Iceblood

by James Axler

  Lakesh looked completely enthralled. "Did Roerich speculate on the physical composition of the stone?"

  Brigid nodded. "He speculated the stone was a form of moldavite, a magnetic mineral said to be a spiritual accelerator. Also, some historians have stated that a fragment of the Chintamani Stone can act as a homing beacon, leading to the main piece and therefore to the abode of the Eight Immortals."

  "What about the unknown letters inscribed on the stone?" Banks asked.

  "Roerich recognized them as Sanskrit and translated them as reading, 'Through the stars I come. I bring the chalice covered with the shield. Within it is a treasure — the gift of Orion.'"

  "And the so-called Eight Immortals?" Kane inquired. "What are they supposed to have been — or be, since they're immortal?"

  "Roerich asked the same question," answered Brigid. "The abbot told him how the immortals were made of air and clay, formed by Mu Kung, the sovereign of eastern air and Wang Mu, queen of the western air."

  She paused, and with a crooked half smile, added, "Or if you want a post-Taoist spin on it, they came from a planet in the solar system of Sirius and established a stronghold in Asia to conduct their genetic and hybridizing programs."

  Kane pressed the heels of his hands to the sides of his head. "I should've known."

  Grant pursed his lips. "I still don't see how the stone relates to any of this. What's the connection?"

  "Roerich's theory about the stone is that it's charged with shugs, currents of psychic force. He speculated it resembled an electrical accumulator and may give back, in one way or another, the energy stored within it. For instance, it will increase the spiritual vitality of anyone who touches it, infusing him with knowledge or enhancing psychic abilities that allow him to glimpse Agartha, the Valley of the Immortals."

  Brigid touched her lips with the tip of her tongue and said hesitantly, "There's something else."

  Kane groaned. "I knew there had to be."

  "I cross-referenced Agartha and came across something else in the database." She took a deep breath and declared, "In 1947, the same year as the Roswell crash, a mysterious man who called himself the Maha Chohan, Regent of the Realm of the Agartha, visited France. Not only did he describe the underground kingdom of Agartha, claiming its origins dated back fifty thousand years, but he made allusions to a system of physics that transcended what the scientists of the day understood.

  "He was quoted as saying, 'All the sacred sciences are still preserved in Agartha.' He also hinted that it was more than a city, but a sanctuary for the superior ancestors of humankind."

  "Hmm," Lakesh said meditatively. "So far, it all fits with what little we know of the Archon presence on Earth. If Agartha is a sanctuary for Archons, it is little wonder that Balam became so agitated, particularly if the fragments of the black stone are keys that lead to it."

  "Do we have any idea where any of these fragments might be?" asked Banks.

  Brigid slid a sheet of paper across the table to him. On it was a photographic reproduction of a dark stone, one side of it smoothly angled and faceted. It rested inside of a glass case, bracketed by other, smaller chunks of rock. A metal plate affixed to the base of the case bore the word Tektites.

  She said, "This picture shows part of the permanent mineral exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in Newyork." — She swept an expectant gaze back and forth across the faces of the four men.

  "Where the anomalous mat-trans signature registered," Lakesh muttered apprehensively.

  Banks, in the same low, anxious tone said, "The Hall of the Frozen Past."

  "That's as accurate a description of the museum as I ever heard," Lakesh replied.

  Kane tapped the illustration with a forefinger. "You're saying this is a fragment of the Chintamani Stone, Lucifer's stone? The shining trapezohedron?"

  Brigid shrugged. "What else could it be? Combined with the gateway materialization in Manhattan, and the clues Balam fed us, the conclusion is fairly obvious."

  "Maybe too obvious," Grant rumbled suspiciously.

  Banks shot him an accusatory glare. "He wasn't lying. I would have sensed it."

  "Then why didn't he just tell us where the fragment could be found?" demanded Kane. "Hall of the Frozen Past, my ass. That could just as easily refer to the cryogenic-suspension facility in Duke."

  "I have a theory about his choice of words," Lakesh ventured.

