Tesla's Signal (63 page)

People screamed and shouted...Martian ships loosed rays of fire. Buildings collapsed...bricks and concrete fell. Niko lay unable to move.
What's happening?
The Martians...an organ that reached for his eyes to suck out...
they were going to eat
...

His gut clenched, and then he realized:
good Lord! How did I get free?
 

He struggled to put it all together.
It is possible that I...stepped between the dimensions? How did I...
 

What was it Alu had told him? He reached for the memory.
But surely none would survive...>
 

And yet somehow Niko had stepped out of 3rd-d space, leaving the net that had imprisoned him, escaping the U'jaan who were about to consume him. And he had materialized somewhere in mid-air...above the street...and then gravity had taken over, dropping him to the pavement.

It had happened again: under extreme threat, Niko had done something that no human could do. He had no idea how.

But I survived!

Only...for how much longer?

“Help,” he tried to call out. He coughed; tasted blood; his lungs felt as if they were full of glass splinters. As he managed to raise up to his hands and knees, a Martian ship came zipping past. He heard the sizzling sound of the death ray and a skyscraper came down...bricks showered all around him. The floors of the skyscraper collapsed, trapping him among the detritus of business offices: a desk, a filing cabinet spilling out paper. Metal pipes. Radiator.

Every cough was agony, but he could not stop. He felt blood dribble down his chin. As a scientist he examined his situation and understood that he must have broken several ribs. Probably a punctured lung.
Pneumothorax...hypoxia. I guess this is it for me.
 

Well...better to die here as a free man, then as a morsel to be feasted upon by  a horde of hungry Martians.

His last act on Earth was to cheat the Xeno-mentalist V'kaan, stepping out from between her claws and leaving her empty.
It is good.
 

He shut his eyes.
Clara, I'm finished. It's all up to you now.

35: The Last Obstacle

Clara clung to Jake and they both struggled through the crowd of hysterical Angel disciples. “C'mon, let's take shelter in here.” They made their way to the revolving doorway of the Lord & Taylor Department Store.

“Now what?” said Jake. “How are we gonna find Nick?”

They stood between the revolving glass door panels, and stared out at the chaos beyond.

“He probably headed for the Terminal. That's where the big Orb has to be.”

A gigantic Martian vessel had landed in the great open plaza in front of the Terminal. Beneath the bright electric lights, she could see lines of people being taken up the ramp into the ship.

“What are those Martian
schmucks
doing?” Jake clutched the gun, but he had lost his gangster bravado. His eyes were huge with terror.

“Collecting human beings. Herding them like cows at the stockyard.”

“Gevalt!
Can't we stop 'em?”

Before she could answer, she heard a sudden roar, as if a whole new crowd had arrived on the scene.

“It came from inside the Terminal. Look!” With a crash, one of the tall windows blew out—and then another. “I think Niko's done it,” Clara cried.  A quick check on her meter confirmed the truth. “He's destroyed the Orb in there—he's set the people free!”

And now the crowd began smashing more panes from the window, crawling and leaping and running out of the Terminal. They weren't crying
hallelujah
anymore. She could definitely hear the anger in the crowd's roar. Someone escaped, turned to pick up a brick and threw it, smashing yet another window. A mob of them burst out the front door.

This drew the attention of the Martian troops who had been herding the 'cargo' onto the ship.

She pushed the glass door. “Jake, now's the time—while their attention is diverted. Let's destroy that ship!”

The revolving door let her out first. She had to make it past this crowd of Angel disciples, still under the power of New York's main Orbs. “Jake, hurry—” she turned, but Jake wasn't following.

“Jake?” She turned back. A stout man had grabbed him from behind. “Look,” cried the man, gripping Jake by the chest. “Look who I got! It's that demon Tesla!”

The news rippled through the crowd. They instantly converged on Jake and set up a tremendous cry. “Masters! It's Tesla! We've got Tesla!”

“No, you idiots,” Clara screamed. “That's not Tesla, it's Jake Flint! Let him go!” Of course no one heard her. Jake struggled, but he had no chance against a thousand crazed maniacs.

“Bastards!” Clara fired the induction gun into the crowd. It barely made an impact. It was like trying to shoot water. They bore him away and all her desperation, all her clever weapons, availed nothing.

They really think he's Niko?
Clara had never really thought about it, but the two men did have a similar appearance. The same tall, slim build, dark wavy hair, small mustache. Good Lord, that was all these mindless maniacs would need! She had already heard that the Angels' servants had arrested numerous Italian and Greek men who superficially resembled Niko.

 
They'll rip him to pieces. Or they'll hand him over to the Martians.
Another horrifying thought occurred to her:
he knows too much. The locations of the subway refuges. Niko's weapons. The Amulets. I can't let them have him!

She weighed her options and realized she would never be able to reach Jake in time to save him. And Clara remembered the pact she had made with Niko.
If I am about to fall into their hands, I want you to kill me first.
 

Surely Jake would want the same thing. The chilling conclusion was all too clear. “Better you should be dead than a prisoner of those monsters,” she muttered, and took cover behind a hansom cab. There, she jammed her hand in a pocket and took out the small, pearl-handled revolver that Jake had given her merely an hour ago.
He saved it for years, to give me as a gift.
Blinking away tears, she took aim.

Jake was the one who had taught her how be tough: how to banish fear. How to shoot a gun. Now she called up those skills and held her arm steady. She could not let her hand tremble as she shut one eye and took aim at that rose on Jake's lapel.
Almighty God, let it be quick...merciful.
 

