Evil Triumphant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  From the suite in the top of the Lorica tower, my people prepared to head up to the roof and into the Peregrine designated Kestrel-1. Before we departed, after trying on our nightvision goggles and doing a radio check, I gave everyone an appreciative nod. “Look, we all know better than to think we’ll all get through this unscathed. I hope we will — I pray we will — but I fear it won’t be so. I think all of us have agreed that stopping Pygmalion and Fiddleback is vital, so we’re willing to make the ultimate sacrifice if we are called upon to do so.

  “I just want to let you know that your courage and effort over the past months is what has made me willing to risk life and limb. I was created a minion of a Dark Lord, but Coyote freed me from his service. In my association with you, I have recaptured my humanity. Without it, I would not be here, and because of it, I am going to do what must be done to stop the evil of the Dark Lords.”

  I glanced at my watch and saw both the digital and analog portions reading midnight. “The Witching Hour. It’s time.”

  Bat smiled and brandished his Ml 6A2. “Let’s go make something bleed.”

  With Lilith at the controls, Kestrel-1 headed off to the northwest, skirting City Center and cutting between the Digital Express and Build-more complexes on our shot out toward Mercury. I glanced at the Build-more citadel and saw lights burning in the offices at the top. I could easily imagine Watson Dodd there sweating over how he would implement my security selections in time for another test penetration later in the week.

  Kestrel-2 and Joniak’s bird, designated Merlin, joined up from the west. While the raid was well within the range of all three choppers, Lilith had made arrangements for all three aircraft to refuel and, if needed, recover themselves to a small private airport outside Kingman. If we had pushed it and had not refueled, we could have made the trip in two hours, but haste was not an issue, so it ended up taking closer to three-and-a-half hours.

  Once we were on our way up from Phoenix, Lilith radioed instructions to the Rangers, and they began their infiltration of the building site. Earlier in the day, they had gone up into the Mercury area and used old DOE access roads to bypass the town itself. With the three-hour lead time, we expected they would be able to penetrate the site and position themselves to take out any pockets of resistance the guards might create when things started to get hot. One group was to secure the approach to the base, preventing reinforcements from coming in, while the rest of the Rangers would move in and occupy the base.

  Lilith put Kestrel-1 through a single orbit over the site, but nothing looked unusual, so she shifted the wings to vertical and dropped straight down on the helipad. All our passengers dismounted, breaking into their teams and scattering to three comers of the pad. Kestrel-1 took off again, and its sister-ship came down, disgorging the mercenaries. They immediately established a perimeter, pronounced the area secure, and released their bird to fly Combat Air Patrol with Lilith’s Peregrine.

  Crowley and I ran to a stairway, ready to respond with the proper code words if challenged. We saw no guards, so we worked our way down into the center of the site unmolested. The stairway brought us down approximately 50 feet east of the Fair Lady electronics area of the upper floor, but enough of the drywall had been roughed in to actually channel us farther east before we could move north and come back in at it heading west. That was still in keeping with our plan, but might spoil our timing and, if Bat’s team ran into similar delays in their approach from the north, we could have had a problem.

  As I crept through the darkness, moving my head back and forth to give me a normal range of view because of the nightvision goggles, I also let myself sense for emotions and life. Crowley proved black hole because, while I could see him as we moved forward and overlapped each other, I could sense nothing from him. In many ways, that was good because it left me free to actually seek out signs of life, but I still found it disturbing.

  Relying on my empathic ability to sense others, I moved forward at speeds that were somewhat more than prudent, given the circumstances. Having once before visited the gateway core, I moved directly toward the central chamber when I got into the Fair Lady area. I sensed nothing and, in my first visual sweep of the area, noted nothing out of order. “Alpha in. Clear. ETA Beta.”

  “Beta, green minus five.”

