I felt the void in my soul close. I smiled at Mickey. "C'mon, let's get some supplies together and then we'll be off."
"To the bad place."
"Right, once really quick now, and then, very soon, again..."
Mickey's eyes narrowed. "We will make everyone good?"
The idea of making a Dark Lord good struck me as likely as Dan Quayle staging a Nixonesque political resurrection. "We'll do our best, Mickey." If not, we'll make a Dark Lord dead and that, in my book, is good in and of itself.
Crowley and I both realized that the most difficult part of the penetration of the secret construction site would be keeping Mickey in line. Five-year-olds are not known for their attention span. Had Crowley and I been alone, we would have just become two workers at the site and entered it along with everyone else. While Mickey might have passed for an adult worker because of his size, his wide-eyed wonderment and propensity to giggle would betray him in an instant.
The plan we decided to adopt was as outrageous as it was daring. Using Sin's knowledge of Build-more and his connections with people who could manufacture Build-more identification cards, we produced one for me that billed me as Simon "Mike" Michaels from the Auditing and Fiscal Procurement Department. Sin said project managers considered AFP the corporate equivalent of the IRS, and would sooner give lepers full body massages than stay in my presence overlong.
For Mickey and Crowley, we came up with another set of identities. Mickey was to play Mickey, a retarded young man who had the mind of a 5-year-old. Crowley became Damien Collins, the trustee of a substantial trust fund settled upon the boy by his father's family. Each of them were given visitor badges, and Mickey had a nametag that read "Hello, I'm Mickey!" on the lapel of his blue suit jacket. We swapped the Heidi Stiletto for a more benign design featuring a cartoon mouse that both pleased Mickey and made it much easier for him to remember his new role.
By the time we had obtained our IDs, changed clothes and gotten a little sleep, Jytte had pinpointed the construction site as being just a little south and east of Skull Mountain in the Nevada desert. That placed it within the old Department of Energy test site for underground nuclear explosions. I doubted that they were using one of the holes blown by a nuke for their facility, but the location doubtlessly cut down on the number of casual visitors.
We took the Lorica CV-27 Peregrine from Phoenix all the way to Las Vegas, then rented a Range Rover II and headed north on 1-95. Forty miles out of Indian Springs, we turned off north and rumbled over 15 miles of twisty mountain roads to the little hamlet of Mercury. The Rover handled the road fine, but I knew our journey had been made much easier because the roadway had clearly been enlarged very recently.
Mercury should have been a ghost town. Most of the buildings dated from before the last century, back when silver mining provided the wealth that drove the community. When the mines in the area played out, it had begun to die, only to spring up again in the post-Depression era as a winter haven for those who did not like the idea of shoveling snow. Newer buildings outnumbered old, but their condition was little better than those built before the 20th century.
The nuclear tests in middle of the last century all but killed it off again, leaving only the stubborn or foolhardy to reside there. With the construction project, though, a new prosperity hit the area. Mercury became a boomtown again with a few of the buildings sporting new coats of paint and hastily created signs to let the construction workers know these were brothels and saloons. These colorful buildings made the whole town look as if it were a half-colorized movie, with everything else done in the aged sepia tone of dirt and adobe.
We arrived in the middle of the night. As a result, beyond the hills that served as a backdrop to the town, we saw an artificial dawn to the north. I pointed the Rover toward it, threading our way carefully through the crowds of men wandering back and forth across Mercury's main street. Another 20 miles by road beyond Mercury, we came around a bend and saw Pygmalion's new base for the first time.
Even having seen the plans for it, I was not prepared for the sight of the whole thing. Because of our perspective, the project reminded me of some mechanistic ant farm. A huge hole had been gouged out of the earth and, because massive equipment had to be installed, it had been left open. Massive banks of lights — more than enough to light a dozen Wrigley Fields — turned day into night at the site, which had to be a total reversal for workers from Eclipse. The building itself was being constructed from back to front, bottom to top, with the lowest two floors already complete and hidden from prying eyes by concrete walls. The rest of the building already had the floors poured and, in certain areas, looked to have been finished.
Crowley looked over at me and shook his head. "It's incredible. Out here, in this desert, he could have a couple of army divisions in that thing and no one would ever know."
I had to agree with Crowley's assessment. The steel-girder outline for the superstructure looked positively puny compared to the rest of the underground facility.
When complete, the above-ground portion of the project would look like a small office building or a very rich person's dream house built far away from the pressures of civilization. I had no doubt that after the hole had been filled in and the desert landscaping had been restored, no one would give it a second thought.
I pointed to the high-tension wires coming in from the south. "I guess the geothermal generators are not on-line yet. That must be drawing power from Hoover Dam."
"Agreed, though blowing the lines may not take the facility off-line, it might just be that they've not powered up the 'therms because MacNeal is getting a kickback on the power he's using and billing to Pygmalion, not because they are not functional."
