The whole Cape was shaking.
The gantry creaked enormously as it collapsed, leaving the shadow ship standing, smoke pouring from its base.
The spirits were clustered close around the rocket.
Elvis sang "Jailhouse Rock."
A lizardman burst into flames, and fell in ashes. Krokodil looked up at the sky.
"I wouldn't let my daughter cross the street to go to an Elvis Presley concert," declaimed the shouting preacher in 1958, "with his lewd behaviour, his jungle rhythms, his obscene movements, his suggestive lyrics, and raucous jangles that barely qualify as music, that boy is an instrument of the Devil!"
Nguyen Seth's consciousness nestled inside Keystone, and looked down with a strange detachment at the State of Florida. The hair-thin beams were striking down meticulously, criss-crossing the Cape Canaveral site, snuffing out the inconvenient creatures.
And yet there was a disturbance in the Outer Darkness. A great magic was being worked down on Earth. The Ancient Adversary was exerting its baleful influence.
Krokodil was there. And another shaman, a pure human with great powers.
Seth's anger spurted through the circuits of the satellite. The death rained down with redoubled fury.
Shiba didn't know what was happening. People all around him were exploding in flames.
Captain Marcus shouted to everyone to "take cover, take cover…"
Elvis kept playing, too caught up in the music that possessed him to notice the chaos around him. Shiba wondered if the music was doing this, causing people to explode…
In Japan, they had always said that rock 'n' roll was bad for you.
No, he thought. Whatever this effect is, the music is set against it. If the Op keeps playing, maybe there's a chance that the fires from above will stop.
"…take cover," shouted Marcus, his head smoking, "take…"
The Captain's blood boiled over, leaking out of his mouth, eyes, nostrils and eardrums. He pointed his pistol into the sky, and fired…
His clothes were burning now. Marcus struggled to hold himself together, but it was hopeless.
He burst apart, spreading sizzling scraps around him.
Fonvielle's elation was ebbing.
The Dream was working. Needlepoint was on line. The program would be up and running again.
But the console in front of him was doing funny things.
"T-minus ten…" said a rasping computer-generated voice.
"What?" asked the Prezz.
"It's initiated a launch sequence."
"T-minus nine…"
"What has?"
"T-minus eight…"
"The equipment. Something is cleared for take-off…"
"T-minus seven…"
"…according to the readings, it's the Circe IV…"
"T-minus six…"
"…but that blew up years ago…"
Simone ran, the invisible beams all around her. The Suitcase People were being cut down like stalks of wheat.
The ghosts were together now, in the body of the ghost ship. Great clouds were being discharged from the manitou.
She just hoped she lived to see it take off.
"T-minus five…"
Duroc had turned to ice. Not since the Jibbenainosay, had he felt such a dread.
'T-minus four..,"
"Fonvielle, abort take off."
'T-minus three…"
"I'm trying, Mr Prezz, but the instruments…"
"T-minus two…"
"…don't respond."
"T-minus one…"
Duroc hoped Krokodil was dead by now.
"Ignition."
The bunker staff were looking at each other, bewildered. Sister Addams was hugging her knees, tears on her face. Fonvielle was chewing his entire beard.
"Lift-off," said the mechanical voice, "we have lift off!"
"The only possibility in the United States for a humane society," said Phil Ochs, "would be a revolution with Elvis Presley as leader."
It was over. He was exhausted, emptied of music.
Surrounded by burning people, Elvis dropped his guitar and ran.
The dark shape was rising from the Cape, stabbing into the sky.
Krokodil was tearing at the ground, possessed again of an enormous strength, ripping through the elevator platform.
An indentee, down on his knees praying, exploded, spattering Elvis with burning fat. He wiped the fire spots from his jacket.
To the East, the sea was boiling. A tidal wave of boiling steam swept across the base.
Elvis's face and hands stung.
"Something's coming through," Tozer shouted, firing up into the elevator shaft.
"Resist it," Duroc ordered.
Waltons crowded into the shaftbed, trampling underfoot the remains of the sacrifices.
"It's exiting earth atmosphere," Fonvielle said.
Duroc knew where it was going. He swore under his breath.
The Commander was plotting the phantom's trajectory.
"It will intersect with Keystone, sir…"
There was only one thing for it.
"Cease the ground attack. Order Needlepoint to defend itself."
A large chunk of something fell down the shaft, crushing a Donny.
Fonvielle communicated with Needlepoint, rapidly reprogramming it.
Keystone responded, its defensive systems activated.
The rain of death had stopped, Shiba realized, and he was still alive. He looked around to see who else had survived. Raimundo was nowhere to be seen, and that was a bad sign. He should be impossible to miss. Krokodil had torn open the elevator shaft. The black girl from under the ground was wandering out of the smoke, her thin dress wet through. And Elvis was slack-jawed, astonished at what had been torn from him.
The steam felt good on his hide.
Seth withdrew from Keystone, and watched sadly as the Needlepoint System tried to defend itself. Its lases sliced accurately through the sky and passed harmlessly through the smokeshape of the Titan 7 rocketship.
The object was a cluster of angry ghosts.
"We've screwed the pooch, Mr President," Fonvielle shouted, "the Dream's not for killing. Needlepoint's been rotten from the start. It's an insult to the dead. That's why they want to stop it."
The Prezz had a gun. Fonvielle saluted his chief, but knew that what he had done was an obscenity, a perversion of the great work…
Fonvielle knew he had to take what was coming to him. He knew he had to join the knot of spirits in the manitou of Circe.
The Prezz shot him through the heart. "Thank you, Mr…"
"Prezzzzz…"
He was with the others now. Grissom, Capaldi, Metelkina, Poole, Kuhn, Sementsova, Griffith, Collins, Tracy, Lazarev, Mihailoff, Breedlove, Bowman, Rusoff, Gagarin, Victorov. All of them.
Their bodies had some substance. Not flesh, exactly. More like electricity, or fire…
The Circe IV sped towards its target.
Krokodil dropped frags into the shaft, and ducked away from the blast. This battle was nearly over. She knew now that Elder Seth wasn't down there, that she would have to face the preacher on some other field. But she knew that the Adversary had won a victory today, a victory that would tell…
Duroc looked at the monitor. Underneath the splash of Fonvielle's blood, the Circe IV blip .was nearing Keystone. Only moments until impact.
Seth was hurled out of Keystone as the Circe IV phantom enveloped the satellite, and tugged back to his body in Salt Lake City.
In the daytime sky, a star blazed brightly for an instant.
"Sir, sir," shouted a junior lieutenant at Edwards Air Force base, "we're getting some wild readings from earth orbit."
"Shee-it," swore his superior, "this is like last year's fiasco all over again."
"So, do we log it?"
The officer swilled hot recaff, and knew he was going to regret it, "Yeah, log it…"
The tracking screens were flashing like strobe lamps.
"…but be prepared to swear we're talking instrument failure."
Simone knew Roger was down in the hole. He would be angry with her. But she owed him something.