He hit the emergency signal on his Ear and had it put him through to the infirmary.
[Dr. Nava.]
He could hear a fair measure of chaos surrounding the doctor as she made it to her intercom. "What's the situation, SA-7?"
[Partly cloudy with a 40% chance of soul-sucking demons. We need you to send another team down, this one with as many sedatives as you can spare. There are twenty more victims in here.]
Nava wasn't a woman who cursed, but now was a good time for it, and she rattled of a melodic string in both Spanish and English before answering him. [On our way.]
He turned back to his team, who were clustered with the handful of untouched employees, six faces white with panic. "Permission to take charge of the situation, Ness?"
She looked from the chanting man back to Jason. "Enthusiastically granted."
"Thank you. Now, then. They're sending sedatives so we can knock all these people out. That at least will keep them from summoning Gozer the Destructor. We need to find everyone else in the building that ate those cupcakes and separate out the ones with the hardcore effects versus those who'll come down in a few hours. Beck, start a sweep of the building. Get everyone who's unaffected back to their quarters. You, there—” He caught the eye of a woman in a cook's uniform, who swallowed but met his gaze. "Go into the kitchen and dump all that sugar down the drain. And incinerate every damn cupcake you find."
"Yes, sir," she squeaked, and disappeared, looking relieved to have an excuse to get away.
"Frog. Go with her and get a sample of the sugar before she tosses it. We need you to analyze it and work on a way to counteract the drug at least for the 40%. Get whoever you need from R&D, if they’re sober, and tell every other able-bodied person there to meet on the Floor and report to Dr. Nava."
He turned to Ness. "We need to recall everyone in the field and find out if anyone ate in tonight. We're going to need armed guards all over the place, just in case."
She nodded in agreement and pulled out her cell phone; Ness typically didn't wear an Ear. As she turned away she was already barking out orders.
That left him, Rowan, and Sara, both of whom looked about ready to fall over. “Do you have anything left?” he asked.
Rowan took a deep breath. He was pale and drawn, the pain and emotion of everyone in the base beginning to build in his mind, and soon it would overwhelm him. His eyes were unfocused, his voice unsteady, and it was all Jason could do not to fly over and put his arms around the Elf, shielding him from it all. “I can try.”
Sara took Rowan’s arm. “I’ll give you whatever I can.”
The cafeteria doors sailed open, and medical personnel poured in, led by one of the senior doctors, Dr. Rosenberg. He surveyed the situation and immediately started issuing directives, setting up triage. One medic found the dead woman and gently eased her onto her back, closing her eyes with his fingers.
Jason turned back to Rowan. “I have a feeling scientific intervention isn’t going to be enough--can you help them all like you did Sage?”
The Elf, clearly daunted by the prospect, shook his head. “Not at that depth. And you have to consider that if any of them are religious Christians, they’ll have a harder time fighting. This drug was tailored to their cosmology. If we’re lucky a few of the others will be Buddhist or Pagan and reject the programming outright.”
Dr. Rosenberg approached them, grim-faced but collected. “SA-7,” he greeted Jason with a nod. “We’ve got it under control up here, for now.”
“How many are we dealing with, total?”
“It looks like of the 119 full-time staff, 77 were dosed with the drug. By our records 32 could potentially go into the full trance, but we’ve only found fourteen total. All seven Agents above a level 4 are fine; you, SA-8, and SA-5 wouldn’t have eaten the food, and the other four were all out in the field tonight. We’re in the process of consolidating the 14 into the infirmary and moving everyone else into the Floor or here—they’ll be all right by morning, they just need babysitting. We’ve got maybe six hours at most before the fourteen are so mentally blown there’s no recovery.”
“Good work, Doctor. Do you have any updates on Sage?”
“Her vitals are stable and her neural output is depleted but within the safe range. She’ll be all right.”
“Perfect. As soon as she’s lucid we can do a proper interrogation.”
Rowan cleared his throat. “That won’t be necessary, really. I know everything she knows.”
“Is she a threat?”
The Elf shook his head, smiling sadly. “She’s as innocent in this as everyone else. All she did was make her usual supply order this week—we get Imperial Sugar all the time. The people behind this probably have a man in the plant who tracked large orders to Austin locations and found us.”
Sara let out her breath. “Thank goodness. I mean, that Sage wasn’t behind it. I just couldn’t imagine her doing something like that…but I’ve been wrong about people before.”
Jason looked around the room; it did indeed seem like Rosenberg had it under control. “Let’s head to the Situation Room and get everyone together who might be helpful. You can brief us there, SA-5.”
“Situation Room?” Sara asked, falling into step beside him as he led them out of the cafeteria. Once the double doors swung shut, mercifully, it was much quieter, and Jason’s mind stopped spinning in such wild circles. As they walked, every few minutes he heard a distant scream or shout, or a disembodied voice floating through the intercom summoning someone here or there, Emergency Protocol Whatever.
