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Chapter 20
Running With the Big Dogs
“So, how did you end up in this line of work, Pike?” asked Aston.It had been a long few days of feverish preparation for the coming battle, with stress levels running high. At night, the base was locked down tight and everyone expected the general quarters alarm to sound every minute. By day, preparations went on from first light until the fading rays of the sun made it too dangerous to continue work outside — then work continued inside.
But there were rare moments of peace. Pike was smart enough to realize he needed rested people to win the coming fight, not fatigue-addled zombies who would make mistakes, misinterpret orders, or get tunnel vision and not be able to evaluate tactical situations from a broad enough perspective.
And it was during one of those downtimes that Pike sat in the deserted ward room with Hudson and Aston, terrain maps and supply inventories momentarily shoved aside in favor of cigars, a few fingers of whiskey, and some informal conversation free of rank.
“How’d I get into this line of work?” repeated Pike, his boots up on the table and his hands laced behind his head.
He drew on his cigar contemplatively for a moment, then said, “Started a long time ago in L.A. I was a punk, going nowhere fast. Then I met a girl named Buffy Summers. Called herself a ‘vampire slayer’, like that Erin kid. She showed me that there were hidden things in this world bigger than me. It woke me up, you know? Got me thinking about the future — something I’d never really done before. I figured this world was in for some tough going in the next few years. But what the hell did I know about fighting a war? So I did a hitch with the Corps, just to get some of the basics. Wasn’t in there very long before the shit with the Master came down in Sunnydale.”
Pike looked distant and lonely for a moment. “I found out later that Buffy was killed trying to stop him. The Harvest changed everything, of course. It wasn’t too long before we humans had a major war on our hands. I fought in half a dozen of the really big dustups: Los Angeles, San Antonio, Third Manassas … I was there when we defeated the Master in ’99. But as you know, it didn’t end with him. The Master and his goons had opened the gates of Hell, and everything under the sun was coming through. Every time we beat one supernatural thug back, another one would show up with another legion of demons and undead. It became a grinding war of attrition. Then some asshole in the Pentagon decided to give the nukes a try. Turned half the country into no man’s land.
“And so finally this is all that’s left of humanity. Scattered tribes. No central authority, no national government, no organized military anymore. Nothing. The middle ages with rifles and howitzers. And look at me. Just a grunt when all this started, and now I’m leading these people. Go figure it.”
Aston didn’t think Pike noticed the surprised glance that passed between him and Hudson at the name “Buffy Summers”. It gave the Briton pause. Buffy seemed to change things, to twist fate around her no matter what universe she was in. And it seemed to Aston that no matter where he went, he found himself caught up in her swirling destiny even if, in this case, it was only posthumously.
“Life is unpredictable, that’s for damn sure,” said Hudson.
“You can say that again,” agreed Pike, taking a slug of whiskey. “So, I know a little bit about you guys, but I get the feeling I don’t know the half of it. You feel like talking?”
Aston shrugged. “Depends on how open you are to listening. You ever hear of the Dark Hunter …?”
* * *
“Where’d you learn to pick cuffs like that?” Elisa asked Spike, twirling the handcuffs around one finger as she surveyed the small domicile in which the two of them had taken refuge. The quarters were in what she could only describe as an apartment block, but what had lived in it — or was still living in it — she couldn’t imagine. There was a lot she couldn’t imagine about the strange city that she and Spike had staggered into in order to seek refuge from the storm.
“Oh, I’m not a very nice man, you see. It pays to develop such talents when you’re not a very nice man,” said Spike.
“I don’t think you’re as bad as you like to believe you are.”
“I’d ask your mother about that before drawing any highly charitable conclusions about me. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
“I know what you’re capable of. You’re capable of risking your life to save a complete stranger.”
“Well, I suppose you’ve got me there,” said Spike. “Scary thought, me developing a sense of selflessness.”
He shrugged out his fatigue jacket and winced. Elisa saw blood staining his shirt at the shoulder.
“You’re hurt. Let me take a look at that,” said Elisa as Spike settled stiffly into a chair in the small living quarters.
Spike tried to rotate his shoulder and winced in pain.
“I could let you have a look, but I don’t think you’d like what you discovered very much,” he said.
“I have a stronger stomach than you might think,” said Elisa.
Without warning, she leaned across and pushed aside his shirt to expose the shoulder. It was completely healed over.
“What the …. ?” she asked, sitting back heavily in her chair.
“Well, now you’ve done it.”
“You … you’re a … a …” stammered Elisa.
