Thief Trap

by Jonathan Moeller

  There was another pair of metal doors on the far side of the round chamber, and Nicholas unlocked it. The doors slid open, and we stepped into a large room that had the look of a scientific laboratory. There were rows of long tables holding equipment and computers, and numerous bulky machines that had the look of scientific instruments. I recognized one of them as a spectrometer (Morvilind had ordered me to rob a chemistry lab once – don’t ask), but the rest were a mystery to me. In the center of the room was a massive U-shaped computer console flashing with standby lights, and next to it was a smaller version of the Seal machine. This one didn’t throw off arcs of blue lightning, and I didn’t recognize the symbol floating in the air over it.

  “Yes,” said Nicholas. “Yes, there it is.”

  A dozen metal doors lined the walls of the laboratory. Eleven of them were unmarked. The twelfth door was on the far side of the room, two interlocking doors wide enough to drive a truck through them, and two words in black block letters marked the otherwise unadorned steel.

  SKY HAMMER.

  “At last,” said Corbisher, starting to step forward.

  “Wait.” Nicholas grabbed his shoulder.

  Corbisher glanced back at him in bewilderment.

  “Look at the floor,” I said.

  I left out “dumbass.” It was mostly implied, anyway.

  Corbisher looked at the floor, and he saw the same thing that the rest of us had seen.

  There were hundreds of those small craters on the floor, similar to the ones we had seen in the outer lounge. It looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the floor. Or like someone had gotten drunk with a jackhammer.

  Or like something very, very heavy had been walking down here.

  Heavy. For some reason that scratched something in the back of my mind.

  “What the hell did that?” said Corbisher.

  “No marks like that on the walls,” said Morelli, his eyes sweeping the laboratory. “And all the equipment is intact. Not like in the lounge.”

  “Miss Moran,” said Nicholas. “Cast the detection spell. You have the most skill at it. I want to know if there are any invisible guards in here.”

  Now that was a creepy thought. I had a sudden vision of a dozen Cloaked anthrophages or elder bloodrats crawling through the laboratory, converging on us in perfect silence. And if they were Cloaked, even the spell to sense the presence of magic wouldn’t detect them. Elder bloodrats were big, heavy, and had strong claws, but they didn’t carve footprints into solid concrete while walking.

  I cast the spell to sense the presence of magical forces, and a wave of power washed over me.

  “That machine with the symbol,” I said, pointing at the device next to the wraparound computer console. “That’s radiating a lot of magic. It…ah, damn, it reminds me of some of the spells in the Royal Bank.”

  “Do you know what it does?” said Nicholas.

  “Not a clue,” I said. “But it seems like it’s…latent. Waiting for a condition to be met. Like a ward that doesn’t go off until someone walks into it.”

  “Then no one touch that machine,” said Morelli.

  “Agreed,” said Nicholas.

  “Those doors,” said Russell.

  Corbisher scowled at him. “What about them?”

  “The unmarked doors,” said Russell, gesturing with his AK-47. “None of them have any handles.”

  I looked and saw that he was right. The eleven unmarked doors had no handles and no obvious way of opening them. They didn’t even have those computer terminals that all the other doors did.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s not creepy.”

  “Remain cautious,” said Nicholas

  We crossed the room and headed towards the doors marked SKY HAMMER. I noticed that the equipment in the lab had been laid out in such a way that it left a wide, truck-sized aisle leading towards the double doors. Nicholas stopped before the doors and slid the rod into the terminal.

  My hands kept flexing, my magic waiting at the edge of my thoughts. The doors clanged and started to slide open. I knew that the minute we saw what was inside that room, we might try to kill each other. Corbisher glowered at us, his eyes darting back and forth. Morelli’s expression remained calm, but his eyes were fixed on me. He knew that I was the most dangerous one, and he would try to kill me the minute the fighting started. Russell had his gun pointed at Morelli, and Murdo watched Corbisher without blinking.

  Nicholas ignored it, his eyes fixed on the opening doors.

