Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (51 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
I imp
osed my will on the dimension. I knew a synthesizer
had to be close enough to a builder to let me armor this dimension, so I imagined it closing up in an armored ball, trapping her inside.
A new sun, a black sun, appeared in the sky eclipsing the original sun. Darkness leaked from the new sun in a jet corona and flooded the sky vault with blackness like ink spreading through water. The temperature
dropped 60 degrees in a heartbeat, but my internal fire kept me more than warm. A cold wind sprang up at my back and frost appeared on the diamond Natch held.
"You cannot!" she protested.
"I have." 1 stared at Match's body, and in an instant I was beyond her being. My vision took me on in through her eyes and along her optic nerve. When 1 reached her brain, I pushed on farther still, narrowing my focus and running deeper than just the cellular level. I entered her cells and compressed myself until mitochondria passed through the protoplasm like dirigibles, and then farther until her DMA went from a tangled skein to a system of all the world's roads all woven together.
1 duplicated myself a million billion times and spread through her like an infection. I moved through her faster than a shower of neutrinos and did even less damage than they might, always hunting. 1 was doing what Fiddleback had always demanded of me, searching out my elusive quarry in the most unexpected of places.
1 found her, the Empress, huddled deep in cells scattered throughout Match's body. 1 concentrated and
gathered my forces to surround the Empress' fragments, then 1 drove them before me. I could taste her fear as well, but I did not drink it in. 1 wanted nothing to taint me or distract me from my duty at hand.
The Empress, like Fiddleback, felt more comfortable with indirect manipulation than direct confrontation.
While she might have had the power to destroy me, she fled from
me, hoping to elude me through subterfuge, not realizing that she left a trail I could follow no matter how she tried to disguise it. She stank of death and, in that, 1 knew 1 had to pursue her because she was truly mine.
In her last-ditch attempt to escape me, she dc>ve into the diamond Natch held. I shot past her and
returned to my own body, reading her intention to form a warrior from diamonds akin to the obsidian one
Pygmalion had created. Her plan formulated, she hesitated for just a second as she considered how she
would salvage such a creature from her diamond mountain, and in that second 1 had her.
I snatched the diamond from Hatch's hand and held it up, locking my left hand around it tightly. I glanced at the gem to see if she took on any image in there, but 1 saw nothing. Without regret or a second
thought, I snapped my fist closed and consigned her to oblivion.
Opening my fist, I let the diamond gravel spill to the ground. I searched it for any sign of her, but all 1
felt was her death. I pulled that into me and let it warm me for a moment. I had succeeded. 1 had
destroyed her. I had become a Dark Lord, accepting a Dark Lord's power, but I had avoided its
corruption. I had killed the Empress of Diamonds, and 1 knew 1 had ended the most grave threat to Earth
that had ever existed.
A B B YY.c
I could he
ar my friends cheering around me, but something drew my attention backto Natch. Once
again,
I injec
ted myself into her and shrank down until the double-helix of her DNA hung above me like the Milky Way in a clear, dark sky. 1 marveled at its stunning simplicity and how, with only four base pairs
strung together in long chains, it was a blueprint for anything and everything Natch had been or would
ever become.
I moved my consciousness along, swirling my way along the chromosome. Molecules of adenine linked
with thymine and guanine with cytosine, unending, eternal, yet
in patterns that actually meant something. I realized as I sailed along, 1 was racing down the length of
Chromosome 11, and 1 knew that it contained genes so vital for life function that without them, no creature could survive. At that point, I found myself slowing, almost unconsciously, and extending above and below me 1 saw the 1720 base pairs that made up the gene that produced beta-globulin—one of the four proteins that makes up hemoglobin and allows red blood cells to carry oxygen from the lungs to the body's cells.
As I studied it, I knew how important it was. I knew that adjustments to it, breaks in its code, if spread throughout the body, would prove fatal. 1 realized that, if I reached in and changed a thymine-adenine pair for the cytosine-guanine pair right there, I would have this cell halfway toward producing hemoglobin-M. And if I did it in the same spot on Match's other copy of Chromosome 11, the cell would produce that defective form of beta-globulin, as would all its descendants.
