Astronomy (10 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
Someone had dug an aircraft carrier out of the rock.
She looked closer as the clouds shifted over her head. Under the brightening moonlight, the biomorphic contours that had allowed the abyss to blend into the natural landscape showed themselves to be razor sharp—whoever had done this had used a scalpel.
Her knees started to tremble. “What happened up here?” She tried not to whisper. Whispering sounded weak and intimidated. She coughed and spoke louder. “What the hell happened up here?”
“A misalignment,” Malmagden said. He was quiet for a moment after that, as if getting out that one word had taken all his strength. Had it been up to him, he would have stopped there. He had to force himself to go on.
“The Faulkenberg laboratory was nothing more than a lensing instrument, designed to focus the tidal forces of a body of three billion solar masses oscillating at relativistic speeds. I was responsible for the actual lensing of the energies that poured from that breach,” he said. “A group of mathematicians, the Opal Group, was assigned the task of breaching the stress fractures in space-time through which this super-massive body normally travels. Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group researched the protocols for attracting this body, which determined the lensing platform’s stability and usefulness. Really, Leder is the man to talk with. He can give you the underlying principles better than I can.”
“Leder,” she hissed in exasperation, “is clinically insane.”
“To the contrary. Carl Leder is quite lucid. You categorize his analysis as crazy because it is beyond your experience.”
What had Leder described to her on that plane out of Denmark?
—A cognizant universe, born in fire and primordial density, expanding at relativistic speeds to the size of a proton, then an atom, then to a size large enough to encompass worlds. A cinder of exhausted intellect left behind at the center of this expansion, at once dreaming and intimately aware, malevolent and indifferent.
He had called out names Susan had known from her counter-research projects: The Blind Leviathan. The Daemon Sultan . . .
Susan felt the hairs rise on her forearms.
“Malmagden, you crazy—”
Azathoth.
She didn’t realize she had shoved Malmagden to the ground till Charley pushed her back.
“Do you know what they were doing up here? Do you know what they tried to do?”
Charley nodded at the pistol in her hand. “You don’t need that,” he said. She hadn’t realized it was out. Of course, Charley was only doing the sensible thing, protecting their prime witness. She must have seemed like a crazy woman.
“I’m all right.” She took a few deep breaths, closed her eyes a moment to clear her mind. All she saw was her favorite walk along the banks of the Charles River looking like this smoldering valley. “Like hell I am.” She shoved Malmagden to the ground again. Charley grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her away from him. He held on while she leaned over his shoulder to glare. “Do you know how lucky we were? Do you know what could have happened? Not just to the First Army, or the Eighth Air Force, or whomever you thought you’d take revenge on, but to the entire planet? Malmagden, you crazy bastard.”
Malmagden gave Charley a beseeching look. But Charley seemed to have latched onto what she was raving about. He might have been enjoying a few awful visions of his own. At some point Susan realized she was hanging onto him as tightly as he was to her.
Perhaps Malmagden realized this as well. He became suddenly talkative, confiding: “I am with you on this, believe me. I knew the chief administrator at this facility, a man named Jürgen Kriene. I warned him he was not prepared for a full power test of this device. I warned Reichsführer Himmler, who oversaw all our activities in Zentralbund. But the war effort was collapsing. Kriene convinced his superiors to move ahead with his reckless project.”
Malmagden held up his hands at the result.
“So, let me get this right,” Charley said, “they tapped into one of these stress fractures in space-time. They called forth Azathoth, and the tidal forces of Its passing washed over the laboratory, destroying the castle, the reservoir, the Artifact, everything . . .”
Malmagden shook his head. “The Artifact survived the catastrophe. It has been destroyed since.”
“How do you know that?” Susan did not believe this for a second. Still, she kept her pistol out, for purposes of encouragement.
“The Artifact was not a summoning device, but a—like a heat sink, or a lightning rod. It siphoned off energy into alien realms. Europe would have looked like this valley if the Artifact had failed.”
Malmagden hooded his eyes against the glare of moonlight. “There is one man who could have evaporated the Artifact in this manner,” he said. His lips peeled back into a leer. “Kriene!” he exclaimed. “I did not give him credit for sorcery on this level. He has surprised me.”
“Who is this Kriene person anyway?”
Malmagden made a dismissive gesture. “Jürgen Kriene is a dilettante. He is capable of the occasional gesture, as you can see. But he is a technocrat at heart. Everything he knows came from his betters.”
Malmagden referred to himself, of course.
Charley said, “Kriene is a friend of yours?”
