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Maligoth

Chapter Thirty-three

Sasha was still gone, lost somewhere in time and space. The next morning, they returned to the house in the countryside to reset the trap. The technicians had left it in shambles. Much of the monitoring equipment was exposed and inoperative. They were warned to stay out of the basement by one of the retreating technicians. "We don't know if the electromagnetic pulse is a deliberate ploy or just a byproduct of the portal technology. Either way, we've got to redo most of this before we're ready to go again."

Sergeant Nick Waldenski made an unexpected appearance, dressed in fatigues and accompanied by two other armed members of the strike team. Wallace gave the man a fierce hug, his spirits lifted by a magnitude of ten. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again!"

"They're having a hard time finding combatants that can cope with this shit, kid. They don't figure they need me to keep an eye on you anymore. You seem to have found a more than adequate replacement."

Melanie mocked a curtsey as she went on by.

Nick leaned closer. "I've heard about her," he said in a confidential tone of voice. "Whiz kid extraordinaire. Isn’t she a bit rough to handle?"

"She's great."

Nick chuckled. "I can see that for myself, but I think I'll keep my distance. She's a black belt, you know."

Wallace eyed the stubby semiautomatic Nick had slung upside down over his shoulder. Nick's mood turned somber. "They showed us a few snapshots of what we're up against. I don't know what they've got planned. They don't want to scare our two-legged dinosaurs off, but I think they've got something drastic in the works. I suspect they'd like to get us on the other side of one of those portals to do some damage."

"That would be a suicide mission," Wallace said, knowing by practical experience how capricious the portals could be.

"It might be the only way. Keep in mind that we're public servants, kid, and the public's in a heap of trouble."

"You guys can hang loose and see what Sasha can do first," Wallace suggested.

Nick gazed at him evenly. "An eighteen-year-old schoolgirl? How much do you think she can accomplish on her own?"

"She's not on her own."

Nick gave him a pained look. "I'm not privy to the details of this mess. All I've heard are the stories, and some sound pretty wild to me."

"You've seen most of it for yourself, haven't you?"

"I was referring to that Maligoth dude. We're talking about some kind of a god, right?"

"Maligoth's a Stik. They go a long way back."

"I hear you've got one on your side."

"You don't sound convinced."

"I keep my fingers crossed. Not my trigger finger, mind you."

Wallace grinned. "Ghaedor's his name, the one we're friends with, but I don't think we can do much without Sasha. And Qualin. Ghaedor says she'll help."

Nick floundered in the face of Wallace's wild-sounding briefing.

"Does anyone believe you've seen a bird with four wings?" Wallace said.

Nick gave him a crooked grin and shook his head.

"Did you see the hands on those kangaroo deer? Four fingers and a thumb."

"Yeah, I noticed."

Wallace had a lopsided grin of his own. "Tell the story often?"

"I keep my mouth shut."

"I wish I could.”

"Don't worry, kid. We know you're not lying, but when something big like this happens, you have to practically undo everything you've ever believed in and start all over to explain it. It's not an easy thing to do."

Melanie returned and broke up the conversation. Nick said a quick farewell and left with his friends. Melanie took his aside. "We're staying here for the night. We won't be safe from the Carns, but Sasha might try to return here."

"Carns? The big guys?"

"We figure they're male. We're guessing the smaller ones are the Saur. They look a lot like what Sasha's becoming. Apparently, they're the female of the same species as the Carn, but some think they’re both female and male, which is almost like a species with three sexes. We just don’t know.”

By six in the afternoon it was both cloudy and dark outside. Melanie spent an hour talking with her associates in and about the house. When she joined Wallace in front of the television, she wore a shoulder holster complete with a sidearm.

She noticed his surprised look. "Want one?"

Wallace surprise turned to shock.

"Seriously,” she said. “Show me you can use it safely and you can have one of your own. Let's go out back and put a few tin cans on the fence."

Wallace dismissed the idea. "I don't think guns are going to help much."

"Neither do I, but I find the idea of shooting at something that's trying to eat me rather comforting." Melanie plopped down at his side and frowned at the picture on the television. "What are you watching?"

"Don't know. Reception sucks. I can't quite make it out."

Melanie tucked her legs beneath her and leaned against him. Wallace relented and draped an arm across her shoulders.

"Thanks. I've been wanting someone to do that all day."

"For all I'm worth."

