Including the carbine and spare ammo pouch on my left hip, I had better than 30 pounds of equipment on me. Because the harness helped distribute it properly, it felt like much less and would not hamper me if I had to run fast or get out of the way of something. Live weight is much better and easier to handle than dead weight, yet too much live weight could catch up with me and make me all dead weight.
Bat and I helped the others get into their stuff. Everyone had the same amount of equipment and our provisions differed only in that Bat and I carried the plastic explosives while Natch, Marit and Jytte had been given some basic first-aid trauma kits. Jytte, despite the unnatural lightness to her body, seemed to stand the weight of the material better than Natch or Marit. Marit checked her own weapons to make sure they were functional, then quickly acquainted Jytte with the deadly tools we'd given her.
All of us piled into the Vanagon Marit and I had rented that morning. I drove us over to Crowley's and around to the side. The gate there opened automatically and we pulled into a small parking area off the street. A wooden fence shielded the house's backyard from the street, but the gate there opened as we approached it.
Crowley and Loring greeted us in the backyard. Loring looked dressed for a weekend of fishing, but his tan fatigue pants had enough pockets to let him redistribute some of the supplies on his combat harness. Marit helped him get into his gear, and they started a pleasant conversation about Lorica before Nerys had assumed control of it. Loring seemed thankful for her attentions and pleased to have a new ally.
Crowley looked at the equipment I'd brought him and smiled. "Carbines are a good choice because, if what I have read is at all accurate, fighting will be in close. You might as well pass out my ammo and that gun because I prefer these." He dropped to one knee and zipped open a blue nylon bag. From it he pulled two small, boxy guns with short barrels that had a bore only slightly smaller than my Wildey Wolf. He handed me one, and I smiled.
"Ingram Mac 10, .45 caliber, fires from the open bolt. Nasty little gun." I turned the gun over in my hands. "Old, but still deadly. They look like they've seen a few wars."
"Relics of a misspent youth, my friend." Crowley pulled on his radio, then donned the combat harness I had brought. He stripped out the CAR-15-A2 clips and replaced them with clips for his Mac 10s. He put one of the small guns in the pouch at his back unloaded, then let the other dangle by its shoulder strap from his right shoulder. Both he and Loring already wore body armor, so his CAR and their vests remained in the duffle bag.
"If you'll follow me," Crowley announced, "We can get started."
His house's rear yard was remarkable in that it had fully leaved trees and bushes. White stones covered the earth everywhere except for the patio on which we stood and had been raked into a zen ocean pattern. As he spoke he waved us toward a koi pond toward the rear of the property, then he squatted down near a big, mechanical statue that looked like the offspring of a steamroller and a Harley Davidson motorcycle. He flipped a switch and the fluttering thump of a pump came from inside the machine.
Crowley stood and wiped his hands off on his thighs. "One of the owners of this house put in a bomb shelter shortly after World War II. Before the turn of the century, when I bought this place, it had served as an avant garde art gallery, which is when the koi pond went in, covering the shelter's opening. I reclaimed the shelter, though I have put it to a different use. Before it was meant to keep things out. Now, in many ways, it keeps things in."
As he spoke the water level in the koi pond dropped, revealing a small island created by a submarine bulkhead hatch. Bat twirled the wheel on top and the hatch hissed open, spraying water out of the water-tight seal. Bat descended the ladder built into the wall first, then the rest of us followed, with Crowley coming down last. The hatch clanged shut above, and I heard the clicks of another couple switches being flipped.
One, I have no doubt, reversed the pump to cover the hatch. The other apparently turned on the lights, because fluorescents flickered to life and filled the moderately-sized room with light. Aside from some battered swords, shields and similar archaic weapons of war mounted on the white walls, the room appeared empty to me. Then, as I shifted to the left, I saw a black box in the far corner. It remained visible for a moment, then vanished until I changed my position.
"What the hell is that?"
Crowley made a beeline for the corner in which it appeared to exist. As he walked to the space where I had seen it, he reached out and jerked back slightly as if he had gotten a static shock. His touch seemed to "ground" the device for a moment, and I got a chance to get a good look at it.
To me it looked to be of very fine hardwood construction. Half again as tall and wide as a phone booth, it had a depth of approximately four feet. It stood flush against the far wall of the room, and I could not see a seam at that end. It almost seemed like the box had grown out of the wall, and I would have remarked about that aloud, but I was very much afraid Crowley would confirm my speculation.
Over on the far side he seemed to be playing with controls, but as I moved over to see what he was doing the center of the box started to sizzle with the gray static of a television getting no signal. Blue and red sparks played through the gray and white, but I heard nothing coming from the display. As nearly as I could tell the box had just become a giant TV screen with no sound.
The old man stepped away from the control surface. "Let me explain this quickly. We are going to be traveling to another place, another dimension which actually lies fairly close to our own. It is called Plutonia—thought I doubt the natives think of it as such. It is a place where all the natural laws seem to apply, save some area-specific time flow fluctuations."
