Enemy (22 page)

     “Milicom silenced the miners and moved in.”

     “No wonder Jennings was so jumpy in the end. He must have thought the little green men were coming back for their lost toy.”

     “It was no toy.”

     She paused, and her hand drifted to the healing gash across her left eye. A reflex.

     “Jesus. Milicom was using alien technology to build new weapons.”

     Ember’s frigid gray eyes drifted up, somehow judged him. She turned, hiding the wounded eye from him in the firelight.

     “The vessel in the earth was a warship, once piloted by… by some kind of humanoids. There was tech greater than anything we’d ever conceived, greater than anything we could have imagined, in that ship. Impossibilities made possible.”

     Flynn grew silent, gazed into the fire.

     “Maggie?”

     “They found it in this huge room, a spherical room, at the center of the ship. It must have been a mile under the surface… The vessel was so big.”

     “What did they find?”

     “They sent my group into the room, and at its center was the

     purest light they had ever seen. They approached it, expecting it to be hot, radioactive. They expected it to hurt them in some way, but there it was, the most perfect sphere of light. It was beautiful, hypnotic. They drew closer.

     They were mesmerized. Trapped.

     Reaching... Grasping... Something crawled over their minds, their souls. Something drew them.

     A flash. Surreality. Heaven.

     It pulled them in. And

     when I came out, I’d been changed.” Without any warning, she reached into Simon’s pocket, withdrew his cigarettes and ancient Zippo lighter. She silently lit up and inhaled.

     “What—was it another dimension? Another world?”

     Exhalation. “I don’t know. It was... It was beauty.”

     “You said it pulled your group in. Was it some kind of portal?”

     “I don’t—we—our bodies remained behind. It was like hypnosis. The Milicom medical team entered the room after we’d gone into the orb, and tried to revive as many of us as they could. They pulled me back from the light.”

     “What about the rest of your group?”

     “There was two survivors from my group, me and another Milicom agent named West, a real American farm boy from Nebraska. We became the K-level Styx, the survivors of the eleventh experimental entry into the light. The rest were, well, all electrical activity had ceased in their brains. They were brain-dead.”

     Hayes frowned. “The light killed the rest of your group, but you two were pulled out before it could trap you. You came out, and you could shift.”

     She nodded, drawing on the cigarette. “No one knows why. It was like that light had activated the unused portion of my mind. It was like my soul had been freed from my body, and then forced back into my physical form. But my mind had changed.”

     “And Milicom saw the advantages immediately.”

     “They were still recovering from Three. They were desperate to prevent another war. They sent more people into the light, more test groups. When my group went in, Milicom had already been sending groups in for months, but they were mostly prisoners and the mentally ill. Most never came back, but the ones that did, the ones they pulled out before they were trapped—”

     “The Styx.”

     “They were sending hundreds of people into that light, but only a few came out. We were the nation’s last line of defense, the soldiers of the future. I never saw Diablo again, or the orb. Each day I have to live with the fact that I was in Heaven, but they pulled me back and made me a killer. They saved me from execution so that I could kill for them. I was just a girl who needed some new lungs. Each day is a struggle not to go crazy with that knowledge.” She regarded the cigarette she held with a wry smile. “All for a new set of lungs. What I really could use right now is a fucking hit of Pearl.”

     Hayes saw the bittersweet mixture of sincerity and sarcasm in her eyes.

     “Whatever it was, it was the vessel’s power source. It was like a star—or a black hole, pulling all of the world’s light inside, reflecting it from within. It touched my mind, and burned its image there.”

     “Do you think the vessel itself could shift, like you do? Different dimensions, fading in and out?”

     “I hope it couldn’t, but I know it did. I’m terrified to think of what kind of war would involve vessels that can shift from dimension to dimension, time to time. A civilization that lives between times.”

     “Do you think they were fighting them?” He pointed upward, where a seemingly endless procession of Enemy vessels flew upon unknown missions.

     “Yes.”

     They drew closer in the dark. Maggie handed Simon the lit cigarette, and they shared the delicious felony in the now-dark world where laws and order had been replaced by nightmares and aliens and Black.

     West was in the valley of Chicago’s ground zero.

     He had crept down the crater wall, amazed at the scene that emerged before him. He walked across the blast-scoured surface of the crater floor. Large chunks of what appeared to be asphalt and concrete where fused into the black glass.

     “Where’s ground zero?”

