Frost (12 page)

“But the years kept going by, and as they died off, they chose replacements. Roll
the clock forward a hell of a lot of years more, and you end up with us.” She gestured
above Jack’s head, and he saw that the largest bank of screens had been filled by webcam feeds, a dozen people of as many races. They all eyed him silently. “You’re looking at their legacy,” Kat finished.

The others’ faces tightened with a flavour of stubbornness. Their combined stares coalesced as a single solid slab of willpower.

“You’ve been waiting, all this time?” he said. “What the hell kind of torture is that?”

Kat smiled, a strained and painful glimmer. The intensity of her gaze bored into him. An odd stirring in Jack’s gut urged him to look away. “I have seen you two in my dreams,” she breathed, “for so long… I’d started to think you’d never come. I don’t know you. But I
feel
like I do.”

If this were a movie, we’d kiss now. Isn’t that how it goes?

A part of him expected her to draw close with a coquettish wink, then.

Instead her gaze lingered on him only a fraction of a second, then she sighed. The disappointed slump to her shoulders burned like acid.

Jack could only stare. Entire lifetimes, waiting with that knowledge, unable to do anything about it. One night had been enough to stretch him to the limit.

Barry waved an impatient hand. “That’s really bloody tragic, but can we skip the sob story?”

“Hey!” Jack said. “Lay off.”

“This bunch of jokers don’t know squat. So they saw things. It’s like she said: some creatures are just a little bent that way; they pick up things, like a car radio catching longwave from Korea or some bloody place. It doesn’t mean they can help us.”

The group started up. Barry squared his chest, baring his teeth. “Easy!” he growled. “I mean no offence. It’s nice that you’re playing super-spy and all, but we’ve got a mission to get to. We can’t afford to team up with amateurs.” He cast a pointed finger around at them. “Look at you. Dressing up with all this gear, like it can make up for what you really are. Anybody with a pair of eyes can see the truth. You’re just…”

“Normal,” Jack finished.

The two parties squared off for a tense moment, ugly glares lancing back and forth.

“What makes you so different?” Kat said.

“The fact that we
are
.” Barry clapped Jack on the shoulder. “Even this one. Don’t let the wrapper fool you.”

“Less of that,” Jack muttered from the corner of his mouth.

Barry ignored Jack, spreading his hands. “Like I said, I mean no offence. But we don’t have time for this. If you can help us, prove it.”

In response, Kat nodded to the gorilla with the goatee, who punched a few commands at a terminal.

Jack and Barry turned to a bank of monitors hanging behind them. At least twenty video feeds popped to life.

“You say we don’t know what you know? I doubt that. If you knew They were everywhere, I bet the powers-that-be would have sent more than the pair of you.”

“What are you talking about?” Barry’s voice was low, his eyes squinted.

“They’re everywhere. Harper’s not just a monster, he’s a puppeteer of monsters. He’s been here a long time, before the first of us. Our influence stretches pretty far, but him… he has an army.”

Jack felt the strength drain out of his legs. He waved his hand blindly at his side until he made contact with an empty swivel chair, and dropped into it.

The feeds were blurred and obscured in places by foliage or buildings, clearly being filmed from hides and hidden crannies. But there was enough information for him to guess that each showed a different country. The shadows fell differently in each, indicating a different local time, and the architecture was different; some in tundra, some temperate forests, others semi-arid.

In most, hives of figures buzzed back and forth busily. Encampments of tents, motor pools and tonnes of scaffolding surrounding central depressions in the ground, leading towards what seemed to be glistening metal caps.

In a few, however, the story was altogether different, and stalled the breath in Jack’s throat. In these there were but a few people working upon great towers of scaffolding, submerged almost totally in deep, excavated pits. The scaffolding was riddled with tarps that obscured what lay beneath, but between a few wind-loosened flaps, Jack caught glimpses of obsidian, sparkling yet totally black, blacker than nothingness.

His throat tightened, took on an ache akin to one experienced after a bad scare.

He swept his eyes across all the monitors, counted the ones with scaffolds.

