Outlanders 53 - Infinity Breach, page 14
“That’s solved that problem,” Grant muttered to himself.
As if hearing Grant’s words, the angels turned—their movements like flocking birds, heads moving as one unit—to look at the doorway where the humans watched. The lead angel, the one whom Kane had tagged as a female, smiled, such benevolence pouring from her like a physical force, lapping against the onlookers like a wave.
“The children,” the angel said, her beautiful mouth opening but the lips never moving in that shining white face. “Welcome.” Then her mouth closed and she smiled again, and behind her the other angels smiled, too.
Simona Jurist left the others, stepping forward, transfixed by what she saw. She walked back into the room, striding up to the angels on her long, sapling legs. “You’re real,” was all she could think to say.
“This garden is yours,” one of the other angels said. The voice sounded more masculine, though the features seemed androgynous. “Child.”
Jurist reached for the lead angel then, her hand touching the fiercely glowing robes that she wore. The angel’s smile grew wider, and she looked upon the tattooed woman with loving eyes, a mother to its infant. Then, with no warning, the angel’s smile disappeared, and a look of horror crossed her beauteous face.
“Impurity discovered,” the angel said, and the others repeated the words like a choir.
It was the work of only an instant then, a second, perhaps two. The seven angels, Heaven’s number, circled Simona Jurist, their dazzling bright robes swishing in their wake. Jurist turned this way and that, wondering what was happening as the angels closed in around her.
“What is it?” Jurist asked. “I don’t understand…”
Ignoring her pleas, the angels reached out to her, placing the glowing white palms of seven white hands upon her, their eyes fixed on their subject.
Simona Jurist began to scream.
Chapter 15
“What th—?” Carver spit, hurrying back through the doorway and into the circular control room as Simona Jurist began to shriek in agony.
Kane grabbed the man, pulling him back from the open doorway.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Carver snapped at Kane.
“Could ask you the same question,” Kane shot back, barring the way into the room as he glared at Carver.
Behind Kane, through the open doorway, Carver could see the seven angels swirling around Jurist’s form in their eerie dance, their outstretched palms brushing against her. Even as he watched, Jurist’s eyes rolled up into her skull while her mouth remained open in a hideous scream that just went on and on and on.
“We have to help her,” Carver told Kane, struggling to push the ex-Mag aside. When Kane didn’t move, Carver raised his hand, balling it into a fist. “I’m warning you…”
Grant stepped in then, grabbing Carver’s wrist as the ex-Mag swung the first blow. “Carver, we need our weapons,” Grant told him, his voice level and calm. “We need them now.”
“I can’t authorize that,” Carver began, but the words seemed to tail off as his attention was drawn to the control-room doorway once more.
Within, Simona Jurist was glowing a bright, bloody red like an angry volcano, her scream wailing forth from a mouth held so wide it looked as if it might tear open. The fight drained from Carver’s body, and Kane peered over his shoulder to observe what happened next. Jurist screamed as the angels’ snow-white hands played across her, and her body seemed to flake away, starting from her booted feet and working upward through her long, black-clad legs.
Kane had never heard anyone scream for so long without taking breath. In fact, none of them had. But Jurist held that shrill, painful note as her body broke apart as easily as gossamer, disappearing like spume on the waves. It was as if her body had become stuck screaming, like the key of some hideous, poorly tuned musical instrument being held down, jammed in place. The burning, or whatever it really was, made Jurist half a person, then less, as it worked over her hips and up through her torso, disintegrating her chest. And still she screamed relentlessly, far beyond anything a human breath could achieve, the sound like something artificially looped. The disintegration reached Jurist’s shoulders, then the beautiful curve of her long, fine neck. Beneath her head there was nothing now, and yet her mouth continued screeching that impossible shriek.
