The entity knew that its awareness was almost complete, and while it did not yet understand the subtleties of such intangible realities, it experienced satisfaction. The manifestation had collected all but one of the fractured pieces of its consciousness, and the last remaining piece had, quite inexplicably, been drawn near to the source-to the entity itself.
Its new awareness had increased the entity’s knowledge of its physical environment. It knew that the manifestation was outside the building, and that it needed to go inside, but the way was blocked by a wall. That posed no great difficulty; with a touch, the manifestation could change the mass of the obstacle, transforming it into a gaseous vapor. But as it reached out to open a passage, it felt again the impact of an assault.
Bullets, fired from a gun.
This had happened before, when its understanding was not complete. Now, as then, the bullets could not harm it. As they touched the manifestation, the projectiles were changed, but this simple action caused the manifestation to halt its advance, if ever so slightly. These bullets…the gun that fired them…were keeping the manifestation from accomplishing its purpose, and that was intolerable.
Though it did not understand the subtleties of intangible realities, the entity experienced annoyance.
It reached out with its awareness. The bullets…the gun… a man.
The manifestation changed the man.
The assault ended. The entity experienced satisfaction. The manifestation returned to its purpose and began moving again.
39
King drew away from Fiona and Sara and turned to Suvorov. He didn’t know what to make of the Spetsnaz. Was he the Russian’s captive? His partner?
“I’ve got to get moving,” he said.
Suvorov nodded. “We’ll try to slow it down.”
King started to move away, but the Russian called out to him.
“Wait.” He handed King the suppressed Uzi and the satchel full of magazines and improvised explosive devices. “Might come in handy.”
King wasn’t so sure about the sentiment, but was grateful for the gesture. He slung the satchel over a shoulder and then without further delay, set out along the perimeter of the crater, all the while feeling irresistibly drawn toward its center.
He knew that he had to stay ahead of the thing, but also that he had to draw it away from the others, because even a glancing contact would prove instantly fatal. Getting back outside the museum seemed his best course of action, but doing so would be a challenge, as the quake had collapsed hallways and blocked points of egress. A single wrong turn might send him to a dead end in a very literal sense.
Multiple reports-the Spetsnaz’s Uzis and Chesler’s pistol-reached his ears over the insistent grinding from the accretion disk, signaling that the dark shape, Fiona’s basilisk, had arrived. He risked a glance back and saw the thing emerging at the edge of the pit, not far from the passage he and the Russians had used. But the basilisk didn’t need to negotiate the choked corridors of the museum; it had passed right through all obstacles in its path.
The muzzle flash from the guns illuminated the surreal skirmish like strobe lights, revealing the scene in a series of freeze-frame images. The basilisk barely moved as bullets poured into it. Suvorov had been right about being able to slow it down, but he didn’t dare believe that it was possible to harm this otherworldly thing. Indeed, despite the hesitation, the great dark shape appeared to shrug off the fusillade and began sliding forward, creeping out over the edge of the pit, angling straight toward King.
King realized immediately that the basilisk was unaffected by the micro black hole’s gravity well, and felt panic rise in his chest. The basilisk would be able to cut across the crater and quickly close the intervening distance while he was reduced to practically crawling along the precarious edge of the pit.
Damn. I should have expected that.
He reached an opening leading back into the museum, and reluctantly climbed inside. He caught one last glimpse of the others-of Sara, Fiona and Alexander huddled together in preparation to do whatever it was they were going to do to stop the black hole-and he breathed a silent prayer that they would succeed. Then he ventured into the dark tunnel.
40
The explosive report of gunfire made Fiona jump, but Alexander’s firm hand on her shoulder calmed her nerves. She gazed up at him. “Tell me what to do.”
“Do you recall the sound from the recording I was playing? ‘Om.’ It is an ancient word, the first part of the Buddhist mantra, which when chanted, clears the meditative mind and opens one’s awareness to the universe. The word likely derives from the mother tongue and is full of power.”
“If it’s that simple,” Sara asked, making no effort to hide her anxiety, “why do you need Fiona to do it?”
“Last time, it took the combined voices of an entire village to render the black hole dormant, and even then, it was a close thing. They repeated the word, but did not understand it. It is my belief…my hope, that Fiona’s ability to understand the mother tongue will make the difference.” He turned his attention again to the girl. “The word might be only the beginning. As you speak it, open your mind to what you know of the mother tongue. The knowledge is in you. Your ability to recognize the hidden language of creation in works of art proves it, and if you can unlock that knowledge, you will be able to bend the black hole to your will, even as you once used it to stop the golem.”
“Bend it?”
“Tell it what to do. Black holes are so much more than just destroyers. They are gateways to other realities, gateways that are closed to us because of our own physical limitations. You hold the key to changing that, Fiona.”
“I just want to stop it.”
“And so you shall. But you must trust me, and follow my instructions no matter how difficult it seems.” He grasped her hands and directed her to sit on the floor. He sat in front of her, crossing his legs in the yogic lotus position, but bracing her against the inexorable pull of the black hole’s gravity. “Now, let us begin.”
