Her Dark Wolves unit disembarked from the chopper, moving out from the sandstorm with their heads low.
Jim Brock stood still, nearly frozen in terror by the big machine and the burly men coming toward them, one of whom walked directly to Nina.
“Captain Forest,” Vince Caesar removed goggles and spoke in a voice mixing no-nonsense and respect. “May I have a word with you?”
Nina nodded and walked off with him. The other two commandos hovered next to Jim Brock and waited. They probably did not intend to intimidate the man but, no doubt, took some perverse pleasure in it nonetheless.
Carl Bly said, “Out for a walk on the beach?”
“Um…yeah…” Jim glanced toward Nina who walked out of earshot.
“Say, mate,” Maddock asked, “exactly what are your intentions toward our Captain?”
“Um…”
Meanwhile, Vince leaned close to Nina and said, “We’ve got an assignment, a real rush job just came in.”
Nina grew uncharacteristically frustrated and snapped, “Who’s the asshole who thinks they can just call us out on a whim?”
Vince’s eyes widened and his normally stoic expression morphed to mild surprise.
“Cap, we always get called out on a whim. As for who’s asking, that’d be Trevor Stone.”
This time Nina’s eyes widened and, at the same time, her cheeks reddened. She raised a hand to her temple, closed her eyes, and mumbled, “I think all this R amp; R is going to my head. I’m not used to…not used to staying in one place this long.”
Caesar said, “If Stone called us out personally, it must be important. We have a rendezvous to make.”
“Yeah. Yes, of course. Let me grab some stuff.”
Vince followed his commander as she retrieved her gear from the back of the Humvee parked in the lot, including one box that was not standard issue.
Denise Cannon ran out of the condominium and right to Nina.
“You’re going?”
Nina saw panic-outright fear-in the little girl’s eyes.
“I have to go, but I’ll be back.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Denise glanced nervously at the other soldier standing nearby.
Nina nearly pleaded, “Listen, this is who I am. Do you understand?”
Denise nodded.
“Please, tell me the truth. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” the girl said but Nina kept staring at her. “I do. Really. ”
Nina knelt and hugged Denise Cannon.
“I’ll be coming back for you, Denise. If you want me to.”
The girl answered with no hesitation, “I do.”
Nina thought for a moment then handed Denise the dress box.
“Could you hold this for me? I’ll get it from you when I get back.”
Denise slowly nodded her head.
Nina-the soldier — stood tall with her gear slung over her shoulder. She looked at the eleven-year-old girl, smiled briefly, and then walked away with Vince Caesar on her flank, passing Jim Brock and the other two commandos on the way.
Carl Bly finished telling a tale-a tall one-to Brock, “…so Nina, she cuts the thing’s head right off and starts drinking its blood.”
“Hell of a bloody mess,” Maddock agreed.
Jim stepped out from between the two men.
“Nina? Nina, what’s going on?”
Vince directed Carl and Oliver to the Blackhawk.
“I need to go, right now,” she told him.
“Is there a problem?”
“No, you’re safe,” she said with as much confidence as possible in a world of Shadows and Jaw-Wolves and Goat-Walkers.
He stumbled, “About before…what I meant to say.”
She interrupted, “You’re a nice guy. I think you’ve got a good heart.”
“But…?”
“But the world changed, Jim. I’m not the one out of place. You could say, I guess, you could say I’ve never felt more in place. For better or worse.”
The chopper’s engine spooled louder, encouraging Nina to get on board.
“I have to go. I’ll stop back as soon as I can, but my vacation is over.”
She left him standing there, watching. She raised a hand to ward off the raging sand storm and then jumped onboard the helicopter. The Blackhawk lifted away from the beach and flew off to the southwest.
Toward New Winnabow.
23. Enigma
The journey concluded.
There, on the frozen flats of the ice cap, at the exact coordinates provided by Trevor Stone, stood the finish line and Jon Brewer had never seen a finish line quite like it.