Kane watched in horror as Simona Jurist’s neck swirled to nothingness, her lower jaw burned away, and then upward through her nose, her eyes, destroying any evidence of that foreboding cobra tattoo that she wore over her equine face. Then just the scalp remained, the roots where her hair connected to her skin. The hair itself bleached to white, then became nothing. For a moment more, Jurist’s pained scream continued, echoing throughout the Antarctic complex in sheer terror. Finally, fully seven seconds after Simona Jurist had ceased to exist, her terrible cry ceased, too.
Carver was still looking through the doorway, mouth agog, watching as the glowing angel forms remained in place, circling the empty space where Simona Jurist had stood just seconds before. “You need your weapons,” he said in a monotone. Then, still clearly in shock, he turned to Grant. “You’ll get them, Grant. I’ll see to it now. I want an angel for the consortium.”
Grant nodded. “Best we continue this discussion elsewhere, Magistrate,” he said, hoping that his use of the man’s old title would trigger the disciplined reaction they would need if they were to get out of there alive.
“Right,” Carver agreed vacantly. He pawed at his hip holster, pulling out a reconditioned Sin Eater. It was an older version of the weapon that Kane and Grant habitually carried, and it lacked the folding mechanism that was used to store the modern model in the wrist holster.
Kane urged everyone back from the open doorway, hurrying them down the narrow corridor. “Let’s get moving, then,” he shouted.
Carver shushed Kane for a moment, waving him aside. Then he raised his voice, bellowing an order to everyone within earshot, his voice resounding off of the metal walls of complex. “This is Carver,” he shouted. “New plan, people. A bonus and triple wages to anyone who bags me one of those…those glowing things. Dead or alive.”
Kane grabbed Carver’s arm and hurried the man down the corridor. Was he serious? Had he just put a price on an angel’s head?
IN THE CIRCULAR control room, the angels stepped away from the spot where Simona Jurist had been, turning as one to look at the fallen body of Dr. Winterslow.
“There were impurities in the child,” the first angel said, astounded at the revelation. Her name was Abariel.
“Corrupted,” one of the others replied in a voice like a song. His name was Damiel.
Another angel spoke then, the beautiful one called Abariel, her voice like a river glade. “Not all of the children. That cannot be.”
“We must test them,” Damiel said.
“Judge them,” the angel Bateliel agreed. “Each in turn.”
One of the glowing angels, this one with a tangle of locks flowing past his shoulders, crouched before the corpse of Dr. Winterslow, touching his hand against the late doctor’s face. The angel’s name was Domos.
“This one has no spark,” Domos stated, the words like the flapping of a bird’s feathered wing. “It is not his time, yet his spark is missing. I cannot locate it.”
“Is he corrupted?” Damiel asked in his voice of song.
Domos considered the question for a long time, pressing his hand harder against the corpse’s cooling flesh. “I cannot tell. There are impurities,” he decided. “It is difficult. He has no spark. He should have his spark.”
“His spark is gone,” Bateliel said, the licking of flame in the sound of his voice. “We shall find others and judge.”
“What if they are all impure?” Abariel asked. “What if all of the children have been corrupted?”
“Then we shall cleanse the system,” Bateliel stated, “and the cycle shall start anew.”
“Cleanse the system,” the others agreed.
As the angels were reaching their conclusion, several of the braver Millennial Consortium men edged into the room, their Calico subguns thrust before them.
While most of the consortium men had made their way to safer cover when they had seen Simona Jurist disintegrate, hoping to box in the angels, these three had stayed. Their leader, a man called Irons, had egged them on, encouraging them to return to the control room. “You heard Carver,” Irons had growled. “Come on, we can take them.”
Irons and his two colleagues, Blythe and Denning, lined up their weapons and began to spray the seven glowing figures with 9 mm bullets.
“Kneecap them,” Irons instructed. “Shoot to wound.”
