“Ghost,” I yelled as I ran for the stairs. We got halfway up when thunder boomed and chased us. The whole basement shook, and I hoped that I’d underestimated the explosive power of the plasters. Maybe they’d have vaporized the crystals and done some serious damage to the God Machine, too. From the rumble, I didn’t think many of the computers would survive, either.
We ran up and up until I found a signal.
Then I called it in.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
Bug sat in his sealed computer clean room, listening as Joe Ledger made his field report. The details punched him back against the cushions of his chair.
“Damn,” he said aloud, even though he was alone, “I kind of hate it when I’m right.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE
“Okay,” I said to Doc Holliday, “what in the wide blue fuck is up with these green crystals?”
I didn’t exactly yell, but Ghost gave me a reproving whuff and cut a significant glance at the doorway.
“Answer my two questions first,” she said. “Are the crystals unusually light in weight? And do they glow at all? Not when you shine light on them, but as if they are lit from inside.”
“Both. Why?”
“Shit,” she said. “Listen, Cowboy, we are putting together a field briefing for you on that.”
“Don’t be coy, Doc,” I said. “If you know something, then tell me right now.”
“I can’t. There’s too much to go into. Bookworm will brief you shortly,” she said.
“Bookworm?” I yelped. That was Junie’s call sign, for those rare times she was in the field or advising a field team.
“It is absolutely critical that you avoid all physical contact with the green crystal, particularly if they glow and are lighter than they should be. It means they have been activated. Don’t ask me what that means, because this is Bookworm’s territory. I’m as much a tourist as you are on this. Follow my orders, though. If the crystals are not in a Faraday bag, then retreat from them immediately. No exceptions.”
“Copy that,” I said, and then verified that my telemetry was working properly. It was, and so was the rest of Echo Team’s. “Then I think we’re done here. Initiating soft exfil now. Huckleberry, stay with me. I’m going to bring the team up to speed.”
I tapped over to the team channel and gave them the bullet points. Doc told them again about the dangers of direct exposure to the activated green crystals.
“Now, listen closely,” said Doc, repeating the same instructions she gave me, then adding, “You need to work the buddy system more than you ever have. If anyone— anyone—begins acting strangely or erratically, you need to get them out of that building. If they begin to exhibit violent behavior, use horsey on them and carry them out. The green crystal affects mood and behavior. We think that’s part of what happened in Washington. You need to evacuate that building right now. Is that understood?”
There was a beat before we all agreed. And I thought back to how my mood, and Bunny’s, shifted into low gear after I left Rolgavitch’s office.
“I want everyone to confirm Huckleberry’s orders right damn now,” I growled.
There was a chorus of emphatic Hooahs. Bunny hit it a little harder than the others, which meant his thoughts had gone in the same direction as mine. We’d both felt it in the car on the way here.
“Okay,” I said once Doc dropped off the call. “Gather all samples, upload all data and photos. You have ten minutes and drop and go. Evac by teams and converge on the vehicles.”
That got a much more enthusiastic reply.
“Cowboy,” said Top, “we still going soft in here?”
“When possible,” I said. “Mission priority is to get out with evidence. If we can do that without additional casualties, then we play it that way. However — and everyone hear me on this — the future of our country may depend on us getting this evidence back home. Nothing prevents that from happening. Hooah?”
“Hooah!”
Ghost whuffed. There was some edge in it, just as there was in the agreement from my team. The day was sliding downhill and we all knew it.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN
Sometimes they start off bad and then the universe decides to really up its game and show you just how truly nasty and weird it can all get when it doesn’t like you.
Ghost and I made our way along the corridors, doing quick-checks in the various rooms, and suddenly my wrist computer pinged that one of the doors was not the standard metal-covered oak but a solid piece of reinforced steel. When I bypassed the locks I found another high-tech door behind it. Not as intimidating as the airlock downstairs, but clearly intended to keep everyone out who wasn’t authorized to be there. MindReader laughs at that kind of thing, and the door yielded to me.
Suddenly Ghost went into a tense crouch, and a split second later I heard voices inside the room. Two men speaking in Russian. Saying something about a girl one of them was dating who he thought might be sleeping with a guy who lived in the flat above her. They were strategizing on whether to brace the guy and beat the shit out of him. Or maybe kill him. Or maybe kill the girl, too. Every option seemed to be on the table. A couple of real pillars of society. This, for the record, is part of the reason I have rage issues. Besides, most of my buttons had already been pushed, so I was profoundly cranky.
I listened from the doorway. There was a short corridor inside that led to a T-junction. Light and the voices were coming from the left-hand side; only shadows from the right. I sent a couple of houseflies to check it out and they sent back a livestream of two guys dressed like the guards I’d killed downstairs. Tough, with cold eyes and automatic weapons. On the wall against which they stood was a symbol I know way too welclass="underline" a plain trefoil, with three cir cles overlapping each other equally like in a triple Venn diagram with the overlapping parts erased. The international symbol for biohazard.
We moved to the very edge of the T-junction, and I signaled Ghost to stay. I took a breath, wheeled around the corner, and shot each guard in the head twice. They went right down, and I pivoted to make sure there wasn’t anyone else at this party. There wasn’t. Pushkin seemed to have a pattern. Two special nighttime guards at each of their higher-security labs, and the cookie-cutter guards patrolling the hallways in ones or twos.
A glance showed me that these guards also wore heavy rings.
I holstered my gun and used the BAMS unit to sniff the air. The lights glowed a reassuring green. When Top, Bunny, and I had encountered our first God Machine, it had belched out a witch’s brew of toxins, including a hitherto unknown strain of the Spanish flu. We all got sick and I nearly died. I was planning on lighting a candle to whichever saint was in charge of keeping idiots like me safe. Or, safe-ish, anyway. There were no obvious microscopic monsters here. Did that mean they hadn’t turned it on yet? Or had found a way to prevent those sorts of things from happening? No way to tell until Bug and Nikki tore apart the data I’d sent, and there was a whole damn lot of it to sort through.