Edge of Dawn

by Melinda Snodgrass

  Richard turned, ran back through the gate and into the fortress. Mosi was standing on the battlement, tears staining her face as she stared desperately toward the gate. When she saw Richard, she covered her face with her hands, the slender body shaking. He raced up the stairs, sheathed the sword, and gathered her into his arms. They sank down onto the stone walkway.

  She battered at his chest with a fist. “I thought you had left me!”

  “Never, Mosi, never.”

  He pulled her into his lap and rocked her gently while her tears soaked his shirt and her wails echoed off the walls. Kenntnis emerged from the small alcove and loomed over them, staring down with an almost puzzled expression.

  The sobs began to die, then Mosi once again slammed a fist against Richard’s chest. She lifted her head out of his shoulder and glared at him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the sword? How it was gone.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “If you had, we’d have had the sword back waaay sooner. You were dumb!”

  “Yes, I probably was, but why didn’t you tell me when the sword appeared and dove into Mr. Kenntnis’s body?”

  “’Cause you didn’t say anything and I thought it was something you had done and wanted to keep it secret since everybody was so mad.”

  Richard sighed and rubbed at his forehead. “That’s fair. I guess we need to talk to each other more.”

  “Okay. And you can’t leave me ever again!” she ordered fiercely.

  He didn’t bother with words. He just hugged her close. That was how the authorities found them.

  Chapter

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “WHY didn’t you go after him? You could have caught him easily.” Weber’s warm breath puffed against Richard’s ear.

  There was enough city glow that he could make out the older man’s features as Richard lay in the circle of Weber’s arms. He was pressed against Weber’s right side since a bullet had grazed his left hip, gouging a deep channel almost down to the bone.

  It had been an insane day. Richard had briefly been detained by the police, but the presence of heavily armed men who had been attacking a child inclined things in Richard’s direction, and his badge hadn’t hurt either. It had also helped that rumors were swirling over the imminent collapse of the Islamist government. The arrest and torture of General Çelik had not sat well with the military at large, and the civilian government was scrambling to mend fences. Holding Richard and his people blameless was one plank in that fence.

  Also, many of the men incapacitated by the flash-bang and then the sword had been eager to throw the blame on Titchen. The authorities didn’t want to hear talk about a creature summoned by Titchen that had been threatening the city. As was a cop’s wont, they went with the simple explanation—Titchen had hired men with guns to try and effect a very hostile takeover of a fellow businessman, and as a distraction, they had set fire to the shantytown. Richard, wearily amused, let it stand.

  Titchen was in the same hospital where Weber had been treated and where Ranjan was currently resting after having a bullet dug out of his shoulder. When Richard had visited the Indian scientist, intending to apologize for getting him into this mess, Richard had found himself stunned into silence as Ranjan thanked him fervently for “this very big adventure. I feel like James Bond.” Richard had been unable to muster up much of a response beyond, “Happy to oblige.” The word on Titchen was that he would recover but was likely paralyzed from the neck down from the fall.

  Since the danger was past, Richard moved his people to the Lugal hotel. He figured everyone would welcome a private room, restaurants, swimming pool, and spa services with in-room massages available. He had been going to maintain the fiction and get separate rooms for himself and Weber, but the security chief had been blunt. “Save the money, and you know one of them will be empty anyway.”

  “Did you hear me?” Weber nudged.

  “Yeah. Why didn’t I go after him?” Richard repeated slowly. “Mosi, mostly. I started to, but then I remembered her. She’s been through so much, to abandon her would have been … unforgivable.”

  Weber kissed him. “Go on, I can tell that’s not all.”

  It was not an admission he relished making, and it was a testament to how much he trusted this man that he felt he could. “I realized I was becoming the thing I was fighting,” Richard said softly. “I didn’t just touch Titchen with the sword. I cut him, and there was no reason for that. And if I’d caught up with Mark I was going to…”

  “Kill him?”

