Evil Triumphant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  At those two places, 12-foot-wide ramps led up at a 30° angle for about 25 feet, then leveled off 10 feet above the level of the floor. There they connected to a 20-foot diameter disk made of the same synthetic, insulating black coating that covered the walls and floors in the cylinder stations. The ramps held the disk firmly in the center of the cylinder, but the gap around the cylinder edge still made for a long fall if anyone on the disk was not careful.

  Running perpendicular to the ramps, a blue crystal lattice appeared to have grown up out of the disk’s midline. I could see no seam between the disk and the crystals, but I hardly thought they were made of the same material. I could see no structure within the crystal, but somehow it had grown up into a hollow rectangle with rounded corners both inside and out. Twenty-five feet long and half again as high, it appeared to have been made all of one piece and naturally faceted, because I could see no signs of workmanship.

  I turned to ask Crowley what it was, but he had already moved around toward the east to a control bank, it looked more complicated than anything I would have imagined in a facility built in America, for the buttons had no icons to suggest their use. As I studied it more closely, I seemed to recall having seen something similar to it before, and I suddenly recalled a dimensional gate control panel I had seen and used in Plutonia. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Crowley frowned, “It’s meant to look like it, but it doesn’t really work.” Each of the buttons on the 10-by-10 grid glowed with one of the colors that corresponded to the mnemonic Roy G. Biv: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. I knew that after violet came ultra-violet, which I couldn’t see, and then the “off position. Selecting the correct pattern of lights would program the dimensional gate to link to another gate. If that remote gate was receptive, stepping through the gate would instantly transport a person to that other point.

  The occultist punched the buttons through a new color pattern. I glanced at the gate and saw nothing happen. Crowley waited for a moment, then reset the original pattern and shrugged. “This thing has power running through it, but it cannot interrogate a remote gate. I punched up the code for the gate at Pygmalion’s place. I should have gotten a new pattern on the board that I would have had to complete so I could travel there, but nothing.”

  I pointed at the crystal rectangle. “So is that a dimensional gate or not?”

  He shrugged. “I think so, and I think it’s operational, but I don’t know why it would be. In any event, if it is, the coding is in that crystal and it only goes one place.” He reached beneath the right side of the console, then nodded. “Power switch is in the “on” position.”

  Mickey scowled. “Does it go to the bad place?”

  I nodded. “I think we’d best find out.”

  I loosened the Colt Krait in its holster and saw Crowley do the same with the Beretta M9 he had chosen to bring on the expedition. From the start, we had known we would have to try to go through any dimensional gate we could find, and would have preferred to be loaded with heavy weapons and explosives. Unfortunately, the way we had to get into the base precluded that, so the two of us settled for using pistols that carried Teflon-coated, armor-piercing bullets. Hardly subtle, but if things got nasty, subtle was not much of a concern.

  I led the way up the ramp and moved toward one edge. Crowley moved to the other, leaving Mickey between us. “On three, gentlemen,” I instructed them. “One... two...three.”

  Stepping through a dimensional gateway is normally a disorienting experience. Colors flashed before my eyes, but that came from the transition from a dark cylinder to the bright sunlight that greeted us on the other side. The external heat also spiked and could have led me to believe we had just exchanged night for day in the Arizona desert, but the air smelled different and felt even less humid. While experiencing none of the discomfort dimensional gating usually causes, I knew we were far away from Earth.

  It took my eyes a couple of seconds to compensate for the shift from dark to light. When vision returned, I found myself standing on one platform of a whole tower created from the blue gemstone that made up the gates in the Nevada base. I looked down at my feet and saw the disk on which I stood had been coated with the black, no-skid covering as back on the other side, and I could not be 100% certain the same disk with the same rectangle was not existing in both places at the same time.

  Out beyond the tower, as far as I could see to the horizon, a city built of black-purple obsidian rose up out of a black sand desert. While some of the outlying buildings seemed little more than shelters constructed like houses of cards from stone slabs, the hub of the city was very much a work of art. Each building appeared not so much built as sculpted, and I had no doubt that from the air the effect would be as stunning as an Aztec calendar stone or a primitive sand painting.

  Vast though the city was, and as captivating a vision as it constructed, it did not hold my attention for long. To my right, Mickey nodded his head emphatically, telling me wordlessly that we had arrived in the bad place. Beyond him, I saw Crowley’s shadowform and he clearly understood what Mickey meant to communicate. We had arrived at our destination and now we needed to return, if that were possible.

  Unfortunately, standing directly to the north of us, three men were enjoying the view of the city. Two were dressed in suitcoats and white shirts, with the conservative sort of haircut I had grown to expect on young executives. The third man stood tall and gangling. The Build-more security uniform he wore in no way disguised his lack of shoulder breadth and the stiff collar called attention to his scrawny neck.

  “...Now this is just a Saudi Arabian test site of course, since it’s petrodollars building the place in Nevada, but wait until we hook up with Hawaii...” the security man droned. His companions took notice of us first, and he turned to follow their lines of sight. “Oh, hello,” he began, then his voice sank and his hand started to go for the pistol on his right him. “I know you. You’re Tycho Caine.”