“SS-13,” he replied. “A secure room with its own computer system. Disaster control.”
“Jason…what are we going to do?” Sara asked, her voice higher pitched than normal. “We’ve been trying to come up with a cure for this stuff for weeks and Frog still has no idea how to counteract it. We can’t bring everyone out individually like we did Sage. What if it’s all over the city? They had 400 bags of sugar!”
“Calm down,” he said firmly. “First we gather all the information and assets we have, then we come up with a plan. I’ll tell you when it’s all right to panic. In the meantime, stay grounded. This is what we do, Sara. Now keep moving.”
SS-13 had its own separate elevator controlled by a generator, so if the base went into lockdown and lost power, it could still be accessed. By the time they reached it, Ness, Dru, and Nava were all there; Beck arrived moments later, not exactly the picture of serenity herself.
“All right, what do we have from outside the base?” Jason asked, helping Sara deposit Rowan in a chair. “Is this confined to the building or did they decide to broaden the experiment?”
Ness shook her head. “APD has no unusual activity. I’ve called in reinforcements to surround the building and make sure nobody gets in or out. Lockdown in ten minutes, and I’m not lifting it until we find out if they have a man inside watching the situation.”
“They must,” Dru said. “The two Eyes we have unaffected went back through the external readings and there are no unusual signals leaving or entering the base. Whoever they are, they’re here.”
Jason had the intercom patch through to R&D. “Frog?”
“Yes sir?”
“Report.”
“I got a sample of the sugar before Amy incinerated the rest, and I’m running it through the GC/MS and the Ectoplasmic Chromatograph right now. So far it looks identical to the sample pills you brought us before. Same basic composition, same spells. I’m analyzing for any anomalous particulates that might tell us more about where it was stored or how it was shipped—that will be helpful later.”
“Well, what do you recommend as a course of action for now?”
“I would say we need to find a way to break the third formula—the one that implants the chant in the victim’s brain. We also need to shut them down psychically so that they don’t fry. The first formula, the one that causes the hallucinations, is harmless enough once it runs its course, although it’ll c
ause some pretty hardcore nightmares and probably result in either born-again Christianity or atheism.”
“All right. We need you in SS-13 as soon as you’re available. Can you beam us a scan of the formulas in their original context? We can start looking for a loophole.”
“Right away. I already have them on my server—give me two minutes and you’ll have them there.”
“Okay.” Jason sat down, and the rest followed suit, surrounding the conference table that had a variety of technological wizardry installed to manage a crisis situation. “Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page here. This is what we know so far: the base has been infiltrated by Pentecost. We have 77 victims with the potential for 32 to go into full demon-summoning mode. Thus far only 15 to 20 have been so affected. The method of dispersal was imprecise—unlike with a pill, where you can control the dosage, eating it in a recipe means that some people got more and some less. We have confirmed three deaths from overdose. The source has been identified as a shipment of Imperial sugar fed to the dinner crowd this evening from 19:00 to 21:00 hours. The source and its resultant cupcakes have been destroyed.”
“I can’t believe we’re dealing with magic cupcakes,” Beck muttered. “This is so demented. And kind of lame, really. Leave it to Austin--this kind of shit never happened in the D.C. branch.”
“The base is going into lockdown,” he continued, ignoring her. “We have approximately six hours to find a way to cure the full victims before they are permanently damaged. The rest will come out of it on their own. We managed to bring out one of the victims, Sage.”
“How did you manage that?” Dru asked. “Can we do the same for the rest?”
“Rowan and Sara used the fact that Sage is a Pagan and therefore doesn’t believe in heaven or hell to cause a disruption in the hallucinations. The dissonance between her actual beliefs and what she was seeing was enough to break the cycle. She was then able to fight her way out of it.”
“We can’t count on the others being that strong,” Rowan spoke up wearily. “We have a dozen religions represented here on the base, but at least half the staff is some form of Christian. The drug plays right into the fear of hell to convince the victim to summon the Devourer. Even those who practice a different religion may have enough history with Christianity that the images will have the same effect. Whatever you may believe, when you see your loved ones tortured by Satan, it’s hard to deny.” He looked over at Dr. Nava. “Rosenberg said Sage was recovering—has she said anything, or displayed any unusual behavior?”
Nava made an indeterminate noise. “If you call chanting unusual.”
“Chanting?” Jason asked. “What is she chanting?”
Nava lifted her hands and shook her head. “No, no, not the bad kind, not from the spells. This is her own thing. She said something about it giving her strength—she’s still pretty confused and afraid after seeing all that, even though she barely remembers it. All the noise and chaos around her is making it hard to rest. So she started chanting something, something Pagan, and before long she fell asleep.”
Sara sat up straight. “What was it, did you hear?”
