The Omega Device (The Ha-Shan Chronicles Book 1)

by S. M. Nolan

  She smiled weakly, motioned forward, “C'mon, we're not safe here.”

  He followed after her in silence. Maggie did her best to take in what peace the dirt path afforded as she replayed their conversation, considered all she'd survived.

  Initially, she'd loathed the idea of a cop coming to her work, questioning her integrity, regardless of their obvious attraction. Then, when circumstances forced them closer, she loathed the idea of a soldier ordering her around. Worse then was the attraction growing despite it.

  Since then though, all loathing had turned to affection. Now, in light of her new perspective, she saw Russell's commitment and loyalty. His duty was to those he cared for. It made her plight more tolerable, gave her the courage to retain that precarious balance over the abyss, and take in the world around her. More importantly, his admiration made her confident in retaining the balance.

  With a resounding breath, she exhaled all but the last of her stress.

  21.

  Bunker

  October 5th

  1:45 PM

  Outskirts of the Protectorate Temple

  The dirt-path twisted and turned through flat grassland while the sky darkened to gray and obscured the sun. When, at last, a village broke the empty horizon Russell referenced the GPS, deduced their destination was somewhere in the village.

  They trudged through muddy grasses of former farmland that rose and fell as though plowed and left to the Earth's bidding. Nearer the village, the comparison became more apt; the shacks were long overgrown and dilapidated, their thatched roofs absent in spots.

  Near the village-center, their coordinates aligned with the GPS-beacon. They rubbernecked in confusion, found nothing but the swish of a loose roof that rose and fell in the cool wind.

  Maggie turned in small circles to survey the area, “Something's not right. He must have input the wrong coordinates.”

  Russell examined the device with a flurry of fingers, “This is all that appears on sat-maps for miles.”

  She peered at it, “Well?”

  “Start checking the huts. Something's hidden here. He wouldn't have done this for nothing.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she countered sarcastically.

  Russell threw open the door to the nearest hut, his rifle raised, and called out for anyone nearby. The village's eerie silence replied.

  Maggie turned for the next hut, approached it. A low rumble sounded inside. She squinted through the half-open door. A growl rippled low, slotted frequencies into a high roar.

  The door burst open. Maggie was knocked to the ground. Something sprang off her, knocked the wind from her lungs. She gasped, rolled to right herself. The low growl idled from the throat of a massive leopard. Light sank in spotted fur as it stared her down. She rose to her knees, eyes locked on it.

  Maggie's hand inched toward her pistol. It sensed her intent, charged. Bared teeth closed the distance over a frenzied gallop. Maggie rolled to dodge. It followed through, reared for another charge.

  Gunfire crackled. Holes riddled its chest, sprayed blood and fur. It slumped over in a whimper, back leg twitching. Russell approached, rifle raised. He nudged it with a boot and lowered his rifle to help Maggie up. She stood mesmerized, blood draining from the carcass into the dirt.

  He spoke before her thoughts could linger, “Keep looking.”

  She swallowed, opened the hut's door again to scan its innards with what little light shone in. It was small, not unlike her Protectorate cell, with enough room for a bed and a squat table but little else. She made her way to the next hut, then the next; each the same as the first.

  They went through the village one-by-one until a lone hut remained at its head. From outside it appeared no different than the others. Inside however, a singular, wood-frame bed lay askew in the obvious signs of a search.

  Maggie looked over the room's disarray, “Another animal?”

  “Doubtful.”

  He hung his rifle off his shoulder, twisted on his flash-light, and crouched to run his hands over the floor beside the upturned bed. Maggie knelt beside him while his fingers traced a raised symbol. He recognized the Ha-Shan emblem, ran his hands in wider arcs to suss out the trap-door.

  “It's here.”

  Maggie shifted and the floor creaked, “Beneath us?”

