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Chapter 18
Movement to Contact
Military snipers called it “the stalk”, the excruciatingly slow, methodical approach to a target. Often, yards took hours to cover. It required unbelievable patience and self-discipline.Buffy had made her quarter mile “stalk” to the old M-7 installation with Xander in six hours along an approach they’d plotted from the satellite reconnaissance. It took six hours of creeping through, under or around some of the densest vegetation she’d ever seen, putting up with a population density of insects that would put the Everglades to shame, and dealing with one very close call with a poisonous snake known as a bushmaster.
The loss of time appalled her, knowing that her daughter’s life hung in the balance. But if she and Angel and her friends were killed, what chance did her daughter have then? From Xander’s description of Cade and his troops, they were ruthless and extraordinarily competent, and she knew from experience that M-7 installations were surrounded by seismic, acoustic and thermal sensors. Move too heavily, too noisily, or too quickly and it could trigger any one of them. A less stealthy approach would most likely have been suicide. But it tormented her nevertheless. She had failed Elisa too many times. She couldn’t live with herself if she failed her this time, too.
If anyone from her high school days had seen her now, they wouldn’t recognize her. Like Xander beside her, she was dressed from head to toe in a “ghillie suit”, a hand-made camouflage outfit that enabled her to blend seamlessly into the jungle. Her face was a mask of green and earth-tone camouflage paint. The high-tech sniper rifle she pushed before her was festooned with similar concealment.
Buffy Summers looked like nothing less than one of the demons she had fought over the decades, a malevolent earth elemental, a thing to be feared, a nightmare fairy story told to children to make them behave. The nightmare was made manifest in the dress and the demeanor, but most noticeably in the eyes. They were a cold, cold green, an emerald northern sea in the deepest depths of January.
They were the eyes of a killer. They were the eyes of a woman who no longer knew if she had a soul. They were the eyes of a mother who would destroy the universe itself to save the child she had brought into the world, a child she had never really known, a child she had failed and abandoned in favor of her own cursed destiny.
Below her, less than fifty yards away, was her destination, one of the large exhaust ducts that carried waste heat away from the two fusion reactors that powered the M-7 installation. It would not be easy to get in that way. The M-7s had not been stupid or careless. But as hard as it was, it would be easier than trying to get in through the front. Stealth was her only advantage.
There were two guards near the grating covering the exhaust shaft. The stood several yards away from it to avoid the rush of hot air that made an already unbearable jungle even more insufferable. Grass and branches swayed and danced in the outflow.
Slowly, painstakingly, Buffy readied her electromagnetic rail gun, resting the barrel of the sophisticated sniper weapon on the olive drab equipment “drag bag” that she positioned in front of her. Dimly, in the back of her mind, she was aware of the profound alien-ness of it all, the distant primeval savagery of this cold, calculating preparation to take the life of another human being. She was keenly aware of how far she had come from the innocence of youth, from the idealism of a young Slayer. Too much had happened to her. Too much time had passed. Too much evil had been destroyed by her hand, and too much of it had crawled inside her own soul along the way.
Some important part of her had died inside so that the rest of her might live. That was the sad truth of it. Nothing in the universe came free, and there were costs to be borne for every action, every decision. And there was never any way to turn back, to unwalk the miles, to undo one’s own past — not without destroying oneself in the process.
With deliberate care, she dialed in the sights on the rifle’s scope, adjusting for windage and drop. Xander would normally have been her spotter, but at such short range and with a second guard to be eliminated, he too became a sniper. She was peripherally aware of him capably setting up his own rifle.
She pressed a recessed switch and a small servo chambered the first rail-gun round. The rail-gun fired projectiles in the transonic regime, and therefore created a small sonic boom with each shot fired. The sonic boom from conventional ammunition would have tripped the acoustic sensors surrounding the installation. But the sonic boom from the rail-gun’s projectile had an entirely different acoustic profile from standard ammunition, and wouldn’t register on the sensors’ digital signal processors as a gunshot.