“Can I help?” Sara asked, likewise settling down next to Fiona.
Alexander nodded then drew in a deep breath, indicating that they should do the same.
Fiona felt her chest grow tight with fear. What if she couldn’t do this? What if Alexander was wrong and she didn’t know how to tell the black hole what to do? King would die…they would all die.
But if Alexander was right about the radiation poisoning, they were all dead already. So what difference did it make?
With her lungs filled like a balloon about to burst, Fiona pressed her lips together and let the strange word vibrate from the roof of her mouth.
“Om.”
41
Fickle luck decided to throw King a bone. In addition to being broad and relatively intact, the passage was lit at intervals by battery-operated emergency lights and exit signs. He sprinted down the corridor, glancing back every few seconds to see if the basilisk was following. The third time he did this, he saw that it was.
The thing was a moving wall of darkness, filling the height and breadth of the hallway, rolling forward like a ponderous but unstoppable tsunami of night. One by one, the emergency lights were engulfed in its mass and the scant illumination behind King dimmed.
He put on a fresh burst of speed, taking a left turn at an intersection-as indicated by the arrow on the exit sign-without slowing, and once again, briefly lost sight of the basilisk.
A few more turns brought him to the exit, or rather the place where the exit door had been. Now, there was just a gaping hole where the entire wall had collapsed inward. He picked his way across the rubble, painfully aware that the delay was erasing his lead, and vaulted through the opening into the night.
Muted light issued from the breach in the wall, and as he ran out across the courtyard, he glanced back, waiting for the moment that the light would be eclipsed by the basilisk’s bulk.
Several seconds passed, but the light did not change.
; Something was wrong. The basilisk wasn’t following him anymore.
King felt a new rush of fear as the realization hit home. If it wasn’t chasing him, that could only mean…
“Fiona!”
The entity had no memory of its past, but it comprehended this new threat.
The manifestation had nearly reached the man who carried the last fragment of its consciousness, but that was no longer the entity’s primary concern. The word resonated through every particle of its physical being and it understood what would happen if the speaker of the word was not immediately silenced.
The entity was not defenseless. The word stimulated it in a way that the creatures of this world would understand as pain, and just as pain triggered a violent, instinctive reaction in those fragile beings of flesh, so too did the harmonic vibrations cause the entity’s essence to respond with furious intensity.
Raw matter spiraled into the entity and was changed. Its mass increased…doubled…and doubled again.
The steady hum of the word faltered as the world around the entity shook, but the reprieve was short-lived. The speaking resumed and the pain returned.
Though it did not understand the subtleties of intangible realities, the entity experienced fear.
Filled with primal desperation, the entity turned the manifestation away from its pursuit and summoned it back with a new purpose.
42
As a vibration rumbled up through the ground, Suvorov threw his arms around Julia and tackled her to the ground. The reaction was instinctive. He barely knew the woman and she meant nothing at all to him, but protecting her felt like the most natural thing in the world.
He’d felt the same way about assisting King. Despite the fact that the man was notionally the enemy of his country, despite the fact that King had killed Kharitonov, Suvorov knew that King was motivated by something profoundly superior to patriotism or a desire for revenge. King was risking himself to help others, to save a world of strangers, and that was something Suvorov could not help but admire.
He had emptied two magazines into the basilisk before it disappeared into the passage after King. The bullets had definitely slowed the thing down, and that made him think that it might be possible to kill it. It would surely take more rounds than they had, but he wasn’t going to let that fact prevent him from taking action.
Then the quake had started.
He covered Julia with his own body as the walls of the Louvre groaned under the increasingly violent shaking. The earlier tremor had already collapsed the roof overhead, eliminating the danger of anything falling on them, but now pieces of debris were breaking off and falling at an angle, like raindrops being driven sideways by a fierce wind. Suvorov felt chunks of marble and wood strike his exposed back before bouncing away and tumbling into the pit. Then he felt Julia and himself sliding into the crater as well.
He frantically scrambled for a purchase and his fingers curled around a piece of metal jutting from the wall of the crater.
Pain tore through him. He felt as if his left arm had been wrenched from its socket. It was not just the combination of his own weight with Julia’s; he felt impossibly heavy, like his clothes were made of lead. Julia, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, seemed to weigh a ton, and he could feel her slipping.
A scream pierced the ominous rumble and Suvorov glimpsed his teammate, Konstantin Vasileyev, tumbling down the side of the pit. The Spetsnaz’s fingers clawed at the rough slope of the crater but to no avail. Vasileyev slammed into the slowly gyrating mass of debris at the center and was smashed flat against it like an insect against the canopy of a fighter jet.
Suvorov thrust the horror of his comrade’s demise from his mind and focused on saving himself and Julia. He wrapped his legs around her, squeezing tight to prevent her from slipping further, and then released the embrace of his right arm and reached for the metal protrusion.
Ignoring the agony in his left shoulder, he heaved with all his might. A sustained exertion got him only a few inches before exhaustion forced him to relent, but thankfully, the sloping crater wall afforded enough resistance to keep them from sliding back. After a few seconds of respite, he tried again.
