“Hi honey,” Nicola acknowledged Peel with a combination of fear and irony.
Suddenly the Major’s worst fears had become reality, that Nicola had become entangled in his secret world of military and covert operations, and used against him.
Reznikova laughed perhaps sensing Peel’s thoughts. “What’s it going to be, Major?” She waved at the Russian pilots to drops their arms, which they did. “You kill me? If you do, the lovely Nicola here dies immediately afterwards. Then it’s a showdown between yourself and the very capable Mr. Anderson. My money is on Anderson.”
Peel didn’t hesitate. He lifted his pistol in a non-threatening manner, removed his finger from the trigger, flicked on the safety and placed the weapon on the concrete floor. He then kicked it along the ground towards Reznikova with his foot.
She lifted it quickly, pointed the weapon at Peel.
“Happy now?” he asked hoping he didn’t sound as defeated as he felt.
She smiled, cocked her head in a seductive tilt, even though this game of suggestion no longer needed to be played. “You know I have to take you with me?”
“Fine, but leave Nicola out of this.”
“What, so she can run off dutifully and raise the alarm? I don’t think so.”
The operative called Anderson pushed Nicola forward. Reznikova took over and led the protesting Nicola up and inside the Challenger 300. Anderson then came up behind Peel, punched him hard in the space between his left shoulder and spine, sending Peel to the ground. While Peel was disorientated, his back aching from the blow, a zip lock tie was secured around his wrists binding him.
“No funny business, Peel,” said the assassin in an American accent that didn’t sound like a put-up job. He pulled Peel to his feet with strength that came only from pumping iron in the gym two to three hours a day. He frisked Peel looking for other weapons finding none. Anderson then forced Peel up the stairs and into the aircraft. Inside, Nicola was already in a seat and secured there by the SVR spy.
“When you’re done with him load the crate,” Reznikova spoke quickly.
The heavy set man nodded and disappeared.
“Right,” the Russian waved Peel’s Glock in his face, “into that seat.”
Peel did what he was told and sat so he could face Nicola. This was both good and bad. Good because they could potentially converse and plan and escape. Bad because she could be tortured before his very eyes—a more effective means of extracting information than by torturing him directly.
Once he was seated, Reznikova used a zip lock to secure Peel to his seat. To the pilots she said, “Are we ready for take-off?”
“Cleared for 0620 hours,” the man said in his Russian accent now that there was no need for pretense. “We’re going through the final flight checks.”
She looked at her watch. “Fifteen minutes from now, perfect.”
At that moment Anderson came on board, dragging the crate behind him. He secured the heavy load between the seats on Peel’s left, Nicola’s right. Reznikova stepped into the cockpit with the pilots and closed the door behind her.
The assassin still wearing his sunglasses took the spare seat opposite Peel. Perhaps this was so he could look diagonally across at Peel, and he wondered why. He felt he knew the man from somewhere, an old Intel file perhaps. That seemed right but he couldn’t remember which file, or if the contents were important here today.
“I’ve never dropped a man out of a plane before,” the assassin sneered. “Don’t be the first.”
Ignoring Anderson, Peel turned to Nicola and said apologetically, “I’m sorry about this.”
Nicola smiled, shrugged, but it was all for show. She was scared like him now. “I’m sorry too.”
“Don’t be, this was my fault.”
Anderson snarled. “Shut the fuck up, the both of you.”
Peel noticed the bloody scar on Nicola’s lips, the bruising on her bare arms where Anderson had manhandled her, and swelling around her left jaw. He tensed, forced down his rage against the thug who had assaulted the woman he loved.
“The brute came into our room,” Nicola explained ignoring Anderson’s threat. “You’d already left for work and I didn’t hear him enter.”
“We’ll get out of this in one piece, I promise you.”
“I said shut it!” yelled Anderson, pulling a switchblade and waving the sharp end in the vicinity of Nicola’s left eye. The assassin was smart enough to know that firearms were a hollow threat on an aircraft where a single bullet could depressurize the cabin and send the craft into a tail spin without a happy ending.
Reznikova appeared carrying a small tool kit, grinned when she saw Anderson waving his knife, and took her own seat opposite Anderson. She patted the TOP SECRET crate between her and Anderson’s feet like it was a favorite pet, then strapped herself in.
“Taxiing now, and lift-off in ten minutes. Looks like you didn’t instruct anyone to ground us, Peel.”
He said nothing because she was correct, he hadn’t covered his tracks. It had been less than half an hour since he had seen the news report about the dead woman washed up on the beach, recognized who she was even though the Darwin police had not, and finally figured out who Reznikova was pretending to be. There had been no time to act other than to race to the airfield in an attempt to stop the Russian spy himself. With hindsight this was terrible plan.
All too soon the Challenger 300 was airborne. No one said a word and each passenger expressed their anxiety in their own way. Reznikova would only stare out the window as Darwin disappeared behind the curve of the Earth to be swallowed by the expanse of ocean. Anderson put away his knife and played with his thumbs. He didn’t look like the kind of man who could sit still for very long and maybe Peel could use this to his advantage. Nicola not surprisingly expressed a combination of terror and being pissed off that no amount of smiles from Peel would erase.
