Dog Warrior (25 page)

Because the Ontongard's ability to pass on perfect memories negated the need for written plans.

“They referred to Buffalo with a word we haven't been able to translate,” Mouse said, and then he cleared his throat and attempted the word, a rough guttural bark.

“No,” Ether said. “It's more . . .” She got the
pronunciation right and Ukiah recognized the word: Landing site/invasion point.

“You know what it means.” Ice leaned forward, his gaze intense. “Tell us.”

The Ontongard must have planned to land the seed ship at Buffalo and tap into the extensive power grid of Niagara Falls. Luckily, the Pack had triggered the ship's self-destruct, and all their plans were now moot. But explaining the ship to the cult, who believed the Ontongard were demons, perhaps wouldn't be wise.

The cult stirred, put into disquiet by his silence.

“Ah, it . . . it's got a lot of meanings . . . if that's really the word they were using.” Ukiah wished for his brother's smooth lies. He decided on the less specific of the meanings. “I think they were using the word that means ‘invasion point.' They planned to launch a massive assault from Buffalo.”

“Planned,” Ice echoed. “But something happened in Pittsburgh. Things went very wrong for them. And you were there.”

What to tell them? He was a horrible liar. He decided to stick to a version that Max and he created to tell authorities. “They stumbled into me. They attempted to kill me and they kidnapped my son.”

“And the others? Your foster father? The female FBI agent? Are they angels too?”

“No!” Ukiah bolted to his feet, spilling the kitten out of his lap. “Leave them alone!”

The cult reacted with impressive speed. Even before the kitten hit the ground, all the cultists had weapons drawn and pointed at him.

Ukiah put up his hands, warning off their attack. “Wait!” And when the cultists didn't fire, he continued, trying to keep his voice level. “They're human. You mustn't harm them. If you hurt them, they're not like me—they won't survive what you've done to me! Please don't involve them.”

“We'll leave them in peace as long as you cooperate with us.” Ice motioned for him to sit. “Eat, and then we'll start working.”

Ukiah sat stiffly and ate only because he would need the food later, after he learned where the Ae were stored.

 

After a tense dinner, the cultists split into two groups. Ice, Mouse, Ether, and Link herded him like shepherds with a flock of one into the living room, which was crowded with computer equipment. The rest stayed to clear the table and relieve those who hadn't eaten yet.

They indicated where Ukiah should sit, and Mouse settled nervously beside him.

“We've got hours of recordings, broken up into shorter sound bites to make them easier to handle.” Mouse handed him a headset. “What we're going to do is play a recording for you to translate. Speak into this microphone. It's hooked to that computer there with speech-recognition software. It will type in your translations as you talk.”

“Okay.” Ukiah slid the headset on. The word “okay” appeared on the monitor beside him.

“Here's the first.” Mouse opened a folder labeled “Angel” and clicked on the first file.

A man spoke, in Hex's emotionally dead voice, a phrase in the Ontongard language: “Returning/rejoining/regroup-ing at gathering/den/nest.”

“The speaker is returning to the nest,” Ukiah said, and the words wrote themselves on the text.

Mouse glanced to Ice, who nodded. “All right, and the next one?”

They played through eleven more segments, growing longer in length, but of no great importance; all in Ontongard with no English intermixed. The speakers changed, but not the tone or delivery. Played back-to-back, it was like listening to a dozen people trying to mimic one person. Mouse
nodded as Ukiah translated them, as if he already knew what the clips contained.

They were testing him, Ukiah realized. They were seeing if he actually understood the language and was not just making up random comments.

After the last one, Mouse looked again to Ice. “He nailed them all.”

“Good, good.” Ice swung a chair around and straddled it, facing backward. “Play him the last call we managed to record.”

Mouse closed the “Angel” folder and picked a program off the toolbar via an icon of a reel-to-reel tape deck. The resulting program quickly scanned through the selected recording, did a voice recognition on the speakers, produced photographs of a young black woman and a middle-aged white man, and rendered out a complex 3-D tree of colored nodes. The woman was identified as Demon BU1-623-S, alias unknown, and the man as Demon B3-215-S, alias Peter Caldwell.

“What are the numbers for?” Ukiah tapped the numbers for the man and was startled as a window opened giving more information: Peter Caldwell, six-one, a hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. Nest: Caldwell and Associates Engineering, Totten Pond Road, Waltham.

“The first set is the nest they belong to.” Mouse closed the window. “This is a demon from one of the Buffalo nests, speaking to a Boston nest.”

“Since they rarely travel solo,” Ice said, “a nest number gives us a truer idea of their movements.”

Mouse nodded and tapped the last part of the identifying number. “The S indicates that these are Speakers, which means they're the ones who usually do the phone calls for their collective. We thought this meant the Speakers were also the leaders, but we learned they're kind of like salmon swimming upstream. They all react—individually or as a mass—in identical fashion to whatever predetermined goal
they currently have locked into their collective brain. Killing the Speakers doesn't throw them into confusion.”

“But it means one well-designed trap,” Ether said, “presented to them individually, will trap them all.”

“It's the only way we can hope to fight them,” Ice said.

Phone numbers were shown. The Buffalo Get was using a phone in Butler, Pennsylvania; the Boston Get was in Waltham, Massachusetts.

“I am in Butler,” the Buffalo Get reported. “Ae missing, not destroyed, thief unknown. New incursion of aware hosts discovered. Partial Get recovered.”

“That's what they call us: aware hosts,” Mouse said as Ether added, “We think they're talking about Eden.”

“Neutralize,” the Gets harmonized as they agreed on a course of action.

