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Chapter 22
From Bad to Worse
Buffy keyed her lapel mike and broadcast to the others, “Everybody see that smoke coming from that tower?”They were still miles from the towers and palaces of the walled city, but the black plume of smoke billowing from one of the taller towers was clearly visible.
“You think it’s Elisa?” asked Angel.
“It’s Elisa,” said Buffy confidently.
“I don’t know, it could be anything,” said Xander.
“Lighting a signal fire is exactly what you or I would have done in this situation, Xander,” said Buffy. “Anyway, I don’t see that we have a choice. We know they’re in the city, so smoke or no smoke, that’s where we’re going.”
“Oh, shit. The storm’s shifted its track. It’s gotten between us and the portal,” said Xander, looking back across the large, empty plain they were crossing.
Buffy followed his gaze and immediately motioned for Angel to stop. The chaotic, swirling mass of the Chaos storm was making its violent transit across their trail several miles away.
Buffy exited the buggy and studied the storm through a pair of binoculars. “Judging from the shape of it, it looks like the ether wind is pushing it this way.”
“Well, that’s just terrific,” said Xander, watching the storm as Lillith and Angel approached them.
“Lillith, you’re the resident expert on this sort of thing. What’s your recommendation?” asked Buffy.
The Elder Power studied the storm for several minutes, then turned to Buffy.
“The city may be the safest place for us. We just have to get to there before the chaos storm or something else gets us,” she said.
“I’ve been to the cities down here,” said Buffy. “‘Safe’ is not a word I’d used to characterize them.”
“Look around, Buffy. Everything’s dead. Even the dead things are dead,” said Lillith. “Hell’s been picked clean, probably starting with the cities with the densest populations. No, what we have to worry about are the things that turned this place into a Mad Max remake. We can wait out the storm in Dys’ Sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary?” asked Buffy.
“I’ve heard that term before. When I was here. Some sort of safe havens for the archdemons, weren’t they?” asked Angel, a pensive look on his face.
“Every major city in Hell has a Cathedral Fortress in its center,” Lillith explained. “And beneath every Cathedral Fortress is a Sanctuary. The fallen angels who established their dominion here, who beat back the ancient inhabitants of this place, always knew that one day one or more of those First Ones might break free of their containments to threaten them. So they built the Sanctuaries, warded shelters constructed for them and their most trusted and powerful allies …”
“Like a bomb shelter?” asked Xander.
“Exactly like a bomb shelter,” said Lillith. “Except these shelters weren’t designed for thermonuclear warheads, but to keep the archdemons safe from things like Joergenson’s Entities or the Dark Mind.”
“Or the Abstract,” said Buffy.
Lillith shook her head. “No. The Abstract was never native to Hell. As far as I know, it’s always been stuck in its own little pocket universe — which is a good thing, since I’m not sure anything could stand up to the Abstract if it found its way into the general Multiverse. But the Sanctuary should be proof enough against a Chaos Storm, at least. Better than being caught out in the open, that’s for damn sure.”
“Um, guys? I think maybe someone ought to take a look at this, because there are some really big flying jellyfish materializing over in the other direction,” said Xander.
Buffy was surprised by the suddenness with which Lillith grabbed her binoculars and trained them in the direction Xander was looking. Buffy didn’t need the binoculars. About a mile away and less than a thousand feet up, the air was being rent by ethereal silver lacerations. And from each tear in space emerged a bloated monstrosity the size of a blimp, with long translucent tendrils that extended downward for hundreds of feet beneath the discolored, hovering behemoths. The creatures floated gently downward until their tendrils brushed the ground, at which point Buffy could see arcs of discharging blue energy writhing around the tips of each tentacle.
“Oh, shit,” said Lillith. “Ether Phages. An entire school of them!”
“I take it they aren’t nice?” asked Xander.
“Just be glad they aren’t closer, or …” Lillith began, just as several additional brilliant rips in the continuum opened up almost directly on top of them.
* * *
“Did you see that?” asked Cordelia.
Willow glanced up from the computer terminal. “See what?”
“I don’t know. There was like this shimmering that just moved across the surface of the vortex.”
Willow’s brow furrowed and she glanced back and forth between the wormhole and the status displays.
“Maybe a minor quantum fluctuation or some boundary layer instability at the event horizon,” she said. “Let me check the system logs.”
She brought up the telemetry from the wormhole and built a three dimensional graph out of the data.
“Hmm,” she said.
“Is that a good ‘hmm’ or a bad ‘hmm’?” asked Cordelia.
“I’m not sure … more like a ‘that’s odd’ ‘hmm’. There’s a spike in the tachyon emissions. That usually indicates a transit through the event horizon, but I don’t see … wait, there it is again.”
“And there’s the distortion again. Look,” said Cordelia, pointing to something.
Willow followed her gaze to an odd refraction of visible light moving outward from the center of the vortex.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all,” said Willow. “I’m shutting down the generator until we can figure this out.”
She flicked a row of toggles into the “OFF” position and the vortex contracted to a point before vanishing entirely. Somewhere in the recesses of the complex, a bank of turbines could be heard spooling down to standby RPM.
“What do you think …” began Cordelia.
Willow held up her hand. “Wait a second. Did you hear something?”
Cordelia shook her head, her eyes wide.
Toward one end of the room, a metal floor panel groaned. Then another.
