Gradually the man unbent himself, lifting his head to get a better view. Abruptly he fell backwards, his gun falling, his body hitting the sand with a puff of dust. Up in his rocky eyrie, O’Reilly had picked him off with a single shot.
Garner grinned at Phillips. “No one does it better than O’Reilly.”
Phillips was watching the other Arab guard. He’d seen his companion collapse and knew something was wrong. Immediately he got up and ran back under the shadow of the helicopter, meaning to board it. Garner raced after him, firing as he went. The Arab dropped for cover, but wasn’t hit. Instead he fired back so that Garner had to drop to his belly. It was still too dark for a clear view.
“He’s under cover,” Garner called softly. “O’Reilly can’t see him. I’ll have to go in.”
Phillips didn’t argue. Garner got to his feet and ran in a zigzag. Immediately the guard opened fire. Sand spurted as the bullets hit and Garner’s own weapon was pouring a stream of bullets into the darkness. Phillips wove his way around to the side of the helicopter. Silence fell again. Phillips waited. He heard something at the escarpment, the crumbling of rock, as if a large buttress had collapsed. That thing in the tunnel, was it breaking free?
He inched forward, craning his neck. The guard was sprawled in the sand, clearly wounded, though he held his gun ready, waiting to see if Garner would come for him. There was only the soft whisper of sand shifting in a light breeze. Soon it would be dawn.
Phillips watched as the wounded man tried to swing around, back to the safety of the machine, but he must be badly injured. Phillips ran forward and the man saw him, but too late. A quick stutter of bullets finished him. Phillips went down the dune face. He saw Garner, face-down in the sand that was already starting to cover him. A quick inspection showed him that the engineer was dead. The pilot! Phillips was thinking. But he knew that to Garner, escape had never been more important than the mission. He and O’Reilly had known from the outset their chances of getting out alive had been slim.
There were more rumblings from the escarpment and Phillips saw to his horror that the thing from the underworld had pushed itself out of the cleft, raising its upper body, a grotesque fusion of bloated limbs and claws, limned in moonlight. Around it, scores of smaller creatures hopped and slithered, a nightmare host. They began the ascent of the dune and Phillips knew that he was their target. And the machine — they would tear it apart. He opened fire, shouting like a madman as the rain of bullets tore into the front rank of the monsters, shredding them like so much paper. But it was like trying to hold back the sea.
Behind him, he heard the sudden roar of the helicopter’s engine. He swung round. From the pilot’s cabin he saw a hand waving at him. O’Reilly! He’d made it down the escarpment and slipped into the helicopter while the gunfight was ensuing.
Phillips shouldered the empty weapon and raced up the sand. He swung up into the body of the craft and O’Reilly lifted it, like a huge, fat insect, into the dawn skies. Phillips clambered through to join O’Reilly.
“Jake was the expert, but I trained on these birds,” said the engineer. His face was set, a terrible mask in the poor light. “I reckon the Mauritanians know Al-Qaeda is using them, otherwise they’d have sent jets in to blow this one out of the sky. Which suits us for the time being.”
“I’m sorry about Garner.”
O’Reilly nodded grimly, masking what he must have been feeling. Phillips knew he and his buddy must have had any number of brushes with death. It would have welded a particular bond between them, strong as any pair of twins.
“Comes to us all in this game,” said O’Reilly. Whatever regrets he had, he was going to face them later. Not now, not while the job had to be finished. He looked back at the escarpment. “Let’s give these bastards a farewell present. These machines usually carry a heavy payload.”
He swung the helicopter around in a wide circle and came back to face the things that had burst from the tall cleft. The central colossus, now a dark green, splotched worm, with row upon row of serrated teeth ringing its open mouth, lifted itself higher as if it would challenge the machine and snatch it from the sky. O’Reilly knew how the firepower of the machine operated, though. He fired off two missiles and swung the nose of the helicopter up and away. The thundering blast of the explosions buffeted the aerial machine, but O’Reilly wrestled control back and swung around again.
Phillips saw the huge worm writhing on the sand, smashing rocks this way and that. Most of its head had been blasted to pulp. Around it the smaller creatures gathered and then, as one, plunged into the dying monster, feeding avidly like sharks ripping apart an injured whale.
“We’ll head east to Mali,” said O’Reilly. “They won’t like it, but we can sell them this bird and head for home down the Niger river. I’ve got friends in Niamey, the capital.”
Phillips nodded. He knew the place, which would be as safe as any in this otherwise hostile terrain.
The helicopter had long crossed Mali’s western border by the time the explosion deep in the desert of Mauritania had detonated. If anyone saw the small mushroom cloud that plumed up into the night sky, they kept it to themselves. The desert was full of storms. One more was of no concern.
Out of Time GEOFFREY HART
The Adversaries knew they’d disappear from the galaxy after their too-brief existence, for they were mortal and bound by time — and they had attracted the attention of the Voices, who were neither. In what time remained to them, the Adversaries fashioned a trap they knew the Voices could never resist: a place with such a paradoxical relationship with time that even the Voices could never fully grasp its properties without entering the trap. Having entered, they found they could not escape. The trap had worked, and the physical forms of the Voices were imprisoned. The Adversaries knew that like all things material, the trap could not endure forever. But it might endure long enough for some future race to find a better solution.
The Voices could not tolerate the Adversaries; indeed, they could tolerate no voices other than their own. As they had done before, they swiftly imposed silence on those competing voices. Their whispers from the darkness infested susceptible Adversary minds, spreading like flesh-eating insects until they consumed all other thoughts and those minds heard only messages of madness and despair. The Adversaries’ civilization consumed itself in fits of suicidal rage and horrific violence. And the Adversaries fell into their final darkness, despairing, weighted with the knowledge that their best effort had been insufficient. Many subsequent voices that arose were extinguished similarly, until all that remained were the Voices.
For billions of years after they’d fallen into the Adversaries’ trap, the Voices chittered among themselves at the heart of the galaxy in a place where gravity curled so tightly upon itself that all sane descriptions of space and time ceased to apply. So tightly that even the Hounds of Tyndalos found no angles upon which to fasten. Then, as had happened before, a new vessel for the Voices arose outside their prison, far out on a spiral arm. They knew of its imminence, since all of time was one to them, but those lesser voices had begun to intrude on their eternal debate. That was unforgivable.