
"No," Ether said. "It's more . . ." She got the pronunciation right and Ukiah recognized the word: Landing site/invasion point.
"You know what it means." Ice leaned forward, his gaze intense. "Tell us."
The Ontongard must have planned to land the seed ship at Buffalo and tap into the extensive power grid of Niagara Falls. Luckily, the Pack had triggered the ship's self-destruct, and all their plans were now moot. But explaining the ship to the cult, who believed the Ontongard were demons, perhaps wouldn't be wise.
The cult stirred, put into disquiet by his silence.
"Ah, it . . . it's got a lot of meanings . . . if that's really the word they were using." Ukiah wished for his brother's smooth lies. He decided on the less specific of the meanings. "I think they were using the word that means 'invasion point.' They planned to launch a massive assault from Buffalo."
"Planned," Ice echoed. "But something happened in Pittsburgh. Things went very wrong for them. And you were there."
What to tell them? He was a horrible liar. He decided to stick to a version that Max and he created to tell authorities. "They stumbled into me. They attempted to kill me and they kidnapped my son."
"And the others? Your foster father? The female FBI agent? Are they angels too?"
"No!" Ukiah bolted to his feet, spilling the kitten out of his lap. "Leave them alone!"
The cult reacted with impressive speed. Even before the kitten hit the ground, all the cultists had weapons drawn and pointed at him.
Ukiah put up his hands, warning off their attack. "Wait!" And when the cultists didn't fire, he continued, trying to keep his voice level. "They're human. You mustn't harm them. If you hurt them, they're not like me—they won't survive what you've done to me! Please don't involve them."
"We'll leave them in peace as long as you cooperate with us." Ice motioned for him to sit. "Eat, and then we'll start working."
Ukiah sat stiffly and ate only because he would need the food later, after he learned where the Ae were stored.
***
After a tense dinner, the cultists split into two groups. Ice, Mouse, Ether, and Link herded him like shepherds with a flock of one into the living room, which was crowded with computer equipment. The rest stayed to clear the table and relieve those who hadn't eaten yet.
They indicated where Ukiah should sit, and Mouse settled nervously beside him.
"We've got hours of recordings, broken up into shorter sound bites to make them easier to handle." Mouse handed him a headset. "What we're going to do is play a recording for you to translate. Speak into this microphone. It's hooked to that computer there with speech-recognition software. It will type in your translations as you talk."
"Okay." Ukiah slid the headset on. The word "okay" appeared on the monitor beside him.
"Here's the first." Mouse opened a folder labeled "Angel" and clicked on the first file.
A man spoke, in Hex's emotionally dead voice, a phrase in the Ontongard language: "Returning/rejoining/regrouping at gathering/den/nest."
"The speaker is returning to the nest," Ukiah said, and the words wrote themselves on the text.
Mouse glanced to Ice, who nodded. "All right, and the next one?"
They played through eleven more segments, growing longer in length, but of no great importance; all in Ontongard with no English intermixed. The speakers changed, but not the tone or delivery. Played back-to-back, it was like listening to a dozen people trying to mimic one person. Mouse nodded as Ukiah translated them, as if he already knew what the clips contained.
They were testing him, Ukiah realized. They were seeing if he actually understood the language and was not just making up random comments.
After the last one, Mouse looked again to Ice. "He nailed them all."
"Good, good." Ice swung a chair around and straddled it, facing backward. "Play him the last call we managed to record."
Mouse closed the "Angel" folder and picked a program off the toolbar via an icon of a reel-to-reel tape deck. The resulting program quickly scanned through the selected recording, did a voice recognition on the speakers, produced photographs of a young black woman and a middle-aged white man, and rendered out a complex 3-D tree of colored nodes. The woman was identified as Demon BU1-623-S, alias unknown, and the man as Demon B3-215-S, alias Peter Caldwell.
"What are the numbers for?" Ukiah tapped the numbers for the man and was startled as a window opened giving more information: Peter Caldwell, six-one, a hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. Nest: Caldwell and Associates Engineering, Totten Pond Road, Waltham.
"The first set is the nest they belong to." Mouse closed the window. "This is a demon from one of the Buffalo nests, speaking to a Boston nest."
"Since
they rarely travel solo," Ice said, "a nest number gives us a truer idea of their movements."
Mouse nodded and tapped the last part of the identifying number. "The S indicates that these are Speakers, which means they're the ones who usually do the phone calls for their collective. We thought this meant the Speakers were also the leaders, but we learned they're kind of like salmon swimming upstream. They all react—individually or as a mass—in identical fashion to whatever predetermined goal they currently have locked into their collective brain. Killing the Speakers doesn't throw them into confusion."
"But it means one well-designed trap," Ether said, "presented to them individually, will trap them all."
"It's the only way we can hope to fight them," Ice said.
Phone numbers were shown. The Buffalo Get was using a phone in Butler, Pennsylvania; the Boston Get was in Waltham, Massachusetts.
"I am in Butler," the Buffalo Get reported. "Ae missing, not destroyed, thief unknown. New incursion of aware hosts discovered. Partial Get recovered."
"That's what they call us: aware hosts," Mouse said as Ether added, "We think they're talking about Eden."
"Neutralize," the Gets harmonized as they agreed on a course of action.
"Neutralized," the Buffalo Get stated.
The Ontongard then bombed Eden Court, reducing the grand mansion to smoking rubble.
"This part we don't understand," Ice murmured.
"Female host has interacted with breeder," the Buffalo Get said.
"Prime's breeder?" the Boston Get asked.
"Prime's," the Buffalo Get said.
"Capture and contain," the two spoke in duet.
"Contained female," Buffalo reported. "Incubation, nine months."
"Incubate." Again the duet.
Ice leaned in, stabbing a key to pause the conversation. "What are they talking about? Ping is the only female missing."