Ragnarok cta-4

by Kane Gilmour

  He shook hands with both men, noting with approval how supple the gloves on the suits were. While still padded with a thin layer of the experimental armor material, the fingers would still be able to operate triggers and even keyboards if necessary.

  “Sorry about the switch to the chopper, but Persephone would have trouble with how tight the buildings are in Midtown. Plus, no easy rooftops for VTOL nearby, like you had in Chicago. There’s crap all over the roofs here.” The general led the other men up 6 ^th, along the sidewalk.

  “No problem. We came in low from Jersey and couldn’t see much. How bad is it here?” Deep Blue asked the general as they began walking up to West 49 ^th, where soldiers from Fort Dix stood and crouched behind sandbags, weapons trained down the street.

  “Well, let’s just say that I’ve been wondering whether it’s too late to join the Peace Corps and get assigned to the ass-end of Botswana. I can tell you it was no damn fun getting all the civilians out of these buildings in this part of town. NYPD played a big part in that, but it would have been impossible later in the day.”

  The men rounded the corner of a small concrete-bordered city-planning park with about ten trees, all still tenaciously clinging to their orange leaves before winter’s inevitable pull. Beyond it stood five abandoned hot dog carts with brightly colored umbrellas. Keasling’s stomach rumbled at the thought of wolfing down a few dogs with brown mustard and sauerkraut. They turned onto West 49 ^th Street and saw an empty road, cordoned off a few bocks west, down the narrow corridor of tall buildings before them. Steam gently seeped up from manhole sewer covers on the asphalt, and a discarded sheet of crumpled, dirty newspaper caught an errant breeze and wafted along the street, wrapping around the leg of a squat black fire hydrant with a silver top on the other side of the street.

  “Where-?” King began, his voice thick through the built in voice modulator on his helmet.

  “Up gentlemen, up.” Keasling said more forcefully than necessary. The situation was wearing on his nerves.

  His armored companions slowly titled their heads up and took in the sight.

  The Cobra Head streetlamps, stretched into their view, but otherwise, all they could see were two glass-walled skyscrapers reaching into the sky on either side of the road. The one on the right reached to 750 feet and the one on the left went almost as high, to 675 feet. But the building on their right had a glowing energy sphere embedded in it, close to the top. The globe of light stretched across the 100 foot gap between the buildings, over the street and just barely kissed the edge of the building on the left. The ball of light floated in the sky, with the right third of it clawing into the taller building. The globe was steady and solid, with none of the lightning effects Keasling had seen in video footage of the Chicago event.

  “Gentlemen, the building on your right is the Exxon Building. The X part of the so-called ‘XYZ buildings’ of Rockefeller Center. The building on the left is McGraw Hill. The Y. Far as we can tell, the event does not actually touch the Y building, although it does look like it from where we are standing. The Exxon Building has 54 floors and floors 38 to 51 are inside the affected area. The elevators are just clear of the effect, though, so we can still get up top if we need to. I’ve got men in the Y building just opposite the curving wall of light, ready to fire if needed. No one in the X building though. If the creatures show up, I don’t want my boys too close.” Keasling turned to face Deep Blue and King in their armor. “They haven’t got pillow suits on.”

  Deep Blue kept his head tilted upward, looking at the floating ball of light jammed between the two glass skyscrapers.

  King lowered his head and looked at the General. “I think we’re going to need that helicopter to come back.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

  3 November, 1300 Hrs

  Eirek Fossen was so close to his freedom, he could taste it.

  He sat behind a desk in one of the offices looking at three, side-by-side, 17-inch monitors. He had divided each screen into four windows displaying video footage from major world news stations. The volume on all of them was off, but he didn’t need it to understand what was happening around the world. Portals were opening up. Shanghai. Chicago. Los Angeles. Istanbul. Kinshasa. Lima. Mumbai. The portals, and the pack of dire wolves that came from them, were devouring entire cities.

  It was all too delicious.

