Bell did not wait for an answer. Instead he turned and walked to the door.
“I’ll be downstairs. You still have some of that scotch I gave you for Christmas? Let me go see.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE VINSON MASSIF
THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS
ANTARCTICA
AUGUST 19, 11:23 P.M.
We spun toward the sound, our combat reflexes doing what our numbed minds probably couldn’t. Our guns came up, our fingers laying flat along the trigger guards. The voice was far away but it was piercing and shrill.
“It’s back in the lab complex,” said Bunny, and we began moving that way. Stumbling at first but finding our coordination. Walking, fast-walking, running. We left the cavern and reentered the corridor that led back into the Gateway complex, and then moved quickly but cautiously between the rows of stacked boxes. The sound continued, calling us, drawing us. But it was still far away, deep inside the structure.
“Boss,” snapped Bunny, “on your ten o’clock.”
We all turned. Ready to fight. Ready to kill. I could almost hear the coming thunder of fresh gunfire. The savage Killer who shares my mind with me was poised, ready to do the things that earn him the name he wears. All of my earlier hesitation was gone.
A figure came walking around the end of a long row of crates.
It walked slowly and a bit awkwardly, but it wasn’t another albino penguin. It wasn’t another soldier, either. This time it was a thin, fortyish man wearing a lab coat over a plaid shirt and khakis. His feet were bare. His glasses were nearly opaque from the blood that was splashed across his face. It soaked his clothes and dripped from him, and he left a long line of bare red footprints behind him.
“Stop right there,” I yelled.
He kept walking.
“Sir—you need to stop right there or I will put you down. Do you understand me?” My finger was along the curve of the trigger guard, quivering, ready to slip inside and squeeze off the shot. The Killer snarled inside my mind.
The man slowed and stopped. He lifted his head as if listening to something far away, and again I thought I heard that voice cry out those same meaningless words we’d heard before. Not Russian and not Chinese. Not any language I ever heard of.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
We couldn’t see who spoke, but it was closer now. Just beyond the range of our flashlights. A hundred yards? Less? Fifty? Twenty? The echoes were deceptive.
“Put your hands on your head, fingers laced,” I told the man. “Do it now.”
The man seemed to smile for a moment. “We are always what you want,” he said in a voice that was muddy and thick. “The sequence is written in the stars.”
“Put your hands on your head,” I repeated. “I won’t tell you again.”
“It is there to be read.”
He said those words—or at least those are the words I heard—but I swear to God that those aren’t the words his mouth formed. It was so strange, like watching a foreign film with bad dubbing.
“No truth is unlearnable.”
“Tell me your name,” I demanded. “What is your ID number?”
The man opened his mouth to say something else, but this time instead of words a pint of dark blood flopped out and splatted onto the front of his shirt. He made a faint gagging sound and then his knees buckled and he collapsed with exaggerated slowness to the ground.
“Go,” said Top as he moved up to cover me.
Bunny and I broke cover and ran cautiously toward him, checking each side corridor in the maze of crates, covering each other.
“Green Giant,” I said, and Bunny grunted an assent. He took up a defensive posture while I dropped to one knee by the fallen man. I put my fingers to his throat and got a big silent nothing. “Dead.”
He was a mess. Blood everywhere. A name tag hung askew from his lab coat.
M. ERSKINE
The scientist in charge of this project. From close up I could see that his skin was as gray-white and mottled as the penguin’s feathers had been. Like the skin of a mushroom.
Erskine looked up at the ceiling with dead eyes and a slack mouth. And then he spoke again. “We are always what you need.”
We all jumped.
“He’s alive!” yelped Bunny.
“No, he ain’t,” growled Top.
I jabbed my fingers back against his carotid and got the same nothing as before. Top tried, too.
He jerked his hand back.
“We have waited for you since the lands split,” said the dead man.
We scrambled back.
“What the fuck?” yelped Bunny.
“I know, I know,” I said, my heart hammering in my chest.
“No,” insisted Bunny, and he held his BAMS unit in front of my face. The comforting little green light was glowing bright red.
We scrambled back from the dead man.
“Reads as unknown biological agent,” Bunny said.
“Yeah,” growled Top, “but what kind? Bacteria? Nerve gas? A virus? Are we hallucinating this shit?”
Bunny shook his head. “I don’t know … it paused on viruses for like half a second and then went to unknown particles.”
Top looked at his while I covered everyone. “Mine says bacteria … no, I’m wrong. It’s reading unknown, too.”
I glanced at mine just as the reading changed from virus to unknown.
We stared at each other, then at the units, then at the dead man.
We backed away from Erskine and tried to get readings from different parts of the airflow. Every few seconds the BAMS units would shift. Virus. Fungal spores. Bacteria. Mycotoxins. And even plant pollen. But each time the meter flicked back to the display for UNKNOWN PARTICLES.
“Something must be interfering with the sensors,” said Bunny.
