Read Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Online
Authors: Dennis Detwiller
Tags: #H.P. Lovecraft, #Cthulhu Mythos, #Detwiller, #Cthulhu, #Dennis Detwiller, #Delta Green, #Lovecraft
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (30 page)
Arnold gave him a coin anyway and the child ran off into the filth to die.
“So, sir, what now?” the smiling Gurkha asked in slightly accented English. Manbahadur Rai was one of Major Cornwall’s men, and was along as their impromptu jungle specialist, since the OSS was having some transportation and contact problems in the Pacific. Arnold’s information was spotty at best since they had left Matadi two days before, but it seemed some of their men had run into some incident in Australia; further details were not provided. Cornwall had alerted the members of the PISCES team which had been sent earlier to monitor the situation in the Congo to fill in the gaps of the DELTA GREEN team. It seemed between the British and American forces they could only scrape together four human souls who were willing to save the world.
Rai had served in Burma himself for three months, fighting a guerrilla war against the Japanese in the canopied jungle of the Burmese highlands. He was tiny but looked in some way...ready. Rai somehow managed to always be prepared for anything which might occur. That was what came to mind when confronted with such a vibrant presence; his grasp of every situation was plain for anyone to see. Endlessly upbeat and incapable, it seemed, of tiring, Rai hauled packs like he was an ant, lugging a full load of gear which looked improbably huge upon his back. He could walk for hours (a fact he demonstrated when the train broke down at Boma the day before), hauling any load up slopes, stairs, anywhere. The Nepalese tribesman never lost his breath or looked winded. He never sweated. He was the perfect fighting machine.
Arnold, watched as Rai removed his kukri from its sheath with a tiny, childlike hand. The huge, hooked fighting knife was razor sharp and could, when used properly, take an enemy’s limb off with one well-placed slice. Often, when fighting in guerrilla actions, it was the only weapon the Gurkha used. The Japanese had learned the hard way that it was a superior weapon.
Rai checked his perfect white teeth in the reflection of the blade. Arnold, despite his dour mood, smiled and looked back at their group.
The three other members of the team stood in a tight circle about fifteen feet behind them, gathered around a pile of equipment. Smith stood off to one side, watching Arnold with unblinking, lizard eyes. Two were OSS men recently churned out of the newly minted United States commando production line: Louis Jackson, from Jackson, Mississippi, by way of Yale, who was in charge of explosives and who looked like a car salesman, and Archibald (never Archie) Haulewell from New York, who was there just in case something happened to Jackson. The other man was a PISCES intelligence analyst who had prepared the report on the local rumors regarding the grey city in the Congo, and who had contacts in the bush. Despite numerous introductions, Arnold could still not place the man’s name. There were just too many facts to consider which seemed far more important.
“Well, Rai, I guess we wait for the train for Lumbaso and then we’re off to Loto. Then it looks like it’s into the jungle.” Arnold stood up and lifted his rucksack up with a grunt.
“Yes, sir.” Rai deftly returned his kukri to its sheath in a single fluid motion that simultaneously nicked his thumb, drawing the smallest trickle of blood. Rai’s explanation that Gurkha tradition demanded that the sacred kukri never be returned to its sheath without being blooded had not made Arnold any less uncomfortable about seeing him do it.
“How’s the explosives? Did Jackson check them?”
“Good. Good. Yes, sir.”
“They have me paranoid, Rai. It’s a rough trip out there.”
“Don’t worry, sir, nothing but electricity can set it off. I hear you can even cook the composition-B in a fire, and nothing—”
“All right, Rai.”
“Sir,” Rai said, and trotted back to the group.
As the hours passed their group separated, individuals breaking off to smoke cigarettes, to talk to one another in hushed tones, or to be alone. Only Smith remained completely aloof. At one point, Jackson confided to Arnold in a thick southerly drawl that the contents of their box of explosives would:
“Give all the heads on Mount Rushmore a severe headache.”
No one could know what Arnold did. The explosives would never be used in the manner their orders prescribed. He would never allow them to be—even if he had to kill every man on his team with his own hands to prevent it. The city of Thule would survive him, that much he was sure of. Whether it survived him by minutes or decades, only after death it would no longer be his responsibility. Until then, the city, Thule, would come to no harm.
When the second train came in, the one that would wind its way to Lumbaso in the center of the jungle, Arnold and his group loaded their gear onto it and were given a seat up front by the white Belgian conductor who smiled at them through rotted, yellow teeth. The crowd outside mysteriously congealed again as if by instinct, pushing and screaming and moving, each person sure of his or her own importance above all others. Small clusters of hogs, boxes of chickens, and hundreds of other animals were rapidly pushed aboard by the natives, who treated each small animal with the love usually reserved for children.
Arnold settled into a polished wood chair as the car filled up in a matter of minutes with children, old women and animals. The rest of his team shoved their way on to the seats across from him. And as he knew he would, Arnold found himself looking directly into the flat eyes of Dr. Smith who stared through him with the implacable gaze of a man trying to dissect a particularly difficult puzzle. Smith looked carefully at the bag on Arnold’s lap. The bag which held the alien “camera” device. Trying, it seemed, to look through the bag and wood to the alien interior of the machine. Its eyes remained fixed on the box for a long time. The train began to slowly lurch forward.
“Why do you not take any pictures?” Smith suddenly asked. Arnold could not be sure, but he thought he heard a note of amusement in its voice.
