Tiamat nodded at the demon at the control panel and the demon flipped a switch. A monitor over their heads displayed:
CAUTION: CCD IS ACTIVE!
A low-pitched, almost subaudible hum filled the room. Lights on the control panel blinked crazily as dozens of preprogrammed processes woke from their slumber. Below the surface of the panel, millions of electrons shuffled from place to place, like commuters in a vast city of copper and silicon, each of them doing their part to bring the monster to life.
“No!” Christine screamed. Demons on either side of her gripped her arms. Last time around, Jacob had been here to save the day, leaping onto the console and breaking open the tube, releasing the apple before it ever reached the bowels of the machine. But this time, Christine could only watch helplessly as the apple was sucked through the tube, disappearing to some unknown location deep within the earth where it would be filled with the mysterious particles known as chrotons. Christine’s grasp of the physics was fuzzy at best; for all she knew, the apple was being subjected to dark enchantments by the dwarves of Khazaddûm. What she did know was that if the experiment worked and Tiamat got her hands on the chroton-powered apple...well, the world might not end, but it certainly was going to get a whole lot less pleasant.
She could only hope Mercury and Jacob were having better luck with Lucifer.
THIRTY-NINE
Mercury threw the door open and burst onto the concourse, running headlong into a lanky blond demon carrying a black backpack tucked under his arm. The angel and the demon fell in a heap while the backpack continued on its forward trajectory, sailing through the air twenty feet and then sliding several feet farther on the hard floor.
“You again!” snarled Lucifer. “Don’t you have anything better to do than interfere with my diabolical schemes?”
Mercury shrugged. “What can I say? I love interfering with diabolical schemes.”
Jacob emerged from the doorway and took in the scene. The planeport was just as Christine had described it: an interdimensional gateway that had all the charm of Chicago’s Midway Airport—minus the Orange Julius stands. So it really was true. There really were Beings of Indeterminate Origin who traveled between dimensions using this absurdly ordinary-looking structure as a connecting hub. This revelation should have served to make the notion of angels seem even more ridiculous to Jacob, but in a strange way it was sort of wonderful—the idea that the trustees of the space-time continuum were tramping through these corridors on their way to conduct the Business of the Universe. To Jacob, who had dreamed of working for the FBI only to find that the legendary Bureau was mostly a bunch of people shuffling papers around in office buildings, it made a twisted sort of sense. Of course this is the way the Universe is run, he thought. This is the way everything is run.
A few terrified travelers cowered in the corners or ran in terror away from Lucifer. More angels, thought Jacob, realizing that he could no longer think of them as BIOs. It seemed petty to deny them the appellation of angel now. These people looked like...well, people. Presumably they were immortal and just as capable of “miracles” as Mercury, but they didn’t seem to have a clue what to do about a rogue demon carrying a backpack. Lucifer appeared to be alone, but gunfire rang out down the hall, in the direction from which he had come. Apparently Lucifer had outrun his offensive line. Jacob sprinted after the backpack.
Lucifer and Mercury tussled on the floor. Mercury eventually managed to get Lucifer in a headlock and, unsure of his next course of action, proceeded to give the Prince of Darkness noogies until he howled with rage. Lucifer scored a solid punch under Mercury’s ribs and wormed out of the hold. He scrambled away from Mercury and got to his feet. “Come back here, you fool!” he snarled at Jacob.
Turning to see Jacob running down the concourse with the backpack, Mercury got to his feet, holding his bruised side. Lucifer took off down the concourse after Jacob.
“Crap,” grumbled Mercury, who was wishing he’d had more time to plan this little adventure. Jacob was taking the bomb farther down the concourse, closer to the Heavenly portal—and farther from anywhere they could safely dispose of a nuclear bomb. The only positive was that civilians were sparser in that direction. He got up and ran after Lucifer.
Lucifer had almost caught up to Jacob when Mercury dove at him, throwing his arms around Lucifer’s ankles and sending him sprawling down the concourse. Lucifer retaliated with a heel to Mercury’s face, breaking his nose. Jacob disappeared around a corner.