Buffy settled the illuminated dot reticule of the scope on her target and she willed her self-doubts and regrets to fade to a distant part of her mind, a part that had no role in the hard cruelties of her war against the dark things of the universe.
It was a shame in a way. It might have been nice to live and grow old and die untarnished by the brutal realities of a life predicated on the deadly application of violence. It might have been nice, but that wasn’t her life. It could never be.
Her breathing steadied to a rhythm, her heartbeat slowed. She increased the pressure of her finger against the trigger. Every sensation seemed enlarged — the hard light of the jungle slashing in humid bright shafts through the canopy of trees, the chaotic symphony of rainforest sounds, the feel of the rifle’s synthetic stock against her cheek.
The trigger pressed against the weapon’s internal firing stud and a massive voltage potential vaporized the rear of the projectile, turning it from metal to superheated plasma and lending it a massive impetus. Her conscious mind ignored the complex workings of the machine, concentrating instead on the figure in her sights as the projectile tore through his chest and he dropped, dead, to the ground. Beside her, she heard the soft, electric buzz of Xander’s rifle, and the second guard was dead before he could react.
Buffy sighed. Too easy. It had all become too easy. She doubted it could ever be different, that it could ever again be like it was back in those more innocent days, back in Sunnydale when it had all been so black and white and the battle lines so clearly drawn. The stark proof of that impossibility lay fifty yards away in a spreading pool of blood. There would be a price to pay, the regrets and guilt transforming in dark nighttime landscapes from memories to nightmares. And when those phantoms of her mind came for her, it would do no good to know that this man was almost certainly a bad man, that he was almost as certainly a killer, that he was in his own small way a very real part of the evil she fought daily.
It would do no good at all because deep down she couldn’t really know this man and what forces and circumstances and just dumb luck had conspired to place him here and now, that had caused his path to intersect blindly with that of a Slayer he would never know, a killer he would never see, a fate he would never understand even as it placed a red dot overtop his heart and ended his life.
And then the moment of introspection was gone, and she was once again focused on the task at hand, and the universe rolled onward toward its fated destiny at the end of time.
As she started forward toward the vent shaft, Xander came close and asked softly, almost sadly, “Do you ever hate what we’ve become?”
She paused and said, “All the time.”
* * *
“Leave us,” said the man seated behind the ring of status readouts and computer screens in the center of the dark, circular, metal walled room.
“Colonel Cade, sir?” asked the guard who had just roughly prodded Elisa Summers through the door.
“Leave us, soldier,” repeated the man. “Or do you think I am in some particular danger from one unarmed girl in handcuffs?”
“No sir,” said the guard said.
When the door slid shut behind him, the man the guard called Colonel Cade turned his attention to Elisa.
“So, this is the Slayer’s daughter,” he said.
“Yeah, well, the Coal Miner’s Daughter was busy today so I had to sub,” said Elisa.
“Ah, the fabled Summers wit. Obviously a genetic trait, although I must confess I never did meet the legendary Buffy Summers.”
“I don’t think she missed out on a whole lot by the omission.”
The man rose and moved past the monitors to stand before her. He cupped her chin in his hand and roughly tilted her head upward. She met his eyes squarely.
“Do not toy with me, girl,” he snarled.
Elisa shook herself free of his grip and said, “Or what? You went to a lot of trouble to get me here. Way I figure it, you need me alive — for now at least.”
Cade circled her like a shark around a wounded fish.
“You don’t know anything. You have no idea about what you are, what you will be,” he said.
“And what’s that?”
“You are the key to limitless power, girl. Your life force, the life force of a bloodline descendent of a Slayer, is the quantum key to reestablishing a nexus with Hell itself,” said Cade. To Elisa, it seemed as if his eyes almost glittered with the psychotic vision of it all.
