Callsign: King - Book 3 - Blackout (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella)

by Ellis, Sean; Robinson, Jeremy

  The ceaseless ordeal seemed to drag on forever, though in reality it took only about a minute. As soon as he got his upper torso level with the protrusion, he was able to heave Julia up and over the lip of the crater. The black hole’s gravity still tugged at him, like sandbags tied around his ankles, but without the additional burden of Julia, he was able to scramble the remaining distance to join her on the flat ground at the pit’s edge.

  The earth still shook beneath them and pieces of rubble peppered them like hailstones, but through it all he could hear a faint humming—Fiona, Alexander and Sara, clinging together precariously at the edge of the crater, but still sounding the atonal chant that would, if the big man was to be believed, render the black hole dormant.

  A series of loud reports alerted him to a new danger. Chesler, about twenty yards away and clinging with one hand to an upright column, was firing his pistol into the shadows.

  No, not shadows, Suvorov realized. The basilisk.

  He could barely make out the dark shape as it slid from the ruins of the museum and began oozing along the crater rim.

  It got King and now it’s coming back for the rest of us, he thought.

  The basilisk seemed to recoil from the impact of Chesler’s rounds. Suvorov felt sure he could sense its frantic need to advance, and suddenly he understood. The quake had started at almost exactly the same moment that Fiona and the others had begun to chant. The black hole knew what they were doing and was desperate to stop them.

  Chesler’s pistol clicked empty and he hastily hit the release and let the spent magazine fall. The metal arced away at an impossible angle and bounced down the side of the crater. Chesler fumbled another magazine from his shoulder holster, but before he could insert it into the pistol grip, a dark tentacle snaked toward him.

  Suvorov grimaced as the SVR operative was vaporized. The chant was working, but if the basilisk reached Fiona and the others, all would be lost. And he was the only one left who could stop it.

  The basilisk resumed its advance, now only ten yards away.

  Bullets wouldn’t be enough, he realized. They might slow it down, but he didn’t have enough rounds to keep it pinned down indefinitely. No, he knew what he would have to do to stop it.

  He threw back the flap on his satchel and reached in. His fingers closed around one of the IED’s, but he did not draw it out. It was one of the flash-bangs they had improvised, but that wouldn’t make a difference for what he had in mind. When the device detonated, it would set off the rest—nearly five pounds of Semtex altogether.

  Five yards away now, and only about thirty yards from where Fiona desperately tried to keep up the chant. Too close, he thought, and he knew exactly what he was going to have to do.

  As a soldier, he had always been ready to give his life in defense of his country. But what did that even mean? How many brave men—men like his blood brother Ian Kharitonov—had died, not protecting their fellow citizens from invaders, but simply to advance the interests of a privileged few, for mere political or economic gains?

  Suvorov was about to give his life to save the world. How often did a chance like that come along?

  He activated the timer and shouted, “Julia, stay down!”

  Then he turned to basilisk and smiled.

  He caught a flicker of movement as a dark tendril lashed out at him, and then saw no more.

  43.

  As King dashed back into the Louvre, the earth began to move beneath his feet. He careened back down the tunnel, but the violent shaking sent him bouncing off the walls. Chunks of debris fell from overhead to land directly in his path. A few pieces struck him, knocking him flat, but thankfully none were large enough to pin him down or cause unconsciousness.

  He reached the edge of the crater just in time to see Chesler evaporate. The man’s abrupt demise sent a shudder through him. He’d witnessed every manner of death and knew that rarely was the final passing ever truly instantaneous. He had always wondered if death would be like that old Ambrose Bierce story, where the final moments of consciousness stretched out into a wondrous dream. But what went through your mind when every atom of your body came apart in a nanosecond?

  King ventured out into the crater, and immediately felt the black hole’s gravity pulling at him. It was much stronger now; at least as powerful as the G force he felt when Chess Team’s supersonic stealth plane, Crescent, took off. The difference here was that instead of being pushed back into an acceleration seat, the force here was trying to yank him off his feet and into the crater. He leaned into the wall and, with as much speed as he could muster, headed out after the basilisk, but even as he did, he knew he wasn’t going to make it in time.

  He hauled the Uzi around and took aim. Maybe he could distract the thing, get it to come after him the way it had Chesler, and give Fiona a few more seconds.

  The basilisk filled the Uzi’s sights, but in the corner of his eye, he saw Suvorov make a move. Even from a distance, he could see what the Russian was about to do, and threw him a mental salute as he waited for explosive package to detonate.

  The Russian disappeared from view but after a few seconds, the dark shape advanced again, and King saw Suvorov standing motionless with the satchel still clutched in his hands. The Spetsnaz leader did not move. The IEDs in the satchel did not explode, and King knew with sickening certainty the man and the devices had been transformed into stone.

  Now nothing at all stood between the basilisk and Fiona.

  King pulled the trigger on the Uzi. The suppressor muted the violence of the discharge, but a stream of lead arced out across the crater and vanished into the basilisk’s bulk. “Come on,” he shouted as the bolt slid forward against the last spent cartridge. “You wanted me, remember?”

