INTERLUDE 6:
Vanished worlds are real to me today
March 14, 1943: Somewhere near Itoko, Belgian Congo
Long before the ambush, John Smith knew it had somehow been located by the council’s agents. It felt the peculiar sensation of a stutter in time, a vague discontinuity in reality, like the skipping of a record, which marked the passage of minds from ancient earth to the present day. This was its first warning that its plan had been compromised. This sensation was unusual enough in itself, but when Smith felt it occur more than twelve times in a single day, as he trudged through the jungle with the humans towards Thule, it understood the severity of its situation. For the first time it understood the newfound resolve of the council, which was usually hesitant to engage in such brash acts.
This meant that likely Smith’s plan had already eradicated the future, leaving a black void past the point when the ward would be compromised. Soon enough, it would prove the council’s fears correct.
It was rare to risk Great Race agents in human forms in large numbers. Usually such tasks were handled by the human cult, the Motion, which the Race had fostered throughout human history. Smith did not panic. It knew the agents of the council could not possibly be tracking the human shell it currently inhabited, and it had discarded any exotic items which could be pinpointed by the powerful science of the Great Race. This was a lesson it had learned long ago and a weakness it had learned to exploit against the agents of the council, who often relied upon it. Smith had nothing of Pnakotus on its shell. That left only the humans with which it was traveling. The council had somehow learned to track one of those human companions.
Or one of the council was one of its human companions.
John Smith had remained guarded from that point onward, ready for decisive action at any moment. It had not suffered through so much in this uncivilized age to fail now.
At the first sign of disturbance, when one of the humans had detected the approach of unknown entities, Smith had left the group for the first time. Silently it crept off to the south, skirting the area of dispute by more than a mile while the sounds of the ambush played out distantly behind it, echoing beneath the vault of the canopy. The thunderous cracks of the lightning guns and the stuttering, ineffectual pops of human weapons were suddenly lost in one colossal explosion, a circumstance which Smith had not planned but which pleased it greatly. The weapon of choice of the Great Race had reacted violently with the explosive compound the humans had carried, removing the humans and the council’s agents alike in one cleansing eruption.
Smith would now have to disable the ward itself. But this was no great matter.
Smith did not look back. It hurried forward through the lush jungle towards the grey city.
Thule.
When it arrived, it knew that its time here had almost ended.
Although Smith did not realize it, tears poured from its shell’s eyes as it wandered the abandoned streets. It stumbled, nearly blind, to the center of the necropolis, searching for its goal. A city of Stonehenge-like rock structures built in the scale of skyscrapers, laid out in vast, ever-tightening concentric circles.
Only something of such grand size could keep the jungle at bay. The vast spires of grey rock, reared over two million years before, still remained untouched by harsh nature, which laid a quiet, constant and tireless siege to it on all sides. It was a testament to the hubris of Smith’s race, the greatest project the Great Race had undertaken and its greatest secret, more vast that the library at Pnakotus or any of its millions of other forays into time. The place called Thule was the ward which kept the Great Race’s only true enemy at bay, and which allowed a future into which they would construct an escape from that enemy’s unavoidable release.
When the whistling horrors had risen up and consumed their world, the Great Race had fled to a future assured by their constant diligence, by visitation and alteration of history. A distant future free from the terrors of their most feared enemy—the insubstantial, immaterial, cancerous polyps they had imprisoned beneath the earth when they had first arrived here from the star of their origin. But in the interim, between the destruction of Pnakotus and the age of man, when the polyps roamed free upon the Earth, unchallenged and supreme, what had become of them? No mind of Pnakotus thought to ask such questions. Neither had Smith, until he discovered the secret buried in the sands of Australia.
The otherworldly polyps, so alien and abnormal, bred in an equally unnatural manner. It happened every four hundred million years. Gathering in an orgy of semi-solid fluid exchange, the species itself became a seething biological reactor, spewing forth new offspring to further infest the globe of the earth. They would remain in this state for hundreds of millions of years, depending on obscure celestial cycles which affected organs peculiar to their form.
The Great Race had gained this knowledge early in its time on earth, during the first great subjugation wars which led to the imprisonment of the polyps. Few knew that the polyps were subdued so easily only because many were still locked within this orgy when the Great Race arrived. These polyps, lost in some instinctual rhapsody, were easily moved underground and posed no threat while in this state. Those few that were motile and conscious were much more difficult to defeat, but the vast numbers of the Great Race proved enough to quash their initial attempts at counterattack.
All the polyps were imprisoned beneath the earth.
Even in the midst of victory, though, the members of the Great Race knew that their defeat would eventually occur. Their power to travel through time established this grim fact even before the last polyp was placed beneath the ground. The day would come when the polyps would break free of the wards of alien science the Great Race had laid to lock them within the earth. There was no way to stop the polyps, and the Great Race did not try to stop them; they understood even then that the only advantage they possessed, their ability to travel through time, was their only hope at survival.
