Ascendant

by Sean Ellis

  One of the papers, however, required no translation. A large map, folded by eighths, showed a detailed relief of South America. Several notations had been made suggesting that something of importance might be found somewhere in the remote wilderness near the border of Chile and Bolivia. Behind the glass of her dive mask, Mira’s eyes lit up. The U-boat did not conceal a treasure, but perhaps this was a treasure map.

  She refolded the map and stuffed it, along with the other papers, back into the case, then crammed the entire parcel into the mesh bag along with the flares. Hopefully, the stiff leather would minimize water damage during the brief ascent, but it was the best she could do to protect the documents under the circumstances.

  Feeling a rush of triumph at the apparent success of her mission, Mira turned back to the long-deceased keeper of the knowledge, wondering what other secrets had died with him.

  With his burden removed, she could see his features more clearly. A pale, gaunt man, he barely resembled the Hollywood version she had imagined. His short dark hair and whiskers had continued to grow for a while after his death, leaving him with uncharacteristic stubble. Ironically, German submariners did not shave when they were at sea, and the SS officer’s attention to personal grooming surely added to the ideological gulf between himself and the crew.

  A dim reflection of the flare’s light caught her eye; the German was wearing something around his neck. A gentle tug on his collar revealed a necklace of heavy golden links, dropping in a V into the hidden depths beneath his buttoned shirt. Curious in spite of the urgency she now faced due to her rapidly diminishing air supply, Mira took the chain in her fingers and drew the hanging ornament into the light.

  Her eyes grew wide as she focused on the impossible yet familiar relic the man wore as a pendant. Then, her heart froze as a hand gripped her wrist and she found herself looking into the eyes of a man who had been dead long before she was born.

  PART TWO: DUALITY

  FIVE

  She reacted without thinking, slapping the restraining hand away without a second thought for the impossibility of what she was witnessing. Mira Raiden had long ago learned how to avert the paralysis of fear. Dead or alive, the man had become both foe and threat. As the reanimated Nazi drew back his lips in a silent, feral howl, she struck. The heel of her right hand slammed into his jaw, snapping his head back. The well-preserved skin seemed to slough away from bone to reveal the curve of his skull. There now seemed little question that the SS officer was still dead; all that remained was finding a way to return him to his eternal slumber.

  Recovering from her blow, the dead man began to uncurl from his seated position and rose to his full height, a head taller than Mira. Though apparently possessing supernatural strength, he had only his hands to use as weapons. With a swift slash of the dive knife, she removed one of them, but her foe seemed unconcerned.

  As the initial shock of the attack subsided, part of Mira’s thought process turned to the other impossible thing she had just witnessed: the object dangling from the necklace of gold links around the German’s neck was—without a doubt—the Trinity.

  Accepting that the SS officer she now faced was a sort of zombie was not without precedent. In the ruins of the temple in Panama, she had witnessed a supernatural display of power from the Trinity, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to accept that the relic could reanimate mummified corpses.

  But how did it end up here, in a sealed compartment, on a submarine lost more than six decades before?

  Simple answer: there’s more than one. Now you know why Atlas called it the Trinity.

  The undead creature darted forward, using its maimed arm as a club, while the remaining hand tore at her mask. Ducking under his attack, Mira swept a foot at his legs, unbalancing him, but only for a moment. The Nazi recovered with unnatural agility, hopping over her kick, and dropped down into a crouch to renew the attack. The stump arm struck a blow to her mid-section that knocked her against the upturned floor of the compartment.

  There seemed only one practical means of defense. The Nazi would pose little threat if he were reduced to a pile of disconnected, undead parts. Yet his attacks were too swift to allow her to wield the small knife effectively. Parrying another thrust, she aimed a kick at his chest.

  As her foot made contact, the zombie closed his jaws on the end of her flipper. The momentum of the kick knocked him away, but several of his teeth and a fair amount of flesh were ripped loose from his decomposing face. When he came at her again, he resembled death incarnate.

