by John Meaney
“I didn't.” Kelvin stopped in front of the apparition. “That would've been impossible.”
“Then how's it—?”
“Professor Helena Steele,” said Kelvin, glancing mostly toward Harald, “sends her regards.”
Then he stepped into the turning framework of light—
“Thanatos,” muttered Roberson.
—which pulled and distorted his body into elongated ribbons—
“Courageous bastard,” said Fleming.
—and out of existence.
“Hold tight,” called Harald.
Roberson grabbed the rear of the passenger seat. Fleming took hold of a stanchion. Both men stared at the evaporating illusion as it shrank to nothingness.
The truck lurched as Harald took it through a swerving series of turns. Cones appeared to block off this tunnel completely, but team five had laid them so there was a chicane that could be navigated, but not at speed—at least, not by a normal driver.
Tires screamed as Harald hauled the truck into another impossible turn.
Lexar climbed out of a different truck, parked on ground level beside a twisting highway that spiraled downward from this point. He headed for the same iron doors that he'd used on his last visit. This time, when the doors opened and he went into the short tunnel, he was followed by several people bent over beneath a dark-gray sheet of heavy, hex-saturated fabric. They should have looked comical, scuttling in like that, but this was too serious a time to laugh.
When the inner doors pulled open, it was the same guards as before who greeted Lexar.
“Hello, Bone Listener. What's—?”
The dark-gray fabric was flung aside as three people leaped forward. The first was Ruth Zarenski, her heel taking the bigger guard under the heart as she thrust her kick from the hip.
Adam Obsidian whirled the other guard around bodily, whipped on a choke-hold, and squeezed, tucking his head down, closing his eyes, protecting them from the guard's darting fingers. Soon the strikes ceased, the body softening into limpness. Adam lowered him to the ground.
The third cop, O'Carnel, stared at Ruth and Adam, and checked the slide action on his automatic. Shooting, he could deal with. This hand-to-hand shit was something else.
“Which way, Bone Listener?”
“Here.”
Lexar led them through the next tunnel, and they came out at the edge of the great pit. A bone-and-stone coach was waiting at the surface, ready to take them on the zigzag ride down the pit wall.
O'Carnnel shook his head, seeing how easily Adam Obsidian ran to enter the coach, taking up point with his Lucifer III sniper special held ready.
“Youngsters.” He noticed Lexar, probably the same age as Adam, staring at him. “Oh, well. I'll try to keep up.”
He was the last one into the coach. As soon as he pulled the door shut, the coach shuddered and jolted its way into descent.
Malvern McGamma sat in the iron-walled guardroom behind the main entrance, staring at the distorting lens of the monitor, which showed the tunnel immediately before the huge, round, iron doors. The limousine he was seeing might or might not have been familiar, but when the rear window rolled down, he recognized the Very Important Passenger looking out. The VIP stared straight into the glass eyes of the moving, metallic reptile that was looking at him from the ceiling, transmitting the image to McGamma's monitor.
“Open the Death-damned doors.” McGamma thumped the shoulder of his youngest team member. “Come on.”
“But no one gave the—”
“For Death's sake, open the fuckers now!”
One of the other guards looked into the monitor.
“The mayor!”
They got busy with the levers. In a few moments, the great outer doors groaned and rolled into the slot in the wall. The limousine entered the Westside Complex. It drove through the shimmering aurora-like scanfields, through the inner doorway, and stopped in the tunnel just outside the guardroom.
“Oh, Hades,” muttered McGamma. “Don't tell me there's a problem.” Nine more minutes, and there would have been a change of shift. Barney Kilvarl would have had to deal with it, and more power to him.
Two guards pulled open the heavy armored hatch of the guardroom. The familiar figure of Mayor Van Linder was standing there. Except that McGamma didn't remember Van Linder being that tall…
“Those are the door controls?” Van Linder asked.
“Yes, sir,” answered one of the juniors, called Laris.
