Devil's Vortex Read online

  And so they did. Two lines of men filed out of the mirror at opposite ends of the ellipse. They had helmets with black face shields, gray and shiny black body armor that looked to Ryan to be some kind of plastic, and black weapons like long, skinny black eggs with a sort of notch scooped in the bottom where the handgrip was. They formed up eight men strong on either side of the road, weapons ready, with a six-or seven-foot gap in the middle.

  Meanwhile Ryan’s friends, apart from Jak, came up to stand with him, keeping close to the wag in case they had to dive for cover.

  A pair of people stepped out. Both were tall, thin and dressed in gleaming white in no doubt deliberate contrast to the faceless black-armored sec troops. One was male, one female. The woman sported blond hair cropped so close to her head it looked almost silver in the waning daylight. The man’s head was shaved bald.

  A strange sound like a whistling scream came out of Doc. It sounded almost like a hurt or frightened child.

  “It is them!” he shrieked in horror. “The whitecoats! They have come to take me back!”

  He fell down next to the cab of the wag, curling into a fetal ball of fear and sobbing.

  “Are you with Operation Chronos?” Krysty asked the white-clad pair.

  “You know about those amateurs?” the man asked curiously. “No, we are not. And we have no interest in this demented old man. Now, lay down your weapons.”

  Ryan laughed harshly. “Not likely. A person might construe an entry like the one you just made as downright unfriendly.”

  The bald, skinny dude laughed. “Do you actually believe your primitive firearms can harm us?”

  “Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact,” Ryan said. “We banged heads against your kind before, once or twice. We’re willing to take our chances.”

  “You may take for granted,” the gaunt woman said, “that if we need to summon further resources in order to destroy you, that lies within our capabilities.”

  “But it is not you we are interested in,” the man said. “Which fact you have to thank for being alive at this moment.”

  He turned his pale blue gaze toward Mariah, who stood beside Krysty, holding her hand.

  “You, child,” he said, in what Ryan reckoned he thought was a reassuring voice. A quick glance sideways told him it hadn’t worked any better on the girl than it had on him. “Come with us.”

  “No,” Mariah said.

  “But we can give you—opportunity.”

  “I want to stay with my friends.”

  “You can help build a world of peace and order for everyone—not over the course of a century more of suffering, as our projections say it will take now. But in a matter of mere decades. Or even a handful of years!”

  “I don’t trust you. You’re whitecoats.”

  “Forget the silly superstitions you’ve been taught by those around you,” the woman said. “We represent science, order and hope. Look around at these people you’re with. They represent filth, decay and random violence. What do you expect the likes of them to think of us? They are incapable of understanding us, with their dim and rudimentary minds.”

  “They’re my friends,” Mariah insisted. “They’re not like you say at all. I don’t think I like you much.”

  “But you belong with us, child,” the woman said, dropping her voice low, into what Ryan reckoned she had to think were persuasive tones. To his ears it just made her sound like a different kind of threat. “Where do you think you come from, if not our laboratories? Do you remember who your mother was? Your father? Somehow you came to be abandoned in this dirty, dangerous world, all alone. Now we have come to take you home.”

  As she extended a pallid hand toward the now openly trembling Mariah, the woman seemed unaware of the snake-eyed side look her male companion shot her.

  “But I know who my friends are! And I’ll never go with you!”

  The man uttered a sharp, hard yip of laughter, like a crazy fox. “What makes you think you have a choice? Security, secure the girl—unharmed—and dispose of the rest. I had imagined some of them might have possible value, as objects of study if nothing else, but I see that they are nothing but defective specimens in need of culling.”

  Ryan caught the gist of what the skinny baldhead bastard was saying. “Blast them!” he ordered, raising his Scout longblaster.

  Taking quick aim at the male whitecoat through the ghost ring sight, he squeezed off a shot. But even as he shouldered the weapon, the pair in the long, white coats stepped backward through the mirror-like surface.