  “Copy, Beta. Kestrel-1, phase one red minus one, phase two green.” In keeping with military practice where radio signals might be intercepted, we had codes for numbers. Green indicated 10 and red five, which meant Bat felt he was five minutes out. In radioing the codes order to Lilith, I had her make the call to Warner at the dam to tell him that he was to do his bit in two stages, four and 10 minutes apart, respectively.

  “Copy, Alpha.”

  I took another look at the area and saw something I had missed before in the core. A slender cable, no thicker than standard co-ax, hung down in the darkness. Except for when its slight swaying let the gentle green light from the gem rectangle paint it, it remained invisible. Looking more carefully, I also saw two small cubes, each about half the size of a shoebox, sitting on either side of the platform in the center of the core.

  I keyed my radio. “Deuce, I have something odd in the core. I’m moving up to check.”

  Crowley double-clicked his radio in acknowledgment, but offered no comment. As I moved forward, I visually scanned the chamber again. While the ANPBS-9 did a great job of letting me see in the dark, it forced me into a tunnelvision that could have proved disastrous. While I could sense the location of folks, I could not aim and shoot based on that feeling alone. I needed to keep my head moving to give me the normal cone of vision.

  Things remained clear for a second, then I felt a presence in chamber. Exiting the gateway on the northern edge of the circular platform, I caught a glimpse of a profile I had seen before in what seemed an earlier lifetime. I started to swing my MP-7 toward him, but the bright flashlight he had taped to the barrel of his pump-action shotgun got to me first, and the AMPBS-9 went “green-out” on me.

  “Easier than spotlighting deer,” Darius MacNeal laughed aloud. I could sense incredible arrogance from him, which did not strike me as unusual, but the confidence underlying it started to worry me. “Greetings, Mr. Loring, or Caine or whatever your name really is.”

  “Coyote,” I heard Crowley whisper through the radio, “I’m back and not blind, but you are in my line of sight. You have to move if you want me to take him.”

  “I see you decided to do your own dirty work when the Aryans failed.” I let the MP-7 dangle from the trigger-guard, then I set it on the ground. I sensed other people slipping through the gate behind him and on the platforms down below. “I never really thought of you as a hands-on kind of guy — except perhaps with women.”

  “A glib tongue won’t stop deer slugs, Loring, and the Teflon-coating means your body armor won’t stop them, either. You made a big mistake assuming I would not monitor Watson Dodd’s fax traffic.”

  I flashed him a genuine smile. “Actually, I counted on it. I hoped you would take command of the security here, and I know that’s not your forte.” Still blinded by his light, I shrugged. “If you want to surrender now, I’ll let you live.”

  “No way, Loring. You underestimate me. Your two dozen commandos cannot take this base and secure it long enough to blow this area. I have twice as many people here ready to neutralize you.”

  “And I have a dozen dozen people throughout the site, Darius. The plans I faxed Dodd were incomplete.”

  More confidence surged through MacNeal. “So I assumed. That’s why I’ve had engineers in the Lorica Citadel wiring it with explosives. Unless I give a check-code every 12 hours, they detonate it.”

  My jaw dropped open as I realized what he was saying. The destruction of the Lorica tower would kill countless people both in the citadel and in Eclipse when it fell. That he could even conceive of such a plan struck me as monstrous, and that realization snapped shut a couple of other connections in my brain. “You really do kn
ow for whom you built this place and what it was created for, don’t you?”

  “That’s why it’s called a joint venture.”

  Through his pride and laughter I sensed another individual enter the chamber from the north. I glanced over, moving my head less than two inches, but could see nothing because of the light. Then, suddenly, my vision cleared and I saw Vetha pinned in place by MacNeal’s spotlight. As I dove to the left, rolled and came up with the Wolf in my hand, Darius got off his first shot. He jacked a second round into the chamber as I flipped the safety off on the gun and we each fired simultaneously.

  My shot went in low, hitting him in the right thigh. The leg immediately went out from under him, dropping him down and whipping him around to his left. He bounced up once, then a burst of automatic fire from behind where Vetha had stood struck him in the chest and pitched his body back through the gateway into Pygmalion’s dimension.

