by Baen Books
But that smell, and the eerie sense of wrongness that pervaded the entire area around the thing, argued otherwise. She might have to go back and ask . . .
She repressed a shudder. No. This is not even close to bad enough to justify that.
She focused on the activity around them. The major problem was that the thing was just too big. It wasn't going to fit on a flatbed trailer; hell, it was so big that even if they could get it to a train they'd need special variances just to transport it. "We're going to need a dispensation from Central," she said to Hughes.
"Don't see any way around it, Agent," he said, nose wrinkled but otherwise acting as nonchalantly as though he was looking at nothing more than a rather large boulder. "Unless they're willing to take the specimen in pieces. I figure we could transport it in about eight, ten sections."
"I'll find out what they want. I'll recommend we go that route, though Thorndyke will undoubtedly scream about it. He wants his samples as intact as possible."
"Then he'll need to pull one of our little miracles out, and you know the rest of Central won't like that."
"I'm glad it won't be my decision on that." She went towards the scaffolding that had been hastily erected around the body and went up the ladder to the top. "Gilbert, Marsters, you got anything?"
The two investigators were wearing full-coverage body suits with padded feet, to minimize their effect on, or exposure to, the dhole corpse. Gilbert, hearing her question, rose carefully from his position near the bottom of the craterlike wound in the thing's head, and made his way up to her before pushing back his helmet.
"Well, we have something," he said, "but nothing that will lead us directly to our pretty little enigma." He gestured at the wound. "The implement doing the damage was an edged weapon, as we saw. But."
She repressed a roll of her eyes. Warren Gilbert liked his dramatics, and that was a flaw she could tolerate as long as he got the job done—which, so far, he had. "But?" she asked, as he obviously expected.
"But look at this wound. It's an impact wound, though there's definite signs of that blade cutting into the thing at the bottom. Still, if it was just the blade doing the job, you'd expect that she'd have just stabbed that oversized spear right into the thing, doing a regular Ahab on it. Right?"
The implications were frightening. "Instead it hit more like . . . what, a wrecking ball?"
"A wrecking ball with an edge, yes. An immaterial wrecking ball, based on the visuals. You could get something like this if you had just the right kind of detonation at the point of near-impact, but then I'd expect more fracturing over the interior surface than I'm seeing. Right, Owen?"
"Best as I can make out, yeah," Owen replied, his voice somewhat muffled by the suit. "That little girl didn't just smack it with her silver stick; somehow she hit it as though she had a fist the size of a minivan."
"You got any trace from the wound?"
"A little. A very little. But yeah, some, Agent. I think it's actually silver, which again doesn't make much sense. Silver's a really great metal for a lot of things, but as a weapon? It sucks balls."
"Make sure you put that down in your report," Kisaragi said. "I'm sure Central will be impressed with your technical description."
"Sorry, Agent. I know, be proper and formal whenever possible. This is just such a crazy situation . . ."
"Understood. Just make sure you write this all up right. We've got no chance of containment—seeing this site pretty much put the nail in that coffin—so we've absolutely got to convince Central that we're doing the best we can otherwise."
Gilbert and Marsters nodded soberly. Gilbert glanced around cautiously, then said in a very low voice, "Is it . . . true? What they say about what they do with the really bad failures?"
It's not true . . . in some ways it's worse. But you're not going to hear that from me. "The really bad failures don't usually get a chance to find out what Central will do with them," she said casually. "Anyway, get those samples analyzed ASAP. I need anything and everything we can get out of—what is it?"
Investigator Marsters had stiffened, staring at something. Then he slowly straightened up, and she could see his grin even through the foggy faceplate. He pointed down.
At first she just saw an expanse of cracked stonelike exoskeleton, covered and blotched with multicolored ichor from within the thing. But then she became aware there was a pattern within the material, two patches that looked different.
"Well hello there," Gilbert said. "Our friend left some footprints, it looks like."
"Yes. That's about where the video seemed to show her standing. Can we get a cast of that, or just photos?"
"I think I can spray-cast them pretty well; she landed with a fair force, looks like," Marsters said.
A motion caught her eye. Looking down, she saw Josephine Morales waving at her. "Sounds good. Keep at it. It'll be a bit before we get the word on how they're going to remove this thing."
She slid down the ladder, using her hands to control the drop. "What've you got, Investigator?"
"Made some progress on the tracing," Morales said. She hooked a thumb at one of the patrol cars behind her. "Local police had the same idea, and they got lucky. Several witnesses saw something going by over the rooftops, really fast. Eventually the sightings drop off, but they were generally in a straight line." She held up her phone, which displayed a dotted line extending from the strip mall. "I'm guessing since the sightings ended, that our mysterious friend lives somewhere in this area, a couple miles from the mall." She tapped a several-block region of the city.
Dana repressed a sigh. This was, after all, considerable progress. "Start working on that area immediately. We need to find reasonable candidates for this . . . Princess Holy Aura."
"Exclude commercial stuff?"
"No," said Dana, after a moment's consideration. "I know that would make it a lot easier, but I have to presume that she could be either using a commercial setting as a base of operations, or could actually have a direct connection to one of the commercial enterprises present."
