The Sons of Heaven (44 page)

“No,” he cried suddenly. “No. There is something.” With the point of his dagger he speared a Black Coffee Truffle. Turning to his console he fished out a content analysis slide with his free hand, holding the dagger well out and away from him. He cut the chocolate open and smeared its center on the slide, using the dagger blade like a palette knife; fixed and sealed it, and put it into the console.

A moment later the image swam into view. “There,” said Suleyman in a terribly calm voice. “Just like what we found in Lewis’s blood.”

“Oh, my God, what are those things?” Nefer screamed. “Those were inside the Theobromos? Look at them, they’re
moving.”

“They’re attempting to deploy.”

Up in the corner of the console, lights were flashing, advising Suleyman that his private transport fleet was even now maneuvering into the docking bay on the south side of the compound. “The young master has returned,” Suleyman observed absently, unable to take his eyes from the screen. Nefer leaned closer, staring in horrified fascination.

“I can’t believe the Company’d do this,” she said. “Poisoned Theobromos? How trusting do they think we are?”

“You were ready enough to eat it,” Suleyman replied.

“I wouldn’t have been once I was told it was my reward for meritorious service,” Nefer pointed out. “I’d have scanned it more closely. And so would any of the rest of us! Free Theobromos, this close to the Silence? As paranoid as everybody is, nobody’s going to touch that stuff. How could the mortals have been so stupid? All it’s going to do is make us all angry.”

“Maybe that was the point all along,” said Suleyman. “A mass-murder attempt so blatant it would spark the rebellion.”

“But why would the mortals want us to rebel?”

“Maybe this wasn’t their idea.” Suleyman pulled his gaze away from the fluttering horror on the screen long enough to glance out into the courtyard, where uniformed figures were thronging in from the transport hangars. “This is Labienus’s style, poison and plots within plots. If we overthrow the Company, he’ll be perfectly happy, won’t he? Especially if mortals die in the process.”

He spoke so quietly, watching the figures in the courtyard. Nefer knelt beside him, staring up into his set face. “My God, aren’t you angry? Don’t you
ever
get angry?”

He looked down at her and his voice was still quiet as he replied: “What good would it do? We’ve been caught in an escalating pattern since the beginning, Nefer. The Company created immortals, but we frightened them, so they created Options Research. We angrily liberated Options Research, and our anger frightened them even more.

“What happened next? Were they desperate enough to come up with this stupid gambit themselves or was it put into their hands by someone much more clever? It won’t matter in the end.”

They could hear footsteps vaulting up through the house, now, booted strides covering the distance to the study.

“Fear and anger,” Suleyman mused. “Every swing from one to the other ratcheting the big clock closer and closer to this hour.”

The door burst open and Latif walked in, closely followed by Sarai. One look at his face was enough to tell them.

“Oh, no,” said Nef. “You didn’t find him.”

“Lewis? Hey, I found him,” said Latif, in a hard bright voice. “Even got a glimpse of his face, for about two seconds before I lost him again.” He threw himself into a chair.

“They got away, most of them,” Sarai explained. “And they took Lewis with them. They had a flying disk, like in the old pictures. It just lifted out of this hilltop and took off. We tracked it a few kilometers and then it disappeared.”

“Casualties?” asked Suleyman.

“No mortals lost. A couple of the techs had seizures; some kind of disrupter field in the main entrance. They reset. They’re okay now,” Latif said.

“Good.”

“Except that the mission was a total failure. We brought back stuff from their little elves’ workshop, though,” Latif continued, drumming his fists on the arms of his chair. “Or laboratory or whatever it was. We’d have brought back a couple of bodies to study but they were all turning to slime and ashes while we watched. Nasty, huh?” He was striking the chair harder now, it was
beginning to creak under his blows. Suddenly he cocked his head and stared around at the Theobromos. “What’s all this muck?”

Sighing, Suleyman told him. The rage faded from Latif’s eyes; they became ice cold in expression. “Then it’s already started,” he said.

At that moment a tone chimed, advising Suleyman that a call was coming in on his private channel. He turned in his chair as the image on his console vanished, to be replaced by the incoming message. He signaled acceptance and decode; a second later there was a woman’s face on the screen, an immortal with ash-blonde hair escaping from a braid, and her blue eyes were tired. “Suleyman, are you still there?”