It was massive, the size of a small city.
It was black, black like granite and appearing just as solid.
It had a flat roof on top of curved walls, hundreds of feet in the air.
One giant structure, like the end of a cylinder poking through the ice, or maybe the universe’s largest hockey puck.
And it moved.
He saw no lines or breaks in its colorless surface, yet layers-rings of varying thickness-periodically rotated, turning one on top of another like floors of a building spinning at various speeds and intervals.
An enigma.
Jon Brewer and his expedition waited outside that gargantuan puzzle.
A half-mile away another group waited: Wraiths. They had discarded their travelling windstorm and huddled outside the building, or city, or whatever it was.
The Vikings, too, reached the finish line. They gathered to another side of the obelisk.
Three armies encamped on three different sides of the gigantic structure, each exhausted after forty-eight hours of running, trading small arms fire, launching artillery strikes, and employing various maneuvers in an attempt to win the race.
Each suffered casualties along the way. Neither gained an advantage.
Regardless of how fierce the Wraith’s storm appeared, well-placed explosive charges drew them from their veil of wind and slowed their advantage in mobility.
The Vikings exhibited incredible endurance, rarely stopping or even slowing for rest, moving at a fast jog hour after hour, even when exchanging pot shots with their opponents.
As for humanity, Jon’s force needed periodic rest stops, but their convoy of dog sleds, the tracked SUSV command vehicle, and snowmobiles allowed their vanguard bursts of superior speed.
The Wraiths arrived thirty minutes before Jon, that an hour before the Vikings, each making camp as close to the obelisk as possible, but also as far away from their enemies as possible.
Nonetheless, the order of arrival made no difference. Scouting parties sent by each force found no entrance to the enigma. So they stayed in place and waited, watching both the city-sized obelisk as well as the foes to either side.
While Brewer and Fink established battle lines and considered strategies to move against their enemies, Reverend Johnny sat in the cab of the command vehicle. Behind him, several wounded soldiers moaned and squirmed. He worried he would soon need to shut off the engine in order to conserve fuel. At that point, they might move the wounded to one of the tents popping up on the snowy ground outside.
Regardless, he sat in the front seat and stared out the frosty windshield, watching the obelisk as it worked. A level near the top spun and then halted; two more levels rotated near the middle but in different directions. They slowed, increased speed, slowed again, and then stopped just as the top level moved once more.
He kept trying to count the number of moving rings but that proved frustrating; the size of each changed with each movement. Initially he thought seven or eight layers composed the structure, perhaps floors of some kind, each equal in height. Then more movement convinced him that twice that number existed on the structure’s surface, only to see three giant rings move moments later. It was as if the building melded and separated ‘floors’ at whim and with no lines clearly visible, counting the total number of those ‘floors’ remained an impossible, even madden
ing, task.
Over time, the erratic movement mesmerized Johnny. He watched for what seemed like thirty minutes, only to find he had, in fact, sat for four hours. Yet he thought he saw a pattern developing; the manner in which certain levels turned, stopped, expanded, and then spun again in the opposite direction. Certainly some arcane mathematical problem was at work as if, yes, as if the obelisk attempted to solve itself.
As he watched, his mind discerned that pattern. He could not put that pattern into words, he could not explain what he saw or why, but he grew convinced he understood the puzzle, and that soon an entryway would be revealed.
But where would it open? Closer to one of the enemy armies?
Reverend Johnny exited the command vehicle to find Jon Brewer. One last sprint remained.
Each of the three combatants dispatched scouts to circle the obelisk, doing so from a distance armed with sniper rifles and binoculars. The groups traded fire here and there, but no one risked a full scale engagement, at least not before a way through the final obstacle could be found.
Brewer stood at the front of their camp watching the obelisk rotate, stop, turn, rotate again. Reverend Johnny paced behind him, back and forth and mumbling.
