Firebird

by Michael Asher

  Andropov saw me looking at it. ‘There never was a body in there,’ he said. ‘The scholars who believed the pyramid was Khufu’s tomb were quite wrong. It wasn’t even built by Khufu. The pyramid was conceived and built with only one idea in mind — to transmit a message to Sirius.’ He took a step forward and pointed at the shaft through which the mass of cables disappeared. ‘They used to think these were air shafts,’ he said, ‘but actually they were devices for measuring the alignment of the stars — in this case Sirius. The pyramid is built with superb precision and stands on a temporal nexus point. When the stars come into conjunction then the capstone and the pyramid together act as a boosting force for the psionic message generated by the “pilot”. In ancient Egypt these individuals were specially bred over generations, but the psionic gene got scattered through the human population and Ross got it by chance. Of course there are other illuminati alive in this generation, but they’re not that easy to isolate.’

  ‘One minute to go!’ Van Helsing said. He switched on the largest of the TV monitors and we all saw the technicians fitting the new capstone sheath into place on the top of the pyramid. The sheath was hollow, of course — and made of some light alloy — but at the very apex of the cone, I guessed, the real Benben Stone had been concealed.

  Andropov watched with fascination. ‘It’s all academic now, anyway,’ he said, ‘the Benben Stone is more remarkable than you people can even imagine. It is capable of opening rifts in space-time, of powering a starship through hyperspace. Its power is phenomenal. Last time they used it, in 2500 BC, it caused a massive energy blowback that started a chain reaction in the atmosphere with devastating runaway potential. It destroyed the ecosystem of the whole of North Africa, turned a fertile land into a desert and brought down Egyptian civilization. The same is going to happen this time, with even worse results, but what does that matter to the Nommos?’

  ‘Time!’ Van Helsing said, and on the screen we saw the capstone sheath being slotted into place by the technicians. ‘And now,’ Andropov said, poising himself by a handle on one of the control consoles, ‘the first message across the cosmos for four and a half thousand years!’

  55

  Andropov worked the handle and there was a surge of power and a hum like a billion bees swarming as the ancient energy cells began to wake up after four millennia. The cables and wires quivered, crackled and vibrated. Ross went rigid in his chair and he let out an ear piercing shriek that was magnified by the perfect acoustics of the chamber. The oscillations on the computer terminals went haywire, and Andropov lifted a fist in triumph. ‘I thought so!’ he said. ‘You can’t resist, Mr Ross, because the Benben Stone is drawing out your psionic power.’ He turned towards us and I saw that his face was shining. ‘My people will hear me,’ he said. ‘They’ll come.’ It was only for a fraction of a second but it seemed to me his features began to liquefy and run like colours on a painting, his body shaking, trembling as if a thousand volts were going through it, until it became a cocoon of vibration, a vortex of eddies, a plethora of forms fading and melting into one another. It was as if his face was a tape fast forwarding through scores of possible human features, and at the end of the tape I glimpsed something monstrous — an insect-like head with protruding jaws and a cranium projecting backwards. The ghoul at last. Then Andropov’s face returned, still split with the leer of victory.

  ‘There’s just one thing I don’t get,’ I burst out. ‘You could have had anything you wanted. Why murder innocent kids like the tailor’s boy, or the other two I found in Cairo?’

  The creature with Andropov’s face looked at me through eyes as old as the universe. ‘My species is predatory, like yours,’ he said. ‘We have ways of suppressing the hunting instinct just as you do, but when your friend here allowed me to escape into the desert I reverted to the old ways. I found I actually enjoyed it.’