  He leaned back in the tilting office chair and one after the other, placed his lower legs diagonally atop the corner of the desk. He slipped his hands behind his head and prepared to enjoy one hell of a show. A portal had even opened up halfway up a set of skyscrapers in New York. He would have liked to see some of the footage of action on the ground-the dire wolves ripping into people-but none of the camera operators could get that close to the conflagrations for more than a second or two without being shredded themselves.

  The door to the office opened, and Fossen looked up. Nathalie Schroder was Fossen’s assistant. She was young, at 25, but highly capable. She had a brilliant mind for the math involved in their undertaking, and she was equally good with electrical engineering. She wore a lab coat, and her dark hair was back in a ponytail. Her father had worked for the project before her. Fossen liked her, but she had been asking the wrong kind of questions lately.

  “How are the power readings?” he asked her.

  “Good,” she said, looking down at her tablet PC. “The turbines have collected a surplus and we should be ready for another test.”

  “How long has it been since the last test?” Fossen interrupted her.

  She tapped a few times at her tablet. “Five hours. I have the statistics now. It was at 98 % stability and generated over 12 gigawatts at one point, but I think we can go higher-”

  Fossen waved his hand cutting her off. “I don’t need the details. As long as we are at 98 %, that’s all that is important.”

  He let his eyes drift back to the screens with the scenes of destruction.

  Schroder looked over his shoulder and cleared her throat. She spoke softly. “We still have no control over the global portals. They are definitely a byproduct of the experiment, but as you can see, they open at random intervals and geographic locations. There are far more of them than we ever expected.”

  “I know. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “People are dying,” she said. “Far more than was projected.”

  Fossen stood up from the chair, staring at her. Schroder lowered her eyes to the floor. “We knew this when we began, yes? Opening and maintaining the portal was always going to have side effects. One collateral portal or a hundred, it makes no difference.”

  “But so many people-” she began again.

  “Do not matter!” Fossen finished for her. “If after all this time you are having doubts about the project, if your faith is wavering…you can go.”

  Schroder raised her eyes to him, hopefully. “You would let me leave?” Then more furtively, “ It would let me leave?”

  Fossen grimaced as though pinched, but quickly forced a smile. “If your heart is not in it, Nathalie, you have no place here. You’ve already performed your part. The system is self-sustaining now. If you want to leave, go.”

  She looked him in the eye, relief washing over her. “Thank you, Eirek.”

  Schroder turned to make for the door.

  Fossen drew a Walther pistol from his lab coat pocket and shot her twice in the back of her head. The bullets went through her at such a close range they chewed holes into the wood of the door beyond her. Her skull detonated like a popping water balloon, before her legs gave out and her body dropped to the floor.

  “You are welcome. They are not people. They are sheep, waiting for the wolf.”

  An intercom on the wall came to life with a clicking noise.

  “What is it?” Fossen asked, disgust in his voice as if the shooting was the latest in a never-ending series of distractions and interruptions.

  “Security, sir. We
have intruders. The dire wolves have them cornered.” The voice said through the intercom with a thick slur, as if the man attached to it was on drugs.

  “I want them alive. I’ll be right there.” Fossen got up from his chair and made for the door to the chamber.

  Oh Stanislav, you should not have come back.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Pinckney Bible Campground, NH

  3 November, 0700 Hrs

  George Pierce sat atop a brown picnic table with his feet propped on the bench. Pierce knew the campground would fill with people in the summer, but right now, he was the only human being in sight. When Chess Team fought the monstrosity Manifold Genetics had created from the original Greek Hydra a few years back, the battle destroyed parts of the campground.

  After the fight, Deep Blue had arranged for the Army to take over the entire area, while Hazmat teams cleaned up the secret Manifold facility hidden under the mountains behind the campground. Then they had the base refurbished and refitted to house Chess Team and its extended support crew, now collectively dubbed Endgame.