Mercury recoiled from the blow and slowly got to his feet, ready to resume the chase. But Lucifer remained on the floor, curled up in a ball. He moaned quietly, apparently nursing some injury.
“Is that all you got?” asked Mercury, wiping the blood off his chin in what he hoped was appropriate action-movie tough-guy manner.
“Actually,” said Lucifer, leaning forward on one elbow and smiling, “no.”
Pain tore through Mercury’s torso, throwing him forward and knocking him to the ground, stunned. He turned, raising his head to see seven men in combat fatigues standing some fifty feet down the concourse behind him with assault rifles pointed in his direction, barrels smoking. Then Mercury collapsed, face down in a pool of his own blood. The offensive line had caught up.
“Leave him!” Lucifer snapped. “After the idiot with the backpack!”
He and the SEALs took off around the corner.
“Son of a bitch,” Mercury moaned, rolling onto his back. There was a lesson here about hubris or the importance of good defense or something. Dizzy and short of breath, he dragged himself slowly to his feet. He had to get to Jacob. The little guy was a solid distance runner, but he was no match for Lucifer and a squad of Navy SEALs. Not to mention that he was running straight into a dead end.
Mercury stumbled around the corner in time to see Lucifer playing tug-of-war with Jacob over the backpack. It wasn’t much of a contest; Lucifer was basically dragging Jacob around the planeport with the backpack, trying to shake him loose as if Jacob were a feral cat. Finally, with the help of a couple of the SEALs, he managed to pry loose Jacob’s grip, tossing him across the floor like a bag of laundry. Lucifer slung the pack over his shoulder and moved toward the portal to Heaven, which lay only a few feet away.
“Stop!” wheezed Mercury, limping down the concourse toward them.
Lucifer, turning to see Mercury, erupted in laughter. “You just don’t know when to quit, do you, Mercury? Gentlemen, I’d be obliged if you’d take care of our two friends here. I wish I could stay, but I have a doomsday device to deliver.” He stepped onto the portal and was gone.
FORTY
The Heavenly portal was in an intersection of two of Heaven’s main thoroughfares, just west of the center of the celestial city. On each corner were buildings housing various branches of the Heavenly bureaucracy, from Prophecy Division to the Angel Band Communications Board. To the west, the road dead-ended in front of the Apocalypse Bureau. A quarter mile to the east, in the dead center of Heaven, lay the vast pyramidal structure known as the Eye of Providence.
The portal was guarded by a dozen cherubim, but the guard had always been more ceremonial than functional. Everybody knew that nobody was going to attack Heaven. As a result, the job of guarding it generally fell to cherubim who weren’t paying attention when assignments were handed out. This turns out not to be the best way to select security guards. Not only were the guards easily distracted, but as there was no precedent for Heaven being attacked, there was no clear protocol for what to do in case of an attack nor even a reliable litmus test to determine whether an attack was occurring.
Take this fellow here, for instance, carrying a big black backpack under his arm and sprinting at top speed toward the Eye of Providence. Terrorist with a bomb or just another bureaucratic functionary late for a meeting? To the untrained eye, such a figure might seem suspect, but when you’ve spent the last three hundred years standing in the same spot with absolutely nothing of interest happening, you know that the n
otion that this person might do something to relieve your crushing boredom is at best a harmless pipe dream and at worst a dangerous distraction from your responsibility to stand very still and act like you are not to be messed with. At a moment like this, your training takes over and you become completely unselfconscious, an unthinking, unfeeling machine, a machine whose purpose is to look as much as possible like it is guarding something without having any intention to do any actual guarding. And so it was that the Guardians of the Portal of Heaven passed yet another test of their resolve, refusing even to allow an actual attack to distract them from their assigned task.
Lucifer ran tirelessly through the streets of Heaven, undistracted by the stares and gasps of the civilians he passed. His face was well known in Heaven, having been plastered all over the lobbies of most of the surrounding buildings for the past seven thousand years. Seven thousand years at the top of Heaven’s Most Wanted! That was a record not likely to be broken any time soon.
