2012 (20 page)

“Two hundred and eighty clicks, Sir.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Sir, you’re gonna see a lot of wonderful machinery today. I mean, some of the stuff down here-Sir, this is a new world.”

He glanced at his watch, calculating in his head. Two hundred and eighty clicks an hour was a little over four and a half kilometers a minute, so they’d gone almost three miles. He made a note of the time.

“What’s your first name, Captain?”

“Jennifer, Sir. General Burt Mazle’s my old man. I’m third-generation Air Force, Sir.”

He’d never heard of Burt Mazle, but all generals were supposed to know each other. The mythical first name club. “Old Burt,” he said. “Sure.”

Whoever he was, old Burt had surely produced a handsome specimen of a daughter. Bright, too, or she wouldn’t be in the Mountain. Al had not thought about sex in a long time. He’d been attracted to many women, but every time he tried to start a relationship, he just lost direction.

He still kept his picture of his Sissy in his wallet, with her brightness and her smile, looking up from their table in the Wright Pat Officer’s Club where they used to go dancing. Her expression held surprise at being photographed, her eyes joy. Her skin shone with sweat, because they’d just come back from a vigorous rumba. A year later she had said, “Al, I need you,” and fallen over in the middle of the bedroom, dead before she hit the floor. It had been a massive aortal aneurysm. She was thirty-eight years old.

“You doing okay, General?”

“I’m fine.”

“You weren’t need-to-know on this part of the project, were you?”

“Apparently not. I thought I was need-to-know on everything.”

She smiled at him. “Then look at this as the adventure of a lifetime, because that’s what it’s going to be.”

“What about our prisoner?”

“Gonna die die, that’s what we call it.”

“What’s his crime?”

“Dunno, sir. Bad boy, though. Not a friend of ours.”

“No, I suppose not. Do we know for sure that the soul persists outside the body?”

“For sure, Sir. We’ve taken them out and put them back in.”

“Really!”

“We’re making strides, Sir. Catching up fast. We know for certain that when the body is killed, the soul does not die or lose its integrity. It can be destroyed, though.”

“How?”

“Certain frequencies make it fly apart. Trillions of electrons. All organization gone, tiny bits of consciousness flying off into space forever.”

He had to think that this progress was brilliant. They were racing against time down here, but at this rate they might just learn enough to actually win this thing. “Could we give the wanderers back their souls?”

“It’s conceivable.”

“That would be a hell of a victory, right there.”

“It’d ruin somebody’s day, for sure.”

“The God-for-damned enemy’s day.”

“That would be true.”

Another glance at his watch: they’d traveled seven miles, meaning that they weren’t under Cheyenne Mountain anymore.

He put his foot against the footrest and leaned back. The little transporter, about the size of a jeep, was now passing under the thickest conduit he’d ever seen, a black, endless river affixed to the cut stone of the wall with heavy steel wrapping that flashed past hypnotically as they sped along. On either wall were light fixtures about every fifty feet, but glowing so softly that they did not completely penetrate the darkness. Looking ahead through the windshield, it was as if an endless stream of lit portholes were coming up on either side, then speeding past the side windows as a continuous streak.

“That conduit carry power?”

“A lot of power. You need it to change the patterns of the electrons. Disrupt the frequency of a soul, it becomes confused. Then you just keep ratcheting up the power until-bang, it flies apart. Humpty Dumpty.”

“You’ve killed some down here before?”

“Couple dozen.”

“But just the bodies? Not the souls?”

“Taken them out. Soul surgery. Today’s our first try at a kill.”

“But the ones you took out-where did they go?”

Her face clouded, and she fell into what he could only interpret as a sullen silence. It was as if he’d insulted her, but how? What was the big deal if there was some part of the thing they didn’t understand yet?

They were now eighteen miles in. Eighteen goddamn miles! Where was this place? Who had built it and when? He recalled that on September 12, 2001, the Secretary of Defense had announced that the Defense Department had “lost” a trillion dollars, and he thought that projects like this might be an explanation.

