It was far harder to climb up to the ventilation shaft the second time. Her lungs were raw and her ribs badly bruised, and her fingers refused to completely unclench from the claws she'd made of them to get the grate off. Her scrubs were drenched in sweat, the oversized boots chafing her feet, which slipped around inside them when she tried to get traction to lever her body up into the hole. When she finally flopped onto her side in the shaft, she'd heard Mrachek's heavy footsteps thudding down the corridor below her, and knew this time she couldn't hide. Fighting panic, she reached up the crumbling wall, praying that whoever ripped out the rungs in the corridor hadn't stripped the whole shaft. Her knuckles grazed one, and flakes of rust rained down into her eyes and mouth. She pulled on it, felt it wobble in her grip, but its anchorage held—just barely.
"There's something else, Stella," Mrachek's voice found her, she was at the mouth, not ten feet below her, and out of sight only by the elbow of the shaft. "Wittrock couldn't knock down their satellite. That's how they did it, you know. He says it's still active, and they know where we are. Keogh's going to retaliate any minute now. There's no hiding from it, Stella. It's like an X-ray, but it penetrates a good hundred feet below the surface. No bunkers can protect you from it, Stella. We'd all die horribly, but you—you'd
change
, Stella. Is that what you want? To be like Mr. Napier, a thing made of cancer?"
Stella had fought her way up to the midpoint of the shaft, and dangled over open space with both arms locked at the elbows around a loose rung. She watched the badly eroded mortar sifting out of the crack around the block that held the rung in place, like an hourglass measuring out the span of the rest of her life. "I want to live," she growled. "Let me go, please—"
"You want to be one of them? I'm afraid I can't let that happen, Stella. Let it go, it's not worth all this."
From the resigned, pleading tone of her voice, Stella guessed Mrachek was giving up, or maybe she just couldn't get her chunky ass up the shaft. This thought helped her find a last pocket of adrenaline and injected it into her sputtering system. She found the strength to drag herself up to the next rung, and the next.
Blinding white light filled the tunnel from below. Mrachek shining a flashlight up the shaft with one hand, aiming the dartgun with the other. "You brought this on yourself," Mrachek said, and fired twice. The gun gave two sharp, short whistles as it let fly.
Stella kicked out with both feet, half a reflexive defense, and half slipping out of pure panic, as her animal midbrain told her the only way to dodge the darts was to drop off the ladder, even though falling down the shaft, Mrachek or no Mrachek, would break both her legs. She felt something strike her left heel, and something else hit her right toe. Her feet flailed at the ladder, kicking the loose rung again and again, but refusing to grab hold of it. She felt the rung give way under her left foot and the whole concrete block in which it was moored came crumbling out of the wall and toppled down, down, and there was a scream and a resonant crunch, and Mrachek's light went out.
She clung to the next to last rung until she could breathe regularly again, and her eyes stopped tearing up. She'd earned the right to live, now. She had to get out, now it'd been paid for.
When she felt able to move, she climbed the next rung and pressed her hand against the ceiling.
Let this be easy, I've earned that much, haven't I?
Evidently not, because it was as hard as everything else. She managed to get one shoulder against the shaft's cap, which was a trapdoor. After much griping, it gave a little, and oily clumps of sand spilled through the crack and into her face. Sand. She was on the surface. With renewed vigor, she threw herself at the trapdoor, but no matter how much she beat herself up on it, she couldn't get it more than nine inches wide. It banged against something directly overhead; by jamming her head into the gap, Stella could see she was under a parked car. Rays of starlight sprinkled through the yawning cavity of the car's engine compartment. Starlight. Night sky. Freedom.
She knew she was meant to live through this, everything had brought her to this place. She knew now why she'd been born small, as she wriggled through the gap and lay in a crusted pool of motor oil under the gutted '72 Duster, and examined her boots. One dart was broken off in the rubber heel of the left boot, another still protruded through the toe of her right, having missed her diminutive foot by a scant inch. There was a reason for everything. She was destined to live, and to learn something from this.