  “No, I wasn’t that far gone, but hurt him, certainly.”

  “He needs to pay for what he did.”

  “He will, but in a court of law. Law, like science, is the antithesis of the Old Ones. They push us to give in to the worst of our nature, to shut off our critical faculties, to embrace hate and violence and vengeance. The law is dispassionate, or it tries to be. It makes you wait and not take justice into your own hands. Grenier will be judged and go to prison.”

  “And if he doesn’t? If he gets some slick lawyer and gets off?”

  Richard shrugged. “I doubt he’ll survive long. He was party to events where another Old One was killed. He worked with me. They’ll find him. They might even find him in prison.” Richard fell silent, then added softly, “I almost feel sorry for him, Damon.”

  “Well, I don’t. Bastard tortured you, came crawling, then betrayed you. Fuck him.”

  “I’d rather not,” Richard said with a small smile.

  “Oh, God, why did you put that picture in my head?” Weber cuffed him lightly on the head.

  “Sorry. How about if I distract you?” Richard let his hand slip down.

  Weber caught Richard’s hand. “I have a question first. You’re heading home, right?”

  “As soon as Ranjan gets released, and I deal with Boğazkale.”

  “Okay. So where am I heading? Where do you want me?”

  “Wherever I am.”

  The worried expression in Weber’s eyes cleared. “Okay. Good.”

  “You and Joseph get to switch places.”

  “And what is the word from home?” Weber asked.

  “Pamela’s trying to find some way to keep us from losing all the employees in the subsidiaries, and she and Dagmar are juggling money. They’re also lining up people for me to interview to replace Kenzo.” Richard sighed. “There is one piece of good news—the stock price on Gaia tanked after Titchen’s arrest. But I still need to hire people to track down all those computers and destroy them. Being broke sucks.”

  “We gonna have to sneak out of here in the dead of night?”

  “We can pay this bill, but…” Richard shook his head.

  Weber gently touched him between the brows with an index finger as if erasing the frown. “Worrying won’t help. We’ll figure something out.” A wicked grin appeared. “How about if I distract you?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  * * *

  As the helicopter passed over Boğazkale, Richard saw that a fleet of ambulances was parked in the village and masked and biosuited medical workers were gathering and identifying the bodies.

  “Do you think the village will be abandoned?” Weber asked Sözer, who had accompanied them this time.

  The general shook his head. “No, the archaeologists will want to return. Eventually, the tourists will return because most will never hear of these events. Relatives will come. Life endures.”

  “It does indeed,” Richard said. “And fights like hell to endure,” he added almost to himself.

  The chopper landed, the rotors slowed, and the engine howl died into silence. Richard climbed out and headed for the stone. He had the sword drawn just in case. Clouds were boiling over the distant hills as if fleeing from the flashes of lightning, and the music of the goats’ soprano bells was punctuated by basso growls of thunder.

  “Do you think they sense you coming and that’s why the storm?” Sözer asked as they walked through the
ruins of the lower city.

  “I think Kenntnis would tell us we’re trying to form patterns where none exist.” He gave the general a quick smile. “This feels like normal earth weather to me.”

  Arriving at the stone, Richard pivoted slowly, looking for any indication that something else had emerged from the portal, and didn’t see any. He then laid the blade on the top of the stone. There was a deafening crack, and the stone split in half. The interior held overlaid imprints that suggested faces.

  Weber blew out a nervous breath. “Well, that’s not at all creepy. And once again Lumina damages a priceless archaeological artifact. Go, us.”

  * * *

  The Atlantic slipped away beneath the wings of the plane. It was very late, so the lights were dimmed in the cabin. Weber was snoring loudly on one side of the plane. On the other, Mosi, wrapped in a blanket, slept in her fold-down seat.

