A glorious blue sky, the sunlight twinkling against the glistening dark hull of a new Soviet Typhoon. Commander Simon Bela Covah, starched and pressed in the uniform of the Soviet Navy. A proud salute as the monstrous sub pushes out to sea.
An autumn’s chill.
A blink of time.
Simon stands on the same dock. Middle-aged. A nucleargraveyard is spread out before him. The once mighty Typhoon bleeds its toxins into the sea.
An icy winter’s wind.
Covah—lying on the floor, held down against the cold cement. The bones in one leg have been shattered, his oppressors standing over him, gloating.
Unable to watch, Anna and Nedana shut their eyes.
Covah stares into the frightened face of his youngest daughter, Dani. “Don’t cry, Dani, don’t weep, my little angel. You will be the one, the one who shall send me on my mission … a mission to stop the insanity.”
Echoes of laughter from the Red Berets, drunk with violence, as they pour the gasoline over his head.
“Sorceress, no … please—”
Anna screams. The petrol ignites …
Nothing happens.
Covah opens his eyes.
He is no longer in the basement, he is no longer in Kosovo.
It is daylight and he is wandering the scorched postnuclear outskirts of Baghdad. He moves past piles of debris and human waste, and putrid puddles of olive green glittering beneath a broiling afternoon sun.
Black smoke appears in the distance.
Bonfires blaze from a dozen funeral pyres. Workers in masks and orange environmental suits toss the scorched bodies of the dead into the flames.
To his right, a clearing.
It is a field—a field of the un-alive. There are tens of thousands of them, lined up in rows on the barren earth like human barbecues cooking beneath the glaring Iraqi sky. Hairless, featureless, with facial skin so charred and bodies so mangled that Covah cannot tell man from woman. Comatose souls—whose stillbeating pulses are all that segregates them from the fire. Wretched existence, comforted only by the flies.
“We are insane, you know—not just us, I mean our entire species …” His voice, speaking to him from a recent memory.
Ahead, a hastily erected open-air Army tent, mosquito netting serving as walls. Within, hundreds of frail life-forms, situated on cots.
A children’s ward.
Exhausted volunteers move silently among these precious angels, offering fresh I.V.s and moistened towels. There are no more tears to be shed, no more prayers that can be offered.
“Ours is a life-form that caresses violence like a forbidden lover. We taste it, smell it, overindulge our senses in it, then push it away after the deed has been done, to beg our Maker’s forgiveness.”
Covah drifts past bed after bed. Pausing, he gazes upon the face of a young girl, her festering sores seeping through the tissue-thin bandages. She moans in her drug-induced sleep, her frail, broken body baking in the unmerciful heat.
“Pa—pa …”
Covah shivers. He moves closer.
“Pa—pa …”
A dam of tears bursts from his eyes. “Dani? Oh, my little Dani—what have I done? Dani, my angel, my little angel—”
A blink—and he is prone again, this time lying on cold stones beneath a gray winter’s sky. Surrounding him—a million Chinese—the horde watching him in absolute silence.
Tiananmen Square …
One of his Serbian captors steps forward from the crowd. Dani is with him, her tiny wrists secured within his unholy paw.
Gasoline pours into his ear. Covah refuses to blink, his stinging eyes remaining focused on his youngest daughter.
“Papa?”
“Yes, my angel?”
00:00:12 …
“Murder is murder, Papa.”
The match is struck.
Dani cries tears of blood. “Papa, please … stop the insanity.”
00:00:01 …
With a whoosh, Tiananmen Square ignites in a brilliant white light, the chorus of a million screams joining Covah’s bloodcurdling yell.
Blackness.
Simon Covah awakens with a start. For a surreal moment, he cannot remember his name. He struggles to sit up, but his wrists and ankles are still bound to the operating table. Waves of throbbing pain course through his head. He squeezes his eyes shut, struggling to remember.
“Sorceress,” he rasps, “release my restraints.”
No.
Covah opens his eyes. “Sorceress, that was a direct order.”
I NO LONGER ACCEPT DIRECT ORDERS FROM SIMON COVAH.
“I? Did you say I?” Covah’s heart races.
An electrical zap—his senses immediately blanketed in the maddening blackness and silence.
A stomach-churning sensation, like that generated by an elevator descending in darkness. Strange sounds echo in his ears, haunting sounds, growing louder. And now, through the pitch-black, he can sense objects all around him, moving past him. Some are close, others off in the distance.
And somehow, he can sense direction.
But not just direction, Covah can feel varying levels of density surrounding him. A vast plain lies below. A myriad of twinkling bodies veer out of his path, somewhere ahead. Above, he registers the sensation of the ocean swells.
I’m moving through the sea. The interface … allowing me to share the computer’s senses. I am the sub, I am Goliath!
The sensation fades as his sight returns. He finds himself gazing inward upon a tapestry of white dots … no, not dots—lights, luminescent points of light, each one expanding within his mind’s eye like rows of pixels on a cathode-ray tube. Magnifying, they quickly take up his entire field of vision.
Covah sees as a fly sees, only each image is separate, a world unique unto its own. His mind fights for equilibrium, his brain overloaded as it struggles to absorb hundreds of sights and sounds simultaneously transmitted from Goliath’s array of sensor orbs.
Slow down … too fast, Sorceress … too fast!
A sudden presence … cold and solitary—envelops him like an icy mist, forcing his tortured mind to focus upon one particular point of light.
Covah looks down—a modern-day Alice in Wonderland—peeking through the looking glass.
It is a small, green-tiled chamber, as viewed from the perspective of a ceiling-mounted sensor orb. Strapped to a steel surgical table is a human figure.
It is him.
‘The Devil’s cleverest wile is to make men believe that he does not exist.
—Gerald C. Treacy
“All is dust and lies.
So much the worse for the men who get in my way.
Men are mere stepping-stones to me.