  Ryan actually saw the bullet squash itself against that surface, as if it had struck the vanadium-steel wall of a redoubt.

  From the other side of the wag’s hood he heard J.B.’s shotgun boom. The helmet of a sec man on that side of the road suddenly snapped back. Ryan could hear its occupant’s neck break.

  “Take cover!” he shouted as more shots cracked out from among his companions.

  The sec men had their weapons pointed at the group. Seemingly, all they had to do was pull the triggers, or depress the firing studs, or whatever, to blast the companions, which, physically, was true. But in actuality things weren’t so simple.

  In fact the sec team was at a disadvantage: they were in a state of not firing, and Ryan knew well the human mind needed time to work. The sec men had to perceive that they needed to shoot, make the decision to shoot, and their brains had to transmit the impulse to shoot to the muscles of their hands. Each step at time, even if only a fraction of a second. And if those delays added up to a second, that could make the difference between death and life.

  But in this case it might only serve to delay the inevitable, by not many seconds more. Even as he hurled himself left toward the ditch, Ryan heard a peremptory buzz and the sound of a headlight shattering.

  He put a shoulder down as he landed and rolled and saw to his horror that Krysty was still standing by the wag, apparently urging Mariah to seek cover with her. The sec men hadn’t blasted her for fear of hitting the girl—yet.

  “Drag her or leave her, Krysty!” Ryan shouted.

  He pointed the Steyr, found a fast target and fired prone from the bank of the round-bottomed, weed-choked ditch. The sec men had their heads down over their long egg-shaped blasters, making them harder targets. His bullet instead struck the side of an armored shin of a kneeling trooper. The leg crumpled, dropping the sec man on his face plate in the road ruts.

  Ricky and Doc had vaulted into the wag’s bed and were blasting through the glassless cabin, sheltering from whatever it was the sec men were shooting behind the mass of its big six-cylinder engine. Ricky was firing his DeLisle, while Doc, who had recovered from his near-paralyzing fear of the whitecoats, was taking shots with his M4 carbine. Ryan heard the brief snarl of Mildred’s M16 from the far side of the track and caught a glimpse of J.B. milking short bursts from his Mini UZI as he dashed for the cover of the grass to the right of the wag.

  Something made Ryan’s ears ring, the short hairs on his neck and arms rise, and his skin prickle as if with beginning sunburn. One of the sec men had shot his ovoid at him. He shot the man in the top of the breastplate, just left of where his clavicle notch would be.

  The bullet had to have deflected upward and punched through whatever kind of armor protected the sec man’s throat. He dropped to his side and lay still.

  But most of the sec men were still up and firing. Ryan and his people were in a tough spot. Their blasters could only hurt the faceless black-armored figures by accident. He gathered himself for a rush for the wag. If he could make it without having his insides pulped by near-soundless blasters that made dents like metal fists in the wag’s hood and frame where they hit, he could ram them with it. See how they liked that.

  Krysty was bent over, pleading with Mariah to flee. Ryan wondered where the redhead’s own survival reflexes
had gone. Then she jerked, her eyes rolled up and she dropped to her face on the road.

  Ryan’s heart seemed to stop. Blackness welled up within his eye. He tensed to jump to his feet, charge the faceless, black-clad bastards, do whatever damage he could lashing out with blaster butt and panga and boots and fists and rage before they sent him to join the love of his life.

  But Mariah was faster.

  “You monsters!” she screamed, throwing out her hands before her. Blackness streamed from her palms. It spun itself into a whirlwind of blackness between the fallen Krysty and the sec men, tall as Ryan and three times as broad in the wink of an eye.

  Ryan heard muffled outcries of consternation from the sec men. His own people had stopped shooting when the cloud appeared. Now he could also make out strange, dry buzzes as the ovoid blasters shot.

  The intruders were shooting at the black whirlwind. It grew without showing signs of being affected until it was high as a house and wide as the road.

