The Sons of Heaven (38 page)

Hi, Ron. Can’t talk now.

But my chronometer says it’s 2354!

Yeah. There’s a war on, soldier.

Great!

I just gave you your orders in code. Access them when I’m gone. Who do you want for second-in-command?

The giant in the tank thought briefly.
Albert, I guess
.

Okay
. Joseph ran to a particular vat where another giant slept, swarmed up its side, and repeated the procedure. Albert stared in surprise, asked roughly the same questions, and was given more or less the same reply. Joseph scrambled down. He picked up the two discarded circlets and zipped them into his pack where the others had been. Then he turned and ran from the cavern, back up the long tunnel.

Ron and Albert looked out through their respective tanks and saw each other. They waved. Then they closed their eyes to access the orders they had been given.

Joseph emerged into pouring rain. Much more quickly than he had gone up, he came jogging down; was back on the agcycle and roaring away south within five minutes.

No ghosts followed him. He returned the agcycle at Northallerton and purchased a train ticket for Selby. While waiting to board, he went into the men’s lavatory, changed his clothes again, and dropped the two circlets he had brought away down the lavatory’s fusion hopper. With a clang and a whoosh they were gone, to do their bit keeping the lights burning in Northallerton.

Joseph boarded, got off at Selby, and caught a flight to Calais. There he rented an agcar and drove to Irun Del Mar in the Pyrenees.

At the bunker under the Pyrenees, he woke two more sleepers and gave them their orders. He woke two more in the bunker outside Fez. Catching a flight up to Norway, he did the same; rattling all night in a train across Siberia, he found his way to the bunker in the Verkhoyansk mountains and did the same there. Another train took him to Vladivostok, where he caught an air transport to New Mexico. He was in and out of the bunker in the Sangre de Christos in ten minutes. From Santa Fe he took the bullet train to San Diego, on the coast, and booked passage on a commuter clipper to San Francisco. On
Lombard Street he rented another agcycle and forty-five minutes later was speeding up the side of Mount Tamalpais, where he completed his mission.

He went back to Lombard Street, returned the agcycle, and walked up to Van Ness, where he rented an agcar. He drove it south as far as Big Sur. There he got out, set its autopilot on return and walked to Garrapatta.

At Garrapatta he reported to Budu, ate a very large meal, and then slept for three days.

Budu let him sleep. He had earned it.

“The Hangar Twelve Man,” said Latif meditatively. He turned onto his back, staring up at the square of sky above the courtyard. “I watched that footage and I thought, where have I seen that guy before? Then I placed it. The strange thing was, it wasn’t the face of anybody real.”

“What do you mean?” Sarai turned. The raft bobbed and Latif reached out for the pool coping to steady them.

“I knew a Preserver, a long time ago, who wrote bad historical novels. I read his stuff once, as a favor. Volumes and volumes of crap. I never got through it all. At the front of the file Lewis had a graphic, scanned in from this old daguerreotype he’d found somewhere—”

“Lewis?” Sarai leaned up on her elbow. “The Literature Preserver who went missing?”

“The one who went missing,” said Latif, not taking his eyes off the sky. A white bird crossed the square of blue, high up, flying into the west. “And the picture was of a British navy guy from the nineteenth century. Not handsome—strange-looking. But Lewis had become obsessed with him, for some reason. Wrote all these romantic adventures. The point is, the guy in the old picture looked exactly like the Hangar Twelve Man.”

“Peculiar, that,” said Sarai cautiously.

“Yeah. I heard another story, later,” said Latif. “Right after Lewis disappeared. I heard the reason the Company took him out was, he tried to find out who the man in the picture had been, and got too close to something the Company’d covered up, so—good-bye Lewis. Wonder what he’d have thought if he could have seen your Alec Checkerfield?”

Sarai said nothing.

“Even stranger thing,” Latif added. “The person who told me about Lewis—
Joseph, who disappeared right after that—swore that the man in the picture was also a dead ringer for somebody
he’d
known back in the sixteenth century. In England. Some big mortal who’d had an affair with one of his recruits, a Botanist named Mendoza. He hated the guy for it.”

“What are you telling me, boy?” Sarai’s voice was taut.

