Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  Her father had always liked Dylan Thomas’ poetry. “You really think?” asked Biscuit. Shortstack had paused in prying at a black blob on the muzzle of his revolver.

  “Dump us all,” her father’s voice said. “The—original bottle too.”

  Biscuit looked across his fishbowl at her mother. The old woman’s eyes were still closed, but she nodded and reached out to touch her husband’s fishbowl. “Go gentle, dear,” she whispered.

  Biscuit picked up the glass box and shook it, and as always the penny came up heads, for yes.

  Her mother leaned over to look at it, then sat back and nodded again. “It’ll be strange to have only a few people at Thanksgiving.”

  “They’re enough,” said Biscuit.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There’s always some elderly relative at family gatherings who misbehaves or says the wrong thing—before long it’ll be me, if it isn’t already—and it could only be worse if they still attended after their deaths.

  In the first sentence of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He didn’t comment on haunted families, and I figured that such families would be uniquely weird—with domestic difficulties only exacerbated by the necessities of dealing with eccentric family members both living and dead.

  This is as close as I’ll probably ever get to writing a James Thurber story like “The Night the Bed Fell on Father”—“The Night Shortstack Killed Amelia’s Parakeet.”

  On-Site for the Apocalypse

  Ryk E. Spoor

  Chapter 1.

  The screaming alarm cut through the soothing hiss of the shower like a bucket of razor-sharp shards of glacial ice. Dana Kisaragi jumped, cursed, yanked the curtain aside while blinking through a trickling mask of stinging shampoo, grabbed a towel to get the worst of the water off one hand, and then snatched up the phone that—per regulations—had to be within ten feet of her person at all times. "Kisaragi."

  "Conference with Central, five minutes," said the coldly anonymous voice of Directives. The line immediately went dead.

  For several precious seconds, Dana stared uncomprehendingly at the phone. Five minutes? With Central?

  Then the time limit registered and she cursed. She leapt back into the shower and scrubbed the suds out of her hair. Dammit, dammit, no time for conditioner really, just rinse off!

  A minute and a half gone, and she was toweling herself furiously. Jesus. Central? The last time she'd been at OSC Central (formally, Obtain, Secure and Counter Central Control and Command) had been three, four years back, and aside from routine reports every month, she hadn't had—or expected—any communication with Central ever again. She was a local field agent and director; any assignments would come to her through her state, regional, or national offices—in that order.

  Two minutes left. Hurry, hurry! You did not keep Central waiting. Not ever. And the idea that whatever it was had leapfrogged three full levels of control and command? To her? "I'm either winning the lottery, or I'm in it so deep I'll need goddamn scuba gear," she muttered as she yanked on a shirt and grabbed a suit coat. They'll only see me from about the stomach up . . . I hope. No time for anything fancy, she snatched up her pajama bottoms, pulled them on, and dashed for the basement.

  She reached the blank wall, touched the fourth brick from the left and stared into what looked like an old nail hole. For an instant she thought the automatic ID system had crashed, and wouldn't that be just peachy, being locked out of the secure area so that she couldn't respond to an emergency alert? But then the hidden door unlocked, the wall slid back and aside, and she dashed in, sliding into her seat and slamming her hand down on the scanning pad that would verify her access to the system.

  The screen lit up almost instantly, and she felt an inward shudder of trepidation. There were no fewer than five people looking at her, one of them Sir John Covenant, the Head, the Big Boss himself, and the other known members of the Board.

  She tried to show no emotion. "Agent Dana Kisaragi, reporting as directed." The words came out slightly breathy; all that scrambling had left her just a bit winded.

  "Agent Kisaragi." Covenant's photographs had shown the long, handsome, darkly-tanned face and graying black hair, but couldn't convey the sharp, deadly calm of his gaze. Dana felt as though she was being dissected as his eyes flicked from one point to another, surveying her image.