"Good point." I braked as we came down the hill and hit the first checkpoint. A man in a red-plaid flannel shirt yawned and looked squint-eyed at my identification. He waved us on through without comment, so I headed off on the straight and very level road to the second checkpoint, it lay just beyond a makeshift parking lot, and I gathered workers left their vehicles outside the construction site itself.
An armed, paramilitary guard in a blue-and-gold Build-more uniform waved me to stop and roll down the window. I did so with a smile and presented my identification. "Evening, Mr. Kwan. Quiet night?"
The guard glanced at my ID, then up at my face. "Yes, sir, it is quiet." He looked beyond me at Crowley and Mickey. "I need their IDs."
"How silly of me, of course." I handed him the tags he requested, then smiled slyly. "As you can see, Damien, we have very alert and diligent security personnel. They are worth more than every cent we pay them."
Subtle though my hint was, Kwan stiffened when he got it. He handed the ID cards through the window. "They seem in order. You can park..." he began to explain, looking back toward the lot, but I looked forward toward the building and he followed my line of sight,"... over there near the project manager's trailer. Mr. Preston is running things during this shift, and I'm sure he'll want to talk with you."
"Thank you, Mr. Kwan, I appreciate your help."
I heard him say, "Glad to be of service," but his eyes told me he hoped I would forget him the second he passed out of sight.
I parked behind the Ford-Revlon Elite beside the trailer, and the three of us alighted from the car. Crowley and Mickey remained beside it, in clear view of the trailer's window. I mounted the steps quickly, knocked once lightly, then pulled the door open and entered the narrow project brain-center.
A man in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows looked at me from his vantage point by the window. "Bill Preston. You're...?"
"Michaels from AFP. I need some hardhats to take them on a tour of the project."
Preston frowned. "No one told me about a funding tour."
I gave him an easy if-you-were-meant-to-know-you-would smile. "This is a very quiet little visit. You didn't hear this from me, but that young man could quite possibly be the illegitimate son of a certain ex-vice-president and
a TV journalist."
The construction chief looked back out the window. "Right height, but he looks too smart. You'd think the vice-president would have more things to do than get caught up in anything dealing with a TV personality."
"You would think so, wouldn't you?" I let my voice drop into a conspiratorial whisper. "You know the VP was big on family values, so his family did the right thing. They settled a big trust fund on the kid to take care of him and keep him out of sight. Damien Collins is his trustee. Turns out he's a chip off the old block — body of a man with the mind of a 5-year-old."
Preston snorted. "Ignorance breeds true."
"So it seems." I began to wonder how Sinclair had escaped having his father's sensibilities, but I cut off that rumination as troublesome. "I want to give them a quick run-through. The kid likes flashing lights and that sort of high-tech stuff, so I'll be taking him everywhere."
"Need a guide?"
I forced a frown, then sheepishly withdrew it in place of a slight smile. "I wouldn't want to take you away from productive work, would I?"
"No, no, not at all." He started to point to a shelf of hard-hats, then came around from the blueprint table to pull three off for me. As he did that, I smoothed down the blueprint and saw a large blue splotch toward the west end that read "Fair Lady Electronics."
Preston saw what I was looking at and smiled nervously. "That section of the project has been finished ahead of schedule. No overruns."
"Excellent. Don't worry, Mr. Preston, I'm not here to audit you. At this time." I nodded to him and took the white plastic hats. "I appreciate your cooperation."
"If there is anything I can do..." He tried to smile, then looked concerned when a hat brushed my jacket back enough to show him the Colt Krait in my shoulder holster. "Ah, wearing a gun might make some of the boys on the site kind of nervous."
I raised an eyebrow. "More so than a man from AFP?"
"Ah, no, ah, probably not."
"I appreciate your concern, Mr. Preston. You might not believe it, but some people in Build-more don't like folks from AFP. I like to feel secure."
"I can understand that, sir, the secure part, that is."
"Indeed, I thought you would. Carry on, Mr. Preston."
I closed the trailer door behind myself and descended the metal steps. Tossing one hat to each of my companions, I donned mine and headed in toward the center of the base. Away from the trailer, I told Crowley, "Fair Lady Electronics put in several sections of the project. Looks like they have a city-block-sized area on each floor, located approximately beneath the helipad on the surface. I'd like to think that's what we're looking for, but I can't believe Pygmalion would be so stupid as to use that again as a name for a group he has doing business here on Earth."
"You're forgetting, my friend, that Dark Lords tend to be arrogant in the extreme. When you take someone as unimaginative as Nicholas Hunt and give him unlimited power, he becomes enamored of his own little inside jokes. What he thinks is clever is really trite. He does what is ultimately stupid because he wants someone to figure things out so they can appreciate how clever he really is."
"Like movie directors making cameo appearances in movies..." I offered.
"Or authors writing themselves into books or, worse yet, using characters to mouth and espouse the writer's views on a subject. It's a form of narcissism they defend as creativity, but it's really a cheap trick that feeds their egos." The occultist shrugged. "Pygmalion sees himself as an artiste of sorts and wants to orchestrate everything. Symbols mean a lot to him, hence the naming of his companies."