“I haven’t told you the strangest part yet.” Latif pushed himself up off the raft, sat on the coping with his legs in the water.

“And that would be?”

Latif reached for a towel and met Sarai’s stare. “How’s this for a coincidence? At a New Year’s ball back in 1699, I sat at a table with all three of them. Lewis, and Joseph, and Joseph’s recruit Mendoza. She said something that night, about how unlikely it was that the four of us would ever be together in one room again. It gave me the creeps. The idea of loneliness, especially the loneliness of working for the Company for all time … It’s haunted me ever since.

“All three of them knew about this mysterious Englishman. All three of them have disappeared. We never have been together in one place since that night, just as Mendoza said. ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’”

“Damballah,”
murmured Sarai. “My Alec …”

“Weird, isn’t it?” said Latif, never taking his eyes off her. “But you knew Alec Checkerfield.”

“What is it you want from me, eh?” she said wearily.

“Answers,” Latif replied.

“I haven’t got them. And, boy, we’re at the end of time! What does any of it matter now?” Sarai cried.

“It might matter a lot,” said Latif. “Anyway, I owe it to Lewis and the others. You think your Damballah would know?”

“Hello?” Nefer ventured out and peered along the arcade at them. She cleared her throat. “Latif? Something’s happened. I think you’d better—”

But he was on his feet immediately, pulling on a robe. Sarai scrambled out of the water, grateful for the interruption.

They followed Nefer back through the house to the room where Suleyman received visitors. There was a mortal monk there, gratefully sipping tea, though he set it aside and stood to bow when they entered the room.

Suleyman sat at the table regarding two objects. They appeared to be, respectively, a gift box containing a perfume atomizer of ruby glass nested in strange-looking packing medium and a page from a medieval manuscript, straggling Latin uncials on a rough-torn scrap of paper. Suleyman took up the
paper and presented it to Latif without a word. Latif scowled, reading it over quickly. He looked at the monk. “You brought this?” he demanded.

“Yes, Lord. It was delivered to our chapter house in Dublin.”

“Regular parcel post,” Suleyman told him. “The shipping stamp’s from a place called Knockdoul. Unusual excelsior it was packed in.”

Latif looked down into the box and his eyes widened. “Those are human finger and toe bones,” he observed.

“So they are,” Sarai concurred. She sidled up and read the message over his arm. “This would be from the famous lost Lewis?” she asked.

“Or we’re meant to think so,” Suleyman replied. He looked at Latif. “You knew him, son. Does this sound authentic?”

“I can’t tell!” Latif began to pace the room. “All right, maybe the style’s similar. He had an old-fashioned way of expressing himself. Have you had that thing checked out yet?” He pointed at the red bottle.

“No, son, it only just arrived,” Suleyman told him.

“Then let’s get it checked out,” Latif shouted, and grabbing up the bottle he strode out of the room. They could hear doors slamming after him as he progressed through the house toward the laboratory. Sarai exchanged glances with Nefer and Suleyman and followed him in silence. The monk, looking disconcerted, said: “If I’ve given offense—”

“No, no.” Suleyman waved a hand. “You mustn’t think so. The boy is hot-tempered, that’s all. More tea?”

Victor peered through the lens, his pale face expressionless.

“Yes,” he said. “That is unquestionably an engineered toxin. Rather unorthodox compared to the ones with which I’m familiar. Someone’s little work of native genius, no doubt.” He stood and turned to Suleyman. “Are you certain it’s Lewis’s blood?”

“Well, this came with it,” Latif said, offering Victor the message. Victor read it in silence a moment. His mouth tightened. Handing the paper back to Latif, he cleared his throat before he said: “Shall I tell you what I think is going on?”

“Go right ahead,” said Latif, folding his arms.

“I think our masters have grossly miscalculated. They gave Lewis to those creatures, in the hope they’d devise a way to kill immortals. It must have seemed like a reasonable expectation; the little freaks had invented so many
other useful things. These toxins, however, won’t do the trick. I have no doubt the results would be dramatic and uncomfortable, but not, ultimately, fatal to one of our kind.”

“Speaking as an expert,” said Latif.