The ceaseless ordeal seemed to drag on forever, though in reality it took only about a minute. As soon as he got his upper torso level with the protrusion, he was able to heave Julia up and over the lip of the crater. The black hole’s gravity still tugged at him, like sandbags tied around his ankles, but without the additional burden of Julia, he was able to scramble the remaining distance to join her on the flat ground at the pit’s edge.
The earth still shook beneath them and pieces of rubble peppered them like hailstones, but through it all he could hear a faint humming-Fiona, Alexander and Sara, clinging together precariously at the edge of the crater, but still sounding the atonal chant that would, if the big man was to be believed, render the black hole dormant.
A series of loud reports alerted him to a new danger. Chesler, about twenty yards away and clinging with one hand to an upright column, was firing his pistol into the shadows.
No, not shadows, Suvorov realized. The basilisk.
He could barely make out the dark shape as it slid from the ruins of the museum and began oozing along the crater rim.
It got King and now it’s coming back for the rest of us, he thought.
The basilisk seemed to recoil from the impact of Chesler’s rounds. Suvorov felt sure he could sense its frantic need to advance, and suddenly he understood. The quake had started at almost exactly the same moment that Fiona and the others had begun to chant. The black hole knew what they were doing and was desperate to stop them.
Chesler’s pistol clicked empty and he hastily hit the release and let the spent magazine fall. The metal arced away at an impossible angle and bounced down the side of the crater. Chesler fumbled another magazine from his shoulder holster, but before he could insert it into the pistol grip, a dark tentacle snaked toward him.
Suvorov grimaced as the SVR operative was vaporized. The chant was working, but if the basilisk reached Fiona and the others, all would be lost. And he was the only one left who could stop it.
The basilisk resumed its advance, now only ten yards away.
Bullets wouldn’t be enough, he realized. They might slow it down, but he didn’t have enough rounds to keep it pinned down indefinitely. No, he knew what he would have to do to stop it.
He threw back the flap on his satchel and reached in. His fingers closed around one of the IED’s, but he did not draw it out. It was one of the flash-bangs they had improvised, but that wouldn’t make a difference for what he had in mind. When the device detonated, it would set off the rest-nearly five pounds of Semtex altogether.
Five yards away now, and only about thirty yards from where Fiona desperately tried to keep up the chant. Too close, he thought, and he knew exactly what he was going to have to do.
As a soldier, he had always been ready to give his life in defense of his country. But what did that even mean? How many brave men-men like his blood brother Ian Kharitonov-had died, not protecting their fellow citizens from invaders, but simply to advance the interests of a privileged few, for mere political or economic gains?
Suvorov was about to give his life to save the world. How often did a chance like that come along?
He activated the timer and shouted, “Julia, stay down!”
Then he turned to basilisk and smiled.
He caught a flicker of movement as a dark tendril lashed out at him, and then saw no more.
43
As King dashed back into the Louvre, the earth began to move beneath his feet. He careened back down the tunnel, but the violent shaking sent him bouncing off the walls. Chunks of debris fell from overhead to land directly in his path. A few pieces struck him, knocking him flat, but thankfully none were large enough to pin him down or cause unconsciousness.
He reached the edge of the crater just in time to see Chesler evaporate. The man’s abrupt demise
sent a shudder through him. He’d witnessed every manner of death and knew that rarely was the final passing ever truly instantaneous. He had always wondered if death would be like that old Ambrose Bierce story, where the final moments of consciousness stretched out into a wondrous dream. But what went through your mind when every atom of your body came apart in a nanosecond?
King ventured out into the crater, and immediately felt the black hole’s gravity pulling at him. It was much stronger now; at least as powerful as the G force he felt when Chess Team’s supersonic stealth plane, Crescent, took off. The difference here was that instead of being pushed back into an acceleration seat, the force here was trying to yank him off his feet and into the crater. He leaned into the wall and, with as much speed as he could muster, headed out after the basilisk, but even as he did, he knew he wasn’t going to make it in time.
He hauled the Uzi around and took aim. Maybe he could distract the thing, get it to come after him the way it had Chesler, and give Fiona a few more seconds.
The basilisk filled the Uzi’s sights, but in the corner of his eye, he saw Suvorov make a move. Even from a distance, he could see what the Russian was about to do, and threw him a mental salute as he waited for explosive package to detonate.
The Russian disappeared from view but after a few seconds, the dark shape advanced again, and King saw Suvorov standing motionless with the satchel still clutched in his hands. The Spetsnaz leader did not move. The IEDs in the satchel did not explode, and King knew with sickening certainty the man and the devices had been transformed into stone.
Now nothing at all stood between the basilisk and Fiona.
King pulled the trigger on the Uzi. The suppressor muted the violence of the discharge, but a stream of lead arced out across the crater and vanished into the basilisk’s bulk. “Come on,” he shouted as the bolt slid forward against the last spent cartridge. “You wanted me, remember?”
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