by Greig Beck
‘Yes, my President, we have recovered most of the bodies and also the special subject I mentioned. Yes, the lead lining of the suit seemed to give the man some physical protection and he still lives
… in a manner.’
The scientist compressed his lips and turned again to look through the cell window. It was true the creature lived, but it would never be a man again. When they tried to cut away the heavy lead-impregnated suit, they discovered that suit and man had somehow combined. The black hole had created a soup of flesh and lead, reformed it and delivered it back to them. Now the creature was contained in a large tub; spread out, its body covered nearly twenty feet, with tendrils and flaps of flesh splaying in all directions. It was able to move around and raise itself up. Al Janaddi knew this because a small square mirror on the wall above the tub had been smashed into sparkling splinters. He guessed the creature did not want to see its own image. He could not blame it.
He swallowed and moved his gaze up to its face. One eye was a milky white; the other, though still clear and brown, was over three feet long. Sickeningly, it still managed to fix on the scientist whenever he entered the room. That single eye held a plea – perhaps for a quick death and release from the permanent hell it was now trapped in.
The president was hungry for information about what the man had experienced. Where had he gone, what had he seen? Had he been judged and allowed to cross the bridge to Jannah, or did he fall to Jahannam?
Al Janaddi squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. ‘I think he was judged unworthy, my President; maybe even more so than Professor Shihab.’ The voice on the phone grew louder.
‘It will take us some time to prepare another event,’ Al Janaddi replied. ‘Even if we… Here? Yes, of course, my President; we would be delighted for you to observe our work first-hand.’
Al Janaddi sucked in a juddering breath as he listened. Please don’t ask me to take the phone in to… him, he thought.
He answered the final question as best he could. ‘I’m afraid we may never know what he saw, my President; all he does is scream.’
Something thumped wetly against the door. Al Janaddi turned to see that horrific face pressed up against the window. The screaming stopped for a moment and the giant lolling tongue writhed as if the creature were trying to speak.
Ahmad Al Janaddi wiped more tears from his eyes. ‘Allah forgive me,’ he cried, and sprinted away down the corridor.
Out in the Iranian desert, something lay motionless on the ground, disorientated. One minute it had been feeding with the others of its kind on the massive carcass of a plant-eater at the edge of a brackish swamp, warm blue sunlight bathing its back; the next it was here. It remained immobile as its senses slowly returned. The gravity was lighter here, giving its body more strength, but the air was thinner and drier. Though its exoskeleton contained a wax-like lubricant, the dry atmosphere was irritating and it needed liquids to survive – to feed on.
It raised its eyes on their cartilaginous stalks and surveyed the area. It had no idea what predators might stalk this strange barren land with its intense golden sun. Fan-like mouthparts extruded from between its bony mandibles and sampled the air, tasting the aromas. It could detect water, vegetation, salts and minerals, and strange fluids in creatures it had never known or sensed before.
It called – a subsonic sound that frightened a falcon overhead and woke a band of shivering bats sleeping in a cave miles to its south. To the rest of the animal kingdom, the sound was not perceptible, especially to any modern biped’s ears.
The creature compressed its gristly carapace plates against the heat – it needed to be away from the burning yellow sun. Articular membranes and muscle fibres pulled its chitinous exoskeleton segments together and it burrowed its pointed, armoured body a few feet below the surface of the sand. The going would be slower than above the ground, but it would retain more body fluid by staying out of the heat.
In the distance, the city of Arak was waking. Its inhabitants had no idea that the universe had delivered a little piece of hell to their doorstep.
TWENTY-THREE
Alex sensed something else in that dark tunnel, something more tangible than the tortured souls he’d imagined trapped there. There were people approaching – he could feel the vibrations of their footsteps.
He held up a flattened hand. The team stopped and crouched left and right behind the steel door. Alex silently pulled the door closed, leaving just a small gap.
He put his hand against the cold steel so he could read the vibrations from the other side. Three large men approaching – must be part of a Takavaran squad, he thought.
