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Chapter 24
Seeds of Destruction
“I’ve just got one question,” said Cordelia.Willow ducked under a low-hanging pipe that was part of the cooling system of one of the fusion reactors and said, “Fire away.”
“What if these things — what did you call them again?”
“According to the copy of Rubenstein’s ‘Paleomythological Entities and Precursor Phantasms’ I was able to access on the DH Group server, I think we may be dealing with something called a ‘Phase Parasite’. Good thing I never go anywhere without a datapad and a secure satellite modem, huh?”
“Sure, whatever. Anyway, what if these Phase Parasites manage to get out of the complex? I mean, I hate to be down on humans as a species, but I have a feeling that these things nudge you guys out for top-of-the-food-chain honors,” said Cordelia.
Willow stopped in her tracks. This particular Cordelia was really sharp sometimes.
“Uh, oh. I was so preoccupied with our own continued existence that I never thought of that,” said the redhead.
She activated her field radio. “Bravo team, this is Rosenberg. Do you copy?”
The response was laced with static from the layers of steel, rock, and earth between them and the surface. It had made establishing a connection with the DH Group database difficult, and was making radio communications no easier.
“This is Bravo Leader, I read you, over,” came the broken reply.
“I just wanted to tell you not to let anyone in here under any circumstances. We’ve got some nasty wildlife loose in here and we can’t risk it getting loose. We need to maintain a total lockdown on the facility,” said Willow.
“Understood, but are you sure I can’t send some of the boys in to give you a hand?”
“Negative. We’ll try to deal with it on our own for now. Just do me a favor and contact Zoot Kerschel at the Ops Center. If you don’t hear from me in the next couple of hours, you’ll have to assume the worst, and you’ll need Zoot to operate the wormhole. Okay?”
“Affirmative.”
“Rosenberg out.”
“Oh, that’s just great,” said Cordelia. “And just how do you plan to deal with this on our own?”
“If we can get to the main security monitoring station, we might be able to track the Parasites with the internal sensors. And if we can do that, we might be able to hunt them down by remote control with the base’s automated defenses,” said Willow.
“There were two really big ‘might’s in there,” said Cordelia. “And what about Buffy?”
“Staying alive is the best way we can help her right now,” said Willow. “If we get killed, it’ll probably be at least two days before Zoot can get down here, figure out the control system, and open the wormhole again. That’s two days Buffy might not have. On the other hand, I’m not going to be reckless to save time, either. Buffy’s tough. If anyone can hang on until we get back to the control room, it’s her.”
Willow saw worry in the vampire’s eyes as Cordelia said, “I really hope you’re right, Willow, because I’m just too old and tired to try to replace a best friend.”
* * *
The heavy, two-inch diameter iron spike that served as the head of Lillith’s disjunction sledge flared bright white as Lillith directed incredible magical energies into its crystal structure. Around the Elder Power, atoms of atmosphere were ionized from the massive buildup of magic, surrounding her with a flickering aura of light that gave her an otherworldly, ethereal quality.
She worked for a good fifteen minutes until perspiration ran freely down her face and her hair sagged damply. Then she broke her connection to the magical forces of Hell and sat down. She rested her back against one wall and took a long drink from her canteen.
“That’ll take it out of you, that’s for sure,” she said.
“It’s done?” asked Buffy.
“Far as I can tell. Won’t know for sure until we give it a try,” said Lillith. She rose, hefted the newly crafted disjunction sledge and shrugged.
“Well, it’s not exactly a masterpiece of thaumaturgical craftsmanship, but it’ll do, I think.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” said Xander.
“Oh, just one, huh?” Lillith asked.
“That would be a more effective insult if I hadn’t heard it before, Lillith. You have a ways to go before your level of sarcasm can ever hope to equal Cordelia’s,” said Xander. “Seriously, though. The Sanctuary is supposed to protect us from the Chaos Storm, right? So if we break the door down, won’t we destroy the protection enchantments and leave ourselves vulnerable to the storm?”
