A Covenant of Thieves

by Christian Velguth

  The camp was larger than she had expected, but seemed to be completely deserted. A moment later, as they entered Operations, she saw why: everyone had crowded into this single tent. They were gathered around workstations, staring at monitors displaying data. Everyone seemed quite agitated by what they were seeing.

  As soon as she entered, all eyes turned to her. Dozens of unknown faces. Estelle felt a moment of panic -- and then she saw Nasim, standing at the front of the room. Nasim stared at her for a long beat, then pushed her way through the crowd.

  “I,” Estelle began.

  Nasim pulled her into a hug, catching Estelle off guard and squeezing her tight. “I never would have believed,” she whispered. She released Estelle and took a step back, still holding her by the shoulders. She wasn’t smiling, but was studying Estelle as if trying to see through her. “It is you?”

  “I --” The strangeness of the question gave her pause. “Yes. I think so.” Estelle tried to laugh, to make it a joke, but somehow it didn’t quite work. “What’s going on?”

  “A team went up the mountain,” Booker said. “To try and interact with the Ark. Turn it off. But…it doesn’t seem to be working.”

  On every monitor in the tent Estelle could see images of bright light, blazing gold, flashing emerald. She also saw screens that were ominously black. Everyone who wasn’t looking at her was watching one of these screens with the same expressions of fear and uncertainty.

  “We’ve been unable to contact them,” Nasim said, turning back to stare grimly out at the sea of screens. “We have no idea what’s --” She faltered as another earthquake swept through the camp. Several monitors and computer towers toppled over, and Estelle felt a shiver of emotion that was not her own. It passed before she could put a name to it.

  Nasim turned to her. “They say you know something. Feel something, that you’re still connected to the Ark.”

  Estelle nodded, though she felt far less confident now that she was here, in front of all these people. “I -- I could, after I first woke up. Or whatever. Every time there’s one of those tremors, it’s like I get a flash of something. A feeling.”

  “What can you tell me?”

  She closed her eyes, concentrating on that distant presence. “It’s…angry. Damaged. And frightened.”

  “It has emotions?” someone asked.

  Estelle opened her eyes. Everyone was still staring at her, looking for answers. Even Nasim. “I don’t know. I feel something like emotion. It’s not just an object or a machine, though. She’s intelligent, alive -- she can feel and be hurt --”

  “You said that before,” Booker said. “She.”

  “It feels feminine. Maybe because it thinks of itself as female, or -- or maybe because it’s in my head.”

  “How does this help us?” someone else called impatiently.

  “Enough,” Nasim snapped without turning her gaze from Estelle. In a softer voice she said, “What else can you tell us? Anything.”

  Estelle focused, trying to remember her time in the dark, the nothing, when it had felt like she’d both been nowhere and lived another lifetime. “She was…abandoned. Multiple times. By many people. Because they were afraid of her, or didn’t understand her, or just because people die. It was a long time before we found her. She -- she never wants to be alone again. So she’s going to remake the world. Remake everything.”

  “How?”

  She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. The earthquakes? That has to be a part of it.”

  “How can you know all this?” Booker asked. He sounded a bit frightened. “Estelle -- how do you know any of it is true, and not just…I don’t know. Hallucinations.”

  “You don’t hallucinate when you’re dead,” she said grimly. “I know it’s real because I feel it. She brought me back, and now I’m connected to her in some way.” She closed her eyes. “I can feel her. Every time another tremor comes, I can feel her power, her rage. Her fear.”

  “And this connection,” Nasim said. “Could you use it to stop all this?”

  “Yes.” Estelle hadn’t known until she said it. She opened her eyes. “But I’ll need to be closer. Right now it’s like we’re on opposite sides of a wall.”

  “I’m not sure I’m willing to risk sending anyone else up that mountain, let alone someone I just got back from the dead. The last team that went had roughly the same idea as you. I’m guessing it didn’t work.”

  “Who was with them?” Yet she knew as soon as she asked. “Rick.”

  “And Kai,” Booker told her.