Our conversation went on hold as we mounted the gantry to the fourth level of the construction area. Most of the workers ignored us, making the most difficult part of our trek pulling Mickey away from wanting to watch welding operations. We managed that without too much trouble and approached the Fair Lady section of the project. Not unexpectedly, a couple of Build-more security guards stood in the area. They appeared distracted, which bothered me a bit, but as they did not challenge us and had not yet shoved clips into their FN-LAR assault rifles, I assumed our covers had not been broken.
We slipped into the Fair Lady area and Crowley coughed lightly. "We're definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Look at this."
What I saw impressed me as well. The whole Fair Lady section formed a shaft that ran from surface to bottom in the facility. While the area was square, a central cylinder roughly 50 feet in diameter linked each level. A guard rail, finished in the same flat, black matte that marked this whole portion of the project, kept people away from a dangerously long drop and surrounded the cylinder entirely except at the northern- and southernmost points.
At those two places, 12-foot-wide ramps led up at a 30° angle for about 25 feet, then leveled off 10 feet above the level of the floor. There they connected to a 20-foot diameter disk made of the same synthetic, insulating black coating that covered the walls and floors in the cylinder stations. The ramps held the disk firmly in the center of the cylinder, but the gap around the cylinder edge still made for a long fall if anyone on the disk was not careful.
Running perpendicular to the ramps, a blue crystal lattice appeared to have grown up out of the disk's midline. I could see no seam between the disk and the crystals, but I hardly thought they were made of the same material. I could see no structure within the crystal, but somehow it had grown up into a hollow rectangle with rounded corners both inside and out. Twenty-five feet long and half again as high, it appeared to have been made all of one piece and naturally faceted, because I could see no signs of workmanship.
I turned to ask Crowley what it was, but he had already moved around toward the east to a control bank, it looked more complicated than anything I would have imagined in a facility built in America, for the buttons had no icons to suggest their use. As I studied it more closely, I seemed to recall having seen something similar to it before, and I suddenly recalled a dimensional gate control panel I had seen and used in Plutonia. "Is that what I think it is?"
Crowley frowned, "It's meant to look like it, but it doesn't really work." Each of the buttons on the 10-by-10 grid glowed with one of the colors that corresponded to the mnemonic Roy G. Biv: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. I knew that after violet came ultra-violet, which I couldn't see, and then the "off position. Selecting the correct pattern of lights would program the dimensional gate to link to another gate. If that remote gate was receptive, stepping through the gate would instantly transport a person to that other point.
The occultist punched the buttons through a new color pattern. I glanced at the gate and saw nothing happen. Crowley waited for a moment, then reset the original pattern and shrugged. "This thing has power running through it, but it cannot interrogate a remote gate. I punched up the code for the gate at Pygmalion's place. I should have gotten a new pattern on the board that I would have had to complete so I could travel there, but nothing."
I pointed at the crystal rectangle. "So is that a dimensional gate or not?"
He shrugged. "I think so, and I think it's operational, but I don't know why it would be. In any event, if it is, the coding is in that crystal and it only goes one place." He reached beneath the right side of the console, then nodded. "Power switch is in the "on" position."
Mickey scowled. "Does it go to the bad place?"
I nodded. "I think we'd best find out."
I loosened the Colt Krait in its holster and saw Crowley do the same with the Beretta M9 he had chosen to bring on the expedition. From the start, we had known we would have to try to go through any dimensional gate we could find, and would have preferred to be loaded with heavy weapons and explosives. Unfortunately, the way we had to get into the base precluded that, so the two of us settled for using pistols that carried Teflon-coated, armor-piercing bullets. Hardly subtle, but if things got nasty, subtle was not much of a concern.
I led the way up the ramp and moved toward one edge. Crowley moved to the other, leaving Mickey betwe
en us. "On three, gentlemen," I instructed them. "One... two...three."
Stepping through a dimensional gateway is normally a disorienting experience. Colors flashed before my eyes, but that came from the transition from a dark cylinder to the bright sunlight that greeted us on the other side. The external heat also spiked and could have led me to believe we had just exchanged night for day in the Arizona desert, but the air smelled different and felt even less humid. While experiencing none of the discomfort dimensional gating usually causes, I knew we were far away from Earth.
It took my eyes a couple of seconds to compensate for the shift from dark to light. When vision returned, I found myself standing on one platform of a whole tower created from the blue gemstone that made up the gates in the Nevada base. I looked down at my feet and saw the disk on which I stood had been coated with the black, no-skid covering as back on the other side, and I could not be 100% certain the same disk with the same rectangle was not existing in both places at the same time.
Out beyond the tower, as far as I could see to the horizon, a city built of black-purple obsidian rose up out of a black sand desert. While some of the outlying buildings seemed little more than shelters constructed like houses of cards from stone slabs, the hub of the city was very much a work of art. Each building appeared not so much built as sculpted, and I had no doubt that from the air the effect would be as stunning as an Aztec calendar stone or a primitive sand painting.