White Peak

by Ronan Frost

  Rye saw a second bone barb lock into place in the strange weapon at the assassin’s side.

  Tenzin Dawa turned, sensing him there without seeing him, and fired.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Rye threw himself to the ground, and rolled as the bone barb whistled through the air inches from his face.

  It buried in the wall behind him, only three inches of the bleached white bone visible.

  A third shot came before he was back on his feet.

  Rye pushed himself forward like a sprinter coming out of the blocks, and fell before he’d even half risen, but the organic bullet powdered into shards of bone even as it punched through his healed hand. The black mites of the peculiar protective glove seemed to part around the bone shard, then close around it, healing the wound before it could bleed. Rye didn’t waste precious seconds thinking about the miracle it was.

  He threw himself behind the protection of the metal lotus leaves as the prayer drum began to close up once more.

  A fourth shot ricocheted off the metal drum, fizzing away harmlessly.

  He scrambled to his feet and, as he rose, saw the Russian move up behind the Asura and, with one almighty swing, bury the blade of her ice ax in the back of Tenzin Dawa’s head, splitting the assassin’s skull.

  The bone gun went off in Dawa’s hand, the barbed bullet streaking over Rye’s head as the dead Dawa’s hand reflexively came up too far, too fast as the nerves fired off one last time.

  The Russian hunkered down beside Dawa, working the ax head free of the dead man’s skull, then crossed the temple floor to check on Carter.

  Rye scrambled to where Vic lay, and cradled the dead man in his arms.

  The gulf of grief he felt was overwhelming.

  Of course it was, he’d barely begun to come to terms with the murder of Hannah, and that grief had already been compounded by the loss of Olivia Meyer. Vic on top of that was too much to bear. The pain crushed him. His breath hitched. The weight on his chest threatened to cave in the bones. Tears tracked down his cheeks as he pressed his healed hand to the wound as though he could somehow push the blood and the life back inside.

  “We need to get out of here,” Iskra said.

  Carter leaned on her for support.

  His pain was plain to see as he moved gingerly to where Rye sat with Vic.

  Rye shook his head.

  “We have to,” the thief said.

  “No,” Rye said, as simple as that. No room for argument. “I’m not leaving him down here.”

  “Then carry him,” the Russian told him dispassionately. “But you’re not getting back up the rope with him on your back, and you know that. So, leave him. He won’t mind. He’s gone.”

  But Rye wasn’t listening.

  He stared at his hand.

  The tiny black mites had begun to migrate from him to Guuleed, amassing around the wound. They moved in a frenzy, rippling around the ragged hole in the dead man’s chest. In seconds there wasn’t a single mite on his skin. The palm of Rye’s hand was still red raw with new skin where the burns had been repaired. Without thinking about what he was doing, Rye pulled Vic’s heavy down coat open and lifted the layers of material to expose the full extent of the wound that had killed him.

  He gripped the exposed length of the bone barb buried in Vic’s chest and pulled it out.

  He winced at the sound it made as it cut through the meat and grated against the broken ribs.

  Rye threw the lethal bone dart away, not looking at where it fell.

  The black mites swarmed across Vic’s skin.

  They moved faster and faster, seemingly multiplying as they fed off the dead tissue, until less than a minute later they formed an oleaginous protective layer across his skin.

  “What’s happening to him?” Carter asked.

  Rye looked up and told him the truth: “I found the Cintāmani, but it’s not a stone. Rask was right, though, it’s some sort of nanotechnology. Nanite healers.” He held up his hand as proof.

  “It can’t—” the thief said, about to say, it couldn’t bring a dead man back, when Vic’s eyes opened, and a huge death rattle of breath escaped his lips.

  The big man’s hand flew to his chest where the nanites swarmed all over the wound, knitting the flesh, healing the ragged muscle walls of his heart, and jolting it with the electrical pulse it needed to jump-start the dead organ.