  Etelle nodded and closed her eyes again. Searching, reaching out. Yes. “I can feel him,” she whispered. “Rick. Distant, like a candle at the end of the road.” It flared suddenly in her mind, and a moment later the ground shook beneath her feet.

  “He’s alive?” Nasim sounded both surprised and relieved. “What about the others?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t feel anyone else, just Rick. He’s connected too, but it’s not strong enough to stop her. Maybe we could work together, reinforce each other.” She opened her eyes and met Nasim’s gaze. The tremor was still going, a prolonged buzzing through the earth. “But I need to be closer.”

  Nasim was frowning. Estelle could feel the balance shifting away from her. She would say no, it was too risky. Better to abandon the site while they still could, fall back and come up with a better plan. She opened her mouth to tell her no.

  They all ducked as what sounded like a bomb exploded somewhere outside. The violence of the tremor suddenly increased by factors of ten. The desks and chairs and equipment in the tent toppled over. Estelle lost her balance and fell into Booker, who failed to support them both and went sprawling. The walls shook madly, and beneath the floor of the tent Estelle could feel the dirt starting to liquify.

  “Everyone out!” Nasim shouted, struggling to her feet. “Now!”

  Booker propped Estelle up as the tent broke into chaos, and she made to move -- when she heard the scream.

  It came with a bolt of pain that shot through her head and forced her to her knees. Estelle pressed her hands against her skull to drown it out, to shut off the scream, but it wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t coming from outside, it was in her. In her, beyond the black of her closed eyes, in that white space where she could still feel the Mind, a Mind in pain and horror at some sin it had committed, some thing it should not have done --

  ABOMINATION

  “Estelle!”

  Booker’s voice cut through the scream, popping it like a bubble. A ringing silence replaced it -- and then the shouts and panicked voices of those fleeing the tent returned, and she was being shoved forward. People rushing around shattered monitors and computer components littering the space. The ground began to bubble and roil, and suddenly it was like trying to run through thick mud. Support beams teetered and sank, and the heavy nylon roof began to collapse. She could see the entrance as a square of light, rapidly deforming as the tent deflated around them. Another moment and they’d be caught in the nylon, trapped, dragged down beneath the surface of the Earth --

  And then she was free, tripping out into the open and bouncing off a body. Everyone had gathered in the central courtyard, but nobody seemed to know what to do next. All around, tents were being sucked into the earth. A tall halogen lamp fell like a tree, lights exploding with sparks as it hit the ground. There was a strange, springy sound above the rumbling and the screaming -- the fence that surrounded the camp was whipping and twisting madly. Somewhere, something flammable exploded, a ball of fire mushrooming into the air.

  Booker caught himself on Estelle before he could fall over, and they used each other to remain standing. Estelle looked around for Nasim and found her nearby, ushering the last people away from what had been Operations. She turned to face the crowd -- and then a collective scream went up. The quality of the light suddenly changed, growing bright and strange, and Estelle turned to see Jabal Musa in the distance. Its slope was crumbling before her eyes, massive chunks of
rock splitting off and tumbling down to the desert plain. Dark clouds were gathering around its head like smoke, and from its peak a thin column of blinding golden fire had shot into the air, crackling with bolts of snarling, aquamarine lightning.

  “Oh my God,” Booker said.

  For a moment, all anyone seemed able to do was stare. Estelle could feel an energy vibrating through her, a trembling buzz, and it was coming from that pillar of fire. Even as she watched, what had been a pencil-thin line of gold was slowly widening.

  “It’s not going to stop,” she said to Nasim, coming to stand beside her.

  Nasim’s head was craned to watch the roiling clouds and strange lightning. Premature darkness was settling over the plain, a bruised twilight broken only by the strobe-like flashing of the mountain. Estelle could see the pillar of fire reflected in Nasim’s eyes, a golden pall cast over her face.

  “Mofat,” she said in a carrying voice, still staring up at the sky.

  A man in a grey uniform scrambled to her side, moving with difficulty as the ground shook. “Ma’am?”