“Ha! That is good. I will hang him by his testicles when I catch him. And then I will put that wheelchair of his into overdrive.”
“I don’t get it,” Susan said. “Even if Jürgen Kriene could do something like this,” she indicated the chasm before them, “why would he?”
“Because,” Malmagden laughed, as if amazed at her question, “
Das Unternehmen
is not ended. It has been duplicated somewhere. It comes to fruition. Do you not see?”
“This Artifact,” she said. “Kriene took it back with him to his new digs? As a sort of safety valve to prevent this from happening to him again?”
“Kriene has not the power to move it with magic. He hasn’t the knowledge of the black arts. He can only destroy it.”
“Naw, come on,” Shrieve said. “If Kriene has been up here, he’s seen what comes pouring out of the end of that fracture. Why would he destroy the only firewall in the world?”
“Is it not obvious? Jürgen Kriene is not developing a weapon.” Malmagden paused, as if he were only realizing the truth of this as he spoke the words. “He is fashioning a punishment for the entire world.”
Malmagden laughed with sudden malicious glee. He leaned back and shouted at the sky, “Jürgen, you are such a coward!”
Came an answering voice from the dark:
“And you, Krzysztof Malmagden, are a war criminal.”
Chapter Eight
S
USAN HAD A WILD IDEA THAT SHE WOULD
turn around and this Kriene, whoever he was, would be standing there, waiting to rebut Malmagden’s argument.
But it wasn’t Kriene. Lieutenant Illyenov was coming across the glass with a squad of soldiers and a pair of heavy machine guns.
Susan could guess what was happening. Something unearthly was coming. She heard a crash of rocks in the dark directly ahead of them. A curtain of dust silvered under the moon. Whatever they had tracked among the valley’s western cliffs had come around to attack from the rear. Illyenov’s men were establishing their eastern perimeter.
Somewhere on the far side of the Russian camp, the Lysander engine
wheek-wheek-wheeked
, coughed itself to life, rose to an even drone. The Russians had positioned it on the far side of the campfire, pointed in their direction. Susan looked back to see the flames flatten and stretch beneath the sudden wind. Plumes of oily smoke were already rolling across the glassified plain to meet them. An idea came to her, a bit from her Dunwich, Massachusetts, lectures. She started to get an idea what the Russians needed this smoke machine for.
She really hoped she was wrong.
“You know,” Illyenov said, “you press my Slavic hospitality to the breaking point.”
A kid pointed toward a promontory of rock overlooking the glassy lakebed, crowned by the wreckage of the Faulkenberg hydroelectric plant. This had been their destination. The kid wanted to know if they should carry on. Good cover up there. Lots of metal and concrete to hide behind. With a little time, they would have found a way up the cliffs and set up a nice crossing field of fire. Indeed, Susan tried to imagine what Illyenov was doing down here.
He had a bag of something that he eased gently to the ground. With a couple head-slaps and a few quick words, Illyenov directed his troops to form a defensive perimeter right here on the glass. Then he turned his attention to them.
“You did not tell me your friend was the great Krzysztof Malmagden. I had to eavesdrop on you till you said his name out loud. That is hardly the way comrades and war-time allies treat each other.”
“We’re here investigating a threat to the peace,” Susan said.
“With your friend the war criminal, you are worried about the peace?”
She winced a little. That sounded lame, even to her.
Illyenov turned a predatory smile on the German. “You are Krzysztof Malmagden,” he said.
Malmagden stepped back, touching his throat in the manner of an aging movie star. “Excuse me. Do we know each other?”
“You are the man who ran the dead people. You are the man with the ghouls.”
“I am afraid you have me confused with someone.” Malmagden turned toward Susan. “Tell him—”
Illyenov went for him with a bayonet coming up from below. Malmagden caught the Russian’s wrist, threw a forearm into his throat. They went down, locked together at hand and throat.
The machine gun crews looked up from their work. Susan went, Uh oh. She could see things going south in a hurry.
She showed them the Thompson. Maybe, she thought, they’ll remember what’s waiting for them just beyond the firelight. She knew what Malmagden would say to that: People love to hate. Give them a choice of saving the human race, or crowding around to watch one of their own beat up some German whose name they don’t even know, and the human race is doomed, of course.
Malmagden didn’t help things when he explained how his ghouls would rape every virgin in Russia. Illyenov found enough breath to describe how he would tie Malmagden’s entrails to the bumper of a truck and drag him back to Berlin.
Susan sighed. This was not proving productive. She pressed her pistol to the back of Illyenov’s head. “That pleasure may have to await another occasion,” she suggested.