“That’s what this is about?” she asked. “Opening a gateway to Hell is just going to get you killed, Cade. You run with those big dogs, don’t be surprised when you get bitten.”
He leaned close to her.
“Do you take me for a fool?” he hissed. “I had twenty years to plan this, girl. You see, I have leverage. Once the ether conduit is established, I will be in control of the only nexus point in this universe. I’ll be in control of the Panama canal of interplanar travel. And if anyone or anything tries to take it, it’s an easy enough thing to destroy. Need will keep those big dogs of yours on their leashes. Need and fear of losing their only effective route to this world.”
“I don’t get it. What’s in it for you — or did you just always fantasize about being a toll collector when you were a kid?” asked Elisa.
Cade smirked. “Demons tend to go in for the favor trading business. I’m doing them a favor. It will be understood that I plan to collect in kind. By the time I’m done, this world will be ruled by me.”
“Watch it, Cade. Your Caesar complex is showing.”
“Caesar, child, was a great man. A leader. The world needs leaders.”
“Caesar was a butcher who waged war for political gain. Genius, sure. Great strategist and tactician no doubt. But still a butcher,” said Elisa.
“Ah, how pleasant to encounter someone your age who knows at least a little bit about history. But war is always about political gain, about power. It always will be. At the end of the day, all the equations are about power.”
“The problem with that is once you get power, there’s always someone who wants to take it from you.”
“No one will take it from me. I can assure you of that.”
“Spoken like a true megalomaniac,” said Elisa.
“A shame you won’t be alive long enough for me to prove it to you.”
Elisa hesitated. “You can’t possibly think …”
Cade waved dismissively. “I can possibly think anything I want.”
“You won’t get away with this. My father …”
“…won’t be in time to save you, girl,” interrupted Cade. “Maybe the Slayer in her day could have saved you, but your mother is long dead, and without her there’s no one left to ride to the rescue, I’m afraid.”
* * *
With professional efficiency, Xander and Buffy assembled the tripod mounted cutting laser from the remaining pieces of equipment in their drag bags. The laser was an outgrowth of the Goal Line stand weapons research program from the M?7 conflict, a compact, very powerful neon-argon laser that was probably the only portable cutting tool that could hope to burn through to the vent shaft in a reasonable time.
The M-7s had been careful, Buffy gave them that much credit. She knew from past experience that they would have placed crisscrossing metal baffles at the mouth of the shaft to prevent anyone from getting in while still allowing air to get out. So she’d come prepared.
“Okay, that should do it,” said Xander, locking down the final latch connecting the laser to its power supply.
Buffy nodded and pressed a button on the control panel. A flat screen display came on showing a digital picture of the vent shaft. She started the built-in diagnostic and the laser’s gimbal mount whined its way through three axes of preprogrammed motion. When it was done, Buffy specified the burn pattern for the shaft’s grating on the digital image with a small, built-in joystick.
“Goggles,” she said, and Xander slipped the dark welder’s goggles over his eyes. She settled hers comfortably atop her nose and pressed a large green button marked, simply, “Cut”.
The invisible beam sliced ruthlessly into the tempered steel grating, showering bright sparks around the entrance and teasing blinding white flames from the vaporized metal. After about a minute, the laser’s on-board computer managed to come up with an estimated burn time based on its current progress. Ten minutes. Plus ten more minutes to hack the facility’s computer system . . .
Buffy activated the microphone fastened to her lapel and said, “Dark Angel Team, this is Dark Angel One, over.”
“Dark Angel One, Dark Angel Team. We copy, over,” came Angel’s voice in return.
“The game’s started. Come on over and bring the beer.”
When she signed off, Xander said, “You sure you’re not jumping the gun, bringing them in before we’re finished? They’re going to set off every perimeter alarm in the jungle.”
“It’s a risk,” said Buffy, “but if we wait until we’ve hacked in, it’ll be another fifteen to twenty minutes before Dark Angel Team gets here. That’s almost forty five minutes. I don’t want that kind of exposure. No telling when these guys are supposed to check in or what the rotation schedule is.”