Jytte cocked her head to the side. "Explain please."
Crowley sighed. "I don't know if I can. Dimensions often have their own special properties. Ah, the Underworld of Greek mythology, for example, has an area called Tartarus. It is, in reality, a small collection of pocket dimensions in which the physical laws have been grossly warped. Sisyphus is always rolling a stone uphill because any direction of travel, in that specific dimension, is uphill. The giant Tityus has vultures eating him alive during the day, but during the night he regenerates—as do the birds, so his torment can go on forever. The regeneration is not a property of him, but of the place he has been trapped in.
"In Plutonia, as nearly as I can determine, there are 'holding cells' where time does not pass in a normal way. I think these are really food storage areas, and they inherently retard aging, spoilage and decay for obviously beneficial reasons."
He jerked a thumb at the control panel which, to my eyes, looked like an opal screen with lights pulsing all over it. "I have set this thing to take us as close as is safe to the place where Nerys Loring is being held. It is another dimensional gateway, so we may encounter hostilities almost immediately."
I shook my head. "Wait a minute. Why can't you put us down in another area?"
Crowley sighed heavily. "Dimensions have boundaries. A gateway is a simple place to go through. If I were going alone, I would not be using this device. I would go through by myself and pick out the most beneficial route. I cannot bring all of you with me, so this is it. While the creatures in Plutonia are sentient, they do not really have anything to counter the weapons we're bringing in." He fed a clip in through the Ingram's handgrip. "Besides, hive-mind entities are only dangerous if you really make them angry."
"Great." I stepped up to the box. "Just walk through?"
"Just walk through."
"Okay, folks, radios on. Sound check, black." I heard everyone else identify themselves by color, then I smiled. "See you on the other side."
At first touch the static wall felt cold. Numbness nibbled up through me as I moved forward. I felt goose bumps rise on my skin, and my scrotum tightened. I crouched a bit as I moved ahead, then I felt a flash of heat as I came out on the other side. My head swam for a second, then I jumped up and rotated forward to land outside the dimens
ional gate.
The gateway on the Plutonia side was shaped like a hexagon. It had taken on the identical look to that of the box in Crowley's shelter in terms of the color playing through it. The major difference was that while the static on Crowley's machine appeared to be heading into a central nexus point, here it sprayed out to the edges.
The other difficulty with the gate on the Plutonia side is that it was set in the floor of a large chamber. Bracing myself on the edge of the gateway, I held my hand out to Bat when his head poked through the surface of the static pool. It took him a moment to orient himself, then he leaped up like I had, and I pulled him home.
The two of us crouched side by side, and I heard him whisper some Polish oath through the radio. We both pulled back the charging slides on our assault rifles, then covered the only exit we could see in the weak, moss-born luminescence in the cavernous room.
Bat looked around the room, then shook his head.
"What?"
He shrugged. "I used to have an ant farm when I was a kid."
"And?"
"I used to dream about being shrunk down and visiting the nest." He frowned. "I was a dumb kid."
"Why?"
"I called 'em dreams." The big man circled the room with his rifle. "They were nightmares."
The others came through, and only Nero Loring seemed to be unable to see anything. Jytte held his hand and got him to crouch down as we waited for Crowley to come through. When he did, he took on the black-shroud form I had come to recognize before I met him in Eclipse.
Bat took one look at him and scowled. "That's it. When I get back, I torch Sedona."
Crowley laughed heartily. "I'll give you the matches." He pressed his left hand over Nero Loring's eyes, and the man started looking around the room. Nero's face slackened a bit, then he blinked away tears as he imagined his daughter having spent so many years in this place.
Loring charged his carbine. "What are we waiting for? Let's go."
Crowley held up a hand. "A moment." His other hand came up, and his fingers splayed out. I saw them tremble as he moved them around. The gold ring glinted on his right hand as Crowley worked through a series of eerie and complicated gestures. Finally he lowered his hands and pointed toward the doorway. "We're two levels below where she is. Up a slant corridor, first hard right, then second left. She's in the third room on the left."
Marit frowned at him. "How do you know?"
"Nero gave me a locket his daughter used to wear. I matched the emanations from it to those I feel above. We have to hurry. Something is wrong."
Bat and I took up the lead and moved out into the corridor. Starting at the doorway's round frame, glistening lines of mucus ran along the walls and ceiling of the circular tunnel. In the darkness I could not make out any difference between them, but as I got close I noticed a heavy mixture of scents, almost as bad as being caught in a bar during perfume wars between the women nearby. For a half second I wondered if they were some sort of biomechanical circuitry, then dismissed them as bizarre decoration.
Jytte touched one of the lines. "Scent marking. These are the same as painted lines along the walls of a hospital. I would guess this thick central one leads to something important, like food or the queen."
