A formation of Navy fighters passed less than a mile beneath him, and far, far below them he could make out a tiny gray plank on the water, a white feather of tilled water fanning out for nearly a mile behind it. A US aircraft carrier and a small armada of destroyers rolled north on the Gulf, a volley of arrows aimed unmistakably at his destination.
He hadn't followed the news all too closely before his world fell apart last year, but he'd picked up enough about world events from the gossip circle that gathered on the porch of his store to know that the US had taken to bombing Iraq whenever tempers flared over its ongoing disarmament crisis. To Storch, it had only seemed like political stupidity, and he'd tried not to hear about it. That they had stopped short of Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War had been only one more sign that the whole campaign was an empty maneuver. Storch and his fellow career soldiers had not gone to war to liberate the spoiled, ass-backward Emirate of Kuwait for the cause of democracy, but to do a job. The powers that were had fudged it and called them home before they could complete said job. To read about it or watch it on TV had only made Storch feel sicker, so he had closed his eyes and ears to any reminder of the war. Besides, he never dreamed that he'd be coming back here.
Almost at the horizon, two of the fighters peeled off, climbed, and came back in his direction. The air was crystal clear, offering no cover between himself and the ocean. Naked tan land like wind-polished bone closed in the water on both sides, Saudi Arabia to the west, Iran to the east, and a mere hundred miles away, the Arabian Peninsula joined with the Asian continent to form a crotch, where the merged Tigris and Euphrates Rivers poured their green waters into the Gulf. Two storm fronts circled each other over the lower half of Iraq, orbiting round the point that called to him across ten thousand miles of ocean.
The fighters closed with him and wagged their wings as they passed, so close that he tumbled in the punishing turbulence of their wake. The pilots' jaws flapped and the planes nearly collided as they swept by and circled back for another look. Storch gave them the finger.
His ramjet intake contracted further and the superheated nacelles flattened into a muscular, trailing cloak. He dove straight down, drawing in air and expelling it as a giant squid propels itself through the ocean depths. The fighters slashed the air wide open above him and rolled to engage, but when they came around again, the unidentified object had vanished over—or into—the deep blue of the Gulf.
Storch soared on the convection currents fifty feet above the lapping waves. The skin of his dorsal ramjet had become a bright, highly reflective blue, and he angled himself to fly between the fighters and the sun, so that they were dazzled by its reflection when they looked for him.
He crossed from sea to land unnoticed at dusk, gliding silently less than a hundred feet above the masts of small fishing boats that plied the shallows of the Tigris delta. He passed through bands of blessed rain and bone-jarring whirlwinds bearing frost from the northerly storm out of Iran. As night fell and the storms converged, the terrain devolved into murky black humps and mirrored windows perpetually shattering from the impact of raindrops. The marshes and lakes of the delta gave way to broken land and isolated villages, and his eyes ached as they adjusted to register the infrared and ultraviolet spectra. Loose clusters of heat crawled across the land here and there, flocks of goats and sheep tended by taller, jerkier blobs of warmth that stopped and stared at his silhouette as it passed over them.
Closer, the sound of It became louder than the sonic turmoil of the warring storms. It was not simply the sound of every living thing, but more, it was the sound of life itself, the sound of one great, glacial heartbeat, the husky oceanic sound of a single indrawn breath as long and deep as infinity. Mixed up in it, like the din of a single musician in an orchestra going mad and attacking his neighbors, he could almost make out the subtle brainwave signature of a man who was once named Christian Keyes. It was like a radio station fading in and out, but growing stronger, building itself out of the dissonant chaos of static into a dominant harmony. It was the sound of his mind spreading like a virus, unifying the disparate frequencies of thousands of minds into itself. It grew louder all the time, but the eternal voice it threatened lacked ears to hear it. That was why he was here, to be Its ears, and Its hands.
He didn't think he'd recognize it, but as the plateau and the box canyon swam up out of the dark, it all came back to him. The point overlooking the canyon where they'd camped out to paint the target was covered in a tent city lit only by the sporadic fireworks of rifles and grenades. His enhanced senses made out a vast, brilliantly hot mass of bodies traveling down a ramp that curled round the wall of the canyon down to the floor, where Tiamat had once stood. It was a crowd of a few hundred people, but they marched, breathed, and blinked in locked synchronicity, pressed so close together they were unmistakably Him.