  Daisy was staring at him with shock written all over her, and even Van Helsing registered horror. Suddenly Ross screamed again and arched backwards, pivoting with such force that the cables taped to his head were wrenched out. Van Helsing moved towards him with his pistol ready, and in that second I broke out of the cuffs, slipped my khanjar from under my sleeve, grasped it by the top between finger and thumb and hurled it at him. All the power of all the hate I’d nurtured and bottled up since my days on the streets of Aswan was behind that throw. Time slowed to a crawl, and it seemed I could see the knife spinning ponderously like a propeller, gaining momentum, until it punched into Van Helsing’s chest, making him stagger backwards against the red granite wall. Then time speeded up again into ultra-fast forward, and I ducked just as Hammoudi snapped the pump action shotgun into his hand like a child’s toy, pumped the works once and squeezed the trigger. The sound blasted against my eardrums like a thunderclap and I reeled back as the shell caught one of the guards in the chest with such force that it bowled him three metres across the chamber and hurled him like a rag doll against the stonework in a shower of blood and entrails. Hammoudi whipped off his hood and almost at the same moment Andropov brought out his .38 snub nose and shot him. Hammoudi toppled and staggered against the wall as the two other guards moved in for the kill. He fired the shotgun one-handed into the face of the first and dropped the other with the pistol grip in the groin.

  I grabbed Andropov and tried to grapple the gun out of his hand, and I saw Daisy snap off her cuffs and leap across the room with the power and speed of an Olympic athlete towards Ross.

  ‘Stop!’ Andropov bawled. ‘You fool! Don’t you know it’s too late? The message has been sent! Nothing can stop us now!’

  Daisy wrenched my blade out of Van Helsing’s chest and began to slash at the leather straps that held Ross. She eased his half inert body out of the way, sat down in the chair and slapped the electrodes on her own head. I watched her in shock and Andropov stopped struggling.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said.

  Daisy glared at him and suddenly the buzz and hum of energy increased in a crescendo, until the whole room seemed to be pulsating with it. Daisy’s body seemed aglow with power, and for a moment I swear I saw, not Daisy, but the body of a giant woman, a vast, serene, diaphanous image as high as the stars. There was a deep boom as the chamber seemed to shake, then a blinding flash and a blast of energy as the instruments scattered about the room popped and erupted in smoke. The deafening buzz began to diminish and there was the whine of power running down. Andropov stared at Daisy in amazement and there was fear in his eyes. ‘The Guardians!’ he whispered. ‘She’s one of them!’

  Suddenly he kicked me in the shins, knocked me out of the way and plunged into the antechamber. I jumped to my feet and ran after him, but he was already halfway down the Grand Gallery, knocking cardboard cartons out of his path. As he entered the ascending passage at the far end the lights cut, and when I arrived at the head of the passage I could hear only the clatter of his footsteps on the wooden ramps over the pyramid’s hum. I doubled over and half ran, half stumbled through the darkness, until the entrance loomed out in front of me with the starlit sky showing beyond. I saw Andropov’s figure in cameo as he pushed through the guards and turned abruptly, and in that moment I knew he was going to climb up to the apex of the pyramid. As I emerged into the light of the arc lamps I saw the crowds below, a swaying, seething surge of movement and ecstatic sound, lost in a primeval reverie amid cracking, whizzing and crashing fireworks filling the sky with explosions of colour, and laser beams slicing through the night to the tune of electronic music.

  The Blue Berets at the door seemed adrift in the ecstatic atmosphere, and no one tried to stop me as I followed Andropov up the side of the pyramid. Lights were flashing brilliantly around the new golden capstone, showing me the shambling body in strobes as he climbed the successive courses of masonry. I struggled after him, breasting course after course, some no higher than my shins, others more than waist high, so that I had to feel desperately for some kind of foothold to get myself over. Often I had to st
op for breath on ledges that were no wider than my own foot, holding on to the massive blocks tightly to prevent giddiness and vertigo from overwhelming me as I gazed down on the writhing sea of humanity below. Andropov went on and on, crawling over the stones like a scarab beetle, already hundreds of feet above the crowds. Fireworks exploded throwing momentary splashes of light across the stonework, and the second and third pyramids appeared in the moonlight as vast, incandescent shadows.