  Then it advanced.

  Ricky and Doc had pulled out of the wag bed and were dragging Krysty’s limp form to the open driver’s door. As Ryan hopped up to help, he saw the sec men break, turn in panic and begin jostling one another in their fear-fueled frenzy to get back through that strange mirrored aperture before the black cloud took them. He heard horrific screams as at least one man failed and was torn apart.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Pull back!” Dr. Sandler ordered. The communications net relayed the command from the microphone worked into the fabric of the collar of his white coat and broadcast it through the portal for a short distance, enough to be heard through the helmet sets of his security contingent.

  They were already stumbling over one another in their terror-stricken eagerness to do just that, though. A second man waved his arms and legs wildly as he was drawn into the encroaching black whirlwind. Dr. Sandler made a mental note to mark the survivors as culls. They might, on review, be found still useful enough to serve as blunt instruments. But they would never be allowed to pass on their obviously defective genes. He would see to that.

  “It’s fantastic!” Dr. Oates breathed, staring in wonder at the whirling black cloud. She ignored the black-armored figures stumbling into the staging area around them, even when one thoughtlessly jostled her. “Such power.”

  The blackness spun straight up to the aperture. “Close portal,” Dr. Sandler commanded. Obediently, the techs in the central control room—the aperture device was so calibrated as to operate at several key locations within the sealed facility—broke the connection. The dark vortex winked out, leaving only a blank white bulkhead.

  “But our wounded!” one sec man exclaimed.

  Dr. Sandler took note of the number stenciled in gray on the man’s breastplate, then of those on the chests of the pair of operators who flanked him. “Numbers 10 and 51,” he rapped, “take 23 to Subbasement Zed-Two and dispose of him.”

  The two grabbed Number 23’s arms. Number 10 yanked the sonic projector from his right gauntlet. He protested as they frog-marched him out the door.

  “They were dead anyway,” Dr. Sandler said, turning back to the rest, “as any fool could see. And we don’t want fools among our ranks as brave soldiers of the Totality Concept, do we, men?”

  They all braced and saluted, except the injured operator being supported by the two comrades who had dragged him through the portal. He dropped with a clatter to the nonskid flooring.

  “No, sir, Dr. Sandler!” they sang out as one. Six of them were all that remained standing of the group of sixteen who had trotted out minutes before.

  Considering, Dr. Sandler decided that no further punishment than revocation of breeding privileges was required. Although their disgraceful cowardice in allowing themselves to be routed completely was unpardonable weakness, they could not be blamed for being unable to stand up against the bizarre manifestation of the genetically altered girl’s power.

  He doubted anything material could withstand it.

  “We are lucky you ordered the aperture sealed when you did, Dr. Sandler,” Dr. Oates said.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it, Dr. Oates. Merely cool judgment. Although had you been more observant, you might have noted that the manifestation did reach the portal and was unable to pass through. As I knew it would be.”

  She dropped her gaze. “You are correct, Dr. Sandler. I failed to notice that. I was caught up in the moment, I admit.”

  “Obviously. Why did you feel compelled to blurt out your surmise as to the girl’s origins in front of those primitive people, Dr. Oates?”

  “I felt it to be the best way to appeal to a child of her age,” Dr. Oates said, looking him in the eye. “To offer her a chance to rejoin her real family, as it were, instead of continuing to wander with a gang of violent and obviously unfit strangers.”

  “You felt,” Dr. Sandler said, his voice lambent with contempt. He did not add, How like a woman, because it seemed unnecessary; Dr. Oates was intelligent enough, in her way. She would perceive the core evolutionary truth as well as he.

  “I did not believe it necessary to explain that we ourselves played no role in her conception or engineering, although it seemed clear to me that some branch of the Overproject must be responsible. She is, after all, herself no more than a specimen. But what a specimen! Dr. Sandler, we must secure her, secure that power for our own glorious dream!”

