torg 01 - Storm Knights (9 page)

The Soviet officer pushed through the door and found himself at the top of a stairwell. It appeared to lead down several stories below the ground. He glanced back at the woman, but her back was to him. She had done her job, he realized. Now he must do his. He started down the steps.

After he had traveled down more flights of stairs than he ever cared to travel again, Ondarev reached the bottom landing. There he found a heavy metal door. It, too, was unmarked. Before he could knock, the door swung open. A middle-aged woman in a nurse's uniform met him, nodded, and motioned for him to follow. He did not disappoint her.

The nurse showed the captain into a small room that smelled of hospitals and circulated air. There was a child's desk and chair in one corner. A globe of the world sat atop the desk. A small bed rested against the far wall, and beside it was a hard-backed chair. The nurse left the room, closing the door behind her so that the captain could be alone with the room's two occupants. The first, a man in a white smock, rose from his chair to greet the officer. But the captain ignored the man. His attention was clearly focused upon the young woman lying in the bed.

She was young — perhaps twenty, perhaps less — and she was stunning. But her beauty had nothing to do with makeup or fashion, for she wore no makeup and her clothing was but a simple hospital gown. Her hair was the color of radiant sunshine, and her eyes were pools of light blue water that stared at nothing, but seemed to see everything.

"Welcome to Project Omen, Captain Ondarev. I am Dr. Kazan," the man in the smock said, trying to get the officer's attention. "And this is Katrina Tovarish, the one you have come to see."

The captain continued to look at the young woman. After all these years, was this slip of a young thing the culmination of all the work and money the government had poured into the Department of Psychic Research? And, even if she was, could she really help them?

He took the globe from the desk and studied it for a moment. It was mounted within a curved arm so that it could spin freely. He placed the globe in the young woman's hands, then bent down beside the bed and whispered into her ear.

"What did you see, Katrina Tovarish?"

"Captain, I'm afraid you do not understand," the doctor told him. "Katrina is quite blind."

The officer fixed Dr. Kazan with a deadly stare, then repeated his question to the young woman. He said the words very gently. "What did you see?"

In a haunting voice that Captain Ondarev would never forget, the young woman said, "I saw the storm clouds gather over Earth. I saw the dark rain fall. There are seven raiders coming — seven invaders to attack Earth, seven different places to be attacked."

"She has been experiencing this vision for several months now," the doctor explained. "I reported it to your superiors each time, and each time I was dismissed."

"I am here now, doctor," said Ondarev. "Please do not interrupt us again. Katrina? May I call you Katrina?"

Again the haunting voice spoke. "You may, captain. And might I add that you have a very nice name. I've always liked the name Nicolai."

Ondarev could not remember using his first name since he entered this room. But he must have, he rea-

soned, for her to know it. He dismissed the mystery and went back to his questions.

"Where are these invasions going to occur, Katrina?"

She tilted her head to one side, as though she were listening to a far-away voice. Then she began to spin the globe, letting her fingers run across its textured surface.

"Here," she said, pointing to Borneo without looking where her finger struck.

"Here," her finger tapped New York.

"Here, here, here." Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union.

"And here, and here." Her finger pointed to Eygpt and Japan.

Captain Ondarev stood up and wiped perspiration from his brow. He took the globe from Katrina and held it so he could look at it. The outline of his beloved country stared back at him. She had touched the globe there with her fifth tap. That meant there was still time.

"Captain, the storm has already begun," she added, "and the invaders are falling to our world along with its poisonous rain."

"Prepare her, doctor," Ondarev ordered briskly, "she is to leave with me."

"Why?" the doctor questioned nervously. "I do not understand? What is happening?"

"We have lost all contact with Singapore and its Indonesian neighbors, and the United States has come under the attack of unknown forces. Don't you see? Her storm has begun, and I will need her help if our country is going to survive."

As Ondarev moved to leave the room, Katrina's haunting voice stopped him.

