by David Walton
Now he was as ready as he’d ever be. He plugged the coordinates for Jozef Stefan Institute into his teleportation module. Jean wouldn’t get away with this. Not if he could help it.
Alex could tell that Sean was not happy to see her. At first he stared at her with eyes gone wide, as if she were a ghost. Then his eyes turned hard, and she could see the anger growing. “What are you doing here?” he asked, with barely suppressed rage. Alex knew the rage was because he loved her, and he assumed that her presence here meant she was doing something incredibly stupid. And maybe she was. But she also knew things he didn’t. And could do things he couldn’t.
Instead of answering, she teleported to the far end of the hallway and then back again. He stared at her, his anger dissolving again into astonishment and confusion.
“Let’s assume I’m here for a good reason,” she said. “We don’t have much time, so listen up. The varcolac is here.”
Sean had personal experience with the varcolac. He had been only five years old when it had kidnapped him, along with their mother and sisters, but she was sure he remembered the experience. He had almost died.
“How do you know?” Sean whispered.
“For one thing, the soldiers pouring into the building have no eyes.”
He cringed. It was like a childhood nightmare come to life. Just as quickly, however, the hard look of an elite marine returned.
The marine who had originally found them, apparently the team leader, asked, “Kelley, what’s this about?”
Alex explained as best she could in a few terse sentences.
“It doesn’t change anything,” he said. “We do the job, we get out.”
Alex indicated her team. “Let us stay close,” she said. “When you’re done, we can teleport you out of here.”
The team leader looked like he was going to object, but then he shook his head. “Fine. We don’t have time to argue.” He eyed the wall. “This looks load bearing.” He slapped an explosive onto it and twisted something on its surface. It stuck fast and emitted a tiny whine.
“This way,” he said. Alex followed him, trusting the rest of her team to do the same. “Kelley, is this floor cleared?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Sean said.
“Okay. Johnny is dead. Wilson and Cash are holding the stairs. The first floor is overrun. We need to get down to the cellar.
They reached the stairs. Two Marines were holding position there, one behind the other, shooting at any Turkish soldier that turned the corner. The bullets passed right through the Turks, impacting the floor on the other side of them, yet they showed no inclination to climb the stairs.
“Why won’t they die, sergeant?” one of them called back, his voice stressed.
“Do you have any spare magazines?” Alex asked.
Sean gave her an odd look, but handed one over. Alex thumbed a bullet out of the top, and then waited for another Turkish soldier to come into view at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as it did, she teleported the bullet into its brain. Its head exploded, raining blood and gray matter all over the floor. Its body fell and didn’t get up.
“You did that with the Higgs projector?” Sean asked.
“Newer version. I can copy it for you, but not here.”
“Hand over your spares to Sean’s sister and her unit, then follow me,” the team leader said, apparently taking the oddness of the situation in stride.
Wilson, Cash, and Sean all handed over fresh magazines to Alex and her teammates. The team leader charged down the stairs, shouting incoherently, and his men followed him. “Come on!” Alex said.
They hit the first floor on the heels of the Special Ops crew. The puppet soldiers advanced, blasting them with pulses of energy. The Higgs projectors protected them, shielding them with flashes of blinding light.
One at a time, Alex put bullets into the soldiers’ heads. It was gruesome, horrible work, spattering all of them with gore, but it was better than dying. “Downstairs!” Sean shouted. “This way!”
They descended into the cellar, a long concrete stairwell three times as deep as any normal basement. When they reached the bottom, they entered a room as large as any gymnasium. The linear accelerator was there, a fat, steel cylinder that spanned the length of the room, connected to a host of machines and computers via a tangle of wires. The cylinder was the vacuum chamber through which the particles flew. At the far end, a giant Van de Graaff generator hummed in its own, larger compartment. A dozen scientists in white lab coats attended the machines.
And there was Jean. Alex didn’t wait to see what she would do. She dropped a bullet into her hand and teleported it into Jean’s head.
Or at least she tried. The bullet didn’t move. Alex tried to send it into the Van de Graaff generator instead, but it sat resolutely in her palm. This wasn’t good. She tried teleporting a few feet to her left, but once again, nothing happened. Afraid, she yanked the projector itself out of her pocket. It sat inert, dead, the tiny lights on its surface gone dark.
“Easy to do, once you think about it,” Jean said pleasantly. “A Higgs projector is just solid state electronics, a computer operating a program. It has electrical circuits to fry, just like anything else. A focused EMP will do it. Just a tiny one, right in your pocket.” She snapped her fingers. “Easy. The power of the quantum world is still there, of course. Only you can’t access it.”
The door to the stairway behind them slammed shut. “Why are you doing this?” Alex asked. “The varcolac doesn’t care about helping the Turks.”
“No, you’re right about that. I’m afraid it’s not going to help anyone but me.”
“But you’re human,” Alex said. “Why would you want to throw in with this alien creature? Do you really want to be the only person left in the universe? To have all that blood on your hands? You might live forever, sure, but will that really be worth it?”