Willow’s gaze followed the sound, and she gasped as the air in that spot seemed suddenly to congeal, to coalesce into a nightmare, protean shape.
Instinctively, Grimes brought his MP5 up, thumbed the safety off and activated the weapon’s laser sight. The red pinpoint of the laser traced toward its target until it fell on the shifting, translucent mass, at which point it diverged and refracted crazily, painting a scarlet spray of light against the wall.
“Shit!” snarled Willow as Grimes squeezed off several hurried shots at the … whatever it was.
“What the …?” asked Cordy, stopping in mid-question as the coalescing thing took on a dark, indefinite shape, like protoplasm given animal intelligence.
The mass, looking like black quicksilver, seemed to compress itself, then it leapt forward at a fantastic speed, extruding itself into what looked like a jagged, silver icicle as it arced down toward Grimes. It hit him squarely in the chest and kept going.
Grimes fell to the floor, dead almost instantly, his heart obliterated by the lethal, intelligent projectile. His machine gun landed near Willow, and she rolled out of the chair, scooped it up, and tracked the laser toward the creature.
She never got a chance to fire.
A saber-like extrusion from the seven-foot long mass slashed through the weapon’s receiver as if the weapon were made of tin. Willow scrambled backward as the thing landed hard on the metal floor and seemed to take a moment to regain its bearings.
She looked at Cordelia, who was standing frozen in place. Beyond her, Willow could see another of the creatures becoming visible and taking shape.
“Cordy! The door! Run!”
The vampire shook herself out of her stupor and the two women dashed for the control room’s exit even as the first creature regained its senses and surged forward along the floor in a blur of fluid motion.
Willow pushed Cordelia through the exit first, then practically broke the pneumatic door’s activation switch with a hard slap as she past it in a run. The door slid shut behind her with the comforting sound of forged steel bolts locking into place, followed a fraction of a second later by the sound of something weighty impacting the door from the other side.
Willow tapped the “lock” key on the keypad adjoining the door, then leaned against the corridor wall and took a deep breath. “Not to trivialize yet another violent fatality in the rather extensive list of violent fatalities I’ve witnessed over the years, but that was certainly interesting.”
“Interesting? A man was just killed, we nearly get sliced and diced by giant polymorphs and to you that adds up to ‘interesting’?” asked an incredulous Cordelia Chase.
“Yeah, kind of reminds me of my misspent youth. Zombies and vampires and demons, oh, my.”
“Sorry to trespass on your remembrance of things past, but just what exactly were those things and how are we going to get our control room back?”
Willow shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never come across anything like them in any of the literature. They may be examples of what Lillith referred to as ‘First Ones’.”
“They were invisible. I didn’t know demons could do that.”
“Some demons can, but this wasn’t magic. It couldn’t be magic because Cade never established the ether conduit. I don’t think these things, whatever they are, were really invisible. I think we just couldn’t see them.”
“That would seem to be a pretty accurate definition of ‘invisible’,” said Cordelia.
“What I mean is, light doesn’t pass through them, which is the conventional definition. I think these things are temporally multiphasic. I’ve seen it before. The M-7s tried a similar technology to cloak their ships after our Goal Line orbital defenses were put into place. You see, if you shift an object slightly out of phase with time by modifying the vibration frequency of its chronons, you won’t be able to see it.”
“These things travel through time?”
Willow shook her head. “No, no. I don’t think so. Time travel involves deformations of spacetime. I’m talking about just changing the frequency of an object’s quantum time signature. It’s like moving a radio station slightly off-frequency. The signal’s still there, but you can’t hear it without retuning your radio. Unfortunately, it’s a bit easier to retune a radio than to retune us …”
The explanation was cut short as one of the metal floor plates near the door buckled upward with a loud bang.
“That’s bad, right?” asked Cordelia.
Willow gave her a wide eyed look and said, “Really, really bad I think. Come on, let’s get to the armory. Maybe we can find something there that’ll kill these things.”
The floor plate gave way, and the two women ran for all they were worth.
* * *
Buffy lunged into the driver’s seat and twisted out of the way just in time to avoid the trailing tendril of one of the newly materialized Ether Phages. The deadly, translucent member traced coruscating blue magical energy across the metal roll cage of the buggy as Xander dove into the seat beside her. Buffy floored the gas pedal.
She didn’t need to tell Angel to do the same. His Desert Patrol Vehicle was already accelerating away toward the city.
The problem was that Buffy’s didn’t seem to be following suit. The rear tires spun helplessly in the reddish dirt, sending up an impressive rooster tail of dun-colored dust, but the vehicle itself wasn’t going anywhere.
“It’s got a grip on us!” shouted Xander.
Buffy followed his gaze and saw that the Ether Phage that had nearly gotten her had wrapped one of its tentacles around the roll frame protecting the gunner’s station behind them.
“I think it likes us,” said Buffy, and before Xander could respond she had somehow managed to draw her Masamune katana, which was strapped within reach on her side of the buggy. Despite the cramped quarters, she managed a delicate little maneuver that severed the tendril with a neat, smooth slice.
The tires bit, and the vehicle lurched forward.
Xander whistled. “Damn, you’re good. Very good.”
“Well, don’t get all gushy just yet,” said Buffy as she watched the Phage in her rear view mirror. “It doesn’t look to me like they’re giving up that easily.”
Xander glanced behind him. The Phages were following.