And if I did it in all the cells of her body, instantly she would suffer from
black mouth
and she would die. Or if I only did it in her ova, then did the same to Bat or any other suitor she took, the child would be born with
black mouth
and would die. She would mourn the child and try to create another to take its place, and death would claim ft as well.
I realized that I wanted to make that substitution.
1 realized much more.
Thus it begins,
Fiddleback had told me as he died. He had not regretted his passing and had met it with a smug satisfaction that chilled me. He had long vowed that he would not repeat his mistake with Pygmalion in me, and he had blocked me from ever being able to accept the powers of a Dark Lord unless he approved. At the end, with that statement, he had.
I knew then why he had acquiesced and why 1 had been
able to prevent the Empress of Diamonds from fleeing this proto-dimension. I was not a synthesizer nor
builder. The proto-dimension had lost the Dark Lord that had defined it and shaped it. He had died here,
killing the proto-dimension and giving it the same aspect that Fiddleback had given me.
Death.
Fiddleback had decided never to be tricked and betrayed again. He had fashioned me as an assassin to
actively pursue his enemies, but he had also fused into me something more sinister. He gave me an aspect
that hungered for the death of others. I drew my strength from it; I was drawn to it and to causing it.
Because death was inescapable and came to all things, there was nothing in reality that did not make me
stronger.
A B B YY.c
Once
I accepted my powers and started to draw my sustenance from death, my course of action was
preo
rdained. It would be my place to cause death and luxuriate in it. I would destroy Fiddleback's enemies because their deaths would be strong and make me much more powerful. One after another, I
would visit dimensions and leave them drained husks, devoid of life.
I would continue to do that until there was nothing left for me to kill, then 1 would cannibalize myself.
Fiddleback, my creator and master, would have his final triumph— even over me, the person who had
caused his death.
Without having done anything to Natch, I returned to my body. A thought plundered from Crowley
trickled through my consciousness.
«IfCoyotecanreadmymind...»
"I can't, Crowley, 1 can't," I lied as I turned toward him and the headshot from the pistol 1 had given him.
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Dark Conspiracy 3-38.jpg
Jytte Ravel opened her eyes when Crowley let her hand slip from his grasp. She found herself in a deep
valley on a red planet. Huge red stone walls towered above her, giving her a glimpse of a star-speckled
river of darkness above. She felt neither warm nor cold, but found the place as arid as the Arizona desert in high summer.
She had been the last person to be brought to the site, but the others hung back. Mickey, tall and strong as ever, cradled a chubby, black-haired toddler in his arms. An old Native American, the child's grandfather moved his lips as if murmuring softly to the child. A couple of steps away, Ryuhito watched Mickey
carefully, and between them stood a small, wizened man wearing the scarlet robes of a Tibetan monk.
Though she could see them, and knew they could see her, they remained distant and separate as if in
another dimension altogether.
"I thought you might want to see them off," Crowley said, nodding toward the other people, "and to see this."
The shadow man moved aside, and Jytte saw words had been carved deep into the red rock. "Tycho
Caine," she read aloud, "Bom to be immortal, he died embracing his humanity." She smiled and nodded to Crowley. "He would have liked that, a lot."
"I hope so. He made a tough choice."
"As did Coyote before him."
"True, quite true." Crowley turned and looked at the other five individuals in the valley. "With the training they will get in Kanggenpo, each of them will leam what he needs to know to someday become
Coyote and make those difficult decisions."
He raised his hand and waved at them. They mirrored his motions, with Mickey helping Will's son
Richard wave good-bye. Jytte waved back, feeling a lump rise in her throat as the monk led them off
down the canyon and on up into air on an invisible walkway. As they moved away from her, color
leeched out of their images, and before long they were lost to sight against the starry night sky.
Jytte tucked a strand of blond hair behind her right ear. "Will they be able to leam enough in enough time to face off a threat from another Dark Lord?"