“All of which means you’ve got something to tell me that we didn’t know before, right?” I asked, grabbing my own chair.
“Oh, yes,” Zian assured me. “Check this out … Fairwinds Inc. is a front for some old friends of ours.”
“Define ‘old friends,’” I said.
“The kind that are usually too lazy to lift a finger to help, but who appear to have made an exception this time around,” Zian clarified, giving me a look that said, “work it out on your own, so I don’t have to spell it out.”
My mind connected the dots … the Conclave. Whatever was going on, they’d been trying to stop it a long time before I got involved. That’s what Bran had meant by “affiliated teams.” Lady McDeath may have been one of them but if it was anything like your average corporate boardroom, there were plenty of factions within the structure.
“Got to give them credit for discretion,” Zian went on. “They’ve been doing everything they can to stop Orion from happening in every legal, under-the-radar way that they could. Figure the Berserker getting involved changed that equation in a hurry.”
“I’ve got news too. I have a name for the person behind Arete ...” I paused for effect. “Jacinta Galatas.”
“As in Mayor Galatas?” Kennedy echoed, blue eyes wide open.
I nodded. “My source mentioned another key player too,” I put in. “Just a first name … Horace.”
Zian’s typing went from a thousand words a second to a million. Kennedy started working on hers as well, albeit at a slower pace. A few minutes later, both came away disappointed.
“Strikeout for me,” Kennedy said. “How ’bout you, Zian?”
“Same,” Zian said. “Even ran it through the stuff I had on Fairwinds and came up a goose egg. Sure you heard the name right, Bell?”
“My source was sure that this Horace was connected to Orion,” I said. “But he could have heard it wrong.”
Something about the way I said that made Zian get this distant look.
“What’d I say, Z?” I asked, hoping that I’d just given him the connection he needed.
“Not Horace, Bell,” Zian said slowly. “Horus … the Avenging Son of Osiris and Isis and the old Egyptian name for the constellation of Orion.”
Kennedy and I came around to his side of the desk as he attacked the keyboard with renewed vengeance. In about ten seconds, he’d pulled up an overhead map of the area that Fairwinds and Arete were contesting. A pair of blue dots marked a pair of locations.
“Okay, these are the work sites that I couldn’t get info on,” Zian said, pointing them out. “Now, if we overlay this map with Orion’s belt …”
He did just that with a few keystrokes. The locations were an exact match for the right and left stars. Then I noticed where the middle star was sitting.
“The Cinema Leone,” I said, pointing to the spot. “Per my source, they were building blue mini-pyramids at each site.”
“Hang on a second,” Kennedy said, tapping her temple with her index and middle fingers. “I heard about something like this.”
Zian and I both looked at her in surprise.
“Oh, not exactly like this,” she said. “When I first got hired at the station, they gave me this shitty job. I had to go through the crank file, full of all these letters and emails on how 2012 was going to be the end of the world. One of them talked about the pyramids at Giza and how the layout of them matched up with some constellation and how that was cosmically bad news.”
“Okay, but what’s the point?” I asked.
“Well, obviously, they’re going to be using those ley lines you keep going on about for something,” Kennedy offered.
“The sheer raw power and versatility of the juice those lines carry make the possibilities damn near infinite,” Zian added.
“But you’ve got it narrowed down,” I said, making a half-question out of the sentence.
“Almost wish I hadn’t,” Zian said, tapping the map window. This time, he put an overlay of the local ley lines on top of the map. That was followed with a ghost of the blueprints for the Orion complex in light blue to make sure they didn’t get lost in the mess. “The way the structure of Orion is laid out, it’ll act as an energy sink for any raw spiritual juice coming into the intersection at the movie house. But when you add in the very violent death of the Cinema Leone’s previous owner here”—he made a red dot pop up at the approximate spot, right on the lowest of the ley lines feeding into the intersection—“you taint the whole spot with death energy that narrows down your practical uses of it. With juice that bad, it can only be used for one thing, Bell. I think they’re going to open a gate to the Underworld.”
I felt the air get sucked out of my lungs at those words.
“You mean like—Hell?” Kennedy asked, looking startled.
Zian grunted. “Trust me, there are spots down there that make Hell look like Disneyland.”
“So what happens when the gate opens?” Kennedy pressed.
“All sorts of nasty things come through,” Zian said. “First, they’ll take the city. Then they get the country.”
“Then the entire planet,” I finished. “It’ll be like a global 9/11.”
“Why would Galatas want to do a damn fool thing like that?” Kennedy all but shouted, her Texan accent cutting through her words.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” I told her. “What matters now is figuring out how to stop her.”
“Which leads me to point number two,” Zian said, bringing up the second window. This one showed a map of the stars above the Earth. Cold City was marked at the bottom center.
“Even with all the power that intersection takes in,” Zian explained, “it wouldn’t be enough to open up a gate. It’d need a celestial kickstart … like, say, the project’s namesake coming over the area at some time in the near future. And when I say ‘near future,’ I mean two days from now.”