She grinned up at him. "I know, but I think it's a boy-girl sort of thing. When the testosterone's done with you, you'll be as rough and tough as that cop friend of yours. You just wait and see."

"Okay, I'm waiting."

"Someday soon."

Someday soon would never have arrived had either one of them been facing the two front windows of the living room, or exposed to the blast that sent the glass, blinds and the window frames crashing through the back wall of the living room.

The light came first, two or three seconds worth that gave both Wallace and Melanie the opportunity to dive toward the floor in defense of heat intense enough to ignite the curtains into billowing flame. They didn't have time to actually reach the floor before the blast hit.

Following the initial shock wave, the direction of the explosion reversed itself, shaking the entire house amidst the fury of debris flying outside.

A handful of seconds later, the world outside fell silent. Inside, Melanie was screaming and the house was aflame. Wallace turned to the front door, their only escape route. It burst into spontaneous flame before he reached it, and Melanie spun him around and shoved him back through the house to the basement stairwell. As the flames pursued, Wallace had no choice but to take refuge in the darkness. Melanie came down behind him with her hands on his back.

The burning house roared. Overhead, floor joists smoldered and creaked. Second by second, the temperature rose. Within minutes, they would suffocate in the heat.

Wallace ran to a basement window.

"You can't go out there!" Melanie screamed.

Indeed, the world was incandescent outside. Before the glass darkened and blocked his view, Wallace could see the trees about the house burning like Roman candles.

In the next second, the glass shattered. Wallace reeled back from the inferno that came through like a blow torch.

Melanie gave another scream, this one warning of something of a psychic rather than physical horror. Wallace turned to see the entire west wall of the basement crackling in electric blue light, a familiar phenomenon that had nothing to do with the fire. The stench of ozone seared his lungs.

He had a clear view of the world beyond. His first impression was of a domed football stadium centered by massive generators that whined harmonically and loud enough to drown out casual conversation. Small groups of the seven-foot monsters ran in all directions with massive rifles held across their chests. Smoke and flame rose in the distance from a hole blasted in the far dome wall. A siren wailed like a dying animal.

Three smaller, far more human-looking beings ran toward the portal. Sasha led the group with one of the oversized rifles held diagonally across her breasts. She wore clothes that looked to Wallace to be fashioned of leather and trimmed in polished metal.

She wasn't going to make it. Monsters were on an intercept course. One stepped into view with its back to Wallace and blocked her way. Wallace could have reached out and touched the beast.

Melanie saw Sasha bring her weapon up to bear and rammed Wallace with her shoulder, knocking him out of the line of fire and dragging him to the ground. A beam of light brighter than the sun speared the monster and tore him asunder, the charred remains of his body falling onto the basement floor.

Sasha fired three more times at targets out of Wallace's view. Other beams of hellish light flickered dangerously near her, one heating a swath of ground near her feet in a trail of smoke and bubbling metal. The other figures accompanying Sasha turned and dropped to their knees, bringing their own rifles up to cover her back.

Wallace heard himself screaming for Sasha to run. Again it was Melanie to who kept her wits about her and understood that their own side of the portal was far more lethal that Sasha's. She gave Wallace a brutal shove as the flaming ceiling of burning floor joists came crashing down upon them.

Once through the portal and within the arena of deadly light beams, retreat was cut off by a blast of flame. The portal itself vanished in the next moment to become a wall of gun-colored metal.

Now it was Sasha screaming for them to run for their lives. She lay down indiscriminate cover fire and retreated to a metal railing and a flight of concrete stairs leading into the ground. Sasha's people went down first. Wallace and Melanie held hands as they made a mad dash for cover. Sasha followed on their heels and hit a switch at the top of the staircase. A motor whined and a steel door slid closed overhead.

The incandescent barrels of the rifles continued to emanate a terrific heat. The air stank with the rancid odor of burnt metal. They all met at the base of the stairs and turned to one another, two species of bipeds and one hybrid, six individuals who, aside from Sasha, gawked at one another with utter astonishment.

These were the Saur, Wallace guessed, of the same species as the Carn, but not just female. One of the individuals facing Wallace was clearly male, although far from masculine by even human standards. They moved about with bird-like quickness, evidence of a metabolism far higher than homo sapiens. They were terrified of the newcomers, shying away with sibilant cries of uncertainty.

