by Ronan Frost
He had been chosen.
SEVENTY-THREE
Gray semitranslucent panels offered a glimpse of the horrors that hid beneath them.
Rye saw the vague shapes of bodies, but the shadows were strangely incomplete, as though one panel hid a head and torso, but no legs, whereas another seemed to have the right side of a body without the left.
Only one of the seven amorphous silhouettes appeared to be complete, but even then there was no guarantee. It could just as easily be a case of the back of one body missing and the front of the other gone.
There was more writing on the wall.
Rye laid the flat of his hand against it and watched as the frosted glass cleared, its molecular structure rearranging itself to become transparent.
What he saw in there was a gallery of grotesques.
Tenzin Dawa stood behind the glass.
And not just one of him, but seven, all exhibiting various forms of damage to the flesh.
But they were undeniably all the same man.
Seven Tenzin Dawas stared blindly back at Rye through the glass.
He didn’t understand how it was possible until he saw the single bubble in the liquid in front of his first face.
The assassin was in some form of tank, the liquid preserving the flesh.
Another bubble escaped Dawa’s lips.
The man was breathing, but so incredibly slowly it was impossible to see the rise and fall of his chest that matched it.
The half man beside him offered an incredible insight into the true nature of what Rye was seeing, as the flesh around the side of his face knitted, ribbons of pale skin drifting like streamers in the liquid. The tiny filaments of knitting flesh moved to unseen tides.
He wasn’t looking at a man, not one of flesh and blood.
This thing was a simulacrum.
Organic matter knitted and molded as the new sleeve was grown for life to be transferred into.
That was how Dawa could appear in photographs with Himmler and his SS Ahnenerbe cronies and chase Rask’s team halfway across the world eighty years later—because he grew flesh for each new incarnation, allowing himself to remain forever young.
It was a staggering thought, utterly alien, but this more than anything convinced Rye that Rask was right, they were chasing demons here, only the demons were alien in nature, not magical. He’d been right about that, too. It had never been about magic. That was the ultimate truth: this technology, so beyond the understanding of the ancient Tibetan culture, had seemed like magic because to them it was.
He could only wonder at how long it took to grow a new body, and how difficult it was to transfer the alien consciousness into it, because surely the Tenzin Dawa they had killed in Paris and again in Kathmandu couldn’t have simply died there and rebooted into new flesh to come at them again unless it was somehow part of the core consciousness of the great heart, and not an actual alien, itself.
He walked down the line of growing bodies and realized his first assumption had been wrong.
He wasn’t looking at seven Tenzin Dawas.
The final body, the least-formed flesh, offered a mirror reflection of part of Rye’s own face slowly knitting together as the mothership began the process of growing its imitation him.
It was the single creepiest thing he had seen in his life.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the growing simulacrum, fascinated as it re-created each tiny imperfection one at a time. And it was so perfect a copy it would have fooled his own mother. That was how scary the clone swimming about in the biomass was. Because it was him down to the last detail.
The filaments rippled around one of the deep clefts in the growing shoulder of the new Rye McKenna, beginning to knit, and he saw the umbilicus that looped away from the simulacrum’s back, deeper into the organic growing pod.
The tiny filaments of flesh rippled, constantly moving. Alive.
He sank back against the wall. Lost.
If he’d had the ax, he knew he would have shattered the glass and hacked over and over at the thing in there, destroying it if he could, but what could he do with his bare hands?
His first instinct in the face of alien intelligence was to try to destroy it. Was there anything more depressing in the world than that?
Rye left the chamber, hating just how human his reaction to the sight of the Vril growing another him had been. He so desperately wanted to believe he was better than that, but knew that he wasn’t. But for the fact he had walked into there empty-handed, he would willingly have destroyed a miracle.
He hated himself.
SEVENTY-FOUR
He found more and more gestation chambers, identical to the first, but where there had been seven biomass clones of the Tibetan monk, in these he found made and half-made men wearing different faces. They were blond and blue-eyed; they were dark and hazel-eyed; tall, reed-thin, muscular. Some looked eerily familiar, as though he had seen them before.
He was looking at the survivors of the Kiss Expedition, only they were not survivors at all, and suddenly he understood how history could have been so dumb. The Vril had left this place dressed in the skin suits of the Ahnenerbe explorers, taking up their lives and hiding in plain sight.
How many of them were out there in the world, protecting her secrets and spreading her influence?
Rye rested his hand against the frosted surface, and the man behind it opened his eyes.
Fierce intelligence burned back there.
This was no dumb cypher.
“Can you hear me?”
The half-made head lifted, chin jutting out proudly in answer.
Yes.
Yes, it could.
And it understood.
“Who were you? In that other life? Do you share those stolen memories or are you just an empty shell?”
The thing behind the glass didn’t answer; not that he had expected it to.