  “Has to—”

  A crack splintered wood beneath them. They fell a dozen feet, landed in a heap on cement atop wooden debris. Maggie hit hard with a heavy gasp. She rolled sideways onto her hands and knees, her whole body feeling displaced.

  She leaned over Russell, “You alright?”

  He moaned, “Remind me to sue the Protectorate for hazardous working conditions.”

  She gave a single, pained laugh, pushed up with her rifle-butt. Russell climbed to his feet, limped onward into the darkness. His light guided them as they steadied on a wall. The path ahead was unmistakably a tunnel similar to the temples'. The light-beam veered along it's right-side, opened onto a larger room that echoed their steps.

  Russell shined the beam in absently, “Find a torch or something.”

  Maggie's hand grazed metal in the wall. “Here. What is it?”

  The light splayed over her hand and a high-voltage symbol bolted to a metal panel. It opened on a set of old fuses and a lever switch. She looked to Russell, shrugged, and threw the switch. They waited. The room remained dark.

  Russell's light crawled over desks and footlockers, swept the room's immediate interior. “There must be a generator somewhere. Stay here.” She leaned her sore body against the wall, watched his beam dart around, then disappear past a corner.

  “I think I found it,” he called.

  A loud, diesel-engine sputtered with a chain-pull. A second pull ignited it to a steady idle that rumbled Maggie's tired head. Rows of florescent lights flickered on, revealed tables with old computers along each side of the room. Rowed shelves lined its center, filled with countless books.

  At the room's far-end, cots on either wall sat across from an old, silo-like console just beyond the last shelf with a single chair before it. Russell's appeared from an open doorway just past it.

  Maggie limped over to switch on a computer. It stopped at a bios screen with an error in a Chinese dialect she couldn't read. She moved to the next, switched it on; same thing. She rolled her lip-ring with her tongue, hand at her hip.

  Russell was puzzled by the private library, but headed to her side to examine a screen. “What's it say?”

  She shook her head, “Looks like an Eastern dialect. I can't make it out.”

  “Why Eastern? We're in the Northwest.”

  She shrugged, “Doesn't matter where we are, we're not getting anywhere with it.”

  He turned back for the books, “What about these?”

  Maggie began to examine the shelves. She caught some phrases here and there, “The stuff I understand's no use—Sun Tzu's Art of War, Chinese Survival Manuals. This is… Lewis Carroll's collection, translated.”

  “That doesn't make sense.”

  “None of it's in any type of order, either,” Maggie said as she walked an aisle. “Verne” and “Wells” popped out, but few others were intelligible.

  She continued along the rows, spying translations of English literature and reference books, but nothing helpful. She reached the edge of the last aisle, across from the old console. A row of books caught her eye, leather bound with their spines marked by the Protectorate emblem.

  She reached for one, “Interesting.”

  Russell returned to her side, “What?”

  “I can't translate it, but it's hand-written, and stamped with the Protectorate symbol.”

  Russell grabbed a similar book from beside the empty space; it too was hand-written, leather bound, and donned the ancient emblem. He skimmed the yellowed pages.

  “Some kind of journal?”

  Maggie's brow furrowed. She shut the book, retrieved the first in line. It was bound in a smoother leather, its color all but faded. The pag
es, a papyrus-like material, differed in texture.

  She opened it to the first page, “It's… the Ha-Shan language.”

  “What?”

  Her eyes widened, “Do you realize what these are?”

  Russell's mind was fixed on the handwritten ink of the ancient pages. He tried not to jump to conclusions, “They're probably just journals.”

  “Russell, this book's thousands of years old,” she said, fingering the spine's crude, leather threads.

  “Exactly, it would've faded—”

  Maggie shook her head, “Think about it. The Reverberant sent us here, to the only place we might find clues. This must've been what he wanted us to find.”

  “That's a gamble, especially since the words should've dissolved eons ago.”

  “Trust me, Russell, if the paper was advanced enough, the ink would stay forever. My work's the same—if the canvas didn't slowly decay, the ink would never fade.”

