Deep Silence

by Jonathan Maberry

  I watched him go.

  I could see that the wavering crack was not really in the physical structure of the wall, but rather imposed upon it. Don’t ask me how, because I was way beyond the capacity for rational thought.

  As the intruder vanished inside I caught a glimpse—just the merest glimpse—of a different place. Not another room, not even the darkened parking lot outside. This was a rocky slope painted by bright sunlight that was the wrong color. More of a sickly sea green than yellow. Plants and flowers bloomed between the rocks and I did not recognize a single one of them. They were towering ferns with leaves as long and sharp as swords; and something like a three-headed rose, its petals the color of fresh blood. Weeds lined with seedpods swayed in a wind that I did not feel. At the top of the slope was a building, a tower made from what looked like carnelian and red jasper, that rose into the sky. And the sky. Dear God, that sky. There were two large moons and a dozen smaller ones partly obscured by wisps of clouds, and beyond all of them was the monstrous curve of a gas giant that swirled with storms, like Jupiter, only more violent.

  Something flashed—a burst of green light that snapped like lightning from that alien sky and struck my chest with such force that I was picked up and smashed once more against the far wall. I managed to duck my head this time, but it didn’t matter. The world went black then green then red. I dropped to my knees and felt like my head was cracking into a hundred tiny pieces. Little bursts of color, like crimson poppies, blossomed in the air in front of my eyes. And when I looked down at my hands I could see tendrils of electricity writhing and twisting on my gloves and up my arms.

  When I raised my head toward the impossible crack in the wall, it was gone.

  Bang.

  Just like that. The crack on that wall and, when I turned my aching head to look, the other one as well. Leaving no trace at all of what I’d seen. I shook my head, trying to clear away the debris inside my skull. There were other cracks from the explosion or earthquake, or whatever it was that was destroying the building, but no trace of the two cracks that had allowed the man in reptile-painted body armor to pass.

  If the armor was armor at all.

  If the man was a man at all.

  The last of the electricity faded out from my arms and I sagged back, gasping, my head hurting, my heart hammering. I dug into my pocket and pulled out the torn Faraday bag. The green crystal gun and the guard’s ring lay there, shattered into fragments and dust. I peered close and saw that each piece was glowing as brightly as the wall had done a moment ago. Then it faded, faded, faded … and went dark.

  No. Almost dark. Deep inside of it there was a tiny spark of the green shimmer, but it looked strange. Like it wasn’t so much small as very far away. Which was, of course, impossible.

  Impossible.

  What in the holy hell just happened?

  What had I seen?

  What?

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN

  PUSHKIN DYNAMICS

  VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT

  RUSSIA

  I got shakily to my feet. My balance was for shit and I felt sick and stupid and strange. The committee of three in my head was silent for a change, as if they, too, were dazed and battered. Sounds were weird, too. I could hear the gunfire and yells from different parts of the building, but they sounded too far away. Miles away. Or … or maybe it was that my mind kept not wanting to hear them, or care about them.

  My instincts kept yelling at me to pay attention to that. Not to disregard what was going on, but to start damn well caring about it. There was a big trench opening up in the gulf between mind and heart, and too damn much of me wanted to lean so far over the edge that I’d fall.

  Then, as if from all the way at the far end of a football field, I heard Doc Holliday’s words come echoing back.

  If anyone—anyone—begins acting strangely or erratically, you need to get them out of the building.

  “Jesus Christ…,” I breathed. My head felt like a cracked egg, my nerves were shot, and I had no idea if I’d actually experienced and witnessed any of that, or if my brains were scrambled by trauma. The tremors were subsiding, but the building was a mess. Ghost came over and leaned against me, whining, needing comfort, as if I had any to give. I squatted down and wrapped my arms around him, sharing my reality with his. It was maybe cold comfort, but it was what we had. I felt tears burning in my eyes. My dog had saved me. He’d somehow understood what I was going to do, and he attacked me to save me. It was the smartest, bravest, most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever experienced. I hugged him and kissed his fur and wept as he whined and tried to lick me.

  Then, slowly … slowly … I got to my feet. The floor was buckled and cracked, but it was solid. There were no dark winds blowing, no shadows in my mind. They had gone when the green man had taken the crystals away. Junie was right, as she was often right. Doc Holliday might be a hard-core scientist, but she was going to have to embrace a wider definition of things now that she was working with the DMS. The stuff we encountered was often outside the box of science as she knew it. Sometimes way outside, and Junie was likely to be her guide. After all, Junie’s DNA was proof that we are not alone.

  No. Not alone.

  The green man could have killed me.

  He did not. And as I thought about that, the memory of what the Closers on the road in Maryland said came back with a lot more force and clarity.

  We are not your enemy.

  I licked brick dust and tears from my lips and nodded as I walked over to the far wall. There was a slender crack caused by the explosion—if it was an explosion, and I had my doubts; but it was less than a finger’s width apart. Everything around it was solid and showed no other evidence of what I’d seen. The opposite wall was the same—only a crack that a baby mouse couldn’t squeeze through.

