Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (19 page)

The assassin had been sent through time into the body of a human child both to assure that the greatest portion of its knowledge survived the transfer and to decrease the likelihood that it would be detained by human authorities. Often, the simple brains of humans were far too small to contain the alien minds of the Great Race and much information was lost in the exchange of intellects, just as water may overfill and spill from a tiny receptacle. Excess knowledge was permanently lost. Such was the price of time travel. The brains of immature humans, however, had a higher capacity for the storage of information, much more so than the adults of their species. The assassin’s intellect was vast, so the Motion chose a juvenile human to suit the alien’s needs.

The Motion existed in every time where the Great Race traveled. The Motion comprised individuals from lesser species who had discovered the existence of the Great Race and had chosen to revel in the destruction of their own cultures. The Motion aided the agents of the Great Race, teaching the language, customs, and history of their cultures to those who needed such information, in exchange for technological trinkets and the Race’s good favor. The assassin had come forward in time from the early Paleocene era, an era ruled by the Great Race, guided by a human group of the Motion who had constructed one of the Great Race’s mind-transfer machines on their modern Earth.

It had no pronounceable name in human times, and was simply called One by the members of the Motion. In ancient Pnakotus it was known as the entity who was sent to render justice to wrongdoing, a constable of sorts, and its title was translated into human analog roughly as One Who Is Many Places at Once. Unbeknownst to a vast majority of the Great Race, it traveled throughout time capturing and destroying those of its race who betrayed the chosen line of temporal advancement. Most in Pnakotus thought that their civilization was assured, that their populace was content and that their knowledge was unlimited. But the Great Race, like any other sentient species, held secrets. Even with the strictest safeguards, agents sent through time to further the goals of the Race often defected. The reasons for these betrayals were numerous, but they often stemmed from chemical imbalances inflicted upon the minds of the agents by their newly acquired biological forms. The problems remained no matter what steps were taken to prevent them. So a whole class of citizens of Pnakotus, such as One, rose up to fill the need of their culture. They became the solution decreed by the elders of Pnakotus; a network of assassins throughout time.

The sealed records of the future of the Earth were constantly monitored by the learned elders of the Great Race in the ancient library of Pnakotus. This was the library’s sole purpose, to note eddies and changes in the times they recorded. Why else would such great lengths be taken to create the most magnificent library in earth’s history only to leave it in ruin in the midst of the Australian desert? When the authors of the documents returned to their times, occasionally, the recollections within the documents would shift. Only the elders had access to these original records, and only the elders knew of the great grey area which existed in the midst of human history. While some portions in time would occasionally shift, this great grey spot in time, an area of constant flux, consumed most of the Great Race’s effort. This turbulent era was constantly changing along with records from these times, reflecting a natural maelstrom in history which needed to be continuously corrected to assure the future of the Great Race. Agents were sent forward again and again to guarantee the final outcome of human civilization—the seeding of earth’s atmosphere with sufficient radiation to assure the development of the beetle species which the Great Race would come to inhabit in the far-distant future.

One had jumped forward to the very edge of the grey area in human history, to pursue the races’ greatest traitor, once the most trusted agent of the elders of Pnakotus. One would enjoy expunging the traitor from existence, and would surely succeed where lesser assassins had failed. The traitor was crafty and powerful, but certainly by now its intellect had degraded. The traitor had jumped through many forms, each time losing a bit of its intellect to the limits of the human brain. Soon it would be no match for One, however renowned its intellect had once been.

The inconsequential humans of the Motion had supplied One with the necessary electronics for the hunt. It had then spent some time on modern Earth preparing its arsenal to destroy the prey. Now the pursuit had begun. That final precipice in time, the instant of death, would consume all who stood in One’s way...

The primitive vehicle navigated down a disordered, roaming path which was inefficiently tiled; great gaps in the surface hindered the vehicle’s performance. Multi-level constructions randomly littered the landscape in ill-conceived grids, within which the space-obsessed humans made their insignificant lives. In a dim imitation of Pnakotus, the humans had begun, in this portion of their epoch, to gather in numbers, although no good seemed to come of this advancement. The vehicle continued to travel for a time, until it had left the urban center and instead was rolling on the most rudimentary of paths surrounded by unmanicured wilderness on all sides. The jumbled peaks of distant, rounded mountains, backlit by the falling sun, reminded One once more of the desperate savagery of this time. Humans still lived in consequence of nature, a fact the assassin found highly revolting.

The humans of the Motion flanked One in the center of the vehicle. It sat very still while the humans surrounding it fidgeted. It looked like a small, somber child dressed in dark clothing, its hair combed to match human custom, its hands folded politely in its lap. It held a small device which looked like half of a telephone receiver. One considered the device, which let out a low and steady hum. Suddenly, the tone emitted by the device rose several octaves and took on an odd, ululating resonance.

“Stop,” the child’s body said in a small voice.

Contact with previous pursuers of the traitor (those that survived the encounter) had indicated that the criminal had recovered restricted texts from the ruins of Pnakotus on modern Earth, a fact which was not lost on One. These “books” were unusual by human standards and were easy to isolate, so although it was impossible for the traitor to be tracked itself, its equipment could be located through the use of the simple device One had created. It had proven quite easy. The trail had led straight to the traitor’s retreat.