Their bodies were bald and scaled like than of a snake, except that Wallace had never seen a serpent with colors as bright and patterns as intricate and eye-catching. Black eyes wide with alarm flickered between him and Melanie. Their noses were but slits, as were their lipless mouths. Their skulls were enormous, elongated and placed on the neck at the same odd angle as the monstrous seven-foot version. Still, they were comfortable to the human eye and, given time to adapt, maybe even rather attractive.

Melanie poked him and nodded at the long and slender hands with three fingers and an opposing thumb. The seven foot tall version had the same hands. Sasha had the same hands and only a healing stub of a vanquished fifth finger.

Wallace turned to eighteen-year-old Sasha Abdul thinking her parents would not have recognized her, not as their daughter and certainly not as entirely human. The changes that had occurred had been kind to her for the most part, although she had lost hair along the side of head punk-style where the scales and their silver-blue patterns of color were most prominent. Her eyes seemed larger and darker and perhaps her breasts had atrophied somewhat. Egg-layers had no need of breasts. Otherwise, Wallace guessed that she could have walked a city street without attracting undue attention, at least during hours of subdued lighting.

Tears filled her eyes as he studied her. He sensed that she feared he would reject her because of the changes she had suffered. But Wallace opened his arms to her and she rushed to him weeping, shocking her friends with her unexpected display of affection and vulnerability.

She held tight for a time and then pushed him back him at arm's length. "I'm not so frightening, am I?" she said with tears running from her eyes.

Wallace shook his head absently, despairing of the depth of her fear and the desperate need for approval in her soft voice. "You're very beautiful, Sasha. You were and you still are."

She smiled in pride of Wallace's assessment and turned to Melanie Cass. "Thank you for being Wallace's friend."

"Introduce us to yours," Melanie said, surprising Wallace with the almost cold-blooded intensity of her focus.

Sasha spoke to the Saur in a rapid-fire, sibilant language. When she did so, Wallace saw her body language alter subtly. The three Saur responded with high-pitched voices at a speed several times faster.

"The male is Baen," Sasha said. "The females are sisters, Julit and Bersi. They were the only people Qualin could go to for help. We frightened them quite badly because of our appearance, but things are so terrible in the city that they'll accept a ray of hope from any quarter. They know about the human world and what the Carn are doing, and we have our myths of humanity as well, so we're not complete strangers to one another."

Wallace noticed how she accidentally switched tenses to include herself as a Saur. We have our myths of humanity, so we're not complete strangers to one another. "This is what became of the people of Willington," Wallace said in astonishment.

"In this place and at this time, Willington is two thousand years in their past," Sasha said, "but, yes, these are descendants of the people of Willington."

A muffled booming noise sounded from overhead. Wallace glanced up the stairs they had just descended.

"It's not safe here." Sasha glanced down three corridors stretching away from them in darkness. "The Carn will send search parties about. Follow us."

The three Saur shouldered their rifles and led the way. Melanie and Wallace brought up the rear. At the end of a one of the corridors, an elevator took them further down. When the door opened, brighter and sparsely populated lower corridors appeared to view.

The three Saur called ahead in warning. Doors slammed and locked as the newcomers passed. The walls of the corridor were rough-hewn stone, but the doors were metal and precision-machined with close tolerances.

The six of them piled into living quarters carved from solid bedrock. The lighting was indirect, artistically illuminating the rough rock wall. Again, the furniture and other manufactured items in the room looked to be well made.

Wallace and Melanie were directed to cushions on the floor. The Saur positioned themselves a safe distance away and sat along the wall.

Sasha turned to Wallace and Melanie. She brushed aside her tears. "Do you understand what has happened to me?"

"I know about Qualin," Wallace said. "I've been told you are our only hope."

Sasha visibly relaxed, an enormous burden lifted from her shoulders. "I don't know how I could have explained."

"Is there anything else we need to know?" Melanie said.

"You need to know about the Carn," Sasha said. She squatted before them, her eyes bright in their alien darkness. "Hatchlings must be denied sustenance until their hunger for living flesh passes. Then they can be fed and they flourish as Saur, who are reasoning beings. Hatchlings who consume living flesh immediately after birth become Carn. Carn are violent and have little control over their emotions. They have no adversaries in this world. They fight among themselves and have done so for ages."

Ghaedor had said something about an experiment gone awry. From what Wallace could see, it had been a disaster.