I crouched a bit further up the corridor and took a plastic bomblet from my pack. "Bat, set a red one opposite me here on the wall." I pressed mine against the rough stone and flipped the small switch, arming it. A small, red LED came on to let me know it was ready to go.
The hard right turn Crowley had mentioned took us from one upward-slanting corridor to another, then leveled off into a large gallery. Going forward slowly I could see little more than patches of green luminescence floating in an ocean of darkness. In the distance I could hear some chittering and clicking that sounded like drumsticks being hammered against each other by a very agitated musician.
"Caine, stop!" the radio hissed in my ear.
At Crowley's warning I came to a full stop. I felt the breeze from something moving past from right to left. Clicks and pops sounded closer, then stopped. I heard a creaking sound, like old leather being stretched. Two sharp clicks, like rocks being struck together to make a spark, exploded above my head. I started, then refroze.
Crowley's voice sounded in my earpiece. "Easy, Caine, easy. The one near you is only a worker. You won't smell like food to him, so don't worry. Stay calm. Don't shoot."
Like a ventriloquist, I subvocalized, which the earmike picked up with ease. "You can see these things? You can see in the dark?"
"It is a skill you can develop if you survive this. Stay still."
I drew a quiet breath in through clenched teeth. A thick, bitterly sweet odor like that of dead flowers washed over me and grew as the clicking became closer. I heard the sound again and again from up above me and to the right, but as I tried to see what it was, all I could make out was a shadow eclipsing distant patches of green moss.
A bead of sweat started at my right temple and slowly started to crawl down the side of my face. My right bicep started to quiver as the weight of the carbine began to vampirize its strength. The bulletproof vest I had on became clammy, and I found myself starting to overheat. More sweat appeared on my brow and one droplet coursed down between my eyebrows, along the edge of my nose, to sting my right eye.
The way my heart pounded, I felt certain the thing must have heard it. Because of Bat's remark, I imagined it as some huge ant, just waiting to catch me in its mandibles. Two huge scythe-blades mounted on its jaws would snap me in half. Not the way I expected to go at all. I knew if I could just shift the carbine's muzzle around I could pop the thing.
Then, suddenly, in a series of clicks and crunches, the thing went away. I let my breath out slowly. "Crowley, what the hell was that?"
"A Plutonian, I would imagine." His voice stopped for a moment and, in that pause, lost all the whimsy it had contained. "I don't like this. Forward 12 steps, turn left."
I followed his instructions to the letter and found myself close enough to another corridor that the moss-light let me see my team as they came in. "Crowley, what don't you like?"
The green light did not reflect from his black form.
"That worker was in a classic search pattern with its antennae, but it backed off before it touched you."
"Our luck."
"Or something called it away." He pointed further down the tunnel.
Marit took over the point position and led us to the third opening on the left. She produced a knife from a boot-sheath and started digging away at the wax-covered web-fiber panel blocking the hole. "It's six inches thick. It's like carving clay. There's some light, real light, on the other side."
Bat pulled a knife of his own and stabbed the eight-inch blade in at shoulder height. Wrapping both hands around the hilt, he started tugging backwards and walking from one side of the hole to the other. The wax-web peeled down like whale blubber being flayed from a humpback. Natch pulled the thick membrane back and Nero Loring ducked into the room first.
He wailed so loudly that I tore my earpiece out of my ear. I stooped below the cut Bat had made and found myself in a tiny chamber. Candles stood in a number of alcoves around the room, filling it with a normal golden light. If not for the room's irregular shape, the furnishings, which included two bookcases full of novels, would have caused me to believe it was a rather Spartan dorm room at some paramilitary private school. It hardly seemed a horrible prison and, dozing on the bed with a novel on her stomach, Nerys Loring hardly seemed in distress.
But then, from where I was standing, I could not see what had driven her father to his knees. He reached out for her and pulled her to him. Because she did not react when her father screamed, I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe she had been drugged, but when Nero reached out and hugged her 14-year-old body to him tightly, I saw and understood his anguish.
Like a bad toupee, her black scalp flopped back to hang at her neck like a hood on a jacket. The whole back of her s
kull had been ripped away and her brain had been stolen.
"No, no! She's not dead. Her body is still warm," her father moaned.
I turned toward Crowley and pointed at the bed. "This isn't possible. She had her brain removed and there's no blood? Can't be done."
"Of course it can." He snatched the knife from Bat's hand and grabbed my right wrist. In a slashing motion he drew the blade across the back of my hand, and I felt the sting of the blade. Looking down I saw the cut. It wasn't deep and wasn't particularly long, but it wasn't bleeding either.
"How?"
"I told you, this room, this area is special. Look at the candles." He pointed at one, then went close and tried to blow it out. The flame wouldn't even flicker. "They burn without being consumed. It is an aspect of this place."