  Pierce had assisted in the project at the time, before he was formally a member of Endgame. Finally, once the base was finished and operational, its secret entrance in the mountain sufficiently concealed again, Deep Blue had accepted Pierce’s suggestion of restoring the campground itself. After all, the public would become wary if a supposed chemical spill was being ‘cleaned up’ by the Army, but once that process was completed, they didn’t turn the land back over to the public. The last thing Endgame wanted was more scrutiny from the public. Besides, the base sprawled underground over miles. There were other entrances and exits, which afforded more privacy, and which did not require movement through a formerly public area.

  Still, when Pierce felt the crushing claustrophobia of the underground base weighing on him, he liked to slip out of the vehicle entrance located behind the campground, and come out here to think.

  He was exhausted, after spending all night researching Norse mythology. It wasn’t his field, and there was so very much to learn, although he had found little in reference to the dire wolves. In addition, the dire wolf roar had rendered him nearly useless for much of the night. He still suffered the terrifying visions that the sound induced in him, but they had lessened in their intensity, and he knew them to be nothing more than echoes of his hallucination.

  Carrack had later told him he had fled the computer room at the sound of the roar, but Pierce had no memory of that. What he saw when the dire wolf roar had assaulted them over the speakers of the room, before Aleman had been able to switch off the audio, was worse than anything his mind could come up with in a normal nightmare.

  And George Pierce had plenty of nightmares.

  When Chess Team had gone up against Manifold a few years earlier, Pierce, much like Bishop, had been tortured and experimented upon. But unlike Bishop, Pierce had received DNA directly from the Hydra sample. His skin had changed into a green and scaly substance. He had been half-man and half-reptile by the time Manifold finished with him. The nonhuman genes attached to his body were eventually blocked and he had suffered no relapses. But the bad dreams had taken far longer to go away than his skin had taken to slough and repair itself.

  Pierce sighed and watched his breath in the cool morning air. Some might say chilly, but he had quickly acclimatized to the cold, despite his years spent in Greece and even in the humidity of Peru. His hallucinatory reaction to the dire wolf roar still haunted him. It was far worse than any Hydra nightmare he had yet to experience. He’d seen Julie, King’s deceased sister, his fiancee who had died long ago in a fighter jet accident-except it hadn’t been her. It was Julie as she would have been if she’d been the one Manifold infected. She wore a flight suit and her skin had the same sickly green scaly look that Pierce’s had when he was altered by the Hydra DNA.

  It was so real, he thought. I could smell her.

  He hadn’t run from the computer center as Carrack had said. The monstrous Julie had chased him from the room in his hallucination.

  She was going to eat me.

  Julie’s death had initially led to Pierce and King falling out of touch. The Hydra incident, which had begun with Pierce on an archeological dig site in Nazca, had brought them back together. Pierce’s ordeal cemented their friendship.

  He took another sip of the now cool coffee and vowed never to tell King about the hallucination. It was simply too terrible, and Jack Sigler had enough to deal with.

  Pierce took a deep breath and closed his eyes, bringing his mind back to the present. Soft footsteps approached him from behind. He turned and opened his eyes to see Anna Beck striding toward him from the direction of the base’s concealed door.

  Beck, callsign: Black Zero, was Deep Blue’s right-hand woman. Ostensibly, the man’s bodyguard, she did far more fieldwork for Endgame. She was dating Knight, Pierce knew, or he might have asked the woman out. She was cute, although not stunningly beautiful. But she was tough and had a razor-sharp wit that often manifested in blistering sarcasm. Pierce liked her.

  Beck walked across the yellowing grass. Her brown hair, pulled back into a ponytail, swayed as she walked. She wore her customary all-black military battle-dress uniform, and strapped to her leg was her ever-present sidearm. Pierce had asked her once why she was always armed. Her answer had been that the base creeped her out.