They’d been working on this a long time, then, because facilities like this take years to construct. Hell, generations. And trillions of dollars, for sure.

Twenty-two miles.

“We’re also descending, aren’t we?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And?”

“We’re at six thousand meters at this time, sir.”

Holy God, that was twenty thousand feet! Eighteen miles in and four down. “Why so deep?”

“You don’t want the souls getting away. And they are slippery, sir. Very slippery.”

“They know what’s happening to them, then?”

“They’re alive. Never forget that. If you start messing with a soul, it wants to get away from you. And it’s smart. If one escaped, the enemy would see it immediately and know what we were up to. So we’re deep. Best place for us to be.”

“What kind of lookdown do you have?”

“Sir?”

“Satellite lookdown. Guardianship.”

“None since last week. But we’re guarded by a unit of Air Police and fully sensor protected.”

In other words, the facility was totally exposed. If the enemy got so much as an inkling of what was happening down here, they were coming around, and right now.

The car slowed to a stop.

“We’ve reached stage two, sir. Time to move to the lift for the rest of the trip. Stay seated, there’s gonna be an equalization.”

The door sighed, and there was a jarring pop, and Al’s ears rang. “What in hell is this?”

“We’re at four atmospheres down here, Sir.”

When they stepped out, the ceiling was so low that Al had almost to crouch. The chamber was hewn out of solid basalt-gleaming black walls scarred by drill trenches. It was also very, very confined. He was aware of the miles of stone overhead and all around him. It was like being in a coffin.

How could anything have been drilled this deep in a military facility without the Joint Chiefs being told?

“How long have you been down here?”

She glanced at him, but said nothing. She ushered him into an elevator that looked like some kind of meat locker. It was heavily insulated, with a very small cab. It contained bench seating for four people around its steel walls. There were seat belts.

He asked her, “Are these needed?”

She buckled herself in. “Advisable.”

There was a clank and a whirring sound, then a sucking whine and Al was practically lifted against the ceiling. Scrabbling hard, he got the ends of his belt and managed to strap himself in.

“We’re going down a further three miles,” she said.

Three miles straight down, after another thirty-five laterally and nine down-it was inconceivable. There was no technology he knew of that could accomplish this. But, obviously, somebody did know, and they had been experimenting on souls down here for a long time.

“It’s a Manhattan Project for the soul instead of the A-bomb,” he said.

“That’s right on the money, sir. Need-to-know’s spread very thin.”

“Samson?”

“Project director.”

The man was a shit, but he surely knew how to keep a secret. “Impressive. I never guessed.”

The elevator hummed and jostled slightly as it descended. Confinement disturbed him. And, truth to tell, the closer they got to actually doing it, the more uneasy the idea of killing a soul was making him. He was not really seeing how even the worst criminal deserved destruction like this. It felt like they were intruding into God’s business.

Actually, he wished he could call Samson and request that this be at least postponed. Even if he’d somehow managed the call, though, Tom would never allow it. He’d consider the request treason, and he wouldn’t be wrong. We had to learn everything we needed to learn to defeat that light, and if some criminals were denied eternal life in our quest for answers, then that was too damn bad.

The elevator stopped. “Gonna be another pop,” she said. “Open your mouth.”

She pressed a button and the door slid back. This time there was a loud thud and a sensation of being hit in the chest with a medicine ball.

“Wow!”

“Seven atmospheres,” she said.

They walked out into a tiny chamber with black, sweating walls. It was maybe five feet wide, seven high. Not much bigger than the interior of a coffin. On the far side was a door, equally black. “What is this, the entrance to hell?”

She laughed. “It is.”

He followed her down a steep corridor, then deeper still, down a winding metal staircase so narrow that he could hardly manage to negotiate it. They descended for easily twenty minutes, and he thought that coming back up was going to be a battle.

Now the two of them were in a chamber that really was the size of a biggish coffin. Embedded in one wall was another black door, this one with a round window in it like the bulging eye of an insect.

“You’ll need to disrobe, please.”

“Excuse me?”