“Names. A string of names—all I really caught was Isis, and I think Demeter.”
Sara grinned. “Names of the Goddess. It’s a popular chant among Wiccans. Rowan…”
The Elf looked at her, and something passed between them. Rowan nodded. “You may have something there, Sara.”
Impatiently, Jason said, “Well, would you mind sharing with the rest of the class?”
Sara clasped her hands, obviously trying not to wring them nervously. “Pentecost causes the victim to chant the incantation they programmed into it. Maybe the trick isn’t trying to wake everyone up, but to change what they’re programmed to do. If we can override that one spell, maybe program everyone to chant something else, we can neutralize its effect.”
“And how do we do that?”
“Can you bring up the text of the incantation?” Sara asked.
Jason leaned forward and hit a few keys on the table’s display; as promised, Frog had uploaded his notes and diagrams to the emergency server, and in a few seconds Jason had the scanned and annotated text of the third spell on the screen where everyone could see it. The language itself was impossible for them all to read, but Patel had made enough notes that they could identify which paragraph was intended to do what.
Sara scrutinized the image in silence for several minutes before pointing at a segment of the text and saying, “There. That’s the incantation. Now, if we were to substitute this text with something else, say, the names of the Goddess Sage is chanting, the Devourer wouldn’t be summoned, but moreover, the effect of using something the victim believes strongly in would help them break out of the trance. It only took a few seconds’ disruption with Sage—once she realized that what she was seeing wasn’t real, she got angry and fought back.”
“You’re forgetting,” Ness pointed out, “that only a handful of the victims are Pagan.”
“So we use several alternatives. You have what religion everyone practices here on file, right? Pull them up. We create different versions of the new incantation—one for Catholics, one for Hindus, whatever we need. There’s only fifteen so far, it would be complicated but possible in six hours.”
“We’d need a delivery system,” Beck said. “Obviously the thing doesn’t work just by waving a wand over the person—it has to be in the body. I doubt we can get everyone to stop going crazy and just eat some cookies.”
“Sugar,” Frog said, appearing in the doorway, panting. “I destroyed everything but the organic stuff that Sage ordered from a different company. Dr. Nava—“
“A sugar solution injected into the bloodstream,” she confirmed. “We’ll do exactly what the makers of Pentecost did, and use their idea against them. It’s a bit shaky, but it might work. It’s definitely worth a shot.”
“Frog, Dr. Nava, see if you can find Patel on the Floor—she’s only a level 2, so she should be fine. Get to work on the new formula immediately. Rowan, can you help them?”
The Elf nodded. “They’ll need someone who can work magic. I have the skill, and I can tap into the energy of anyone around me with even a mote of psychic power, if I have to.”
“Good. Just be careful.”
“What about me?” Sara asked. “I can help too.”
Jason gave her a smile that made her blanch. “I have another job for you first.
Part Twelve
“In here,” Jason said, gesturing for her to follow him. She had to admire how, even in the face of extraordinary and pretty insane circumstances, he was all business, his expression betraying neither fear nor excitement.
The room he’d brought her to was long and narrow, with several computer systems set up in a row. She stared at the machines, trying to figure out why they looked odd to her, then realized they were very similar to the Ears—they had wires and headpieces and the chairs were built into the unit, something like a cockpit, except that they looked like they’d been grown instead of constructed.
“These are the Eyes,” SA-7 informed her. “Through this system we monitor occult activity and energy spikes throughout the state. The Ears are our internal communications system; the Eyes are our reconnaissance.”
“Right,” Sara said. “You don’t…you don’t expect me to use one of those, do you? I haven’t even learned how to work an Ear yet.”
“No. You’re going to talk to the building and see if you can figure out who’s responsible for this mess. We’re in here because the room is one of the most secure we have, and because I can access the security camera footage inside and outside the base if we need clarification.”
He pulled up a chair and gestured for her to sit. “Do your thing.”
“My thing?” Sara shook her head. “I need to be able to touch the walls. And I don’t know if I can do it with the entire base—I’ve only ever tried with single rooms, or at most small houses and stuff. I get impressions
off big buildings, but in a place like this, the energy changes constantly.”
“Just look for anomalies,” he instructed. “We’ve got a mole somewhere—if this whole thing was an experiment, someone has to be taking field notes and reporting back to headquarters. Rowan says Sage is innocent, so you have to find out who’s not. Whoever it is, is our only link to the people behind this.”
“Can’t we just—“
“Sara,” he said, his tone becoming deathly serious, “people are dying and going insane all around us. We don’t have time to argue. This isn’t a request, it’s an order.”
Whether it was mere impatience or real anger in his voice, she saw his eyes…change, somehow, as if they were losing some of their color and going faintly silver around the edges. A slow quake of fear rumbled through her belly—pure, human instinct, telling her not to bait the predator.
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