Lillith shook her head. “No. It’s not walls and doors that make the Sanctuary what it is. It’s the wards inside. A First One such as a Joergenson’s Entity or Shambling Horror wouldn’t even be slowed down by something like this door seal. But inside, the heart of the Sanctuary is surrounded by seven Covenant Seals, each seal imbued with the essence of a hundred thousand souls interlocked into a self-reinforcing Necrotic Lattice, with each seal reinforcing the others.”
“And for those very few of us who did not take Quantum Magical Field Theory at a graduate level, that would mean what, exactly?” asked Xander.
“It means that this is just the padlock on the front door of the bank, Xander. The vault is inside,” said Lillith.
Buffy looked questioningly at the improvised disjunction sledge.
“You sure this is going to work?” she asked Lillith.
“Why do you humans always ask that when you know full well that the only honest answer is ‘no’?” asked the Elder Power as she hefted the sledge. She brought it around in a wide arc and drove the tool through the magical wards with a spray of blue-white sparks as the magical lines of force were momentarily cut. The sledge hit the door with a satisfying ring of steel on stone, leaving a shallow, pale gouge in the rock.
Lillith gave the others a self-satisfied smile and handed the sledge to Angel.
“I don’t do the heavy lifting,” she said. “Have fun. I’m going walkabout, see if I can’t get a better handle on what happened to this godforsaken plane. Even allowing for the reappearance of the First Ones, something doesn’t make a whole lot of sense here. Figuring it out might just save our skins before this is over. Buffy, I could use you riding shotgun in case I run into something I can’t handle by myself. It doesn’t take a whole lot to kill one of these bodies.”
“Mortality puts a whole different perspective on the universe, doesn’t it?” asked Buffy sarcastically.
Lillith put her arm around Buffy’s shoulders as they headed off. “Sure does, sis. It sure as Hell does.”
* * *
“They’ve started their advance,” said Pike to Aston. He shielded his eyes against the desert sun as he addressed the Briton atop Hill Tango.
“I see,” said Aston. “Then we’ll have to move these preparations along a bit more smartly, won’t we?”
He motioned Hudson over from where the big commando was busy inspecting an artillery piece. “Corporal, do be so kind as to keep a nanny’s eye on these buggers for a few minutes while I have a little talk with the good Colonel here.”
“Sure thing,” said Hudson. “Always wanted to see what life was like on the cushy Sergeant side of the chain of command.”
“It’s mostly dealing with surly, uncooperative louts such as yourself,” said Aston as he moved off with Pike. He turned to the Colonel when they were out of earshot of any of the troops entrenching the artillery batteries. “So, they’re on the move, are they? A bit bright out here for vamps to be moving, isn’t it?”
“They’re not moving at this instant, no. They moved into their final staging area last night. Our patrols found the new position this morning. It looks like tonight’s going to be the night,” said Pike. “Are we ready?”
“Scrounge up a spare tactical nuclear weapon and I’d say we were ready, Colonel. Absent that, I would say we are marginally prepared unless your gravity cannon can give us an edge.”
“The techs say it’s a go. If you have it in support along with the phase-shifted assets Erin provided us, can we win this one in your professional opinion?”
“What do you think? You know your people better than I do. If they crack, they lose. If they hold together, there’s a decent shot we can pull this off,” said Aston.
Pike ran a hand through his hair as he surveyed the entrenchment work. His gaze shifted to the valley floor beyond Hill Tango.
“We’ll win,” he said. “Losing isn’t an option.”
Aston smiled. “Now that’s talking like an Englishman.”
* * *
Angel drew quietly beside his daughter as she stood off to one corner of the ornate chamber, gazing out a tall window that looked onto a ruined, debris-strewn courtyard. She seemed lost within herself rather than in the view.
“Something bugging you kiddo?” he asked her, trying to keep his tone lighter than he felt.
Elisa gave a little shrug of her shoulders and said after a moment, “It’s just all so … much, I guess. Mom, Cade, this place. It’s a lot to deal with all at once. Maybe this sort of thing is old hat to you, but for me it’s more than a little overwhelming.”
