“Pearl.”
“What?”
“She’s a fuckin’ Pearl addict. It’s a drug the Bloodies use to control their younger members. Keeps them loyal… And addicted. Makes them think they’re invincible.”
“And when had you planned on telling the ASA about this?”
Connelly shrugged his shoulders again. “We assumed MSI knew about it. We thought maybe MSI created it.”
Maggie had stopped coughing, but lay face down on the tabletop, hand still grasping her side.
“It’s an inhalant. It burns their lungs away if they take it long enough. Looks like she’s been hooked for years.”
Smith knelt down beside Maggie, his face inches away from hers. He brushed back her hair, looked into eyes too green, eyes too old for her face. “Are you addicted to Pearl, Maggie?”
“Fuck you, Yankee.” She unceremoniously spit into his face, or rather, attempted to spit at his face. The destructive nature of Pearl had begun its work on her salivary glands. Nonetheless, Smith pulled a pristine white handkerchief from within his jacket and patted down the area of his right cheek where her feeble attempt at real spit and her successful attempt at blood had landed.
Smith stood up, hands placed on hips, pacing slowly back to the other side of the table, returning the folded handkerchief to his jacket interior. “I’m trying to help you. We can save you, you know. In the ASA, we can rebuild your lung in just weeks. Hell, we can give you a matched set of clones if you want in a day or two.”
Connelly stepped to Smith’s side. “What the hell are you talking about? This little lady isn’t going to see another sunrise once we get what we need from her.”
“Step aside, Connelly.” Smith’s eyes took on a sudden frigid quality. “Your government isn’t running the show around here anymore, remember. I don’t really care about your centuries-old little war you’ve fought, either. And I don’t even care if this young woman was involved in yesterday’s bombing. I’ve been sent here for one purpose, and I’ve found my objective.” He walked around the table again and placed his hands on Maggie’s shoulders. “Her.”
“You—She’s directly responsible for the deaths of eighteen people in that bombing! Women and children. And she was involved in other attacks. We have evidence that—”
Smith extracted the microdisc from the wall unit, snapped it in half, and pocketed it. “What evidence?”
“You won’t get away with—”
“Connelly, I need this young woman more alive than you need her dead.”
“What for? Is the ASA using Pact tech now to—”
“Let’s just say that Milicom needs some fine young men and women for a project we’ve been working on. We need Maggie, and she’s ours now. Let us deal with her.”
Smith walked behind Maggie’s chair, bent down to speak directly into her ear. She looked blindly ahead, not at the tabletop but through it. She could feel Smith’s gaze upon her. She did not trust him, or the way he was looking over her young body. His presence was nauseating: the audible inhalation and exhalation, the scent of some American cologne and American shampoo and American toothpaste and mouthwash and chewing gum. Smell of leather as black gloves reached out, paused, gingerly swept back long curls of sanguine hair from pale white ear not pierced for fear of paternal retribution ironic because she was a terrorist but her father might still beat her if she got her ears pierced and white because of the gray skies that were filled with rain not sunshine and the beach was too cold to swim like the Americans did anyway she wanted to laugh but she shook with fear as this ASA brute looked at her profile. His black glove lifted up her chin and turned her face so that he could look into her eyes. His other hand gently wiped away the sticky coagulating blood from her lower lip. His eyes were black, and when they looked into her own green eyes, she felt paralyzed. Black and then silver for an instant she was not sure she had seen.
Connelly, forgotten for the moment, threw the black folder from the tabletop, and it spilled its contents across the floor of the room. Smith calmly looked up, his eyebrows drawing into a frown. “Is there a problem—”
“Fuck you, Yankee. She’s all yours now. The ASA can go to hell. Fuck you and fuck your Bloody too. Don’t come home again, Maggie. You come back and I will see to it that you die, young lady. Let the fucking Americans take care of you now.” Connelly knocked over a chair and slammed the door behind him. Smith was left alone in the room with his prisoner. He turned back to Maggie with his coal-colored eyes.
“I can give you a new life. I like you, Maggie. There’s something about you… There’s a fire inside of you, an ember burning deep down. We can use that ember, Maggie. We can save you from execution. Would you like us to build you a new set of
lungs. They saved me from execution and from Pearl addiction. I was a member of the Blood Army; I did kill those people, but it was for something I believed in. When the ASA annexed the UK, it just brought back all those feelings that we had hoped had been buried after the Civil—”
“Maggie, you don’t have to explain yourself.”
“I sold my soul to Milicom for a set of lungs and freedom from Pearl. That’s why I’m here, in Seattle, in a Milicom uniform, and not at home, buried in the ground.”
“The special project… It was the Styx project, wasn’t it? They needed young people like you to experiment with.”
“Something like that.” Her hand shifted, going from flesh-colored to translucent, flickering, waves of color lighting up Hayes’ face as he looked on.
She studied her shifted hand. The shimmers illuminated her face.
“How the hell do you do that?”
“What?”
“How do you—” He made a waving motion with his arms, frowned. He reached out to take her shifted hand, at which she pulled it quickly away. It flickered, solidified. Maggie reached out, took Simon’s hand in her own.