As they gained altitude and speed, Peel gathered information. Both Anderson and Reznikova appeared alert and fresh. Judging by the angle of the sun through the small windows, they were flying northwest towards Indonesia. He was under no illusion they were headed for Singapore, suspecting that their destination was much closer than that.
When they had been airborne for twenty minutes and at cruising altitude, Reznikova spoke again. “I think I’m going to open the crate now.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” countered Peel.
“And why is that, you terrible man?”
Nicola laughed at the Russian’s blatant use of seductive banter. “Because my boyfriend knows what he’s talking about, bitch!”
This prompted Reznikova to slap Nicola hard.
Peel reacted instinctively and leapt from his chair to protect Nicola, only to find the zip lock held him secure to the arm rest.
Reznikova laughed. “He loves you, doesn’t he? How sweet is that?”
Nicola snarled and Peel could see she was frustrated by every passing comment where Reznikova treated her as a nobody. “You have no idea what is going down here, do you?”
Ignoring Nicola, Reznikova turned to Peel. “So, Major, you seem very passionate. Why shouldn’t I open the box?”
The Russian agent struck Peel as the kind of woman who was very comfortable around men and used to playing them to get what she wanted, yet she was threatened by attractive, intelligent women and unsure how to handle them. Something else he or Nicola might able to use to their advantage.
“You know where the artifact came from?” he asked.
“Antarctica.”
He nodded impressed that she knew this. “But specifically? No? It came from the Pentapod city, Elder City. That’s the alien city your Russian masters would like to know all about, and what Nicola is referring to.”
“So?”
Peel’s gut tightened. “Then you know what I know, that thing can’t be safe.”
“Nice try, but it can’t be that dangerous if the Americans gave it to you to study.”
“T
hey gave it to my government, who will study it very, very carefully.”
She laughed again. “You don’t believe that. You don’t believe anyone should be trusted with the secrets of past aliens who’ve colonized our world long before we did, all but extinct now. You believe we should destroy all the artifacts they left behind.”
Peel didn’t know how to respond, because she understood his motivations perfectly. But more than he feared being kidnapped and tortured, and that Nicola and he might both be dead by day’s end, he feared what might lie inside that crate and what it might do to ‘change’ or ‘mutilate’, or ‘evolve’ them. There were plenty of worse fates than death, as he had unfortunately witnessed too often in his past.
“No come back?”
He said nothing. He knew she would open the crate and there was nothing he could do to stop her. Her sense of greed was far more powerful that her sense of self-preservation.
Still grinning, she took a small crowbar from her toolkit, and began prying nails from the crate. Soon the lid was removed and Peel didn’t want to look. Yet he stared because it was too terrifying not to, as did Nicola. Anything could have been in that crate.
And yet the contents surprised him. A single item lay inside, a solid reflective twenty-sided shape, each face a perfect triangle. The size of football, it was decorated with numerous pentagrams comprising of dot arrangements. Peel knew this to be Pentapod writing. There were what looked to be touch buttons on each face, which Peel hoped Reznikova would not activate.
“What is it?” Anderson asked. He too looked to be physically repulsed by the thing.
“An alien weapon,” Nicola explained, even though she knew nothing about it not having the Code-89 clearance Peel did. She did however, like Peel, have past experiences with horrors from other dimensions. She knew everything that this device would stand for, and like him, knew in the core of her being it could bring them nothing of any value or meaning, and would likely kill them all.
“Really?” said Reznikova, amused with her competition while the advantage was on her side. “How would you know such things?”
Nicola’s eyes darkened, expressing her hatred for the woman as much as Reznikova must have hated her.
“You play with it, it kills you.”
Ignoring Nicola, Reznikova reached to touch a button.
“You really want to do that,” Peel interrupted, “while we are in an aircraft high above the ocean?”
“Major, if I don’t examine this myself before we deliver it to my masters, how do I know I’ve brought them anything of value?”
“Trust me, you haven’t.”
Anderson stepped up, lent over Peel and punched him hard in the gut.
Peel gasped from the shock of an agonizing pain, but no wind seemed to move in his throat. The pain was both sharp and spread across is midsection quickly. He thought he was about to spew up blood, but thankfully it was only spit and bile came forward. He got it all over his uniform.
“You bastard!” Nicola cried.
Anderson slapped her hard bringing red welts to her face. “You two don’t listen, do you? I said shut the fuck up.”
With the lesson in obedience at an end, Rezinkova waited for silence, and then pressed her hand against a random button.
#
Elder City, Miskatonic Mountains, Antarctica, July 1995
The winds of the polar south raged as continent-sized screams, whipped anything caught outside the meager human shelters to near breaking point, and chilled like bullets of ice. The minus forty temperatures took no account of the wind factor. This was Antarctica during the long dark winter, when there would be no sun for six months and no escape from monotony and boredom, and from the cold.
Coaldale stood rigid leaning into the gale, frozen and complaining. He gave up on his cigarette that wouldn’t stay lit and flicked it into the winds where it was instantly lost. Tightening his snow camouflaged uniform he looked up, and up, and up further still until it was too dark to see along the two monolithic alien artifacts before him, despite the powerful floodlights all over it. In that moment he experienced the enormity of the artificial mountains before him, and realized that he hated Antarctica because the continent hated him.