  The nanite healers wove patterns across Vic’s glistening black skin, constantly eddying and rippling as they worked their unholy magic.

  He looked at Rye, haunted, as he asked, “What have you done?”

  SEVENTY-NINE

  Vic didn’t say another word until they made it back to the surface.

  Getting him back topside was a near-impossible task, but they were a team. They fashioned a harness out of ropes and pulled him up where he couldn’t climb, and where he struggled to walk, they gave him their strength. He walked stoically on, leaning on Rye when he needed to, but otherwise focused purely on putting one foot in front of the other without falling over.

  Several times, Rye caught him looking back over his shoulder as though he sensed something in the deeper darkness behind them.

  And perhaps there was?

  Another fully grown Dawa?

  Something worse?

  The cold air, thirty degrees below zero, hit them hard as they emerged from the crevice to stand in the shadow of the deserted Dzyan temple.

  Rye heard the roar of engines in the distance.

  He shielded his eyes against the swirling snow as a huge military helicopter rose into view, emerging from beneath a rocky outcrop. The steel blades chopped at the air, churning up a storm of already fallen snow.

  The moon dazzled off the windshield, lending it the effect of vengeful silver fire as it surged across the mountaintop.

  It was big. Easily capable of carrying a dozen combatants. There were no markings that he could see. More of Cressida Mohr’s mercenaries? She was nothing if not persistent when it came to protecting the secrets of her mother.

  Vic was in no shape to take out another helicopter with his bare hands; once was a fluke, twice absurd.

  Rye didn’t have the strength for another fight.

  He slumped down against the temple wall waiting for death to come pouring out of the helicopter and wondering how he was going to escape it this time—or if he even wanted to. Dying up here would be different. At least it would be dying with the sun on his face, not like down there in that hellhole, Shambhala.

  They’d been to a different kind of hell and back together. Vic to a literal hell if the haunted look in his eyes was anything to go by, while Carter looked like he’d dragged himself all the way there and hit every rock on the way down.

  Rye didn’t say anything for the longest time.

  He stared at the helicopter and realized that the pilot was looking for somewhere to set down.

  The downdraft from the rotors churned up a wall of white.

  He pushed himself up to his feet and turned to Carter. “Come on.” The thief didn’t have the will to fight. He followed Rye.

  The change in altitude and angle meant he could see the faces through the windshield before the helicopter set down.

  He recognized the man in the pilot’s seat as Jeremiah Byrne.

  The side door slid open and Rask emerged, dressed for the elements. He ducked low to be sure he stayed below the slowing rotor blades and came running toward them.

  “We thought we’d lost you,” he called over the blustering wind. “Byrne was monitoring your progress. One minute you were there, then you were gone. Then he found the wreckage.” He looked over his shoulder, scanning the mountainside for the debris and the bodies back there. “I feared the worst when he couldn’t find any sign of life up here.”

  “Because we weren’t up here,” Rye told him. “We were down there.” He pointed toward the snow beneath their feet.

  “You found it?” The hope in the man’s face was too much to bear. His
life depended upon Rye’s answer, and after all of the letdowns and disappointments, the supposed miracle cures he had endured, a simple no now would break him.

  “Yes,” Rye said, but before Rask could feel any sense of joy or relief, cut him short with, “But it’s not what you thought. It’s not what any of us thought.”

  “But you have the stone?”

  “There is no stone,” he said. “There never was. It was a story to make sense of a miracle.” Rask nodded. He looked sick. “Shambhala was never a lost city, not like Atlantis or any of the other places you mentioned. It was a tomb. Thousands of years ago a ship crashed here.”

  “I told you,” Iskra said, a lopsided grin on her face as she came over to hug the older man. “Aliens.” She said it in such a way he couldn’t help but laugh.

  Rye wasn’t laughing.

  He told them what he’d found down there: the dying heart, the core central intelligence of the Vril, and the gestation chambers that had birthed the Asura assassins and sent out cuckoos dressed in Ahnenerbe clothing.