  The other men in MacNeal’s fire-team had been relying on his light for illumination, so when he went down the darkness closed in on them like a tidal wave. Crowley come out of the narrow corridor behind me and cleared the deck with a figure-8 ribbon of lead from the Mac-10 in his right hand. Two of the four men remained on the platform when they went down, while the others pitched off the edge and fell screaming into the void below.

  Gunfire came up from the platform directly below us, but it could only lance up at a steep angle between the platform on our level and the walkway ringing the core. I freed a fragmentation grenade from my harness, pulled the pin, flipped the lever off then counted to two. “An egg is hot.” I bowled it along the floor and it flew off into space on a gentle little arc. Its explosion filled the core with light for a moment, and shrapnel pinged off the guardrails surrounding the core, then as the thunder died, silence reclaimed the core.

  “Kestrel-1, abandon CAP and head back to home base immediately. Begin an emergency evacuation of home base. Tell Scorpion that our tower has been rigged with explosives. I don’t know where, I don’t know all, but assume the tower is coming down. Sweat Watson Dodd — abduct his wife and child if you must — to get information. By dawn, shut down all, repeat all, communication links in and out of Build-more, period.”

  “Alpha, copy. Luck.”

  “Roger, Kestrel-1, and more of it to you.”

  “Omega Leader, start your assault.”

  “Wilco, Alpha.”

  Holstering the pistol and staying low, I scrambled over to where Bat and Crowley crouched beside Vetha. Natch knelt on the floor and cradled the Myrangeikki’s head in her lap. One of the deer slugs had taken Vetha high in the thorax while the other had hit much lower near the abdomen. Part of her clothes glistened with a luminescent green that I took as the goggle’s way of painting her blood.

  “She ran ahead,” Bat offered in explanation.

  “I know,” I told him.

  The light in Vetha’s eyes moved listlessly and one of her fingers tapped nervously against the floor. She looked up at me, moving her mandibles apart. I nodded and patted her twitching hand, then the light went out of her eyes. Natch blinked away tears, and I saw her shoulders heave with a sob, then she gently laid Vetha’s head on the floor and pulled the Myrangeikki’s hood up to hide her face.

  As Bat and Natch moved off and around toward the west, I turned to start back toward the east to recover my MP-7. Before I could move away from the body, Crowley grabbed my right arm and swung me around to face him. “What was that about?”

  I stared at him blankly. “What?”

  “You got her killed, and she knew it.” He nodded toward Vetha’s body. “Her finger. In Morse code she tapped out ‘I not us happy.’ Want to explain?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t want to surrender her freedom a second time.” I sighed heavily. “She was afraid she would betray us to Fiddleback, against her will. This was her way of making sure it did not happen.”

  “You knew all this and did not tell anyone?”

  I pulled off my nightvision goggles. “We all have our secrets. Need to know, just like Ryuhito’s location.”

  Crowley stiffened for a moment, but I still got nothing from him. Even so, I knew our relationship had changed at that point, probably irrevocably. I reached out and clapped him on his shoulders. “We can sort this out when we have eliminated all the Dark Lords, okay? When they’re no longer a threat.”

  “When they’re all gone.” Crowley nodded solemnly, speaking over the first distant echoes of gunfire from our advancing mercenaries. “Then we’ve got some things to thrash out, man-to-man.”

  “Man-to-man.” I nodded and keyed my radio. “Delta, come into the core. We’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter 29

  Bat, Crowley and I mounted the ramps to the platform from the south, avoiding the mess made by the leaking bodies on the other side. Dropping to one knee, I saw that box on the platform was a painfully simple little device that coupled a motion detector with a wide-angle, infrared sensor that pinpointed us the second we entered the core. A wire trailed from it into the gate. “Sensor array with monitors in Pygmalion’s dimension. They might know we’re coming.”

  Crowley shook his head. “MacNeal’s people might have known we were coming, but not Pygmalion. If he had, he would have sent his warriors over to clean us out.”