Xander shook his head. “You’re still too damn impulsive even after a century, Buff.”
“Yeah, but that’s why you like me so damn much,” she said.
“Well there’s that and the fact that you’re pretty hot for a woman older than my grandmother. And I think I’ll stop the conversation right there before I manage to talk my way into one of the same old Xander Harris awkward social moments we all remember so well from high school.”
Buffy smiled. “Probably a good idea.”
The laser cutter went to standby with no fanfare beyond a series of three electronic beeps and the soft hiss as the tripod’s pneumatic pistons decompressed.
At the mouth of the vent, the two foot deep crisscrossing grating was gone, its pieces collapsed into the shaft. Still-glowing metal ringed the mouth of the tunnel like fiery, broken teeth.
“We’re in,” said Buffy over the sound of the huge interior ventilation fan as she approached the shaft. “Watch your step. This metal’s going to be hot for awhile, and the impeller might blow some embers around.”
Xander followed her into the dark vent shaft and crouched in the entrance with his rail-gun and an MP5 submachine gun at the ready, on guard while his old friend worked on the next phase of the infiltration.
Buffy immediately began inspecting the area around the six-foot diameter counter-rotating impeller blades. She soon found what she was looking for, the entrance to the narrow crawlway underneath the fan shroud that allowed one to get past the blades without shutting down the ventilation system — something no one wanted to do unless absolutely necessary when they had two powerful fusion reactors ramped up and generating power.
She dislodged the crawlway cover plate with her combat knife and slithered through the narrow opening to emerge on the far side of the fan, pushing several pieces of equipment ahead of her. She rose and proceeded to scan the shaft with a handheld mag scanner, looking for the junction terminal she was certain would be somewhere nearby. The M-7s would have placed an I/O port close to the fan so that diagnostic, repair, and monitoring equipment could be linked directly to the facility’s central processing core.
After about a minute, she found what she was looking for and pried off the metal panel that concealed the junction. She booted up her portable computer, mated it via a ribbon cable to the junction, and got busy. If Cade hadn’t changed the security protocols — and there was no reason to think he would have the expertise to do so even if he wanted to — then hacking into the processing core would be a snap. The software the DH Group had designed to infiltrate the North Carolina lab would work its magic fifteen years later.
But if Cade had somehow managed to change the codes and protocols, then she was probably up the creek.
She looked at her watch and frowned. Dark Angel team would be tripping the perimeter alarms any minute now. She had to work fast …
Buffy held her breath as the hacking software wormed its way into the heart of the M-7 computer systsm. The initial firewall went down, then the frontline internal security. In less than thirty seconds, the software Willow had developed with Zoot Kerschel so many years ago was assaulting the final security barrier between Buffy and her goal.
The screen suddenly blanked to a ready prompt. An eternal second passed, and then the display refreshed itself and presented the desired command interface into the base’s systems.
“Get ready for a surprise,” she said melodically as she quickly worked through the command hierarchy and executed the subroutine that she sought. “Oh, this is going to be so good.”
* * *
Amid the circle of monitors in the center of the room, an electronic alarm began to beep insistently. An aerial view of some mountainous jungle terrain flashed onto the room’s main display, with computer graphics showing what appeared to be security perimeters and the outline of some type of large base or facility. One quadrant of the outermost perimeter flashed red.
Cade scowled and pressed a switch on the central ring of monitors and consoles.
“Cade here,” he snapped into a microphone. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Perimeter breach, Colonel,” came a voice over hidden speakers.
“Put an end to it,” said Cade.
“It’s airborne, sir. A helo, coming in treetop level. We’re having some trouble getting assets in position to take it out.”
“Son of a bitch,” Cade snarled under his breath.
“Looks like your perfect little plan just ran into an imperfection,” said Elisa, unable to hide a smirk.