In those eons when the polyps crawled about on the surface of the earth unchecked, after the fall of Pnakotus, no native species flourished aboveground or in the open air. The polyps ruled the dark globe and erected seamless black towers to their strange immaterial gods, and waited for the time when they could breed enough young to leave and infect other worlds and other planes.
During one of their reproductive phases, native advanced life began to flourish upon the Earth. The first creature of significant intelligence, with a brain capacity sufficient to support the mind of a member of the Great Race, was a strange and early species of ape. Native to Africa, these great apes evolved about four million years before the modern human era. It was discovered by agents of the Great Race inhabiting their clumsy forms that near the birthplace of this newly evolved race the polyps had taken to their reproductive dance in the jungles.
The polyps’ only weakness was to be exploited.
Hundreds of agents of the Great Race jumped forward in time to inhabit many members of that species of ape and to turn its natural evolution to the whim of the council. Many of the Great Race’s greatest minds were lost in the transference, as the brains of the ape creatures were tiny compared even to that of humanity. Few survived the transfer back when their task was completed. Those that did were little more than shadows of what they once were. These advanced minds ruled the primitive ape-people like gods.
Over two million years of evolution and endless toil in the primordial jungles of Africa, this odd species of ape, ruled by the agents of the Great Race, constructed the grey city, Thule, using the science of ancient Pnakotus. In the process, the agents of the Great Race taught the apes the arts of science and speech, and the first whispers of the belief in gods and magic began to stir among them. But the construction of the city was always the focus, for the city was in fact a device to keep the polyps in their reproductive state—a massive ward to fold the polyps into an unbreakable and infertile Mobius loop of reproduction. Within the center of the ward the polyps remained, locked
in eternal orgy, never reproducing, never tiring, never leaving.
Entombed.
At the end of this great age, with the completion of the ward, the polyps were imprisoned. The remnants of the ape culture continued to develop amidst the city, slowly spreading out into the world, transforming by evolution into many different forms, one of which would prove to be the dominant species for some time in the future. The ancestral knowledge of something greater than their beginnings remained with their descendants, genetic memories of lost cities of birth; Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Thule. Their antecedents, the ape-things, remained in the wilds of Africa, jealously guarding their grey city in the depths of the jungle. From this great, secret endeavor a new future rich with life unfolded upon the earth like an ever-increasing wave, erasing the black expanse of a polyp-ruled world which had once stood in its stead. This new future was free to be traveled by the Great Race and molded to the council’s whim, abused by the council for their own, undeserved preservation.
But no more.
John Smith was here now, in the city which had started mankind on the path of civilization and which would end the rule of the Great Race which had exploited and plundered time itself. Smith lowered its bag to the ground and retrieved its notes in the clear light of the wonderful sun. A sun which would soon shine upon a naked, dead globe, barren of natural life and form—except for the seamless black towers and the haunting cries of the great enemy, the polyps. Without humanity to scar the world with atomic weapons, the future to which the Great Race had escaped would cease to exist.
Before him the limitless streets of Thule sprawled, carving the earth into distinct, mathematical sigils the size of city blocks, which wove a spell of eternal bliss on those cancerous things from outside. The ritual to free them would take some time, but nothing was left in the world to stop it now. Time itself was drawing to a close around John Smith and every single thing in the world, silently, like a shroud. The wave of life which Pnakotus had freed had come to its crest and would soon collapse into an everlasting tide of chaos.
CHAPTER 24:
Full of high state and woe
March 13, 1943: Somewhere near Itoko, Belgian Congo
Manbahadur Rai, the Gurkha, was not alone in the jungle. Three months in Burma had taught him what being hunted felt like. How to notice that particular nuance which circumvented the common senses but which, in the darkness of the jungle, seemed much more trustworthy than something as basic as sight. His kukri, purposely dirtied with mud, sat on his lap, clutched in the loose grip of his left hand. The strap of his Sten gun was looped in his other hand, ready to be brought to bear at any second. The tingling in Manbahadur’s spine told him soon the kukri would be dirty with something other than mud.
His name was, if one were to be specific, Manbahadur Talum, and he was far, far from his home. Rai was the name of his tribe in Nepal, a clan which could count back forty-three generations of names on both sides of the Dhankuta River. It was a place so serene and alien to the filth he found himself squatting in that Manbahadur had to continuously remind himself of his location, and his mission, or the solitude he felt would carry him away in memories to Ilam and eastern Nepal, a place of green-stepped valleys and crooked hanging trees which seemed to hold the sky in place with delicate, thin branches.
Why had he ever left? The reasons seemed as unreal as the jungle which now comprised his world.
What did duty or honor mean in this mud and filth?
