by John Barnes
It would keep some guys in Langley, Virginia, busy for a good long while, I figured.
As we stepped into the bathroom I said, “So they’d take over the world here, under some kind of dictatorship, and then put Closers in at the top of the hierarchy? Is that what they’re after?”
He shook his head. “Basically this is a timeline they’d strip-mine, Mark. You guys are ‘unclean.’”
He had been fiddling with a gadget on his belt; he grunted with satisfaction. “All right, good, they’ll pop us from here in two. Stand close to me, in the center of the room. There we go. Now, to continue … Closers are nuke phobes. Their language is akin to Phoenician, and we think what they are is Carthaginians. Probably in their timeline Hannibal took Rome and won the Second Punic War, and then they went on to conquer all of Europe and the world. And our guess is they fought a lot of nuclear wars in the process; so the only place a Closer will settle is in a timeline where no nuclear bomb has ever gone off. In the ones where nukes have happened, trusted Closer slaves run things, and they basically steal everything nonorganic for export back to the Closer timelines. We think it’s a superstition, that maybe they had nukes a long time before they had genetics and that as a result they have some kind of visceral terror of nukes that we don’t understand.”
I nodded. “You don’t know much about them?”
“After a hundred years of war, no. We’d love to find their home timeline—it’s a disaster that they know ours, but at least we have many allies they haven’t found yet. There’s no way we know of to track a time invasion back to its source—but it does give off a special kind of radio pulse that we can easily detect. That’s how I know that a whole bunch of things just crossed over in the Bellevue area near here, and if we had a car, we’d just drive but—”
It got dark and silent. I was beginning to feel like I was riding an elevator or subway—if you can remember the first time, when you were a child, it was pretty scary, all sorts of fascinating things happened, but by the time you’d lost count of how many times you’d done it, you were barely aware of it at all. I found myself waiting slightly impatiently for the gray … which came, and then the sounds came. We were back in the white room.
“Better reload—this may be heavy duty,” Harry said. “Push on this stud.”
I did, following his example, and little drawers like the drawers on a coffee grinder slid out of the sides of both our weapons. He grabbed an open can from a sideboard—it was filled with a heavy gray powder—filled the drawer full, and shoved it closed. There was a “beep” noise from his SHAKK. I followed his example.
“Is this some kind of gunpowder—?” I asked, but then it got dark and silent, again. The question went right out of my mind.
I’ve been to Seattle a few times, and it’s hard to find a less appealing area (unless you’re a computer dork) than Bellevue. The buildings all look like movie sets from B-grade science-fiction flicks, except for the ones that look like concrete building blocks used by a giant child who just happened to be a complete idiot.
What we were facing, just off the freeway, from a drugstore parking lot, was an immense blue cube. It was all glass on the outside, with just the fine tracery of metal wires holding the glass in place. The blue was very deep, like ink in water. Harry Skena laughed bitterly. “Jeez, they must have worked to keep this one out of the news. This is absolutely typical Closer architecture. They build buildings like this wherever they go. They must really have had substantial plans for this world, though god knows what. With Closers you never quite know.”
“What do we do now?” I asked, dubiously.
“We start by walking toward it,” Skena said. “The instruments I’ve got here—passive radiation gadgets, so there’s no signal they can detect, I hope—show it’s pretty much hollow inside. Nothing that looks like gun emplacements. But notice something about this parking lot?”
I looked around, and then the thought hit me. I ran to check and then came back. “There’s nothing in any of the cars. Any of them. They’re all different ages like a real population of cars, but nobody has any old McDonald’s wrappers, or a shirt hanging in the window, or anything like that.”
Skena nodded. “Yep. And I bet what happens every night is a bunch of low-level flunkies from their base come out in ties and jackets, drive the cars away, take a bunch of different routes to some hidden garage someplace … and then all park and transport back to where they came from. And do it in reverse the next morning.”
I grunted. “A pity we don’t have enough time.”
“For what?”
“Ever driven in Seattle? The idea that someone is putting thousands of extra cars into the traffic for no reason … well, if you let word of that get around town, there’d be an angry mob here in no time, and they’d burn the thing to the ground.”
Skena laughed. “It’s a charming image. But, no, I’m afraid it’s just you and me, and we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way; right now it’s clear they’re …” he glanced down at his gadget on his belt, and then started to trot toward the building.
“What—” I asked, matching his strides.
“They’re powering up their transmitter in a big way. And there are a lot of human bodies in there. Probably they’re taking the remnants of Blade of the Most Merciful back to wherever they stored them before. If we hit ’em now, we can kill most of Blade, and some Closers, and maybe toss a couple of bombs through the portal when it opens.”
He said that last as he broke into a dead run. Any doubts I might have had about the kind of facility it was were erased when three men with rifles ran out of the building and started to level them at us; I fired a one-second burst of auto at them, and they went over with shredded heads.
But I could see a steel door sliding down over the entryway—the place was turning into a fortress before our eyes—and under my feet I could feel the rumble and vibration of immense engines, or maybe the generators, powering up to move great masses across time.