  The basilisk ignored him and oozed ever closer to Fiona and the others.

  If it gets to her, we’re all finished. There was only one way he could think of to save Fiona.

  He let the useless pistol fall, not even noticing as it was pulled away in the gravity storm, and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Fiona!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Stop!”

  44.

  Through the earthquake, Fiona had managed to keep up the chant, but it seemed like all they were accomplishing was to really piss off the black hole. Now the basilisk was heading their way.

  She concentrated on uttering the mantra, but fear stole her breath and she could only manage a few seconds of humming with each inhalation. Alexander’s hand gripped her arm, a forceful but silent exhortation to ignore the threat and stay focused, but she knew it wasn’t going to work. The basilisk was going to kill them all.

  And then King’s voice reached out to her, telling her to stop.

  She did.

  “No Fiona,” Alexander rasped. “You must keep going. It’s the only way.”

  Sara fell silent as well and then hugged Fiona protectively, as if silently encouraging her to trust her decision in the face of Alexander’s growing rage.

  “You must keep going,” Alexander repeated urgently, “Or all will be lost.”

  Fiona felt her heart torn in two. Alexander knew what he was talking about; he’d stopped the black hole once before. But she trusted King implicitly, and if he said to stop… But what if he was wrong?

  The basilisk halted its advance, shadowy tentacles poised mere inches from where they sat. Fiona wanted to retreat from it, but her limbs were leaden and the ground was still shaking violently beneath her. She feared that any attempt to move might send her plunging into the crater.

  King’s voice continued to reach out across the ominous grinding noise of the debris shifting into the black hole and the groan of the Louvre coming apart all around them, but he wasn’t talking to Fiona anymore. He held up a phone and waved it. “This is what you want, you bastard. Right here. Come and get it.”

  Fiona wasn’t sure she could trust what she was seeing; the basilisk was moving away.

  “Now,” Alexander roared. “It’s leaving. We must re
sume the mantra.”

  “No.” The word was barely audible, a timid breath that seemed to falter before she could get it past her lips. She gathered her courage and tried again. “No. King said to stop. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “He knows nothing!” Alexander’s rage was as overpowering as the black hole itself.

  Fiona hugged Sara tighter, and when she spoke, her words were directed only at herself. “I believe in him.”

  For a fleeting second, she thought Alexander’s anger might turn physical. But if such was ever his intent, he didn’t get a chance to act, for at that moment, a section of wall broke free behind them and sailed toward the black hole like a kite caught in a gale force wind. Fiona caught just a glimpse of it before it slammed into all three of them, sweeping them toward oblivion.

  When the word ceased to be spoken, the speaker winked out of the entity’s awareness. Without the word to guide it, the manifestation halted, poised to act the instant the sound resumed and all the while aware of the close proximity of the remaining fragment of the consciousness.

  The entity waited. Its consciousness, incomplete though it was, understood the causal nature of the world it now inhabited. It understood what would happen if the word continued to be spoken, and it understood that the speaker of the word intended exactly that outcome.

  Why then had the speaking stopped?

  The entity could not comprehend this, and was, for a few brief nanoseconds, caught in an endless logic loop. Failing to find an explanation for the cessation of the word, the entity returned the manifestation to its original purpose. Perhaps all would be clear when the final piece of its consciousness was added.

  The manifestation moved immediately for its original goal and reached out with a finger of its strange essence. It embraced the item that contained the last fragment without changing it, and immediately as it made contact, the entity’s sense of satisfaction multiplied. With the assimilation of the final piece, its mind was made complete.

  Now, there remained but one final task for the manifestation: return the complete mind to the entity. The entity’s awesome power to change the very fabric of reality would be joined to the limitless possibilities of awareness…of thought.

  Though it did not grasp that ancient villagers had once thought it to be a devil, the entity now understood that it had become what the insignificant inhabitants of this world would call a god.

  45.

  King remained motionless in the face of the basilisk’s advance. It seemed to be moving faster now, but that was probably just an illusion caused by the fact that it was coming straight at him. Even if he had wanted to flee, it would have been impossible with the black hole’s gravity exerting an almost irresistible pull that threatened to send him tumbling down into the crater.

  He watched as a tendril reached out for the satchel where he’d stashed the quantum phone. If Brown’s supposition about the importance of a connection to a human user was correct, then the basilisk would be coming for him next, but that was a sacrifice he was willing to make to give Fiona a chance to finish what she needed to do.

  The quantum phone disappeared into the basilisk’s massive form, and then without a moment’s pause, it shifted course and descended into the pit, toward the accretion disk.

  King waited, not daring to breathe. He had just given the black hole the one thing it wanted most; if this gamble failed, there was no telling what the consequences of that decision would be.

  The basilisk reached the swirling rubble pile and then, as if it were no more substantial than smoke or shadow, seeped into the grinding rock mass.

