“Now,” said the blue ninja, “we must climb.” He drew a dart from a fold of his robe, aimed it at the ceiling, and threw it. It hit something up there, and a shaft of light fell down and made a wide circle in the floor of the tunnel. “They’ll be after us soon,” he said. “There’s very little time.” “Who are you, anyway?” Matt said. “Are you the one who saved us, out there? Are you the one who—”
“I cannot speak my name; 1 have none.”
Tomoko said, “I know who you are ... I cannot forget your voice . . . you are truly he . . .”
“No!” he cried. “The man you think I am is dead, killed in the explosion that destroyed a great castle and the Visitors’ plan to destroy a distant land—”
“Kenzo Sugihara!” CB squealed. “Totally rad!” “Fieh Chan!” Matt shouted at the same time. “No time for guessing games. Those people are all dead. I have no name now. Only the ritual of Zon sustains me. Come. Enter this shaft of light. It is a forcebeam, advanced alien technology, that will transport us to an upper level of this—” Linking their hands, they waited for a moment and were whisked up to a different tunnel. The stench was overpowering. There was green slime everywhere, and Tomoko was reeling from the odor of human excrement.
“Where have you brought us?” Tomoko asked, almost gagging.
All she could see were his expressionless eyes. She wanted to ask him so much—what he was doing so far from Japan, how he had managed to escape the explosion with his life—but couldn’t say the words. But the old emotions welled up: the fear, the confusion, at last the love. The blue ninja, who had once styled himself the alien swordmaster, who had always delighted in secret identities and mysterious appearances and disappearances, was back with them. An excitement filled her. She wanted to cry out for joy, but she stifled herself for fear of arousing some enemy sentinels. All she could say was, “Where are we, where are we?”
“Where?” said the alien swordmaster. “You are nearer your destination than you think, for these are the sewers beneath the suburbs of Washington . . . in the northern Virginia city of Alexandria.” “The sewers? Sewers as in ‘alligators in the sewers?’” said CB. “Radical!”
Scuffling noises in the distance.
“Uh oh,” Matt said. “They weren’t long in coming, were they?”
They started to run.
Chapter 16
Medea crawled back into the hallway, regarding the recent carnage with distaste. The fifteen-foot-tall visage of Diana still glared down at her from the wall monitor.
“Once again,” Diana said, “you’ve failed me, you pathetic creature. Can’t you do anything right?”
“I’m going after them,” Medea screeched. “They’ll never make it to freedom. Even if they’ve already crossed into the free zone. I’ll release the papinium tanks!”
“And give away Dingwall’s carefully laid plan?” Diana said disdainfully.
“Please, Diana!” Medea begged. “I swear I’ll have them for you . . . and soon.”
“Indeed.”
Medea saw, through the window in front of which her commander was seated, a panorama of downtown Los Angeles. Was that fire spewing from the windows of a skyscraper? She did not envy Diana’s task of controlling the angry mob of the “free city” over which her colleague held sway. My
task is infinitely easier, she thought. The capture of three miserable refugees. She wondered why those three had shown such resistance despite their desperate odds. Something about the psychology of these humans was very disturbing to her sensibilities.
She said, “Give me one more chance, Diana. I promise I’ll make it up to you.”
Diana said, “You weary me ... I simply don’t have time to deal with any of this. Do whatever you want. I’ll deal with you later. When I have the time.”
Gratified at what she took to be carte blanche, Medea left the hall and began rounding up lieutenants. When she reached the control center of the papinium labyrinth, she was informed that someone had switched off the entire monorail system. She bristled and seethed for a few moments, then called for Dingwall on the communications network.
A blank screen greeted her despite her use of the top-secret code.
At length an audio message came over the console: “I have gone to a reception at the Romanian Embassy and will return in approximately three hours. Please leave a message.”
What impertinence! Medea thought. Well, he was still her subordinate, at least for now, and she was the highest ranking Visitor in the sector. She turned around and began to snarl at the lieutenants, who scurried to obey.