  Chapter 27

  “And you’re Watson Dodd.” I knotted my face in a snarl and pointed to a spot beyond him. “Over there, now!” I ignored his half-drawn gun and passed between him and the other two men with long purposeful strides. “I said now!”

  It seemed like a lifetime ago, but I had met Watson Dodd and his wife through Marit Fisk, a woman who had been one of Coyote’s trusted aides. Marit and I had become an item, and our break-up was anything but pretty. Watson had, at that time, been in Buildmore’s Operations division and what little of his talk I had caught here showed he should have been back there pursuing marketing goals. When Sinclair MacNeal had left Build-more, Dodd had been elevated to replace him in the security hierarchy because Darius had wanted a puppet he could dominate in that position.

  Dodd’s presence explained the uneasiness among the guards on the site. I knew the bluff I was going to try to run might not work, leaving me with the alternative of killing Dodd and the two men with him. I was reluctant to do that — more because of Mickey’s presence than because I knew Dodd’s wife had been very pregnant a couple of months back. Killing all of them might have been more efficient, but in resisting that course of action I guess I found the down side of compassion.

  I would have smiled at that thought, but saving Dodd required an angry snarl on my face. I kept my voice a strained whisper. “Dodd, what the hell are you doing here?”

  Watson blinked his eyes and pushed his glasses back into their place on the bridge of his hawk-beak. “I...wait, I’m security here, I should ask the questions.”

  I stared at him hard enough to bore holes clean through his skull. “Security? Security? If you’d been doing your freaking job, Dodd, how the hell would I be here? When I heard you were in charge of things, I figured my security check would be tough, not a piece of cake like this. You’ve disappointed me, and you’ll have made the sultan very, very angry.”

  “What? What sultan?”

  I shook my head. “Okay, you get this once and you forget it immedi
ately. You didn’t hear it from me, and the only reason I’m telling you is because you knew Marit, got it?”

  He nodded, eager to be let in on a secret.

  “I heard you telling those two this was in Saudi. Anyone who isn’t a neuron shy of a synapse knows it can’t be Saudi, it’s Brunei. The sultan hired me to find out how secure this whole operation was. Even Darius does not know I’m doing this, nor should he. If he finds out, you get burned, and I won’t do that to a friend of Marit’s.”

  “What happened to her?”

  For a half-second I contemplated telling him the truth. Part of me wanted to see how he would take learning that she had been turned into an agent by one of Fiddleback’s minions and that, because of her, the Dark Lord himself almost took over Phoenix and the world. “She and I were working for the sultan gathering information on investments. A rival terminated her.”

  I looked beyond his right shoulder at the other two men. “Who are they? Should we kill them?”

  Dodd’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “Kill them? No! They’re just two guys I knew in Ops. They’re okay.”

  “If you vouch for them, that’s fine with me. They’ll have to develop amnesia.”

  “What?”

  “They never saw this place, never saw us, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Good.” I frowned for a moment. “Look, I’m not going to report this breach, got it? In fact, I’m going to fax you a password- and-challenge system that I want you to have in place by next Thursday. Some time after that, I will try another penetration, a small party, just like this time. I want your people sharp so we can impress the sultan.”

  Dodd nodded solemnly. “I appreciate this. Security stuff is still new to me.”

  I smiled. “Dottie deliver yet?”

  Dodd grinned ear to ear. “A boy, Chipper.”

  I hope he takes after your wife’s side of the family. “That’s great. After the next attempt, I’d like to visit with your family, if that’s okay?”

  The security man nodded emphatically. “We’d love it.”

  “Good, we’ll set it up then.” I shook his hand. “You’ll get my fax by tomorrow or the next day.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  “And you’ ll take care of those two, right?” As I asked the question I let my jacket gap open and he saw my pistol.

  “Yes.”

  “Great, then. I’ll be seeing you.”

  I slapped him on the shoulder, then headed back up the ramp and walked through the gateway. On the dark side, I paused for a moment to let my eyes adjust again to the night, then I laughed in relief at having bluffed Dodd. I looked at my watch and saw that little journey there had pushed the analog portion of it well into the middle of the afternoon while the digital display correctly listed the time as 3:05 a.m.

  Crowley and Mickey joined me on the platform, and we left the facility in silence. Once back in the car and headed toward Mercury, I looked over at Crowley. “So, any theories about what that gate was back there?”

  The occultist frowned. “I saw what you saw, and I have a guess. It’s basically this: Those crystals either co-exist in two dimensions — which would require an incredible amount of energy, and I saw no evidence of that being pumped in there — or they have identical lattices. In effect, they would be clones of each other. When energy is pumped into them, it creates a link that bridges the gap between the two. Going through there did not feel like it normally does. I’ve heard rumors out there of such special gates, but this is the first I’ve seen of them.”

  “Mickey, that was the bad place?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good. All we have to do now is get in, bring Fiddleback in, and let him eliminate Pygmalion.”

  Crowley smiled wryly. “Kind of like scuttling a ship to get rid of rats.”