"It'll be quicker if I can use full authority to force my way in and check things out, and then just memwipe them afterwards if it's needed," Morales pointed out.
"I really don't like doing that . . . but we do have full authority." Dana considered pros and cons. Ultimately, speed won out. This was a hot trail, and it wasn't going to get any warmer if they took too long. "Do it if you have to. Try more conventional approaches first."
"Yes, Agent."
A faint buzzing noise became audible. She looked around, then glanced up.
A small object was drifting around in the sky, circling the site. Remote-controlled drone?
She swore. "Take that goddamned thing down!" She was tempted to shoot it herself, but it had been a while since she'd been to the range, and missing in the middle of a heavily inhabited area could have all sorts of not-fun consequences.
One of the black-armored locals—a riot cop, she thought—raised their modified shotgun and fired. Struck by the "beanbag" round, one rotor of the drone shattered and the craft spiraled down to crash on the blacktop a short distance away.
"Morales, get that drone and track it. I want to know who was sticking their nose in." She turned to the cop and nodded. "The drone must have been almost fifty feet up. That was a hell of a shot with a beanbag, Officer . . . Rogers?"
He smiled from under his helmet. "Thank you, ma'am. Done a lot of practice with it."
"Paid off, obviously. Good work."
Inside, she was less cheerful. Technology's advancement kept throwing curveballs at anyone trying to control the spread of information. First it was radio, then it was television, then the Internet, and now independent, high-resolution camera drones affordable by the man on the street. Ah well, we'd already accepted this wasn't really containable.
Things seemed as well under control as she could have expected, and getting answers was going to take time. She took out her phone and dialed a secret and very sec
ure number.
Time to find out just how Central wanted their giant rock-worm shipped.
Chapter 4.
Dana leaned back in her chair, feeling a combination of relief and frustration. "So, in summary, we've got nothing."
Hughes shrugged. "Not nothing. The dhole was shipped without incident. We actually managed to obscure the more detailed information about our unknown. We narrowed Holy Aura's last-seen location to within several blocks. We verified that the metawave spike seen by the local monitors coincided with that flare of light and Holy Aura's appearance. We've got a really good description of her from the various videos and some idea of her capabilities."
He raised his hand placatingly as she began to speak. "But yes, nothing new. It's been a couple of months. The trail's pretty much cold now."
"We had three possible matches to Holy Aura," Josephine said. "But none of them panned out."
Dana nodded. They'd actually interrogated the three girls, then used combined amnesia and mnemorphic treatments to make them forget the interrogation and replace the time with more mundane memories. None of them had had the faintest idea of who Holy Aura was, and all their movements before, during, and after the event were accounted for.
"There have been a few minor metawave spikes in the region since, but they've been way down compared to the first, and they haven't lasted long enough to localize," Gilbert said, touching a couple of charts. "And nowhere near enough of them to get a signature that we can compare, so we don't even know if these spikes have anything to do with our sparkly enigma."
"Anyone else have ideas? Central seems to have accepted we couldn't possibly have managed containment, but I still hate coming back to them for the two-month report and saying that we've gotten effectively nowhere."
Her team looked at each other, then Marsters shrugged, spreading his hands. "Sorry, boss, but there's only so much we can do without new data. Last time a dhole showed up was like a hundred and fourteen years ago, so if it takes something like that to get our Princess to show up, we've got a lot longer than a few months to—"
The alert chime rang, loud enough to make them all jump. "Metawave spike," the calm, automated voice said. "Current metawave reading five thousand, two hundred twenty seven and rising."
Christ Almighty, Dana thought. The automated alert's threshold was only twelve hundred, and the manifestation two months ago had peaked at less than two thousand five hundred. "Speak of the devil. Gilbert, Hughes, talk to me, can we get a bearing and location?"
The two had leapt up from the table and dashed to their stations. "If it keeps up, we'll have it nailed down," Gilbert said with certainty. "Amplitude graphing now. Hughes, I'm getting a concentration in Block Twelve, do you match?"
"Twelve, roger. Getting vectors with the tuned antennas . . ."
"Got it," said Josephine Morales. "Emergency calls are spiking from Palonia Mall."
"Verified," Hughes said. "Palonia Mall's near the center of Block Twelve, and the vectors intersect there."
"Grab and go, people, grab and go!" Dana snatched up her field case and sprinted for the door. "Maybe we can catch this one before it ends!"
*****
"Stand back!" Dana made sure both her people and the locals were clear, then took the proper stance and fired three times at the clear glass door.
The bullets did not ricochet, but nor did they do what they should have, which was blow the door to a mass of safety-glass cubes. Instead, Dana saw three faintly-smoking blobs lying just before the door; the slugs had been simply stopped, as though they'd hit three feet of ballistic gel compressed into an inch.
She stepped forward, then jumped back with a curse. She heard her people swear, and actual screams from a couple of the locals.
For just an instant, something had plastered itself to the entire glass front of Palonia Mall's entrance, something huge and glistening and black. Evilly-glinting eyes, venomous green or blood-red or gangrene-yellow, opened across the surface, accompanied by a myriad of drooling, fanged mouths that leered and champed and gnawed at the glass, leaving white-scraped marks on the smooth windows before whipping back into the depths of the Mall.
