Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (46 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
old man gave both of us a thumb's-up, we trotted back to him.
Loring had plugged the end of that cable into a rectangular box. A gray cable ran from that to the back of the Powerbook, and Loring nodded. "I have a positive reading. When do we get our power boost?"
Hal looked at the analog stopwatch hanging from around his neck. "Seven-and-a-half minutes to full. Phase one in 30 seconds."
I glanced out toward the black city and shook my head. I imagined it a hive full of warriors like Mickey, and 1
sincerely wondered if we would survive kicking it. Given that our job was to kill the equivalent of the queen bee, I had sincere doubts about our chances. Then again, to fail was to die, so the only chance at survival had to be success.
"Phase one power going up now."
Crowley's shadowfonm pointed to the open circle of gemstones at the top of the tower. "1 see him!"
As the phase one level of power kicked in through the grid, the whole structure began to glow like a neon tube. Within the blue light, I saw golden highlights in the stones that looked like the cross between printed circuitry and a capillary network in a living creature. The power seemed to start within the bottom of the tower and ascend up to where four very long posts held a crystal halo above the whole structure.
Descending through it, 1 saw the outline and then landing gear for Bronislaw Joniak's pride and joy. Outdated though it may have been, the AH-64 Apache descended through this proto-dimension's analog of the helipad's target circle as smoothly as if it were on an elevator. The 30mm chain-gun beneath its chin swiveled back and forth for a second, then the aircraft moved forward and swooped down toward the ground before
coming around to face us.
I held a hand up to shield my face from the dust being kicked up. On the right wing, I saw the normal load of eight Hellfire missiles, but on the other wing-stub 1 saw a huge metal drum held by a pair of cylinders that attached to the wing's two hardpoints. The drum rotated a half turn to the right and 10 feet of a fiber-optic cable ejected out the back.
"Merlin at your service. Cable deployment ready to begin."
"Roger, Merlin. Go!" 1 pointed him out toward the obsidian city, and he took off, the cylinder spinning wildly, ft spat out cable at a prodigious rate, leaving it to snake over the black sand surface. When Joniak had flown a sufficient distance away, the end of the cable stopped whipping around wildly. Hal ran over to the end, grabbed the cable and hauled it back toward Nero and his boxes.
Nero slipped the cable into place and locked the end down. "Secure. I have contact."
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Out b
y the edge of the city, the helicopterbegan its long, looping turn back toward us. It raced low over th
e
terrain
, darting forward and side to side like a dragonfly. The tail on the helicopterwhipped around, point
ed
thecraft's nose at us, then it came up and the chopper raced back toward our position.
On its back-trail I began to see movement. The whole city seemed to have awakened with pale and almost
corpselike creatures pouring out of the dark buildings. At that great a distance, I could not make out details, but I knew what 1 was looking at. Thousands and thousands of creatures like Mickey began to move
inexorably toward us. I could see black patches on their bodies and knewthat would be the carbon-fiber armor that Mickey had beneath his flesh. The automatons coming toward us were bald and, as nearly as I could
make out, had a thumb, a forefinger and then no separation between or definition of
the other fingers on their hands—meaning Pygmalion had decided that a thumb for grasping and a finger for using a trigger was more than sufficient for his warriors.
Worse than their appearance, which might have been considered elegant and economical in another setting, I sensed an intense desire in them to provide pleasure for their master. I knew Pygmalion had created them, and their desire to make him happy was backed by a miserable fear of failure. A low level of anxiety built within the mob heading toward us, and it increased in tandem with a sense of expectation.
Joniak's Apache arrived back over us, and the drum spooled out another 40 feet of cable. The drum stopped spinning to the right, then rotated back and forth a couple of times before a cutting device severed the line. It dropped to the sand and the Apache brought itself up to an altitude of 100 feet before turning toward the city.
"Alpha, I have eight Hellfires. 1 can slow them down."
"Negative, Merlin. Nail the cable and we're all done for."
Bat ran over with the other end of the cable and Nero Loring secured it. "Locked down." He hit one button on the computer keyboard, then smiled. "On automatic."
I smiled at him, then felt the mood of the creatures coming toward us change. I looked back and saw the vast majority of them had passed into the noose defined by the cable without molesting it. Their general level of anxiety dropped sharply for all of four seconds, then began a steep climb back up. I knew they were not smart enough to fear us, so that meant only one other possibility.
Pygmalion.