Cade turned on her, and she was chilled by the inhuman rage that showed through the studied military mask. It revealed itself in the eyes, a diseased, pathological glint. His upper lip twitched.
“Children should speak only when spoken to,” he said.
He hit her hard across the face. She stumbled back and he followed the blow with a powerful punch to her solar plexus. She doubled over and sank to the ground.
“Asshole,” she managed to gasp.
He placed his boot between her shoulder blades and forced her the remainder of the way to the floor.
“You could stand to learn some manners. I only need you to be barely alive for this to work, Summers. There’s a long road from where you are now to ‘barely alive’. A long, painful road. Any more disrespect from you and you’ll get to enjoy every single mile of it,” he said.
“Get … bent,” she said.
“Why you little …” began Cade.
“Sir!” interrupted the intercom. It wasn’t the same voice as before. “This is reactor control! We’re showing an imminent confinement breach on Fusion One! If the torus goes, we could lose half the complex.”
Cade gave Elisa a parting kick to the ribs and stalked over to the microphone again. “Get it under control, damn you.”
In the distant reaches of wherever she was being held, Elisa could hear warning sirens keening through corridors.
“There’s not much we can do, sir,” said the man on the other end of the intercom. “Once the emergency shutdown protocols are initiated, it all goes on automatic pilot. The central computer system issues an evacuation order and begins a countdown to full lockdown and containment of the facility. The reactors will be powered down and we’ll have to cold-start them.”
Cade swore. “How much time do we have?”
“Ten minutes.”
“The evacuation can proceed, but have one of the wormhole technicians meet me in the lab,” said Cade. “I’m moving the schedule up. We’re opening a nexus to Hell and we’re going to do it right now.”
* * *
Within ten seconds of triggering the subroutine, Buffy could hear warning klaxons sounding deep within the M-7 complex, their sound carrying clearly through the metal vent shaft. There was another sound, too. A warning message in English, Spanish, and the tongue-twisting M-7 language.
“Warning. Warning. Reactor control malfunction. Plasma containment failure in two minutes, thirty seconds. Evacuate. Evacuate.”
She quickly brought up a new display. This one was a floor plan of the complex linked to the facility’s internal sensors. It showed the location of all personnel represented by green pinpoints. There were about twenty people within, and most of them appeared to be hurriedly moving toward the main exit.
All except seven. Three of them were manning Reactor Control, probably scrambling to figure out why the alarm went off when there appeared to be nothing actually wrong with the reactor. The other four were moving farther into the complex, toward the same area that in the North Carolina facility had housed the M-7s’ wormhole generator.
“Gotcha,” said Buffy. There was no guarantee that her daughter was one of the four, but it all added up. And if she was right, they didn’t have much time …
Outside the mouth of the shaft, Buffy could hear the high-pitched, deafening sound of dual turbines driving carbon-fiber rotor blades. Debris and dust from the helicopter’s downwash swirled and danced as it was caught in the confluence of air from the vent shaft impeller and the rotors.
She squirmed back under the fan shroud and joined Xander at the entrance. The old, refitted Blackhawk transport helicopter settled into the clearing, dual fifty caliber machine gun mounts in the doors sweeping back and forth in search of any hostile forces. None presented themselves as targets and Buffy smiled as Angel, Willow, Cordelia, Spike, Lillith, and an ex-Dark Angel, Sergeant Grimes, disembarked. They were all dressed in combat fatigues and Angel and Grimes were armed with the latest version of the H&K MP5 submachine gun.
My, how times had changed, thought Buffy. We’ve certainly come a long, long way from home, haven’t we?
The copter dusted off for a return to its staging area and Buffy stepped out into the clearing.
“We don’t have much time,” she shouted to Angel. “I think Cade’s moving her to the wormhole generator now.”
“It’ll take at least twenty minutes,” said Willow. “If he knows the physics behind the ritual, he also knows he can’t cut any corners with it. We have time.”