“I’d hoped that, after your mother defeated the Avatar and after the M-7 war, you wouldn’t ever have to deal with Hell or demons or hostile aliens. But I guess this family is just cursed never to lead normal lives.”
“A family,” said Elisa contemplatively, leaning against the wall. “Is that what we are? The mother I knew was an image on a set of vid files. Willow was more of a mother to me. How’s this going to work, Dad?”
Angel sighed. “I don’t have any simple answers for you, ’Lise. Hell, I don’t have any simple answers for myself. She’s been gone so long. And now Willow and I and even Xander seem to be getting younger, while your mother appears to essentially be ageless. What a confused tangle. I honestly don’t know how we’ll get it untangled. But I do know that your mom and I have a way of getting through the craziest things, and I think once you get to know her better, to know the Buffy Summers I fell in love with, a lot of your confusion and doubts will go away.”
“I wish I had the same kind of faith you do.”
Angel looked contemplatively out into the courtyard and said, “Well, when you’ve had to get by on faith alone for as long as your mother and I have, you just learn to trust in it. And you know what? It hasn’t let us down yet, even if it does sometimes take its sweet old time about coming through with the goods.”
* * *
Buffy and Lillith methodically climbed upwards along the tightly winding stairwell of Dys’ tallest spire, located near the Fortress Cathedral in the royal palace of the former lord of the city. It was a long hike, with the gloom of the tower broken occasionally by shafts of light from tall lancet windows or by unnerving, hovering spheres of magical incandescence that bobbed about like buoys in the darkness.
“You’d think among all the wizards and necromancers and the occasional hellbound engineer, someone could have figured out how to install an elevator,” Buffy griped as she trudged along behind Lillith.
“Most of the archdemons can fly, or at least they can take a form that can fly. Polymorphism is a wonderful thing. There are some levitational gadgets, too, if you’re more mechanically oriented. As for anyone else, I think it falls under the general heading of ‘They don’t call it hell because it’s fun, sweetheart’.”
“I wouldn’t mind a levitational gadget right about now.”
“Neither would I, to be honest,” said Lillith. “But that’s big time mojo to lift a couple of hundred pounds up a couple of dozen stories. You start throwing magic around like that, it’ll just attract the Phages again, and maybe some worse things. I’m too damn tired to try to deal with Shadow Wights or a Null Tracker.”
“‘Null Tracker’?” asked Buffy.
“Don’t ask. Big, mean, and nearly impossible to kill. You don’t want to meet one,” said Lillith as she gained the top landing and paused to catch her breath. Then she pushed open the door to the highest room in the tower and went through.
“I hope the view is worth it,” said Buffy, joining her in the round, window-encircled room.
“It should at least give us an overview of the situation, see if anything is moving around in the city. Who knows, we might find something we can squeeze for some information.”
“We’d better be getting back soon. Chaos storm’s getting pretty close,” said Buffy, nodding in the direction of the churning wall of the maelstrom beyond the city. It loomed large now, and it almost seemed to her that she could hear the low rumble of its random power as it swept over the desolate land.
“Just give it a few minutes. The view from up here is just fantastic. Turn around and you can see the whole of Dys spread out before us. And way in the distance are the Nebiride mountains, where they say a great underground city was built ten thousand years ago by a race that was neither demon nor First One, but something entirely different. We’ll probably never know, since they seem to have vanished right after they finished the city …”
“Why are there mountains in Hell?” asked Buffy as she turned to share Lillith’s view. “I mean, this isn’t a planet, so why would you have the tectonic stresses necessary to raise mountain ranges?”
“Oh, now come on. Who on Earth would even think of a question like that? You are absolutely no fun at all anymore, Buffy. And you ask too many questions.”
“Sorry. Remember, I was raised in California. You learn a little bit about geology in school when you live in a state that’s in perpetual danger of being dumped into the Pacific. It happened on that alternate Earth I spent the last seventy-five years in, you know. No more L.A., just the world’s biggest dive attraction.”
