Sea of Silver Light (13 page)

Something thumped in the far room. For a moment, Ramsey thought he heard the general's voice raised in anger. The two bodyguards flicked each other a look, then turned back to the game. Ramsey wondered who the general's conference was with, and why it was more important than the interrogation of Sorensen. The general had clearly expended a great deal of energy to track the girl's father: it seemed strange he would keep the matter waiting for half an hour or more. Ramsey looked up at the wallscreen. Closer to an hour. What was this all about?

Something banged the connecting door hard, like someone had taken a sledge to it. Ramsey had only a moment to wonder why such an expensive suite would have doors thin enough to shudder just from someone banging their fist against it in the middle of a phone-conference argument, then Doyle jumped to his feet. He moved across the suite in perhaps two strides, just as frighteningly quick as Ramsey had feared he would be, and stood before the door to the general's room, listening. He knocked twice, loud.

"General? Are you all right?" He flicked a glance back to Pilger, who had risen now too, then knocked again. "General Yacoubian? Do you need some assistance, sir?" He leaned to the door, straining to hear a reply. After a moment, he pounded again, wide hand flat on the door. "General! Open up, sir!"

"What are they doing?" Christabel asked, beginning to cry again. "Why are they shouting. . . ?"

Doyle took a step back, grabbed Pilger's shoulder to brace himself, then lifted his booted foot and slammed it against the door. "Bolted," he grunted. This time they both kicked the door at the same time, which crunched and fell inward. Pilger splintered it off its broken hinges while Doyle snatched the huge machine-pistol from his shoulder holster and stepped through, the weapon already locked in firing position as he disappeared from Ramsey's view.

His voice came from a few meters inside the room.
"Shit!"

Pilger stepped through after him, his weapon also drawn. Ramsey waited a moment. When no sounds of firing were heard, he stood and moved cautiously toward the door, trying to get an angle to see what was happening. Captain Parkins was leaning forward in his chair, mouth open.

"Christabel!" Sorensen shouted from somewhere behind him. "Don't get up! You stay on that damned couch!"

Doyle was squatting over the body of General Yacoubian, which lay sprawled on the floor between the door and the suite's large bed, his bathrobe rucked around his legs and open over his white-furred chest. The general's tan skin had turned a strange shade of gray. His tongue dangled from his mouth like a piece of rag. Doyle had begun CPR: for a surreal moment, Ramsey wondered how the bodyguard had pushed hard enough in just a few seconds to make that broad purple welt on the general's breast.

"Ambulance to the garage," Doyle said between his teeth. "This is massive. And get the kit."

Pilger was already hurrying back into the main room, his finger pushing against the jack on his neck. He spat a sequence of code into midair, then suddenly turned and waved his gun across the room. "All of you, lie on the floor. Right now!" Without waiting to see whether his order was obeyed, he kneeled and pulled a black valise out from under the couch, then headed back toward the bedroom. He popped its catches and slid it toward Doyle, who was still working on the general; with each blow, Yacoubian bounced on the carpet. Pilger drew a syringe out of one of the valise's inner pockets. As he checked its label, he saw Ramsey standing in the doorway. The gun came up in his other hand.

"Goddamn it, I said I wanted you all down on the
floor
!"

"Daddy?" Christabel was crying back in the main part of the suite. "Daddy!"

Even as Catur Ramsey backed away, helplessly watching the frighteningly large hole at the end of Pilger's gun barrel, something flared in the corner of his eye. He flinched, but there was no sound of a shot. He looked to the right and saw something that made no sense at all: Major Michael Sorensen was standing on a chair in the suite's kitchen holding a burning' napkin clutched in a pair of ice tongs. He was lifting it up to the ceiling, like some bizarre parody of the Statue of Liberty with her torch.

"I told you all to lie
down
!" shouted Pilger, who could not see this inexplicable sight. Even as Doyle plunged the hypodermic into the middle of the dark bruise on Yacoubian's chest, Pilger's gun tracked from one side of the doorway to the other, then tilted down at Ramsey's knees. Something clattered, then hissed.

Suddenly it was snowing purple.

The tiles of the ceiling had folded back like Venetian blinds. Dozens of nozzles racked down, spewing clouds of pale lavender fire-retardant dust. The lights of the room began to flick on and off and a painfully loud buzzing filled the air. Sorensen leaped past Ramsey and snatched his daughter up off the floor, then sprinted toward the elevator door where he began to press the button, over and over.

Doyle was pasting the second of two defibrillation patches to the general's still unmoving chest, but Pilger came out of the bedroom with gun drawn, waving his arm so he could see through the fog of choking purple. He shoved his gun against the back of Major Sorensen's head, inches from Christabel's terrified face. "You don't want it to go down this way, do you?" he snarled. "Your brains splashed all over your little girl? Just step away from the door and lie down."

"No. None of it's going to go down this way." Captain Ron Parkins had drawn his own service automatic and was pointing it at Pilger's head. Parkins' face was red with frightened anger. "We're not going to be disappeared by you bastards, whoever you are. These people are under my authority, not yours. You go tend to the general. We're leaving."

In the moment that followed, silent except for the low moan of the alarm, the elevator door swished open. Ramsey, who had both Pilger and Captain Parkins between himself and safety, struggled to slow his rattling heartbeat. It was already hard to breathe, and although most of the purple dust had settled to the floor, there was enough left in the air that he could feel the mother of all sneezes coming on.
That would just be the capper,
he thought.
Sneeze and set off a gun battle.

"Let us go," Sorensen said quietly, Pilger's gun still against the base of his skull. "The general's dead. You may have more of your people coming to help clean up the mess, but now the fire alarm's gone off, so there are a lot of people on the way that you
don't
own. Just turn around. He's dead. This isn't worth it anymore."