  “Incredible,” Rask said wistfully. “An organic spaceship? Are you sure?”

  “Trust me.”

  “A living entity that came here from the stars. Do you know what that means?”

  “Proof of intelligent life,” Rye offered.

  “More than that, Mr. McKenna. It is proof that what we call god is merely alien.”

  “It’s not all good news,” he said.

  “I’m not sure any of it is,” Rask agreed, without knowing what he was agreeing with.

  “She wasn’t alone.”

  “She?”

  “The mother. That is who is dying here, thousands of years after fleeing her dying world. There were four more, who crossed the galaxies with her. Her children. They have been lost to her for generations, but now they have woken to her distress call. Her children are vengeance and wrath, Rask. The four, when they come, carry death with them. They promise famine and pestilence to ravage the world beyond repair even as we fall into war with them.” He deliberately couched it carefully so that Rask would come to his own revelations regarding their nature. “We know them by another name. And what their waking means for our world.”

  “The four horsemen,” Rask said.

  “The end of days,” Rye agreed. “One lies beneath the remote ice wastes of Antarctica, another beneath the blistering sands of the desert, a third deep in the wilds of the Amazon rain forest, and the last terror far below the surface of the Atlantic, drifting in the deepest unexplored trenches down there, thousands of feet below the surface.”

  “So, the stone was scattered, but not in the way the myths suggested.”

  “Who would have thought a religion would lie?” Iskra said.

  “Quite,” Rask agreed. “And you are sure?” he asked Rye.

  “The Vril was inside my head.” He touched the back of his neck where the ship had interfaced with him. “I saw it all. I didn’t understand what was happening at first as we didn’t share a common language. There was no conversation. I saw flashes. Images. I glimpsed part of her life before she arrived here. And then I felt her wake her children and heard them answer the call. The last thing she showed me before I fled was a clock counting down to doomsday.”

  “How long have we got?” Rask asked. Behind him Byrne started to power up the rotor blades, obviously impatient to take off. The noise made it hard to talk.

  “A year. I think. I don’t know if that’s when all hell will be let loose, or when it will all come to an end. I severed the connection. I needed to get out of there.”

  “I can appreciate that.”

  Rye shook his head. “I can’t get beyond the idea that we’ve unknowingly coexisted for centuries and within minutes of contact with this alien intelligence we are looking at the end of mankind. What does that tell you about us?”

  Rask drew his hood up over his face, struggling with the cold. “That we are long due an extinction event. Anything you can tell us, anything you remember from what you were shown, no matter how insignificant, it might make a difference.”

  Rye tried to remember. “I saw fragments of everything, but they were only fragments. I saw the dying star they fled, I saw her first contact with the monk we’ve known as Tenzin Dawa, the man who gave his face to our assassin. She made her demons in his image. That’s why we found photos of him in Guérin’s chateau with Nazis and faced an enemy who hadn’t aged. She bred him in the image of the only man she knew,” Rye said, not mentioning the fact that the mothership was growing a simulacrum in his image, too. “There are more of them down there, like him. They aren’t human. She sent her simulacrums out wearing the faces of that Ahnenerbe expedition. They’ve been living among us for eighty years, wearing the faces of the dead. But the good news is they can’t live forever. They aren’t immortal. They aren’t even sentient in the way we think about intelligence. They are part of her, the Vril, so she controls their every move and word. And she is dying.”

  “And we will be, too, if we don’t get out of here,” Vic said, moving painfully toward the helicopter’s open door.

  “But it’s not all bad news,” Iskra said. “We saw a miracle, so I’m inclined to believe him.”

  “A miracle?”

  “Rye can explain it, but we’ve got our very own Lazarus,” Carter offered. “I would have said Jesus, but he came back a bit quicker than the other Big Guy. Show the boss man, Vic.”

  The big man stopped in the process of clambering into the helicopter and pulled open his heavy down jacket to show the bloody mess of his shirt beneath. He lifted his shirt to show the constant writhing swarm of black nanites working at fixing his flesh.