  At the child’s insistence, Richard had located the gray gelding, purchased the horse, and arranged to have it flown back to Albuquerque. He gazed down at her fondly, tucked the blanket more securely under her chin, and joined the scientific team waiting in the office at the rear of the plane.

  There was an air of barely suppressed excitement from the humans. Kenntnis sat in a chair, silent and enigmatic. Richard took a seat behind his desk.

  “Okay, you were going to tell me something but were terrified of eavesdropping. We’re at thirty-five thousand feet with ocean all around. Is this private enough?”

  “Wow, grumpy a little?” Eddie said.

  “Eddie,” Richard said warningly.

  “Okay, sorry. So you know how I said Trout was working on something big. Well, he did it! He figured it out.”

  “Couldn’t have done it without the chance to really study Mr. Kenntnis here,” the heavyset scientist said. It was the first time Richard had ever seen the man with any expression beyond a surly frown. He was grinning.

  Ranjan, his arm in a sling, blurted out, “And it is amazing!”

  “A world-altering moment,” Chen added in almost reverent tones.

  “Okay … and it is…?” Richard asked.

  Trout laid a welter of papers covered with calculations on the desk in front of him. Richard gazed at them and once again had that uncomfortable feeling of being the dummy in a family of geniuses. He looked up at the assembled PhDs.

  “Okay, I’m not a brilliant Nobel prize–winning scientist, so tell me what this is.”

  “Quantum computing,” Trout exploded.

  “And that’s a big fucking deal why?”

  Richard saw Eddie react at his unusual use of profanity. He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and reminded himself that none of these men was his father or his sisters, and they weren’t trying to make him feel stupid.

  “I apologize, I’m tired. I just need this put in simple English.”

  It defaulted to Eddie probably because he had the longest history with Richard. The young man sucked in a deep breath and began.

  “Okay, so computers today work by manipulating bits that have a value of either zero or one, and they can only do one task at a time. They do that task very fast, but it’s one task after another serially. But a quantum computer has bits that simultaneously are both zero and one, and because of this parallelism a quantum computer could work on a million computations all at the same time.”

  Chen couldn’t contain himself. “But we can’t look at that happening because if we look at subatomic particles, that will bump them—”

  Ranjan jumped in. “And that would make the particles fall onto one or the other state—zero or one—”

  Eddie again. “And our computer would be back to being just a simple Turing-type computer.

  Trout made an expansive gesture with both hands, as if pushing them all aside. “So we fix that using entanglement, and by studying Mr. Kenntnis I saw a way to—”

  “Stop!” Richard yelled. “So, basically, what you are telling me is that a quantum computer is really, really fast.”

  Eddie nodded. “Yeah, faster than all the supercomputers on Earth … put together.”

  “Okay, that’s fast,” Richard said, impressed.

  “Able to do multiple computations at the same time,” Ranjan said.

  “Can it leap tall buildings too?” Richard quipped.

  Eddie put on an air of long suffering. “Making other scientific advances that much easier.”

  Chen gave a tight smile. “Such as figuring out the sword and how to re-create its power.”

  Trout leaned in on Richard, resting his fists on the table. “And it will be worth a fortune.”

  “And Lumina will control the patent,” Eddie said.

  “So our financial problems—” Richard began.

  “Are over,” Eddie concluded.

  * * *

  They landed in Albuquerque late at night and found Joseph, Estevan, Pamela, and two limos waiting. As soon as he took the final step onto the tarmac, Pamela grabbed Richard in a fierce hug, then held him at arm’s length, looking him up and down.

  “Okay, how are you hurt this time?”

  “I’m not.”

  She gave him a look that clearly indicated she thought he was lying.

  Weber stepped in. “He’s really not.”

  She went to hug Mosi, and Richard gave a quick head shake. Pamela backed off, nodded to the girl, and said, “I’m so glad you’re all home.” She turned to the scientists and Weber. “We’ve made reservations for you at the Marriott.”

  People started moving toward the cars. “Damon’s coming back to Lumina with us,” Richard said.