Except for one old reptile who croaked, “But, Medea, if we unload the papinium vehicles, won’t this interfere with the plans for the invasion of Washington?”
She castigated him for his impertinence and left him in a huff.
“Look . . . there seems to be a manhole or something,” said Matt. “And a ladder.”
It was slick with grease, but somehow they managed to negotiate it.
Matt’s head emerged in the middle of an alley; a brick wall to the left, a boarded-up computer store to the right. “Come on,” he said, helping Tomoko and the kid get to the street. They looked around. The blue ninja followed them, melding unobtrusively into the light of evening.
“I hoped you would come,” Tomoko said.
And Matt felt once more all the confusion he had felt when the alien swordmaster had come into his life before and had seemed to steal away the love of his wife and son ... he felt both joy and resentment. He said, “Why do you always have to be so goddamn mysterious all the time?”
The blue ninja said, “I do not dare be known.” “What name are you using these days?” CB said. “And what’s happened to Setsuko? And to Professor Schwabauer?” Matt said. “Are they languishing away in Tokyo somewhere?”
“No,” said the blue ninja. “They are here, and safe. I believe that they are at the Romanian Embassy at this very moment, enjoying delicious food and drink. The lizard conquest couldn’t be farther from their minds, my friends. So why don’t we join them there, and give them a little surprise?”
“And where would the embassy be?” Matt asked suspiciously.
“In McLean, about ten miles from here.”
“And how are we going to get there?” Matt said. He didn’t think it was a particularly unreasonable question, but the blue ninja had a twinkle in his eye; was he mocking him? It was impossible to tell under all that clothing. Even the small aperture in the ninja costume for the eyes was filmed over with something that resembled cellophane and carried a slight bluish tinge . . . obviously a sheet of papinium stretched to monomolecular thinness, to guard against any possible contamination by the red dust microorganisms that still lurked in the atmosphere here.
The others began laughing at Matt now.
“All I wanted to know was how we’re going to travel ten miles in our condition,” Matt said. “Why’re you guys acting like I’m stupid? What are we supposed to do, hail a cab or something?” “Why not?” said the ninja.
A cab pulled up to the corner of the alley, where a sign read “King Street.”
Tomoko said, “Matt . . . we’re in the Washington area now. We’ve reached the free zone. There’s no lizard jurisdiction here—”
Suddenly Matt understood. As the blue ninja hailed a rather startled cab, he said, “We’re free.” He wanted to shout it out. But he was still afraid to. He didn’t want to trust this vehement upsurge of emotions.
They climbed into the taxi.
A few miles to the south, people heard rumbling noises as they sat down to dinner in their condominiums.
They shuddered, shrugged, and tried to get on with their food.
Dingwall permitted himself a smarmy smile as he took another sip of vodka. A foul Earth drink, he thought, nauseating in every way. But he had to stay in character.
The ambassador in turn tried to smile back, though the man made him distinctly uncomfortable. “I don’t understand,” he was saying, �
�why you would want to conduct music written by our arch-enemies, these saurians . . . and the daughter of Tedescu, my manservant, who is a member of your little ensemble, tells me it is a horrid-sounding piece, replete with cacophanous chords and unpleasant jangling effects—though, you understand, my personal taste is rather lowbrow. Since coming to this country I have rarely listened to anything more arcane than the local popular songs.”
“It always takes time to appreciate new things,” Dingwall said firmly, “and art knows no barriers of war or even species ... it is universal.” What a disgusting platitude, he thought. But it was just the sort of thing these people loved to hear.
The hall was now fairly crowded with tuxedo-clad luminaries. Of course, the party scene had become much depleted by decimation of Washington’s diplomatic corps; almost everyone who was anyone had therefore turned up here. There were even some New York people; Dingwall saw, peeping out from behind the capacious bust of some patroness of the arts, the leonine visage of Isaac Asimov, who was apparently writing a book on the impact of the saurian invasion on the free states.
“It’s my four-hundredth book,” Asimov was proclaiming as the steatopygious woman oohed and aahed resoundingly. “But with the paper shortage and censorship in alien-controlled areas, my publisher is only going to issue it in mini-floppy format.”