“Yes,” Victor replied, unsmiling. He turned away and stared down into the courtyard, where a mortal servant was sweeping leaves. “Ironic that it took them three quarters of a century and they still failed. Lewis had a way of surviving… still has, I suppose. What must he have suffered, all these years?” he mused. No one replied and after a moment he looked across at Suleyman. “You said something about having located him?”

“The bottle was mailed from a parcel depot in the Celtic Federation,” Suleyman explained. “We did a scan in a thirty-mile radius around the depot.”

“The damn Company must have known where they were all along,” said Latif. “There’s a huge concentration of life signs and energy signals, all bunched together in one spot out in the middle of nowhere. I’m betting it’s an underground bunker. We read seventy-one mortal signatures and one cyborg.”

Victor received that news unblinking. He turned back to the window in silence.

“We’re going after him,” Latif continued. “I’m doing reconnaissance for a rescue, before the Silence. Do you want to come along for the ride?”

“I think not,”Victor replied. “Thank you, but I must be getting back to California. So much to do.”

Latif threw up his hands. “Suit yourself,” he said, and stalked out.

“And after all,” said Victor to no one in particular, “I don’t know that I’ve quite got it in me to look Lewis in the face.”

A tremor ran through the great clock. It was going to strike; the gears had nearly come around to the appointed place, the counterweight had begun its ratcheting descent.

A convoy moved silently through Wanstead, and pulled up at Manor Park Storage. Orders were hissed by someone querulous, certain mortals hastened to obey. Purposeful as ants they entered unit 666. Quickly as any team of immortal cyborgs they emptied it, loading the chlorilar drums out to the waiting lorries. They didn’t take long and they were quite unobserved. The convoy sped off into the night, away from London.

It did not stop until safely over the border into Wales, and just outside a village with an ungodly number of Ds in its name the convoy arrived at a private airstrip, dark and unlit, where nevertheless an air transport waited under power. As quickly as the drums had been loaded, they were offloaded. The empty lorries dispersed into various trunk roads. By infrared, without running lights, the air transport rose silently as a black balloon and the occluded stars were the only sign of its flight.

Where it touched down at last, there were mortals waiting to unload it. In no time at all the air transport drifted away, empty. The chlorilar drums went up a ramp, one after another after another, and in darkness—for no lights had been permitted—they were emptied into a great vat, and once emptied were fed down a fusion hopper. Bang, whoosh, away, they were gone and might never have existed, for all there was any evidence left by the time morning broke gray over the horizon.

The Summer Solstice was rigorously observed as a religious holiday in the Celtic Federation, so Ratlin’s Confectionary had given most of its employees the day off in compliance. There were a number of its employees, however, who belonged to old and discredited faiths, who had jumped at the chance to earn overtime bonuses by spending the sacred day filling a specially commissioned order, incorporating dark treacle from one particular vat.

All day the factory ran, shift schedules disregarded, and the music of Raymond Scott’s
Powerhouse
roared from the sound system to inspire the workers as the sun rose to his glory in midheaven and then began his descent. Nut clusters were dipped, balls of fondant were dipped, gummy squares of Turkish Delight were dipped, ordinarily innocent sweets with no power to harm anyone but a diabetic. Ah, and the special Chocolate Deluxe Honeycomb, and the special Black Coffee Truffles! Who could resist them?

All were dipped and rolled out on their particular assembly lines briskly, proceeding along belt-driven lanes to the corner of the factory where printers spewed out bright Special Assortment color reproductions of the nineteenth-century painting
Jupiter Sitting in Judgment
by Gericault, which were cut, pasted onto box lids, and embossed at high speed, whirling around on a carousel to meet the box bottoms, which were by that time filled with frilly paper cups holding a truly unique assortment of Theobromos. Lids met bottoms, embraced and raced on with their dubious contents to the next station on the long line, where they received a double-band of purple ribbon on the diagonal. Hurrying on, each box was the recipient of a small embossed card tucked neatly under the ribbon, and each card bore the message:

So! Packed and self-important the boxes proceeded through the sta-sealer, and then, inviolate, dropped one upon another into shipping units, twenty to a tub, seized each as it reached capacity and hustled into a waiting lorry.