The human construction was isolated in a field of frozen water precipitate, surrounded by deciduous fir trees. There were no other constructions within the area. The small, single-level building had been fabricated of local plant stock and simple pieces of alloyed minerals. Panes of glazed sand hung in gaps in the walls, forming portals to the outside. A single, vertical pivot formed a gate to the interior, although the gate remained closed. Cloth had been hung in the portals to obscure the interior.

One and its agents exited the vehicle. The Motion men carried human-made lightning guns of Great Race design, crooked to their shoulders in a martial stance. These devices, shaped vaguely like rifles but made of solid bronze, could emit searing rays of electricity and were far in advance of anything humans possessed. One itself held a small, box-like device, which none of the Motion could identify but which they assumed was a weapon. One approached the portal slowly, cautiously observing the situation with the limited range of human senses. A single trail of indentations in the precipitate indicated the traitor was inside.

A sign above the filthy door read “SHAFT #42.” The words meant nothing to One.

“Wait. I will go.” A human who served the Motion stepped forward and put its hand to the portal mechanism, cradling the lightning gun in one forelimb. The human was obviously attempting to gain the assassin’s good favor. One could not yet tell the human traits of facial expressions for what they were, although he knew muscle configurations on the human skull indicated emotional responses; he had studied human anatomy for some time. The Motion agent’s orbicular oris muscles were drawn down taut, and its frontalis muscle was pulled back, raising the hair patches near its orbital cavities—but what this implied One could not determine. The assassin also noted a thin sheen of water precipitate on the skin of the human. These responses were mirrored on the faces of the other humans present, so they most likely represented emotional and not physical responses to stimuli. The other Motion men stepped forward to flank the door.

The Motion agent pushed the door wide. The assassin noted a scraping sound on the floor as the portal swung open. Inside the structure, past the slowly widening gap, the assassin could perceive a terrible red, blue, and green pulsating light. It was a familiar perception. The light reminded One of cities in ruin, of endless seas of rippling immaterial beasts as they poured from beneath the earth and consumed Pnakotus, of an evil so all-encompassing that even the Great Race could not resist it. The assassin turned and ran as the whistling and screams began.

The juvenile musculature of the child’s shell could not carry One into the safety of the wilderness fast enough. Behind it the ear-splitting cracks of the lightning guns sounded—but only twice. The Motion agents died in seconds, emitting awful gurgling screams as they were pulled into the gelatinous, not wholly material body of the thing. The assassin fled into a gathering of trees, fumbling with its box in a desperate attempt to save its mind from the impending death of its shell. It did not look back but could feel a smooth and unnatural wind caress the shell’s skin, like fingers playing across foreign objects in the dark.

Then, the terrible whistling growing ever closer. One snatched another small box from its pocket and retreated further, desperately adjusting components in the device as it stumbled to a snow drift opposite the trees it had been hiding behind. The shell that carried its mind collapsed from exhaustion, barely able to consume enough air to keep its blood fully oxygenated. One rolled over on its back, closed the box and pointed it at the copse of trees. The construction beyond the trees and the bodies of the Motion agents were not visible. One gathered its thoughts and prepared for death. From beyond the cluster of trunks a flashing blue, green, and red aura reflected off the snow, illuminating the scene with an eerie purple light, growing closer.

A shearing, high-pitched shriek shattered the scene, bursting one of the shell’s hearing membranes and causing its eyes to water. The beast had detected its presence. The creature that came for One represented the single thing that the Great Race could not conquer and would never fully destroy. It would come for the assassin and erase its mind from existence; all it had worked so hard to gather, expunged forever.

The shell’s tiny hands began to waver and shake. One found that its mind was endlessly repeating the single thought of its own mortality, over and over again. The shell’s eyes emitted a salty, sight-obscuring liquid, and One found its control over the the shell failing. The shell relieved itself, abruptly voiding the body of all waste products.

The enemy appeared through the trees suddenly. A roiling mass of pockmarked red-green jelly, floating improbably five feet off the ground. A halo of purplish light played off it, illuminating the tiny cul-de-sac in an unearthly glow. Its gelatinous form slithered through the mass of the trees, pulling its atoms through gaps in the atomic structure, searing them, leaving behind dead husks. Portions of the beast phased in and out of existence, appearing and disappearing as it wove its way through the trees, slowly slipping through them to the other side to consume the assassin. Odd five-toed footprints sank slowly into the seamless snow, appearing it seemed of their own accord, and pushed deeper as the beast pulled itself forward on invisible legs.

One recovered control of the shell and pointed its box at the clutch of trees. This device of the Great Race remained useless against the enemy because they were not wholly material, but One could target those things that the beasts passed through. One triggered the box-like device with the press of a small button on its side, and instantly the entire area was lost in an immense, bright white flash. All sight was obliterated instantly; even through the closed lids of the shell’s eyes, the flash was enormous. One turned over and stood clumsily, completely blind yet ready to run.

The next second a deafening wet noise sounded and One was suddenly covered in a foul-smelling, jelly-like liquid which knocked the assassin to the ground and coated it in a crashing wave. Slowly, the eyes of the shell recovered and its blood oxygen level returned to normal, One, victorious, turned to survey the scene of destruction.

A huge, half-moon gap was cut through the copse of trees which had stood just moments before. Two great oblong teardrops on either side of the trees were covered in the remains of the great enemy, a thick, viscous black jelly which smelled of ozone and oil. One had removed the trees, and with them the atoms of the great enemy as they slithered within the form, instantly slicing the beast in two. The assassin had succeeded in killing that which its race feared most.

One stumbled forward towards the structure, its shell’s legs still shaky.