  Then there was another rumble way down deep beneath my feet, and I could feel the vibration through the soles of my shoes. It was distant, though; farther away. More explosions?

  No, I didn’t think so. Not explosions. The God Machine was down there and the earth was trembling. That wasn’t difficult math for me to understand.

  I tapped my earbud. “Echo T-team,” I said, tripping over it, “r-report.”

  Top came on the line and used an executive code to isolate the call. “Where’s your head at, Cowboy?”

  “Exposed to green quartz,” I said. “I’m clear now.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay then,” he said slowly, and put the whole team on the call. “Listen up. Cowboy got dosed by the green quartz shit. He says he’s clear, but nobody takes chances with anybody, do you copy?”

  He said it harsh and hard and they all responded with passion. No one offered sympathy or support for me, because that’s not how it’s done. Later, maybe, we’d all get drunk over it. Now we had to survive.

  “Give me a sit-rep,” I said, fighting to keep the shakes out of my voice. There was a jumble of responses, and I heard pain in every voice. Every single one of them checked in. A few dents but no real injuries. No casualties; at least on our side. Thank God for that.

  “Cowboy,” demanded Cole, “what happened to the building? Was that a bomb?”

  “I think it was another goddamn earthquake,” I answered. “There’s a God Machine in the subbasement and I think it somehow went active. Continue exfiltration,” I ordered. Then I closed out of the team channel and got Bug on the line. “Kid, tell me you guys all saw what just happened.”

  “Cowboy, I—” he began, but stalled. The fact that his first question wasn’t “Saw what?” was a total gut-punch.

  Before he could say more, another voice broke into the call. “Cowboy, this is the Deacon. We saw everything your bodycam showed us. Are you in immediate danger from the person you just encountered?”

  “No … no, I don’t think so,” I said uncertainly. “But I don’t know what the hell it was.”

  Instead of answering, Church said, “G
et your team out of that building. By any means necessary. Do it right now.”

  A new rumble shook the building, and the floor canted under me. I grabbed the doorknob and jerked it open just as yet another massive jolt shook the whole building. Bigger than the first two. Ghost went skidding past me, his nails scraping lines all the way to the wall. He barked angrily, but at what? The building? The Earth? God?

  I heard Duffy yelling over the shared line. “Echo Team, part of the south wall just collapsed. I think part of the parking lot’s collapsing. Oh … shit! A fucking sinkhole just opened up in the parking lot. Everyone get out of the building right now.”

  Right now was a problem, though, because the building may have been falling the hell down, but it was also filled with a bunch of guys trying to shoot us. Christ. Ghost and I, weak and battered and sick as we were, ran down the stairs to join the fight.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

  THE ORB AT THE HANGAR

  FLOYD BENNETT FIELD

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  Doc Holliday and Junie Flynn stood in a factory in Russia without ever leaving New York. On one of the big screens they watched the feeds from Echo Team’s bodycams as they moved through the shipping warehouse and rooms filled with manufacturing machines. The individual pieces were absorbed by a MindReader engineering program that applied design logic software and assembled the pieces. The software relied as much on its deep database of existing machinery as the imperative logic of a computer. The pieces could only fit together in so many possible ways, and the quantum system calculated hundreds of thousands of possibilities.

  Junie watched holograms of the various pieces turn this way and that and then fly together, and moment by moment she could feel her heart race faster and faster, and her blood turn to ice. She knew what was coming. When she cut a look at Doc, it was clear the scientist did, too. Neither of them liked it. Both of them were terrified at the possibility. At the reality.

  Calpurnia, speaking for MindReader, spoke so calmly as to be intensely unnerving. “Assembly complete,” said the soft, feminine AI voice. “Pushkin Dynamics is manufacturing and shipping God Machines.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

  PUSHKIN DYNAMICS

  VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT

  RUSSIA

  Doc called and told me the bad news. The scary news. The more she told me, the scarier it got.

  “How many?” I asked, not really wanting an answer. I was working my way along a hallway that was cracked and choked with debris. Clouds of dust filled the air.

  “It’s bad. Estimating the contents of the crates in the shipping bay…? Maybe six hundred.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “These are the small ones,” she said, trying to sound hopeful. And failing. The small ones were what they used in D.C.

  “How many were sent to the States? More than were used in D.C.?”

  “We can’t tell yet.”

  “Try harder,” I snarled, and disconnected from the call. Six hundred God Machines in the shipping bay. Good lord. So many questions caught fire in my head. How many had they already made? How many had been shipped? And … to where? Was D.C. only the first of a series of attacks?

  “Yes,” I said aloud, and my voice echoed eerily.

  I looked around and saw only damage. That felt like a statement about life in general. Whatever was happening here—an earthquake, a God machine coming to life, or maybe something as mundane and comforting as a fricking bomb—the building had taken a real beating. The walls and floor were crisscrossed with cracks and there was nothing left in the windows but broken teeth of glass. Cold wind blew in from outside, turning the swirling dust into frigid ghosts. The rumbling stopped again and now there was a heavy silence, but I did not buy the implied lie that it was over.