“Wait a moment.” McGamma's hand went to his holstered firearm. “Begging your pardon, but we need to—”
The mayor's features shimmered and shook.
“What the Hades?”
“Shit.”
And then a youngish, shaven-headed man was standing in the mayor's place, wearing the same suit. He smiled, and odd flecks of sapphire light appeared to circle his irises.
McGamma felt his eyelids begin to flutter.
“No …”
Then he slumped, grunted, and drifted into sleep.
Donal climbed out of the limo, a Lucifer VII assault rifle in hand. He clambered up to a catwalk running along the wall. When he entered the guardroom, all the security guards were sprawled around the floor, and Mage Kelvin was working the door controls.
“All right,” said Kelvin. “I've got the main doors reopening, without having to close the inner doors first.”
As Donal watched, the glowing auroras of the scanfields grew dimmer and more translucent, until he could no longer see them.
“Nice work, Mage.”
“Thank you.”
“I don't suppose you can sense—”
“Oh, there's a dark mage here all right.”
Donal stared at him for a moment, then said: “Good.”
More cars and a truck pulled into the corridor outside the guardroom. Cops spilled out, Viktor and Harald among them. Everyone paused to look up at Donal on the catwalk.
“Yes,” he said. “Do it.”
Eyes shone hard, chests expanded and contracted, nostrils flared, and mouths pulled back in a primordial expression: not a smile, but a predator's readiness to rend and tear.
Then the men and women moved, fast and silent, into the depths of Westside Complex.
Team seven was only two men, Petrov and Arrowsmith, who had partnered each other on the streets for a little over two years. They moved down a winding bone staircase without a sound, weapons in hand. Three levels they descended, inside a dank shaft, meeting no one.
When they went through the door, they saw McReady and his team, entering through another hatch some fifty feet away. McReady nodded.
It was good luck that both routes were unguarded. Now they could go forward and—
Something moved overhead.
“The ceiling,” whispered someone.
Petrov tried to focus. The ceiling was bare stone, and nothing clung to it. The movement must have been an illusion.
Then a soft glow of white and red showed itself, and disappeared.
“Wraiths.” Petrov swung up his firearm. “Ectoplasma wraiths.”
The cops ran.
“No!” shouted Petrov, firing round after round into the ceiling, shattering stones, with splinters flying.
He glanced back. Arrowsmith was the last of the cops to reach the end of the corridor, immediately behind McReady. The others were already climbing down another stairway, to the next level.
It was time to run.
“Look out!”
A wraith was burning its way into his left shoulder. More were descending from the ceiling.
“Shit. Shit.”
Through tears, he saw Arrowsmith running back this way, yelling, firing silver-crossed bullets into the shining, billowing forms. Then the pain swamped everything, and Petrov's world was the color of blood, his nerves incandescent as the wraiths began to feed.
A balding guard stepped back from the doorway. Beyond him stretched a corridor leading to the osteoanalysis chambers.
>
“Good boy,” said Ruth. “You'll keep quiet now, right? Can I trust you?”
The guard stared at her, then his gaze shifted before he nodded.
“Too bad,” she added.
“What? No, I—”
Her knee smashed into his inner thigh, buckling his leg, then her descending hammer fist struck his carotid artery. He was down, unconscious without lasting damage.
Behind her, Adam Obsidian's mouth twitched.
“Nice.”
A blur of movement crossed the corridor, and more security guards came into view. These were armed, already taking aim.
“Shit.”
Ruth went down on one knee, firing, while Adam raised his Lucifer to his shoulder and shot six times. Behind them, two more cops, Gibson and Hayles from team four, took position and opened up.
Shots banged, then stopped, leaving silence.
The guards were down.
“Shit,” said Ruth again. “We might have just killed some innocent men.”
A groan sounded behind her. When she turned, she saw blood staining Gibson's chest. Hayles was packing the wound from the medical kit that Gibson himself had been carrying.