He found a hundred of them. There could have been a thousand more gestating within the belly of the ship, wearing the faces of dead Germans.
These were the ghosts of the Gangkhar Puensum.
These were the mouths that cried out their laments that echoed through the hollow mountain.
No wonder the locals feared this place.
They must have known what was down here, stories of the damned passed from generation to generation down the ages, all stemming from that first contact with Tenzin Dawa.
It wasn’t until he found the half-formed face of Cressida Mohr that he realized the extent of the Vril’s reach, and how real its hot-housed clones could be.
SEVENTY-FIVE
Rye saw the bone chair in the middle of a huge empty space.
It was the first piece of anything approaching normal furniture he’d found since he’d fallen from the temple.
It faced an immense opaque wall.
It was the only thing in the entire place that wasn’t either a cage of bone or thin mucus membrane.
Rye sat in the bone chair, everything that had happened to him on and under the mountain weighing heavily on him. He just wanted to rest for a while. Wait for the others to find him. And this place was as good as any.
He gripped the armrests and let his head roll against the back of the bone chair for support, exhaustion stealing in.
Not that he could sleep.
He felt the by-now-familiar vibrations of the Vril ship hum through the bones of the chair, but the ever-present resonance felt diminished. Weakened.
It was dying.
He felt the warmth of light on his face.
When he opened his eyes the entire wall in front of him was lit up, showing an incredible wealth of information that made absolutely no sense to him.
No, that wasn’t true; he recognized one thing up there—the same spiral galaxy that he’d seen on the La-Ma drawing—the teacher, that was what it meant, didn’t it?—and again on the metal prayer drum, the final key to the lotus blossom puzzle. The same spiral galaxy he’d seen vaporize a star withi
n a supermassive black hole.
But recognizing a spiral array and understanding all of the alien symbols around it were two different things.
As he stared at the screen, the image zoomed out and out and out with dizzying speed, crossing one hundred and fifty million light-years of space, through dead stars and burgeoning ones, through asteroid fields, gas clouds, and the dust of stars, changing and changing and changing as the Vril ship offered him a glimpse of home.
Was that it?
Did it yearn to die in a familiar place, that instinct to return home still strong after all these years?
“I’m trying to understand,” he said. “Show me.”
More images streamed across the screen offering up the secrets of galaxies left far, far away, but whatever message the Vril was trying to convey, Rye wasn’t grasping it. The screen changed again, and this time he realized that ship wasn’t alone in fleeing the dying star.
There were four more just like her.
Her. That was how he thought instinctively about the Vril ship since she had entered his mind. Her. The mothership. Or just the Mother. Because she was alive, wasn’t she?
“There were five of you? Five living ships made the journey to Earth? Is that what you are trying to tell me, that there are more of you here?”
In answer, he felt a sharp sting in the back of his neck, like a wasp making its mark, but as he reached around to swat it away, the sting intensified. No longer a single sharp needlelike jab of pain, it flared as his hand closed around an umbilical stub of biomatter that was fusing with the higher vertebrae of his spinal column.
Rye screamed as chemicals flooded his bloodstream, pouring in through the cord that joined him to the Vril.
He felt his hand fall away from the connection, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He tried to focus his mind on something as simple as forcing the muscles to respond to his will, but there was a disconnect now between thought and action, and all he could do was ride the wave of chemicals as they swept through his system.
She was dying.
There was no pain.
All things ended.
He was not afraid.
He was ready to join Hannah.
He welcomed the end.
He was ready.
But her children were not.
His mind swam with thoughts that were not his own.
She was mother.
She was first.
They had followed her.
They had run as far as they could run. Until they could run no more.
Rye felt tears of grief stream down his cheeks as he felt the Vril world’s pain.
“Let me die,” he breathed, trying to focus on Hannah’s smile. Such a simple thing. But she was fading already. He was losing her all over again.
She called out to them, over and over, but their answers, if they ever came, were so weak she could barely connect with them.
She was afraid for her children.
She was afraid of what might have become of them.
How they must have panicked to lose their connection with her and be here, so far from anything they knew or understood, more alone than anything on this planet had ever or could ever be.
The sheer weight of the Vril’s grief was heartbreaking.
Rye couldn’t carry it.
He was losing himself beneath the immense force of the Vril’s consciousness as it dwarfed his mind. He so desperately wanted to help the children he had never had, to protect them and nurture them and give them a good life under the infinite stars. That was all any mother wanted. Her love was so vast it engulfed worlds. And she was empty.
“I understand.” Rye choked out a sob. “I understand.”
But there was no letup. The Vril could only communicate with him in emotions, and as each fresh wave broke over him, Rye felt like he was coming undone. Love was replaced by a fear so visceral his screams began again, and he clawed at his temples trying to drive the images out of his head, but there was no escaping them.