Buffy nodded and keyed her lapel mike.
“Bravo team, this is Dark Angel One, over,” she said.
“Dark Angel One, Bravo One. We read you, over,” came Captain Quinn’s voice over the radio.
“You can bring your people in and start mopping up. I’ll also need you to send a squad into the complex to secure Reactor Control. Then get everyone, and I mean everyone, out of here, ’cause I’m going to be locking this place down and getting ready to reduce it to a smoking crater just as soon as the objective has been met.”
“Roger that, Dark Angel One. Any change to the rules of engagement?”
“Negative,” said Buffy. “Fire on demonstrated hostile intent, but don’t feel compelled to wait until you are actually under fire. Do your best to keep noncombatants out of the line of fire, but Cade’s mercs are yours to deal with as you see fit.”
“Roger. Good luck, Dark Angel One.”
“Right back at you. Dark Angel One out.”
She nodded to the others. “Okay, let’s get it done everyone. Spike, Cordy, Willow — you guys okay?”
Willow nodded.
“Cordy?” asked Buffy.
“We’re in a jungle. With bugs. And humidity. I don’t even want to see what my hair looks like. ‘Okay’ in this context is a relative term,” said the vampiress.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” said Buffy. “Spike, you five-by-five?”
“Right as rain, ducks. Wouldn’t mind one of those nice pistols of yours too terribly much, though. Defenselessness isn’t a posture I particularly relish. I promise I won’t go around shooting holes in any of the good guys.”
There was a collective silence for a long moment as Buffy grappled inwardly with the request. To bring Spike into a hostile environment and leave him defenseless was unfair, immoral even. But could she really trust him? Surely Flynn would have run his analyses through GHOST. If Spike posed a danger, surely Flynn wouldn’t have insisted he join them? Would he? Of course, who really knew what Flynn’s motives in anything were …
With the suddenness of a woman used to making bold decisions, and despite warning glances from the others, Buffy handed him her primary sidearm, a nice H&K USP45, and shifted her old duty Magnum to take its place.
“Don’t give me a reason to regret this, Spike.”
He raised two fingers. “Scout’s honor, love.”
“Willow? I really wish you’d consider something a little more serious than that stun gun you’ve got in your belt,” said Buffy.
Willow shook her head. “I kind of swore off the violent, gun-toting action hero thing after the M-7 war.”
Her eyes went wide as she realized whom she was talking to. “Not that there’s anything wrong with violent, gun-toting action heroes in the proper context, like Slaying and so forth, of course.”
“No offense taken, Willow,” said Buffy. She turned to Cordelia. “What about you?”
“Ew. No thank you. Guns just do not accessorize,” she said with clear distaste.
Buffy heard Spike mumble, “Dead weight,” under his breath.
Cordelia obviously did, too. “Look, bucko, I wouldn’t be dead weight if you hadn’t made me dead in the first place,” she said.
“Enough,” snapped Buffy. “Save the sire-versus-sired marital spat for after the mission. Let’s go.”
They followed the vent shaft’s forty-five degree downslope for just over a hundred yards until they came to an access hatch set into the bottom of the tunnel. Buffy cranked it open and they descended via a short, narrow, steel ladder into a dimly lit, drab room whose metal walls had turned dull brown from corrosion, grease, and grime. The source of the corrosion was apparent — steam and water pipes crisscrossed the ceiling and walls, and there was a bewildering array of valve and pump control to be seen. An oppressive, heavy air of humidity hung like a pall over the room.
Buffy wiped perspiration from her forehead and looked at her map.
“We’re looking good. Keep your fingers crossed, everyone. This is where things could go bad in a hurry if somebody’s paying attention to the internal sensors,” she said.
She settled the eyepieces of her night vision headset over her eyes and flicked the tac light of her service Magnum to the infrared mode.