“Stay with him,” Ruth told Hayles. Then, to Adam: “Obsidian, you're with me.”
“Yes, ma'am. I sure am.”
She waited, and in a moment, the two oldest cops, O'Carnel and Gralinski, puffed into view.
“You two, secure the rooms after we've passed. You got snap-cords, right?”
“Sure.” Gralinski held up a handful of the bright red cords.
“I got twenty,” said O'Carnel.
“Good. Some of the analysts are innocent trainees, remember. Practically schoolkids. But make sure they can't move.”
“Got it.”
“Okay.” Ruth nodded to Adam. “Let's go.”
They advanced.
Donal's team passed through a vehicle bay that contained seven trucks in addition to the small black milk float. The milk crates, along with the metal bed they had lain on, were stacked to one side. A hollow compartment was revealed in the float, from which a faint smell rose. At least one of the missing captives had urinated while enclosed inside.
An engineer walked into their path and stopped, blinking.
“Police.” Donal moved his Lucifer rifle from port-arms to loosely aiming above the man's head. “Hold out your hands.”
A female detective called Johanssen pulled out a snapcord restraint. At that, the engineer's eyes narrowed, focusing on Donal's weapon, and Donal whipped the rifle through a vertical half circle, shattering the man's jaw, dropping him.
“Thanks for saving us the time.” Donal looked back at Kelvin. “You sensing his location yet?”
“No. But he's here.”
“Okay. We're going through—”
“Aah!” Kelvin's eyes squeezed shut. “Fuck. Fuck.”
It was not the kind of language Donal expected to hear from a mage. Wasn't there some kind of incantation for him to use in defense?
But Kelvin was already on his knees, and trickles of blood flowed from his eyes.
“Hades, Mage. What can I do?”
“Donal… Pit. Reactor piles. Round … platform.”
“That's where the bastard is?”
“Yes …”
Kelvin was on the floor, on forearms and knees, trying to push himself upright.
“Fuck…”
Then he was sprawled, fists clenched as he continued to struggle, rivulets of blood across his face.
“Right.” Donal hefted his rifle. “Fight him as much as you can, Mage.”
He moved into the next hallway at a lope.
Then he was inside a big, white-tiled chamber where children lay on slabs. The boys wore knee-length dark-gray shorts and cheap shirts, the girls wore dark-gray skirts and blouses, and they all seemed to be asleep. At the far end of the room, a woman wearing a lab coat was bent over what looked like an open-topped aquarium, lacking water but filled with rustling silver things crawling across one another in a roiling mass.
The woman's face went pale as she saw Donal.
Behind Donal, Johanssen muttered, “Shit.”
Two more cops, Kaligan and Dorse, entered and looked at the children. Their features hardened. As they looked, a boy's eyelids opened halfway, and in a drowsy voice he asked: “Are you my new daddy?”
Orphans. The clothing had changed little since Donal's day.
“They …” The woman swallowed. “They've got no one. It's a kindness to … to …”
“From an orphanage, right?”
“Y-Yes …”
“Just like me,” said Donal, putting his rifle down on the floor.
“N—”
He took hold of the woman's clothing at neck and thigh, and dropped into a squat. As her weight toppled, he boosted himself upward, and threw her at the open-topped tank. She was heavier than he'd thought, and she landed on the edge, one hand going into the seething mass of silver to save herself from toppling further.
Then she screamed, as the neural scorpions got to work.
“Help—”
“You've got a nerve,” said Donal, retrieving his rifle.
He would have been willing to stay and watch the mass of scorpions snip their way through her wet flesh, hooking into her raw nerve tissue and steadily drawing the nerves out of her, slick with life-juices, firing in a crescendo of pain until the end. But there was work to do. Kelvin might already be dead.
“You three, get the children clear.”
“Lieutenant.”
There was a door at the end of the chamber. Donal kicked it open and ran through.