"The Carn scorn the discipline of self-sacrifice," Sasha said. "The Carn are slaves of ritual and instinct. They see life as a struggle to dominate, and they cooperate only to engage other groups of Carn in the struggle for domination. The Saur are slaves, but we are the builders of civilization, gifted with forethought, so the Carn need us. We have submitted to the will of the Carn since the beginning times, but as the Carn bring themselves to the brink of destruction, we have sought to save ourselves. Secretly, we have strived for independent thought and independent action.

"We have sabotaged the Carn in their quest for dominance within many national governments, but we were too late to prevent the deadliest of wars from happening. Many cities have been destroyed. The air is poisoned. We may be too late to prevent the Carn from crossing the old bridge into your world to rear our children. If they do, you will be as defenseless against them as we are. They enslave us, but they feed upon you, and think only to consume your world as they have consumed their own. They will leave both in ruins in the end."

"There was an nuclear explosion in our world," Melanie said, this time in a trembling voice. "I saw fire and smoke topside in this place. Is there a connection?"

Sasha spoke to the Saur briefly. Sasha turned back. "The explosion you experienced in your world must have been momentary leakage through an opened portal. A neighboring city has been destroyed. It was not a deliberate attack upon you or your people. This is the madness of which I speak. It cannot be stopped."

"Do the Carn want to take refuge in our world?" Melanie wanted to know, clearly unsettled by the prospect of a wholesale invasion.

Sasha shook her head impatiently. "The Carn wish to do battle in this world to the death, but they need to breed their own kind, and there are no resources here. The feed animals have sickened and died, or they are contaminated. So the feeding must be done in your world, or it cannot be done at all. You supply the hatchlings with the living flesh they need to become Carn. The two hatchlings I denied the taste of your flesh have since become Saur and will be reared among us."

"How do we stop them?" Melanie asked in an eminently reasonable tone of voice. Only Wallace saw the evidence of how badly she was shaken by Sasha's story.

"You do not need to stop them. The Carn will defeat themselves. The question is how to minimize destruction to your world."

"Can we form an alliance with these people?" Melanie gestured to the Saur with a nod.

Sasha seemed surprised by the question. "Of course you can form an alliance. It is their fervent desire to form an alliance with you. Look at how they worship you, you who are of the mother race. They have legends of old Earth and its people. You are their only hope for salvation. But would your people accept them as allies?"

"I have friends who would give their left testicle to shake the hand of a Saur," Melanie said grimly.

Wallace was surprised that the two women were so quickly in agreement. "Then what we have to do is to get back to the ASG with representatives of the Saur," Wallace said, anxious to return to more familiar surroundings. "How do we know they're still alive after that explosion?"

"The explosion came from the north," Melanie said thoughtfully. "Most of the ASG camp is twenty miles to the west. Sasha, do we have a way to return to our world?"

Sasha smiled grimly. "The Carn are tyrants, but the Saur operate the portals."

"Do you have allies among the Carn?"

Sasha tensed with indignation. "The Carn devour Saur who defy or displease them. They tear the flesh from their bodies as a public demonstration of anger, in view of friends, family, and even children."

Sasha glanced at the Saur lining the back wall of the room fearfully. "There are almost too few of us left to defy them, but our lives are at stake. If the Carn have destroyed themselves, the Saur do not wish to die with them."

"Then we should get moving," Wallace suggested, hoping he sounded eminently reasonable.

The Saur leaped to their feet and danced about nervously, sensing that an agreement had been reached. Sasha spoke to them in their own language, and Wallace watched her dual nature at work. It was as if she could switch from Sasha to Qualin at will. Despite her apparent success at adapting to her strange state of being, Qualin was clearly uncomfortable with humans, and Sasha seemed to disappear altogether when she spoke with the Saur.

"We'll have to travel underground to the laboratories where the portals are generated," Sasha said. "Ours is an experimental installation. Others are under construction which will have a much greater capacity with which to invade your world. If we hope to stop the Carn, we will have to do so quickly."

"We can do it," Melanie said with grim confidence.

Sasha balked as Melanie pressed toward the door. "But first we must settle the issue of resettlement of the Saur."

Melanie's expression smoothed over.

"There are eight hundred million of us," Sasha said quietly. "If the portals are closed only for your benefit, we will die with the Carn."

Melanie was stunned. "Holy shit."

"Let's get the show on the road and worry about petty details later," Wallace suggested. "We'll work something out."

Sasha nodded to Baen, the male Saur, indicating that he lead the way. Sasha gestured invitation for Wallace and Melanie to follow and patiently brought up the rear behind the visitors from one of two worlds she called her own.

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