  The doors slid all the way open, and I saw the Sky Hammer.

  After all that I had heard about the damned thing, all the dark hints from Nicholas and bits and pieces gathered from the dust of the past, I admit it was kind of an underwhelming sight.

  The room beyond was big, but it was a blank concrete box, the air musty and dry. A rack of harsh lights shone overhead, throwing tangled pools of white light and shadows across the floor. In the center of the room was a table holding computer equipment, and next to the table was a large, irregular metal cylinder about the size of two big refrigerators put together. A small panel on the cylinder was open, a thick cable connecting to one of the computers on the table.

  “At last,” said Nicholas, taking a few steps forward.

  “That’s it?” I said, trying to keep everyone in sight at once as we walked into the room.

  “What is it?” said Russell. “It looks like a big air conditioner.”

  “It’s not an air conditioner, Mr. Moran,” said Nicholas. “It’s something rather more potent.”

  “It’s a nuclear bomb,” said Murdo.

  I gave him a sharp look. Murdo always sounded grim, but now his face was tight, his eyes hard.

  “What?” I said.

  “Figured it out, did you, Mr. Murdo?” said Nicholas, smiling at him. “He’s right. The Sky Hammer is nothing more than an old-fashioned nuclear weapon.”

  He walked to the table and picked up something that looked like a walkie-talkie, or a really complicated TV remote control.

  “EMP weapons,” said Murdo. “And the easiest way to generate a massive electromagnetic pulse is with a nuclear explosion. The Sky Hammer is a nuclear bomb.”

  “Correct,” said Nicholas. “It was, in point of fact, a doomsday weapon. The United States government intended it as a weapon of last resort, if it was ever about to lose a war with a near-peer adversary. The Sky Hammer was designed to be mounted on a ballistic missile and fired into the upper atmosphere. When it detonated, the resultant electromagnetic pulse would be reflected off the ionosphere to cover the entire globe, disabling every single electrical system on Earth. Civilization would collapse into the Stone Age.”

  I didn’t say anything. I expected Nicholas to attack at any moment. But he kept lecturing.

  “In fact,” said Nicholas, gesturing with the remote, “it was a new design of nuclear bomb. Something called a delayed-catalyst chain reaction.” He tapped the remote. “The bomb can be set to a five-minute detonation sequence. Once the two-minute mark is passed, the reaction is physically impossible to stop.”

  “Neat trick,” I said. “So why did Shane want it?” Pieces began to click together in my mind. “He wanted a nuke to use on the High Queen, didn’t he? But I bet the first thing the High Queen did when she got here was to make sure the Elves seized control of every nuclear missile on the planet.”

  “Of course,” said Nicholas, smiling. “She seized control of them all. But she could only claim the ones she knew about…but Shane was assassinated, and the High Queen killed everyone else who knew about the Sky Hammer and Last Judge when she used the Reaping against Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis. The Sky Hammer and Last Judge Mountain were forgotten until I found them again.”

  I stared at him, my heartbeat thundering in my ears.

  The pieces clicked together in my head, one by one, like the hammer falling on a revolver.

  I remembered Nicholas and Sergei Rogomil talking about how they would be willing to kil
l ninety percent of the human population to ensure that the remaining ten percent would live free of the Elves.

  I remembered my negotiation with Lorenz outside of the Graysworn safehouse, Lorenz scoffing at all of the grand plans that Nicholas had for his glorious Revolution once the High Queen was overthrown.

  And I remembered the news reports that had been the background noise for the last two months, the breathless reporting on the High Queen’s Royal Progress through the United States.

  A Royal Progress that would end with the Skythrone flying over New York on July 4th…

  “You’re going to nuke New York,” I said.

  My voice sounded distant in my ears.

  Nicholas, Morelli, and Corbisher all looked at me.

  “You know the High Queen’s going to be in New York in a few days,” I said. “The Skythrone will be there. Every Elven noble in North and South America will be there. And you’re going to kill them. But there are fifteen million people in New York. It’s like that soccer stadium in Los Angeles times a thousand. You’re going to kill all those people to get at the High Queen.”