Illyenov froze. “Do you know who you are protecting? Do you know what Krzysztof Malmagden’s ghouls have done throughout the Balkans?”
“Don’t think I’m not embarrassed about this.”
“Do you know what his ghouls did to the Russian agents they captured in Berlin?”
“Shut up now,” Susan suggested quietly.
She pulled him off Malmagden with the muzzle of her Walther under his chin. She had no idea what to do next. That was bad. When combined with foresight and planning, a gun is an asset to any heated conversation. When one has no plan, a gun merely draws unwanted attention and hostility.
She looked up to see every kid around them with his gun aimed right at her head.
“You shoot me, he dies too,” she called out in Russian.
Illyenov could barely contain his amusement.
“My soldiers despise me. You use me for a hostage, you are a dead woman.” He raised his chin just enough to clear her gun barrel.
“Fire at will,” he called.
Rocks and earth tumbled down the slope far above. The sound was not so loud as the ragged breathing in Susan’s ear, but it was sufficient. A strained quiet descended on the glassified plain. Eyes met eyes as the silence stretched.
A snap—closer this time, a whisking crash as a tree flew over the top of the crater and slid down the slope above, roots dragging boulders as it went.
Not far from the tree, a kid setting up one of the machine guns waved this way, to the left. He raised his hands to call something out—and then he was gone. His screams filled the darkness where he had stood, and then they too disappeared.
Illyenov’s Young Communist League ran forward to pour fire up the slope. Something waited for them in the darkness. At first, Susan saw only muzzle flashes from their Masin-Nagant rifles. Then she saw this reflection from the campfire just above their heads. Did they see it too? One of the gunners raised his rifle and turned, as if at a sound, then disappeared.
One heartbeat of silence followed. His mates stared around themselves in stunned realization. Whatever was out here, it was among them.
They started toward the hydroelectric station on the cliff. A sensible move. Collapsed iron and concrete had to be a better hiding place than out here in the open. Susan thought about joining them.
Illyenov roared at them to hold this position. They stood bewildered. This uncertainty lasted till the first wave of smoke arrived from the campfire.
A shape appeared in the smokestream, so close Susan might have walked into it just pacing around. And Christ, the thing was as large as a PT boat. It just stood there. If a human face really did ride atop that giant carapace, it might have been grinning.
No one moved. No one breathed.
The shape in the smoke seemed to gather itself up before their eyes. For no particularly reason, Susan found herself watching this one kid. He had his back turned. He knew what was happening; she could see him sneaking little looks over his shoulder. He simply couldn’t face it. For one moment, she was in his skin. She knew his terror as if it were her own—with his back turned, the thing in the smoke was a dream. The world’s many terrors remained mortal, comprehensible.
Then it came on.
Glass crunched, cracks spider-webbed out to the horizon, chips flew like small-caliber rounds. The machine-gun crews broke for the hydroelectric station. The kid she was watching took a glass shard through his thigh. He grabbed it and went down. Susan’s last sight of him, he was staring up at something only he could see. His eyes were white balls. His lips were split back from teeth clenched in terror. And then he too was gone.
His comrades never looked back. They were half-way to the cliffs before his cries had died away. Something large and smooth and silent furrowed the smoke close behind them. Whatever it was, it was fast. But not so fast as a pack of terrified teenage boys. For a moment, Susan thought they had beaten it.
But they had miscalculated.
Scale, she realized, is a hard thing to judge without landmarks. Even as Illyenov’s gun crews had dwindled in the smoky distance, the limestone cliffs seemed to grow larger.
The things she had taken for rocks at fifty yards seemed now to be boulders at one hundred. The boulders turned out to be cliffs. Illyenov’s soldiers won their foot race to the limestone wall only to realize that the nearest handhold was beyond their reach.
Susan knew what was coming. She could not look away. Even as Charley turned her toward the camp, she struggled to know their fate.
The smoke was thin that far out. The attack came from nothing more than an eddy in the darkness. It scythed the boys from the wall in a single unhurried stroke. Some turned to face it. Some pulled frantically at the rock above them. Three soldiers at the end were able to run a few yards.
They were gone before their cries arrived in Susan’s ears.
Illyenov paced back and forth. He shook his head to himself in amazement or disbelief. His face was fixed in this monkey smile of rage. Susan had seen commanders like Illyenov before, among the partisan units in Yugoslavia. If they felt privileged to spend the lives of their subordinates, they were also jealous of that privilege.
