by M. G. Herron
Well, she could surprise him there. That kind of surprise always lit up his face after she’d been on the road for a while. Eliana had to drop the new set of samples off at Audrey’s lab for carbon-dating anyway. She would do that first and then go see him.
After a long hot shower with lots of soap, Eliana climbed into a fresh change of clothes, feeling like a new person. She buttoned jeans, laced up comfortable sneakers, and donned a cotton t-shirt followed by a spring-weight black jacket. Then she got into her car and drove southeast toward the Fisk Industries campus.
The headquarters building was dark, but Eliana didn’t let that fool her. Where Amon worked wasn’t visible from the parking lot, so she wouldn’t be able to tell if he was here until she got past security to the sub-basement level. Would the guards let her in? Likely not. She hoped someone was in the lobby to call down for her. She walked quickly, gripping the canvas bag of samples in her sweaty hands. Eliana used the fob attached to her keychain to let herself in through the broad glass front door.
She still had access to most buildings because she was still technically on the Fisk Industries employee roster. Amon had thought that would be easier for her than having to sign in as a guest every time she wanted to find him at the office. There was a brief moment of relief as she waved the fob in front of the electronic reader, dispelling the notion that Amon might have removed her access after their last conversation. The light flashed green and the door opened.
Why would she think that? He wasn’t given to petty revenges. Still, the fear was present. And more than the fear, the guilt. She must apologize. She should have written. She really should have called.
It was in this state of mind that Eliana first entered the soaring lobby next to the waterfall, thrumming with tension and sick with worry. She immediately decided to go down to find Amon first, rather than drop the samples off first like she had intended. She was procrastinating, and she knew it. She was prepared to face the music now, and it was best to get it over with.
She was walking by the front desk when she heard footsteps clatter loudly down the metal stairs through the open-air of the lobby.
She glanced down the hall and saw a proud man wearing a well-groomed beard and a well-pressed suit, walking down the stairs behind the security checkpoint with his back to her. He held two hands out in front of him, and in his hands was a clear plastic box with a black rock inside of it. When Eliana caught a view of the two big men walking behind him with rifles in their hands, she stifled a gasp and jumped behind the front desk, cramming the bag with the vials and her purse underneath, and folding her long legs in close to her body.
“Kill the old man if he causes any trouble,” Lucas said. “Amon relies on him.”
A chill raced down Eliana’s spine. The elevator door opened, then closed, and took the three men down.
Where were the security guards? She crept out from under the desk, and tiptoed toward the checkpoint. Sure enough, the two guards were on the floor, unconscious, though they seemed to be breathing. Eliana hurried back to the front desk and located the desk phone there.
She paused with the receiver halfway to her ear. Would someone get hurt if she called the police? If they were in danger, not calling could be worse. If she set off any alarms, Lucas would know someone else was here, and come looking for her.
Eliana decided that the safest route was not to piss off the men with the rifles. No alarms. No frantic phone calls. She dialed Audrey’s number instead.
“Hello?”
“Audrey, listen to me carefully.”
“Eliana? Is that you? Why are you calling from Fisk Industries?”
“Just listen. Lucas is here. Men with rifles are with him and the two security guards at the checkpoint are unconscious or…or maybe hurt. I think Amon and Reuben are in danger. Call the police. Tell them to send reinforcements. Now!”
“What! I—well, okay, I’ll do it, but—”
“Good.” Eliana went to set the phone down, then remembered something. “Audrey, there are new samples for carbon-dating under the front desk. I’ve got to go.”
She didn’t wait for a response. Eliana hung the phone up and jogged to the back stairwell down which Lucas had disappeared. She slipped around the metal detector and crept down the stairs as quietly as she could, staying low.
Despite her caution, she met no one in the stairwell. They must have been in a hurry, because she descended to the lowest level unseen. No one was in the long hallway that lead to the Translocator lab, either. But as she approached, she saw the base of the Translocator, the sphere of rings around the platform and the massive arch, through the open door.
