A Gathering Evil

by Michael A. Stackpole

  "'Admit'? You make it sound like a crime." He set his glass down. "I initiated the contact, I arranged for a monthly stipend to be paid, and I've even paid them bonuses when they've driven off thieves trying to rip us off. However, I'm not financing a war. Not only does that cause more trouble than it's worth, it's expensive. I'm giving them enough to keep them drunk and happy, nothing more. Only a fool would arm them and point them at a target."

  "If you're not doing it, who is?"

  Darius MacNeal sat back in his chair and laughed quietly. "I am."

  "What?!" Sinclair turned on his father. "We discussed this. You said you wouldn't do it!"

  The older man slammed a fist onto the table, splashing chowder all over and making wineglasses jump. "Build-more is my corporation! I make the decisions, and I don't have to answer to you. Why pay for an asset if you aren't going to use it? So what if those little fascist bastards go and shoot Lorica up? Who cares?"

  "I care, Mr. MacNeal." I leaned forward on one of the abandoned chairs. "I care because one of my friends got caught in the crossfire. His wife was killed, and he's in the hospital."

  Sinclair shook his head. "Hal Garrett..."

  "Right," I nodded.

  "Who?"

  Sinclair stared at his father disbelieving. "Hal Garrett, the basketball player. You met him last year when you threw a benefit banquet for his Sunburst Foundation. You gave a speech in his honor, then gave him $10,000 in corporate funds."

  The old man shook his head. "Huh. Really? I can't remember."

  "Let me tell you something you can remember, Mr.

  MacNeal." I met his defiant stare with one that was pure holocaust. "If Heinrich and his people do anything, absolutely anything, I will personally make sure you have a closed casket funeral before the week is out."

  "You can't threaten me."

  "I don't threaten, Mr. MacNeal, I merely supply people with life choices."

  Sinclair shook his head. "Don't worry, this Aryan thing will stop now."

  "In a pig's eye it will." Darius MacNeal stood up and tugged at the hem of his jacket. "I own Build-more, I make policies."

  "If you continue paying Heinrich, I'll quit."

  MacNeal looked at Sinclair the way an exterminator looks at a cockroach. "You can't quit, you're fired."

  Sinclair's face brightened. "Good, then I don't feel bad about kicking your ass out of my home."

  "And as your landlord I won't mind evicting you. You have a week."

  "One more thing, Mr. MacNeal," I growled, "you were paying to have Lorica given some trouble. How much would you pay for the Witch's head on a platter?"

  MacNeal's eyes narrowed. "Name your price."

  "$1,000,000, payable to the Sunburst Foundation."

  "$1,000,000! That's seven years of bedevilment by the Aryans."

  I smiled. "You get what you pay for."

  He nodded. "How will I know when you've done it?"

  "Oh, don't worry," I laughed, "it'll be in all the papers."

  As we left Sinclair MacNeal's suite, Bat saw one of the diners and got the man to retch by making a simple "gulp" sound. We laughed about that as we took the elevator down and used the maglev train to take us back to City Center. I accompanied Bat down into Eclipse, but he went off to earn some pocket change in a pit fight, and I headed back to Coyote's stronghold.

  I spent the next two hours getting voice samples and burning vox response chips for the explosive detonators. I double-checked all the equipment that Bronislaw had sent over, made modifications to some of it, and arranged it in discrete piles and color-coded it for everyone. All they had to do was come in, suit up and we'd be good to go.

  I returned to Marit's home a little after midnight. When the door to the transversor opened I thought, for a moment, that something was wrong. Every light in the place was out and had been replaced by a multitude of candles glowing in the darkness. My recollection of the house outside Sedona flashed before my eyes, but evaporated as I saw Marit walking toward me from the back.

  The diaphonous gown clung to her like a white fog and stretched to taut invisibility against her flat stomach. She moved forward and, in the flickering half-light, looked more a ghost than a real person. I caught a hint of flowers as she stopped and candlelight reflected gold in her blue eyes. She folded her bare arms across her midriff, and her right hand bunched the fabric on her left hip.