"Holy Jesus. Hughes, did you get that?"
"Got it. Not sure I wanted to, but got it. Transmitting over secured line now."
"What the hell was that?" Masters demanded, voice shaking. "The metawave meter went nuts."
"I don't know," Dana admitted, trying not to look as frightened as she felt. The sheer malevolence of that momentary appearance was terrifying. "Have we got confirmation of Holy Aura?"
There was a concussion that shook the ground, making the glass ripple across the mall front. "Confirmed," Morales said. "Images sent match our prior manifestation."
"Holy shit," Masters said, staring at his portable instruments. "Metawave readings are nine thousand twenty!"
Dana almost said that was impossible; only one manifestation in the modern era had ever reached that level.
But she'd never heard of anything like this, either.
Without warning, brilliant white light erupted from within Palonia Mall, so bright and pure that it erased color, leaving only sketches in charcoal and mist. For an instant—just an instant—Dana thought she heard a note of music, inexpressibly vibrant, triumphant, joyous, and felt a thrill go down her spine. It was light and music that eradicated the horror and vileness of the prior manifestation, that denied that monstrous power and stood against it, that called to a part of her that desperately needed to hear that Song, to embrace that Light.
Then it was gone; the Mall was once again just a structure of glass and steel and concrete, filled neither with terror nor transcendence. There was a click, and the doors burst open, people stumbling, fleeing outward, crying or staring in wonder or horror.
Her training said they needed to control the exodus, get the people into proper debriefing conditions. Even if there was no way to contain this breach, understanding what had happened here required that they interview everyone they could.
But this was a flood. Normally a breach might have one, two, or up to half a dozen witnesses. How many people were in a mall like this at peak? Thousands? She had five, including herself, plus the local first responders. OSC had sent her reinforcements after the first incident, but they'd left after a month. Look for key witnesses and get hard data, she decided. This was beyond normal practices.
"Listen up, everyone," she said, gathering her people to the side of the exodus. "We're never going to get interviews with everyone. Hughes, Morales, I want you to get security camera footage from every angle you can, plus anything our witnesses upload to the Net. Marsters, Gilbert, you come with me." She looked at the mass of terrified people and shook her head. "This is not going to be fun."
Chapter 5.
Dana cradled her head in her hands. God, I'm exhausted.
The aroma of hot, fresh coffee wafted to her. She looked up to see Hughes standing there, holding out a cup.
"Hughes, I could marry you."
"Marie would probably object," he said with a smile. The circles under his eyes showed that he wasn't really any better off than she was. "Though we'd probably see more of each other than Marie and I do."
She took a sip, then another, and sighed. "OSC and marriage isn't usually a great combo unless both of you are in the same division."
He shrugged. "I didn't have much of a choice. You?"
She looked around. Gilbert was hunched over, studying a screen with bloodshot eyes. Owen Marsters was still seated at his desk, but his head had lolled back and he was snoring. Josephine was in the interview room with the who-knew-how-manyth interviewee.
"No," she said finally. "I was . . ." She snorted. "I was a would-be private investigator. Stuck my nose into something that looked interesting and damn near lost my head. And I can't talk details because no one but me's cleared for what happened."
"Tell me about it. Or rather, don't, because same here. Well, I was a cop myself, but other than that, yeah
."
She gestured for him to sit; his glasses flashed opaquely as he did. "So what've we got, anything?"
"Central's being damn quiet, for one thing. We sent them the initial data and I haven't heard a peep out of them in, what, sixteen hours?"
That wasn't good. They should at least have gotten info on whether that thing they'd seen had been in the database or not. "Great. I'm betting they're sending in State or even Regional forces now. Take over the whole thing."
"Heh. I say let them have this one. It's wayyy too hot for us." He glanced down at his notes. "That thing we saw was huge. Witnesses are unreliable and all, but combining the testimony we're looking at something that had to be whale-sized or bigger, but with no fixed shape. Fully sapient, it spoke, and every single witness agrees the thing wasn't just threatening physically; they all felt the thing's hostility."
"Residual metawave survey get anything?"
"We got some signatures out of it, since we were on-scene, but like I said, Central's given us zip-squat."
"That 'Princess Holy Aura' beat it?"
"As far as anyone can tell. Witnesses say she led it quite a running battle, then seemed to get caught—and then blew it into mist with pure light."
"Timing fit with the high metawave spike, right?"
"Yep. The spike peaked at ten thousand four hundred twenty-seven, averaged among the three meters we have."
"Ten thousand. Mother of . . . I don't think we have any readings in the modern era that went that high." Except one, but he's not cleared for that.
"None that I know of, anyway. Though we both could be not-cleared for anything like that."
"She must have been on-site. Did anyone get anything out of the security cams?"
"No dice," Gilbert's voice said. He plopped into another chair, running a hand shakily through his curly hair. "Well, I can say that she appeared somewhere in the north wing of the mall, because she didn't show up from the others. But something blew all the monitor cameras in the north wing and even scrambled the data for up to an hour before the manifestation."