I had seen the diminutive Dark Lord in Japan, but he had not inspired fear in me at that time. In his own proto-dimension, however, the sight of him made my mouth go dry. Small and highly childlike, he walked through
the air with a simple, almost casual gait that ate up tens of yards
at a step. His approach brought with it an intensity of emotion that mixed incredulity and annoyance into an acid that ate away at my self-confidence and even my sense of self.
He stopped before us, hovering beneath the Apache, but its downdraft had no effect on him. He smiled, almost graciously, and bowed his head in my direction. "You seek to return to me Mickey and Jytte. How kind." His head, which seemed too large for his body, wavered back and forth like that of a disappointed parent. "How incredibly stupid."
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The Dark Lor
d's gaze swept over us, then he clucked to himself. "To think 1 was once like you, so puny
and
powerless. S
o imperfect."
"And you are perfect?" I laughed.
"I am." His head turned sharply toward Crowley. "And, no, that does notmean 1 am a perfect asshole. And, yes, 1 can read your mind, Crowley. I am a Dark Lord who was once human, so unraveling what you think is
a complex cognitive network is but a moment's idle diversion for me."
Crowley's shadow body folded its arms across its chest. "I take it then that ripping women and children apart, then rebuilding them, is something more taxing."
Pygmalion laughed aloud, though it sounded forced to me. "I bestow perfection upon those who need it. Look at her, look at Jytte. When I found her she was nothing. She was more the battery running a plethora of
machines than she was a human being."
The Dark Lord ran his hand through the air, and a dust-devil sprang up. It sucked dirt in, coloring the funnel black, then it condensed into a small cloud hovering in front of him. Like a magician attempting to show no invisible wires or hidden supports, the Dark Lord waved his hands above and below the cloud. He packed it tightly without touching
it, creating a glob of blackness that glistened like molten glass.
The black blob remained in the air and began to undergo changes without Pygmalion's mimed input. It slowly resolved itself into the form of an infant female with no legs and no arms, just feet and hands at her hips and shoulders, respectively. The left side of her face started out of proportion with the right, and that difference became exaggerated as the statuette aged. The homunculus' lopsided head tilted toward its right shoulder and features sharpened somewhat as its breasts grew full and its hair lengthened.
"This was you, Jytte. This is what you were when I found you, rescued you from your prison. You lived in a world of plastic and chrome, encased in a bubble in which you lived and slept. Your only human contact came from the praises your parents had digitized to be played back when you did something good. They were more proud of the new equipment that they could buy than they were of you, and their willingness to spare no
expense for you marked them as saints among their friends."
He pressed a hand to his own chest. "I took you away from all that. I gave you the arms and legs you had never known. I reshaped your face. I fixed all that was wrong inside. I made you the creature of your dreams.
You know this is true."
I looked over at Jytte and saw her tremble. I sensed in her utter panic and shame, but somehow she remained where she was. She wanted to run, she wanted to deny all he was saying, but she knew she could not. He was telling the truth, but not to help her.
He wanted her to have the truth to destroy her so he could feed off her tortured soul.
Jytte's tear-streaked facejerked up a second before the barrel of her M-16. She snapped off a quick shot that exploded the glass parody of humanity. "That is not what I am now."
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Pygm
alion looked at her with new respect. "No, no it is not." His grin became hideous. "But it cou
ld be
again,
my dear, oh so easily."
"I think not, Pygmalion." I covered him with my MP-7. "We like Jytte just the way she is."
The Dark Lord looked disappointed at me. "What? You're not going to tell me that it will be 'over your dead body' that 1 work on her again? Ah, you're the one Fiddleback trained, so I know better than to
expect cliches from you. Mickey, destroy this one."
I shot a glance at Mickey, but he made no move toward me. "No."
Pygmalion's head rocked back. "What have you done to him? Alien witch, this was your doing, wasn't
it?"
"My pleasure, Nicholas." Rajani reached out and took Mickey's left hand.
The Dark Lord's scowl grew rather heavy, and I could sense anger and outrage rising in him. "You are fools all, butbrave fools. Imagine thinking that you and that ancient helicopter could somehow destroy
me. I may once have been human, but no more. I am a Dark Lord."
"But still mortal, eh, Pygmalion?" I formed the picture of a cockroach being stamped into paste in my mind.
"If you could find a big enough shoe, yes," he laughed, "but none of you can kill me."
I saw Hal tap his stopwatch, and 1 smiled. "That's not why we're here, Pygmalion." I let my gun point toward the ground. "We just wanted ringside seats when the exterminator came to do the job."
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Somewhere in the depths of the Hoover Dam, Paul Warner hit a switch that sent every last watt of power