Getting any closer to the Eye was overkill at this point; a ten-kiloton bomb would turn anything within a half-mile radius to plasma. But Lucifer wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted to detonate the bomb as close as possible to the Eye. More importantly, he wanted to make sure that even if he were caught, there would be no chance of sending Wormwood back through the portal.
By the time the authorities finally got their act together, he was less than a hundred yards from the base of the Eye. The massive structure towered more than a hundred feet over him, a shimmering deep-blue pyramid that betrayed not the slightest imperfection. Deep within the translucent pyramid glowed an orb of brilliant light that seemed to be slowly spinning, minute variations in its rays causing it to twinkle like a star. Lucifer couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe. This was the source of the energy that pervaded the planes, the artifact that made reality itself possible. And he was going to blow it to smithereens.
A dozen sword-wielding cherub guards converged on him, forming an impenetrable circle. “That’s far enough,” said their lieutenant to Lucifer.
“Yes,” replied Lucifer. “I suppose it is.” He held the backpack before him and began to unzip it.
“Stop!” cried the lieutenant. “Put the bag on the ground and step away.”
Lucifer shrugged and placed the bag on the ground, taking two steps back. “I’m afraid it’s too late,” he said. The bomb would go off within seconds.
“What’s this about?” growled a voice from behind Lucifer. Lucifer turned and was delighted to see his old antagonist Cravutius approaching.
“Cravutius, old boy,” said Lucifer. “You’re just in time.”
“In time for what, Lucifer? What have you got in the bag?”
“Something that will put an end to your reign of stupidity and ignorance,” said Lucifer. “Go ahead, open it.”
Cravutius nodded at the lieutenant, who finished unzipping the bag. He pulled out a small obsidian cube and what appeared to be a stack of around nine hundred sheets of paper.
“You brought us a book?” asked Cravutius, confused.
Lucifer’s jaw dropped. His face went pale. Nausea gripped him and he fell to his knees.
The lieutenant handed the stack to Cravutius, who flipped over the cover page and began to read:
To Your Holiness, the High Council of the Seraphim,
Greetings from your humble servant, Ederatz,
Cherub First Class,
Order of the Mundane Observation Corps
“Ederatz?” asked Cravutius, frowning at Lucifer. “Who is Ederatz?”
Lucifer shook his head weakly, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“I have no fucking idea,” he said.
FORTY-ONE
The SEALs, ignoring Jacob for a moment, turned their weapons on Mercury, letting loose a barrage of metal and fire.
This time, though, Mercury was ready. The bullets miraculously altered their trajectory in midair as if repulsed by an unseen magnetic field, missing their target by inches. Undeterred, the SEALs continued to fire until their barrels were red hot and their magazines were empty. They began to reload, but Mercury seized the momentary lull to send a shockwave at them that knocked them all on their asses. The immediate threat having been dealt with, he collapsed trembling and exhausted on the planeport floor. Jacob ran to him.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Ugh,” replied Mercury. He was still bleeding badly from the wounds in his chest and lower torso. “I could really use a nap. For, like, a thousand years or so.”
Jacob helped him sit up against the wall of the concourse. The SEALs had gotten to their feet and were conferring among themselves, apparently not sure what to do next. Evidently the mission briefing hadn’t covered what they were supposed to do once the bomb was delivered. Eventually they picked up their weapons and then walked past Jacob and Mercury, regarding them circumspectly.
“Nice work, guys,” said Mercury as they passed. “You realize what you just did, right? You helped Lucifer deliver a nuclear bomb to Heaven. I’d recommend leaving that one off your résumé.”
“What the hell are you talking about, you BIO freak?” growled one of the men, stopping to face Mercury. The others halted as well.
“Lucifer,” said Mercury. “You know, Satan? The devil? That was him. He’s been trying to bring about the downfall of Heaven for seven thousand years but he never even got close before. Not until today. Thanks to you guys. So seriously, nice work. Pat yourselves on the back.”
“Whatever,” said the man.