She pulled the trigger and knew she had hit her target, for a frozen look of surprise came over his face, and he went limp in the hands of the mob
.
 

“Goodbye,
boychik.”
Jake wouldn't suffer dismemberment or torture or Martian enslavement.

 
She bit down on her fist, crying out in grief. “Jake, my
Landsman.”  
He had wanted to see the Saucer.
Something to tell my grandkids.
 

Now Jake would never have any grandchildren.

No.
Clara had no time to cry now. She'd cry later. Wiping her eyes, she watched as the Angel disciples attracted their Masters' attention. Soon an Alien hovercraft descended to collect Jake's body. Would they be fooled too, she wondered...?

Oh, yes, if the Martians thought they had Tesla, maybe that gave her an advantage. They'd stop what they were doing and celebrate. They would let down their guard...maybe Jake's death wouldn't be in vain. It would give her the time she needed to disable that cargo ship!

A strange thought occurred to her. Was it possible that Jake
knew
...that he had meant to
sacrifice..
.

No, don't be silly
. Angrily, she wiped at her eyes with her sleeve.
Get on with it
, she told herself.

Clara and Niko had built several backups of every weapon. She had the second wave rifle strapped to her back, beneath a coat. Now she crept up, taking cover behind carriages and statuary, and climbed up onto a large fountain crowned by a statue of a Greek goddess.

Heart pounding, she studied the view. There sat the huge cargo ship in front of the Terminal. She thought of firing at its center and blowing the whole thing to smithereens. But she hesitated. It was probably already full of people: packed like cattle, and headed for a similar fate.

She aimed instead for a bulge in the back, which might be the engine or motive force. The first shot created a satisfying plume of smoke. Another shot for the line of windows that might be the pilots' bridge. Then she decided to simply puncture the hull of this reverse Noah's Ark so that it wouldn't be space-worthy. She turned down the intensity of her weapon and stitched pinholes in the ship's topside. At the very bottom, she fried the landing apparatus where it touched the ground. This ship was not going to kidnap thousands of humans and shut them in a pen on Mars to feed hungry aliens. No sir.

The crowds swirled about below her vantage, and the chaos became like the river's mouth smacking against the ocean tides, as those liberated from the Terminal met up with the glory-shouting disciples who were still trying to get in. Clara couldn't even imagine the confusion of the liberated prisoners who had once again fallen under the control of the main Orbs of New York. No question: these Orbs would have to be smashed.

As for the Martians, they seemed not to know what to do. Perhaps the ones outside the Terminal did not even realize what had happened inside. So confident of their mastery were these bastards, that it appeared they had a force of no more than a few hundred, to kidnap thousands of people!
Sorry, schmucks, today's not your day
. She had never seen such wonderful chaos in her life, but it wasn't over yet.

Twisting away from the crowd, she disappeared up an alley behind Vanderbilt Avenue and pulled out a signaling watch.

***

Tom Edison shook all over. Sweat ran down his back and underarms, soaking his shirt.
God damn it all, I'm too old for this.
 

“Ed'saan! You have failed again!”

He stood against the railing of the balcony, facing K'viin and Z'duun. The two high-ranking Angels confronted him, making frightening roaring noises. By the acrid-smelling fluid exuding from the Angels' skin, Edison could tell the two Martian fellows were in a high state of agitation, while Mistress V'kaan seemed to be in shock, holding onto her hideous Martian face. Edison put a hand to his translator unit, wishing it had a volume control. In fact, sometimes he wished he could just turn that damn thing off.

“Ed'saan! Explain how Tes'laa slipped away from us again,”K'viin screamed, waving his neural wand about. Edison reflected that if he had been anyone else but the Angels' chief engineer, that wand would now be administering severe punishment on him.

Everything had been going peachy. In fact it had been about the best moment of Edison's life: that insufferable know-it-all Tesla was about to get his brains sucked out by creatures with vacuum hoses for mouths. It would have been even better than the time he and his men had electrocuted an elephant! But then...what in God's name had gone wrong?

He dropped to his belly, groveling the way Shelia was always doing. “Revered Angel Lord, this humble one begs your forgiveness. I promise I will find the answer and recapture that rascal for you.”

That was just plain a lie. Edison would have bet his last dollar that—impossible as it might seem—Tesla had given them the slip. Again!

While the Angel Masters loomed menacingly above, Edison made a show of inspecting the mesh net with which he had bagged Nick. He had gotten it from one of his big-game hunter buddies, who liked to go on safari in Africa. The man had sworn the cords would hold a charging rhino!

None of the cords was disturbed, except the ones he himself had cut.
What in the hell..
.
?
He poked at the ground, looked for telltale marks of explosives or some fantastic weapon. Nothing, except that odd gun he had taken from that dark, sinister Serbian pirate.

He carefully touched a finger to that weapon now, half expecting it might explode. It looked like a simple rod of unknown metal, encircled by copper wires of various gauges. He made a great show of examining it, but he couldn't make head nor tail of the damned thing.

Well now he had better come up with something, or he very well might be the next item on the furious Angels' dinner menu. He touched the floor with a fingertip, licked the finger, took out his little kit of instruments...voltmeter, magnifier, test strips. Nothing presented itself to his analysis.
Think fast, old boy.
If he wasn't a practical man, he'd have to say Tesla just used...
magic!