Jean’s face grew hard. “What did humanity ever do for me? Took my daughter from me. Put me in a cage. Took my life, the few decades that I have allotted to me, and forced me to spend them shut up in a box. Do you know what that does to a person? Watching my precious time tick away, wasted? I have a mind with the imagination to create worlds, and humanity put me in a cage.” Sean reached for a grenade, but she flung it away from him with a gesture. “The varcolac, as you call it, won’t put me in any kind of cage at all. It will give me the universe.”
“What about the billions of people who don’t even know you? They didn’t lock you in a cage. And what about your husband and daughter? Have you even seen them since you escaped? Would you kill them with all the rest?”
Jean’s smile never wavered. “Humanity took my years away,” she said. “Now I am taking theirs.”
“You’re crazy,” Tequila said. “You’re completely out of your mind. You think this will make you happy?”
“This conversation bores me,” Jean said. “It’s time for you to die.” She turned away and snapped her fingers. Tequila’s mouth opened in shock. Her chest made a small popping noise, and she rocked back. She looked at Alex and tried to speak, but a trickle of blood dribbled out of her mouth. Her head lolled to one side, and she collapsed to the floor.
“Tequila!” Alex rushed to her side. Her friend was motionless, her eyes rolled back. She had no pulse.
Alex looked back up at Jean. “I will kill you,” she said, her voice wrenched out through the tears that closed her throat. “I will destroy you.”
“Really,” Jean said. “I’m impressed you located me so quickly, but come now. I have you thoroughly beaten. Now go home before I kill you all.” She smiled. “Oh that’s right, no Higgs projector. You can’t go home, can you? Too bad for you, I suppose.” She snapped her fingers again, and the marine team leader staggered back. He fell to the floor and died, just like Tequila.
Alex screamed in frustration. She cast about for anything she could throw, anything she could use at all to try to hurt this woman. “And where’s the varcolac now?” she shouted. “Are
you so certain you can trust it? Or is it just using you to get its way? What if, when all the rest of humanity is dead, it just discards you, too?”
Jean laughed. “You don’t understand, do you? I am the varcolac. Do you think humanity is the first race it has assimilated? It barely understood humanity before, but now, with its mind entwined with mine, it understands everything.” Another snap of her fingers, and Cash and Wilson collapsed as well. Rod turned and ran for the doors to the stairway. He reached them and yanked on them as hard as he could, but they didn’t open. Jean snapped her fingers, and he fell where he stood. Alex, Sean, and Lisa were the only ones left. Sean stepped in front of them, shielding them with his body, as if that would do any good.
“Stop it!” Alex yelled. The tears ran down her face in earnest now. “Please! I beg of you. You have all the power. Show some compassion.”
Jean’s lips curled and her face twitched. “That’s the thing about prison,” she said. “It beats all the compassion out of you.”
CHAPTER 25
Ryan teleported to the Jozef Stefan Institute and found it in chaos. The complex was surrounded by Turkish military trucks and at least one armored personnel carrier. The soldiers, however, were running to and fro through smoke and shouting, firing their weapons on each other. Ryan didn’t understand what was happening, until he saw that some of the Turks had blank skin where their eyes ought to have been.
A helicopter flew overhead, shining a giant spotlight down onto the grounds, but Ryan cast no shadow. The bullets passed through his body without harm, and a soldier even ran straight through him, never seeing him and never slowing down. It was incredible. Ryan’s software had just taken that man apart and reassembled him on the other side in less than a second, and he was none the wiser.
In fact, Ryan was not standing on the ground, strictly speaking. He couldn’t feel it through his feet, and it didn’t support his weight—it would pass right through him like everything else. To maintain his position, he was continuously teleporting to the same coordinates.
He couldn’t walk, either—no friction—but he could shift his teleport coordinates slightly and thus hover through space. Ignoring the battle raging around him, he passed through the walls and into the main building. The carnage was even worse here, with blood and brain matter spattered across the floor. He wondered if any of it belonged to Alex.
The accelerator had to be in the basement. Instead of finding the stairwell, he simply sank down through the floor. He was surrounded by concrete. Buried in it. He envisioned the reality module failing at just that moment, leaving him entombed, and he began to hyperventilate. He took a deep breath from the oxygen tank and tried to relax. The supercomputer pulled at his shoulders, rubbing them raw. If he had taken more time to plan, he would have strapped himself to a chair. The pack could have hung on the back of the chair while he sat on it, saving him the trouble of supporting the weight.
He burst out of the concrete into a huge open space, and there she was. Jean Massey stood on the floor below him, facing down Alex Kelley, her research team, and a squad of American marines, although most of them seemed to be dead. The linear accelerator hummed and vibrated.
“That’s the thing about prison,” Jean said. “It beats all the compassion out of you.”
She couldn’t see him. The varcolac couldn’t sense him. There was nothing to sense. Ryan walked through her, and for a moment she existed only as a trillion trillion virtual particles passing through his module and out the other side, leaving her unharmed as he came out. But what if . . . ?
