As I turned away from the corpses, something caught my eye and I knelt between the dead soldiers. Both of them wore identical rings to the one I’d taken from the guard upstairs. I worked one off a slack hand and peered at it. The ring was heavy, and I figured it was metal around something dense, like lead. There was a cap over what I assumed was another chunk of green crystal. So the cap was what? Protective shielding? Maybe, but there was no actual way for the wearer to open the cap. When I ran the Anteater over them, though, I found that there was a spring trigger activated by a radio receiver. That was odd, but it wasn’t what I had time to think about right then, so I added the two rings to the Faraday bag.
The massive airlock clicked and then hissed as it swung outward on hydraulic hinges. It exhaled chilled air that smelled of rotting meat. It was like a punch in the stomach and I staggered back, glad that the balaclava was some kind of filter. Ghost growled at the smell and the hairs on his back stood up.
I braced myself and stepped over the threshold, raising my weapon because every time I’ve smelled something that bad in a lab, things went south. Very far south. This particular stench had a vaguely familiar tang to it, but I could not grab the attached memory.
Ghost and I moved inside and shifted away to keep from being silhouetted against the open door. There were only a few security lights on. Huge pieces of machinery crouched there in the shadows, their shapes and purposes indistinct. I tapped my earbud for Bug but got nothing at all, and when I checked my wrist computer it told me there was no signal and no chance of one. Bug warned me about the shielding. It was strange for a grown man and a practiced killer like me to suddenly feel insecure about being in what was essentially an empty room.
On the other hand, I’d been in underground labs before, so it’s not like my fears were totally unfounded.
Ghost was spooked, too.
We moved through along the wall and found no switches, so I darted to the other side of the door and there they were. I kept my gun in one hand while I turned them on.
The overhead lights flared bright, burning off all the shadows, revealing every single detail of where I was and what was in there with me.
If it had been vampires, demons, hobgoblins, berserkers, or genetically engineered werewolf supersoldiers I would have been less terrified than by what I saw.
Nothing alive. Not really.
It was a machine, surrounded by other lesser machines. It was built like the mouth of a tunnel, thirty feet high, with a series of inner rings that stepped back at irregular intervals. The primary structure looked to be made of steel, but there were other metals, too. Lots of exposed copper, some crude iron bands, gleaming alloy bolts, and long circular strips of what looked like gold. Heavy black rubber-coated cables were entwined with the rings of metal, and coaxial cables as thick as my thigh snaked along the ground and ran farther down the slope to where a series of heavy industrial generators were positioned on a flat stone pad. Sixteen generators. Lots of power. The tunnel stretched back so far it disappeared into darkness.
It looked like the mouth of the big hadron collider at CERN.
It wasn’t.
I think my heart stopped in my chest. I had seen two of these machines before. Two this size. One down at Gateway in the Antarctic. The other in the basement of Harcourt Bolton’s mansion.
And now this one.
The rotting meat stink came at me in waves from the open mouth of the machine, like some dragon was breathing in a troubled slumber. All around the opening were round slots into which carefully carved stones could be placed. I knew this, even though those slots were currently empty. I knew, without knowing how, that the stones for this machine were not going to be diamonds and rubies and sapphires. Not like the Gateway machine. Not like Prospero Bell’s. No. The stones for this one would be green crystal.
I stood and stared, wide-eyed, dry-mouthed, terrified at the gigantic God Machine.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
I had no radio, and no way to even contact my team.
So I did what I could. I took out a small digital camera and took as many pictures as I could. All angles of the machine. And everything else in the lab. I also went to each computer workstation and plugged in high-capacity flash drives to download as much data as possible. My regrets over killing the two guards were diminishing. Wished right then I had all the scientists working on the project there, along with Gadyuka, Valen, and every damn person they ever met.
This wasn’t a work in progress. This was a completed machine. In the back of the lab I found a vault that actually had a printed sign: SVOD KRISTALL. Crystal vault. I had to really talk myself into opening it, and my hands were slick with sweat by the time the locks clicked. But then I took another look at the heavy radiation suits hanging on hooks beside the vault, and pushed the door shut again.
Was there time to put one of the suits on?
There wasn’t one that fit Ghost. What would that much green crystal radiation do to him? Did I need to risk finding out?
“Yeah, goddamn it,” I muttered. To Ghost I said, “Ghost, back. Out. Post.”
It was our shorthand to tell him to go back the way we’d come and stand guard outside of the lab. He gave me a lingering look in which I could read doubt and fear in his brown eyes. But he obeyed and moved off, casting looks over his shoulder as he went.
As soon as he went out I moved fast. The radiation suits were oversized and went on easily. I unslung the Faraday bag and set it aside until I was sure all the seals were secured, then I reopened the vault, picked up the bag, and stepped inside. There was no immediate splash of green luminescence. They were too careful about that, and I should probably have thought it through better. They had to keep the rest of the lab staff safe.
Inside there were rows of file cabinets with shallow drawers, much like those used in jewelers’ warehouses. Each drawer was marked by a numerical code, which I ignored. I opened one and there they were. Row upon row of green stones, each cut like a faceted emerald, but of the wrong color. These matched the crystal gun in my pocket and the stone in the guards’ rings. When I picked one up I again noticed how light the stones were; unlike any crystals I’d handled before.
Every file drawer was filled with them. Most were the same size, but then I found raw and uncut stones of various sizes. I didn’t hesitate and began cramming both kinds of crystal into the Faraday bag. I couldn’t take all of them, but I took a lot. It bothered me that I was leaving a significant number of them behind, so I went outside, closed the vault, unzipped my radiation suit, and removed three large blaster plasters. These are self-adhering high-yield explosives. Once applied they can be triggered by, say, a door opening and tearing them apart, thereby mixing the chemicals inside; or via a small timer the size of a quarter. I used those, went back inside, dumped all of the stones into a metal trash can I brought in with me, and then wrapped them in the blaster plasters. There were enough high explosives in there to blow up half the lab. Not enough, alas, to destroy the God Machine. But I had photographic proof it existed, and it was too big to pack up and cart off. Maybe an airstrike would handle it. Maybe the State Department. Who knows. That was above my pay grade.
I set the timers, closed the vault door and sprinted across the lab, slammed the big airlock door behind me, and shucked off the radiation suit.