“A vampire. Spot on. But not one of the nasty ones. At least I don’t think so — not anymore. Happens to a guy when he gets his soul back. You can ask good old Dad about that.”
“I’ve never seen a vampire before,” Elisa said hesitantly, tentatively pushing aside the fabric again and reexamining the wound — or non-wound as the case seemed to be.
“No, I don’t suppose you would have. Extinct on your world, or so I’m told. You’re not scared of me, then?”
She glanced up at him and said, “You were with Mom and Dad. Obviously they trust you. So why shouldn’t I?”
“Maybe because I’ve never really been the trustworthy sort.”
Elisa sighed and sat back. “Look, Spike. Let’s get it all out in the open and stop playing games. Are you planning on feeding on me?”
“No, not actually.”
“Then that’s good enough for me until you demonstrate otherwise. Unless I miss my guess, this is Hell, and that’s not my neighborhood. You and your demon might fare a little better than I would around these parts, so if it’s all the same, I’ll stick with you for the time being.”
“Brave girl,” said Spike.
“Brave? I’m scared out of my wits.”
“The you’re a smart girl, too. Bravery doesn’t mean not being scared. It just means getting on with what needs to be done even when you just want to crawl in hole and hide.”
“Sounds like something my mother would say,” said Elisa. “Is it?”
Spike shrugged and winced again. “Your mother was always more of a fighter than a philosopher, at least on the outside.”
Elisa looked puzzled at his discomfort. “The wound looks healed to me. What’s wrong?”
“The wound healed over, but the bullet’s lodged in a bad spot. A shoulder is a very complicated bit of machinery, and this one won’t heal correctly as long as the bullet’s in there gumming up the works,” said Spike. He withdrew a combat knife from behind his back and handed it to her hilt first.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to dig it out with this,” he said. “It’ll hurt like a bastard, but you won’t kill me, and I’ll be right as rain in nothing flat.”
“I’m not sure …”
“I’m not going to be much good to you with a bum shoulder, love.”
“Okay. But I’m a musician, not a surgeon. Dissecting a frog in high school is about as far as I’ve ever gone. This isn’t going to be subtle or pretty,” said Elisa. “Take off your shirt.”
“So, were you and Mom friends or something?” asked Elisa as Spike unbuttoned his shirt and laid it aside.
Spike chuckled. “Not exactly, no. Spent a lot of time trying to kill each other, actually.”
“So what changed?” she asked, feeling around the shoulder for the location of the bullet.
“I did. She did. I got my soul back literally. She found hers figuratively. We decided neither one of us liked where we were going so we just … stopped. Turned around and started back from the precipice.”
“Then both of you are pretty smart. From what I’ve seen, most people don’t even realize they’re at the precipice until they’ve stepped over the edge and are in freefall,” said Elisa.
“Your mum’s pretty smart at that …ouch.”
“I found it, huh?”
Spike nodded. “You found the blasted thing, all right.”
“I need a pair of pliers or something. If I go hunting around with my fingers, I’m liable to just push the thing around.”
“I wouldn’t be keen on that,” said Spike. He set his musette bag in front of him and opened it. “Let’s see what we’ve got in this little grab bag.”
He hunted around in the bag and finally managed to come up with a pair of needle nosed pliers from a general issue toolkit.
“Ah, good,” said Elisa. “Now, what were you saying about Mom?”
“I was saying …”
Elisa made an incision in Spike’s shoulder without warning.
To his credit, a slight grimace was the totality of his protests.
“That was damnably sneaky of you,” said Spike.
“Sneakiness is greatly underappreciated as a character trait,” responded Elisa as she probed the incision with the pliers and managed to get a firm grip on the flattened metal projectile.
“Ready?” she asked.
Spike took a deep breath. “Go for it, love. Short and sweet.”
Elisa removed the bullet swiftly and smoothly, in one motion.
“Ahh! Bloody hell, that hurt,” said Spike.
Elisa tossed the bullet aside. “Well, that’ll teach you not to try to be such a knight in shining armor. You’ll get yourself killed coming to the rescue of all us damsels in distress.”
Unexpectedly, Spike took her hand in his and looked her directly in the eye. “Some of them are worth it. Thank you.”
Elisa smiled and pretended to punch him playfully on his recovering shoulder. “You’d better believe we are.”
An awkward moment passed and Spike cleared his throat.
“Well. That should heal up just dandily,” he said, rising and pulling his shirt back on hastily. “Unfortunately, we’re still stuck up a rather nasty little creek here. We need to find food and water, then we need to work on finding a way back to that portal.”