“Buffy? Just be quiet and enjoy the view. With any luck neither one of us will ever see it again, so savor the moment, okay?”
As they gazed out over the city and beyond, something vast and shadowy seemed to flicker into existence for a fraction of a second before vanishing again, too fast to register definitively on the eye.
“Did you just see that?” Buffy asked.
“See what? There’s a whole bunch of stuff to see,” asked Lillith.
Buffy pointed in the direction of the apparition. “Something appeared for an instant, then disappeared. I’m not sure what it was, but it was huge.”
“Nothing there now. Maybe it was an optical illusion. Or something phasing in. A First One like an Eternity Specter might pop in and out like that …” said Lillith when suddenly the distant object flickered into visibility again, this time stabilizing for several seconds.
The two women stared in speechless dread as the thing vanished again and then finally reappeared for a third time. This time, the manifestation did not vanish.
This time, the Elemental Abstract was in Hell to stay.
* * *
Willow made a quick visual scan of the central monitoring station that Cade had used as his office, then moved to the ring of control consoles surrounding the chair on the central dais. She took a seat and her fingers immediately began to flit over the flat panel keyboards around her. Throughout the room, monitors began to flicker to life with data displays or camera views of different portions of the complex.
“That’s more like it,” said Willow.
She brought one large display on-line and a wire-frame three dimensional map of the complex appeared.
“You sure seem to know a lot about this stuff,” said Cordelia.
“I should. I fought the M-7 aliens for years. Learning their technology was a matter of survival.”
“Have you ever noticed how often the word ‘survival’ comes up among people who know Buffy?” asked Cordelia.
Willow smirked. “Now that you mention it.”
She frowned up at the display. “Not showing anything on the internal sensors in the infrared spectrum. Let’s try optical motion sensors. As long as our friends aren’t time-shifted, the motion trackers ought to be able to pick them up.”
She tapped a few keys and half a dozen small, triangular icons appeared on the screen. They shifted from amber to red and back to amber as the optical sensors lost and regained their locks on individual Parasites.
“Hello,” said Willow. “Looks like they’re one level below us. They’re on the move though.”
“Did you just see that? That blip split into two,” asked Cordelia pointing at an amber triangle. There were now seven targets being tracked.
“Probably just one that was time shifted, or maybe one that was just not moving until now …” began Willow.
Another icon split into two.
“Then again, I could be wrong.”
“They’re multiplying,” said Cordelia.
Willow nodded. “I think so, yes. And it looks like they’re heading this way. Look how they’re all converging toward the same point even though they’re scattered in different parts of the complex.”
“I don’t think now’s the time to do a nature study of Phase Parasite tracking behavior.”
“Tracking … yes, they are tracking, but how?” Willow ruminated, momentarily oblivious to Cordelia. “Smell possibly, but unlikely given their polymorphic physiognomy. Not heat. We’re too far away behind too many walls … Wait a second. How about bioelectric?”
“With all this equipment turned on, don’t you thing our bioelectrical signatures would be just a little hard to see?” asked Cordelia.
Willow snapped her fingers. “That’s it! It’s not us that’s drawing them here, it’s the equipment. The complex is powered down for the most part. The reactors are shielded and the wormhole generator is on standby. Right now, this is one of the few electrical hot spots in this place.”
Her fingers flew over a keyboard and suddenly all the monitors except the main one went dead and the status lights on the computers went dark.
The blips hesitated and seemed to mill around for a few moments as if uncertain about where they were going.
“Cool, it worked,” said Cordelia. “So, now what? We lure them off while we make it back to the lab?”
“That might work for a little while, but we need to get these things off our backs for good.”
“Too bad there are no Roach Motels for Phase Parasites,” said Cordelia.
A moment passed and she continued, “You’ve got that look again.”
“There might just be a Roach Motel for Phase Parasites,” said Willow. “We might be able to trap them in the facility’s HazMat vault. The fusion reactors produce clean energy, but not everything the M-7s worked on in these complexes were nearly so benign. They were working in secret, so they had to store any dangerous materials and byproducts on-site in a secure storage vault — something fireproof, airtight, and explosion resistant,” said Willow.