  That orderly process was getting its ass kicked by memories of a guy dressed like a reptile walking out of walls and walking into walls. That was seriously scrambling my head, and I had no idea in hell what I was going to do with that.

  There was sporadic gunfire from several different parts of the building, and then Bunny called, “Green Giant to Spartan, be advised Bravo Squad’s coming out, but we don’t want to walk into a shooting gallery. We could use some covering fire.”

  Duffy’s reply was, “Yeah, yeah, don’t tell your grandma how to suck eggs.” Despite everything, he was trying to sound normal. Cool and confident. It was a soldier’s trick; a battlefield version of fake it ’til you make it. But the cracks in his voice were as evident as those in the walls. Even so, I heard two spaced shots accompanied by the sound of shattering glass. Then a third shot.

  “No one’s waiting outside the door, kids,” he said dryly.

  “What about the parking lot?” asked Bunny.

  “They left four men outside to guard the vehicles,” said Duffy. “Mind you step over the bodies.”

  “A team is pinned down in the loading bay,” called Cole. “Count twenty-plus hostiles between us and the door. Guards and staff, and all of them acting crazy.”

  “B team is in the same shit, boss,” said Bunny. “We’re about to get swarmed. No way we’re getting through this without putting civilians down.”

  I took a breath in through my flaring nostrils and ground my teeth. “There are no civilians in here. This is a target-rich environment. You are free to go weapons hot, weapons all. Get out of the building by any means necessary.”

  I heard Tate’s bass thunder of laugh. “Then hold on to your nutsacks, kids, because it’s about to get loud in here.”

  And by that we all knew he was about to unlock Doc Holliday’s Toybox.

  * * *

  Bunny and Tate hunkered down behind a row of file cabinets as a bunch of Russians ran through the darkened office suite. There was no plan or coordination to the movement of the hostiles, and Bunny could see three distinct types of enemy: men and women in lab coats, upper-floor security personnel, and soldiers.

  “Where are all the lab guys coming from?” murmured Tate. “Thermals said there were only guards in here.”

  “Got to be shielded labs like the ones Cowboy found,” said Bunny. “No way to know how many cockroaches are going to come out of the woodwork.” He shifted around to look into Tate’s eyes. “You ready to do this?”

  The bravado Tate had used when on the team channel was just that. The reality of using deadly force against people who were clearly under the influence of some kind of strange technology, and many of them civilians, was the kind of thing that could cripple a soldier. It could also make a soldier freeze, or hesitate. Or it could go the other way and turn a horror show into something approaching entertainment. None of those outcomes was good.

  The balaclava hid Tate’s mouth, but from the way the material moved it was clear Tate was licking his lips. Dry mouth. Fear. Yeah.

  “I’m good to go, Green Giant,” said the big former cop.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m good,” Tate said. They studied each other for a moment longer, and then Bunny gave him a single, slow nod.

  “Then let’s do this and go home.”

  Tate pivoted on the balls of his feet and peered around the edge of their shelter. A pack of the madmen were coming their way.

  “Fire in the hole,” said Tate as he reached for the buttons on his wrist computer. He didn’t yell it, though. It was like he was telling himself to brace for what was coming.

  The blast and fire chased all shadows from the room.

  * * *

  “Sergeant Rock,” cried Cole, “on your six!”

  Top ducked, spun, and fired as a bearded man in a lab coat swung a heavy fire ax. The blade whistled three inches over his head as three rounds from Top’s gun punched neat red holes in the attacker’s chest. The ax, released from dying fingers, thumped hard between Top’s shoulder blades and drove him down hard on his knees.

  “Stay down,” Cole yelled as she fired over him at two other attackers, catching them dead center in the sternum. Then
she caught Top under the shoulder and hauled him to his feet. “Are you hurt?”

  “Who cares?” he growled as he turned to cut down a pair of soldiers with submachine guns.

  * * *

  I heard Bug in my ear as I ran toward the sounds of battle.

  “Cowboy, the building’s coming apart.”

  “No shit,” I said as I jumped across a four-foot-wide split in the floor that widened further as I cleared it. Ghost barked furiously and then ran and leaped across. I snaked out a hand and caught his harness and hauled him to safety.

  “Listen,” said Bug urgently, “the cracks in the structure are allowing the thermal scans to get a better picture of the sublevels. There are five big rooms, labs or machine shops or something. There are more than a hundred new thermal signatures. There are a lot of people down there.”

  The screams and gunfire that spiraled out of the closest stairwell made it sound like a war zone.

  “No shit,” I said again.

  * * *

  Pete Smith ran through shadows, moving from one parked car to the other, working his way around to a covering position on the back door.

  He froze as one of the SUVs came rolling up and stopped outside, blocking the exit. Six heavily armed men piled out, each of them dressed in nondescript black. They left the engine running and closed on the door.

  Peter could hear them talking in Russian, but he did not much understand the language, and it was too far away for his MindReader link to capture and translate it. So Smith edged forward, staying low and out of sight. One of the newcomers spoke to the others with a clear voice of authority. He caught a terse order given by the leader in a clear voice.