“Sorry, but—Well, you shouldn’t touch me when I’m shifted. It’s too dangerous for solid matter to touch shifted matter.”
“Shifted matter. That’s how you killed the—the things. The black things. The enemy.”
“Yes.”
“How do you go right through them?” He held up his blood-spattered fatigues. The Enemy’s blood. “And how do you start fires with your hands?”
“You mean shifting.”
“Yes. Shifting.”
“Well, I—”
“The medical journals were faked, weren’t they? Styx aren’t genetically altered. Where did Milicom get that kind of tech?”
“A little town called Diablo.”
“It’s not human technology, is it?”
“It’s… You could say they stumbled upon it. There was a mine. The workers found something down there…”
Their eyes locked. She pointed up.
“One of those. An alien vessel.”
A vessel of black and silver and nightmares and everything that little kids feared at midnight cruised silently over them in the starless morning sky.
Desert. Arizona.
His black rubber-soled boots crunching over sand and grit and spiked desert plants was the only sound besides the constant, dry, coughing wind. His black cloak flew out behind him, swirling the dust into a whirlwind contrail. The sky was not as bright and the desert was not as hot as it should be. He casually brushed encrusted salt and sand from his face. The grit was somehow cleansing. He whistled a song he had once danced to in a life and a place that had been erased from his heart long ago. Dry tongue attempted to wet dry lips. The song continued. How did that song go? Something about shaking hands and unraveled kingdoms and flying dishes and awful aim.
Richter stopped walking for a brief moment as one of the massive black forms flew almost directly overhead, impossibly stopped in mid-air and turned on an unknown axis, presumably now facing him. The amorphous object made discernment of spatial orientation almost impossible, as it changed its form almost constantly, like some hideous black airborne tumor. It began to move agai
n and sped away from him. One human must not have warranted a landing to pick up.
Richter made time stop for an instant and his fiery silver eyes illuminated his world. A rage of energy built within him.
He reached out with his mind and tore apart what he assumed were the aft drives of the vessel. The enormous ship thundered to earth and crashed half a mile from where he nonchalantly stood. It rolled end over end, finally coming to rest after littering the desert floor with shards of black.
He walked toward the wreck, whistling to the beat of his bootsteps. What was the name of that song? He frowned, shook his head to no one, smiled bemusedly. It was going to be a great day.
West followed the shore of Lake Superior until Chicago lay before him, or rather, where Chicago should have been. It was no longer recognizable as the Windy City. The wind remained, a cold, harsh breeze that did not belong in June that seemed to emanate from where Chicago used to be. In what appeared to be a blast crater that was quite a few miles across, there were very few vestiges of the city that should have been there. The only feature noticeable from the rubble was the huge black spire standing in the center of the crater.
So this was the hub.
He had realized that the alien vessels that cruised overhead had to come from somewhere, and apparently this was it. The sky was black with approaching and departing vessels, descending and landing within the blast crater.
No. Oh god no.
People.
Ringed by the black demons, large crowds of people surrounded the spire. A group was being forced into the black tower as he watched. So this was where everyone was.
What is in there?
There was a sudden flash of silver light. Must be dissent in the ranks, West thought. A rebellion against the aliens? Apparently not successful.
West walked on, toward the edge of the crater.
Richter.
The aliens that survived the crash were wary, on edge. They saw him coming and moved to intercept him. He calmly kept walking.
He saw that the vessel had held a cargo of human beings. He saw their remains among the spreading flames. Their bodies were quickly consumed by silver, dissolved.
The aliens rushed at him.
He studied them with mild interest before he tore them apart with his mind. Limbs flew.
Too bad he couldn’t have saved the people.
And then…
Something crawled over his mind, icy fingers grasping for his soul. He forced the thoughts from his mind, and went to find the cockpit.
“That can’t be,” Hayes insisted. “One of them?”
They looked up in unison. The vessels continued to fly over, impervious to them.
“It wasn’t exactly like them. It didn’t change shape; it looked like a double-bladed dagger. It was so big… It had crashed a long time ago, so long that it was embedded in the rock layers. A town grew up at the base of the mountain, and their main business was a copper mine. When the main shafts dried up, they went deeper, and they hit a wall they couldn’t blast through. A metal wall.”
“In the earth. A UFO in the earth.”
“Milicom silenced the miners and moved in.”
“No wonder Jennings was so jumpy in the end. He must have thought the little green men were coming back for their lost toy.”
“It was no toy.”
She paused, and her hand drifted to the healing gash across her left eye. A reflex.
“Jesus. Milicom was using alien technology to build new weapons.”
Ember’s frigid gray eyes drifted up, somehow judged him. She turned, hiding the wounded eye from him in the firelight.
“The vessel in the earth was a warship, once piloted by… by some kind of humanoids. There was tech greater than anything we’d ever conceived, greater than anything we could have imagined, in that ship. Impossibilities made possible.”
Flynn grew silent, gazed into the fire.
“Maggie?”
“They found it in this huge room, a spherical room, at the center of the ship. It must have been a mile under the surface… The vessel was so big.”
“What did they find?”