The air seemed to thrum with electricity. The walls and floor vibrated, sending a shiver through her body. Her heart slammed against her breast, and her mouth dried out. Even the thought of the Translocator was enough to frighten her since she returned, but hearing it active was a more visceral reminder.
As she came around the corner, all the people in the room were staring at the sphere, which spun madly at the back of the room. No one noticed her as she stepped into the room and slipped through the door that led to the lounge.
They were all too busy staring at a kind of window that had opened in the air. Through it, as if looking through a thin sheen of moisture, Eliana saw the black night sky she’d spent the last year dreaming about and dreading in equal measure.
She caught her breath as the dark God of Kakul stepped through the air, the bronze orb floating through behind him.
Xucha.
24
Rendered Inoperable
The man in black turned his head toward Amon and the mercenaries standing over him. The being’s face was concealed behind a sleek, reflective helmet that was curved at the front. It was narrow, jutting out slightly where the mouth should be. No face could be seen in the reflection, but Amon had the distinct spine-crawling sensation that it was looking directly at him.
And then the helmeted head snapped with snake-like reflexes to Lucas. Or, more specifically, to the carbonado within the transparent plastic containment unit Lucas held.
The man in black made a sharp gesture with his hand and the metal orb floated forward. A hole opened in the orb’s smooth metal face, and a fan of red light formed a blade in the air.
“Down!” Amon yelled, throwing himself sideways into Wes and Reuben, forcing them to the floor. They tumbled to the side as a wide red laser shot out and took the heads off all six mercenaries who stood nearby. A few shots fired from the rifles before the dead men dropped. Bullets clanged off the metallic side of the orb and ricocheted against the wall. The red laser finally cut into the control panel and holodeck, slicing off a backup monitor and clipping a corner of the machine in a flash of sparks and a hot orange glow of metal that liquefied and then reformed in a molten puddle. The bodies of the mercenaries crumpled to the floor with meaty thuds.
Amon gasped and scrambled to his feet, yanking Reuben up with him. Someone gestured from inside the lounge, and the CERN hostages darted toward that room for cover.
Eliana? What is she doing here?
The man in black rushed toward Lucas and the two remaining mercenaries, who now flanked him at the back of the room. The mercenaries shot their rifles and the bullets ripped holes in the floating orb’s hull, but didn’t seem to damage its motor or do much to stop it. The laser changed to a blue light. It shot at Lucas, and missed him by a hair’s breadth—but then the plastic box unit containing the carbonado was rising through the air in the grip of the blue beam. Lucas cried out, his face twisting in a hate-filled snarl, and lunged for the box. The box lifted out of his reach and came to rest in the palm of the man in black.
Amon pushed Reuben and Wes toward the dubious cover of the bank of computer equipment and control panels. The holodeck still responded to his commands, despite the damage done to it by the red laser. The carbonado solution canister sat nearby where Lucas had left it when he went to retrieve the large carbonado from Audrey’s lab.
Amon watched fearfully out of the corner of his eye while he and Reuben attempted to wrest control of the Translocator back from this powerful creature’s black rift. They issued shutdown commands, override passwords, you name it. The black rift remained, the rings still spinning madly. Reuben’s white hair stood on end from all the latent electricity buzzing through the air.
Amon continued to gesture and jab at the screen. He plugged the carbonado solution canister back into the power source. Still no response from the Translocator.
The two remaining mercenaries raised their rifles and fired at the man in black. The bullets struck an invisible wall six inches away from the dark suit and clinked harmlessly to the floor.
The orb returned to the offensive, the red light reappearing and slashing out again, driving the mercenaries and Lucas back. Reuben, Wes, and Amon ducked behind the base of the holodeck, and Amon peered around to get a better angle on the machine. The man in black stepped toward Lucas and his cronies, the metal orb floating in the air in front of him. They cornered Lucas and the mercenaries in the corner, leaving the black rift open behind them.