  The controlled, expressionless face creased in a sudden smile so shocking that it was nearly as startling as the alarm had been. "So sorry to disturb you in the bath."

  Well, I don't think he'd be saying anything so light if I was in trouble. "No problem, sir. I assume it is very urgent if Central is calling me."

  The smile was gone. The other four shifted uneasily, looking at something out of frame; she could see Director Pitt biting her lip in unconscious worry, and that brought the fear back, though not for herself.

  "Extremely urgent, Agent. You have a situation in your territory; a Class Seven manifestation, with a Breach Factor of at least seven."

  She nodded, felt her mouth open and heard her voice say, "Details, sir? I will deploy at once but I need anything Central has," while inside she was wrestling with the implications of those words. Class SEVEN? There hadn't been a paranormal manifestation over five since she'd joined the OSC (or, more accurately, been recruited by them) twelve years ago. The scale only went to ten! And a BF of seven was terrible—it meant it might be uncontainable, multiple groups of witnesses, first responders on site, the whole nine yards.

  Of course, now she understood why Central had called her. Class Seven meant something that posed a direct and grave threat to the public on a city-wide scale.

  "Location is at Twin Pines Strip Mall, approximately seven miles from your current location," Covenant said. "As for details, all we have is what we have managed to glean from the ongoing local reports and some camera footage we could access due to our ongoing Omniscience initiative. Before you head into the field, I want you to watch this."

  The screen flickered, shifted to a grayscale camera view of a mall parking lot, obviously from one of the increasingly ubiquitous security cameras. For a moment, nothing happened; then she saw the pavement buckling, rising in the center, and suddenly something tore its way free of the earth and rose, a writhing column of living stone a dozen feet across.

  "Christ on a crutch," she murmured. "What the hell is that?"

  "Dhole," answered the voice of Jacob Thorndyke. "From our older records—no recorded sightings of them in modern times, though Lumley referred to them as ‘chthonians.’ He presented a rather distorted version of them in a few of his stories. It's assumed they had subconscious contact through metawave entanglement, as with other similar correspondences between fiction and reality."

  "Can it be dealt with by conventional means?"

  "Generally, yes, though deploying appropriate firepower in an urban or suburban area is problematic. They're generally considered a Class Six to Seven threat by themselves."

  "So, wait, the problem isn't the dhole?" Dana felt her train of thought derail. "Are you–"

  "Watch," John Covenant said.

  The giant rock-worm was turning and twisting, as though searching for something. Then, as it began moving towards one end of the parking lot, a brilliant light shone from the opposite side of the screen, and the creature halted and curled around.

  "What. . . ?"

  The light faded, and for a moment the rock-worm was still. Then without warning it lunged.

  Something became visible then for an instant, jumping out of the way of the creature's attack, and again, as the monster slewed around, trying to catch the whatever-it-was. Dana had the general impression of a human figure, but one moving far too fast and leaping impossible distances.

  The next sequence of events was unclear; whatever the newcomer was, it was out of the frame, high up or otherwise out of sight. Then the dhole was hammered down, armor shattering like g
lass under an impossibly powerful blow. It gave a mighty convulsion and juddered into stillness.

  That tiny figure—too blurred and indistinct in the grainy security footage to make out in detail—stood atop the immense body, then appeared to give a bow or salute and . . . disappeared.

  The screen blanked, and returned to the view of Central. For a moment, everyone was silent.

  "What the hell did I just see?" Dana said finally.

  Sir John Covenant's smile was chill, devoid of any but the slightest touch of humor. "That, Agent Kisaragi," he said quietly, "is what we want you to find out."

  Chapter 2.

  "Gilbert! Hughes! Talk to me!" she said, as she entered the office.

  Warren Gilbert looked up from the multiple-screen displays on his desk, the glow from the screens emphasizing the premature gray at his temples; other than that, his hair was still solidly dark brown, just one shade darker than his skin. Alan Hughes, tall, slender, and distracted-looking behind his glasses, shook his head.