  "Tycho, if we attack Lorica, we'll die."

  Her words came quietly in a tone befitting such a dire and final prediction. I saw gooseflesh pucker the flesh of her arms, and her nipples became erect. Her eyes never left mine, but the shifting of the candle flames made it look as if a thousand little demons danced within her skull. Her face remained blank, as if it had been composed for viewing by a mortician.

  "If you are that certain of death, Marit, take a pass. Don't go."

  She shook her head in a motion so slight that had her hair not moved, I might have thought it a trick of the light. "No, I will go. I must. I owe it to the others." She blinked her eyes and some life returned to her face. "It's just that I wanted to let you know what I am feeling. I want you to understand why it is so very important for you to be with me tonight. There is only one way to defeat death, really drive it away."

  She turned back in the direction from which she had come, but held her left hand back out to me. "Come with me, my love. Let us laugh at death together."

  The next morning Marit and I walked into Coyote's stronghold hand in hand. Jytte was there before us. Bat and Natch arrived soon after we did, and I set about briefing them as I put the equipment for Crowley and Loring into a pair of large, canvas dufflebags.

  "Your equipment is color-coded with a small piece of tape on it. Bat, you've got red; Marit, blue; Natch, green; and Jytte, gold. I'm black. Get your body armor on first, then suit up in the rest of this stuff. If you need any help, sing out."

  Natch frowned. "I know this is Eclipse, but won't we look a bit conspicuous going into Lorica with all this on? I mean, shouldn't we get it in to Lorica first, then put it on once we get inside?"

  I nodded. "Good thinking, but things have changed a bit. After I left Bat I spoke with Nero Loring and El Espectro."

  Bat shivered. "Crowley? I shouldn't have let you within 50 miles of Sedona."

  "Right. Loring told me that the woman running Lorica is not, in fact, his daughter. He says the real Nerys was kidnapped and this new Nerys was substituted for her. He came to that realization recently, yet was ousted from Lorica before he could act upon that knowledge. He would have done something, in fact, but his daughter's captivity made that impossible. We're going to rescue her and then put and end to the Witch."

  Everyone accepted my explanation with a little more ease than I would have expected, but life in Eclipse was weirder than I found myself comfortable with anyway. Clearly the folks near Boxton had known the tenement through which Marit and I had returned to Eclipse was the seat of some weird stuff. They'd set up barricades against whatever came out of it. Likewise the Indians had come up with a very effective way to deal with creatures like Leich. Instead of worrying about the grander implications of these inhuman things and other places, they just handled them.

  I suited up. I put on my radio headset and settled the earpiece over my right ear. The main body of the box I clipped to my belt. I turned it on, heard static, and shut it off again. The earpiece, which also served as a microphone by picking up sound through the eustachian tube in that ear, fit snugly over my ear but did not wholly prevent me from hearing sounds other than the radio.

  That in place and working, I pulled on my combat harness, buckled the web-belt around my waist and tightened up on the shoulder straps. Across my stomach I had three ammo pouches, each with two clips for the AR-15-A2. At the small of my back I kept another pouch that contained six blocks of Semitek with radio/vox detonators attached. A holster on my right hip contained the Wildey Wolf and on the left hip, to balance it, I had three clips of ammo for the gun. Under
my left arm I wore my Bianchi shoulder holster with one of the Colt Kraits and on the right three clips for it helped balance me out.

  Including the carbine and spare ammo pouch on my left hip, I had better than 30 pounds of equipment on me. Because the harness helped distribute it properly, it felt like much less and would not hamper me if I had to run fast or get out of the way of something. Live weight is much better and easier to handle than dead weight, yet too much live weight could catch up with me and make me all dead weight.

  Bat and I helped the others get into their stuff. Everyone had the same amount of equipment and our provisions differed only in that Bat and I carried the plastic explosives while Natch, Marit and Jytte had been given some basic first aid trauma kits. Jytte, despite the unnatural lightness to her body, seemed to stand the weight of the material better than Natch or Marit. Marit checked her own weapons to make sure they were functional, then quickly acquainted Jytte with the deadly tools we'd given her.