The stars started moving. Orion was labeled as it slid into view from the right. As soon as it got over Cold City, the movement stopped. Three lines were drawn from each star on the belt to three sets of coordinates on the ground.
“Those the coordinates for the work sites and the Cinema Leone?” I asked.
“You know it,” Zian affirmed. “It’s going to take another three thousand years before we see this configuration again.”
“Hell of a deadline,” I observed, “… and pretty good incentive to step things up with a Berserker to help clear the way.”
“But the plans for Orion never went ahead, thanks to all the legal wrangling,” Kennedy pointed out. “So what good’s this going to do them now?”
“It all goes back to those pyramids Bell found out about,” Zian said. “The rest of this is largely window dressing for the public. But if you can get all three pyramids ready to go and the right angles carved into the buildings proper, they’ll have everything they need to swing that gate wide open.”
“But neither side owns all of the territory,” Kennedy argued. “So how are they—”
“Trust me, Kennedy, the moment that thing becomes active, there won’t be enough people left alive to care who owns the buildings,” I informed her. “My guess is, Galatas and Arete stopped playing fair, right around the time they got a freaking Berserker to do their dirty work. Red tape or not, those charges are in place … trust me.”
“So, when’s it gonna go boom?” Kennedy asked.
Zian’s lips tightened. “Any time between now and forty-seven hours from now, when Orion passes over us.”
I took a look at my watch. It was two in the morning. Unless we did something, the end of the world would kick off at one in the morning two nights from now.
“We need to come up with a plan,” I said. “Fast.”
That was when we all heard a loud bang and the walls shook.
Chapter twenty-six
Meeting the mother
I had just enough time to say “What the hells?” before the next bang hit the old factory’s front door. It sounded like a cross between a ship’s guns going off and the heartbeat of some Lovecraftian monstrosity.
Zian dialed up the front door camera feed. A group of eight armed men in trench coats over tactical armor were standing outside. They were all watching what looked like a giant scorpion punching its way through the door with its tail.
“Want to make a bet those are the assholes that tried shooting us up the other night?” Kennedy conjectured as she grabbed her S&W from her purse.
“Never bet against sure things,” I said, feeling grateful that I’d taken the time to grab my Sig before coming on over. “Though the seven-foot-tall scorpion is a novelty,” I added, hating myself for not bringing some extra clips …
The scorpion hit the door again. If what I was seeing on the camera was any sign, it only had two to three hits to go before we were breached.
“Can you guys hold them off for a few minutes?” Zian asked. “I’ve got an idea that might get us out of this, but I need time.”
I glanced at Kennedy, who nodded.
“Just have it ready to go before we run out of ammo,” I said, as Kennedy and I walked quickly towards the office door.
We took position behind the nearest girders, each of us at opposite ends of the factory. I wasn’t optimistic about our chances. Two of us with handguns against a crack crew with automatic weapons and a pet tank … I’d rather have been fighting the Berserker with a pen knife.
It took four more hits for the door to give way with a crash. The scorpion bent the doorframe further out of shape by squeezing through it. The armored thugs following right behind it looked like a living wall of Kevlar.
I thumbed back the hammer on my Sig and waited for the right moment. As soon as they started spreading out, I popped around the side and squeezed off a shot. I ducked back in time before the return fire hit my position like a storm of lead raindrops. It was good to know those old steel girders would repel anything short of a mortar round.
Kennedy popped out from cover and fired off a few shots. That attracted its share of return fire and gave me an opportunity to make another contribution. Our assailants responded by relying on the scorpion for cover. The creature itself seemed to be impervious to our nine mils and .40 slugs, which were doing rubber ball bounces off its armor. But there was only so much protection to go around and I managed to catch one of the attackers in the leg, making him pitch forward on the floor.
I did a quick mental shot count. I was down to five shots, so I needed to make every one of them count. I was getting glimpses through the scorpion’s feet of our attackers’ legs so I knelt down and poured my last five shots in their direction. I only managed to knock down one more for my trouble.
The scorpion had advanced further inside the open space, its eight legs making strange clickety sounds on the bare floor. Its tail was enormous and the venomous stinger seemed to swing in search of a soft target.
It went after me, pincers opening and closing. I had just enough time to duck and roll out of the way when the stinger hit the girder.
“You know, people in Asia eat things like you,” I muttered, getting back to my feet.
It mustn’t have liked the joke, for the stinger came swinging dangerously close to my torso again.
“Where in the hells are you, Zian?” I whispered to myself. I knew he had said a few minutes but what was taking him so long—
The thought was interrupted by a strange gurgle-cum-howl from the office door. It was so unsettling that everybody froze and turned to see what was making the racket, even the scorpion. Then Zian stumbled into view, still making that weird noise again as he slumped against the wall. He looked … puffier is the word I’d use.