As the last of the hot air vented out of his dorsal nacelles, he dropped out of the wind a mile away from the camp and hit the ground running for cover. The manta-cowl deflated and began to decay almost instantly, tearing on the ragged rocks and sloughing away like a demolished parachute.
A tumble of rocks at the mouth of a narrow, winding wadi offered the only cover, and he slunk into it and collapsed in a puddle, turning it to steam, and blacked out.
When he awoke, the ground rumbled and the wind carried the words of Him, raised in an exultant shout hundreds of voices strong. Exhausted, ravenous, burning in the rain, he dragged himself up on a rock and looked around.
A broken field of basalt tumulus and twisted, blasted boulders lay between his position and the pit, which shone against the rain-streaked dark with a string of explosions, painting fiery, bestial faces on the racing clouds, but the voices only shouted louder.
This body was spent, used up, and wanted to melt into the ground. It wanted to go to sleep forever, and Storch wanted to let it. He could lie here, unnoticed, and maybe die, maybe not. In the end, did it really matter?
The screaming and shooting from the tent city was abruptly cut off. Only the voice of Keyes becoming One clashed with the storm. There would be no air support. Reinforcements would never come. Nobody else even seemed to know this shit was happening.
He was the furthest thing he could imagine from human, now, but he was still a soldier. The eternal rationale of the elite infantryman plugged all the holes in his leaking resolve:
Some people just need to be killed. You've come all this way to do a job. Do it.
Willing himself to find the energy, to burn the marrow out of his own bones to get himself going, he moved. He slithered among the rocks, bones grinding, muscles burning, paying for every inch. Endorphins spilled into his bloodstream, but they were like snowflakes in a furnace, and only made him forget his agony for a few moments. But in that time, his body tapped into reserves its original owner never knew he had, and, rising up, Storch began to run.
He saw shapes coming out of the dark, bodies squirming over the rain-slick rocks. They made sounds, but he could hardly recognize them as human, let alone sane words. Iraqi soldiers ran down the hillside, blind to the terrain, mad from the rain and what they'd seen. Hitting rocks, slipping and falling, they got up again, screaming and sobbing, and smashing their bodies to ruins in their blind panic. Storch slipped unseen past them and into the tent city.
Here, at least, there was light.
The camp, a hundred or so big sand-colored tents with a motor pool and a helipad, wreathed in razor wire and Arabic signs with pictures of land mines, burned. A 90mm antiaircraft battery that might have been the very same one they blew up a decade ago, in this very spot, stood unmanned at one corner of the camp, aimed at the storm. Helicopters and heavy trucks sat on a slab of hastily poured tarmac, fitfully blazing in the downpour. Someone had cared enough to stop the soldiers from fleeing and spreading the word, meaning that, until tonight, it had been business as usual in Tiamat. It did his heart good, to see that, finally, someone had gotten the better of Saddam, the way he'd gotten the better of the world. Evolution was funny that way, in human terms. Something worse always came along, someone or something that did evil that much more efficiently, and so prospered.
A few more raggedy-ass soldiers ran out of a burning wood shack, shot wildly in his direction, and ran off into the night. Keyes wasn't here. Whatever was happening now, it was happening down in the hole.
He moved through the camp by the numbers, sprinting from cover to cover, though he saw nobody who could have hurt him, if they wanted to. The foolishness of this struck him, made him clamp his jaws shut against the barking laughter that wanted to come out and never stop. Here, nine years ago, he'd seen something too awful to remember, and thought he'd become sick. In truth, it had been his first step away from being human. Now, back here under very different circumstances, to say the least, he still pantomimed the old tactics. But he had no weapon.
Weapon?
he thought, running his hands over his change-wracked arms,
what do you think this is?
Still, he scrounged some good stuff off some dead Iraqis and stowed it in a heavy gear harness he slung across his shoulders.
He caught himself looking too long at the dead men in the mud, and rummaged around in the flattened wreckage of a mess tent until he found some foil-pouched UN relief rations. When he gobbled them down, his stomach roared painfully to life and his body temperature started to fall.
Storch crossed the inner perimeter and scaled a house-sized boulder that teetered on the edge of the canyon and peered over the edge, down into the deeper dark from which came the strident cry of Keyes in his hundreds.