  The wound had already partially knitted, the hole the bone bullet had opened half the size it had been before Rye had laid hands on him.

  “Like I said, there is no stone,” Rye explained. “But that doesn’t mean there’s no basis to the stories you heard. On the most basic level, a mother is a nurturing creature. She cherishes and gives life. She is a healer. I don’t know what they are”—again he held out his own hand with the pink scar tissue visible as though an answer all its own—“some sort of biological-nanotech medical bots or something, but they can work miracles.”

  “So, there’s a chance?” Rask asked. It was the hope in his question that was heartbreaking.

  “There’s a chance,” Rye said.

  “As long as the world doesn’t end first,” the thief chimed in.

  They bundled into the helicopter, belting themselves in as Byrne took them up.

  A voice crackled over the internal headset, “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This is your pilot speaking. Tonight’s flight back to civilization is expected to take far too long, and the weather is, unsurprisingly, a bitch, so I advise you to buckle up and hang on to your stomachs as I really don’t want to have to clean up after you. In the event of a forced landing on water, we’ve obviously got horribly lost. We’re much more likely to crash into the side of a mountain. And with that cheerful thought I’d like to thank you for choosing Byrne Air for all your evac needs and look forward to saving your asses again in the near future. Because, let’s be honest, we know you’re going to get into trouble again.”

  “Take us home, Mister Byrne,” Rask told the other man.

  “Roger that.”

  EIGHTY

  “How can we be sure it has healed your heart?” Rask asked. He sat uncomfortably in the chair, angled back to face the ceiling.

  Vic stood over him, Rye beside him.

  There was no nurse this time.

  “If it hasn’t, I die,” Vic said.

  “He really does have a way with words, doesn’t he?” Rask said, earning a smile from Rye. “Perhaps we should wait?”

  The big man shook his head. “You don’t have the luxury of time.”

  “None of us do,” the billionaire agreed. “If you are sure?”

  “I am sure.”

  “Then how do we do this?” He looked
at Rye.

  “I just held my hand over his heart and the nanites migrated to the wounded flesh,” Rye explained, miming the action that had brought the other man back from the dead. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “What is wrong with me isn’t a bullet hole or a rope burn. It is inside my blood. My body is betraying me.”

  “It may not work,” Rye agreed. “But what have you got to lose?”

  “Hope,” Rask said, and Rye understood all too well what he meant. Until this moment, with Vic about to lay on hands, there was always the chance that a miracle was out there, and that was something to cling on to. But if this didn’t work, if there was no miracle, then there was only death.

  Vic unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it off, exposing a mess of pink scar tissue around the wound where the bone barb had killed him. Thousands of microscopic nanites swarmed across his glistening skin, rippling along the rigid lines of muscle.

  “Should I?” Rask asked, reaching up tentatively.

  Vic pressed a huge hand down on the other man’s chest, preventing him from rising.

  At first nothing happened, and then, like a living tattoo, the nanites coiled around Vic’s pectoral, forming a spiral galaxy of movement that churned and eddied as the nanites curled a path up to his shoulder and then down his arm, like ants marching. They swarmed down his forearm and out across each finger, finding their way to the dying Rask.

  But it was different this time.

  There was no obvious wound to heal.

  They spread out in an oily coating across Rask’s chest, before slowly being absorbed, sinking into his body. There was no black glove of healing across his hand or heart. In the minutes it took for the nanites to leave Vic and enter Rask, burrowing in through the pores in his skin to enter the bloodstream, they left no trace to betray the fact they had ever been there.

  Vic slumped down into the chair beside the bed, breaking contact. The big man was breathing heavily. Sweat beaded on his brow and broke to run down his temples. “It seems I am not dead yet,” he said, but the words were labored and came between deep gasps. More beads of perspiration sheened his naked torso. He put his hand to his chest as though to confirm that his heart was still beating.