  “We don’t have enough bedrooms,” his sister began.

  “We’ll manage,” Richard said firmly. Weber coughed and looked away.

  Eventually they reached the building, and Richard found that most of his staff were still there despite the late hour to welcome them. Everyone from Paulette, the front desk receptionist, to Franz to Jeannette to Dagmar … and Jorge. Richard turned to Pamela, and she gave him one of her tight little smiles.

  “Once I knew you’d won, I hired him back.”

  The young man stepped forward and thrust out his hand. “Wish you’d trusted me, Mr. Oort. You could have told me.”

  “I needed your reaction to be absolutely natural. Grenier would have seen through anything else.”

  “And speaking of … what happened to that pendejo?” Jorge asked.

  Dagmar was at Richard’s side. “Yes, I’d be very interested in that bit of information.” There were murmurs of assent from the rest of the assembled staff.

  “Still at large. The Turkish authorities are searching for him.”

  “You don’t seem concerned,” Pamela said.

  “I’m not.” He turned to the assembled staff. “Thank you all for being here to welcome us home, but it’s really late, and I need to get my ward”—he laid a hand on Mosi’s back—“and our newest paladin to bed.”

  There was a sudden babble of voices as people reacted. The assembled crowd started clapping. Mosi hid her face against Richard. He chuckled and stroked her hair.

  It still took a while to actually get on the elevator. Hands had to be shaken, thank-yous murmured, backs slapped. Franz gripped Richard’s suit-coat sleeve and said, “There is a small casse-croûte waiting upstairs.”

  Weber looked pleased at the prospect. Richard, knowing that Franz’s idea of “small” was relative, hoped that between Weber and Cross, if he turned up, the snack would get eaten. Finally they were deposited in the marble foyer of the penthouse.

  Richard exhaled. “Home.” He turned to his sister. “You get home too. Business can wait until morning.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. Looked from Weber to Richard. Richard tensed, waiting for the frown or blush. Instead a little smile curved her lips. She patted Weber on the shoulder and kissed his cheek too.

  “Make sure he eats some breakfast, okay?”

  Weber, looking poleaxed, watched her enter the elevator.
The doors closed on her broad smile.

  Richard watched as Mosi and Weber ate some of Franz’s casse-croûte. He gave Mosi time to brush her teeth and get into her pajamas, then went into the room to bid her good night. Richard sat on the edge of the pretty canopy bed. Mosi sat up and wrapped her arms around his waist. He returned the embrace.

  “There are still monsters … out there, aren’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “We’ll fight them.”

  “Yes, we will. Good night, Mosi.”

  He returned to the living room. Kenntnis stood at the side of the Bösendorfer grand piano, and Richard realized it was silent. When the alien had been intact, his presence pulled soft chords from musical instruments all around him. Since his capture and illness, the sounds had been discordant. Tonight it was silent. Richard wondered what that might portend.

  Weber sat on the couch, arms outstretched along the back. “So, couch for me? Or are we taking the twin beds?”

  “Kenntnis will sleep there.”

  “The master bedroom…?” Weber’s voice trailed away.

  “Is mine. Ours.” Richard held out his hand.

  * * *

  Richard moved to the desk in the office and looked at the books, the paperweight, the bookends. Jeannette, poised at his side, waited for him to speak.

  “Grenier’s?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get rid of it. All of it. Please.”

  “Of course, sir. May I throw it away?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Richard fell silent and studied the room, noted the art—one Impressionist painting and a number of Renaissance pieces. The predominantly red-toned geometric-style Oriental rug underfoot.

  “Jeannette, I’d like to keep the Degas, but I want to replace the others with some of the modern pieces from my apartment. They’re nowhere near as valuable, but they’re more to my taste. They’re in storage right now. Maybe you could send Estevan?”

  “Of course. What would you like done with these pieces?” She indicated the art currently on the walls.