He made the sound twice more and then gave a great howl as he was suddenly enveloped in a blinding golden light. I think my eyes could have handled staring at the sun for an hour better. When the light faded, an imperious, six-foot woman stood where Zian had been. She wore the serpent crown and accoutrements I recognized as belonging to Old Kingdom Egyptian rulers. She also had olive skin, black hair, kohl-darkened eyes, and a figure that could only be described as perfect. She turned those dark eyes on the intruders.
Our attackers opened fire but the bullets hissed and turned into steam within a foot of this vision. Then, in some ancient tongue that I suspected was spoken before the first pharaoh had even been born, the woman pointed at the scorpion and said something. The beast immediately turned away from me and grabbed the nearest of our armor-clad assailants with its right pincer. A sharp crack later and he was just a crushed sack of meat and bones.
A wave of panic passed through the other men and they opened fire on their former protector. Even at that close range, it worked out about as well as it had for me and Kennedy. One of them caught one of his own bullets through a ricochet off the scorpion’s plates. To their credit, the other three continued firing while backing away. The tail impaled one of them in the center of his chest, while the pincers quickly dispatched the other two.
The woman gave the scorpion fresh orders. In response the creature flicked its tail to remove the corpse stuck on it and began to pile the bodies up in a stack. While it was doing that, Kennedy and I ventured from behind our cover. I had a hundred questions on my lips but right then I couldn’t get any of them to come out of my mouth. A quick look at Kennedy told me she was having the same problem.
The woman spoke once more to the scorpion, which promptly retreated and faded to nothing.
“Thanks,” I told her, finally finding my voice.
She looked at me with an unreadable expression. There was so much contempt in her stare that I wondered if I should be kneeling in front of her or something.
Then, as suddenly as she’d appeared, the woman doubled over in pain and collapsed to her knees, making the weird howls again. A flash of light later and Zian was standing in her place.
“Who the hell was that?” Kennedy asked in a bewildered voice as she approached to check on Zian.
“And why do I get the feeling that you just did something else your dad would kill you for?” I added as I helped him to his feet.
“That … that was Isis, mother of Horus,” Zian gasped as he tried to find his legs. “I summoned her up with a shapeshifting spell that I got out of my dad’s Hermetic database.”
“How does that work again?” Kennedy asked while checking him over the way a concerned mom would her kid.
“Dad has a real longwinded explanation involving the collective unconscious and quantum physics,” Zian answered, managing to give her a grin. “But simply put, you tap into the universal connection to all living beings to make the god, or goddess, in this case, within you come forth.”
“You were aware of what she did?” I asked as we made our way unsteadily towards the violated entrance to our compromised safe haven.
“Every bit of it,” Zian confirmed. “But it’s like I was a passenger in my own body. Tartarus, I’m feeling weird now.”
“Nobody summons a divine being lightly,” I said, giving him a dark stare. “Be glad she went away again that easily.”
It would have been just wonderful to have to deal with a possessed Zian on top of all the other crap we had to juggle already.
“No worries. That kind of spell never lasts long,” Zian explained. “And it takes a special kind of juice to get it on in the first place.”
I nodded. The way he’d said it let me understand that had he not been the son of Hermes, it wouldn’t have worked. Nice to know.
The door was a total loss. Short of substantial reconstruction, which would take time we didn’t have, there was no way we would be able to reblock the entryway against further intrusions.
“The way you talk about it, it sounds like that s
tunt was anything but safe,” Kennedy commented, with more than a trace of reproach in her voice.
Not to mention a big violation of the agreement the Conclave had struck, I thought.
“I wouldn’t have done it at all if we weren’t in such dire straits,” Zian admitted. “There’s a reason Dad keeps that spell locked up. But one thing all the old stories of ancient Egypt agree on—nobody plays with Isis. And she has a way with scorpions.”
“My guess is that Mayor Galatas was the one behind those thugs,” Kennedy told us.
“Yeah,” Zian agreed. “Guess my snooping into Arete’s files left a bigger data trail than I thought.”
“Then we’re moving this op to my place,” I said, leaving no room for discussion in my voice. “The protection on the apartment should keep out any more unwelcome guests. Whatever you need to do to ensure quality Internet over there, Z, now’s the time to get it together.”
Zian nodded. “Might be able to tap into your protection to beef up my Internet security if I handle it right too.”
“While he’s moving in, we should try hunting down Her Honor before she figures out her not-so-merry men failed to close the deal,” Kennedy suggested.
“Once I get moved in, I could try to see if Fairwinds can give us some back-up,” Zian added.
“Hurry it up. There’s no time to lose,” I said, as I checked my watch for a countdown update.
Chapter twenty-seven
Desperate times
I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I dove into my first slice of supreme pizza. It came from a little place called Andolini’s, a small pizzeria that managed to do enough business to stay afloat but not so much as to attract the attention of the big chains. Kennedy was enjoying the eats just as much as I was but she looked concerned.
“I have to tell you, hoss,” she said after polishing off her second slice, “this is probably the first thing that’s gone right all day.”
Hostile Takeover (Vale Investigation Book 1) Page 23