On first glance, it was almost something ridiculous. There were no siege engines, no enormous bombs, no diabolical scientific apparatuses on the floor of the canyon, only hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand or more standing shoulder to shoulder, all eyes focused on the impenetrable blackness of the pit within the pit. It looked like nothing so much as a bizarre and inept demonstration of interracial unity, a symbolic arrangement of humanity on the order of Hands Across America, or a papal appearance. Only the subdued nature of the crowd and the subtle currents of galvanic twitches passing through them betrayed the wrongness of it. They were white and black and brown, the survivors of the Chernobyl enclave and a lot of places the Mission never knew about, all dressed in the same black suits, an ocean of faces, their mouths wide open in song, yet they were not a crowd, but the individual cells of a new and colossal organism gestating in the canyon, as if in a womb. Their song was that of an unborn god striving toward awakening.
There was about the chorus an undercurrent of pain and strain and doubt at the labor of being reborn, and around the edges of it, discordant tones peeling off the dominant like flakes of ash falling from new-forged steel, the dwindling voices of the outcast tenants of all those bodies. Gradually, they died away, and the combined roar of Keyes was almost a visible haze in the air, through which the assembled bodies below were only a huge blur of heat. As his ears adjusted to the sheer power of the noise, he began to make out distinct syllables, though they were gibberish to him. Thinking back to the high school classes he'd napped through while waiting to enlist, he believed he understood what it was trying to do, if not what it was saying.
Keyes was trying to figure out a math problem, and a fucking big one, too, by the sound of it. Numbers and words were among the garbled sounds, and now he noticed that the flurries of syllables were variations in numbers and symbols, different groups of bodies shouting different permutations as He tried to work out the solution. When the right variation was found, the whole group repeated it in a single, deafening voice, and moved on to the next step in the formula. There was a warm, almost beautiful exultation to the voices as they harmonized towards one voice, like a choir nearing the triumphant coda of an aria. It touched Storch and softened his resolve, but underneath it, there was a tone-deaf gurgle in the back of every throat, the ravenous sound of the insatiable amoeba, the Shoggoth, as it devoured their minds and became them.
What was He trying to do? It didn't matter what, didn't matter why, to Storch.
Stop Him.
The mob of Keyes filled the canyon from the walls to the deeper pit, a hundred feet across, in the center. Only one figure stood out in the crowd, not because it was head-and-shoulders above the rest, but because it burned brighter than the rest, and yet it was silent. Spike Team Texas. A thread of panic choked off his wind as he searched the crowd, then the shadowy rocks around him, for the others. Maybe they were in America with the main colony of Keyes. And maybe Storch deserved to get his throat cut for assuming.
Once, a weapons testing facility had stood here, and he had helped to destroy it, never knowing what lay underneath. Before that, a ziggurat had stood here, its priests charged with the same duty the Iraqis had today: to keep what lay within from getting out. Before that, if the latest voices in his head were to be believed, this place had been so much more than even his God-mad Dad would have believed. Hiram Hansen's words came back to him:
Zane, the world isn't what you thought it was yesterday, but your father was still crazier than a shithouse rat.
"I do believe it runs in the family," he told the storm.
He slid back down the boulder and braced his back against it. His feet slid and dug in the mud, but slowly, the boulder gave way with a great sucking slurp, and rolled out over the void. Storch leapt up on top and rode it down into the canyon.
Under his feet, the boulder turned as it tumbled, so he had to run like a lumberjack on a rolling log to stay atop it. He may not have remembered much about physics, but he'd seen more than enough Road Runner cartoons to stay away from the business end of a falling rock. For just a moment, he was the sole inhabitant of earth's newest moon, and could see only the horizon of rock beneath his feet against the sky. Then the sheer walls of the canyon closed around his satellite like yawning jaws, and the crowd seemed to notice his arrival, but too late. He leapt off the rock blindly just before impact, flinging out a double handful of good stuff in the form of incendiary grenades. The boulder hit behind him a split-second before he did, smashing a dozen bodies to pulp and shivering into tumbling, car-sized shards. Storch arched his back and splayed his arms and legs out to spread the impact across his body and direct as much of it as he could into the dense mob. As one, they looked up at him and smiled.