  Heartened by the success of her defense, Mira sprang erect once more, slashing with the knife in a double-handed grip. The blade of the Tekna drew a bloodless line across the German’s throat, its tip catching for a millisecond on the neck vertebrae before severing them completely. A thin ribbon of flesh still connected the Nazi’s head to his body, but it was not enough to keep it from rolling backwards to dangle impotently between his shoulder blades.

  Even that was not enough to halt the attack.

  The undead Nazi continued to flail at her, sensing her presence, though his desiccated eyes could no longer find her. Ducking under his thrashing limbs, she thrust out her right hand in a stiff-arm blow that would have left a linebacker gasping for breath. The undead SS agent staggered back with the force of the connection, but did not seem otherwise affected. As her foe staggered back, now precariously close to the hole through which she had entered, her hand closed on the shape of the circlet beneath the cloth of his shirt. Wrenching her arm back with all her might, she tore the fabric off of the reanimated corpse. The golden necklace pulled taut for an instant, then, like the blade of a chainsaw, cut through the remaining cords of flesh that held the German’s head on his shoulders. The severed head vanished through the opening, but the decapitated form did not relent.

  Neither did Mira.

  Spinning on her left heel, she brought her right foot, flipper and all, in a roundhouse kick that struck the zombie just below its left elbow. The impact of the blow knocked Mira off balance, but as she struggled to right herself, she caught a glimpse of the German dropping through the cut in the freezer wall.

  With her opponent vanquished, Mira felt a preternatural calm come over the silent crypt. She could almost see the vibrations of her heart beating wildly in the grip of adrenaline overload, against the rubberized fabric of the wetsuit. She took a deep breath of air from the mouthpiece, hoping that in the heat of combat she had not overtaxed her oxygen supply. A glance at the wrist chronometer revealed that only a few minutes had passed since her last time-check; her battle with the undead SS officer had lasted mere seconds, but every breath brought her precariously close to an empty air tank.

  Nevertheless, she contemplated the cloth-wrapped article in her right hand as if detached from the urgency of her situation. Almost reverently, she pulled back the impromptu shroud, exposing the relic. It was unquestionably a twin to the Trinity she had brought back from Panama. The ring of silver-colored metal unlike any alloy known to modern man, and the white hexagon of unnatural crystal—this one undamaged—were features both eerily familiar.

  Yet much about this development was unprecedented. In Panama, the Trinity had blasted her with a psychic assault that had ultimately numbed her precognitive faculties. From this relic, however, she sensed only a faint tingle of background energy, and that only with physical contact.

  Where on earth did you come from? She thought to the talisman, unable to speak the words past the mouthpiece. The Trinity offered no illumination.

  The papers in the dead Nazi’s case, however, might, but those answers would have to wait. As she stuffed the Trinity piece in her mesh bag—owing to a flash of intuition or maybe just plain old deductive reasoning—she realized that Walter Aimes had somehow known about the presence of the artifact on the U-boat. It was the only explanation that made any sense, yet in the larger context it made no sense at all. She wondered if the mystery of her elderly benefactor’s impossible knowledge would ever be un
covered.

  Before dropping back into the chilly waters, Mira struck a fresh flare, leaving the sizzling stub of the first to burn itself out. Though the water was only a few feet deep beyond the opening, it was shrouded in shadows, hiding the remains of the enemy she had just defeated. Holding her mask tight against her face, she jumped out into the center of the opening and was instantly immersed in cold darkness.

  Before her eyes could register the surrounding images in the sudden illumination provided by the flare, she sensed movement off to her left. She twisted around in time to dodge yet another attack from the relentless reanimated Nazi. As his arms closed on empty water, she kicked at his torso with both feet, shoving him into the maze of tables and benches. Even as he thrashed, his flesh seemed to boil off his bones. The wasted skin and muscle tissue peeled away in the salt water until nothing remained but an impotent skeleton of bones, cartilage and ligaments. The grotesque headless form remained impossibly upright, but there was no fight left in him. However, the zombie’s final attack gave her the edge of adrenaline that enabled her to survive what happened next.