  "It's a disaster," he said, a combination of relish and resignation in his voice. "Completely without precedent, at least in the files we have clear access to."

  "I just finished a call from Central; they don't know anything about it either."

  "Holy crap," Gilbert said. "Central? Seriously?"

  "With Sir John C in the front seat."

  "That'll get you up in the morning," Hughes said wryly, a glint of humor in his green eyes.

  "Enough chit-chat, what are we dealing with?"

  "Well, the worm-thing—dhole, if I searched the records right—is bad enough. There's no way to cover this one."

  God, it's already worse than I thought. "No way at all? We've got full authority, if we have to we can go to air-dispersed amnesia and mnemorphic agents . . ."

  "Absolutely none," Gilbert said flatly. "Twenty, thirty years ago, maybe, but today we've got the problem that everyone, everywhere, is connected. There's already at least four separate independent videos of most of the event, and two of those were up on video-sharing sites before we even got the full alert details. We can probably obscure some of the details of the event, including our real unknown, but even that's iffy."

  Boy, I am not looking forward to my next debrief. "All right, enough of that, we're not going to waste time talking about what we can't do. What about the dhole? Did you get the wheels turning on that?"

  "Josephine?" Hughes asked, looking at Agent Morales, who had just put down her phone.

  Josephine gave a thumbs-up. "All under control, Agent Kisaragi," she said. "We've got authorization through our local assets in the military and intelligence communities, so we'll be able to take possession of the remains and get them sent to the nearest containment facility. Though it seems pretty dead."

  "Seems could be the most important word there," Dana said, with an inward shudder. She'd seen more than one OSC agent torn apart by something that seemed dead. "Make sure the team on-site understands the priority is that it stays dead, or at least inactive, until it's contained. If they have to they're authorized to use any force necessary."

  Josephine nodded and picked up the phone. Dana turned back to Gilbert. "All right, now, our 'real unknown' as you put it. Brief me. What are we dealing with?"

  He and Hughes exchanged glances and despite the seriousness of the situation they were grinning. "Oh, chief, you are so going to love this one." He touched a button and swung one of his screens to face her.

  A video came on, this one in full color, though shaky. "Wow, I've never been in an earthquake before," came the high-pitched voice of the owner, a girl from the sound of it. "That was a—whoa!"

  Another jolt caused the camera to swing wildly, but even in the blurred images Dana Kisaragi could see the pavement of the parking lot buckling. "What . . . Oh my GOD!"

  The rock-worm erupted from the lot as in the prior video. What most impressed Dana was that the girl who owned the phone kept filming. Really, did people have no sense of self-preservation? Dana was damn sure she would have been running for shelter as soon as the monster popped up. Apparently the immortality of youth was just as insulating today as it had been when she was young.

  But this time, unlike the prior grainy footage from the security camera, the camera swung around to look at the blaze of light. A figure appeared—jumped? Ran? Stepped? The light didn't make it possible to tell how it had gotten there—and Dana found herself gaping, even as the shaky cam view steadied and zeroed in.

  It was a girl—no more than sixteen, maybe younger—dressed in one of the most outlandish outfits Dana had ever seen, something like a cross between a suit of armor and a wedding gown, if both the gown and armor had been designed by a fantasy artist with a love for cheesecake.

  "STOP!" the girl shouted, in a voice so loud that it drowned out the grinding noise of the rock-worm and silenced the screams throughout the mall. She extended her hand and pointed at the dhole. "I am the one you seek, monster! Mystic Galaxy Defender, Apocalypse Maiden the First, Princess Holy Aura, reborn as sword and shield, weapon and wielder, mistress of souls and stars! You have threatened innocents and brought fear to this world," she continued, "and for that, this Apocalypse Maiden says that you," the extended hand pointed, and then turned to a fist with the thumb outthrust, turning until it pointed to the ground, "are going down!"