“They sent my group into the room, and at its center was the
purest light they had ever seen. They approached it, expecting it to be hot, radioactive. They expected it to hurt them in some way, but there it was, the most perfect sphere of light. It was beautiful, hypnotic. They drew closer.
They were mesmerized. Trapped.
Reaching…Grasping…Something crawled over their minds, their souls. Something drew them.
A flash. Surreality. Heaven.
It pulled them in. And
when I came out, I’d been changed.” Without any warning, she reached into Simon’s pocket, withdrew his cigarettes and ancient Zippo lighter. She silently lit up and inhaled.
“What—was it another dimension? Another world?”
Exhalation. “I don’t know. It was…It was beauty.”
“You said it pulled your group in. Was it some kind of portal?”
“I don’t—we—our bodies remained behind. It was like hypnosis. The Milicom medical team entered the room after we’d gone into the orb, and tried to revive as many of us as they could. They pulled me back from the light.”
“What about the rest of your group?”
“There was two survivors from my group, me and another Milicom agent named West, a real American farm boy from Nebraska. We became the K-level Styx, the survivors of the eleventh experimental entry into the light. The rest were, well, all electrical activity had ceased in their brains. They were brain-dead.”
Hayes frowned. “The light killed the rest of your group, but you two were pulled out before it could trap you. You came out, and you could shift.”
She nodded, drawing on the cigarette. “No one knows why. It was like that light had activated the unused portion of my mind. It was like my soul had been freed from my body, and then forced back into my physical form. But my mind had changed.”
“And Milicom saw the advantages immediately.”
“They were still recovering from Three. They were desperate to prevent another war. They sent more people into the light, more test groups. When my group went in, Milicom had already been sending groups in for months, but they were mostly prisoners and the mentally ill. Most never came back, but the ones that did, the ones they pulled out before they were trapped—”
“The Styx.”
“They were sending hundreds of people into that light, but only a few came out. We were the nation’s last line of defense, the soldiers of the future. I never saw Diablo again, or the orb. Each day I have to live with the fact that I was in Heaven, but they pulled me back and made me a killer. They saved me from execution so that I could kill for them. I was just a girl who needed some new lungs. Each day is a struggle not to go crazy with that knowledge.” She regarded the cigarette she held with a wry smile. “All for a new set of lungs. What I really could use right now is a fucking hit of Pearl.”
Hayes saw the bittersweet mixture of sincerity and sarcasm in her eyes.
“Whatever it was, it was the vessel’s power source. It was like a star—or a black hole, pulling all of the world’s light inside, reflecting it from within. It touched my mind, and burned its image there.”
“Do you think the vessel itself could shift, like you do? Different dimensions, fading in and out?”
“I hope it couldn’t, but I know it did. I’m terrified to think of what kind of war would involve vessels that can shift from dimension to dimension, time to time. A civilization that lives between times.”
“Do you think they were fighting them?” He pointed upward, where a seemingly endless procession of Enemy vessels flew upon unknown missions.
“Yes.”
They drew closer in the dark. Maggie handed Simon the lit cigarette, and they shared the delicious felony in the now-dark world where laws and order had been replaced by nightmares and aliens and Black.
West was in the valley of Chicago’s ground zero.
He had crept down the crater wall, amazed at the scene that emerged before him. He walked across the blast-scoured surface of the crater floor. Large chunks of what appeared to be asphalt and concrete where fused into the black glass.
“Where’s ground zero?”
“Probably Chicago. That fleet of Spears…They must have dumped everything they had on it.”
He forced the memory from his mind and focused ahead. It was maddening, the throngs of humanity spread before him, screaming, weeping, dying. He walked resolutely toward his goal, the black spire that blotted out the ever-fading sun. The black monsters were everywhere, herding the humans like cattle into the tower. They were oblivious to him as he walked like a wraith amongst the gathered masses.
He had shifted to a point where he could walk, unseen by anyone, at his leisure toward the tower. He was not shifted to a lethal point, because in this surging sea of humanity, that could draw the attention of the aliens if he were to carelessly stumble into an innocent person and shatter their being. Even now he walked a straight path, mindless of the men and women whom he passed through. He could feel the brief touch of their minds and their thoughts. They did not notice him, except for some, who felt only a short chill, a sense of confusion.
Oh, it was so tempting…
He knew he could shift higher; he knew he could destroy the entire alien force gathered here if he tried; he knew he could rescue these innocent people from whatever death awaited them within the interior of the black spire. With a steely resolve he continued walking toward the monolith. Maybe he could not only save these people, but others as well.
West finally reached his goal. He stood in the shadow of the mysterious monument in awe.
He took a deep breath.
The sounds of humanity around him disappeared as he shifted higher into that realm of silence and cold mute light that was the shift, and entered the vessel, fading through the matte black material of the hull. He entered the void within the spire.
In the realm of the aliens, the vertigo of memory surged through him.
Richter’s inspection of the vessel cockpit confirmed his suspicions. He now knew where he had to go. He let go of the black creature’s dead body and it fell to the desert floor in a cloud of dust and shattered silver rivulets.
Enemy tst-1 Page 12