  Grant and Kane snorted disdainfully at the same time.

  Lakesh ignored them. "During his communication with us, Balam was limited in his descriptive language by Banks's easily accessible store of knowledge." He addressed the young man. "What do you know about the museum?"

  Banks shrugged. "Almost nothing. I've heard of it, I guess, but it's not at the forefront of my mind. I usually get it mixed up with the Smithsonian. All I have are impressions of what it was supposed to be."

  "Exactly. Balam more than likely drew on your inchoate impressions, and the closest approximation he could come up with was Hall of the Frozen Dead."

  Kane swallowed a mouthful of coffee. "Balam also mentioned a thief. Do you figure that's who made the jump into the Manhattan gateway?"

  "I would presume so," Lakesh answered. "On his way to the museum to recover the piece of the stone, drawn by the fragment already in his possession."

  Thoughtfully, Grant knuckled his heavy chin. "Best as I recall from old Intel reports, Manhattan Island is a flat zone — not part of any baronial territory. It's supposed to be overrun with slagger gangs and muties. All the bridges are down, so there's no way off it… kind of like a giant, open-air prison. There's no escape from Newyork."

  "Which doesn't make it that much different than your average ville," Brigid interjected wryly.

  Kane leaned back in his chair, frowning at the picture of the tektites. "So because Balam suddenly gets a hair up his ass — if he has an ass — we're expected to jump to Manhattan on a rock-collecting expedition?"

  Lakesh drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "Yes, but not simply because he wants us to do it. This is a way to establish a rapport with him, and perhaps to others of his kind."

  "And," Grant argued, "it may be a trap, to get as many of us chilled as he can, reduce the number of the opposition so others of his kind can break him out of here."

  Lakesh nodded grimly. "There's that possibility, too."

  "I believe Balam is sincere," Banks declared vehemently.

  Gently, Brigid said, "Don't take this wrong, but you can't trust your perceptions. He may have altered them."

  "Don't you think I'd know it?" he argued.

  "Not necessarily," Kane said. "You yourself told me that you didn't know the extent of Balam's mental influence on the human mind."

  Lakesh shook his head in weary frustration. "Regardless of the risks, this is a mission we must undertake, for diplomacy's sake if nothing else. We must try to establish a bond of trust and channel of communication with Balam — not just for our benefit, but for what remains of mankind."

  "Diplomacy?" repeated Kane skeptically. "With the Archons?"

  "How is it any different than the way you dealt with the Indians?" Lakesh challenged.

  "A bond of trust stretches both ways. What if it is a trap Balam has laid for us?"

  No one spoke for a tense moment, then Banks pushed his chair back noisily from the table. "I'll go if the rest of you are afraid."

  His announcement was hard with conviction.

  Kane's eyes flashed with anger, then an amused smile played over his face. "There's a difference between caution and fear, kid. This is a percentage play, calculating the odds, figuring if what we might gain outweighs what we might lose."

  "I think it is," Banks stated dogmatically.

  "No surprise," observed Grant. "But since you don't know a blaster from a blister, you'll stay here."

  Brigid glanced at him in surprise. "You're volunteering?"

  Grant nodded. "Under one condition."

  "Which is?" inquired Lakesh.
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  "If it's a trap, and if I manage to make it back, I get to chill Balam. As slowly and as painfully as I can."

  Banks squinted toward Grant, trying to ascertain if he was serious.

  "Whoever makes it back earns that honor," Kane said smoothly. "At least we'll have more to look forward to than another cup of coffee."

  15

  Lakesh stressed urgency and expediency, so an hour after the briefing, Kane, Grant, Domi and Brigid met him in the ready room adjacent to the central control complex. It held only a long table and the Cerberus gateway chamber.

  Enclosed on six sides by eight-foot-tall slabs of brown-tinted armaglass, the Cerberus unit was the first fully operable and completely debugged mat-trans unit constructed after the success of the prototype in the late twentieth century.