  Then something strange happened. There wasn’t a flash or an explosion or any other kind of display, but the change was just as instantaneous. The mass lurched a little, as if the accretion disk had hiccupped, and shimmered in the dim light as the swirling pieces of rubble and debris were pulverized into particles finer than sand. Then the entire mass appeared to implode, shrinking inward as if sucked through a straw into another dimension.

  For a fleeting instant, King thought his plan had worked. When the basilisk had grabbed the satchel with the quantum phone, it had also taken about five pounds of Semtex, wired to a detonator which he’d set with a ten-second delay.

  Suvorov had given him the idea. The Russian had observed the effect of bullets on the thing and had sacrificed himself in a futile effort to get explosives close enough to do some real damage. Unfortunately, the basilisk’s touch had altered the chemical nature of the plastique, rendering it completely inert.

  But Suvorov’s idea had been a good one. King had gambled on the fact that within the monster’s impenetrable body, the quantum phones were still intact, and that it would add his phone to the collection, along with his ticking time bomb.

  Beyond that, he hadn’t known what to expect. He didn’t know if the basilisk could be damaged; maybe it could absorb the energy and shrapnel as effectively as it absorbed bullets. He was hoping that, at the very least, the blast would completely destroy the quantum phones. When the basilisk had gone into the accretion disk, he had dared to hope that it might somehow be enough to destroy the black hole itself. Instead, the energy of the explosion, compressed and amplified by the black hole’s gravity, had liquefied the accretion disk, allowing the entire mass of debris to be instantly consumed by the singularity.

  King wondered if he had just made things a hell of a lot worse. He could still feel the black hole’s gravity, stronger now than before. He couldn’t tell what was happening at the center of the pit; it roiled in his vision like convection waves off hot asphalt.

  At least the basilisk seemed to be gone. Now it was up to Fiona to save the day. He turned away from the crater and searched for Fiona and the others…

  His heart seized in his chest as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing. A massive piece of rubble—a section of wall or ceiling—had crashed down right where they had been seated. Alexander was still there, his head and arms protruding out from beneath the slab and out over the edge of the pit. Fiona and Sara had both been swept over the edge. Alexander had caught them, but it was evident from the strain on his face that he couldn’t hold on much longer.

  King started crawling toward them. He didn’t dare try to stand; if he raised his center of gravity, he would surely topple over and fall into the black hole. Even now, pressed flat against the ground, he felt like he was slipping sideways.

  King was only about ten feet from Alexander when something slammed into his ribs. As he slid into the pit, King caught a glimpse of a gloating Graham Brown, staring down at him.

  46.

  Once they’d discovered the black hole inside the Louvre, both King and the Russians had completely lost interest in Brown. He could have slipped away at any time, and several times, he almost did.

  But what good would that have done?

  This wasn’t the first time he’d lost big; nobody could climb as high as he had, without getting knocked back down a few times. He’d always come back, stronger than ever.

  Not this time.

  He couldn’t believe how badly he’d misjudged Pradesh. He was an excellent judge of character, and the Indian computer expert had never struck him as anything more than an opportunistic cyber-mercenary. He never would have believed that the man harbored apocalyptic delusions, much less the technical know-how to use the quantum computer to summon a black hole out of thin air.

  But that was exactly what Pradesh, with Brown’s unwitting help, had done. Pradesh had started a wildfire that would devour everything, and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do to stop it.

  So why bother trying to escape?

  His only regret was that he wouldn’t be going out a winner, and when he spied King crawling along the edge of the crater, he saw a chance for one last victory. Again and again, this man had beaten him, thwarting his carefully laid plans. Now, it was time for payback.

  His first kick caught King completely unaware, and sent him sliding toward the edge. Brown hug
ged the ground to avoid being dislodged from his own precarious position, then drew back his foot and kicked again, driving his heel toward King’s face.

  He missed. King ducked away from the attack, and then threw one arm around the gambler’s outstretched foot. King’s weight stretched Brown’s leg like a hangman’s rope. The gambler grimaced in unexpected agony as his knee and hip joints hyper-extended with a sucking noise. King felt impossibly heavy. Brown clutched at the ground, but found nothing to grasp. The heels of his palms skidded futilely on the rough ground as he slid toward the crater, with King desperately trying to pull him down…

  No, he realized. He’s trying to pull himself back up.

  Through his agony, Brown felt a sudden thrill of understanding. Why was he fighting this? They were both dead men anyway; by struggling against his fate, he was really accomplishing nothing more than to give King another chance to beat him.

  In fact, the probability was quite high that if he managed to endure this, King would survive—albeit temporarily—and exact his own retribution against Brown. The only way to win this game was to be in control at the very end, and so, with something almost like a smile, he stopped fighting and launched himself toward the pit.

  One final time, King defied Brown’s expectations. Perhaps anticipating that Brown would opt for a pyrrhic victory, he had spent those desperate moments securing a handhold, and when Brown let go, so did King.

  The black hole’s gravity caught Brown instantly. He slammed against the side of the crater and tumbled uncontrollably down the slope like someone being dragged behind a speeding car.

  And then he stopped.

  47.