“Okay, everyone. Let’s go to I.R. I don’t want to get cut up in an ambush for being blind if someone gets the bright idea to cut the power. And double check the blink rates on your laser sights. I don’t want any confusion about who’s shooting at what. I’m on point. Grimes, you’re tailgunner.”
“She’s something else,” Xander said to Willow as they headed from the room. “Not the Buffy Summers I used to know.”
“This is just her Dark Hunter side showing,” said Willow.
“Whatever it is, it’s almost a little scary.”
“Sometimes it can be a lot scary. Elisa Hunter was, well, a very intense personality type.”
As they resumed their penetration of the complex, Xander said, “‘Intense’ in this case is a little bit like calling Metallica ‘energetic’.”
* * *
“Can’t you move any faster?” snapped Cade to the technician configuring the Maxwell’s Demon machine that would disintegrate Elisa and establish the ether conduit to Hell.
The technician’s eyes flicked to Cade and the woman to whose head he was holding a pistol and he said, “You know the procedure. If we deviate even fractionally from the specified tolerances during the Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking procedure, the quantum linkage will fail to imprint across the manifold and we’ll never establish the conduit. It takes time.”
“Just do it,” said Cade.
“Great. I’ve been kidnapped by a Nike spokesman,” said Elisa.
“Shut up, girl,” Cade snarled as he forced her toward the circular containment ring of the wormhole generator. Suspended from the ceiling like some mechanical insect was the hulking form of the intermediate vector boson accelerator that was designed solely to tear her apart at the subatomic level.
“Your best laid plans are falling apart around your ears, Cade. Give it up. Get out and live to fight another day,” said Elisa.
Cade yanked her hard by the hair. “I think not. This is my destiny. You can’t stop it. That failure you call ‘Father’ can’t stop it. In a few minutes, I will be a god, and there is no one in this universe who can prevent it.”
* * *
Buffy Summers burst into the wormhole generator lab with death in her eyes and spoiling for a fight. As the others charged into the room behind her, she scanned the area with a professional’s eye. Then her eyes found her daughter and her heart froze, professionalism gone, only a mother’s protective instincts left.
Cade was standing beside Elisa, near the wormhole, his sidearm pressed into her side. Behind them the wormhole vortex blazed silver, a slowly rotating whirlpool of brilliant incandescence that cast cold argent illuminations and etched vivid black shadows into patterns around the lab and among its equipment. To one side, a lab technician raised a pistol …
… and died on the spot as Grimes took him down easily and remorselessly with one round from his MP5.
Buffy stripped the encumbering night vision goggles from her head and brought her duty Magnum up, resting the ghostly reticule of the holo-sight squarely on Cade’s head.
“Tsk, tsk. Such bad manners for guests,” said Cade, jabbing the gun sharply into Elisa’s ribs and eliciting a grimace from her.
Buffy’s gaze met her daughter’s, and the Slayer saw the recognition there, felt the connection across years and dimensions.
“Mom?” asked Elisa.
“It’s me, ’Lise. Not the way I planned our reunion, but it’ll have to do under the circumstances,” said Buffy.
“Buffy Summers,” said Cade coldly but with a hint of disbelief in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s what it says on the birth certificate,” said Buffy, the muzzle of her service Magnum never wavering from Cade’s head.
“Why can’t you ever just stay dead?” asked the Colonel.
“I’m waiting for the Cubs to win the pennant before I kick off. I’m going to be around for awhile,” said Buffy. “Now, how about you let my daughter go. The game’s up. The only choice now is whether this ends hard or easy.”
Cade smiled and pressed the barrel of his gun harder into Elisa’s side. Buffy saw her daughter wince and fought the urge to do something violent and foolish.
“The game as you call it is far from up, Slayer,” said Cade. “You see, with you back I don’t need your daughter anymore. If she dies here and now, I still have you I can establish a Nexus with. You’ve given me options I didn’t think I had, and options give me power.”