She was in a junkyard. The ground lay in low ridges, like the staggered ground of a drive-in, littered with piles of stripped car skeletons. A corrugated metal movie screen loomed at the far end of the junkyard, its whitewashed face awash in strobing red and blue lights from the mass of vehicles outside. She heard helicopters circling overhead, and saw the probing beams of searchlights. Peering out through the hood of the Duster, she saw military choppers, not newscrews, with snipers hanging out of the doors, watching the ground through comically oversized starlight scopes. This was not a criminal situation like any she'd seen on TV. There were no TV helicopters in the sky, and no police shouting for a peaceful outcome over bullhorns. This was the Army, or the Navy, or whoever, but they weren't fucking around. Surrendering to them might not be possible.
What about the other thing?
Had Mrachek been making it up to break her down? The satellite—
The Moon-Ladder
You'd change—
Was it better to die than change? What she'd seen had been horrific, but it was new and strange, not inherently evil. Napier's transformation had been an aberration, he was infected by Stephen's tissue, it wouldn't be the same for her. She would live through this, and through the cancer, too, and whatever else was different, she could learn to accept, just as she'd come to accept her own mortality when it'd seemed there was no way out.
Yes, she'd stay right here, and pray that it would come before the feds found her. It was what was meant to be.
The Black Hawk cleared a ridge and swept down into the hollow over the highway like a bird made of smoke, only to find the road was clogged with troop carriers, the sky alive with helicopters. The junkyard was aglow with searchlights, like a lighted beacon on the black face of the desert, and like a moth, they headed for it.
Storch hadn't moved since he'd settled in behind the pilot, except to stare down Wittrock every so often. Though there were still plenty of weapons still stowed in the racks on the walls of the cabin, Wittrock only sat on the deck with his arms wrapped defensively around his legs, frowning peevishly but daring to do or say nothing that would provoke another beating.
"What can we do?" Storch asked.
"I've got a wideband jam going. Their comm channels, their phones, headsets, they're all deaf, but all we've got left is the Vulcans."
"Jesus, I've got missile locks incoming."
"Jamming countermeasures online, but we're within shooting range, we'll get cut down."
"Get us to the yard and put down for two seconds, I don't give a damn what you do after that," Storch told the pilot, and backed out of the flight deck. "I can still see you," he added.
He went to the loading door and hung out of it long enough to see the yard rushing up on the horizon, and the convention of APCs and government-issue sedans all around it, and the pair of Apache assault helicopters in position directly above it, and the older choppers with snipers and machine gun pods swiveling to take them in, and the blooms of disabled missiles detonating impotently on the ground. One erupted in the midst of the troops, who were already scrambling like disturbed ants without any network of command buzzing in their ears. The hull of the Black Hawk vibrated and pinged with ricocheting machine gunfire from the ground and the loose sortie of choppers hemming them in on all sides. It looked like they'd be able to crash-land in the yard, if they were lucky.
Maybe he'd see her again before he died. It was stupid to think about, now, stupider still to hope for, but he'd found himself looking back on that hour he'd lain in the sickbay with her watching him, telling him something she couldn't see herself when he was awake. Too late, he realized he was meant for something more than battlefield-fodder, and he wanted to make a gesture of his last moments. Like his father's insane crusade to exorcise the 1992 Presidential election, it was something he'd learned. How you die can be more important than how you lived, if there's something to believe in.
The Black Hawk swooped so low so fast Storch thought they were falling, but leaning out the door, he saw the wisdom of this. The three choppers nearest them shied away from going so low, and with the armada of ground vehicles beneath them, they daren't fire. Small arms fire from below still pinged off the underhull, a rain so steady, it sounded as if they were sledding across a field of pinballs. They ducked under power lines, less than thirty feet above the ground, and the pilot called out, "Dust-off countermeasures away, watch your eyes," and the ground vanished under a shower of phosphorus flash cluster-bombs that burst from pods mounted on the inside curves of the landing skids. The gunfire didn't stop, but it stopped hitting them.
"You're going to get us all killed—for nothing," Wittrock said. Storch looked over at him still lying on the deck with his laptop clutched to his sunken chest.
"That's what tonight's been all about, hasn't it, Wittrock? That's what the Mission's really all about; everybody laying down their lives for something you eggheads did years ago. Well, Mission accomplished, motherfucker."
The razor-wired perimeter fence of the yard was coming up fast, and their altitude now couldn't be higher than twenty feet. One flash-blinded sharpshooter kneeling on top of a troop truck passed by so close, Storch could've reached out and slapped him.
