by Wen Spencer
***
. . . If I never loved I never would have cried.
Atticus blinked, aware that tears were in his eyes, but having no idea why he'd been crying. He was in a bus shelter, rain drumming on the roof, an old Simon and Garfunkel song running through his head. For a panicked moment, he was worried something had happened to Ru, but his love was right there, on the wooden bench beside him. Mice whiskers tickled his fingers. He glanced down and found his knife in his right hand, a healing cut on his left wrist, and a mouse cupped in his palm, anxious about its fate.
He hadn't drained out memories since he was a child. Oh, God, what happened that made me do this again?
"Kyle?" he asked fearfully.
"No," Ru whispered huskily. "Your brother died."
"Again?"
Ru gave a shaky laugh, and then hunched over and began to weep.
Atticus spilled his mouse onto a floor strewn with cigarette butts and gathered Ru to him. "Hush, hush, I'm here."
What had happened? he wondered with dread. His brother must have gotten himself totally fucked-up if Ru was worried. The mouse climbed his shoe to press against his sock, fearful, aware of being cast out. Atticus had learned the hard way that he did this to himself for good reasons; taking back the mouse would be worse than being ignorant. His brother was dead—that was all he really needed to know to function. Perhaps all he could handle.
Tentatively, he probed his memories.
He could remember splitting up possible drug lab sites with Sumpter. After that, images of driving to South Boston and finding Daggit packing stuttered through his mind, ending with the Ontongard bearing down on them, and Ukiah racing toward them, and behind him, sweeping in on motorcycles, the Pack. At the time, he'd been too caught up in the roar of explosions to even notice the Dog Warriors. Distanced by time, now, he could feel them moving as one creature, with Ukiah as its heart and soul. They resounded with one will, one thought: to protect Ru. It would kill Atticus to lose Ru.
He had one clear memory of Ukiah shielding Ru with his own body, and then his recall ended, as if sliced out with laser precision. Practice made perfect. He could guess what followed. Even without the memory, knowledge that his brother sacrificed himself for Ru made him feel sick even as it confused him.
Why had Ukiah saved Ru? Why had he cared?
On the heels of that, he realized how close he'd been to losing Ru. Ukiah had acted with inhuman speed; Ru wouldn't have been able to save himself. The potential loss opened up a canyon of grief, which he could look into but—because of Ukiah—not fall into. If Ru had died, draining out a day's worth of memories would not have helped. To go home to an empty house and empty life, to go back to his life as it had been while he was growing up . . .
Ukiah had been right—losing Ru would have driven him mad.
It was stunning and humbling that his brother guessed what he hadn't known about himself.
Worse was the knowledge that he'd created the danger himself. He'd known the Ontongard had been tracking the cult, and in any direct confrontation between human and alien, the aliens would win. Yet he had not taken Ukiah with him, admitted the truth to Sumpter, nor contacted Indigo. He'd been a fool.
This wasn't just about the drug anymore. It couldn't be. He couldn't accept that huge a gift from his brother and then let all the pieces of Ukiah's life fall to the ground. There was the second Ae, the rest of the cult, and the transmitter to find. But his team couldn't do it alone. They had to get help .
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Summer Street, South Boston, Massachusetts
Thursday, September 23, 2004
The rain tapered off, leaving behind streets that gleamed like black silk. A wild wind rushed through the darkness, chasing the storm front. The warehouse burned with bonfire ferocity; they could feel the heat even where they stood, a full city block away. The smell of burning diesel and human flesh tainted the honest wood smoke of the Mayflowertimbers. Assaulting his senses, fire trucks wailed past them, lights cutting with razor intensity through the rain-black night.
Atticus noticed that the Jaguar sat across the street from the bus shelter, tucked back into shadows, far away from all the excitement. Had the Dog Warriors moved the car, or had he done it himself during that time of not remembering?
He could feel the Pack around him, numbers growing as more arrived, but scattered and well hidden. Shaw came out of the shadows, smelling of slaughter and smoke, the fire reflecting red in his eyes.