  At last I saw that Andropov had paused, perhaps two thirds of the way up, and I realized I was gaining on him. I scrambled over the courses panting heavily now, taking in the vast glowing sprawl of Cairo, a patchwork of light and shade, a glimmering gloss of streetlights hanging in the sky, pierced by tower blocks and minarets in a dozen colours. Andropov was climbing more slowly, his energy sapped. By the time he reached the top I was only a few feet behind him, and as he pulled himself over the lip of the shelf on which the new capstone stood, I grabbed his leg. He snarled like a vicious animal and turned on me, launching a kick at my head. I dodged and almost lost my footing, then heaved myself over the lip and dived at him. The gun went off, the bullet skimming past my ear, but Andropov lost his balance and fell. I closed with him, trying to shake the gun out of his hand, but he was stronger and heavier than me and he forced himself on top and pressed the pistol into my ear.

  ‘You meddling little worm!’ he spat, his eyes wide with hate. ‘You think you can destroy me? You think you can foil plans made by a species that has the patience of millennia? I should have ripped you to shreds when I saw you in the alley or in the house in Old Cairo. You remind me of Ibram. Oh, he wanted the power and privilege of having alien technology at his disposal, but when he found out what the Stone would do he got scared. He was going to rat on us, and that couldn’t be allowed. That’s why he had to die. And now it’s your turn.’

  I groped madly to get a purchase and suddenly my right hand closed on a loose iron bar — something left by the technicians who’d fixed the capstone sheath in place. I took it, and felt power flooding through me. It was the most primitive tool imaginable, but with this club in my hand I was suddenly filled with confidence. I gave Andropov a smashing blow across the head and he fell backwards, lost his balance and slipped sideways off the ledge. For a moment he hung there, fighting for a hold, his big face growing diaphanous and distorted again, until I could see the ghost of the creature there.

  ‘The message was sent,’ he growled through gritted teeth, ‘the Nommos are coming and there’s nothing you or your precious Guardians can do about it!’

  I looked him in the eyes, and stamped hard on both hands one after the other. ‘That’s for the tailor’s boy!’ I said. He screamed, let go of the masonry and dropped like a dead weight, plummeting headlong down the side of the pyramid, bouncing from course to course until he was out of sight.

  56

  Daisy was sitting on the steps below the main entrance when I came down, with her arm round Ross. Hammoudi sat below her, smoking a Cleopatra while a medic bandaged up his thigh. An ambulance was making its way ponderously through the crowds to pick up the body of the man who’d been killed falling from the pyramid. I imagined the authorities would keep it hush hush for the sake of the tourist trade. The music of synthesizers was still coiling through the atmosphere, the audience seething and surging blindly, but I noticed the numbers were dwindling now. It was the year 2000, and the new millennium had arrived.

  I sat down heavily next to Hammoudi. ‘I won’t ask you any questions,’ I told him, ‘but thanks.’

  He shrugged. ‘It was your brother, Mansur,’ he said. ‘Ross gave him an emergency number for me, and he used it. Told me you’d been captured at the Fayoum by this oriental looking guy. Didn’t take long to work out it was Andropov. I had to put a couple of people down to get into the pyramid, but on the way I came across Elena and Ross’s son. I liberated them. They’re waiting for Ross round the corner at the Mena Palace.’

  Ross was pale and looked half comatose, but he sat up at the sound of his wife’s name. ‘It was that...blowback,’ he stammered, ‘almost killed me.’

  ‘But the message went?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t stop it. The Benben Stone was designed to draw psionic power out of its operators. I sensed...it was incredible, there’s a sort of creature inside the stone — an artificial intelligence millennia old, wise, sort of, but without any real temporal sense. It was almost as if I spoke to it...’

  ‘The Stone’s dead now,’ Daisy said. ‘I killed it. I had to, or it would have opened up a rift in space time and caused the same kind of runaway chain reaction that happened last time.’

  ‘Ibram knew what would happen when they used the Stone,’ I said, ‘that’s why the alien had him murdered. Sanusi got cold feet too, and tried to warn us. Andropov must have been the Sayf ad-Din character Sanusi said had taken the amulet. One of his boys wore it and left it in the tunnel of the teashop to put us off the scent.’

  Ross was staring at Daisy. ‘I knew as soon as I met you that you had the power,’ he said, ‘but I decided to see how things panned out. Are you an illuminatus?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the woman who took me from the orphanage was well...a human projection...she was one of the Guardians. That’s why I couldn’t tell you who chose me for the assignment.’