  “So, what you're saying's—”

  “Russell, this book was hand-written for the first Protectorate—look at it.” She turned it over, “It's bound with some type of papyrus in leather. They made it to survive eons and it has!”

  He swallowed breathlessly and marveled at the book. If Maggie was right, then the knowledge passed from the Ha-Shan to the Protectorate remained here, unadulterated. Inside might be answers to all the questions that had plagued them since meeting with She-La.

  More importantly, it might specifically reference the weapon and its location. The Reverberant had to have known this, and sent them to it. Now only a translation could tell them for certain.

  The book also defied something Russell had yet to admit aloud; his skepticism. As a person who sought physical proof before drawing conclusions, the idea of the Ha-Shan's existence had remained a work of fiction thus far.

  This book changed that. Indeed, it cemented at least their existence in his mind. While he required further evidence for some things, he was by no means stubborn. The book's obvious age, in conjunction with the time-line of events relayed, swayed him.

  “Amazing,” he breathed. “But if their language is so old, I seriously doubt we could ever read it.”

  Maggie spun the ring in her lip, thinking. She passed the book over, “Hold on to it.”

  She pulled the others down and carried them to a desk, flipped them open beside one another. She examined the pages closely with a puzzled look.

  “They're all the same,” she said with a hint of disappointment

  The words repeated in Russell's head, “Different versions?”

  “Repeated again and again, but—” Maggie stopped mid-sentence, examined two passages closely. “I can't read them exactly, but this phrase differs between the two.”

  He hoped to compel her forward, “So it's not word for word?”

  “No. I can't read them, but I can tell. Here's another.” She hesitated and it hit her. “Each one's in different handwriting! This one seems to build off the last's thoughts. I recognize some words, but not enough of them.”

  “Build off? For what purpose? To translate the first book?”

  She shrugged, “Maybe. But with enough years between the first and latter versions, the ancient language may've become indecipherable. Which means someone in the Protectorate may've begun rewriting what they could translate and guessing at the missing sections.”

  “So either the Reverberant or the Keepers,” he guessed. “And since then they've refining their thoughts?”

  “Possibly.” She considered the knowledge before her. “We need to take them all.”

  “Why?”

  She glanced at him critically, “Why else would the Reverberant send us here? We were meant to find these books. Of everything else here, what looks important?”

  Russell glanced around; however interesting the library was, the stack of Protectorate volumes were its real prize. He nodded, removed the duffel bag from his back, “Alright.” They arranged the books inside with care and Russell zipped it closed, left it on the floor. He pulled a chair from a desk to sit. “Now, what do we do with them?”

  Maggie positioned a chair in front of him, mentally exhausted. She shook her head, “We still have no idea where to start looking. The weapon could be anywhere.”

  Russell shared her defeat. With the Reverberant and Keepers dead, the only answers lay in volumes the two could never decipher alone.

  He admitted his lack of direction with overtones of despair, “We don't have the resources. There's no way we'll find it alone.”

  Maggie agreed. Even if Omega didn't catch them first, the Reverberant's death solidified their inability to decipher the language. Moreover, the inevitable chaos within the Protectorate now made any hope of future aid a lost cause.

  She was once more struck by what she'd said about the Protectorate's death, and found herself wondering whether they'd truly led Omega to the temple, or if the slaughter was inevitable regardless. The point seemed moot, but an idea arose; radical and outrageous even in her own mind. It had to be presented.

  She looked to Russell. His skepticism foiled her gleam.

  “No Russell, we don't have the resources, but I know who does.”

  “You're not suggesting—”

  Maggie threw her hands up, recognizing their desperation, “We're at a dead end. What do we have to lose at this point?”

  He went dark, “Our lives! Maggie, we can't risk it.”

  “We just need to convince them helping us is worth the cost of letting us live.”

  “We've been running from them this whole time, and now you want to work with them? Have you lost fucking your mind?”