A vague rumbling could be heard in the distance.
Could it be? Surely not! Dingwall dismissed the suspicion from his mind. It would not do to think of such a thing now, when everything was falling so nicely into place.
“Will it rain, do you think?” the ambassador was musing.
Ah, rain, of course, rain! That noise was only thunder then, Dingwall thought, relieved. He had forgotten that on this obscenely lush planet water frequently fell right out of the sky in enormous quantities. He laughed at himself. To think that he’d almost thought that that far-off thunder could be . . . ridiculous! He said, “I think it may well rain, Your Excellency.”
“Well, whatever, I’ve decided to go to your little performance. There’s so little to do these days . . . and any diversion will be welcome, even if it is an afternoon of utter cacophony. Besides, the opening of a new shopping mall . . . perhaps I will be able to buy something.”
Good, Dingwall thought. Another victim. Whom had he successfully garnered tonight to be unwitting victims of his great invasion? Already he had half the bigwigs of the free states of the eastern seaboard convinced; tonight he had picked up many more, including Asimov himself, Dr. Charles Sheffield, the head of some corporation that controlled the placement of the few satellites the earthlings were still able to muster, Sir John Augustine, the British Ambassador (Britain being one of the few who had full ties with the free states and did not recognize the authority of the Visitors), and several members of the cabinet of the U.S., which persisted in calling itself a free nation despite the obvious facts . . . how troublesome! Then there was that troublesome Schwabauer and his scientist-geisha friend Setsuko. There they were, chatting away with Asimov. Doubtless discussing some arcane mysteries of their primitive pseudoscience! Soon they would be discussing it in hell—or, at the very least, within the uncomfortable confines of a microwave oven. Dingwall’s mouth watered at the prospect. McLean was a perfect spot from which to launch an attack on unsuspecting humans, for it was inhabited by many of the city’s elite, many of whom had children in the Youth Orchestra, and who would be dragged to the concert by their charges—
Little did they know they would be the first victims in an all-out assault on the former capital of the United States!
He smiled smoothly at the Romanian ambassador and said, “I daresay you will come to like the
music after a while. It grows on you.”
The rumbling from outside continued.
The taxi turned off the George Washington Parkway and began to wind down Kirby Road, a hilly pathway that threaded the houses of the rich.
“I think we’re almost there,” said the blue ninja. A thunderous rumbling—distant at first, it grew to an earsplitting din. As they turned into the driveway of the embassy, CB screamed, “Gash me with a ginsu! Someone’s following us!”
They had had ten minutes of freedom. Matt reflected as he turned around to see enormous vehicles, coated in blue metal, gaining rapidly on them—vehicles armored and impregnable and topped with laser cannon that were even now pointed straight at them!
Ten minutes of freedom! Had it been worth it?
Chapter 17
And now the rumbling burst upon their senses. The guests were running towards the great French windows of the Andrescu mansion and gasping at what they beheld: four desperate figures fleeing across the lawn, diving for cover among the elegantly sculpted bushes, and an enormous vehicle, tanklike but hovering without wheels over the grass, an eerie cold blue in the moonlight. On its roof a laser turret whirred and whined, repeatedly taking aim and firing great blasts of blue light across the night.
Dingwall watched the spectacle in alarm, elbowing Sir John and Isaac Asimov out of the way in his haste to reach the windows. One of them shattered at that very moment. A chandelier crashed onto an enormous platter of ham.
I ordered no attack, Dingwall thought, as he desperately considered how to intervene without blowing his cover. Who were the figures fleeing across the grass? One of them was garbed as a ninja, the others were a man, a woman, and a child dressed in the tattered remnants of Visitor uni-
forms. They must be the notorious Jones family whose escape everyone had been discussing earlier. What was he to do?
The Romanian Ambassador was plowing through the throng now, his fists upraised. He was shouting, “This is a diplomatic mission, do you hear? This estate is the sovereign territory of Romania, and cannot be violated! I’ll complain to the United Nations! I’ll complain to Visitor Headquarters, with whom my government has a treaty! Dumnezeu, heads will roll for this transgression of immune territory!”