“Can’t,” said Top. “They’re self-contained and they have ruggedized cases.”
The red lights flickered at us like rats’ eyes.
On the floor the dead man spoke again, and once more his words and his mouth didn’t match. His body trembled as with the onset of convulsions, but the tone was normal. No, “normal” isn’t a word I can use here. Normal wasn’t in that place with us. His tone sounded casual, like he was having a calm conversation with someone. The tone and words were well modulated. It sounded for all the world like a tape playback of something this man might have said at another time and under incredibly different circumstances, but somehow repeated now despite his condition.
What he said was, “There’s nothing to worry about. This is a clean facility.”
I could feel the shakes starting. They started deep, in my bones, in my muscles, and then shuddered outward through my skin.
“Cap’n,” whispered Top, “this motherfucker is dead.”
“I know.”
Bunny said, “What?”
“No pulse. He’s dead.”
“We defeat time because it interferes with service,” said Erskine. Or, at least, that’s what the voice said. His mouth formed different words. Even dead. I made myself look at the shapes his lips formed. And as I read those words I could feel—actually feel—my blood turn to ice. The words his dead mouth formed were, “I’m sorry. God forgive us. We should never have opened the gate. I can see the sleeping things. God forgive us.”
Over and over again. His dead, cold lips pleaded for mercy while the cooling meat of his body spoke to us in this vast and impossible place.
Bunny held his BAMS unit in one hand and had his M4A1 carbine pointed at the man’s head.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” repeated the voice. “This is a clean facility.”
Suddenly all of the red lights in the BAMS unit turned green.
I stared at my unit. The display read NO DETECTABLE PARTICLES.
I’ll buy one malfunctioning unit. Maybe two at an absurd stretch. Not three. And not three malfunctioning in the same way at exactly the same moment.
Then the
dead man on the floor sat up.
He didn’t struggle to get up; he sat up as if he’d been doing ab crunches five times a day for twenty years. With his legs straight out in front of him, Erskine’s upper body folded forward until he sat erect. He turned his head very slowly toward me. His eyes were no longer totally vacant. There was a strange new light in them, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that says someone’s home. It wasn’t that at all.
Bunny actually shrieked. It was the only thing you could call that sound. I was so close to doing the same thing that I had to clench my jaws shut.
Erskine said, “All doors can be opened.”
Top said, “What?”
“Any open door allows ingress and egress,” Erskine said in that same reasonable tone. “This is a fundamental truth of all dimensions.”
Blood, thick as molasses, dribbled from the corners of his mouth and ran down over his chin.
Dead things don’t bleed.
But that blood didn’t look like normal blood. It was so dark, almost like oil.
“The question of controlling ingress is solved at the quantum level.”
The dead man looked at Bunny, then at Top, and then at me.
He smiled. With black blood oozing from his mouth, he smiled.
It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. In a life spent fighting every kind of human monster, every twisted aspect of natural evil, here was a smile that shook me, stabbed me through the heart, froze my soul.
Behind us we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li!”
I whirled and saw a shape, pale as one of the penguins, and I fired at it without pause, without thinking, breaking all protocols and training. The bullets tore into the flesh of a naked man. Holes opened in his flesh and black blood poured from it.
The man I shot was Dr. Erskine.
I froze, finger still on the trigger, smoke drifting from the barrel.
Behind Dr. Erskine was another man.
Another Dr. Erskine.
Other figures emerged from the shadows. More Erskines.
Then other people. Some in bloody clothes, others naked and pallid as mushrooms. The lights on the BAMS unit flared red again.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” they said.
Then behind me, the first Erskine said, “Function is a by-product of need.”
There was a rattle of gunfire as Bunny emptied half a magazine into him.
Then the man said, “Tekeli-li!”
More and more figures stepped from the shadows. Dozens of individual people. More than a hundred. Some of them were dressed in the bloody shreds of lab coats. Some were in military uniforms or engineers’ coveralls. Some were American. Some wore the uniforms of Chinese or Russian military. Beyond, amid, and around them were hundreds of others. Copies of each. Hundreds of copies of each.
“Tekeli-li,” they said. “Tekeli-li!”
Though they each spoke with their own mouths, it was all said with a single voice. One voice that spoke in perfect harmony.
One voice.
Beyond the figures I thought I saw something else. No, make that two things. Maybe I saw them. Maybe my mind was slipping gears. I really don’t know.
Off to our left I thought I saw a man dressed in almost the same kind of thermal combat rig as we wore. Except he had a different kind of helmet and he seemed to be holding out a small device. I’m pretty sure it was a camera of some kind. He saw me looking, lowered the camera, turned, and vanished behind a row of metal shelves. Neither Top nor Bunny saw him, and a second later the image of him was crowded out by something else.
Something that was so wrong. So totally wrong.