Harald's team went down beneath a bolt of black sheet lighting—a plane of coherent antilight—that sliced horizontally at waist height, powerful enough to cut through stone, easily shearing through Harald's three comrades. Their steaming torsos toppled from their lower bodies.
Some peripheral cue had caused Harald to throw himself to the floor just in time. At the corridor's far end, he could make out two figures.
“I hate mages.” Prone, he took aim.
Then his head was filled with images of swirling red-and-black skies, of immense views over plunging chasms where lava boiled and spat.
“Illusion.”
Harald closed his eyes, still seeing the blazing images, but knowing them for imaginary since his eyelids were squeezed shut. He concentrated on the feel of the stone floor, its hardness beneath his chest, its coldness.
Eyes shut, he swiveled his weapon, remembering where he'd glimpsed the mages.
“There,” he said.
And squeezed the trigger four times: crack-crack, crack-crack.
Two mages dropped.
Harald went back to his comrades. All dead. He turned away, and walked past the fallen mages: two more corpses of young men who'd grow no older. Apprentices, devoting themselves to the wrong side.
Now they were nothing but reactor fuel.
Two minutes later, he was approaching the sound of protracted gunfire. He rounded a corner. Six men in Energy Authority uniforms—their backs to Harald—were firing at two figures Harald instantly recognized: Ruth Zarenski and Adam Obsidian. Adam was already down.
The six men showed slack expressions, firing under someone else's volition—but they were still firing.
Harald's bullets tore through their spines.
In the room where he had fallen, Mage Kelvin lay prone and still. Then his fists clenched, and he groaned, aware of the salt-sweet blood in his mouth, the eruption of hot blood inside him, the bursting of capillaries around his eyes.
But he was still fighting.
Alone, rifle at the ready, Donal came out onto the stone landing overlooking the great caverns containing the reactor piles. In front of him, a long walkway stretched, ending in a seven-sided platform. Beyond that was the vastness of the caverns.
When Donal had been here before, that platform was where the dignitaries stood, looking out over the rows
of massive reactors, experiencing the dark shimmering resonance that filled the air, even for those who were not especially sensitive.
Now, a single man in a dark suit stood there, looking out, his back to Donal.
He didn't look like Malfax Cortindo.
Mages can alter their appearance.
Beyond the man stood two convex glass screens, with transparent cables linking them to a floating area of twisting light and darkness: a portal through space-time, as Kelvin had used earlier. Whoever this man was, he had to be a mage.
Donal stepped into the open, to the near end of the walkway, and raised his rifle, tucked the hard butt into his shoulder, and aimed. Then the man turned, and Donal wavered.
Mayor Van Linder smiled at him.
Dead parazombies lay facedown, but Harald had already verified they were no threat. Instead, he concentrated on checking Adam Obsidian's wounds. The hole through Adam's thigh was serious, pumping hot blood. With Adam's own help, Harald tied off a tourniquet, and checked it for tightness. Then he rose to his feet, and beckoned Ruth Zarenski.
“Down there”—he pointed along the corridor—“is where they tip the bodies onto the trucks, and wheel 'em to the reactors.”
“So we can get out to the caverns. What about Obsidian?”
“We always leave our men behind.”
It was a Marine dictum: sooner abandon a man than a platoon, a platoon than a battalion, a battalion than a regiment. Despite the pain he was fighting, Adam looked up at Harald and grinned.
“Fuck 'em and die, brother.”
Harald gave a gentle smile.
“Fuck 'em and die.”
Every Marine knew how to invoke the Suicide Trance if it came to that. But Adam was going to live, provided he got medical help in time.
Provided they didn't screw up the operation.
Donal still held his rifle, but he had not fired. Mayor Van Linder spread his arms wide. Behind him, on the circular platform, images shifted in the two curved-glass screens.
Cortindo.
One of the screens showed the revenant Malfax Cortindo, the other a dark-haired woman it took several seconds to recognize: Marnie Finross. Donal had seen her only in Commissioner Vilnar's office, with silvery cables attaching her eyes to the surveillance system.