“Is there food in Hell?” asked Elsia, wiping the blood off the knife and pliers.
“As I understand it, your mother survived for quite a long time down here. Obviously there’s something edible. Unfortunately, I don’t know what that would be, and I suspect there’s a long list of very unhealthy things to eat in this place.”
“Mom and the others will come looking for us, you know. I don’t think we need to worry about setting up our little house on the prairie just yet,” said Elisa.
“I hope you’re right about that, ducks,” said Spike. “I really, truly do.”
* * *
“This is very cool,” yelled Xander over the roar of the dune buggy’s rear mounted engine.
“Absolutely!” shouted Buffy in return as she guided the lead Desert Patrol Vehicle across the dusty wasteland of Hell, raising a cloud of dust that had probably alerted everything within twenty miles to their presence. It couldn’t be helped, though. Elisa and Spike were too far off, and the discovery of the military surplus Desert Patrol Vehicles in the Belize facility’s armory was too convenient, to risk slogging miles through the inhospitable reaches of Hell on foot.
A dozen yards off her right rear quarter, Angel and Lillith followed her in the second vehicle.
“How’s that locating beacon working?” asked Buffy.
Xander glanced at the radio direction finder they’d found in Cade’s armory. Its needle pointed back toward the locating beacon they’d placed at the Crossover Zone to help them navigate back. The beacon was another one of Cade’s toys, and a pretty useful gadget to have in Hell without magnetic pole to get compass readings on. He apparently thought of just about everything.
“I’ve got a strong reciprocal bearing. Signal’s good,” said Xander. “Cade certainly seems to have thought his inventory through. I get the impression that he had big plans for Hell. Probably planning to secure the Hellside transit point with a firebase. I haven’t seen so much ordnance in one place since the M-7 war.”
“Cade’s not a guy for thinking small, I take it?”
“Not at all. He’s not a guy for taking stupid chances, either. If he was opening a door to Hell, then he had good reason to think he had the big stick to back up his plans,” said Xander.
“Judging from what was in the armory, I’d say he might have been right,” said Buffy. “The last time I fought a large force of demons, we took them apart with a lot less firepower than what Cade was stockpiling. Demons don’t seem to have a clue about modern firearms or tactics. Maybe they haven’t gotten the message about cold iron, enchanted weapons and silver bullets yet, because they attack like the damn Roman Legions. I think they go for numbers over tactics. Or they did, anyway. Let’s hope they don’t learn from experience.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.”
Buffy nodded. “Amen.”
“I wonder what the fifty cal on this baby is packing. It’s not silver,” said Xander, casting a glance at the Desert Patrol Vehicle’s fifty caliber machine gun.
“Probably the same cold iron alloy the DH Group was using years ago. It works. Not as effective as silver or the enchanted stuff, but it’ll get the job done with a heart or head shot.”
Xander grinned. “This is starting to look like old times, Buff.”
“Old times with a lot more firepower,” said Buffy.
“Not very politically correct.”
“If I were a network exec I’d lose sleep over it. As far as I’m concerned, we’re going to do some damage,” said Buffy.
Xander didn’t think he’d ever seen such a sadistic smile on Buffy Summers. It sent a chill down his spine, and he knew then and there that this was still a woman he could count on to finish what she started. And here in Hell, far from home and behind enemy lines, Xander couldn’t think of anything he’d rather have in an ally.
“Let’s rock,” he said.
* * *
“So, like, what is this again?” asked Cordelia, a look of titanic incomprehension on her face.
“It’s a scanning electron microscope. Very sophisticated. Some of it is probably M-7 technology,” said Willow, engrossed in an object pictured on the microscope’s flat panel display.
The two women were in one of the M-7 complex’s laboratories.
“The M-7s were those alien thingies you fought on this world, right?”
“The alien thingies. Yeah, that would be them,” said Willow.
“We never had aliens on my Earth. Just demons and stuff.”
“Oh, well, then you missed all the fun,” said Willow, smirking.
Cordelia studied the green-hued image on the electron microscope’s screen and said, “What is it?”
“It’s a machine, of sorts. A nanobot,” said Willow.
“Eww. Where’d you get it?”
“From me. It’s in my blood. Probably in Angel’s, too. And I suspect you’ll find the same in Oz and Elisa.”
Cordelia stepped closer to the monitor. “This is beyond anything I’ve seen. Maybe the Lothair Corporation could have pulled something like this off …”
“Who?” asked Willow.