"Where's my brother?"
"Bear, Heathyr, and Smack took his body back to Pittsburgh."
Atticus flinched. "He's not going to recover?"
"It's too soon to tell. Even if he does, he'll be weak as a kitten until the poison works out of his system. I wanted him safe regardless of what happens here."
It dawned on Atticus that Shaw loved Ukiah dearly. The human race had always confounded him; even the most hardened of criminals often had someone they loved. Someone they would protect. Someone they would die for. It seemed that the Pack retained that in their vestiges of humanity.
The shadows danced as the flames leapt through the warehouse's roof, brightening the night with flickering reds. The colors moved across the wet asphalt like running blood.
"Daggit said the cult took Loo-ae away," Ru said, changing the subject.
"Our Cub destroyed it." Shaw explained that Ukiah had called Indigo to let her know he had figured out Loo-ae's location and arranged for the Pack to meet him. The Dog Warriors arrived to find the device full of bullets and Ukiah far out ahead of them.
"And the cult?" Atticus asked.
"No sign of them," Shaw said.
"How did he know we were walking into trouble?"
Shaw gave him a look that made Atticus realize the Dog Warrior was lying about something but wasn't about to betray Ukiah.
"We're about to hang our asses way out over the line to work with you. The Ontongard are working on a transmitter. Ukiah showed me Prime's memories. I know we have to stop them, and I'm committing to do whatever it takes, but I need to know everything. Tell me what happened."
Shaw assessed him with a long, hard stare. "The Gets caught up with the cult this morning. We found Ice's body with Loo-ae; he was within a few hours of transforming fully into a Get."
What Shaw didn't say—would probably never say to a law officer—was that Ukiah had killed Ice.
Atticus pushed through the flash of anger at his brother. He was jumping to conclusions in thinking it was a coldblooded murder. Given how he had first found Ukiah, self-defense was entirely possible. "We need to pool knowledge."
Something exploded in the warehouse, drawing their eyes.
"Not here." Shaw jerked his head in the opposite direction. "Let's find someplace quiet to plan."
***
They gathered under a highway overpass slated to be torn down as part of the Big Dig. Indigo arrived, flanked by her Pack guard. The Dog Warriors drifted into the shadows to stand watch. Indigo had once again wrapped herself in her arctic zone. She saw Atticus watching her, and said, "It's not like I haven't been through this a dozen times before," to which Ru nodded.
He and Ru had pried Kyle from Sumpter, distracting their supervisor with Hellena Gobeyn in her tight leather pants and camisole top. The alpha female promised that she wouldn't break any bones and all Sumpter's bruises would fade within two or three weeks.
The meeting was deceptively small. To the humans, it probably seemed that Rennie Shaw was the only addition to the combination of DEA and FBI forces, but Atticus could sense the rest of the Pack spread out around them, listening in.
"The cult had learned that the Ontongard set their nests up in a hexagonal pattern." Kyle spread out a map on the Explorer's tailgate, showing that the Waltham site formed one corner. "Ukiah said that the cult also had an algorithm to figure out where they would move to if one nest was destroyed; basically this pattern would swivel on the nest opposite of the nest destroyed. Since the Pack attacked the
Watertown nest, it would have made sense for them to destroy the Waltham nest, and these, but they should have left this one."
"So they've cut the thread."
"Stone cold."
"Maybe," Zheng said. "I've noticed one thing about these nests: They're all at companies that have to do with large construction projects."
That niggled something in the back of Atticus's mind. "Well, if they've built this transmitter someplace, they would need construction companies. This thing is supposed to be huge."
"Much bigger than a bread box," Rennie agreed.
How do you hide something so big—especially with it just hours from being finished?
Atticus gasped and flipped the map. "The Big Dig. It's the largest construction project in the country, perhaps the world, at the moment. If the Ontongard infiltrated the right companies, they could just add the transmitter to the design specs."
"Okay." Kyle took out a highlighter and marked up the map until the downtown area of Boston bled pink. "This is an old map we picked up from the D.C. office. These highways here are what got buried."