A slight, dark-haired figure in jeans and a black jacket sprinted from the door of the lounge and crossed the room toward the black rift. Was that—
Eliana slowed just before the rift, and looked back at Amon. She held her cell phone in one hand. Her brow furrowed, and she frowned as their eyes met.
“No!” Amon cried. He got up to run toward the rift, but the orb’s red laser swerved toward him and he was driven back down, forced to take cover behind the workstations near the holodeck.
“Eliana, don’t!” Reuben shouted.
Under the workstations, Amon saw her hop through the rift.
“I think I can reach her,” Reuben said. “Keep the lasers off me!”
Mercenaries dodged and juked away from the lasers, shooting their rifles in bursts at the orbs, which moved in rapid strafing patterns. A few bullets cut gashes into the orb’s metal plating. The one that kept Amon pinned down kept swiping it’s laser around him. When he tried to peer out, a 3D printer was knocked, in pieces, off a nearby desk. “Okay, go!”
Lifting the wooden lid of a fabricator crate as a flimsy shield, Rueben began to move in a crouch toward the rift.
Through the chaos, the man in black had managed to crack open the plastic case and lift out the carbonado. Though he could only catch glimpses, Amon could see how the stone glowed fiercely in his hand. Bullets fired at the man in black careened wide or clattered harmlessly at his feet, but the constant barrage seemed to keep him pinned down. Rueben made quick progress.
In the other direction, Lucas had fled from the gunfire of the mercenaries toward the warehouse end of the facility. He dug in his coat pocket and pulled out a round object out of his pocket. He looked at it uneasily. The blood drained from his face. He closed his eyes and mumbled something under his breath. A prayer?
Amon had to duck back under the desk as the red lasers cut a piece of the large glass monitor down. It crashed onto his fingers. Amon hissed in pain, and craned his neck around the other side of the desk to see that Reuben had made it unnoticed to the base of the ramp.
“You’ll need this!” Amon picked up one of the modern transponder bracelets they had built and threw it toward him. It bounced along the floor.
Reuben picked it up, and kept moving toward the Hopper.
Lucas’s angry cussing pulled Amon’s attention back in his direction. He tapped on the watch device and glared at Amon with deep resentment evident on his face.
They locked eyes across the room until the firing stopped and the mercenaries rifles began to click on empty.
Reuben had reached the ramp. He sprinted up it and jumped through the rift after Eliana. This time the man in black saw the old engineer go through, and hissed a horrible, snake-like sound. But he didn’t follow.
His hearing echoing in the absence of gunfire, Amon peered through a hole in the desk as a backhand from the man in black opened the throat of a mercenary.
Bodies littered the floor. There was only one mercenary left standing. He frantically clicked his spent rifle’s trigger, then tossed it away and pulled out a knife from his belt. A large black hand darted out and gripped him by the neck. A snapping noise split the air and the man fell heavily to the floor.
Amon’s skin crawled. The orb was still there, but if he went quickly he could make it across the gap behind the cover of the boxes where Reuben had gone. The sound of the orb’s engines receded.
He was about to make the move when Lucas began to groan. A second later, he screamed. The sound pulled the man in black’s attention, too. A faint haze seemed to surround Lucas. His limbs disappeared one at a time until he was gone.
His scream seemed to linger in the air for a long moment. Amon shuddered.
Now or never. He got up to run, but the man in black darted in front of him, impossibly fast.
He gripped Amon by the shoulders.
“How?” The voice was impossibly human, but with a metallic undertone.
“He has a Translocator.” Who was this being in the sleek armor? Certainly not a god. But not of this world, either. Amon couldn’t help but notice the incredible texture of the suit, like carbon fiber crossed with snakeskin. It seemed to be more than just armor and was remarkably unscathed after the firefight.
“Like this machine?”
He nodded.
“Your machine?”
Amon swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded.
The strange being tossed Amon into the stack of wooden boxes, cracking the frame of one and knocking the air from Amon’s lungs.
The man in black took one last look around, hefted the carbonado in his hand, and gestured at his machines. The orbs dashed through the rift. Then the man in black walked up the ramp and stepped through as well.