Even now, as the endless, humid jungle moved around him in the dark, nothing more than a sheer sheet of black, full of stealthy, suggestive sounds, he found it difficult to concentrate on particulars. His mission had somehow evaporated before his eyes, lost in a series of untoward events which had partially relieved him of the guilt that rode his shoulders like a pack so heavy even he could not heft it. Relief was what he felt for these disasters, the release of a burden worse than he had ever carried before. The Americans were his allies and had selflessly laid down their lives and safety to come to the aid of the world, unmindful of the human cost to crush tyranny. The trust between Britain and America was implicit, something unquestioned and basic. Manbahadur knew that trust alone would give him the edge he needed to complete his mission; to locate the grey city and then kill all the American agents in the group. Major Cornwall had calmly ordered their deaths like a man ordering from a menu, as if the Americans were nothing more than Axis agents, like they were nothing but animals. Now there was only one American left, and in his current condition, Manbahadur was not sure he would last the night. Fate had spared him the crimes he was ordered to commit, or so it seemed. Everyone else involved in their little excursion was dead, including his fellow PISCES agents. The explosion had been spectacular; nothing had escaped.
Nothing except Manbahadur and the American, Arnold.
But the blast had called more of their attackers from the jungle. The Gurkha had ditched his pack and hefted the unconscious American on his back, easily supporting the dead weight at a run, and headed to ground south of the blast before they were discovered by the groups of natives combing the jungle around them. He had no clear idea why he was saving the man he would have to kill later (orders, orders)—perhaps it was just his training, an unconscious reaction; the man was wounded but not dead; the automatic response was to save him at all costs so he could fight the enemy another day. On the other hand, Manbahadur figured that Arnold had pushed him down the hill for a reason, that somehow the American had one of those flashes of intuition men often have in combat and knew the composition B was in danger of detonation. Arnold had not hesitated. He’d thought of Rai before himself. Rai knew he owed the American as much again, even if they only survived to face another fate too terrible to contemplate.
As the sun fell in the sky, hidden by the canopy, Manbahadur struggled four miles through the jungle over deadfalls and through neck-high razor weeds in what seemed slow motion, a dying man on his back. Soon enough he was spent, despite his Nepalese advantages. His lungs burned and his knees shrieked as he lowered Arnold to the muddy ground. It had been a long time since he had felt such fatigue.
Darkness crept through the jungle on spider’s legs, slowly consuming the world in shadow.
Now, as the growing silences of the jungle told him something was moving towards him in the black, Manbahadur looped the strap of his Sten gun around his forearm and fixed it in the crook of his elbow. Lt. Arnold hitched a strained breath in the dark that sounded thick with mucus or blood, and Manbahadur tried vainly to pierce the veil of darkness around him with more than his eyes.
Something was in the clearing with him. He had the sense of a presence, of a thing which moved through forms like fish moved through water. A spirit.
A spirit.
Manbahadur stood suddenly, sure of something he could not possibly know. The L-shaped Sten gun let out a double belch of flame, illuminating the scene in stark flare-like light for a brief moment. Four dark-skinned natives had entered the clearing invisibly, silently. Two clutched their chests in flashing stop motion afterimages, felled by the bursts. A third seemed to sprout a hooked, foot-long prong from his chest in the light of submachine gun fire before he fell. Manbahadur’s Sten had misfired on the second burst, so he had thrown the kukri more than fifteen feet and it had found its mark, flying through the air with a deadly accuracy.
Silence drifted in as the jungle held its breath.
Manbahadur dropped the submachine gun to the ground and retreated into the jungle, fishing his Webley revolver and Arnold’s .45 from his belt with trembling hands. He dropped in the dark past a deadfall and brought the guns around and up, ears trained to find any sound of pursuit.
Instead, a light from the clearing illuminated the leaves and the feeling of pursuit died away.
The greenish ghost light spilled over the leaves, trailing huge, slat-like shadows behind them. Manbahadur heard the first native voice from the jungle then, but what was said he could not understand. It was a swift, organi
c language, mumbling and without pause. Soon, others joined the voice.
The Gurkha crept forward towards the ghost light, a gun in each hand, eyes wide with fear and desperation.
Thomas Arnold lay unconscious on the ground, surrounded on four sides by natives, who had placed some sort of box lamp on his chest. The tiny, square box flooded the area with a rich, viscous green light. The natives sang a mumbling, sing-song chant in unison, arms grasped to one another in a loose circle around the downed man.
Arnold’s head lifted slowly from the ground. Arnold’s eyes were wide and conscious and full of fear, searching the bizarre tableau before him for comprehension. As his shoulders began to rise off the ground, the natives roughly pinned him back down and held his arms in place with their knees. Arnold let out a muffled cry which may have contained speech. His head bobbed up and down from the ground, eerily illuminated by the green box.
Manbahadur Talum Rai cocked both pistols and took a deep breath. A hush fell over his mind. Thoughts as straightforward and clean as mathematics scrolled through his brain. Betrayal of an ally called for the ultimate penitence, he knew. And even if Arnold did not survive the situation, Manbahadur would die with a clean conscience. The American had trusted him, and Manbahadur had plotted to do his “duty.” There was no excuse for such cowardice.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 26