Even before Illyenov turned back to her, she knew what he wanted.
“You can’t kill Malmagden,” she warned him. “He’s in my custody.”
“Your custody?” He cocked his head at her like a wry uncle. “Tell me, Comrade Foreign Service Officer. If Malmagden is in your custody, where is he?”
Susan heard Charley swearing even before she turned around.
But he couldn’t be gone. She had saved his life just a few moments ago. Damn it, she seethed. He couldn’t be gone.
They stood alone in a circle of empty glass.
Bad enough he had disappeared. But Susan had been the Malmagden expert. She had been witness to all his tricks. This, she suspected, had been the real reason she was along on this ride at all.
Charley spotted movement a hundred yards to the east. They had passed the wreckage of the
Güterzug
freight locomotive; Malmagden must have been planning his escape since then. She could see him leaning from the shattered boiler as if catching his breath. He was turned toward a cleft at the north end of Faulkenberg Tal. The dam had been there. Perhaps whatever was left made for a traversible incline.
Illyenov picked a Masin-Nagant rifle off the glass. His eyes never left the figure at the train as he ejected a spent round and raised the muzzle.
“We need him,” Susan said. “Malmagden knows what happened up here.”
“Of course he knows what happened up here! Ask your John Dillinger what happened to all those banks. He might have surprising insights as well.”
Susan grabbed at his arm and he shooed her off. She grabbed again. Illyenov spun on her. Suddenly, she was staring down the barrel of his rifle.
“You put pistol on me once already,” he reminded her. “And I did not like that. How personal would you like this to be?”
Susan could not help a feeling of awkwardness. They had just done this a few minutes ago, hadn’t they? Some scenes did not bear repeating.
Charley Shrieve placed his Colt against Illyenov’s temple. To no effect. Illyenov held his eyes steady through his breech sight.
A sound passed beneath them—a pop, and then a squeal of fissuring glass. Illyenov lifted his foot as a fracture slid under it. A second crack came in from the lakeshore, just a little south of the hydroelectric plant.
The smoke was dense out there. It was denser than it had been just a moment before. Or maybe it was simply piling up against the bow shock of some large body coming this way, very fast.
Illyenov lowered his rifle. “You lead a charmed life, Comrade Foreign Service Officer. Perhaps your luck sustains you through next ten minutes.”
He reached into the bag and brought up gasoline bombs for each of them.
“I will kill Malmagden when we are done,” he said in a tone of mild reason. Susan did not bother to dispute this. By the way the glass trembled beneath her feet, she guessed she had moments to live anyway.
“There is an art to throwing gasoline bomb!” The shriek of fracturing glass was so loud that Illyenov had to yell to be heard. “You wait till your target is just within throwing range, and light rag on top. Tip the bottle forward—so. You want to keep the flame away from the bottle without spilling petrol. You want to burn creature, not yourself.”
A spotlight from the western face of the valley swung around to touch the flank of something too large to take in with a single beam. She watched in awe as the spotlight penetrated a gelatinous wall.
She fired into the front of the thing. It flinched slightly. It seemed to become aware of her, so that it tracked her as she moved away. She fired again. The thing moved toward her.
Charley heaved his first Molotov cocktail against the side of the creature. Flames lent it sudden volume. Susan would have stepped back to take the whole of it in. There was no time for that. She snapped open her Ronson. She thumbed the ignition wheel, once, twice, three times—to no effect. The flint was damp, or she was nervous. Either way, she knew she was dead.
Illyenov threw his gasoline bomb into the creature’s crablike maw. It bellowed, loud as a locomotive in labor. The roar startled Susan. She dropped the bottle. It crashed across the ground. Suddenly she was covered in gasoline and broken glass, and this flaming mountain of flesh was rolling her way.
Charley Shrieve stepped up next to her with his Colt. He fired right into it from a little more than arm’s distance. A tentacle unfurled from the dark and took his hand. The gun clattered to the ground. It levered Charley down, right beneath its many whipping and scything mouthparts. With his free hand, he reached back for his gun. But his gun was gone.
Susan remembered the charcoal drawings by the bonfire—that awful parody of a human face leering down from the carapace. She sensed vulnerability in its most human feature.
She raised her Walther to fire into the humanesque mask riding atop the flaming hump. It occurred to her that she was covered in gasoline. She saw her muzzle flash catch a bit of vapor from her clothes—saw herself lit in a halo of flames.
Even as she lowered her pistol, a second image overpowered the first. A middle-aged woman, waking every silent morning to the feel of that unsqueezed trigger.