He looked at Sam and held up three fingers. Sam stared hard until he could make out the gesture in the dark and then nodded. Alex quickly glanced over his shoulder – there was no cover, nothing to provide some form of concealment or a defensive position. They had their backs to a pit that may have fallen to the very base of the Kouh-e Rahmat mountain.
They waited in silence until they saw torchlight shining through the slit of the doorframe. Now, the entire team could hear the sound of the men’s low conversation.
Adira moved close to Alex and whispered into his ear. ‘They’re coming in.’
Alex nodded and gave her and Sam a closed fist signal, followed by a chopping motion left and right. Both were expecting the command and immediately pressed themselves to the wall either side of the door. Adira grabbed Zach and pushed him down behind her. She drew one of her unsilenced Baraks but Alex waved it away, pointing at his ear. She shrugged, reholstered it and drew out one of her slim black blades instead. She adopted a fighting pose and waited.
The colossal steel door rolled back slowly and two men entered the black room, facing the pit and fanning to each side of the doorway. They were large and moved fluidly for their size. A third man stood in the doorway and shone a strong torch directly into Alex’s face. In a smooth motion, Alex grabbed the front of the man’s black fatigues and flung him out over the pit. The first his comrades knew of his fate was when his torch, still in his hands, flew over their heads. Their shouts as they entered the battle obscured the sound of the body hitting the bottom of the black abyss.
Two soundless bullets from Sam took one of the men in the eye and the chest. He fell dead before he could fire the gun he had drawn.
Adira threw one of her slim blades at the third man, but he avoided the killing strike, rolling sideways and taking it in the flesh of his shoulder. He was up quickly with a gun in his hand, swinging it smoothly around to aim at Adira. She delivered a vicious front snap-kick that should have knocked the gun from his grip, but the Takavaran were no ordinary soldiers; they were strong, well trained and very familiar with close-quarter combat. Instead of loosening his gun, all the kick did was cause it to misfire into the pit. The sound of the unsilenced discharge in the enclosed shell of the laboratory was excruciating, the echoes bouncing around like a giant’s stone drum being madly beaten.
The Takavaran regained his balance and threw out his arm, hitting Adira on the side of her head with an open-handed strike as he brought his gun back around to aim directly at her chest.
‘Harah,’ Adira cursed in Hebrew. She drew both her Barak pistols and fired four shots into the large Takavaran before he could loose another round. The force of the bullets pushed him backwards and he too disappeared over the rim into the black void.
Adira turned to Alex and shrugged. He shook his head and put his fingers in his ears.
‘Party’s over,’ he said. ‘Double-time it!’
Zach was still flattened on the ground. Sam pulled him to his feet as Alex leapt through the open steel door and began herding them all to the elevator shaft.
‘Sam, Ms Senesh, you two first,’ Alex said loudly. There was no need for silence anymore, and their ears were still ringing from the gunfire.
He looked at Zach and knew the slightly built young man was never going to make the rapid ascent straight up for half a mile. He told him to wait wh
ere he was and disappeared back through the steel door. In a moment he reappeared with a length of black material torn from the uniform of the Takavaran Sam had shot. He bound Zach’s hands together with it, then looped them over his own head.
‘This is just for insurance,’ he said. ‘I’ll climb you out, but you still have to hang on.’
Alex could feel the young man’s arms shaking with nerves against his shoulders. He sucked in a deep breath and reached for the first rung.
Zach thought about protesting. Even though he was tall and thin, he still weighed about 150 pounds and he doubted Alex could carry him all the way to the top. He looked up the dim shaft and could just make out Sam and Adira about seventy feet up, climbing quickly. As Alex began his climb, Zach felt as if he were flying. In no time they had caught up with Sam and Adira, and Zach glanced quickly at their glowing green faces as he flew past. Adira’s was astonished, while Sam was smiling.
Near the rim of the shaft, Alex stopped and tilted his head as if listening. All Zach could hear were the faint sounds of Adira and Sam climbing to join them. Then Alex spoke into his helmet comm: ‘Move it; we got company.’