The angels watched as the first of the bullets raced across the room toward them. Beautiful Abariel stepped forward, watching the bullets fly through the air, wondering at their purpose. To Abariel, the bullets looked like insects, their shells a lustrous silver. She saw them moving through the air and thought them pretty, shiny, new things. And so Abariel reached out with a chalk-white, glowing hand and plucked the first bullet from the air. It moved so quickly that it stung, burning her fingers as they clasped at it. She had misjudged its speed, having never seen a living thing move so fast as this. To her angel eyes it moved slower or faster depending on how she interpreted it, but it still burned when it was plucked from the air, such was its speed.
Behind Abariel, the other angels were doing similar things, snatching at the silver projectiles flying through the air, gazing at them in abject wonder.
Close to the communications array, his finger clamped on the trigger of his Calico subgun, Irons saw the first angel step forward, a blur of light, straight into the path of his attack like some kind of simpleton. The blur of the moving angel was so fast, and then she stood stock-still as Irons sprayed her with bullets. She stood, holding something between her fingers, gazing at it with such curiosity that it seemed childlike, almost ludicrous.
Irons saw then what it was that this beautiful, magnificent being held: a bullet, impossibly plucked out of the air. Her examination of the bullet concluded, the angel looked up at Irons with those eerie, blue-white eyes, and an indulgent smile crossed the perfect mouth of her white face.
Irons’s finger was still clenched down on the trigger of his gun, even as the ammo clip ran dry and the firing mechanism locked in place, waiting to be refilled. He stood there, holding the gun on the angel as that wondrous vision flipped her hand almost languidly, like someone moving through water, and returned Irons’s first bullet back to him.
The tossed bullet hurtled through the air, cutting a path back to the nose of the Calico, driving down the barrel and beyond, until it burst the back of the gun and drilled onward, through Irons’s shoulder at the far end of the outthrust weapon.
Irons screamed in pain as his shoulder erupted in blood under the impact of the bullet at the same time as the subgun shattered in his grip. He staggered backward on unsteady legs, dropping the useless subgun to the metal plate flooring of the circular control room.
The angel Abariel watched in wonder. She had returned the shiny insect to its nest, its hive, and yet it had not stopped there, had not landed. It had traveled on and damaged one of the children. This was unexpected. This was a new thing. Abariel found it fascinating.
Abariel strode closer to the fallen form of Irons, though her bare feet never touched the floor itself. She watched, fascinated, as the child reached for something at his hip, pulling a short metallic rod from a holder there and waving it toward her. She smiled, for this was also a new thing.
Lying on his back, Irons whipped out the Sigma pistol as the glowing angel—the one who had plucked his bullet from the air and somehow used it to destroy his own gun, and his shoulder in the process—hovered ominously nearer. An insistent voice in his head was urging him not to hurt the angels, for they were angels—reason enough. But they had killed Simona Jurist, he reminded himself, and with that he pulled at the Sigma’s trigger, blasting four 9 mm bullets at the approaching form. He watched in horror as the angel’s limbs blurred, and she placed her left hand in the path of the racing bullets.
THE ANGEL Abariel saw now that the metal cylinder that the child had produced was another nest, full of fluttering, silver-shelled insects like the first ones the child had tried to give to her. Her eyes could slow time’s input, slow it to such a degree that everything would stop or, if she chose to focus on a specific thing, that one event would slow while everything else raced on around her. She slowed the movement of the four silver shells, peering inquisitively, wondering where their wings were. They had none.
Abariel reached forward, remembering the way the first insect had burned her flesh, and she carefully snagged them from behind, hooking them up out of their flight path, grasping them in her palm. Their energy dulled as she grasped them and, disappointed, she brought them closer to study their bland forms. They were long silver things with pointed snouts—perhaps a sting? They had movement but, when she tried to sense them, they had no discernible spark. Perhaps they were not alive after all. Strange, Abariel thought, that children would give these gifts of dead insects. It had to have meaning, though, for all things had meaning.
Abariel dropped the insects to the floor, where they sang against the metal there in pleasing, sweet chirrups as she strode on toward the fallen child with the wounded shoulder. All the while her feet never quite reached the floor.