Pilger stared at him, then flicked his eyes sideways to the silvery snout of Captain Parkins' gun. His lip curled. He lowered his pistol, then turned and walked back into the bedroom without another look at them. The general's body was twisting on the floor as Doyle turned the defibrillator dial. Ramsey fought the urge to faint dead away.

"Get out here," growled Captain Parkins. They were five miles from the hotel, the van stopped in front of the light rail station. "You can get a cab from here, a train, whatever the hell you want. Just get going."

"Ron—thank you, man, thank you." Sorensen helped his daughter down from the van. The two young soldiers, who had fought to keep astonishment off their faces when three men and a girl stepped out of the elevator powdered in purple from head to foot, sat a little straighter.

"I don't want to know," Parkins said angrily. "But even if I lose my bars for this, I just . . . I couldn't. . . ."

"I don't think you're ever going to hear about it again, Ron. At least not through official channels." Christabel's father brushed some of the powder from her hair; she looked up quickly as though to make certain it was his hand, not a stranger's. "Trust me—you don't want to know anything more about this than you have to, anyway."

"No, I don't."

Ramsey stepped down beside them, still amazed that he was alive and free and under the open sky again. "Thank you, Captain. You saved our lives."

Parkins threw up his hands in confusion. "Jee-zuss!" He turned to Sorensen. "Just . . . Mike, just take care of that wife and little girl of yours. On second thought, maybe I will ask you to explain this to me one day. What do you think?"

Major Sorensen nodded. "As soon as I figure it out, you'll be the first to hear."

Christabel was shivering despite the warm sun in front of the railway station. As the military van drove away Ramsey took off his windbreaker, shook a cloud of dust from it, and draped it over her shoulders. It was only as he followed the child and her father toward the taxi line that he realized he was shivering as badly as she was.

CHAPTER 3

NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: IEN, Hr. 4 (Eu, NAm)-"BACKSTAB"

(visual: Yohira receiving implant)

VO: Shi Na (Wendy Yohira) is a prisoner in the New Guinea cult headquarters of the evil Doctor Methuselah (Moishe Reiner). Can Stabhak (Carolus Kennedy) save her before she joins the cult in their mass suicide ritual? Casting 28 cult members, 5 tribespeople, 2 Doctor Methuselah "special toadies." Flak to: 1EN.BKSTB.CAST

It was strange how it had come back to him, the new swathe of memory suddenly revealed, as though the roof of an ancient tomb had collapsed and let sunlight stream onto its contents for the first time in centuries. At the same time, the memories seemed new and painfully raw, like growing skin exposed beneath a scab.

Of course, he wasn't going to get much chance to think about it. . . .

Paul leaped away up the slithering leafmold hill even as the first of the wood lice just missed clutching his leg in a ripple of malformed paws. He could barely keep his feet: the skeletal remains of leaves were bigger than he was, slippery to climb as the bones in an elephant's graveyard. A dozen more wood lice emerged along the slope, the whole pack moving in that deceptive, staggering way, Their deformed legs might be different lengths, but that was small handicap on such terrain, and their dozens of tiny grasping hands were a perfect adaptation for chasing a stumbling, two-footed prey.

Paul dragged himself up onto a great curl of root that emerged from the leafmire like the back of a whale breaching the waves. He could see that even if he reached the base of the trunk, still about a hundred paces away, there was no escape on the far side except along another descending slope of the same half-decayed mulch, a slope littered with the bodies of other sleeping wood lice, curled like ribbed Easter eggs. He staggered on anyway.

"Come back,"
one of the creatures groaned behind him, and some of its companions took up the cry.
"Huuuungry! Eat you!"

Despite the recognizable English words, the voices were so completely inhuman that he felt utter despair wash over him like a cold rain. Even if he escaped, something else would get him eventually. He was alone in a hostile world—a hostile
universe
. Whether he lived another ten minutes or ten days, he would probably never see another human being, would have only rasping, homicidal monstrosities like these for company until the inevitable end.

The whine of his pursuers became a fierce hiss, a change of tone so sudden and complete that Paul stopped in surprise. The wood lice were all rearing up on their hindmost segments, their distorted little hands waving frantically at him. Or at something behind him.

Paul turned. A man stood at the base of the tree, his dull robe almost invisible against the vast expanse of gray bark, so that for the first instant he seemed an apparition, a trick of the light making a face out of a whorl in the tree's rough hide. He was no bigger than Paul, but he seemed oddly careless of the approaching wood lice as he walked down the humped spine of the tree root.

"Huuunngryyy!"
they chanted, like terrible children.

As the man drew closer, Paul had a better view of the stranger's compact frame and distinctly Asian features and guessed that this must be the one Renie and the others had described—Kunohara, the insect world's creator.

The black-haired man glanced briefly at Paul, showing neither interest nor irritation, then stopped just where the root curved sharply down into the leafmold, so that he faced the swarm of creatures like Moses preaching from the mount. But if these were Kunohara's people, they did not seem much disposed to obey him.

"Eat you!"
they cried, hunching up the slope.

Kunohara shook his head in disgust, then lifted his hand. A great gust of wind abruptly curled down from the sky, then swept along the ground and past the base of the tree—a wind so howlingly fierce that most of the fallen leaves and other detritus were ripped away in an instant. With piping shrieks of frustration or terror, the wood lice, too, were lifted and flung off into nothingness; some managed to cling to larger objects for a few moments, but within a few heartbeats even those were sucked away. Then the gale died.

Paul stood, astonished. Although the closest of the creatures had been only a few paces away from him, and had been hurled sideways like a bullet fired from a gun, he had felt no wind at all.