The captain raced up the remaining fifty feet in a few seconds and threw Zach off his shoulders like a large bag of linen. The scientist lay gasping as if he had made the climb himself; his nerves shortening his breath. He untied the black fabric around his wrists and looked across to Alex to thank him. The HAWC had thrown himself flat on the ground at the shaft rim and was sighting down into the darkness with his gun.
Zach rolled over and looked down into the pit. Sam and Adira were almost invisible, even with his light-enhancing equipment. He looked at Alex again and saw total calm. The HAWC’s eyes shone strangely as they stared unwaveringly down into depths of the elevator shaft.
Zach held his breath.
*
Alex watched Adira and Sam slowly ascend towards him. They still had another sixty-odd feet to go and he could tell they were tiring. He couldn’t climb down and carry them both – that would make them a bigger target. The best he could do was try to give them some cover.
Another Takavaran squad had arrived in the ruined lab. There was no telling how many of them had been waiting down there in the depths. One of them shone a torch up the shaft of the elevator. There wasn’t time for Alex to aim and fire before the man pulled his head back. Next came an arm and a pistol, and bullets buzzing rapidly up the shaft like a swarm of angry bees.
Alex fired as best he could, but even with his keen eyesight the target was too dark and small over the distance.
Adira was falling behind, and had let go with one of her arms to draw a Barak and shoot down into the darkness below her. Alex guessed the shots were intended to act more as a deterrent to buy them some time, rather than with any hope of actually taking down any of the Takavaran.
Sam was first over the edge. He was breathing heavily and his arms must have burned from the strain, but he lay down beside Alex and took aim into the shaft. Alex doubted Sam could see anything, but knew his second-in-command would fire a supporting volley if he did.
Alex waited for the pistol arm to reappear. In a few more seconds he saw movement, but this time it wasn’t a gun that was aimed at them, but the head of a sleek rocket-propelled grenade. Time had just run out.
Adira could see the rim of the shaft and the outline of Alex’s head still high above her. She was a strong woman, but after the long climb her arms wobbled with fatigue. The gunfire had given her a burst of adrenalin, but this too had been eaten up by the strain of the ascent. Stand and fight, a small voice said inside her head, but she knew that holding on one-handed like last time would be impossible now, and probably just result in a dropped weapon. And that was not going to happen to a captain in the Metsada.
Each new rung was agony, and the small shapes at the top of the shaft seemed just as far away as when she’d last looked up. Stand and fight, the voice said again. Just as her hand left the rung to reach down for her weapon, she saw a large figure leap headfirst into the shaft. Unbelievably, he caught the wall rails twenty feet down, right below her. She felt a strong arm wrap around her waist, pull her off the wall and sling her over his shoulder. Alex Hunter’s voice said in her ear, ‘Cover us.’
Adira felt a brief moment of unreality wash over her, then, with her front half hanging down into the shaft, she pulled both of her guns free and rained bullets down into the pit. As Alex was hauling her over the edge, she saw the flare of the initiation charge on the rocket-grenade booster. The flare pushed the grenade out of the launcher before the sustainer motor ignited to propel the small rocket at its target at nearly 600 feet per second. Adira yelled one of the most feared words in any battle: ‘Incoming!’
Sam turned and grabbed Zach, dragging him along suitcase-style. Alex didn’t bother putting Adira down; he just ran after Sam with her held across his chest. They had only covered about forty feet before their world turned orange and they were thrown forward by a molten percussion blow that flung ancient stone fragments at them at near-bullet velocity. Adira heard the storm of rock fragments whack into Alex’s back before he flew forward to land on top of her.
They were saved by the small rocket grenade hitting the granite roof of the tunnel; although dense, the material absorbed some of the initial fragmentation. The few feet of distance they’d covered and their armoured suits had stopped anything penetrating their bodies, but Adira knew they would be bruised and sore for days. They were lucky; it had been a simple fragmentation device. If it had of been one of the newer thermobaric explosives, it would have cooked everything in the tunnel – suits or no suits.