  After the facility had been attacked by Manifold agents, before its restoration was complete, Pierce could understand that. Although Matt Carrack, callsign: White Zero, was officially in charge of security at the base, Pierce knew that Beck played a significant part in stopping the Manifold incursion. They had lost several security members of the team during that incident-the soldiers formerly known as White Two through White Five. Pierce understood afterward that was the reason Deep Blue had insisted on naming the White and Black team members with numbers. It would be harder on Chess Team field personnel to get attached to their support members. Replacing their identities with numbers would lessen the focus of the field team on the loss of these team members in emergencies. They were expendable. Pierce realized the strategy hadn’t worked completely, especially when he saw that Knight and Beck had become a thing. Still, Pierce was glad he hadn’t been given a numbered callsign.

  “What’s up?” he called to Beck.

  “Aleman wants everyone back for a meeting.”

  Pierce leapt up and strode over to her, tossing the remaining cold coffee from his cup into a nearby pine tree and shaking the drips out onto the grass as they walked.

  “Everyone?” he asked.

  She looked at him with a grim expression. “Yeah. Even Boucher is going to be on the call. Then I’m off to Norway as soon as we’re done.” Domenick Boucher was the current director of the CIA, and although Pierce hadn’t met the man, he knew that Boucher was an Endgame ally in the US government.

  “Norway? You’re going after Rook?” Pierce asked.

  “Yeah. Him and Queen both. We need everyone for this mess.”

  They entered the vehicle entrance in the mountain and rapidly descended to the lowest level of the part of the base christened Labs. The main computer lab was a ten-minute ride away by underground tram, in a different section of the expansive base known as Central. They sat silently on the tram, each lost in their own thoughts. Once at Central, they proceeded to the main computer lab down quiet corridors.

  The main screen showed a view from Deep Blue’s helmet of the massive energy globe suspended above Manhattan. Aleman was in his customary jeans and t-shirt, straddling the futuristic workstation in the center of the room. Sara Fogg stood with baggy eyes in a corner, leaning against a wall. Seated next to her was King’s adopted daughter, Fiona, who wore a Disney t-shirt and pajama bottoms, and sleepily ate a colorful breakfast cereal from a porcelain bowl. Her striking Native American facial features were partially obscured by a thick shock of her long black hair that had managed to escape her ponytail. She leaned her head against Fogg’s hip. Pierce was please
d to see how well King’s ‘family’ was working out for the man.

  Matt Carrack leaned against another wall, wearing his usual forest-pattern BDUs. The other five members of the White security team were standing next to him and looking anxious. No doubt, Carrack had already briefed the men on the severity of the situation worldwide. Each man was a crack soldier from the alpine 10 ^th Mountain division at Fort Drum. Pierce had yet to learn any of their names or even speak to them. He had made that mistake with the last batch of White Team members, and now they were all dead.

  Pierce knew the two White Team scientists in the room, but they were easy to recognize from their white lab coats. White Six was an unusually tall, gangly man. At just under seven feet tall, Six had to duck his head when going through most of the doors in the base. Ironically, the tall man with the dark mop of black shaggy hair hated sports. Especially basketball. When he wasn’t working on chemical analyses for Endgame, the man was building models from toothpicks and popsicle sticks. The structures were incredibly intricate, and when Six chose to design something recognizable, like the Eiffel Tower, the structures were meticulously accurate to every detail. Pierce had joked with the man that he had missed his calling as an architect. Six’s serious response was simply “I know.” But Pierce liked the gentle giant.

  White Seven, the other scientist on the team, was a short, burly man with a gruff demeanor. Pierce rarely spoke to the man, but was impressed by the scientist’s wide knowledge of everything but social graces.

  The White Team was completed by a weapons expert named Reggie. Reggie was technically callsign: White Eight, but despite Deep Blue’s admonition that White and Black support team members each keep their names to themselves and use only their callsigns, Reggie had introduced himself to everyone at the base as Reggie, so the name had stuck. He was the consummate joker, but the sort whose jokes were more frequently directed at himself. Everyone liked the man. Plus, he knew everything there was to know about every weapon they had on the base. Reggie certainly destroyed any stereotypes Pierce had had about weapons training experts. He pictured most of them to be hard-assed drill instructor types, and he wasn’t surprised to discover that King had thought much the same. Reggie was also the only one around to best King at horseshoes up on the campground.