  "Pause," Dana heard herself say. She stared at the screen in disbelief. "I did not just hear that. I am not seeing this. I am going to close my eyes, and then I will wake up, and I will be at home."

  But when she opened her eyes, the same enigma—impossibly beautiful and equally incomprehensible—glowed on the screen before her.

  "I know how you feel, Agent," Hughes said. "Believe me, when we first saw this vid we did a full search for movie companies, pranksters, any way this could possibly be fake, but it's real."

  "Can you lock down all the good video?"

  "Maybe. We're trying, Agent, don't think we waited for you, but hell, you know how easy it is for someone to download something and copy it. Even if we think it's locked down, it might pop up again a week later."

  "Do the best you can. All right, show me the rest."

  The girl—"Princess Holy Aura", and who the hell comes up with a name like that?—leapt aside as the rock-worm charged, jumped with superhuman speed and strength that allowed her to easily evade the creature's strikes. Then there was another glow of light, and something materialized in the girl's hands.

  "Pause." Dana studied the image. "Naginata, or with that design might be called a bisento. Interesting. Continue."

  The ending was as abrupt in this video as in the first, except this time it was clear that the girl had—somehow—delivered a single blow hard enough to take the creature down. Jesus, how strong would you have to be to hit something that hard?

  "That's pretty much it," Gilbert said. "She does that little salute, as you see, and then just zips off."

  "Track her. I want to know where she went. We don't know how she got there, but if she ran off, even that fast, someone will have seen where she went."

  "Already on it. We're tapped into the local police, got special agents out looking. That'll take a little time, though, since a lot of our witnesses might have seen nothing more than a blur or movement; she's going way too fast for anyone to get a good look at, and she's bouncing over rooftops in the last few frames, so most security cameras haven't got a prayer of catching her."

  She nodded, frowning. "Thoughts?"

  "Well . . . she's clearly trying to help, not menace, the population. At least so far," Hughes said.

  "Yeah, but the whole thing could be a setup," Gilbert countered. "Remember the 1982 San Diego Vampire case."

  "You mean she, or her associates, could have set up the dhole situation as a way of making this Princess character look good," Dana said. "Very possible. There's a lot more examples than 1982 in the files. One of the more common gambits of high-level threats, in fact; most of them aren't stupid, they'd rather have the
society protecting them rather than attacking them, at least until they're ready to strike. Anything else?"

  "She wasn't as confident as she looked," Josephine said from her desk.

  "Elaborate."

  "Run it back and watch. Her hand shakes a little when she's doing her monologue and gesture, and when that weapon pops into her hand, her body language shows she's pretty startled. And she doesn't strike her pose and bow right after taking the worm down; if you watch, she's clearly startled by how fast it fell."

  "Well," said Hughes, "That'd kinda fit if this is her first outing. You said even Central didn't know what was going on, right?"

  "Either they don't, or they want everyone to think they don't," Dana said. She was quite conscious of just how far Central might go to manipulate things. "But for what it's worth, no, I don't think they've got any more clue than we do."

  "Crap," said Owen Marsters, the fourth member of her team; he'd been quietly working on something in the corner. "Then that means we're dealing with complete unknowns. Which means if she doesn't make another appearance on her own, we've got jack-all chance of finding her, unless someone recognizes her from the vids. But the right wig and makeup, you can change a lot."

  "That's more than just makeup, though," Hughes said. "There's something about her, even in video. I wonder what it was like, seeing all that in person?"

  Dana Kisaragi shrugged, then took a breath. "Well, we may not be able to see that ourselves, at least not yet," she said, "but we'd better get on the scene. Gilbert, Hughes, come with me."

  She looked at the screen. "Time to do a postmortem on an abomination."

  Chapter 3.

  The giant rock-worm's corpse stank already, though not merely of ordinary decay; there was a sulfurous, metallic reek that emanated from it and sent creeping shivers up Dana Kisaragi's spine. She tried to push the memories it triggered back down into the past where they belonged. This had better not have any connection to . . . that.