“Soon, I can feel it coming, soon,” the Revered assured yet again; he had been making such assurances for nearly an hour.
Jon’s mind wandered. “It feels like it’s getting colder” and he waved his arms side to side to generate body heat. “Maybe because we’ve been stuck here for hours now. All that moving must have helped keep us warm. Exercise and all. It would be nice to get moving again.”
“I am not responsible for the machinations of this infernal contraption; I am merely sensing a purpose to the otherwise-”
“Sir!” Fink ran toward Brewer shouting, “Scouts report entrances have appeared in two spots around the object!”
As the words left Fink’s mouth, Jon saw a force of Wraiths break away from their main group and hurry toward the obelisk. He turned the other direction and saw the Vikings sending a similar party forward.
He shouted, “Damn it! We’re going to have to fight our way inside!”
“I think not, General,” Reverend Johnny stopped pacing and pointed.
All the turning and stopping, reversing and turning again, came to a halt. The puzzle had, indeed, solved itself. A huge black hole of a doorway opened directly in front of the human army camped on the plain of ice.
General Brewer commanded, “Entry team! Let’s go!” He turned to Casey. “Captain Fink, you stay outside with the troops. If you don’t hear from us in about an hour, or if you have reason to believe we’ve failed, follow us in. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sir! Good luck, Sir.”
Three dozen well-armed soldiers mustered at the front of camp. General Brewer and Reverend Johnny led them toward the opening in the obelisk. That opening stood tall enough to accommodate a Goat-Walker and wide enough to fit eight lanes of traffic.
As they approached, the massive gate made Jon feel puny; insignificant, like Jack finding the castle after climbing the beanstalk.
They formed two columns and jogged inside. The soft glow of the midnight sun faded as they followed the huge corridor. However, hundreds of pinpricks of light flickered to life on the dark walls, like stars on a night sky, providing just enough glow to illuminate the passage.
Boots thumped on a solid floor but despite the height of the ceiling and a hallway that stretched forward seemingly forever, no echo sounded.
“Cold in here,” Johnny remarked as his breath exhaled in white puffs.
“Listen,” Brewer held a hand aloft and the column halted. “Do you hear that?”
A rumble…deep and low as if machinery worked somewhere in the distance ahead. Jon thought he felt a vibration in the wall…
…Outside, Captain Casey Fink waved his arms and walked the same circular path over and over wearing a track in the snow both in an effort to generate body heat and as a result of nerves. He alternated his attention from the obelisk to the Wraiths off in the distance to his left, to the Vikings off in the distance to the right, and then back to the strange contraption ahead.
At that moment, the puzzle started again. A thick ring near the top rotated, then one at the bottom in the opposite direction, then a pair in the middle, one slower than the other.
The door through which Brewer, the Reverend, and their men had entered disappeared…
…The corridor trembled and the soldiers rocked back and forth. They moved-the entire passageway moved-with mild g-force pushing them toward a side wall.
A slab of black slid out and blocked the passage ahead. Another did the same behind, this one catching a soldier at rear of the column, shoving him into some unseen groove leaving behind his arms and rifle while the rest of him disappeared, either pulverized or carried off.
Groans, mumbles, and curses from the men. Jon suddenly felt more claustrophobic than he had during the entire trip on the submarine; he feared the roof-or perhaps the walls-would suddenly slam together and crush his entire team.
“Dear Lord, we are spinning! The levels are moving again!” Reverend Johnny shouted the obvious.
Brewer shouted back, “It’s a trap! All this way for a trap!”
Johnny said, “No, no that’s not right. It’s a puzzle, General! A giant puzzle box made of levels and rings. A combination spinning and turning to different solutions, one that showed us the path. Another to…to…”
Their movement stopped with a heavy thud as if something locked into place. Every man in the entry team including the Reverend and General Brewer slammed against the wall and fell to the ground, gear scattering and legs wobbling.
An eruption of noise burst into the hall.