     “Probably Chicago. That fleet of Spears... They must have dumped everything they had on it.”

     He forced the memory from his mind and focused ahead. It was maddening, the throngs of humanity spread before him, screaming, weeping, dying. He walked resolutely toward his goal, the black spire that blotted out the ever-fading sun. The black monsters were everywhere, herding the humans like cattle into the tower. They were oblivious to him as he walked like a wraith amongst the gathered masses.

     He had shifted to a point where he could walk, unseen by anyone, at his leisure toward the tower. He was not shifted to a lethal point, because in this surging sea of humanity, that could draw the attention of the aliens if he were to carelessly stumble into an innocent person and shatter their being. Even now he walked a straight path, mindless of the men and women whom he passed through. He could feel the brief touch of their minds and their thoughts. They did not notice him, except for some, who felt only a short chill, a sense of confusion.

     Oh, it was so tempting...

     He knew he could shift higher; he knew he could destroy the entire alien force gathered here if he tried; he knew he could rescue these innocent people from whatever death awaited them within the interior of the black spire. With a steely resolve he continued walking toward the monolith. Maybe he could not only save these people, but others as well.

     West finally reached his goal. He stood in the shadow of the mysterious monument in awe.

     He took a deep breath.

     The sounds of humanity around him disappeared as he shifted higher into that realm of silence and cold mute light that was the shift, and entered the vessel, fading through the matte black material of the hull. He entered the void within the spire.

     In the realm of the aliens, the vertigo of memory surged through him.

     Richter’s inspection of the vessel cockpit confirmed his suspicions. He now knew where he had to go. He let go of the black creature’s dead body and it fell to the desert floor in a cloud of dust and shattered silver rivulets.

     He looked at the faint light on the eastern horizon.

     He turned and walked north.

     He had been here before.

     West felt the flood of long-suppressed memories wash over him. He scanned the room with slowly dawning realization.

     A spherical room. An orb of stars at the center. And—

     People.

     Long ago he had entered the Diablo vessel and became something else in the orb of stars. It had been Heaven in that light. So peaceful, so beautiful.

     He had been pulled from the light. It had not claimed his soul for its own. How often had he hoped to return to that heaven? And now, stretched before him, were countless people, caught in the rapture of the orb. The harsh light had already killed most of them, uploading their minds. Something was different...

     black

    
THERE IS A DISTURBANCE HERE.

     WHAT DO YOU MEAN((?))

    
CAN YOU NOT FEEL IT((?)) IT IS AS IF A SHADOW IS CAST OVER US, EVEN AS WE SPEAK.

     A THREAT TO THE PURPOSE((?))

    
A RIPPLE ON THE OCEAN OF OUR FAITH.

     IT IS COMING((?))

    
IT IS HERE… WE SHALL READY OURSELVES. DOWNLOAD, SYNTHESIZE REINFORCEMENTS.

     IT SHALL BE DONE.

     the black closes

     In his shifted form, West was beyond the grasp of the light. He knew that if he shifted down, he would be seized by the radiance; his mind would be captured once more.

     The remaining humans were falling dead to the floor, their minds too feeble to withstand the power of the light.

     Something was wrong.

     West looked at the bodies near him.

     Horror.

     They had been changed.

     Fine lines of glistening metal had encompassed most of their bodies, like some grotesque spider’s web. Flesh and metal were intermingled. West saw that the bodies were quickly decaying, becoming mercurial extensions of the room. When the body was gone, the remaining metal webs fluidly merged with the walls of the massive room, disappearing into the black.

     Thoughts flickered in his mind at a phenomenal rate as he made a connection between this monster embedded in the earth and the vessel they had found in Wyoming.

     There had been no metal webs in Wyoming. There certainly had not been this ravenous silver substance.

     People, falling. Dying. Being webbed and encompassed.

     Souls being harvested. Souls being uploaded.

     Who had the owners of the Diablo vessel been fighting?

     Wars through time and space. Wars in the space between sanity and light and yesterday. Who had they been chasing?

     Only one human remained, a woman partially ensnared in the metal webs. The orb of light snaked outwards, lines of fire entering her mind through her eyes. West knew she must be strong to withstand the force of the light, which crawled over her eyes, trying to gain entry into her mind.

     He could save her before the light took her soul.

     He shifted back into human form.

     fury

    
INTRUDER((!))

     HOW((?)) WHAT((?))