"The storm has a name, Captain Nicolai Ondarev."

He forced himself to look at the young woman, even though his sweat was now running cold.

"It calls itself Torg."

28

"Time To Go, Time To Go, Time To Go," streamed redly, blinking across the inside of her closed left eye. Irritatedly, she opened her eyes. The alarm display continued to flash and stream across her vision as she looked about the room. Faint, ghostlike images, leaking backward from the sensover chip in the first socket behind her right ear, through her brain, optic nerves, and to her retinas, overlay the hard reality of the sleeping portion in her living cubicle. She blinked her left eye once, turning off the alarm display and activating the snooze control. That would let her go back to sensover for ten more minutes before the alarm roused her again.

The cubicle faded from her vision and the translucent images became solid as she closed her eyes and returned to experiencing a recording of the Kios City Philharmonic playing Hartel's Post-Invasion Symphony, with herself playing first piano.

Atonal, bass vibrations trembled in the tips of her fingers where they pressed down upon the polished white plastic of the keys, and the attenuator pedal quivered under her foot as she floated back into the sensover scene. She was just getting to her solo when a voice came through the intercom panel near the door. The voice intruded on the music and spoke her name questioningly.

"Dr. Hachi?" the voice of the security doorman forty-seven floors below asked.

"Triple damn," she muttered to herself as she sat up in bed and pulled out the sensover chip of the symphony. She tossed it onto the counter that ran the length of the room, letting it mix with the jumble of electronic equipment, papers, books, program chips and data disks that littered the surface.

"What?" she asked after she had slid off the bed and pushed the speak button on the intercom. Noting her absence, the bed retreated into its wall slot.

"Your driver is here for you, Dr. Hachi."

"Where?" she asked.

"Garage level five, stall twenty-three."

"Okay. Tell him I'll be down as soon as I can."

"Sure thing ... uh, Dr. Hachi?"

"Yes?"

"Good luck, Mara."

Mentally paralyzed for a moment with the thought of luck and how much of that elusive, randomly indeterminate substance it would take to save a world, she made no answer to the doorman's last remark. Then, thinking that even if she could not calculate nor mathematically define luck, only the probability of it, she was going to need all of it that she could get.

"Thanks, Randin-Six. Randy."

"Nothing of it, Mara. Carry your bags up when you get back?"

Back. The word echoed in the shadowy, fear-filled corners of her mind. Back. Step off into the cosmverse and back again. Just like that. Nothing to it.

"Yeah, sure. See you, Randy," she said, and took her finger off the speak button.

29

In sheer reptilian pleasure, Baruk Kaah hissed his approval. The new tribe members were making excellent progress. They used their hands to dig shallow holes throughout this field they once called Central Park. Into each six-paces-by-three-paces-by-one-arm-length-deep hole was laid a gospog seed. Then one of the dead of this world was placed in each hole, taken from the growing piles that lined the edge of the field.

Off to the High Lord's left, another pile of bodies was carted in atop a dinosaur with a large, flat back. After it deposited its gruesome cargo, it trundled back to reload. Baruk Kaah looked to the field again, eager to watch his hand-picked master planters firmly tamp the loose earth back into the holes, sealing the seeds and bodies in place.

Further along the rows of holes, a new member of Baruk Kaah's tribe dug enthusiastically. He wore dark blue slacks and a light blue shirt that had a New York City Transit Authority patch on the left sleeve, and he moved in a rolling, chimpanzeelike gait. His uniform, his mirror-finish sunglasses, and his clean-shaven face looked out of place as he hunched over to dig another hole.

Baruk Kaah tilted his head upward and inhaled deeply. As he exhaled, he closed a flap in his nasal passages and diverted his exhalation through the hollow, elongated and u-shaped bony structure that ran from his nostrils, passing up the center of his face and arching at the top of his head. The trumpeting sound he made was a salute to the planters and diggers. The workers looked up from where they squatted and roared in response to the High Lord's praise.