“How do we get in?” I shouted at Skena, as we rushed on, now only a few dozen steps from the steel-shuttered entryway.
“The good old-fashioned way,” he said, pulling up. “Set for bursts.” I did, and as I looked up he was opening up on the door.
I followed suit. The little slugs did nothing fancy, but they carried a huge load of kinetic energy, and six of them in a hex pattern were hitting a space no bigger than an ordinary double window with each burst. Visible ripples formed in the steel, and the door shuddered under the impact. Then, as we pumped burst after burst into it, one of the ripples snapped and cracked, and a few more bursts made a hole more than big enough to get in through.
I ran on ahead, and then an idea hit me, and I sprayed a dozen bursts at the huge blue glass wall that towered around the gate. Windows shattered everywhere.
Harry Skena followed suit, and as he caught up with me—glass was still plunging to the pavement all around—he said, “Great idea, for diversion?”
“Naw. I’m an art scholar. I’ve just always wanted to do that to a modern building.”
He laughed, and I liked the sound of it. It was great to have a friend to do these things with.
We charged on through the gap we’d blown in the steel door, past the deserted reception desk, and down a corridor. All around us we could hear alarms going off. Skena dropped a few little tennis ball-sized objects behind us—“PRAMIACs,” he said, “set to go off whenever we’re both out of the building or dead, whichever comes first.”
I was going to ask what a PRAMIAC was, but there was no time; we were turning the bend, and suddenly we were in the heart of the building, on a high platform overlooking a huge room that stretched to the top of the building ten stories over our heads, and at least that far underground. At its center there was a black column, beginning to glow a faint blue.
“That’s a full-fledged gate,” Skena said. “They could bring an army through there.”
Machine guns chattered on the other side,
and we dove for the deck. I crawled over next to him, squeezing off SHAKK rounds toward the gunners—stray rounds were doing things like knocking down pieces of guardrail and fluorescent lights, unfortunately, because my angle was so bad I couldn’t really aim straight at the gunner—
I concentrated and put one into the machine gun, which blew to pieces with a gratifying roar. Then I rolled over next to Harry, some question half-formed in my mind.
But I didn’t get to ask it. He was gasping for air and blood was puddling under him; he’d taken a round in the chest, and you didn’t have to be a doctor to know he’d be gone in seconds.
“Harry!”
“Take a PRAMIAC from the hall. Leave blue knob as it is. Turn red knob to position eight—no farther! Get it close to the base of the column.”
“Red to eight, base of the column, got it—Harry, can I—”
But I couldn’t do anything for him, at least not anything except what he’d just asked me. His chest had stopped heaving, the blood that ran from under him was no longer gushing, and in the long second before I tore my eyes away from his, his eyes filmed over just a bit as they started to dry out.
For the first time, I had lost a client. More than that, I had lost a friend. And though I didn’t know what exactly I was doing, I had a feeling if I followed his instructions, I could probably avenge him.
7
I scooted backward, ran down the hall, grabbed a PRAMIAC from the floor, shot the door off where it was marked EXIT, and ran down the stairwell.
As I ran I noted that the PRAMIAC was marked with symbols I couldn’t read. I stopped and stared at it, and then the little symbols swam before my eyes and I saw which one the eight was, by the red knob. How did I—
A familiar voice in my head said, “Remember, they didn’t remove me. I am still here to translate as needed—if I know the language.”
“Thanks,” I said, to the empty air, then the building started to buzz and shake like it might just come apart even before the PRAMIACs went off—I figured they were bombs of some kind.
The bottom door was locked, too, so I set for burst and fired five, experimenting with rotating the SHAKK. Sure enough, the bursts at angles to each other cut through the steel and concrete like a Sawzall, and the door fell into pieces in front of me.
I charged through, ducking low and rolling; bullets rang randomly around. I was about eighty feet from the base of the column, which was now that strange shade of deep purple that a working black light turns, and there was a whole gang of Bladers rushing around the other side. I could hear someone yelling at them, probably to come back, to judge from the way a couple of the more alert-seeming whirled and headed back.
I set the SHAKK on auto and sprayed the room in front of me; the last Blade of the Most Merciful went down like tenpins. I love my old .45, and I’ve won a lot of contests with it, but in a real fight you want high-tech, I decided.
I ran right up to the column and placed the PRAMIAC directly against the glowing base, which gave me an odd tingle but didn’t seem to be hot or electrically charged. Two more Bladers popped out—that column was a good forty feet in diameter, so it was plenty to hide behind—and I SHAKKed them without a thought—except the thought that clearly most of them were on the other side of the column.
Which meant if I ran around there—
I flung myself around the column; something made me not quite want to touch it, especially since it now towered twenty stories over my head, all with that fierce blue glow. A few feet and I saw that the other side seemed to be bathed in red light; I pulled the SHAKK around to ready, but the gunfire I expected didn’t come, and as I ran on around the corner—
I shot the last two as they entered the red, glowing door of the column. Faintly, through the door, I could see shapes moving—Harry had called this a “gate,” and I realized it must be exactly that, some kind of open doorway that they could move big groups of people through. And to judge from the scream of the machinery in the background, this was about the limit of what it could move.
