Bunny actually shrieked. It was the only thing you could call that sound. I was so close to doing the same thing that I had to clench my jaws shut.
Erskine said, “All doors can be opened.”
Top said, “What?”
“Any open door allows ingress and egress,” Erskine said in that same reasonable tone. “This is a fundamental truth of all dimensions.”
Blood, thick as molasses, dribbled from the corners of his mouth and ran down over his chin.
Dead things don’t bleed.
But that blood didn’t look like normal blood. It was so dark, almost like oil.
“The question of controlling ingress is solved at the quantum level.”
The dead man looked at Bunny, then at Top, and then at me.
He smiled. With black blood oozing from his mouth, he smiled.
It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. In a life spent fighting every kind of human monster, every twisted aspect of natural evil, here was a smile that shook me, stabbed me through the heart, froze my soul.
Behind us we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li!”
I whirled and saw a shape, pale as one of the penguins, and I fired at it without pause, without thinking, breaking all protocols and training. The bullets tore into the flesh of a naked man. Holes opened in his flesh and black blood poured from it.
The man I shot was Dr. Erskine.
I froze, finger still on the trigger, smoke drifting from the barrel.
Behind Dr. Erskine was another man.
Another Dr. Erskine.
Other figures emerged from the shadows. More Erskines.
Then other people. Some in bloody clothes, others naked and pallid as mushrooms. The lights on the BAMS unit flared red again.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” they said.
Then behind me, the first Erskine said, “Function is a by-product of need.”
There was a rattle of gunfire as Bunny emptied half a magazine into him.
Then the man said, “Tekeli-li!”
More and more figures stepped from the shadows. Dozens of individual people. More than a hundred. Some of them were dressed in the bloody shreds of lab coats. Some were in military uniforms or engineers’ coveralls. Some were American. Some wore the uniforms of Chinese or Russian military. Beyond, amid, and around them were hundreds of others. Copies of each. Hundreds of copies of each.
“Tekeli-li,” they said. “Tekeli-li!”
Though they each spoke with their own mouths, it was all said with a single voice. One voice that spoke in perfect harmony.
One voice.
Beyond the figures I thought I saw something else. No, make that two things. Maybe I saw them. Maybe my mind was slipping gears. I really don’t know.
Off to our left I thought I saw a man dressed in almost the same kind of thermal combat rig as we wore. Except he had a different kind of helmet and he seemed to be holding out a small device. I’m pretty sure it was a camera of some kind. He saw me looking, lowered the camera, turned, and vanished behind a row of metal shelves. Neither Top nor Bunny saw him, and a second later the image of him was crowded out by something else.
Something that was so wrong. So totally wrong.
It was huge and mostly hidden in the darkness, but for all its mass the thing moved with a fluid bulk. It was as if a body of viscous liquid was somehow moving without the need of containment. There was an oily iridescence about it and a stink of pollution worse than anything I’d ever experienced. And there were things coming from it. Not arms. Nothing like that. No, I swear to God that this thing had tentacles, as if it was some kind of obscene octopus. But it wasn’t that. Maybe there’s no word for what it is.
I saw it, though.
We all saw it. And in that moment of awful clarity I saw the machine outside of the ancient city. I saw the gateway opening and this thing came out. This tentacled abomination. It reached out of its world and into ours.
I saw it.
We all saw it.
“No,” breathed Bunny. His eyes were wide and unblinking and he seemed like he was tottering on the edge of total panic.
Then all of the Erskines came charging at us. Some of them were bare-handed. Many of them held guns, knives, chunks of rock. Anything they could grab. We saw Russian and Chinese soldiers mixed in, guns in their hands, eyes empty of sanity but filled with madness. Something had taken hold of all of them and had turned this entire group of people — at least a hundred men and women — into a mindless swarm of killers.
They surged toward us, screaming their weird chant, hurling stones, firing wildly.
“God almighty,” breathed Top in a terrified whisper. “If this is real… if this gets out… Jesus Christ…”
The swarm came howling toward us. I said nothing. I opened fire. It was a target-rich environment. We filled the chamber with thunder. We fired every bullet. We threw every grenade. We hurled every satchel charge.
Then we turned and ran.
We screamed the whole time as the collective voice screamed back at us.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The LC-130 was still taxiing down the runway when I called in the air strike.
Top’s words rang in my head.
If this is real… if this gets out…
I yelled the orders to hit the lab. To hit all of the labs. Ours, and the ones run by Russia, and the Chinese. All of it.
The USS California hit the Vinson Massif with six Tomahawks. I told them to empty the whole closet on them, so they sent the other six.
There is no Vinson Massif anymore. Not one you’d recognize.
We huddled in the belly of the plane, wrapped in the barbed wire of shock, hurt down deep on levels we could not name.
Behind us the missiles did their work.
And we prayed it was enough.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He walked in dreams.
It was beautiful.
So many things to see, to know. To learn.
So many secrets.
Open to him.
It was like having a key to every door.
Almost every door.
Some places were shut to him. Some minds. He didn’t know why. Not even the people at Gateway understood that. No one in Project Stargate had ever understood it.
Some minds were so open they invited you in. The Mullah in that little town in Iraq was like that. His mind was uncluttered, without defenses, without guile. A simple man of simple faith living a simple life. The Dreamer could go into his head without effort. He could almost do it while awake. There were a few hundred others who were like that. The Dreamer went in and out of them with no more effort than walking through doorless rooms in a big house. The more often he went, the less effort it took to push the inhabiting consciousness to one side, to gag it and bind it and tell it to be quiet. That was fun. That was very useful.
Others were different. Some were harder to breach, and it took effort that drained him, aged him, exhausted him. A few were worth the effort. Some made even the dangers worth it, even when it left him so thoroughly spent that his mind nearly broke loose and went drifting. That was bad because there were awful places a drifting mind could go.
He knew. He’d been there. He had scars on his mind, on his soul. Some things are not unseeable.