“Seven,” Jack muttered. “Sets of seven.” He kept on saying it, quieter each time, under his breath. Each time it was like a hammer blow to his inner divining rod. “Blessed Beacons. Set of seven.” He looked with effort over his shoulder at Barry, whose face had been cast into an unflattering blue hue by the monitors, highlighting a network of scars criss-crossing the length of his face.

Barry looked back at him, speechless. The Scot-but-not turned weakly to Kat. “I don’t understand.”

Her lips tightened. She chose not to gloat, something Jack thanked her for. Instead she stepped in front of the monitors. “He holds reserved clientèle, to be sure, but you’re not the only ones to get a visit from the Man in Purple.” She held up a hand to stall Barry. “I know, impartial. All I know is he’s toeing some kind of line.” She shrugged. “I don’t pretend to understand. Like you, I’m just following orders. All I need to know is this: we’ve been preparing for this for eighty years, and now it’s here. We get one shot to stop it.”

“Do you know what’s coming? Have you seen it?” Jack leaned forward in his seat.

Her throat worked visibly. “No. But when I was a girl, I felt it.” Her eyes glazed. “Cold. Cold that burned like fire.”

The others fidgeted uncomfortably, writhing in recollection.

Jack nodded, tight lipped.

Kat turned to Barry. “You need our help.”

“The magic fairies tell you that, too?”

“No. I just know it. We saw you face Harper.”

“Listen, lady. This is all very impressive, but none of you is worth shit in a fight against him.”

“Knowledge and influence are our weapons.”

Barry snorted. “Quaint.”

“It got us this far. And like it or not, we’ve been told more than you. Looks like the universe screwed you over.”

Barry hissed bitterly.

Jack frowned as a question occurred to him. “Who sent you here, anyway?”

“Doesn’t work that way. It’s not like there’s a cosmic job centre. I just kind of… know. I know what I need to know. Always have.”

“Doesn’t look like it’s worked out for you, pal,” Joblonsky guffawed.

“Laugh again, and I’ll break it off and stick it up there,” Barry said without looking at him. “Don’t forget, you’re still ants, and I’m the anteater.”

“Looks like you got royally screwed, and we know a hell of a lot more about this than you do,” said Joblonsky.

“Enough,” Kat said, casting a stern look in Joblonsky’s direction. “This isn’t a pissing contest. We start working together now, or bringing you here was pointless—and we’re all dead.”

Barry waved her on impatiently. “All right. Fine. You made your point. Get on with story time so I can get out of here.”

A muscle leapt in her jaw, but she pressed on. “Most of the feeds show underground complexes Harper’s organisation has been building. They go deep, big enough to hold over a hundred people for at least a month. We have sleeper agents inside.”

“Fallout shelters? He’s planning to nuke us?” Jack said.

“No. There’s no radiation shielding. But there is something else. Some kind of next-gen integrated circuitry built into the walls.”

“What does it do?”

“No idea. We got a sample, but nobody could make heads or tails of it. It doesn’t seem to do anything; a bunch of junk, wires and strips of exotic compounds. Some don’t even make electrical contact. But it means something.”

“Maybe it’s a decoy? Maybe they know you’re onto them.”

“It’s no decoy. They’ve been filling the vaults with people for three days, rushing them by airlift from all over the world. Most are already sealed.”

“Eleven confirmed,” Gant said from her terminal.

“Bastard must have given them a way to hide from the Frost,” Barry muttered. He shook his head. “This isn’t right. It’s against the rules. Everyone has to play by them. Everyone.”

“So what’s this?”

Barry made to speak, but faltered. “I don’t know.”

“Comforting.” Jack nodded to the monitors again. “What about the others? The scaffolds?” He bit back the urge to mutter,
Seven, seven, seven
.

Kat nodded to the rock in his hands. “That right there is a part of an object uncovered in the seventeenth century, during an exploratory in a place called Radden Moor in England. It’s made of some material that doesn’t correlate with any known geology on the planet.” She held up a hand to staunch his retort. “It’s regular old matter. No little green men, sorry.”

At this point, I would have welcomed Martians
, Jack thought.

“But it’s not from around here.”

“The Beacons,” Barry said. “They bind your world to others in the Web. If Harper tears this place apart, the others will start decaying, too.”

