“Hooah,” they said softly.
I looked at their faces. Seeing strength, resolve, and confidence, but also some fear and uncertainty. It is a mistake to forget that soldiers, even top-flight special operators, are human. Just as it’s a mistake for them to forget it, too.
“Now hear this,” I said, “Coffey and Darth Sidious, this is your first field op, but it’s not the first time you’ve been in the shit. You were cops and your records speak to your courage and professionalism under fire. You’re here because you’ve both demonstrated superior skills. You got gold stars from Top Sims, and believe me when I tell you that he is a hard sell. Remember your training, trust your instincts, trust to knowledge rather than assumptions, and be the elite operators I know you are.”
Tate and Smith said, “Hooah.” There was no high-fiving or trash talk. This was a moment for sober understanding, clearheadedness, and resolve.
“Then let’s roll,” I said.
And so we rolled.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE
“Lemurian crystal?” echoed Doc. “Never heard of it. But don’t tell me you want me to believe in the lost continent of Lemuria. What’s next? Atlantis?”
“No,” said Junie. “Look, Atlantis was almost certainly the Minoan culture, and what’s left of it is probably Santorini and some smaller islands. That’s not where I’m going with this. In the areas where Atlantis and Lemuria were thought — by some — to have existed, there have been artifacts found made from a very specific kind of green quartz crystal.”
“From Lemuria?”
“No. Just listen, okay?” Junie explained about the two types of quartz labeled as Lemurian crystal, and how the much rarer green variety was tied to the ancient Roman festival of Lumeralia. “The Romans performed rites on the fetish items they carved, and these rites were intended to activate some kind of power. In the texts they called it summoning or invoking, and they believed the activation called a demon or god to inhabit the stones. Now, I don’t believe that’s what happened, but there may be a hint in there, an echo of what really happened. The story has it that these Lemurian crystals were part of an altar, and if the pieces were assembled the correct way it opened a doorway to the realm of gods. Opened the wrong way, it opened to a world of demons and evil.”
Doc Holliday tried to keep a disbelieving smile on her face, but as Junie spoke, it cracked and fell away. “Lordy, I see where you’re going with this,” conceded Doc. “Kind of like what Prospero Bell’s dadgum God Machine was supposed to do.”
“Right. From what I’ve been able to piece together, the ancients knew how to assemble a completely crystalline version of the God Machine. Maybe it’s an older technology from before the earliest machine ages, or maybe it’s simply a similar design with a different purpose. We don’t know.”
“The machine Joe saw was metal.”
“Right, but with green crystals inlaid. Possibly a third design, possibly a Russian redesign… I don’t know. What I do know is that in all of the old legends and histories, those crystals are not natural to our world, but were part of some kind of technology brought here by—”
“Let me guess… little green men.”
“ Big green men. Yes. The Reptilians,” said Junie.
Doc suddenly stiffened, squeezed her eyes shut, and slapped her own forehead. “Junie, you may be as crazy as a box of frogs, but here I am being one fry short of a Happy Meal. Why didn’t I see it when you said it?”
“What?”
“You done said it yourself, about how the Romans who were exposed to the activated green crystals ran wild? Ran wild… how?”
Junie’s eyes were filled with strange lights. “If the rituals of proper handling were not followed to the letter, some people would run mad and kill their own families, slaughter whole villages, and often kill themselves.”
“Riiiiight. Now… what does that sound like?”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO
Once Duffy was in place, and Smith was spooking his way around the perimeter, the rest of Echo Team moved out, running low and fast. The fact that all the video cameras were hacked was not an invitation to be clumsy or incautious.
The first two teams split off and vanished. I knelt in place and covered them until everyone was in position, then Ghost and I ran for the front door. The lock was expensive and trustworthy by ordinary standards, with a keypad and a card-swipe. I smiled, feeling almost nostalgic for quaint stuff like that. It’s adorable. I tapped my earbud.
“Bug—”
“On it.” Without me having to touch anything, the little red lights on the keypad flicked to green and I heard the door click open.
“Thank you, Thing,” I said in my best Gomez Addams voice. Bug laughed, because Gomez sounds a lot like Rudy Sanchez.
There was a short entrance hall inside, with an umbrella stand, time clock, various official certificates on the wall, and doors leading to an empty conference room, a broom closet, a secretary’s office, and a set of stairs. I swept the area for motion sensors, found none, and shook a bunch of housefly drones out and let them buzz their merry way throughout the building. A built-in reconnaissance program coordinated the swarm’s dispersal pattern with the floor plan of the building. Got to love twenty-first-century mad science.
The new DMS policy was that if anyone else had the same toys, Mr. Church made sure to give us next year’s stuff. He had a lot of “friends in the industry” dedicated to making sure we would never be outfoxed again. At least not by technology. And Doc Holliday was right there with him, upping the game in a lot of truly disturbing ways. Disturbing for people we don’t like, I mean. Personally, I found it all on the comforting side of creepy.
Ghost and I took the stairs, moving without sound in the empty building. The lack of noise bothered me on a weird level and I had to fight to keep myself focused. Made me wonder if I wasn’t beginning to manifest a little PTSD. If so, the timing really blew.
“Bug to Cowboy,” came the quiet voice in my ear. “I’m still picking up the energetic signature from that green crystal gun. Have you found more of it or is that thing still with you?”
The hall was empty, so I risked a response. “With me.”
“It’s messing with your suit’s telemetry.”
The new combat rig for Echo Team includes a fully integrated tactical telemetric netting sewn into our clothes. What that means in human language is that there are hundreds of tiny sensors in every part of our clothing and equipment. It hot-links to all of the other sensors and to our forearm computers so that we are both gathering information through those sensors and being fed real-time data. And we each wore special contact lenses that gave us a virtual reality display of information that ranged from facial recognition to a mission clock to technical readouts. It’s all very science fictiony and I felt a bit like a horse’s ass with it running. The trick is to not let yourself be distracted by the available data.
“Messing with the telemetry how?” I asked.
“Weakening the signal on your vitals. Suggest using a Faraday bag.”