  She was just turning over to swim out of the galley area when a flash of light and motion struck out of the shadows. She twisted away instinctively, her psychically attuned reflexes saving her life, but nevertheless felt a sudden rush of frigid water as a blade sliced along her left arm, opening both the neoprene suit and the flesh along her biceps. The icy water and the sharpness of the knife dulled the pain of a wound.

  Her new assailant was revealed in the light of her torch, not a reanimated submariner, but a living man, breathing compressed air from a SCUBA tank. His gray eyes narrowed behind the glass of his mask, and Mira sensed that another thrust of his blade was imminent. She remained motionless, as if petrified with fear, waiting for his arm to draw back, but as his torso twisted in preparation to strike she spun away. The blade stabbed through the rotting steel bulkhead up to its hilt.

  The diver tried to pull it out, adding both hands to the effort, but the blade was lodged firmly in the pressure hull. Mira kicked her flippers vigorously to right herself, then darted toward the momentarily distracted diver. Her wounded arm left a ribbon trail of blood in the water, but she ignored the growing ache, driving like a spear at her assailant. An instant too late, the diver surrendered in the battle for his knife and turned to meet her charge, but a swipe of Mira’s right hand removed his mask. The man howled in an instinctive panic as the mouthpiece of his SCUBA system ripped away. A rush of bubbles filled the companionway as Mira’s Tekna sliced the man’s hose in two. As the doomed diver’s terrorized thrashing grew to a fever pitch, she darted past him and began threading the labyrinth in her own desperate bid for survival.

  Despite her haste, she was wary. Battling the supernatural guardian of the Trinity had caught her completely by surprise, but this secondary assault from a more ordinary source was not so easily hidden. There were more attackers lying in wait. She took a deep breath as she approached the hull-breach, holding it in lest her air bubbles announce her approach. Gripping the ragged edges of the broken pressure hull, she drew in like a coiled serpent, then launched herself at the fissure.

  Right away, she saw two more divers, their generic black wetsuits stark against the dimly illuminated surface above. Both men swam patrol circles, perhaps fifteen feet above the wreck, holding spearguns at the ready. One of them, startled by her sudden appearance, triggered the release on his weapon, sending the barbed spear harmlessly into the depths.

  The moment in which the divers struggled to verify that it was their quarry, not their comrade, emerging from the wreck was one Mira used to her advantage. Turning a quick circle in the water, she spied a third diver lurking near the still-clouded waters by the gash in the U-boat’s keel. Rapidly inverting herself, she kicked furiously toward the lone diver, knife extended in her right fist.

  Something tugged at her right calf and then flashed past her. The narrow tunnel view of her mask did not allow her to see the object, but she knew by the sudden stinging on the back of her leg that the remaining diver above had scored a glancing hit with his spear gun. Unrelenting, she continued her torpedo assault on the frogman below.

  Comprehending his danger more readily than his comrade inside the wreck, the man immediately started swimming away from the target zone. Mira struck an instant later, driving the point of the weapon into the back of his thigh. The tip struck bone and the rubber grip of the knife was wrenched out of her fist as the wounded diver thrashed in agony, a trail of blood darkening the water around him.

  At least now, Mira thought morbidly, if the neighborhood great white shark puts in an appearance, I won’t be the only dish on the table.

  Like his friends above, the wounded man carried a harpoon launcher, but the weapon now dangled uselessly by a nylon strap that was itself attached to a quiver full of harpoons secured with elastic cords to his air tank. Forgetting the lost knife, Mira made a grab for the spear gun. Bracing her feet against the man’s back, she wrestled the weapon free and whirled to find a target.