  “Jesus,” said Russell.

  He never swore.

  “No, it’s worse than that, isn’t it?” I said, my mind racing. “A sufficiently powerful EMP can interfere with magic, can’t it? And magic is holding up the Skythrone. If the spell holding it airborne is disrupted over New York…”

  “It will be like an asteroid struck the Earth,” said Nicholas with perfect calm, hooking the Sky Hammer’s detonator to his belt. “The Sky Hammer’s blast radius is sufficiently powerful to kill all fifteen million people in the New York area, and I suspect radiation poisoning will kill another five to ten million. But when the spell holding the Sky Hammer fails, it will be the equivalent of a five-hundred meter asteroid striking the Earth. The wave it causes will inundate every coastal city on the Atlantic. The dust cloud from the impact will block out the sun for at least a year, and the planet will have two or three years of failed harvests. The resultant social chaos will make it easy to pick off the remaining Elven nobles and exterminate the cities of Elven commoners.”

  “You’re going to kill billions of people,” I said. Somehow, I had always known it would be this bad. “Billions of humans and Elves.”

  “Participants in the system of oppression that I am fighting,” said Nicholas. “The Revolution will reconstruct the world in a new and better form.”

  “No,” I said. “No, you’re not.”

  “Nadia,” said Russell, his voice quiet. “It’s time. My life isn’t worth this.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. Morelli was pointing his gun at me, Russell was pointing his gun at him, and Murdo leveled his pistol at Corbisher with his left hand, his elemental blade snapping into existence from his right. “Because our deal is done, isn’t it, Nicky? I had to steal three goddam things for you, and you’ve got all three of them now.”

  Nicholas smiled. “Yes, Miss Moran. You’ve stolen all three. And now…”

  If he had finished that sentence, we would have all killed each other then and there.

  Instead, the clanging from the laboratory drowned him out.

  “What the hell is that?” said Corbisher.

  I risked a glance at the doors to the laboratory, worried that Nicholas had somehow put together a distraction.

  He hadn’t.

  The other eleven doors in the laboratory had slid open to reveal closet-sized compartments, and armored men strode out, their boots clanging against the floor with terrific force. For some reason, the men wore suits of armor that looked medieval, complete with helms and visors that hid their faces.

  No. Not men.

  An icy wave of fear rolled through me.

  Golems. The things were steel golems, similar to the ones we had escaped in the Royal Bank. I had no idea how to create golems, and I had no idea how these golems had ended up at Last Judge Mountain, but that didn’t matter right now. Each one of those golems had to weigh at least a thousand pounds, and I had no idea how to stop them. My lightning globe spells could slow them down, but I had no way to destroy them. Neither did Nicholas. He could turn into that armored panther-thing, but claws and fangs were useless against a solid mass of steel, and the shadow fire his Dark One granted only irritated the golems.

  We had no way of stopping the golems. Seriously, how do you defeat a thousand pounds of walking metal?

  And more urgently, how do you stop a half-ton piece of ambulatory steel from crushing your head?

  “Move!” roared Murdo. “Move! Move! If they catch us in here, we’re finished!”

  He was right. Our only hope was to get away from the damned things.

  Russell and Murdo sprinted for the laboratory, and I ran after them, not bothering to see if Nicholas, Morelli, and Corbisher followed. I heard their boots slapping against the concrete, and I had the awful fear that Nicholas was somehow controlling the golems. I risked a glance back and saw that both Nicholas and Morelli looked alarmed, and Corbisher seemed downright terrified.

  No, they definitely weren’t controlling the golems.

  We dashed into the central aisle, and some of the golems moved behind us, blocking the entrance to the room with the Sky Hammer. The rest of them strode to block the way back to the room with the Seal device and the operations center. The blue light flashing from the room with the Seal machine and the glow from the strange device by the computer console flashed off the golems’ steel bodies.