Rennie was already shaking his head. "We've been all over this area. Hell, your team has been sleeping almost on top of it. The Ontongard aren't down in these tunnels, and I can't see them leaving the thing unguarded. It's not Hex's way to trust humans."
Atticus studied the highlighting. There had been plenty of Ontongard at the warehouse just hours ago, and there had been Ice, halfway between the two races. "Where did Ukiah find Loo-ae?"
"Here." Rennie pointed out a point just on the water's edge. "Ventilation Building Six."
Kyle typed in a search. "VB-Six pulls exhaust out of the Ted Williams Tunnel." He paused to draw a line across the harbor. "And feeds in fresh air."
"Loo-ae was duct-taped to one of the intake fans," Rennie reported.
"Intake?" Atticus said. "The cult wanted the poisons down inthe tunnel?"
"We haven't been out on the water," Rennie murmured. "If Hex somehow added to the tunnel there, under the bay, his Gets would be well hidden from us."
"I saw a documentary on how they built these tunnels," Indigo said. "They actually built large tubes down in Baltimore, floated them up the harbor, and sank them to make these tunnels. It seemed like an insane way of doing it to me."
"The transmitter's particle tubes need precision you're not going to get tunneling through rock." Rennie tapped the map at VB6. "But there were no Ontongard with Ice at this building."
"If it's number six," Atticus said, "there's at least five others."
"One on each end of the tunnel." Kyle spoke without looking up, searching through files on his laptop.
"So what if, knowing that he couldn't get Loo-ae into this building"—Atticus pointed to the far end of the Ted Williams Tunnel—"he put it in this one and counted on the poison being sucked through?"
Rennie went still, but Atticus could feel him expanding outward, becoming all of the Pack, tapping their memories. "That peninsula is all man-made land in the last few decades. We forget it's there. They made it to build Logan Airport. We've always had little need for planes. Wolves are meant to run on the ground. None of us have been out to that part of the city."
"So they've hidden the control center someplace out here." Atticus ran his finger along the runnel and up to the man-made land. "We need to find it and destroy it."
"In a nutshell, yes," Shaw said. "One very big and hard nutshell—and the clock is ticking."
Kyle made a noise of frustration. "There's a ton of info on the Big Dig, but for as-built drawings and actual information on access doors and security protocols and locations of cameras . . . we're talking hours for me to get anywhere."
"Then let's go to the source." Ru grinned. "DEA with FBI backup? We can glide into anything tonight."
***
Operations Control Center, nicknamed OCC, was in South Boston. Flashing badges, his team and Indigo bullied their way into the building, sans any of the Pack—but only after being sure it was innocent of Ontongard. The bulk of the building was dedicated to keeping watch over the intricate roadway. In one huge room, employees sat bathed in the glow from over a hundred monitors, dominated by blue images of light gleaming off ceramic tiles lining miles of tunnels. It felt like walking into a missile command center. It was running on a skeleton shift of three employees.
"I don't understand," the nominal supervisor stuttered as Kyle made nice with the two techno geeks. "What exactly is the nature of this alleged emergency?"
Obviously this guy was in charge because he had a degree in political babble.
"We've been dealing with a dangerous religious cult, the Temple of New Reason." Ru wove his half-truths. "We believe they're linked with the bombings that took place earlier today. We've learned they might have plans to attack the tunnel system."
The man gasped and waved toward a bank of monitors, all of which seemed to be dead. "The camera system on the ventilation buildings went out this morning. We've been running diagnostics on it all day. It looks like some kind of virus."
"There's a possibility, then, that they've gotten into the maintenance access areas," Ru said, as if he knew for certain there were such things.
"We've pulled together some undercover agents who are familiar with the MO of these perps," Atticus said, using copspeak to confuse. "I'm going to lead a team of them to sweep for signs of forced entry and sabotage. We're going to need your full cooperation."
"Yes, of course."