  All of them understood, in theory, that the mat-trans units required a dizzying number of maddeningly intricate electronic procedures, all occurring within milliseconds of one another, to minimize the margins for error. The actual conversion process was automated for this reason, and was sequenced by an array of computers and microprocessors. Though they accepted at face value that the machines worked, it still seemed like magic to Brigid, Kane and Grant.

  Intellectually, they knew the mat-trans energies transformed organic and inorganic matter to digital information, transmitted it through a hyperdimensional quantum path and reassembled it in a receiver unit. Emotionally, the experience felt like a fleeting brush with death, or worse than death. It was nonexistence, at least for a nanosecond.

  Their first jump, made some eight months ago, from Colorado to Montana, had been marked by nausea, vertigo and headaches, all symptoms of jump sickness. Lakesh had explained that the ill effects were due to the modulation frequency of the carrier wave interfacing with individual metabolisms. It had since been adjusted and refined, but Kane wondered how the few hardy souls who had used the devices after nukecaust could have tolerated the adverse physical effects.

  Grant and Kane wore their full suits of Magistrate body armor. Though relatively lightweight, the polycarbonate was sufficiently dense to deflect anything up to and including a .45-caliber projectile. The armor absorbed and redistributed a bullet's kinetic impact, minimizing the chance of hydrostatic shock.

  The armor was close-fitting, molded to conform to the biceps, triceps, pectorals and abdomen. The only spot of color anywhere on it was the small, disk-shaped badge of office emblazoned on the left pectoral. In crimson, it depicted stylized, balanced scales of justice, superimposed over a nine-spoked wheel, and symbolized the Magistrate's oath to keep the wheels of justice turning in the nine villes.

  Like the armor encasing their bodies, the helmets were made of black polycarbonate, and fitted over the upper half and back of their head, leaving only portions of the mouth and chin exposed.

  The slightly concave, red-tinted visor served several functions: it protected the eyes from foreign particles, and the electrochemical polymer was connected to a passive night-sight that intensified ambient light to permit one-color night vision.

  The tiny image-enhancer sensor mounted on the forehead of the helmet did not emit detectable rays, though its range was only twenty-five feet, even on a fairly clear night with strong moonlight.

  Their Sin Eaters were securely holstered to their right forearms. Attached to their belts by magnetic clips were their close-assault weapons. Chopped-down autoblasters, the Copperheads were barely two feet in length. The magazine held fifteen rounds of 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds, which could be fired at a rate of 700 per minute. Even with its optical image intensifier and laser scope, the Copperhead weighed less than eight pounds. The twostage sound and muzzle-flash arrestors screwed into the blasters' bores suppressed even full-auto reports to mere whispers.

  Fourteen-inch combat knives were scabbarded on the sides of their boots. Honed to razor-keen cutting edges, the titanium-jacketed, tungsten-steel blades were blued so as not to reflect light.

  Brigid and Domi wore long coats and dark clothing of tough whipcord, with high-laced boots enclosing their feet and calves. A mini-Uzi hung from a strap beneath Brigid's coat, and Domi's Detonics .45 Combat Master was snugged in a shoulder holster. A flat, square case containing medicines and dehydrated foodstuffs lay on the table, next to a small packet of precision tools. Other odds and ends of equipment, like Nighthawk microlights, rad counters and the motion sensor lay scattered on the table.

  Lakesh swept all of them with a searching, penetrating gaze. "Are you all aware of what you're to do?"

  "Other than making our way to the museum," Brigid said, touching the tool packet, "you want us to remove and return with the Newyork gateway's molecular-imaging scanners."

  Lakesh nodded. "As you know, every record of every gateway transit is stored in the scanner's memory banks. We need to download and review them in order to trace the point of origin of our interlopers."

  Kane snorted. "They're no more interlopers than we are. I'm more concerned with finding the museum. Manhattan is dark territory, has been since the nukecaust."

  "I found a New York City street map in the database," Brigid asserted. "I memorized the shortest route to the museum from the World Trade Center… though I imagine there have been some changes since the map was made and since we were last there."