  “Get your VTOL ready to fly. Ms. Kingston needs to be up there.” She turned from the mountain, facing the crowd. “Everyone else, prepare to abandon camp!”

  * * *

  “If anyone out there can hear me,” Torv yelled into the radio, voice barely audible, “you need to evacuate now! Not just Camp Moses but the whole desert!”

  He led the sprint up the narrow tunnel, hurrying in a crouch so low he was almost on all fours. Behind him, Dr. Okai was pulling himself along by the glowing guideline with both hands. The rope was pulled taught, snapping like a high-tension wire. Rick followed, with Kai just behind, urging him on.

  There was no need. He could feel the now-constant rumble and its accompanying, jet-like roar. Worse, he could feel a powerful magnetic pull trying to suck him back down the tunnel and into the maw of the firestorm. They were all feeling it, slowing their escape. He risked a glance over his shoulder -- beyond Kai, the end of the tunnel blazed with a furious golden light. Even in that split-second glance he could see rock melting away, pulled beyond the ever-expanding event horizon of the cyclone.

  “Less looking,” Kai grunted between bellowing breaths, “more running.”

  “Pull back all civilians within a twenty-mile radius,” Torv was shouting, though it was anyone’s guess if anyone was listening. “Make it fifty.”

  It won’t be enough, Rick knew. This wasn’t going to stop with Jabal Musa, or the desert, or even all of Egypt.

  The knowledge that he was at the epicenter of the end of the world should have had some deleterious effect upon his psyche, but Rick only found himself running even harder. Get out of the damn mountain, then worry about what to do next. Just keep living for one minute longer.

  He was certain the tunnel had grown in length since his last trip through it. Maybe the Ark had stretched it out somehow. He was just starting to wonder if they would ever actually reach the end when they burst out into the domed cavern. He felt a moment’s exhilaration that died almost as soon as it arrived.

  Dust and flakes of rock were raining from the ceiling, but that was hardly the worst of it. In the center of the cavern lay the mangled remains of the lift, crushed beneath a large chunk of rock that had broken off from the stone surrounding the shaft. It had widened the shaft, so they could see clearly up into the chapel, some three or four meters overhead -- but it had also removed the handholds that had been cut into the stone. With the lift unusable, it felt like a final, cruel twist of fate.

  “Motherfucker!” Torv screamed, tearing off his helmet and hurling it against a wall. He stalked around the remains of the lift like a frustrated predator, beard glistening with sweat. “Of course. Of fucking course.”

  “What -- what do we do now?” gasped Dr. Okai.

  Torv didn’t answer. He was running his hands through his sweat-soaked auburn hair, staring down at the crumpled metal as if it were the body of a loved one. If he hadn’t reached the end of his rope now, Rick could see that he was very close.

  Kai stepped up to his side, removing his biohazard hood, and peered up into the shaft. “Looks like the scaffolding is still standing. The cable snapped, but the upper-half looks secure. If we can reach it, we can climb up.”

  He turned to Torv, but he barely seemed aware of Kai or anyone else in the cavern. Rick came over, craning his neck. He could see the cable, hanging from the scaffolding and trailing down into the shaft. It ended two meters up.

  “Give me a boost.”

  Kai removed his biohazard suit for better mobility and crouched, letting Rick hop up onto his knee. He leapt for it. Rick caught the cable with both hands and let out a triumphant whoop. He hung there for a few seconds, feet braced against the side of the shaft, and then something lurched overhead. There was a crunch of metal, and he fell on top of Kai.

  “Look out!” Kai cried, throwing them both to the side. A moment later the cable and scaffolding hit the ground where they’d been, the crash of its impact sounding flat beneath the rumble of the cavern.

  “Shit,” Torv hissed. The commotion seemed to have snapped him out of his funk, and he started pacing, both hands to his head. “Ok. Ok, think, think…”

  “We’re running out of time.” Dr. Okai’s voice sounded hollow. He’d removed his hazmat hood as well and held it limply in one hand. He was standing at the mouth of the tunnel, staring down it, bathed in the furnace glow of the firestorm. He suddenly whirled to Rick, eyes wide. “Mr. Álvarez, you must try again!”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ll probably only make it worse.”