He was going to die here.
The artifacts—as best as anyone were able to tell—were two perpetual motion machines each the size of tiny mountains. Impossibly riveted contraptions resembling ice yet forged from exotic matter far stronger and durable than materials humans could conceive of, let alone build. The surface could not be dented by diamond tipped drill heads or the blast from a military grade fuel air explosive. The Antarctic wind had buffeted them for millions of years and had done nothing to erode even a single atomic layer off its surface. They had remained functional for nine hundred million years through continental drifts and the rise of complex life upon the Earth, producing a bizarre form of energy the human explorers had yet to understand, or tap, but a source that had kept the Pentapod City functional and self-repairing for the last fifth of Earth’s four and a half billion year history.
No one knew what powered them. Everyone wanted answers of course, and not to know at the same time.
The Junior CIA Case Officer accompanying Coaldale, Tyler Jansen, chattered through blue lips, snapped off the icicles forming above his eyes taking the eyebrows with them.
“How long did you say we’ve known about this?” Coaldale pointed with his M16, itching to use the assault rifle on the smaller, weaker shoggoths that were supposed to be lurking around here, but had yet to be seen. He wanted to kill something to relieve the boredom but also to convince himself that the unseen enemy was not as indestructible as everyone made them out to be. “Jansen?” he said again when the CIA man had not heard him over the howling winds, or had ignored him. He repeated the question.
“Since 1933, when the Starkweather Moore Expedition mapped elements of this… Elder City…” The CIA man was casual in his use of the new nickname for the Pentapod ruins circling amongst the new recruits. “RESOLUTION ZERO has been in place since the foundation of the United Nations, and the US has maintained a permanent presence here since the start of the Second World War. As for this location, and the deeper levels of the city, we’ve only recently begun to properly explore them.”
Coaldale grinned, feeling like he was being lectured on a secret history of his people, and probably was. Truth was he didn’t really care much about the details. He only talked to pass the time.
“What exactly have you explored, Jansen?”
The CIA man gulped. It was unusual to see a hardened field agent who’d seen action in Vietnam, Beirut and El Salvador go weak at the knees and clammy at the mere mention of venturing further ‘into the abyss’, as the Marine contingents assigned to RESOLUTION ZERO and its sister operation GREY NEBULA liked to call it. All kinds of soldiers had been deployed to explore and reconnoiter. None had come out again, at least none who weren’t gibbering wrecks. Coaldale didn’t want to be another in a long list of the dead, maimed or mentally wounded. He’d signed up to fight human monsters, not this kind of shit he didn’t understand.
“I mean you really don’t know what’s down there, do you?”
“No…” Jansen made an effort to project confidence, but Coaldale could see had none. “No real intelligence at all.”
Coaldale’s grin grew large. “So you call in the US Rangers. When everyone else fails, you turn to us?”
Jansen nodded. “We just want information, that’s all, about who the Pentapods are, and what these servants they kept referring to in their literature are, these…” he hesitated to use the word, “…these shoggoths.”
“I’ve seen the footage,” Coaldale explained. “I know what I’m up against. What I don’t know,” he said kicking a black shiny icosahedron on the ground next to them that he’d only just noticed, half buried in the snow, “is what this is?”
#
Stage One, Tetrahedron, October 2012
The world flipp
ed as edges and corners unfolded from higher dimensions into space-time, reformed like multiple complex sliding doors joining together like interlocking puzzles until a four-sided room enclosed them.
Disorientated, Peel looked up, realized he was lying on a triangular floor, but not the same floors as Nicola, Zoya Reznikova and Anderson. Their cell was a tetrahedron approximately ten meters along each wall length. What was slanting roofs to Peel were floors to the others. Most disturbing was a splash of red suspended in the air like the spray of blood from a slaughtered animal, and across the room were tiny egg shapes also hanging suspended and uncannily resembling bullets.
Anderson stood quickly, snarled at an unusual angle to Peel because gravity was different for him, and fired his Colt 10mm semi-automatic.
In the seconds Peel knew he would not be able to react fast enough he realized he was a dead man… until the bullet remained suspended in the air, not moving.
Just like the bullets already frozen and suspended that were here before them.
As soon as Anderson leapt towards Peel to tackle him, he too froze like a statue and floated suspended in zero gravity.
Peel stood, bewildered, looked up at Nicola who was looking up at him.
“Stay where you are,” he commanded.
He took a small pocket knife from a false compartment in his boot that Anderson had failed to find and cut the zip lock bindings. He then stepped from his floor to Anderson’s floor doing his best to ignore the weird sensation of changing gravity vectors until he was within touching distance of the assassin. Anderson and the bullet appeared frozen, but more likely he was in stasis, or very near stasis and moving at glacial speeds.
In a single motion, Peel snatched Anderson’s sidearm while punching him hard in the kidney. Contact made with the surface wall/floor again, Anderson collapsed on the triangle next to Peel. The Major punched the assassin again and again until the man was too winded to move.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 29