"You're wrong!" Wittrock shouted. "We were sworn to lay down our lives to protect the human species from its unelected successors! We can still win!"
"It's over," Storch shouted back, and leapt from the chopper.
For a split-second he floated over the junked cars and the startled counterterrorist squads standing around the gaping pit of the motor pool. He hadn't quite hit yet when the Black Hawk dumped another fusillade of flash bombs across the length of the yard and slipped out of sight over the far fence, both Apaches in full, shooting pursuit.
Storch kept his head down as the ground rushed up, landing in a poised squat on the roof of a '83 Cadillac with a yucca tree growing out of its trunk. The massive white leather-topped roof dipped with a thunderous crump, but soaked up most of the force of impact. He rolled off and into the crawlspace between the Cadillac and the next wreck. Bullets banged off cars and smashed safety glass all around him, but he couldn't be sure if there was anyone actually aiming at him. He took a deep breath through his nose, held it, and thought. He would not kill US soldiers or police officers in the course of doing their jobs, but he would not allow them to kill or take him before he got the lady out. Alive or dead, she deserved better than what the Mission had served her.
Abruptly, his bottled air ran out and shut off, and he was sucking empty plastic. Something must've been wrong with the gauge, because the first he became aware of this was when black spots pooled on the yard and began eating up the scenery. He switched it over to filtered, then figured, fuck it. He undogged the seals on the helmet and tore it off. It wouldn't save him from the kind of whup-ass the soldiers would open up on him if he exposed himself, and if he found her—when he found her—he wanted her to know it was him, and not another Mission goon or a fed. It offered him only slim reassurance that she wouldn't shoot him anyway if she was armed, but he didn't want to die with his head in a fishbowl. Maybe, when he found her, she might kiss him—
Footsteps outside his hiding place, soldiers running through the yard, firing wild into every crevice and shouting at each other like they were playing blind man's bluff. Storch hugged the dirt and rolled under the Cadillac as a spray of bullets pelted the neighboring car. He thought about breaking out of cover and running for the motor pool, but it was a stupid idea. The Mission would've sealed the doors when they left, and if the feds had broken in, that would be their staging area. There were other ways in, he was sure of it, but he didn't have time to find them. Hiding like this was stupid, running in was stupid. He crawled out from under the Cadillac and raised his arms in the air. "I surrender! I'm not shooting! Hey, goddamit, over here, I'm a hostage, there's more of us inside!"
The soldiers turned and started firing. Storch hit the dirt again, and crawled back between the cars, screaming over the shooting, but only leading them closer to where he was hiding. "Stop shooting at me! I'm not gonna fight with you, you stupid fuckers! I'm trying to get a hostage out of the fucking hole!"
"Sergeant Storch? Where are you?"
Storch heard her clearly through a momentary break in the shooting, but he thought he was hallucinating. It was her! He stood up and threw down his weapon. "I'm unarmed! Don't you fucking shoot me, you bastards!"
"Get down! Get down on the fucking ground right now! Hot shit! We got a live one!"
Storch lay down on the ground, trying to make them hear him, that they all had to get out of here immediately, that something very bad was going to happen, from above or from below, but soon.
One of them squatted on his back and was securing his hands when the starlight curdled and turned to luminous smoke. The soldier rolled off him and started screaming, they were all screaming, and as soon as the soldier got off him, Storch started screaming, too.
It was like turning inside out at a cellular level, like every fundamental building block of Zane Storch was the flashpoint of a revolution, locked with its sister cells in a battle to fling off the yoke of multicellular tyranny and become a microscopic free agent. He clenched every muscle of his body as if to relax would let them all fly away into the sky, into the starscraping cone of unholy quicksilver unlight that bathed the junkyard. It passed through everything, living and inanimate alike, and suffused the entire scene with a lambent glow of sublime wrongness. He could see the marrow of his bones before his eyes, could feel his heart stuttering and oxygen-depleted blood backflushing into his veins, and his arteries tugging on a vacuum; could feel his bowels writhing as if there was some refuge inside his abdominal cavity from the awful invasion; could feel his brain bubbling and sparking flashes of intracranial light like incandescent gas in an overcharged streetlamp. He willed himself to force his perceptions back outside the turmoil inside his skin, and opened his eyes and saw again.