  Deplore her emotionalism as he had to, and did, Dr. Sandler could not fault its direction.

  “In that, at least, you are thinking like a scientist, Dr. Oates,” he said. “We must. And we shall.”

  She looked at the remaining sec men. The wounded one had drawn himself to a position of sitting at attention among his fellows. He still seemed unable to stand on his own.

  If he could not economically be returned to full service in a reasonable span of time, he would be recycled. Just as the weak-minded Operator Number 23 had been. But that was down to Major Applewhite, their director of security, to see to.

  “Shall we order out a full platoon of operators, Dr. Sandler?” she asked. “If they act expeditiously, they can in all probability stun the girl before she can deploy her enhanced abilities against them.”

  “We shall not, Dr. Oates. Have you forgotten your own initial reluctance to enter the target continuum to survey the effects of the manifestation? We have expended energy and caused spatiotemporal distortions far in excess of safe levels. To do any more at this time would be tantamount to manually triggering alarms within the Overproject—or among our rivals, such as Operation Chronos.”

  He turned his face toward the sec men. “You are dismissed. See 17 to the infirmary.”

  “Yes, sir, Dr. Sandler!” Two operators helped the crippled man to his feet, and they marched out the door.

  “We have assets on the ground, Dr. Oates,” Dr. Sandler said. “It’s time to put them to use. Our prime subject must be made to see that now is an opportunity to offer some slight repayment for the aid we have provided him.”

  “But communicating with Dr. Trager—” Dr. Oates began.

  “Your concern does you credit, Dr. Oates,” he interrupted. He had regained his equilibrium. After all, he was not only a scientist; he was the senior scientist. In the present context, the patriarch, as it were. “Yet it is not entirely well-founded. As you know, our communications link to Dr. Trager draws such infinitesimal amounts of power and entails such a microscopic interpenetration that it remains intrinsically undetectable unless sensors are focused at its exact locus in space-time.”

  He turned away. “Enough talk. Further action is required. And now is the proper time to apply it!”

  * * *

  KRYSTY’S EYELIDS FLUTTERED, then her brilliant green eyes looked up into Mildred’s as the doctor bent over her, where she lay stretched out across the wag’
s bench-style front seats.

  “I’m fit to fight, Mildred,” Krysty said, though the weakness of her voice belied her words. “Why are you upside down?”

  Mildred reached down to briefly pat her friend’s cheek. “It’s a long story. I’m glad to have you back with us.”

  Krysty started to sit up. Mildred helped her.

  “Krysty,” Ryan said.

  “Ryan,” Krysty breathed. “Sorry for worrying you.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” the tall one-eyed man said, “once Doc and Ricky told me you were breathing. You’re a tough one to chill.”

  “Why, thank you.” Mildred could hear the smile in her friend’s voice, even though her face was turned directly away. “I’m pretty sure that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day!”

  “Play your cards right, somebody might even top it,” Ryan said. His lips twitched in the ghost of a smile.

  “Is she concussed?” J.B. asked. He had moved around the wag to stand at his best friend’s side.

  Mildred shook her head. “Nope. No pupil dilation. Something knocked her out, but it wasn’t like getting a whack on the head.”

  “Judging from the sounds they emitted, and the effects produced by near misses, I surmise those ovoid devices projected some manner of tightly focused sound beam. Possibly analogous to a laser.”

  “They called those things ‘masers,’ I think, Doc,” Mildred said. “Like, ‘microwave amplification of stimulated emission of radiation.’ Or something like that.”

  He cocked a brow. “Did they? Indeed. I should further surmise that such weapons might be tunable. At higher levels of output, they could damage metal and inflict potential lethal wounds on flesh and bone. At lower levels, they might be used to disrupt the target’s nervous system, stunning him. Or, well, her.”

  “A sonic blaster! I read about them in old predark books that my uncle had,” Ricky said. “Cool.”