  “It is that, but when a rat is promoting himself to captain of the ship, almost any solution that will work is viable.”

  Crowley asked me what I had said to the security man. “I told him we were working security for the person who was financing the project. I told him I’d fax him a password-and-challenge system so he could have it in place by next Thursday, when we return.”

  “Ah, the fox instructing the chickens how to guard the henhouse.”

  I nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Think he bought it?”

  “I don’t know, but I hope so.” I gave Crowley a sly smile. “If he does what we ask, it becomes an easy job to break in again and do what we need to do. If not...”

  Mickey leaned forward from the back seat. “We play rough.”

  “Very, very rough, Mickey. Very rough.”

  The Peregrine landed on top of the Lorica tower just before dawn. I dictated instructions for Lilith, then caught four hours of sleep. I would have preferred it to be dreamless, but visions of Marit’s death played through my head again and again. I wrestled control of the dreams away from my unconscious mind and directed them toward the happier, passionate moments we had known together, but whenever I got caught up in eroticism, the dreams melted away, leaving me skeletal nightmares.

  The person I had been for the vast majority of my life would have ignored the dreams, but I had changed. I didn’t know if I had truly loved Marit — I don’t know if I was capable of love before knowing compassion — but the new person I had become demanded I re-examine her death and my part in it. Had I a choice in doing what I did? Did she really have to die?

  I knew better than to fall into a guilt trap. Marit had betrayed Coyote, me and the rest. She had allied herself with the creature Fiddleback had molded into Nerys Loring. She had sent other friends to their deaths, and she had almost had me killed on at least one occasion. That she deserved to die was not a question. What I did want to know was if there was any way I could have dealt with her treason without killing her.

  The fact that I had been trained as an assassin meant I had an understanding of almost all the antipersonnel devices that had ever been created. I had manufactured the thing that killed Marit. Examining the alternatives, I could find nothing that would have been 100% certain to neutralize her as a threat. Anything less effective could not be trusted, nor could she.

  She had given me no choice. She had gambled everything against a promise of immortality and eternal youth. I fulfilled half that bargain, for she never got any older. I would have preferred it to be otherwise, but in connecting the dots, I created a picture that excluded her.

  I climbed out of bed, showered and dressed in sports slacks, a polo shirt baggy enough to hide the vest I wore, and some running shoes. I placed a quick call to Bat, got a grunt of assent in return for my requests, and called Lilith. She reported that she had begun to procure what I needed from her and that all would be ready by dusk.

  My call to Bat, among other things, had caused him to set up an appointment for me at noon in a tiny Eclipse pawn shop that huddled up against the bulk of City Center. When I walked in, it looked to me as if nothing at all had changed since my first visit there months ago. The teenager behind the fenced-in counter chuckled slightly as he read from A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. I smiled slightly as he looked up and started to share something with me, but he just mumbled, “Snuff is a killer,” and went back to his reading.

  I threaded my way through shelves and shelves of the dust-laden detritus of civilization. I saw a whole host of appliances that had been manufactured in the United States only a dozen years before, but ignorance of how to affect the little repairs they might need meant that they rusted away to nothing while people made do with inferior products from the Russian Commonwealth or Mexico. People, by their reluctance to learn how to make changes, just grew used to accepting less and less in their lives.

  I reached a gateway in the back, and the kid behind the counter buzzed me through. Beyond it, down a narrow corridor that went left and back right, put me in front of a steel door. A periscope built into the panel above it swiveled around to s
tudy me, then the door slid open. Beyond it, I descended a spiral staircase and entered a low ceiling’s bunker that bristled with a wide selection of weapons.

  A dwarf slapped the handles on the periscope up and it descended into the floor. “Good afternoon. I believe you were Tycho Caine when I met you last, but the television said you were Michael Loring when you were all but killed a few weeks ago.”

  I shrugged and shook his hand. “You cannot believe everything you hear on the television, I guess, Mr. Joniak.”

  “No.” Bronislaw Joniak climbed up on a stool behind a counter. “Luckily for you, Bat said you were also known as Coyote. You don’t look like the Coyote I knew, but you’d not be wearing that name if it had not been assigned to you. What do you need?”

  I looked around the dimly lit room, peeking at objects half hidden by the railroad tie pillars that held the ceiling up. A Chrysler Combat Exoskeleton stood guard over the back half of the room, preventing anyone from moving in toward the confusion of crates nestled there. Off to my right, in what passed for the client waiting area, Joniak had a number of sample weapons mounted on a pegboard, and I studied it before I began to place my order.

  “This will be very expensive, and I will need some trustworthy personnel to fill out my ranks.”

  Joniak made a note on the pad he held in his lap. “I have contacts with an ex-Ranger company that maintains a survivalist community near New River. They’re clean and experienced. They’re also expensive.”

  “Fine, contact them. One weeks’ work, with an option to extend for two more. Standard compensation with signing bonuses and completion payments. I only want those who are night-combat trained, and I have a special screening they will have to go through at the Sunburst Foundation. If they wash out during the screening, they still keep their signing bonus and will be on reserve in case we need them.”