  ‘The side of the angels!’ I said.

  ‘I had a hunch the Guardians were behind this,’ Ross said. ‘I encountered them first four years ago, when I discovered a Nommo starship buried in the desert. The ship contained the body of the Pharaoh Akhnaton, who was also a Nommo — a ghoul. The Guardians helped to defeat him and sealed him up there. They’re a kind of cosmic police force of unbelievably advanced knowledge whose function is to make sure developing species aren’t exploited by more advanced ones. My guess is that they built the Benben mansion in the desert and put the Stone there for safekeeping until such time as we’d be wise enough to use it. But the ghoul got there first.’

  Daisy looked at me and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘The tests I told you about,’ she said, ‘were tests of my psionic power. The Guardians knew that the Nommo lived and that he would make another attempt to reach the parent species. They knew the consequences might be disastrous for the earth, and they trained me to use my power. They didn’t tell me anything about the ghoul or the Stone — their own rules prevent them influencing things directly. All I knew was that I had to contact Omar James Ross and Desmond Redfield’s son.’

  My face must have dropped a mile. I looked at her with absolute astonishment. ‘You knew my father?’

  ‘No, I never knew him. My mentor told me about him. He was an early recruit of the Guardians and he was sent here in the sixties in the cover of a USAF sergeant, to investigate the connection between Egypt and M J —12. He had the psionic gene, and you inherited it.’

  ‘But the letter! He told my mum that he was already married with three children.’

  ‘Your father was liquidated by MJ —12 as a threat, and the letter was concocted by them. Desmond was never married to anyone else and never had any other children. M J —12 got rid of all his records and managed to eliminate his memory from the face of the earth. That’s why I didn’t know your name or anything else about you.’

  ‘But you never trusted me?’

  ‘I had to be sure. MJ—12 has a long reach — you could easily have been a plant.’

  I stood up, my mind awash with emotions that I couldn’t control or even understand. I took Daisy by the hand and led her down the steps and into the jiving, ranting, electric crowd.

  ‘It’s not over yet,’ Daisy said. ‘The message was sent. There will be more visitors from Sirius.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’ll take them light-years to get here. That gives us plenty of time to prepare.’

  The crowd around the base of the pyramid had all joined hands and were singing ‘The Age of Aquarius’. We stood on the last step and I put my arms around her, sought out her
mouth with mine and kissed her. It was a kiss that seemed to last for ever, and when we finally broke I realized that the crowd was cheering and clapping.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you don’t even know my name.’

  I smiled. ‘To me,’ I said, ‘you’ll always be Daisy.’

  A barrage of fireworks exploded suddenly and she took my hand. Together we walked out into the crowd, our eyes fixed on the stars that scintillated in the endless night, until we were lost and adrift, another nameless pair of dark figures among thousands of wildly dancing shadows.

  If you enjoyed reading Firebird, you might be interested in Shoot to Kill by Michael Asher, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Shoot to Kill by Michael Asher

  1 - The Maroon Machine

  On my first morning in the Parachute Regiment Depot at Aldershot, I met a sour-faced corporal. ‘Excuse me, mate,’ I said, ‘but where’s the Personnel Selection Office?’

  The corporal was a barn-door of a man, an inch shorter than me. He sniffed suspiciously. ‘You a recruit?’ he inquired.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then I’m not your fucking mate! See these tapes?’ He pointed to the two snow-white chevrons stitched on his heavy-duty pullover. ‘I’m a corporal, and from now on you call me corporal! Got it? You’d better get it quick, or you’ll be out on your arse before your feet touch the ground!’ That was my welcome to the Parachute Regiment.

  I followed his directions in something of a daze. Was he supposed to talk to me like that? I wasn’t really in the army yet. I came from a school where colonels and generals were ten-a-penny in the Old Boys’ Club. A corporal seemed very small fry.

  I introduced myself to the clerk at the reception-desk. He was a corporal too. He was taciturn and morose with a moustache like a barbed-wire entanglement and sad brown eyes. ‘Name and number?’ he snapped.