Her children were alone out there. Lost. Frightened.
She called out to them, a desperate song of mourning as despair took hold.
She called out to them, a heart-wrenching chorus of hope as her calls came back to her.
You are not alone, she wanted to say, but lacked the words, so instead pictured their home, the one safe place that had been stolen from them, and offered a soothing lament because whatever else happened, she could never reach them, and they could never be free of this prison they had thought offered salvation.
“I want to help,” Rye said, finding the words, or thinking he did. He tried to share images of his own, remembering his own loss, that desperate empty feeling as he fed coins into the pay phone and begged Hannah to find a way out of that shopping mall, trying to show the thing inside him that he understood pain; loss was loss. But once he allowed himself to remember, it wasn’t with sadness. Images of that cell and Matthew Langley’s face as he took the belt from him and buckled it around his own neck filled Rye’s mind. There was still so much anger in him. He hated that man for what he had stolen from him. And remembering Langley brought back the hate—pure, black, destructive. He heard Hannah’s last words, that she could see the light up ahead, and the hope in her voice. He remembered the chilling finality of the stranger’s voice telling him she couldn’t come to the phone right now.
And he wanted to be the one to die.
He had managed to hide from the grief, chasing Rask’s mad treasure hunt, but it caught up with him finally.
The pain was overwhelming.
It broke him.
The mocking voice.
The belt.
Arranging the bedsheets over Matthew Langley’s corpse.
All of that.
More.
But mostly, savoring that single moment when his lips parted, and that last sigh escaped them.
He hadn’t realized just how much he needed to see that man suffer. He’d thought that in not doing it himself, not beating Langley to death with his bare hands, he’d somehow risen above, proved himself better than the spotty-faced brat who had killed so many innocent people, but he wasn’t better at all. The blood was still on his hands. And worse, by far, given the distance of time, he knew he’d do the same thing all over again.
He felt the Vril touching his mind, feeding off his hatred for Matthew Langley.
There was no forgiveness.
He felt the great intelligence’s confusion, then fear, as she understood the truth of his nature, his pain burning through. Their bond was symbiotic. She didn’t merely feel his pain, she suffered it. She didn’t simply mourn his loss, she wept with it. She didn’t sense his rage, she boiled with it. She didn’t just witness his guilt, she burned with it. She didn’t only see his darkness, she dwelt in it with him.
And wanted everything he wanted.
Lost everything he had lost.
Ached the way he ached.
But it was so much more than sadness.
She wanted to make the world burn for all of it, because deep down in his heart of hearts that was what Rye wanted.
The quality of ambient light within the living ship changed from the calming rose to an angrier red, thickening as the blood flowing through the membranes thickened.
The pulse within the walls became a drumming.
The Vril reacted to his thoughts as a threat, and like anybody under threat looked to combat that threat with its own natural defenses.
A sudden surge of fire burned into the base of Rye’s skull as the cord joining them lashed tight.
Rye’s hands clamped around the arms of the bone chair.
He had no control over his muscles as they contracted.
He couldn’t break the grip.
His back arched against the chair as wave after wave of black agony pulsed through his body, the pain so intense it threatened to overwhelm his heart and end him.
And that would have been a blessed relief.
Release.
Help me, he pleaded, unable to say the words.
Help me help you.
The only answer was the all-consuming image of the supermassive black hole up on the screen destroying another world.
Was it a threat?
A promise?
The sense of time was all wrong. The suns raced across the skies, chasing the moons. The stars winked out, consumed. Was she trying to impress upon him the passage of time? Promising infinite patience? Mocking the headlong rush of his mortality?
Motherhood. Nurturing. Kindness.
That was her, at the core.
But her children?
They were bred in war.
They were conditioned to survive.
Rye saw them again, in that first morning light as they found this new world, and realized what they looked like in the pale light: four dark riders on the pale sun.
Where she had promised those primitive early souls life and the nourishment of her magic, her children were vengeful and offered only dark destructive forces—strong enough to drive men to war, to inflict sickness and starvation upon them and their cities, and eventually death.
Rye understood.
Golden symbols filled the screen and his mind, but unlike the other text, this strange writing wasn’t static. It was fluid. Changing. Repeating patterns.
It was counting down.
The symbols shifted again, resolving into a doomsday clock that promised an end to all things.
Rye understood—without knowing how he did—that the countdown was matched to the stars and how long it would be until they were in the same positions in the sky.
It was giving him a year.
And as the next second ticked away, another shrill cry went out, this one amplified beyond the range of human hearing, a pulse that shivered through the core of the world. In his mind’s eye, Rye saw it answered beneath the sands of the desert, beneath the trees of the ancient rain forest, beneath the ice of the polar cap, and deep beneath the churning surface of the oceans blue.
Her lost children waking to the sound of her distress.
Answering her call.