It was huge and mostly hidden in the darkness, but for all its mass the thing moved with a fluid bulk. It was as if a body of viscous liquid was somehow moving without the need of containment. There was an oily iridescence about it and a stink of pollution worse than anything I’d ever experienced. And there were things coming from it. Not arms. Nothing like that. No, I swear to God that this thing had tentacles, as if it was some kind of obscene octopus. But it wasn’t that. Maybe there’s no word for what it is.
I saw it, though.
We all saw it. And in that moment of awful clarity I saw the machine outside of the ancient city. I saw the gateway opening and this thing came out. This tentacled abomination. It reached out of its world and into ours.
I saw it.
We all saw it.
“No,” breathed Bunny. His eyes were wide and unblinking and he seemed like he was tottering on the edge of total panic.
Then all of the Erskines came charging at us. Some of them were bare-handed. Many of them held guns, knives, chunks of rock. Anything they could grab. We saw Russian and Chinese soldiers mixed in, guns in their hands, eyes empty of sanity but filled with madness. Something had taken hold of all of them and had turned this entire group of people—at least a hundred men and women—into a mindless swarm of killers.
They surged toward us, screaming their weird chant, hurling stones, firing wildly.
“God almighty,” breathed Top in a terrified whisper. “If this is real … if this gets out … Jesus Christ…”
The swarm came howling toward us. I said nothing. I opened fire. It was a target-rich environment. We filled the chamber with thunder. We fired every bullet. We threw every grenade. We hurled every satchel charge.
Then we turned and ran.
We screamed the whole time as the collective voice screamed back at us.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE VINSON MASSIF
THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS
ANTARCTICA
AUGUST 19, 11:49 P.M.
The LC-130 was still taxiing down the runway when I called in the air strike.
Top’s words rang in my head.
If this is real … if this gets out …
I yelled the orders to hit the lab. To hit all of the labs. Ours, and the ones run by Russia, and the Chinese. All of it.
The USS California hit the Vinson Massif with six Tomahawks. I told them to empty the whole closet on them, so they sent the other six.
There is no Vinson Massif anymore. Not one you’d recognize.
We huddled in the belly of the plane, wrapped in the barbed wire of shock, hurt down deep on levels we could not name.
Behind us the missiles did their work.
And we prayed it was enough.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE DREAMER
IN THE PLAYROOM
MONTHS AGO
He walked in dreams.
It was beautiful.
So many things to see, to know. To learn.
So many secrets.
Open to him.
It was like having a key to every door.
Almost every door.
Some places were shut to him. Some minds. He didn’t know why. Not even the people at Gateway understood that. No one in Project Stargate had ever understood it.
Some minds were so open they invited you in. The Mullah in that little town in Iraq was like that. His mind was uncluttered, without defenses, without guile. A simple man of simple faith living a simple life. The Dreamer could go into his head without effort. He could almost do it while awake. There were a few hundred others who were like that. The Dreamer went in and out of them with no more effort than walking through doorless rooms in a big house. The more often he went, the less effort it took to push the inhabiting consciousness to one side, to gag it and bind it and tell it to be quiet. That was fun. That was very useful.
Others were different. Some were harder to breach, and it took effort that drained him, aged him, exhausted him. A few were worth the effort. Some made even the dangers worth it, even when it left him so thoroughly spent that his mind nearly broke loose and went drifting. That was bad because there were awful places a drifting mind could go.
He knew. He’d been there. He had scars on his mind, on his soul. Some things are not unseeable.
; So for those people, he had to weigh risk against reward. The way a soldier does, the way a spy does.
And then there were those other minds. The dark ones. The dangerous ones.
There were not many of them, but he had encountered a few. They were sealed against him. Or, if he managed to get inside, the things he saw there terrified him. The worst of all had been that time he had tried to crawl inside the mind of the man who called himself Church.
God.
Such darkness there.
If people only knew.
If anyone knew.
He knew, though. The Dreamer knew.
It had taken weeks to recover from that one brief encounter. Even now he had nightmares. Real nightmares, not dreamwalking. He woke up screaming sometimes.
It had been a harsh lesson.
Since then he had focused on other minds, on sailing through less dangerous seas.
Where next? he wondered.
There were so many places he could still go.
So many.
So many …
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE MULLAH
NEAR KIRKUK
NORTHERN IRAQ
TWO YEARS AGO
He was the Mullah of the Black Tent.
That is what he came to be called.
He was born to a poor family near the Iraq-Kurdistan border. For the first forty-seven years of his life he was known by his given name, Maki Al-Faiz. He went to school to study Islamic traditions, known as hadithi, and spiritual law, fiqh, and over time he became a quiet, devoted, and respected man of his local mosque. Al-Faiz said his prayers and made his offerings. He was generous and humorous, but not a particularly brilliant cleric. However, since the villagers of his town were often less educated than Al-Faiz, over time they came to regard him as their mullah. When the mosque’s official cleric died, Al-Faiz became the mullah in fact and from then on it was the only thing people called him. The Mullah.