“Take off your clothes, General. You’ll be provided with a special suit. So it won’t kill your soul, too, General.”

“What about you?”

“I stay out here, sir.”

He took off his tunic, his tie, his shirt, while she watched impassively. He waited, but she did not turn around. Finally, he removed his shoes and trousers. He waited again. “Ma’am, could you give me some privacy?”

She turned, then, and faced the wall. He could understand her reluctance-she now had a face full of basalt.

When he was naked he faced the door. It was eerie, the way the dark porthole seemed almost like something alive.

“The prisoner is ready,” she said. And the door began slowly to open.

Before him there appeared the most astonishing thing he had ever seen. The room was painted vividly, with images right out of the interior of a fabulous Egyptian tomb, lines of men, a god in a golden head-dress, prisoners standing stiffly, strange objects that looked like giant vacuum tubes.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Then he saw a stack of what looked like the same vacuum tubes in real life. There were men in the room, too, dressed in black uniforms without insignia.

“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I need something to wear.”

Nobody took any notice of him. They were clustered around the vacuum tubes, which were attached to thick cables that came out of the walls. He saw only backs.

Some of the rigid figures in the relief painting had cables thrust down their throats, and the tubes attached to the other ends of these were brightly lit. Others still were being intubated, their heads thrown back, their guts distended as black-painted soldiers just like these men pushed the cabling down their throats. Others waited, their faces turned away.

“Look, I need that coverall now, please, gentlemen.”

Behind him, he heard a loud thunk. He turned toward the sound, which proved to be the door closing.

The young captain had come in after all. Ready to explode in her face, he turned around-and just plain stopped dead.

Her eyes regarded him with a doll-like emptiness that did not look alive. Immediately, he remembered his dream of two nights ago-that face, geisha-like, staring at him.

It was her.

She smiled a little. “Hello again.”

He threw himself past her. She didn’t try to stop him. On the contrary, she stepped aside with the grace of a matador.

He sought some way of opening the door, sweeping his hands across its smoothness. There was no handle, there was no lock. She watched, completely impassive.

He stopped. His heart was hammering so hard that he thought he might simply drop dead from the shock. He tried to talk, but his mouth was too dry. He hesitated to think who these people must be-but he did think it, they were the enemy, that was why the blackness of the uniforms was so bizarre, as if they were literally dressed in night.

A powerful realization came to him, of the sort that will come to a dying man. It told him that it was sin that generated that blackness, that they were not in uniforms at all, but were as naked as he was.

“Your soul isn’t going to be killed,” she said from behind him. Her voice was-well, it was musical. And yet, there was something else in it, something that he could only think of as rage, and maybe deeper rage than he had ever heard before.

Or no. He had heard that rough, bitter tone before. “Samson is one of you.”

“Indeed.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “You can make this easy or you can make it hard.”

She was wary. She knew that he was dangerous. “I don’t want you to imagine you have any chance to get out of this,” she said.

And then she shuddered for all the world like a dog shaking its hide.

The uniform fell away, and he saw that it wasn’t actually a uniform at all, but something thin and now dry. It looked like skin shed by a snake.

Her real skin shimmered, and her face changed. She blinked her eyes, and the sockets were round, blinked them again and they were long. Now a nictitating membrane came across the eyeballs, and when it retracted he found himself face-to-face with the most beautiful and awful thing he had ever seen.

The face was that of a snake or a lizard, but flattened and extended so that it covered the front of a human-sized head. It was softly angled, sleek, with a snake’s fixed lips. There was a smile, though, sparkling in the golden eyes, which were an incredible contrast to the human eyes she’d been exhibiting a few moments ago. These eyes were sparkling with life and humor and, he could see it so clearly-glee.

There was an earthly equivalent to these creatures. They were chameleons. But these-they were far, far more evolved than any earthly shape-shifter. And he suspected, also, now, why Samson carried his syringe. He wasn’t an addict. To live on the surface, they must need some kind of support. Allergies, diseases-he’d probably never know what endangered them there.