“Van Drouten? We’re here.”

“Suleyman, I’ve just had a delivery from the Company.”

“Theobromos.”

“But it’s adulterated with something! The directive with it sounded so fishy we thought it was a good idea to analyze some of it, and we found these horrible little biomechanical kind of things all through it and—but you’ve found out too, eh?”

“Yes,” Suleyman replied. “They’re poisoned, Van Drouten. Any operative eating this stuff will be disabled. Maybe irreparably.”

“So obviously you’re not going to follow orders and distribute any,” Van Drouten said, brushing back strands of loose hair. “It’s beginning, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“We have to warn everybody else. Emergency comm protocols?”

Suleyman nodded. “Except that I’m going to have to ask you to handle it all. I’ve got another situation developing here.”

Van Drouten winced. “All right. Well, if I never speak to you again—is that Latif in the background? Hello, sweetheart—anyway, if this is really it—”

“Van Drouten! Listen to me. I think this was intended as provocation, and not a serious attempt at murder.”

“You mean they wanted to see what we’d do?” She looked dubious, then began to laugh sadly. “Goodness knows it’s a dumb idea, concocting something this fiendishly complicated and missing the obvious fact that we’d see right through it—”

“So we can’t rise to the bait,” Suleyman told her. “You agree?”

“Oh, of course. Though I don’t know if I’ll be able to get anybody else to agree with us!”

“You’ll have to try,” said Suleyman. “Will you try, while I’m dealing with my situation?”

“What else can I do?” Her laughter grew a little wild. “Why not?”

Then she was gone, perhaps signing off abruptly. Perhaps the connection had been broken elsewhere. Suleyman turned away from the screen and sighed. “Status report?” he inquired.

“The transports are being refueled and offloaded,” Sarai answered. “Team A is having a pit stop. Team B is assembling.”

“I’d better go brief them on the next stage.” Suleyman rose to his feet.

“You’re moving on Alpha-Omega
now?”
Nefer asked.

“I have to. It’s started, Nef,” he told her.

“Then—I think I’ve got a flight to catch,” she said. He nodded and she hurried from the room.

“We move out in ninety minutes. You should eat something, son,” he told Latif.

“I’ll see he eats,” Sarai volunteered.

“Thank you. And … get rid of all this.” He gestured at the boxes of Theobromos.

“It’s gone,” Latif told him.

Some time later, Suleyman was just concluding his address to the troops in the hangar. Team A was combat-grimy and finishing the remains of a late supper; Team B was fresh and ready, lined up sharp, bouncing on their toes. Some of them were immortals, Suleyman’s own security techs. Most of them were mortals, bound to him by love and obligation. None of them expected to die.

He had spoken to them quietly, had refrained from oratory tricks to inflame them, had concentrated only on the next step of the operation in detail. “… Once the objective is gained, we rendezvous here with Team A. At that point you will be briefed on the third stage—”

He became aware of flames and an overpowering smell coming from another quarter of the compound. He turned as Latif and Sarai came in. “What’s on fire?”

“The Theobromos,” Latif informed him. “I dumped all the crates in the empty pool and set fire to it.”

“You could have just thrown them down the fusion hopper,” Suleyman remarked, raising an eyebrow.

“This way it’s a gesture,” Latif said. “It means something!”

“It means you’ve ruined my pool.” Suleyman turned, shaking his head ruefully. “Gentlemen? Ladies? I think it’s time we were gone.”

“Let’s go,” Latif shouted, running forward as Team B saluted and broke into their units, each heading for their designated transport. “Let’s make this one count!”

Nefer was out and heading for the public airstrip when she heard the transports lifting, rotating, screaming away. She turned her head and saw the column of smoke rising from Suleyman’s house, and the play of red flames under it. She couldn’t look long. Already before her eyes stretched the yellow plain of her dreams, and the quiet herds coming down to the water.

Sighing, she adjusted her pack and walked on.