  All of us piled into the Vanagon Marit and I had rented that morning. I drove us over to Crowley's and around to the side. The gate there opened automatically and we pulled into a small parking area off the street. A wooden fence shielded the house's backyard from the street, but the gate there opened as we approached it.

  Crowley and Loring greeted us in the backyard. Loring looked dressed for a weekend of fishing, but his tan fatigue pants had enough pockets to let him redistribute some of the supplies on his combat harness. Marit helped him get into his gear, and they started a pleasant conversation about Lorica before Nerys had assumed control of it. Loring seemed thankful for her attentions and pleased to have a new ally.

  Crowley looked at the equipment I'd brought him and smiled. "Carbines are a good choice because, if what I have read is at all accurate, fighting will be in close. You might as well pass out my ammo and that gun because I prefer these." He dropped to one knee and zipped open a blue nylon bag. From it he pulled two small, boxy guns with short barrels that had a bore only slightly smaller than my Wildey Wolf. He handed me one, and I smiled.

  "Ingram Mac 10, .45 caliber, fires from the open bolt. Nasty little gun." I turned the gun over in my hands. "Old, but still deadly. They look like they've seen a few wars."

  "Relics of a misspent youth, my friend." Crowley pulled on his radio, then donned the combat harness I had brought. He stripped out the CAR-15-A2 clips and replaced them with clips for his Mac 10s. He put one of the small guns in the pouch at his back unloaded, then let the other dangle by its shoulder strap from his right shoulder. Both he and Loring already wore body armor, so his CAR and their vests remained in the duffle bag.

  "If you'll follow me," Crowley announced, "We can get started."

  His house's rear yard was remarkable in that it had fully leaved trees and bushes. White stones covered the earth everywhere except for the patio on which we stood and had been raked into a zen ocean pattern. As he spoke he waved us toward a koi pond toward the rear of the property, then he squatted down near a big, mechanical statue that looked like the offspring of a steam-roller and a Harley Davidson motorcycle. He flipped a switch and the fluttering thump of a pump came from inside the machine.

  Crowley stood and wiped his hands off on his thighs. "One of the owners of this house put in a bomb shelter shortly after World War II. Before the turn of the century, when I bought this place, it had served as an avant garde art gallery, which is when the koi pond went in, covering the shelter's opening. I reclaimed the shelter, though I have put it to a different use. Before it was meant to keep things out. Now, in many ways, it keeps things in."

  As he spoke the water level in the koi pond dropped, revealing a small island created by a submarine bulk-head hatch. Bat twirled the wheel on top and the hatch hissed open, spraying water out of the water-tight seal. Bat descended the ladder built into the wall first, then the rest of us followed, with Crowley coming down last. The hatch clanged shut above, and I heard the clicks of another couple switches being flipped.

  One, I have no doubt, reversed the pump to cover the hatch. The other apparently turned on the lights, because fluorescents flickered to life and filled the moderately sized room with light. Aside from some battered swords, shields and similar archaic weapons of war mounted on the white walls, the room appeared empty to me. Then, as I shifted to the left, I saw a black box in the far corner. It remained visible for a moment, then vanished until I changed my position.

  "What the hell is that?"

  Crowley made a beeline for the corner in which it appeared to exist. As he walked to the space where I had seen it, he reached out and jerked back slightly as if he had gotten a static shock. His touch seemed to "ground" the device for a moment, and I got a chance to get a good look at it.

  To me it looked to be of very fine hardwood construction. Half again as tall and wide as a phone booth, it had a depth of approximately four feet. It stood flush against the far wall of the room, and I could not see a seam at that end. It almost seemed like the box had grown out of the wall, and I would have remarked about that aloud, but I was very much afraid Crowley would confirm my speculation.

  Over on the far side he seemed to be playing with controls, but as I moved over to see what he was doing the center of the box started to sizzle with the gray static of a television getting no signal. Blue and red sparks played through the gray and white, but I heard nothing coming from the display. As nearly as I could tell the box had just become a giant TV screen with no sound.