“You’re delusional, Cade,” said Buffy. “I’m never going to let you establish the conduit. This only ends one of two ways. Either we call it a draw and part company without any more trouble, or it gets ugly and people get hurt. Either way, there isn’t going to be a Nexus. Not on my watch.”
“Not even if I offered you a chance to save your daughter by taking her place?” asked Cade. “No matter what you try, I can pull this trigger faster than you can get to me, and Elisa dies. But you agree to stay here, to take her place as the Key, and she can go. As can your husband and your friends. No one else needs to die. Think carefully about the offer. It’s the best one you’re going to get.”
“It’s really not going to happen, Cade. Trust me on this,” said Buffy, surprised at the cold steel in her voice. What she felt inside was a different story. She would have made the trade in an instant if she didn’t know deep down, from long experience with sociopaths like Cade, that to do so would still end in her daughter’s death.
Cade inched backwards in the direction of the wormhole and Buffy realized with sudden, horrible clarity what Cade planned to do. She had given him only one way out, and he was going to take it — and he was going to take Elisa with him.
It all happened in a handful of seconds. Cade pulled Elisa toward the wormhole, his back foot slipping past the shimmering event horizon and sending quicksilver ripples across its surface. Out of the corner of her eye, Buffy saw Spike dash forward with inhuman speed, the speed of a demon trapped within supernaturally charged human flesh, bone and muscle.
“Spike, no!” yelled Buffy, but it was too late.
Cade reacted instinctively, pulling his gun away from Elisa’s head and tracking it toward the blur of motion that was Spike. Cade fired on instinct, not aiming, but in so doing he provided Spike with an opening, a moment when Cade’s .45 was pointing at something other than Elisa Summers.
The .45 caliber hollowpoint caught Spike in the shoulder, twisting the vampire around in mid-stride, but his momentum carried him forward anyway, into Cade. With his good arm Spike grabbed the wrist of Cade’s gun hand and wrenched his opponent’s arm violently, trying to turn both Cade and Elisa away from the spiraling vortex and back into the lab.
But the complex dynamics of three bodies in simultaneous motion were unpredictable, and Cade instead fell backwards into the blazing maw of the wormhole, dragging both Elisa and Spike with him. Then with a ripple of concentric silver waves across the event horizon, they were gone, all three of them, gone into a place Buffy had hoped never to see again.
Buffy stood in stunned silence before the incandescing wormhole that had just claimed her daughter and her enemy and her most unlikely friend. There was a moment of blind panic, then that confused and erratic emotion found itself edged out of her consciousness by the killing machine part of her mind, that part of her that was always evaluating strategy and odds, the part of her that had always managed to find the single, twisting path to success in the labyrinth of fate.
After a hundred and seven years, she had come to trust that part of her. It wouldn’t let her down. It couldn’t. Not this time.
Angel started for the wormhole and Buffy said, “Careful. He might be expecting us to come through hastily. He could have an ambush set up. Let’s not be impulsive here. He won’t kill Elisa as long as he needs her for leverage.”
“Leverage? What do you mean?” asked Angel.
Buffy’s voice was cold steel as she said, “Cade may be sociopathic, but he’s not suicidal. He took Elisa because he knows I won’t just shut down the wormhole and trap him in Hell as long as Elisa is with him. He’s buying himself space, time and bargaining room. A desperate move, but probably the smartest one he had.”
“Oh, my,” said Lillith from beside her. The Elder Power too was regarding the wormhole, but not with horror. The merest hint of a smile played at one corner of her mouth, and there was a gleam in her eyes. “My, my, my. Flynn is going to be very unhappy with me. He told me to prevent you from going to Hell at all costs.”
“He doesn’t get a say in this. Neither do you,” said Buffy.
“No, I don’t. Besides, this time we’re on the same side. Looks like we’re heading back to our old neighborhood, Buffy. Kinda deja vu all over again, isn’t it?”
“They say when you stare into the Abyss, it stares back into you,” said the Slayer. “So let’s get into a little staring contest.”