IRONS WATCHED as the glowing white angel plucked his bullets from the air, peered at them for a second, then tossed them aside. Then, horrified, he saw the angel hover closer, a beatific smile on her perfect face. “I have no insects for you, child,” the angel said, sounding apologetic in a voice that ran like sluicing water.
Then the angel Abariel reached for Irons, placing her hand, palm flat, against his forehead where he struggled on the floor. His pulse quickened, his breathing came in ragged gasps and, against his will, Irons felt his bowels vent as the angel touched him. She began her analysis, searching for impurity in the child’s shell.
Around the circular room, the screams of Blythe and Denning rent the air as they, too, fell beneath the curiosity of the angels. As the millennialists lay there, wounded by their own bullets, which the angels had sent back to their housings in the Calico subguns, the seven glowing beings moved toward them, preparing to cast judgment.
Their voices echoed around the circular room as the angels touched the three fallen soldiers in unison.
“Impurity discovered.”
It sounded like a choir singing of the glory of Heaven.
Once Irons, Blythe and Denning had been judged, the seven angels moved as one, exiting the control room in the same instant via different doors.
Domos hovered out into a narrow corridor to the northeast of the mobile base, his flowing locks swishing behind him. In the metal-walled, low-ceilinged corridor he was immediately accosted by the next wave of Millennial Consortium guardsmen. Their squad leader, a bearded man called Chuck Allen, shouted the order the second the glowing figure passed through the doorway. Behind him, there was a phut sound as the compressed air of the launcher was released, blasting a net at the angel Domos.
Domos watched the net flying through the air toward him, perplexed at its purpose. At first he took it for a bird, a strange kind of bird that flew in a clump, its wings spreading as it took off. Then he saw that the netting was insentient, all holes and lines, spreading out through some trick of its launch.
The net fell about Domos then, wrapping around his willowy, glowing form, cinching his arms to his sides as it tautened. Domos smiled uncertainly, wondering at the sensation of the net upon him. It tickled.
Squad leader Allen stepped out from cover, his Calico M-960 held firmly in two hands, trained in the direction of the captured angel, a savage smile on his face. The angel was trapped, and yet he didn’t struggle, didn’t even appear uncomfortable. He just hovered there, upright as though standing, his skin and clothes exuding that fierce glow, the pure light of Heaven.
Behind Allen, his troops were stepping out of the shadows, their own blasters held at the ready as their leader paced toward the angel.
“We got one,” Allen heard one of his men shout excitedly from behind him.
Yeah, that’s right, Allen thought. “We got you, you bastard,” he snarled, jabbing the muzzle of the Calico against the angel’s robed gut.
Domos looked at the child and wondered whether this was a game. Children liked games, he remembered; perhaps they desired to play. “Come closer, child,” Domos said in a voice that sounded like the waves lapping against a sandy beach. “I will not hurt you.”
Allen looked up at the angel’s pale eyes, his pupils narrowing as he peered at the light. The angel had spoken, his mouth open, the words tumbling forward with such beauty but his lips never moving. It was as if the angel spoke to him in his head.
In his eight years working for the Millennial Consortium, Allen had seen a lot of strange sights. He had been part of field teams that had uncovered tombs and missile silos, unearthed dead bodies and gene freaks, creatures that belonged to another time. This luminescent creature, however, hovering before him like a chandelier, exuding beauty from every pore, this was something he had never imagined he might experience. It was like a tune stuck in his head, a wonderful, melodic tune.
“Come, child,” Domos repeated in a note of ultimate purity. “Come closer.”
The words were in Allen’s head, blocking his other thoughts, overriding them. He stepped closer to the angel, his elbow bending to accommodate the length of the Calico subgun that he had shoved against this beautiful creature’s torso. The thing—the angel—was trapped in the net. The angel couldn’t hurt him, he assured himself. And it wasn’t just the voice in his head; he really wanted to get closer to this beautiful creature, to feel his touch.
“It’s doing something to Allen,” one of the other men in the corridor called. “It’s tricking him.”