“Nothing. Just thinking out loud. What I’m saying is, this thing shouldn’t exist in this world.”
Willow raised an eyebrow, surprised at the intelligence lurking beneath this particular Cordelia’s dumb-as-a-post first impression. The multiverse never ceased to amaze.
“You’re right. Even with what we learned from the M-7s’ technology, this is beyond anything we can do. I mean, we’ve made advances in nanotechnology, but nothing like this thing.”
“What does it do?” asked Cordelia.
“As near as I can tell, this particular variety acts as a sort of caretaker for cells. It corrects any DNA transcription errors it finds, literally rebuilding genetically damaged cells before they can reproduce and replicate the errors. I’ve found several others, one of which appears to scour the body for free radicals. There are others I haven’t figured out yet, but it looks like they all have one thing in common,” said Willow.
“The aging process.”
Willow nodded. “Yep. That’s why I’m suddenly getting my youthful glow back. Oz and Angel, too. Provided these little buggers don’t have any nasty side effects, this is as close to the fountain of youth as anyone’s ever managed to find. I just wish I knew who found it, and why we’ve ended up with them.”
“Flynn. Or Lillith. But most likely Flynn,” said Cordelia.
“Why would Flynn do something like this?”
Cordy shrugged. “Don’t ask me. He’s Buffy’s problem. I’m just along for the kicks.”
“Buffy. That must be it,” said Willow. “She’s immortal. Biologically she’s what, twenty years younger than I am? So why didn’t she come back to a point in time just after she left?”
“’Cause she would’ve destroyed what her daughter had become without her. It was a conscience deal. You know how she gets with that sort of thing. She only got involved here because of Cade. She never meant to.”
“It must be absolutely terrible for her,” said Willow, shaking her head. “To come back after so long just to find that time has passed you by? That the people you cared about have grown old and left you behind? That may be what’s behind this.”
“You think Flynn wants you guys back in the same age bracket again? Maybe get all the Slayerettes back together?” asked Cordelia.
“I think it’s possible. If you know Buffy, this Buffy, then you know how she is about Angel and Elisa. I don’t think she could bring herself to leave them again, but emotionally this whole thing is a train wreck just waiting to happen. Flynn needs her for something. What he doesn’t need is a Slayer who’s going through an emotional meltdown. Buffy’s the strongest person I know when it comes to fighting evil. Unfortunately, when it comes to the people she loves, she’s one of the most vulnerable, too. Maybe Flynn sees that.”
“I wouldn’t count on Flynn’s sentimental side,” said Cordelia.
Willow glanced at her watch. It was almost on the hour. “Time to open the wormhole again. Let’s head back to the lab.”
* * *
“You four are here because you are the four best operatives we’ve got, Flynn’s Killer Elite. Yes, this is that bad. Let me bring you guys up to speed,” said Willow Six Five November. “What we’re looking at is a Cascade Reality compromise encompassing approximately ninety-nine point nine eight percent of mapped Realities. GHOST did a preliminary magnitude assessment and the only thing she could come up with that could destabilize that many timestreams simultaneously would be the Elemental Abstract.”
“What about other possibilities? The Von Housemann Dark Mind, maybe a very powerful Joergenson’s Entity? Maybe even the Genesis Symmetry?” asked Elisa McKenna. Mac had always been by far the most academic of the group. It fit with what Willow knew of the former Dark Hunter’s approach to the job of fighting evil — careful, intelligent, responsible, and lethal.
“The Dark Mind and the Joergenson’s Entities wouldn’t be able to affect multiple realities simultaneously. And if the Genesis Symmetry is anything more than an Elder Power urban legend, I think it would be worse than even this.”
“The Symmetry is real end-of-time stuff. It shouldn’t manifest itself until a fourfold unification of forces reoccurs at the simultaneous terminus of the primary timestreams,” said GHOST.
Faith Six One Whiskey Kilo smirked. “Thanks, G. That cleared things right up.”
“Moving forward,” said Willow, “this event is what is known in temporal dynamics as a metastable fixed attractor. Meaning, we don’t have the resources to budge the thing, let alone change it.”
“We could nail a requisite precursor, undermine it that way,” said Buffy Echo Fox. “That’s how we handled the Harvest in Five Six Romeo.”
“The one where Buffy died in L.A. and never got to Sunnydale?” asked Cordelia Niner Bravo.