Kat and the others shared an incredulous stare. From the look in their eyes, Jack guessed this was new to them.

They’re just like the rest of us. Duped into doing things they don’t understand.

Kat finished with an impotent gesture towards the monitors, then returned to her companions. As a group, they turned their attention to Jack and Barry. “So, now you know us. And you know the score.”

Jack expected some pithy retort from Barry. Instead, ringing silence filled the void between them.

“So,” Jack said, looking between them, “we’re totally screwed. Now what?”

Harper walked in total darkness with the surefootedness of one who followed a brightly-lit corridor. While no ordinary light reached down here, far beneath even the deepest subway tunnel or water pipe, every surface glowed with that strange aural otherness that emanated from the people above. The same radiant rainbows, dripping off the walls, pooling on the floor. Lighting his way.

Descending with every step, the tunnel narrowed gradually, transforming from a long-forgotten exploratory channel, to something altogether different; low and jagged and twisting, scarcely large enough for even his svelte body to pass.

Good thing my suit was already ruined
.

Still, he hated to think what the sharp spurs of rock and slicks of mossy gruel were doing to his jacket. Several times he was forced to stop and manoeuvre inch by inch, slipping through gaps no wider than the span of his hands, a strange dance upon his toes even, his torso pivoting, angled to an absurd degree.

A silent creeping in the dark, malleable as shadow, Milton Harper poured himself down into the earth. Descending ever deeper, he moved on determined, not a thought passing his mind, until even the most distant shudders of overhead trains had faded, the rocks grew warm, and the effervescent light dripping off the walls shone like the surface of the sun.

Then the lights in his ancient, wicked mind blinked to life, gears machined by cruel insane hands chugging to life in his skull. A grin spread over his face, the stretching of his cheeks driving him forward.

This world’s time is done. It’s time to free the master.

Somewhere, from no particular direction but at the same time everywhere, he felt hands pulling at him, pinching and tugging, questioning and watching; a thousand creatures across All Where, sensing him for the first time, and the chaos he prepared to rain down upon this place.

But they were all so far away, scattered and already dwindling.

Fools. Of all the Great Weaver’s legions, all that had been sent against him was a band of piss-ant humans, and that slick of bearded scum. There was nothing any of them could do to stop him.

A few of them might have noted something amiss when Harper had arrived here, so long ago, and set their own plans spinning (to his chagrin, there was no denying that his carefully laid scheme, everything he had built, teetered on the brink of ruin), but to most, he had slipped under the RADAR.

They had grown prideful, blind.

It’s time for the Pendulum to serve its real masters.

From that same not-but-every direction as those thousand pairs of eyes, came a single presence. Not quite a voice, yet deafening; not there, yet all-consuming; intangible and more unreachable than any world in the Web, forcing ugly fingers into the meat of his being and threatening to tear it asunder with the merest jerk.

Yes. It’s time. Too long have I held the Web together. It’s time to make the first tear.
A gentle, silky sigh, threaded with peaceful dulcet tones upon the surface. Yet underneath it all, permeating each angelic syllable, an emotionless, white malice.
There is no room for error. Such a shame it would be, should you fail me.

Harper froze a moment, swallowing a full-body shudder with difficulty. Almost swaying, he wiped a sliver of drool from his lip with the back of his hand.

Yes. Yes, master. Soon you will be free.

Harper kept descending, using his hands now, moving forward with hunger and, somewhere under all the tarry sludge of his soul, a childish and mewling fear.

“The subway?” Jack said, leaning close to the monitor.

On the screen, a shimmering bag of air floated amidst weaving tracks of tourists, parting them like a stone in a river, heading up the street. Nobody seemed to notice what they were doing, sidestepping as naturally as though avoiding a streetlight.

But there was nothing there, just an undulating pocket of air, like a heat wave.

A heat wave that stopped in front of the stairs to the subway—Jack thought he might have momentarily caught a glimpse of a polished loafer or freshly-pressed jacket—and then headed down.

“We can get you close, do what we can,” Kat said. “The others will stay here and coordinate with our people across the world. We have a plan: we’re going to crack the vaults open.”