"What isss your crop?" Baruk Kaah asked hissingly of the edeinos planter nearest him.

"These are gospogsss of the first-planting, Sssaar," the planter said. At the same time, he kept track of the carelessly swinging, sharply-ridged tail of the High Lord. It had been known to strike swiftly if the Saar was displeased. "In seven suns, you will have an army of gospogsss to march at your back."

"How long before we sssee gospogsss of the fifth-planting?"

The answer came, not from the planter, but from the ravagon that landed nearby. "When you win more land for the planting, Baruk Kaah. Then will the Gaunt Man's gift truly bear fruit."

"Sssoon, ravagon, sssoon." Baruk Kaah turned away from the demon and looked back at the workers in the field. He addressed the planter, "Do you have enough workersss?"

The master planter scanned the field. "Yes," he answered. "More of the nativesss are joining usss all the time."

"The Gaunt Man planned well," said Baruk Kaah so that the ravagon could hear, giving grudging respect to the demon's master who looked like the soft-skinned, easily crushed natives of this cosm, but who truly thought and acted as an edeinos.

"Grow well, planter," the High Lord said as he made his leave, not bothering to say anything to the ravagon.

30

On the island of Borneo, a new reality held sway. Gone were the laws of Earth, replaced by the axioms of Orrorsh. In the island's dark interior, a writhing bridge constructed of tortured bodies spanned an expanse from sky to ground. Beside the bridge, a small town had been constructed hastily, though to look at it one would believe that it had been in place for ages. The town lay clouded under a gray pall of burning coal and wood. Its cobbled streets were made odorous from the droppings of horses that pulled an incessant flow of carriages, delivery wagons, and hansom cabs. At the town's center, rising slightly over the other buildings, was a walled estate.

To the general public of Orrorsh, this was Salisbury Manor. But to the lord of the estate, it was Illmound Keep.

Within the walls of the estate was a four-storied manor house. Pointed, domed, and open-topped towers, which were round, square, oval and slanted, stabbed at the sky. Crenelated walkways arced and connected the towers or ended halfway to nothingness. Gable ends, held in the arms of massive, stone gargoyles who crouched upon the peaks of the slate roofs, jutted outward at every conceivable angle. Windows, dark and lighted, of thin-scraped horn and oiled vellum, of glass that was cut and stained and clear, looked out upon the rolling lawns and black, gnarled forests of the estate. Dormers wept from the eaves and down the sides of the manor house. And here and there, a buttress flew.

In a room on the top floor of the manor house, a room paneled in heavy, dark wood and walled in shelves of leather-bound books, stood the hunter called Kurst. He stood with his back to the darkly green upholstered furniture and the massive, oak desk. The room was lit by the yellow, softly hissing flame of a brass and crystal gas lamp hanging from the tin-paneled ceiling. He stood looking out the leaded-glass, diamond-paned window down into the gardens below, tracing out with his eyes the intricate patterns of the hedge maze that dominated the west lawn of the estate. Carefully, as though he were actually walking on the crushed gravel, his eyes followed the angled and curved path. So as not to mar the challenge, he avoided looking at the center of the maze, the small open square that held the prize for any who could win their way there. Yesterday, when the gardeners had rerouted the maze, they had chained a young woman, one of the dark-skinned maidens native to the island, to the iron bench at the center of the open square.

Kurst calmly drank some of the heavy burgundy from the crystal wine glass he held. He almost had the pattern solved, and soon he would go down to the west lawn, enter the maze, make his way through its winding, deceptive paths, and take the prize that the Gaunt Man had provided for him. He had never failed to take whatever prize was set out for him. He did not know if the Gaunt Man knew of this vantage point in the slanting west tower that allowed an overview of the maze below, nor did he care. He finished the wine and set the empty glass down on the tray, next to a half-filled decanter. He was turning away from the window when a hesitant knock came from the other side of the door.