Buffy Echo Fox nodded. “Right. I had to go back to two years before the Harvest and neutralize the drunk driver that killed her. It was a gamble, since it really wasn’t a Convergence Node event, but it did stabilize that timestream and get the probabilities to fall out a bit more in our favor.”
Willow shook her head. “I had the same thought. GHOST came up with several solid precursor events, but we got data back from our drones and it turns out that whatever is going on was set up by the actions of Buffy Two Six Alpha herself. If we undo any of the precursors, we undo everything that she’s done since. That would be a disaster, and not only because of her role in defeating the Avatar in her timeline.”
“Let’s not be vague now,” said Cordelia.
Willow thought it over then nodded. “Okay. What I’m about to tell you doesn’t go beyond this room. It’s classified Ultra — knowledge outside of this organization could cause unknown damage to the timestreams. Buffy Two Six Alpha is vital because it stands at seventy five percent probability that she will be the Buffy who is instrumental in helping Lysette Haven Four Six Juliet recognize her role as the White Rose Bodhisattva. I don’t need to tell any of you that GHOST’s projections are for Buffy and the Bodhisattva to be the human race’s two primary Transfigurative Aspects during the Final Battle. And according to the current probabilities, Two Six Alpha and Four Six Juliet are the key incarnations of those Aspects into which all the others will be unified. This is very serious stuff. It doesn’t get any more serious.”
Willow let that sink in. Even Faith seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation.
“So where does that leave us? The Bodhisattva and the Reunification and the Final Battle won’t mean a damn if the Abstract decimates ninety-nine point nine eight percent of the mapped Realities,” said Mac.
“I asked GHOST to model the contingent event chains using data from our bracketed data probes. She’s come up with something interesting. Whenever she makes a time stream observation and the probabilities in Two Six Alpha happen to favor Buffy’s safe return through the wormhole, the chances of the Cascade suffer a very significant downspike. In other words, one of the best ways to positively impact this scenario is to ensure Buffy’s safe return from Hell, and according to the simulations, the biggest risk right now is that Willow Two Six Alpha for some reason fails to open the wormhole and Buffy is killed. We don’t know why Willow fails to open the wormhole in time, but the probability is very high,” said Willow.
“What about the integrity of the timestream? Buffy Two Six Alpha has already begun superposing a new template on that Reality. There could be stability problems if we go in and start introducing even more permutations to the mix,” said Mac.
“That was my first concern,” said Willow. “But GHOST thinks we can insert into Two Six Alpha safely. Temporal decoupling generally only occurs when you keep trying to undo or change your own role in a particular time interval. It has to do with the quantum indeterminacy that is introduced by continual remapping of the same event chain. But since you four won’t be rewriting your own roles in the progression of the Two Six Alpha timeline, GHOST doesn’t anticipate any statistically significant problem. Of course, in this business there’s no sure thing.”
“Do you have a mission profile for us?” asked Buffy.
“And can we launch without Flynn’s approval?” added Cordelia.
“GHOST is working on that, and we’ll find out,” said Willow. “Not even GHOST has been able to contact him, and if the percentages on that Cascade get much higher, we could find ourselves with a situation we can’t correct without massive and dangerous manipulation of the timestreams — if we can correct it at all. It’s never been put to the test, but mathematically speaking there may be such a thing as an ‘event sink’, an event whose probability approaches certainty and can never be undone without destroying the entire probability structure of the affected Reality. We wait on Flynn for this, it could be too late. I’m second in command, and since I’ve got GHOST’s blessing on this, I say we go.”
“Fuckin’ A, we go,” said Faith. “Beats sitting around here waiting for it to hit the fan.”
“Mac? Buffy? You two have the most experience. What’s your call?” asked Willow.
Mac said, “Flynn rarely overrides GHOST on these things, and when he does I’m pretty sure he’s acting on an agenda rather than on any concrete safety concerns. As long as GHOST’s simulations and projections back you up on this, I’ll sign off on it.”
Buffy Three Echo Foxtrot nodded. “I agree. We go.”
“Okay, then you four are now officially the pointy end of the stick. GHOST’s designation for this operation is ‘Twilight Sword’. Mac, she’s recommended you as squad leader, as usual,” said Willow.
Mac inclined her head in acknowledgement and said, “No problem. But I want to see details. Sometimes Flynn has us flying mighty blind, and I don’t think we need to be taking risks like that on this one.”
“No, we don’t.” She pressed a key on a remote control and a three-dimensional map of some sort of research complex appeared above the center of the conference table. She cleared her throat. “Take a good look at this map. This is where you’re going …”