Ryan stepped into her again, enclosing her body within the field, and just stayed there. Anyone else looking at this patch of space could see Jean, detect her body heat, even reach in and touch her. She still cast a shadow. But she was only a virtual Jean, a simulation of the particles that made up her and everything else within the field. Which meant, if he deactivated the field at just this moment . . .
It was surprisingly easy. When Ryan deactivated the field, Jean was just . . . gone. The supercomputer stopped simulating those particles. That patch of space was replaced by Ryan, his air, his hardened computer backpack. There was no mess, no blood. Just no more Jean. The thought did occur to Ryan to wonder where those particles had actually gone. After all, it shouldn’t be possible to actually destroy a trillion trillion particles. Matter and energy were never actually lost. The particles must have been repurposed somehow, diffused as heat energy through the packet of air around him, or converted into much smaller exchange particles . . . or something. He would have to ponder the problem at some later date. The important thing was, Jean was gone.
“Ryan!” Alex shouted. She threw her arms around him. “You did this? You destroyed her?”
It felt good. Her arms were light and feminine. She was crying openly, her face red and streaked with tears. Ryan felt a surge of pride.
But no. This is what pretty girls always did. They made him feel happy just to be in their presence, but they didn’t care about him, not really. They manipulated and took what they wanted. Alex didn’t like him. She just thought she could control him. But she couldn’t. “You can’t have it,” he told her. “Go home. It’s mine.”
She took a step back. “What’s yours?”
“Don’t play with me. I’m the one who deserves this, not you.”
She was giving him that look again now. “Deserves what?”
“To be the One. To live forever. To be humanity as it should be, until the universe cools and dies.”
“You’re . . . taking her place?” Alex said. The horror on her face was evident. He felt it as a physical loss, this change from appreciation to revulsion, but it was for the best. The mask was off now. She was just showing what she really thought of him.
“There’s only one person getting out of this alive, and that’s me,” he said. Where was the varcolac? He had only imagined this as far as killing Jean. He assumed that once he killed her, the varcolac would naturally gravitate to him again. Wasn’t he the one who had freed it? Wasn’t he, among all humans on Earth, its intellectual equal? He deserved this.
As one, the white-coated scientists at the accelerator turned to look at him. They had no eyes. They dropped their equipment and advanced, moving in lockstep.
“I’m here!” Ryan shouted. “I’m yours. I’m ready!”
They walked on, slowly but inexorably.
Ryan started to tremble. What if the varcolac was angry that he had killed Jean? “I had to,” he said. “It was the only way to be with you.”
The scientist puppets came closer. Ryan engaged the reality module. At least, he thought he did. But he could still feel the floor beneath his feet, could still sense the circulation of air from the room’s big fans. He tried to teleport and failed. His Higgs projector had been compromised. He was helpless. And the varcolac was coming.
Ryan wracked his brains, trying to think. He remembered the short, beautiful time when he had shared the varcolac’s mind, known its thoughts, understood its beautiful vision for the universe. How could he prove that he was worthy?
His eyes slid to Alex. Her gaze was intent, her expression set. Her tears were dry. And suddenly Ryan knew what to do. The varcolac had been trying to kill this girl ever since it first entered the world, and somehow, time and again, she had eluded it. It was impossible. She was just a girl in her twenties, a fragile human, with a common sort of intelligence. At least, that’s how she appeared. And yet she had so far defeated a power that commanded the very structure of space and time. There was only one explanation: Alex was not who she pretended to be.
He could see it now. She had manipulated him from the very beginning. She had pretended to be frightened and out of her depth, yet she had lured him into following her and then tricked him into inviting her to his lab, where she had stolen his work. He had known it was folly to trust a beautiful woman, and yet she had seduced him all the same. Oh, she was good.
Now that he saw the truth, he wondered that he had ev
er missed it. She had known the varcolac fifteen years ago, had known what it could do and what it wanted. She had been preparing for its return all her life. She was cunning and manipulative, and she had played him for a fool. He felt a hot flush in his cheeks. She had been laughing at him all this time. Laughing at his silly fears, laughing at his fat body, laughing at how easy it was to trick him with a pretty smile. She had dragged him onto that plane just to laugh at his distress. They were all laughing at him, weren’t they? When they thought he wasn’t looking. All of her friends. Everyone, all of his life. Laughing, laughing, laughing.
The body of a dead marine lay at his feet. His gun was under his body and tied with a strap. Inaccessible. But on his belt there was a KA-BAR combat knife, sharp and made for killing. Ryan knelt and slid it out of its sheath. Alex stood with her back to him, distracted by the oncoming scientists.
She wouldn’t laugh at him anymore.
CHAPTER 26
“Sandra,” Angel said. “You should take a look at this.” He was watching the feed from the module her father had planted on Alex’s phone.
“I can’t,” she said. “It puts me too close to her. Next time, I might merge with her and not come back.”
“They’ve found Jean,” he said. “At least, I’m pretty sure it’s Jean. She’s glowing—I don’t know if she’s really glowing, or if there’s something different about her that the quantum field monitor . . . oh no.”
“What is it?”