  Lakesh acknowledged her oblique reference to the disastrous time-travel mission with a wan smile. A couple of months before, Brigid and Kane had been temporally phased to December 31, 2000, in a desperate bid to change the future in the past. They had arrived in a past, but not their past, so any action they undertook had no effect on their present.

  "You'll materialize in the same gateway as you did on that occasion," Lakesh said. "Or rather a duplicate of it, so you should have no trouble finding your way around."

  He picked up the packet of tools and handed it to Brigid. "I've already shown you the procedure for removing the scanner's hard disk."

  As she stowed it in a coat pocket, he asked, "So we're clear on everything?"

  "Except," Grant stated, "the reason for this op. I'm still fuzzy about the importance of this rock."

  "That makes two of us," said Kane.

  Domi held up three fingers. "Three of us."

  Brigid eyed her dourly. "You weren't at the briefing."

  Grant tapped his breastplate and hooked a thumb toward Kane. "We were and we still can't figure it out. Balam hinted that it was a conductor of some kind, you gave us a history lesson and I'm no closer to understanding the point of this than I was two hours ago."

  Brigid smiled wryly. "To be frank, neither can I, not completely. But I remembered something I was shown in Ireland, in the Priory of Awen's citadel — the so-called speaking stone of Cascorach."

  Lakesh stiffened in surprise. "You're right. I didn't make the connection."

  "It was a dark stone," Brigid continued, "and when touched by Morrigan's mind energy, it activated something like a recording, a psionic message implanted within the designs cut into its surface. Morrigan told me that ancient people knew that certain stones and metals could be charged with a memory, like a storage battery. She also mentioned that quantum theory dealt with such an electromagnetic effect."

  Kane nodded. "I remember you telling me about it. So you suspect this black stone of Balam's is the same thing?"

  "It's possible," she replied. "Perhaps it holds all the hidden information about the Archons and that's one reason he's so terrified."

  Thoughtfully, Grant said, "And some of that information might be about their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities and he doesn't want us apelings to access it."

  "Exactly," stated Brigid.

  "Even if that's true," Kane interposed, "won't we need a psi-mutie like Morrigan to tap into it?"

  "Worry about that later," said Domi impatiently, picking up the equipment case, a microlight and a rad counter. "Let's jump."

  Grant slipped the motion sensor over his left wrist, and the four people crossed the anteroom and entered th
e gateway jump chamber. Right above the keypad encoding panel was imprinted the notice Entry Absolutely Forbidden To All But B12 Cleared Personnel. Even after all this time, they still had no idea who the B12 Cleared Personnel were and what had happened to them.

  Grant pulled the heavy, brown-tinted armaglass door closed on its counterbalanced hinges. Manufactured in the waning years of the twentieth century, armaglass was a special compound combining the properties of steel and glass. It was used as shielding in jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.

  The lock mechanism clicked and triggered the automatic initiator. A familiar yet still slightly unnerving hum began, climbing in pitch to a subsonic whine. The hexagonal plates on the floor and ceiling exuded a shimmering silvery glow that slowly intensified. A fine, faint mist gathered on the floor plates and drifted down from the ceiling. Thready static discharges crackled in the wispy vapor. Lakesh had explained that the vapor was actually a plasma form, a side effect of the inducer's "quincunx effect" — the nanosecond of time when lower dimensional space was phased into a higher dimension. The mist thickened, curling around to engulf them.

  Kane watched the spark-shot fog float before his visor and he closed his eyes. He plunged through a kaleidoscope that constantly shifted into patterns of colors he couldn't name, somersaulting over a never ending series of contrasting textures, hues and shapes.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes and saw nothing but mist, but he heard the emitter array beneath the jump platform winding down from a hurricane howl to an electronic whine. Kane didn't move, waiting for the world to stop spinning. The vertigo and nausea slowly seeped away, as did the vapor. He heard his companions stirring around him, taking in shuddery breaths.

  Raising his head, he blinked blearily and looked around. Through the transparent armaglass walls, he saw a small chamber with a control console running the length of one wall. To his left, a ten-foot-high passage, walled with dully gleaming metal, led straight ahead.