But the main thought that ran through my head at that moment was pathetically simple—
Blade of the Most Merciful was getting away! They were about to leave our timeline forever—before I was done settling the score!
So I know perfectly well what I did next was bone stupid. If you tell me that, I won’t even try to argue with you. What’s more, I know perfectly well that I would do it again.
Vengeance will move a man to all kinds of things.
Having shot the last two in line, I dove through the gate in their place; I hoped to open up on the backs of the crowd as they entered whatever Closer base they were going to, and then either jump back, get shot to death, or—
Or what? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Jumping back or getting shot seemed like the only likely options.
I hit the deck in a tsugari roll and came up with my SHAKK ready, but everybody in front of me was bent over on the floor in a deep bow.
Then the most amazing pain I’d ever felt tore across my back. I looked up to see a man with a flexible little metallic whip that looked like nothing so much as a plumber’s snake. When I stared he lashed me across the forehead and pointed to the crowd that was all bent over.
The corner of my watering eyes told me there were hundreds of guards with whips all around, and every one of them was also carrying a sidearm. I wouldn’t get half a shot out before they gunned me down. But clearly they’d mistaken me for—
The whip lashed my cheek. Shit, I got the idea; I ran and joined the ranks of Blade of the Most Merciful, bent over on the floor, kneeling with our faces to the ground and our hands locked behind our butts.
Guards walked around lashing the men and kicking them. If I hadn’t been scared to death that the same was going to happen to me, I’d have enjoyed the spectacle.
I noticed that the whips drew no blood; probably they acted on the nervous system directly somehow. After the man on one side of me was whipped until he began to gibber and scream and sob, and the man on the other side was abruptly turned over, his pants cut away, and the whip applied to his genitals and anus until he fainted, I decided it was having a real effect on my nervous system, too.
I don’t mind admitting I was ready to piss my pants with fear, and I had no idea how I was going to get out of that one. It was abundantly clear that these guards did not speak English, or possibly any other language from my timeline, and my translator wasn’t volunteering anything about the strange grunting barks they made at each other.
It was also clear that they were just indulging in petty sadism—there was no point to the beatings and humiliations they were administering, they were just doing them to show they could, but the men who were obviously their officers made no attempt to stop it. In fact, when the guards tortured the man beside me, one young officer came over and laughed at the screams. When they threw him, still half-naked, to the floor, unconscious, so hard that I thought they might well have fractured his skull, the officer cheerfully flipped him over on his back, opened his fly, and urinated on the unconscious man’s face.
Then they whipped the man on the other side of him into licking it off. The poor bastard threw up, and they beat him unconscious, this time with their fists.
Meanwhile, behind me, I could hear work crews going in and out, and tons of stuff rolled by. I figured it was loot from our world, and wondered how many art heists were going to go unsolved forever …
That woke a spark of anger in me. I’d spent years of training to conserve humanity’s heritage of culture, and here a bunch of barbarians with a sadistic child’s idea of entertainment were carrying stuff off as trophies. I still couldn’t work up any sympathy for Blade—they were only getting what they deserved, and it was almost worth the risk of getting the same to be here while it happened—but that didn’t make me like these guards any better.
One Blader just ahead of me was being tormented by their touching him with turned-off whips; I could tell when they tur
ned them on by the way he jumped. They played with him in a way cruder than I’ve ever seen any cat be to a mouse.
Finally, the Blader couldn’t take it any longer, and jumped to his feet to run.
I don’t exactly know what they used on him. The Closers, I was to learn, have an all but infinite number of ways and tricks for inflicting pain. I think it was something that locked his legs and spine and paralyzed him from the neck down, because after they zapped him with it, leaving him a sort of frozen statue like a running cartoon character hit with a garden hose on a cold day, three of the guards carried him up to the front of the space.
Then they whipped us and kicked us till we were all sitting up straight.
We all watched the poor bastard as his face filled with terror; tears ran all over him, and he was screaming and gibbering for mercy like a madman.
He was about to discover that even if Allah was the Most Merciful, Allah’s creations were anything but.
The Closers slowly wet him down with something. The smell permeated the room, and though none of us dared to make a sound, or to move, you could feel the silent shudder run through us all.
Gasoline. Or something enough like it as to make no difference.
He knew what was coming, and now he was raving, shrieking, blood running from his mouth because he’d torn his lips and tongue, but all that did was make the Closers laugh harder. Then they spent a long while teasing him with little torches, bringing the flame close, moving it back; twice they lit his pants and then squirted them immediately with something to put the blaze out, and then wet him down with the flammable liquid again.
Two thoughts ran through my head. One was how much I hated the Closers for being the kind of people who would do this.
The other thought was that I hoped to god this was the one who’d put the bomb under the van. I’d never been able to get over the feeling in my gut that Marie had been conscious when it burned. And if this happened to be him, I was finally seeing my number one fantasy, and as horrible as it was, as little as I liked the Closers for being the sort of people who would do it, if it had to happen, I wanted to be there.