Adira and the others looked back into the boiling smoke. The stone tunnel would have collapsed over the elevator shaft, and the Takavaran would have known that when they fired the RPG.
‘Hmm, committed,’ said Alex as he got to his feet.
Adira nodded and looked up at him as she struggled to one knee. He wasn’t fatigued or hurt, and he hadn’t needed special equipment in the dark. She remembered the general’s order to seek out the Americans’ special weapon – the Arcadian. Could this be him?
Alex put out his hand to her. She ignored it and got to her feet, dusting herself down as she said, ‘Next time, I carry you.’
On the slight broken rise above the basin, Hex heard the muffled explosion and saw the tent covering the entrance to the ruins billow as the shock wave travelled out of the underground complex. He also saw the two teams of Takavaran outside fly to their feet, draw their weapons and close in on the doorway. Their movements were not panicked, but fluid and professional.
Hex spoke quietly into his comm unit. ‘Wolf packs closing.’
From within the ruins, Alex responded. ‘Engage.’
TWENTY-FOUR
On a sunny afternoon on the other side of the world, Major Jack Hammerson sipped his coffee and watched a live feed of the Persepolis site from a recalibrated orbiting satellite over the Middle East.
It was just after midnight in Iran, and from a height of about 1000 feet the light-enhanced Persepolis ruins were a dark greenish-blue, the angular shapes of the Apadana, Throne Room and Treasury only vaguely visible. He zoomed in on the image to just a few hundred feet above the age-old buildings.
As he took another sip, he saw the human-shaped specks of light closing in on one of the ancient structures, then smiled as a dot of white flashed out from the surrounding hill line to touch on a glowing point at the ruin’s perimeter. It repeated again, touching on another area, and then again. There were quick muzzle flashes from near the ruins – and the white dot raced out to touch the muzzle flashes, which immediately stopped. The pattern repeated six more times before it ceased.
‘Hmm, looks like the KBELT works just fine,’ the Hammer said out loud.
His phone rang and he lifted the receiver to his ear while taking another sip of the steaming coffee. His eyes never left the screen as he spoke. ‘We’re on the ground… insertion successful. Yes, sir.
’
He listened, then his computer beeped as a packet of new information was received. He read it quickly. ‘Understood, sir. Supplementary energy pulse information acquired – redeployment to new target is ASAP.’
His caller spoke again and Hammerson’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Don’t worry, sir. We’ll have the technology soon… or no one will.’
Hidden among the rocks, Hex looked along the smooth end of the KBELT and lined up another of the Takavaran as he ran towards the entrance to the Jamshid I facility. He pressed the trigger and a million-joule energy pulse of super-compressed emitted light leapt from the muzzle to touch the man on the forehead. He dropped immediately. By the time the light was visible, its trail had already disappeared, which, combined with the soundless discharge, meant the Takavaran were at a loss to pinpoint its origination point.
Lagudi slammed into the rocks just down from Hex and Irish and held his pistol up close to his chest. Hex motioned one-handed to both men to hold fire – he knew his weapon would be the most efficient, and silent, in the dark desert.
Irish had Hex’s sniper rifle and he aimed at one of the last two black-clad men. Over the distance and in the near total darkness, it was a shot that even Hex would have struggled to pull off. Irish fired and missed, fired and missed. The noise of the gun and its muzzle flashes gave the Takavaran the origination point and they fired in a continuous volley up at the HAWC, forcing Irish to hunker down behind the rocks. Then they began to advance, taking turns to shoot while the other scurried twenty feet closer to Irish’s position.
Hex cursed under his breath: they were good. He aimed the KBELT at the nearest Takavaran and pressed the button trigger. The Iranian fell forward into the dry sand, close enough to his comrade that the smoking, red-black burn hole in his temple was probably visible. The last man leapt to take shelter behind a large flat-faced boulder. As he dived, he pulled a small radio from under his robes and began to dial in a signal. Time had run out for the HAWCs – their position was about to be compromised.