  Both of the divers were closing on her position, so she brandished the weapon left to right, watching to see which direction they would break in order to avoid her spear. The nearest diver reacted frantically, twisting away from her feint and unwittingly exposing himself. Mira did not hesitate. The harpoon gun shuddered in her hands as the energy stored in its elastic band snapped the projectile forward. The spear itself slipped noiselessly through both the water and the abdomen of the unlucky diver. His final confused thoughts were almost audible: It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. . . .

  The remaining diver capitalized on his comrade’s misfortune to take careful aim with his own weapon. Mira abandoned her efforts to thread another harpoon into the gun and kicked to the right. Her foe’s barb struck too close for comfort, piercing through the leather case in the mesh bag and lodging midway through. The tip remained dangerously close to her hip as she swam away.

  Suddenly her view of the battle vanished in a splash of frigid water. With so many threats from so many different directions, she had missed this one.

  An unseen foe had ripped her mask away, blinding her with stinging salt water. Before her vision could resolve the blurry image of the seascape, she felt the assailant attacking again, this time trying to rip her mouthpiece from between her teeth. Like a horse fighting the bridle she resisted, thrashing from side to side and swinging the impotent spear gun like a truncheon. One of her blind attacks scored, and she felt a muted impact as the makeshift club clipped her attacker.

  Through the haze of seawater pressing against her eyeballs, she could see the figure of the man she had stabbed with the dive knife. The blade remained firmly planted in his thigh, but apparently he had worked through the pain, intent on accomplishing his mission and avenging his comrades. Before he could recover his equilibrium, Mira clutched the hilt of the knife with both hands and tried to wrench it free.

  Agony flared in her left arm where the first attacker’s blade had cut deep. Her traumatized muscles rapidly failed, but the momentary exertion yielded favorable results. Though her left hand slipped away, the knife broke loose, gouging a divot of flesh and bone that sent the diver into a state of shock.

  Her triumph was short-lived. The other diver slammed into her back, finishing what his friend had started. Rather than wrestle the air hose from her mouth, he attacked the line itself, hacking into it with his knife near the junction with the tank. Mira felt the sudden change in pressure and spit the mouthpiece out as a flood of brackish water rushed into her mouth.

  The SCUBA gear on her back, which a moment before had enabled her to endure the alien undersea environment, now represented nothing but a bulky, heavy liability. She sensed that her foe had backed off, content in the belief that her fate was all but sealed. For a moment, she, too, almost accepted that judgment. Hanging in the water, surrounded by the last gasps of air that rushed from the tank on her back, she frantically searched for a better answer
.

  An experienced swimmer, Mira could easily hold her breath for over two minutes under ideal circumstances, but this situation was far from ideal. She had not even been given opportunity to draw one final good breath before losing her air supply. The ocean surface was more than a sixty feet above, a virtually impossible free ascent, even for someone of her skill. Willing herself calm, Mira chose to make better use of that final gasp of air.

  A couple of quick cuts with the knife severed the straps that bound her to the useless SCUBA tanks. Another cut sliced the line of lead weights free of her belt, sending the gray blocks spiraling downward. Unencumbered by the heavy apparatus, she pirouetted in the water like a dolphin, the full power of the long swim fins propelling her rapidly toward the retreating diver.

  At the last second he saw her approach and brought his hands up defensively. His blade slashed menacingly to warn her off. Agilely evading the knife, Mira darted around behind the man and snared hold of his air tank with both hands. The diver spun in circles, trying first to find his attacker, then to throw her off.

  Immediately, she wrapped her legs around his waist, locking her ankles together to free her hands for the rest of her plan. Anticipating her next move, the man dropped his knife, throwing both hands up to hold his mask in place. Mira was faster by a heartbeat. After ripping the mask away, she began tearing at his eyes and nose. Though her gloved fingers did little real damage, the terrified diver was too caught up in protecting his face to launch any kind of counter-attack. He barely resisted as she tore the breathing apparatus out of his mouth.