  The golems went motionless. Like, totally motionless. It was uncanny. When moving, they strode as lightly and as fluidly as a healthy man. But when they went motionless, you could tell they were massive slabs of steel. A single hit from one of those fists would make my head explode like a melon or collapse my ribcage like an empty shopping bag.

  “You’ve fought these things before,” said Corbisher, his voice urgent. “How did you beat them?”

  “We didn’t,” I said. “We outran them.”

  “Use lightning spells,” said Murdo. “That’s the only thing that seems to affect them. The lightning disrupts them, slows them down.”

  “Doesn’t kill them, though,” said Corbisher.

  “It does not,” said Nicholas. “Suggestions?”

  I stared hard at the golems, my mind racing, and I noticed something odd.

  The blue light was reflecting oddly off their armored forms.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. Some of the blue light was shining from within the golems’ armor. I had thought the symbol from the bronze machine was reflecting off their cuirasses, but I had gotten it backward. The symbol was glowing on the armor of the steel golems.

  The golems started to stride towards us, their armored boots carving chips from the concrete floor.

  “Lightning!” said Nicholas, and he, Murdo, and Corbisher all cast the spell. Murdo and Nicholas each managed two lightning globes, but Corbisher only cast one. The globes slammed into five of the golems, and the steel of their bodies provided an excellent conductor for the lightning. Five of the golems went into wild, thrashing dances, their legs hammering against the ground. It would have looked comical, if not for the booming thunder of the impacts and the fact that concrete chips flew from every blow.

  Instead of lightning, I cast the spell to sense magical forces as the other six golems advanced. I tried to make sense of the flows of magical power in the room…

  “Nadia!” shouted Nicholas. “Lightning, now!”

  Suddenly I saw the answer. There was a maze of magical power in the room, but it was centered on that bronze machine next to the computer console.

  “Nicholas!” I said. “That machine! The machine is controlling the golems. Destroy that machine!”

  He didn’t hesitate, but he started casting a spell, as did Murdo and Corbisher. I drew together my own power and unleashed a volley of six lightning globes, each sphere striking an individual golem. Again, the golems went into a wild, jerking dance, and Corbisher struck first, hitting the ma
chine with a burst of shadow fire. Murdo and Nicholas followed with a volley of lightning globes that slammed into the device. Fingers of lightning coiled up and down the bronze machine, and a spray of sparks burst from the side.

  The golems did not slow in the least.

  I cast another volley of lightning globes, forcing the spell through my tired mind. I sent the globes spinning in multiple directions, stunning the golems that had avoided my first attack. But that was only a delaying tactic. I couldn’t hurl lightning globes forever, and I couldn’t hurt or shut down the golems.

  A thought flickered at the edge of my mind. The machine was controlling the golems…and the machine had a computer terminal with a slot for a data rod. Could I Cloak, run across the room, and use my duplicate rod to shut down the machine? That was a good idea…but my lightning globes were the only thing that kept the golems from ripping the others apart.

  “Nicholas!” I shouted. “The machine. It’s got a slot for the rod! You can shut down the machine!”

  It was a long shot, but it was the only hope we had.

  “Go!” said Nicholas. “Keep the golems off me! Move, everyone!”

  We ran forward. Morelli and Russell brought up the back, while I ran alongside Murdo, Nicholas, and Corbisher. We threw lightning globes at the golems, stunning the automatons, and then we scrambled to the U-shaped computer console and the whirring bronze machine. Nicholas sprinted around the metal ring at the base of the machine and slammed the data rod into the slot.

  Nothing happened.

  The golems converged on us. I gritted my teeth and drew together power for another spell. Part of me wondered if it was better if we died here, if the Sky Hammer never saw the light of day.

  Then the golems froze in place.

  I let out a long, shuddering breath. The golems had gone motionless, all of them, locked in mid-stride.

  I looked at Russell, at Murdo, and then at Nicholas and Corbisher and Morelli.

  The tension in the air increased.

  I drew together as much magical power as I could hold.