  The old man stepped away from the control surface. "Let me explain this quickly. We are going to be traveling to another place, another dimension which actually lies fairly close to our own. It is called Plutonia—thought I doubt the natives think of it as such. It is a place where all the natural laws seem to apply, save some area-specific time flow fluctuations."

  Jytte cocked her head to the side. "Explain please."

  Crowley sighed. "I don't know if I can. Dimensions often have their own special properties. Ah, the Underworld of Greek mythology, for example, has an area called Tartarus. It is, in reality, a small collection of pocket dimensions in which the physical laws have been grossly warped. Sisyphus is always rolling a stone uphill because any direction of travel, in that specific dimension, is uphill. The giant Tityus has vultures eating him alive during the day, but during the night he regenerates—as do the birds, so his torment can go on forever. The regeneration is not a property of him, but of the place he has been trapped in.

  "In Plutonia, as nearly as I can determine, there are 'holding cells' where time does not pass in a normal way. I think these are really food storage areas, and they inherently retard aging, spoilage and decay for obviously beneficial reasons."

  He jerked a thumb at the control panel which, to my eyes, looked like an opal screen with lights pulsing all over it. "I have set this thing to take us as close as is safe to the place where Nerys Loring is being held. It is another dimensional gateway, so we may encounter hostilities almost immediately."

  I shook my head. "Wait a minute. Why can't you put us down in another area?"

  Crowley sighed heavily. "Dimensions have boundaries. A gateway is a simple place to go through. If I were going alone, I would not be using this device. I would go through by myself and pick out the most beneficial route.

  I cannot bring all of you with me, so this is it. While the creatures in Plutonia are sentient, they do not really have anything to counter the weapons we're bringing in." He fed a clip in through the Ingram's handgrip. "Besides, hive mind entities are only dangerous if you really make them angry."

  "Great." I stepped up to the box. "Just walk through?"

  "Just walk through."

  "Okay, folks, radios on. Sound check, black." I heard everyone else identify themselves by color, then I smiled. "See you on the other side."

  At first touch the static wall felt cold. Numbness nibbled up through me as I moved forward. I felt goose bumps rise on my skin, and my scrotum tightened. I crouched a bit as I moved ahea
d, then I felt a flash of heat as I came out on the other side. My head swam for a second, then I jumped up and rotated forward to land outside the dimensional gate.

  The gateway on the Plutonia side was shaped like a hexagon. It had taken on the identical look to that of the box in Crowley's shelter in terms of the color playing through it. The major difference was that while the static on Crowley's machine appeared to be heading into to a central nexus point, here it sprayed out to the edges.

  The other difficulty with the gate on the Plutonia side is that it was set in the floor of a large chamber. Bracing myself on the edge of the gateway, I held my hand out to Bat when his head poked through the surface of the static pool. It took him a moment to orient himself, then he leaped up like I had, and I pulled him home.

  The two of us crouched side by side, and I heard him whisper some Polish oath through the radio. We both pulled back the charging slides on our assault rifles, then covered the only exit we could see in the weak, mossborn luminescence in the cavernous room.

  Bat looked around the room, then shook his head.

  "What?"

  He shrugged. "I used to have an ant farm when I was a kid."

  "And?"

  "I used to dream about being shrunk down and visiting the nest." He frowned. "I was a dumb kid."

  "Why?"

  "I called 'em dreams." The big man circled the room with his rifle. "They were nightmares."

  The others came through, and only Nero Loring seemed to be unable to see anything. Jytte held his hand and got him to crouch down as we waited for Crowley to come through. When he did, he took on the black-shroud form I had come to recognize before I met him in Eclipse.

  Bat took one look at him and scowled. "That's it. When I get back, I torch Sedona."

  Crowley laughed heartily. "I'll give you the matches." He pressed his left hand over Nero Loring's eyes, and the man started looking around the room. Nero's face slackened a bit, then he blinked away tears as he imagined his daughter having spent so many years in this place.