Kyle held out a headset to Atticus. "Here, this is ready to go. I've added a low-light camera to our two-way radio, in case I need to see what you're looking at."
Atticus clipped the headset onto his ear.
Indigo took a sharp breath, but said nothing.
What was that about? No time to ask, though.
Ru walked him to the door, murmuring, "I still say I should come with you."
"Ru, if these were humans, I'd want you with me. But these monsters—it's like trying to stop floodwaters with bullets. You'll be in over your head and dead without making a scratch on them."
Ru looked away so Atticus couldn't read any hurt or resentment on his face.
"Ru, you're a last line of defense here. I think Indigo kept silent all this time about what she knows because of my brother, but I don't want to count on her alerting the right people if the shit hits the fan. Kyle wouldn't be able to do it. You'd be able to make people listen to you."
Ru looked at him then, eyes full of pain.
"Besides," Atticus forced himself to joke, "you know how Kyle is at giving directions."
And Ru forced himself to smile. "Yeah, there is that."
***
They avoided the Ted Williams Tunnel so as not to give warning to their approach, instead going the long way around the bay. The Pack raced before him on motorcycles, like hounds before the hunter, while Ru murmured in his ear.
"OSHA inspections—got to love them. Apparently our friends haven't been able to infiltrate them or block them, so the inspectors had full access to the construction site. After every inspection, new areas are added onto the as-built drawings. Unlike the other ventilation buildings, the one you're heading to—VB-Seven—has a rat maze under it. No wonder this project is so overbudget and late being completed."
"You've got an entrance for this rat's nest?"
"Yeah. Here." Kyle demonstrated the need for Ru on his end.
"Take the next left," Ru clarified, giving detailed instructions for the desired door. "The electrical as-built schematics show a camera on that door, but there's no monitor for it. It's possible, though, that someone rerouted it for their use."
"Understood."
***
The entrance was a heavy steel door on the blind back corner of the building.
"We're going to need a battering ram," Atticus called to Rennie as he got out of the Jaguar.
"We've got a battering ram." Rennie worked the pump on his shotgun as a tanker truck with a steel I-beam welded
to its prow turned the corner and roared toward the door. "Get ready; we're going in."
The Pack gathered around the doorway as the truck sped toward it, weapons ready. The ram slammed into the steel door, which folded under the blow, its hinges popping. The bent door fell inward, followed by the frame and parts of the wall around the opening, revealing a dark stairwell. The Pack flowed into the jagged hole. Muzzle flares strobed the darkness.
The stairwell was bare cement with two flights of steel stairway. The gunfire thundered and echoed in the close confines, the ricocheting bullets sparking as they whined off the walls. By the time they hit the bottom, the steps were slick with roiling blood. Atticus sensed that the fight continued on that cellular level, Pack blood fighting Ontongard. Even as the dozen Gets on the stairs lay dead, the blood-spattered walls and steel seethed in anger.
They needed another ram for the door at the bottom. As a police-issued ram was passed down from above, Atticus noticed that the bodies, body parts, and forming rats of the Ontongard Gets were being dragged back up to ground level.
"What are they doing with them?" Atticus asked.
"We're putting them in storage," Stein, one of the Dog Warriors, told him as the Pack male reloaded. "We're sticking them in the tanker so we don't have to fight them a second time."
"Is there an opening on the tanker large enough to shove a body through?"
"Does it matter?"
"Forget I asked."
The leather of Stein's jacket was chewed away by shotgun blasts to expose body armor. Atticus glanced around him, noticing that others who led the charge wore bulletproof vests, all heavily damaged.
"Body armor?"
"Keeps you kicking butt longer." Stein grinned. "A little trick we learned off the Cub."
The ram reached the door and Atticus tensed, readying himself for the upcoming fight.
The door smashed open into a large, bare cement room, cold as a grave, littered with sleeping bags, heavy with the stench of sickness and death. Another twenty Ontongard Gets tried to stand against the flood of Pack.
"Get the doors!" Rennie shouted. "We've managed to take them by surprise, but we're about to lose that advantage!"