“It’s true,” said Jacob. “I’m a scientist for the FBI. I didn’t believe it at first either, but it’s true. Well, most of it.”
Mercury frowned at him. “Really? You’re still skeptical?”
“Oh, no,” said Jacob. “I just meant the—unck—part about Lucifer delivering the bomb isn’t quite true.” He walked a few steps down the concourse and picked up a cardboard box that had been lying there unnoticed. He set the box down next to Mercury and pulled off the lid. Inside was a lumpy, roughly rectangular object about the size of an Oxford Dictionary.
“What the hell is that?” asked another SEAL. He wore a red officer’s chevron on his arm and appeared to be the default leader of the group.
“That,” said Jacob, “is a portable nuclear device. Its official name is Wormwood.”
“Holy shit, Jacob,” said Mercury. “How did you...”
“I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop Lucifer,” replied Jacob, “so when I was out of sight around the corner, I pulled a switch.”
“Pulled a...so what did Lucifer deliver to Heaven?”
Jacob shrugged. “Some kind of book, I guess. Eddie gave it to me.”
The SEALs exchanged uncomfortable glances. One of them looked like he was about to make a move for the bomb.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Mercury. “Even with twenty-eight, no, twenty-nine gunshot wounds, I could stop your heart as easy as snapping my fingers.”
The man thought better of it.
“Was that true, what you said?” asked the officer. “About that guy being...”
“Satan? The devil himself? Yep.”
“Bullshit,” said one of the men.
“You’re right,” said Mercury. “He’s not the devil. He’s just some random guy delivering American-made nuclear weapons to other dimensions. And you’re helping him because that’s just the kind of unquestioning dumbfuck you are. Feel better now?”
The man was silent.
“I thought he seemed a little...wrong,” said the officer.
Mercury nodded. “He’s all kinds of wrong. Fortunately, Jacob here seems to have saved you from eternal damnation for your service to the Dark Lord.”
“Uh, Mercury,” said Jacob.
“I know,” replied Mercury impatiently. “The Dark Lord is Sauron, from The Lord of the Rings. That doesn’t change my underlying point.”
“No,” said Jacob. “I just noticed, the bomb has been armed. Unck.”
<
br /> Mercury leaned forward, noticing a small LCD display that read: 02:26...02:25...02:24...
The SEALs exchanged more uneasy glances.
“So, um, you can disarm it, right?” asked Mercury.
Jacob examined the device, shaking his head. “This is a trickier trigger. Meant to be tamper proof. Pretty sure pulling one of these two wires would do it, though.” He indicated two wires running from the timer to the detonator, one yellow and one blue.
“Which one?”
Jacob shrugged meekly. “No way to know for sure.”
“And if you pull the wrong one?”
Jacob made his hands into fists and then spread his fingers apart suddenly.
“Jazz hands?” asked Mercury.
“Mushroom cloud.”
“Oh.”
02:12...02:11...02:10...
Mercury turned to the SEALs, who were still appraising the situation uncertainly. “If you guys have, you know, wives and children and stuff, this might be a good time to take off.”
“Where we gonna go?” asked the one who had spoken earlier. “The blast radius of a ten-kiloton bomb is over a mile. I can’t run that fast.”
Mercury sighed. “You’re lucky that in addition to about three and a half pounds of lead, my chest also holds a heart of gold. Jacob, how much time do we have left on the Kenya portal?”
“Just over two minutes,” said Jacob, checking his watch. “It’ll disappear about the time the bomb goes off.”
“OK,” said Mercury. “Jacob here will take you to another portal that will transport you home. Well, to a jungle in the middle of Kenya. Don’t ask. But from there you can get home.”
01:52...01:51...01:50...
“I need to stay here and try to disarm the bomb,” Jacob protested.
Mercury shook his head. “No need for you to stay here. I can pull a random wire as well as you can. And if I’m wrong, I’ll just get blown to a billion pieces and then reincorporate. You’d only do the blowing up part. And somebody has to go help Christine.”
Mercury Rests Page 24