5
:
To restore all as it was, my life in reward
The Motion agent dropped the brown paper sack full of electronic components down on the table in the cluttered apartment. The humans had stopped hours before, exhausted, but the thing in the boy’s body continued its labor. They had been toiling for the last five days straight, slowly assembling intricate and bizarre contraptions at the behest of their master. The boy considered the exhausted servant for a moment with contempt, searched through the paper sack for a small roll of silver wire, and waved the human away with an impatient gesture. The human shuffled out, the same way he had come in, head downcast and eyes bloodshot. Moving a large electronic component out of the way, the Motion man swept the door shut and locked it behind him.
Inside an apartment, as it had done in a thousand places a thousand times before, the Motion had set up shop to construct the devices of the Great Race, utilizing the crude tools of the era to fulfill the council’s demands. The attic room was empty except for the barest essentials. None of the usual furniture was present (except for a large wood table and three mismatched chairs), but the apartment was filled with various hand-made components which had yet to be fitted into the machine the group had been working diligently to complete. The being called One considered the fruits of its labor, the device it had been constructing on the table for five days now. Since its conversation with the human, Thomas Arnold, its intellect had been processing all the requirements of such a device, looking for flaws and errors in the humans’ contributions with a critical eye. It would have to redouble its efforts to complete it in time. Even now the precipice in time approached.
The device covered the entire table in odd, geometric shapes and was composed of hundreds of separate segments of wires, glass and mirrors fastened to slots of wood and cardboard with tiny, soldered hooks of melted metal. The construction was filled with large geometric gaps which opened to its wire-filled interior, within which the various separate components now scattered about the apartment—built by the harried Motion agents under One’s direction—would be inserted when the time was right. One would have to complete the device soon, for now it knew, after contacting the council, that the ward at Thule would fail on March 21, 1943. Past that, no recovery of the timeline would be possible.
Temporal communication with the council of Pnakotus indicated that the traitor’s actions had devastated the future timeline. Causality in which the Great Race could exist past November 5, 1945, was completely gone, replaced by a void within which no species existed that the Great Race could occupy. Human civilization, and with it the circumstances which would lead to any future civilizations on the Earth, completely disappeared on that day. The council had already lost four scouts probing the darkness past that time. With the information One had provided on the trap the traitor had set for it, the council now knew that their greatest enemy would be released on March 21, 1943, when some event would destroy the ward. The Great Race’s greatest secret had been compromised.
Following orders, One had informed the human, Thomas Arnold, of the dire consequences of destroying the ward in the Congo. One had given the human a device to prevent this circumstance from coming to pass, the companion device to the one it was constructing now. If One did not complete the device it was working on before the humans and Smith arrived at Thule, existence past November 5, 1945, would cease to be. It would forever eliminate the careful and precise path through time that the Great Race had spent eons sculpting and maintaining. Once released, the great enemy would never be confined again.
Soon enough it would all come to pass, One thought to itself. It continued to rapidly solder components. It was learning that pointless conjecture was one of the first effects of its intellect being housed within a human shell. The traitor and One would meet again in the limited future, and what would become then? It did not know, but it had an idea. They were equals, and like equals they would cancel each other out when their time came.
It knew the truth of time in a way no human could. Events occurred, or they did not. There were few possible outcomes for any event. The traitor would perish, or the future of the world would die in its stead.
20
:
The art of our necessities is strange
Old Muluwari, a hunched, wrinkled, dark-skinned aborigine, looked into Joe Camp’s eyes and smiled a toothless smile, and Camp felt the warmth of the good man flow into him. It was just that plain. Camp could think of no other way to put it; the feelings flowed out of the man in waves, like heat from the sun. After two days of relentless travel, by car and at last on foot, Camp had somehow found himself in the midst of Western Australia’s Gibson Desert in the middle of the drought season, surrounded by a gathering of more than a hundred aborigines.
Camp was sitting at a huge, roaring fire next to the elder, Muluwari, while Maljarna and the other aborigines, the men who had saved him, chattered away in their native tongue behind him. Dozens of others, unknown to him, talked and laughed in low voices, in an aborigine tongue sprinkled with bits of English which Joe could still not piece together. At first he found it disconcerting that he was the only white man in the entire group, but soon, as hospitality was lavished upon him, he felt that discomfort drop away. Everything was very relaxed and informal, and a strong feeling of family permeated the camp. Children were smiling and happy, laughter was the predominant display of emotion—but underneath it all was something Joe Camp could not put his finger to. Something dark. And then there were the weapons.
Several dozen men in the gathering held guns, some of them modern automatic weapons of British design. Others were armed with traditional weapons, boomerangs and wari wari spears. It looked to Camp like the tribe was preparing for war, or at the very least self-defense.
Old Muluwari barked something in his native tongue and a boy rushed to gather what Camp assumed was food from a large, flat bowl, but the boy ran off into the dark, clutching the bowl to his spindly chest, disappearing down the hill.
The tribal gathering, or corroberrie as it was called by the aborigines, was positioned on the near-empty, drought-ravaged Lake Woolomber in a small depression in the artesian basin, with a good view out to the north of the Gibson Desert, which the aborigines had been watching with some diligence since their arrival. Joe Camp had gained no answers since his arrival, but had figured that the Ngaanyatjarra would fill him in when the time was right. During his time among the Kachins he had learned not to question the natural order of things, but to become a part of that order through patience. Camp was nevertheless amazed at his surroundings. It all astounded him, both the circumstances which lead him here and at the comfortable feeling he gained by watching the smiling tribesmembers as they laughed and talked.