  She waved him off, “We want to find the weapon. So do they. We have information they need, and they're willing to do anything to get it. We're in the perfect bargaining position—”

  “We're in the perfect position to be ambushed!”

  “Russell, we're low on food and running out of water, but we have what they need. The Reverberant's dead and the Protectorate's gone, and we have no loyalties either way. We've only been running because they've been chasing us. At this point, we're their only hope of credible information.”

  He growled frustration against her logic, “You can't seriously expect this to work.”

  She scoffed, “Don't be dramatic.”

  His voice sharpened cynically, “Maggie, by any sense of the definition, this is a bad idea. If they don't deal, they're going to hit us twice as hard to get what we have instead.”

  “Then we don't let them know everything all at once.”

  “Then why would they deal?”

  “I don't know!” She yelled, frustrated. She tried to calm herself, pled with him, “Give me another option Russell. We're in the middle of fucking Tibet without a clue or a pot to piss in. If we're lucky, we'll last the week or more it'll take to reach civilization. Otherwise, we'll be murdered in some god-forsaken patch of woods trying to find another solution and starving to death.”

  She huffed, rubbed her temples again, head throbbing from rising blood pressure. He watched, thinking how dangerous a situation either path presented. He wasn't entirely persuaded to her plan, but wasn't sure he ever could be.

  He spoke with a silent admission of defeat, “You're insane, Maggie… but, I guess that doesn't make you wrong.”

  She stood to pace in thought, “We need to play this right. We'll have to be near them for a while, but getting through the door alive's going to be hardest. We just need a way to guarantee our safety.”

  “How 'bout a hand grenade?”

  Maggie suddenly lit up, headed for the tunnel, “C'mon, if we hurry we might still be in range.”

  Russell followed with apprehension, considering the impulsiveness of the decision. He thought of the infinite ways things might go wrong, the million more ways it was sure to, but climbed the ladder through the broken trap door. Maggie stepped from the hut into the afternoon, fiddled with her radio.

  She looked to Russell with a deep
breath and pressed the Lash at her throat, “This is runners to Omega strike-force: If you're listening, we have a proposition for you.”

  Maggie released the Lash. There was a crackle of static as she wondered whether she'd spoken in vain.

  A long silence passed, then static hissed over a sneering reply, “Tell me why I care.”

  Maggie stilled a rush within her, “We know what you're looking for. We suggest a trade.”

  Silence. Then, West responded, “What could you possibly hope to trade?”

  She put a hand to a hip, “Information, and a possible means of locating the weapon.”

  Reese shouted, “Why not just kill you and take it?”

  “How's that worked out so far?”

  “You bitch! I'll have your head mounted on my fucking—”

  A heavy thud interrupted her tirade.

  “You want the weapon? You need us. Alive. You want to risk killing us, it's your asses.”

  There was an audible scuffle, but West replied, “What do you want?”

  She watched Russell turn away, “Safe passage. In exchange, we help find and decipher the device.”

  “Why?”

  She spoke now with confidence, “You've been chasing us for nothing. Whatever you think we took in Oakton died with the Protectorate agents. We're only trying to survive. You've already gotten everything else you wanted. The fight at the temple killed the last of the Protectorate that could help. We're your only hope now. You want to find the weapon. We want you off our backs. You honor the deal and our goals are aligned… for now.”

  “So, don't kill you,” West replied smugly. “That all?”

  “You and your people remain unarmed,” Maggie damned with finality.

  There was a tense silence on the other end. West replied with an obvious malice, but Maggie sensed his helplessness against Omega's running directive.

  “When do we begin?”

  “I'll contact you in twelve hours with a rendezvous. If you're armed when you arrive, the deal is off. Understood?” She glanced at Russell; he eyed her uneasily.

  “Copy,” West bit. “Re-establish contact at oh-two-thirty. Out.”

  Maggie turned off the radio and headed back into the hut. Russell's eyes lingered on the village a moment longer.