“Neutralized,” the Buffalo Get stated.

The Ontongard then bombed Eden Court, reducing the grand mansion to smoking rubble.

“This part we don't understand,” Ice murmured.

“Female host has interacted with breeder,” the Buffalo Get said.

“Prime's breeder?” the Boston Get asked.

“Prime's,” the Buffalo Get said.

“Capture and contain,” the two spoke in duet.

“Contained female,” Buffalo reported. “Incubation, nine months.”

“Incubate.” Again the duet.

Ice leaned in, stabbing a key to pause the conversation. “What are they talking about? Ping is the only female missing.”

Ukiah had avoided all thoughts of Ping and the night he spent with her and Core. Beyond the raw emotions of his rape lay the whole ugly inevitability of conception; he was a breeder and she had been all but painted with the breeding drug, Invisible Red. All the implications—from Indigo's reaction to another woman bearing his baby to the Ontongard
holding Ping—and therefore his unborn child—churned in his stomach like icy snakes.

“Well?” There was fear and hurt, but also steel resolve in Ice's eyes.

“They have Ping,” Ukiah admitted. “She's pregnant. They're keeping her alive and untouched until she has the baby.”

“So she hasn't been possessed?” Ice asked.

“No.”

As Ice relaxed, Mouse restarted the recording.

“Breeder contamination/infection/adaptation detected in one male,” the Buffalo Get reported in Ontongard. “Survival possibility excellent.”

Breeder contamination? Core was dead, and he was the only male Ukiah had interacted with for any length of time. They had to be talking about the missing Parity—but how? True, high on Invisible Red, Ukiah had nearly choked the boy to death, but that was just minutes before the Ontongard captured Parity. There couldn't possibly have been enough time. Ukiah flashed back to the beating he gave Parity in the hall. Wait, the contamination was already in Parity's blood . . .

Mouse had paused the recording and the cultists looked at him expectantly.

“What did it say?” Ice demanded.

How could Parity already have been infected? Realization dawned on Ukiah. “Did Parity handle my son at any point?”

“The nephilim?” Ice looked surprised at the question. “Yeah. It bit him in the leg; he needed stitches. Why?”

“They're planning to possess Parity; he's probably one of them now. Anything he knew, they now know.”

Which included everything about him and Kittanning.

“Shit,” Link hissed. “At least he was just an initiate.”

Ice looked troubled but signaled Mouse to continue the recording.

“Contain breeder,” Boston said.

“Current whereabouts of breeder unknown,” Buffalo reported. “Aware hosts more dangerous than previously thought.”

“They must not be allowed to interfere with the priority project,” Boston and Buffalo stated together.

“Returning to confer,” Buffalo said, and hung up.

“This was Saturday morning. There haven't been any more phone calls.”

“Does Parity know about this place? Sanctuary?”

The cultists looked at each other.

Mouse shook his head. “No. Until the demons hit Pittsburgh, Sanctuary was restricted to inner circle only.”

“Ping knows where it is,” Ether pointed out.

“She wouldn't talk,” Link said.

“She's alone with the demons,” Ether said. “She has to be scared shitless. Who knows how long she can hold out?”

“Go check on the fortifications,” Ice said wearily. “All of you.”

“All?” Mouse squeaked like his namesake.

“Yes, go on,” Ice said.

Cultists scurried off to obey him, leaving Ukiah alone with Ice.

Ice sighed. “We got back to Butler to find Eden on fire. I parked across the street and walked through the gardens. Crowds of people had gathered; the entire neighborhood had come to watch the great house burn. I saw
them
standing in the crowd, like ravens among mourning doves, only no one seemed to notice them. Like they were blind to the evil beside them. There were bodies sprawled on the grass, covered with white sheets, stained with bright red flowers of blood. I couldn't tell who it was—Core, Ping, Io—but there was nothing I could do but turn and walk away.”

Ice fixed his cold stare on Ukiah. “Where were you while it burned?”

“I was flying to Pittsburgh.” Ukiah had managed to
escape to the nearby Butler Memorial Hospital. The fireball from Eden going up had convinced the staff to fly Ukiah via the Lifeflight helicopter to Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh. All things considered, it had been a fortunate decision.

Ice's eyes widened slightly at the news. “Oh, demons can't fly—but I guess that's part of being an angel.”

Ukiah swallowed down an automatic “I meant by helicopter.” It would be best not to shake the cult leader's belief.

Luckily, Ice was cuing up another recorded telephone conversation. “We'll step you backward from Saturday. We want to know what this priority project they're working on is.”

“Tell me first, where are the founts?”

Ice stopped what he was doing to give Ukiah another cold look. “Why?”

“The demons created the founts for the sole purpose of wiping out humans.” If the Ontongard found the highest order of native life on a planet too difficult to take over, they used the Ae to design a species-specific disease and wiped them out—settling for a less advanced species as a host. Since their own intelligence depended on their host, the Ontongard were reluctant to take such a drastic step. “They were holding them in reserve because they thought their invasion at Buffalo would work. They had been planning for centuries for that day, and until June they thought they would win.”

“So why did they wait until September to check on them?”

Why indeed? With the FBI and the cult being new pressures on the Ontongard, why hadn't they acted?

“I don't know,” Ukiah admitted. “But the founts are deadly. You can't use them. Don't even try.”

“We've identified over a thousand demons, and managed only to kill less than a hundred. They have superhuman strength and speed, and now we learn they have telepathy. They can take massive damage and regenerate. Last
Thursday we were fifty people; now we're down to twenty, and we're being hunted by demons that know all our secrets. We need to strike first, and strike hard, or we're not going to survive.”