Amon forced himself to his feet and staggered forward. Wes tentatively stepped in front of him, apparently concerned. Amon shoved him away and moved toward the rift, determined to get through and go after Eliana.
It was shrinking now. He hurried, running with an uneven limp. By the time he reached it, the rift had shrunk to a black ball the size of a fist in the middle of the platform.
It looked like a tiny black hole suspended in the air. Way too small to go through. Dread knotted his stomach.
“God damnit!” he said, bending over and clutching his left knee, which was throbbing with pain from where he’d struck the wooden crate when he was thrown.
He limped back over to the holodeck of the Translocator. The machine was still operable, despite the damage. The monitor was dead, and the power unit partially melted, but the hologram controls worked, and he brought the projectors online now. An array of images appeared in the air around him.
He tried to turn the Hopper back on, but it kept giving Amon an error that told him the magnetic field inside the sphere was unstable.
Translocation cannot be initiated.
Who wrote these damned error messages? Oh, that’s right. He did.
Amon hung his head as the surviving hostages, including Agent Moreno, his hands still bound at the wrist, slowly began to trickle out of the lounge in which they’d been hiding.
They watched as Amon swore and gesticulated at the holodeck. No matter what he told the computer to do, the tiny black hole remained suspended in the air in the middle of the stabilization sphere.
It had rendered his Translocator inoperable.
25
Soul Harvest
“Easy,” Gehro called out. “Careful of the stalactites! They’re good luck and have been here for centuries.”
Rakulo said nothing. His attention was consumed with wading forward through cold water that reached up to his chin. It was deeper than it seemed from the back of the cave. He reached with his toes for some purchase in the slow-moving river. His hands lay on the canoe, which he and Quen were guiding on a careful path through the low-hanging stalactites at the back of Gehro’s coveted cave. It
turned out he was very protective of the arrangement of spiky stones that hung from the ceiling.
“Be careful, boys.”
“I am, Gehro,” Rakulo said.
Quen was taller than Rakulo, so his feet were able to touch the bottom, while Rakulo wasn’t. Quen tilted his head to the left to avoid a stalactite, and they pushed the canoe down lower, filling it with more water so that it could fit under the last row of stalactites. They rose up beyond it, lifting and tilting the canoe to empty it of water. Quen reached out and gripped a thick sturdy spike to anchor them. The current moved more quickly here. Above, the cave had opened out into a rounded tunnel winding off in either direction into the darkness.
“Why haven’t they come back, Raku?” Quen asked.
“Maatiaak’s men and the flying demons are patrolling the jungle around us,” Rakulo reminded him. “Citlali and Thevanah will make it back when it’s safe to do so.”
Quen nodded. “I went out with Yeli not two hours ago. We heard the drums, Raku. The village is gathering in Uchben Na for the first time in a year.”
Rakulo had heard the drums as well, though only in his good ear. He was growing used to the new handicap. His left ear still throbbed and occasionally a high-pitched squeal accompanied by a sharp pain flashed. It had the power to bring him to his knees with its suddenness. He needed Quen’s help and his hearing now. Relying on others felt like weakness. That’s what Rakulo had always been taught. He did his best to hide his handicap from the others.
“That’s why we have to see if this leads anywhere,” Rakulo said. “While we still have the opportunity.”
Yeli had stayed behind with perhaps a dozen others. The rest had been taken by Maatiaak’s men in the skirmish at the wall and the subsequent retreat, and two had simply gotten tired of living in the cave and defected in the night.
Rakulo told them they could go if they were worried about their families. It was not his job to coerce anyone into helping him against their will.
It was enough that these fifteen—plus Citlali and Thevanah, of course—had stood by him. He didn’t know what it proved yet, but it proved something. Maatiaak had, for all intents and purposes, delivered the village back to Xucha, back to the old ways. But they had not taken his warriors, the men and women who had fought and searched with him. Men and women who believed there was hope–a very small, very faint hope—that their people could make a life beyond the Wall that had kept them trapped for as long as their people could remember.