It was raining in Yorkshire, booming and flashing away in the sort of raw summer weather that had made the Bronte family’s lives so brief and comfortless. The few mortals still living in that remote part of the world shivered and drew closer to their electronic hearths, sipped their herbal tea and attempted to ignore the frightening sounds coming from heaven. The ghosts were out in the weather and exulting, however.

A lone rider on a black horse paused on a crag to survey the land beneath him, eternally intrigued by the lone girl making her way through the heather. His cloak, her hair streamed in the wind like banners. On another peak, two lovers pale and fitful as lightning moved against the black clouds in a dance so sensual, so violent, no mortal could have survived its steps. Even to hear the music would drive a mortal mad.

Animals rose and walked like men and women, about their ancient inexplicable business. Restless things bound with gorse roots broke free and stood, their insubstantial feet finding once again the Via Eboracum, ignoring the insubstantial motorcar that rattled along it in the opposite direction.

In all this unearthly commotion the air cargo transport was something of an anticlimax as it zoomed down out of the storm, rain hissing on its gleaming sides, and landed pilotless at the base of a high steep hill some little distance north of Hardraw.

There was no storm in the bunker under the hill. Down there all was warmth, calm, silence, and blue light, as it had been for so many centuries.

Now
. Ron and Albert opened their eyes in the same moment, peered through the glass of their respective vaults and found each other. Ron nodded.
They launched themselves upward through the regenerant fluid and, gasping, hauled themselves out. Staggering and slipping they made their way to each other and clasped hands. They leaned together a moment, coughing, wiping the blue stuff from their eyes, a pair of giants naked as newborns but as far from vulnerable as it would be possible to imagine.

“Go,” said Ron, and Albert turned and scaled the ladder of the nearest vault. He reached in and hauled up the vault’s occupant. One, he wrenched off its circlet; two, he leaned down and lightly butted its forehead with his own, and a spark jumped from the circlet he himself wore; three, he let go and scrambled down, running to the next vault in line to do the same again. Even as he did Ron was at the top of the ladder Albert had just vacated, grabbing for the tank’s occupant, who had begun to move and look around in bewilderment.

He pulled its head up by the hair and stared into its pale eyes.

…
Sir?

We’re moving out, soldier. Decant yourself. Form up by the door and await further orders.

Sir yes SIR!

Ron leaped to the floor and ran to the next vault just as Alfred was scrambling down and running for the next in line. The Enforcer dragged himself up and over the edge, climbed down, and ran coughing and shivering to the cavern’s entrance. There he waited, wringing out his hair and beard, jumping up and down to keep warm.

He was joined almost at once by another Enforcer, and then another and another, and a long line of naked titans began to form as Ron and Albert followed their orders.

One after another after another the vaults were emptied, and the long column grew longer. At precisely the same moment, the same scene was being enacted in the Pyrenees, in Morocco, in Norway, in Siberia, in the Sangre de Christos, and under Mount Tamalpais.

When four hundred and seventy-eight Enforcers stood waiting by the door, Ron turned with a last regretful glance at the sleeping Preservers and ran back. Albert, many yards ahead of him, was shouting: “Atten—
tion!”

The line snapped to attention with an eerie grace, more like some great clockwork serpent than soldiers.

“Low
bridge!”
roared Albert. In perfect unison the whole line dropped forward in a standing crouch, poised for running.

“Move
out!
Quick
march!”
ordered Albert, and raced past them up the tunnel. Ron followed at the head of the column, and though they ran crouched their heads nearly grazed the tunnel’s roof.

Inexorable as the tide they surged, up and out, emerging into the storm without so much as blinking. Ron led them in a winding file through the heather toward the transport, where Albert had already opened the loading doors. He was now ripping open the crates that were stacked inside.

As the Enforcers entered, one by one, he tossed each a prepacked duffel. The first in caught his bundle, advanced to the far end of the cargo bay and waited. He was there joined by the next in line with his bundle, and the next. When the last Enforcer had boarded Albert closed the loading doors and took a bundle for himself, as Ron sprinted to the transport’s cabin and keyed in a signal. The console beeped in acknowledgment and the autopilot activated; with a lurch and a whine the transport rose into the storm, and kept rising, and sped westward at last.