  “Point. Let’s go.” Remaining low, I darted through the gate and instantly found myself in Pygmalion’s hot and incredibly bright dimension. Darius MacNeal stared up at me with dead eyes, his crumpled body nestled amid the legs of a card table with the security monitors on it. Looking up and away from his body, I squinted against the sun, but that did not prevent me from seeing four Build-more security men rounding a comer on a dead run toward my platform.

  Shifting to the right to let the card table with the monitors on it shield me, I opened fire on the guards. Two bullets blew the lead man back off the tower. A third punched another man’s Adam’s apple out through his spine. Bat opened on the other two with his M16, sending them spinning away off the azure tower.

  “Radio check, nice shooting.” Even though the monitors clearly worked, I wanted to be certain our radios would function in Pygmalion’s dimension.

  “Copy.”

  Leaving Bat and Crowley to secure the platform, I ducked back through the gate and waved the ops team through. “Clear, let’s go.”

  Sin and Jytte came through first, followed by Nero and Rajani, with Hal, Natch and Mickey bringing up the rear. They followed Crowley and Bat down the northern ramp, and we quickly worked our way to the ground. We encountered no more resistance and saw no sign of alarm from the city below the tower, even though we knew the sounds of gunfire had to have carried an incredible distance through the clear air.

  On the ground, we moved well away from the base of the crystalline tower. Nero Loring heaved the long, cylindrical case off his shoulder in Bat’s direction. Loring grabbed a clear cable from the center of it, then pointed Bat toward the tower. “Hitch me in to the power grid.”

  Bat hefted the canister and ran back toward one of the blue-crystal tower legs. He doled out the fiber-optic cable as he went, and I moved to help him. Working together — which meant he tolerated my presence during the operation — we played the line out quickly.

  At the tower leg, Bat popped the caps off either end of the cylinder and produced two clear disks roughly the size and shape of hockey pucks. The fiber-optic cable hung from each of the disks like a tail. He peeled brown paper off one side of each of them and stuck the disks on either side of the pillar. He glanced back at Nero, and when the old man gave both of us a thumb’s-up, we trotted back to him.

  Loring had plugged the end of that cable into a rectangular box. A gray cable ran from that to the back of the Powerbook, and Loring nodded. “I have a positive reading. When do we get our power boost?”

  Hal looked at the analog stopwatch hanging from around his neck. “Seven-and-a-half minutes to full. Phase one in 30 seconds.”

  I glanced out toward the blac
k city and shook my head. I imagined it a hive full of warriors like Mickey, and I sincerely wondered if we would survive kicking it. Given that our job was to kill the equivalent of the queen bee, I had sincere doubts about our chances. Then again, to fail was to die, so the only chance at survival had to be success.

  “Phase one power going up now.”

  Crowley’s shadowfonm pointed to the open circle of gemstones at the top of the tower. “I see him!”

  As the phase one level of power kicked in through the grid, the whole structure began to glow like a neon tube. Within the blue light, I saw golden highlights in the stones that looked like the cross between printed circuitry and a capillary network in a living creature. The power seemed to start within the bottom of the tower and ascend up to where four very long posts held a crystal halo above the whole structure.

  Descending through it, I saw the outline and then landing gear for Bronislaw Joniak’s pride and joy. Outdated though it may have been, the AH-64 Apache descended through this proto-dimension’s analog of the helipad’s target circle as smoothly as if it were on an elevator. The 30mm chain-gun beneath its chin swiveled back and forth for a second, then the aircraft moved forward and swooped down toward the ground before coming around to face us.

  I held a hand up to shield my face from the dust being kicked up. On the right wing, I saw the normal load of eight Hellfire missiles, but on the other wing-stub I saw a huge metal drum held by a pair of cylinders that attached to the wing’s two hardpoints. The drum rotated a half turn to the right and 10 feet of a fiber-optic cable ejected out the back.

  “Merlin at your service. Cable deployment ready to begin.”