  “We have no choice --!”

  “Yeah, actually, we do.”

  Okai gave a strangled cry and, before anyone could react, lurched towards Rick, seized him by the shoulders, and began shoving him towards the tunnel where that magnetic pull felt stronger.

  It was the wrong move; in another moment Kai was standing over the doctor, who lay on the ground, blinking dazedly. Rick, dancing quickly back from the tunnel, could see that the man was now sobbing as well.

  “This -- this can’t -- can’t --”

  “It’s not,” Kai said. But the look that he, Rick, and Torv shared communicated the same simple fact.

  There was no way out.

  * * *

  The black VTOL parked beyond the fence had so far survived the upheaval that was swallowing Camp Moses, but there was no telling how long that would last. Great chunks of the Earth were beginning to erupt like breaching whales, fissures opening up in the desert plain. And all the while, that pillar of fire that pierced the dark clouds was slowly widening.

  Booker hurried after Estelle, who was following the pilot -- Mofat -- through the wreckage of the camp. Nasim was staying to make sure the rest of the team got out of Camp Moses alive. “Estelle! I’m coming with you.”

  She paused only long enough to glance over her shoulder. “You should evacuate with the rest of them, Booker. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop this.”

  “No.” He caught up with her and grabbed her hand. “You’re not doing this alone.”

  A look of annoyance flashed across her face. It’s familiarity, and the mundanity of the memories it brought up in him, felt dream-like in the current situation. “I have to do this alone. There is literally nothing you can do to help.”

  “I’ve lost you enough times. If this is going to fail, I’m going to be with you when it does.”

  Estelle stared at him, looking uncertain. She swallowed. “I can’t ask --”

  “You’re not.”

  They held each other’s gaze for a moment, Booker still clutching her hand. The rising whine of engines drew their attention. Mofat had reached the VTOL and was already preparing it for takeoff. The pilot was visible through the windscreen, motioning for them to hurry the fuck up.

  “Let’s go,” Estelle said.

  The side of the VTOL was hanging open, waiting for them. Estelle reached it first, leaping lightly inside. Booke
r was nearly there when the ground shivered, and the VTOL suddenly lurched to one side. He could see a fissure widening beneath it, two great plates of solid rock splitting apart and pulling away from each other.

  “Go!” he bellowed, even as he was throwing himself through the open door. Estelle caught him and managed to keep him from slamming into the opposite side of the fuselage -- only for both of them to go sprawling as the VTOL canted wildly.

  “Hold onto something,” Mofat yelled from the cockpit. They both scrambled into a seat and gripped the harnesses tightly rather than waste time trying to buckle them. The door would have to remain open for now.

  The pitch of the engines quickly rose to an ear-splitting roar, and his stomach dropped out as the world fell away. It wasn’t so much a vertical takeoff as it was a diagonal one. Through the open door, eyes narrowed against the wind, Booker had an isometric view of Camp Moses as it shrank away beneath them. Faintly, he heard Estelle gasp as, for the first time, they got a full view of the destruction.

  The desert plain looked as if it had been shattered by a divine hammer. Cracks were spiderwebbing out in all directions, extending for what looked like a mile or more, great plateaus of stone rising and sinking even as they watched. The smoking wreckage of the camp sat in a bowl-like depression, the sand and dirt already covering what had once been nylon tents and prefabricated huts. Booker felt a modicum of relief to see a caravan of trucks racing away -- Nasim had managed to get everyone evacuated. Hopefully Julie and the others would be able to navigate beyond the edge of destruction and stay ahead of it as it spread.

  Meanwhile, he and Estelle were headed right for the heart of it.

  Still rising, the VTOL banked sharply, the view of Camp Moses and the exodus caravan sliding away. It was replaced by the flanks of Jabal Musa, only a couple hundred feet below them. They were hugging it as they made their rapid ascent.

  “How close do you need to be?” the pilot called.

  Estelle shook her head, hair flying in the wind, standing with arms braced against the walls. “As close as you can manage!”