Clang. Smash. Pop. Bang.
Over and over again, a sound of grinding, whirring, hissing, machinery.
Johnny staggered to stand, retrieved his heavy machine gun, and gawked at the flood of light now filling the tall corridor as he finished his thought, “Another to let us in.”
Brewer regained his feet but struggled to regain his senses.
The passage opened to chaos incarnate. The heart of the enigma.
His mind fought to decipher the sight. Huge, inextricable, alien. He took the vision in bits and pieces in an attempt to digest the whole.
Jon looked up and saw a ceiling so very high above, a ceiling cluttered with piping, gears, tubes, and pillars, some running along the roof, many more hanging down to various heights. Everything moving, pumping, sliding, and rotating.
He stood on a ring made of some kind of cream-colored metal that traveled the circumference of the massive round chamber, stretching off to either side. Ahead, that ring ended at a short drop off where another ring waited, then another, then another, terraced and descending into the bowels of the structure, each crowded with gears, cranks, wires, pipes, blocks of stone with pulsating veins, and spinning top-like gadgets, and glass balls with electronic explosions inside and huge corkscrews and stretching springs.
A city-sized machine.
Jon watched a massive gear as tall as a small skyscraper roll along the lip of one of the rings, matching its teeth to notches in the floor.
A gargantuan pendulum swung from the shadows, swooped through the mass of machinery, and then disappeared again on the far side of the incredibly huge chamber.
On the concave walls, long cylinders jetted forth and connected with arcane sockets, some several times larger than a man. Spinning drill-like extensions darted out for unknown reason. Giant rock balls rolled in oversized gutters.
Like his men, Jon gaped at the sight, paralyzed by the size, complexity, and energy of the place.
“It’s like…like we’re fleas in a giant Swiss Clock.”
Reverend Johnny replied, “The Lord has made everything for his own ends, even the wicked for the evil day.”
A twisting, swooping tunnel encased in some sort of grayish metal or rock worked its way above, through, and around
the madness. Jon spied several openings that might be entrances of some type; perhaps this was a thing meant for transportation. A conveyor belt of sorts moved through that tunnel in a stop, start, stop, start again fashion.
That tunnel rose and turned then descended then turned again like an insane version of the monorail at Disney World. Jon could not see if it traveled all the way to the bottom but it made no difference because the nearest entry port was a distance away.
From far down beyond the descending platforms came a light seemingly a mile away, its shine somehow seeping through the pandemonium to reach Jon’s eyes.
The runes.
“General, do you think we should-” a hailstorm of rail gun rounds cut off Reverend Johnny’s question as the shots ricocheted around the entry team.
A group of Vikings stood on a jetty higher than Jon’s group and a hundred yards away to their right. Their camouflage ponchos struggled to find the right pattern. Some turned cream like the floor of the rings, others splashed blue resembling the arcs of electricity shooting across parts of the machine, others shaded black, gray, silver, and red in reaction to the various colors found in the chaos.
“Take cover!” Jon yelled but that cover presented as much danger as bullets.
“Dear God, we are not alone,” but Johnny did not mean the Vikings. He directed Brewer’s attention in the opposite direction where, in the shadow of a pyramid-shaped metallic structure spitting sparks, gathered a cadre of Wraiths.
The alien races appeared as confused and intimidated by the gigantic apparatus as the humans. However, the commanders of each of the three groups managed to focus their charges on the mission.
The Wraiths split into groups. Three hurried toward the transport tunnel, aiming for one of the entry slots. Others descended the rings level by level.
The Vikings moved carefully, clearing every corner like a SWAT team sweeping a building.
Jon spread out his force in a picket line and hurried to the next ring. His right flank made contact with the Vikings. One human soldier absorbed a series of rounds in the chest and fell. Another tossed a grenade at the enemy. Its detonation caused a nearby glowing red ball of crystal to explode. The resulting shock wave smashed more machine parts and crippled two Vikings.
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