“I say, hear hear,” Sir John Augustine was saying, “Jolly bad show, if you ask me! Fancy that!” Dingwall pushed his way through to the Ambassador’s side.
“They’re obviously not aliens,” Asimov was explaining. “Not only are their costumes dishevelled, ill-fitting, and evidently stolen, but they wouldn’t be able to survive in this red dust-infested environment for long if they were saurians.”
“In that case, we must rescue them! Tedescu, summon the security!”
Inwardly Dingwall laughed. The paltry security forces of the embassy would be no match for a papinium tank! But he had to get them to turn back before they accidently revealed the secret of next week’s invasion. Time was of the essence.
Two or three armed guards appeared and began to shepherd the guests toward inner rooms of the residence. The buffet table was overturned. Food flew everywhere. Shards of glass were raining down from where the French windows had been struck, and a young woman was whimpering as she tried to pull splinters from her arms.
The guardsmen started to fire at the tank with their machine guns. The reports echoed in the carefully landscaped woods that bordered Kirby Road. Somewhere beyond, an explosion: one of the guests’ limousines had undoubtedly caught fire from a stray laser blast. The crowd was screaming now.
“Tedescu!” the ambassador screamed.
Dingwall smiled.
He was sure that Ambassador Andrescu did not know that his faithful valet had already been converted in Dingwall’s own private little dungeon.
The old man shuffled towards them.
“More guards,” said the ambassador.
The old man pulled a walkie-talkie out of his uniform and began to speak rapidly in Romanian.
Then he said to the ambassador, vii nimeni . . . le e greu sa vina la noi. ”
What was he saying? Dingwall regretted that he had not bothered to learn more than one of their languages, but the pain of forcing their subreptilian argot to his tongue had been too much pain for him. When Andrescu frowned, however, he understood that Ted
escu must somehow be conveying to him the fact that there were no more guards, that he was having difficulty in rousing them—
Of course he was! For Tedescu had been obedient and given most of them the day off, just as Dingwall had instructed.
How crafty I am, Dingwall thought, to have planned for such an eventuality! Brains such as mine, and not a passionate temperate such as Medea’s, are what enable one to rise to the dizzying heights of the High Command.
And now—what a stroke of luck! One of the guards had been mortally wounded, and lay screaming, ignominiously buried beneath a mound of salad. Dingwall couldn’t resist a derisive chuckle as he sidled up to the dying man and wrested the machine gun out of his hand.
He came up to the ambassador and, sounding, he hoped, convincingly like John Wayne or one of those other Earthly heroes, cried out, “Don’t worry, Your Excellency! I’ll help hold down the fort!”
Then, springing over the table and wildly brandishing his weapon, he ran towards the tank, firing randomly, as the crowd gasped in terror and admiration. He ran down the steps, reaching for the communicator hidden in his pocket and praying he would get out of earshot of the guests before he was killed by one of his own subordinates in the tank.
“Duck!” Matt heard CB’s shriek and rolled onto the grass. Only a few more feet now and they’d reach the mansion. Just a little more . . .
He closed his eyes. Searing pain knifed his arm as a laser-burst grazed him and burned a black path into the lawn. It hurt so much. Was it worth it? He might as well die now, he thought. It was useless, so useless.
The tank was rolling after CB and Tomoko now. Another second and it would crush them. The blue ninja was facing the tank defiantly, with his sword
upraised, but what could he do? There wasn’t any point, it was all useless ....
Suddenly the tank stopped firing for a few seconds and whirred to a hold over a bed of flowers. A black man in a tuxedo was walking purposefully towards the tank, shouting into some sort of device in his palm . . . maybe in this lull they could make it into the mansion, at least. “Run, now!” he yelled. He and his companions sprinted madly across the few remaining feet of lawn. They ran, breathless, into the crowd, who didn’t know how to react. Some of them were recoiling, screaming, thinking they were lizards; maybe because they still wore the ragged uniforms.
V 16 - Symphony of Terror Page 10