“So if we can lure those things into the storage vault, they won’t be able to get out,” said Cordelia.
“That’s the plan. The thing is, how do we lure them inside?”
“Give them what they want — power.”
“Yeah, but if we try to get from here to the HazMat vault to bait the trap, we’ll be sitting ducks for those things. Unless …” said Willow, letting the sentence trail as she tried to follow a possibility in her mind.
“‘Unless’ is good. Let’s go with ‘unless’,” Cordelia prompted after several long seconds.
“Well, okay, here’s what I’m thinking,” said Willow. “Some of the things stored in the HazMat vault are so lethal that not even the M-7s could handle it safely. So they used waldoes …”
“Waldoes?”
“Robots they controlled remotely. They get around on rubber treads and have a bunch of different kinds of manipulator arms on them to move stuff around. If we could get them going, that might be enough to attract our Parasite friends. And if it isn’t we can use them to activate some additional equipment,” Willow explained.
Cordelia nodded, then the nod turned into a negative shake as she saw Willow’s less-than-enthusiastic expression. “What?”
“I can’t control the waldoes from here. We would have to get to the HazMat containment facility control room to do that, and that brings us right back to square one,” said Willow dejectedly.
“Unless …” said Cordelia.
“Unless what?”
“I was kind of hoping you’d finish the sentence, actually. We just really need another ‘unless’ right now,” said Cordelia.
Willow looked around at the consoles and computers and monitors. An idea began to form.
“I think I have one, Cordy,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I really got my hands dirty with M-7 data and control software, but give me some time and I think I just might be able to rewrite some of the command processing subroutines and hack enough of the security layers to give me control of the waldoes from here. But it will take time, maybe the better part of the day and night.”
“Hey, it beats getting sliced and diced by the blobs of doom out there.”
“Then we’d better get started,” said Willow, seating herself at a terminal. “Pull up a chair, Cordy. I may need your help.”
Cordelia smirked and said, “Willow Rosenberg needing my help. I guess Hell has now officially frozen over.”
Willow smiled back at her. “I have it on good authority from Buffy that it’s been known to do that from time to time.”
* * *
Lillith looked up at the mile-high, revolving pillar of darkness and went pale. “No, it can’t be.”
“The Elemental Abstract,” said Buffy, steeling her mind against the cold fear that rolled in frozen waves from the dark manifestation and tried to overwhelm her senses. It wanted to drown her, to drag her under into its black depths as it had done once before, decades ago. But she knew its tricks now.
“Do you have any idea what this means? Any idea at all?” asked Lillith sharply.
“Yeah, it means we need to get the others and exit stage left pronto. I went a round with that thing once. It wasn’t fun. I’m not interested in a rematch.”
Lillith rounded on her. “Damn it, girl, this is not a joke! If the Abstract is here, it can mean only one thing — Lucifer’s been overthrown. The First Ones have reclaimed their domain, and the Elemental Abstract rules it all.”
“Long live the king. Look, Lucy’s not exactly on my list of all time faves, okay? I didn’t think he was yours, either. Who cares who runs the show down here as long as we destroy the wormhole generator so nothing can cross over?”
“If it’s the Abstract, you’d better care,” snapped Lillith. “That thing is hyperdimensional. It extends upwards through the boundaries of parallel realities. Just like Hell or your universe or your Earth, the Abstract exists in every one of those realities simultaneously. If the Abstract is here in this Hell, it’s in every Hell, but with one crucial difference.”
It hit Buffy hard when the realization dawned on her, and she could feel the color drain from her face. “Oh, my God. The nexuses still exist in those realities. From Hell, the Abstract can get into those universes — into any universe in any parallel reality where the nexuses are still intact.”
Lillith nodded. There was pain in her expression and voice as she said, “Yes. In saving your universe twenty years ago, we may have set into motion the death of every other universe in every other reality.”