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Chapter 33
It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
Angel sensed something was wrong and broke into a run, reaching Buffy well ahead of Xander.But he was too late. He knew it the moment he saw her still, lifeless body lying in the alley, and he felt the universe fall away beneath him. He sank heavily to his knees by her side, his mind for the moment uncomprehending, unwilling to feel, unwilling to take the reality of it inside.
He was dimly aware of Lillith huddled against a nearby wall, shivering and disoriented.
Then Angel found himself sobbing, a pain and loss he had never known before, never even dared contemplate, tearing his soul apart more effectively than anything his old demon had ever done to him. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair, damn it. Not her.
With a sweep of his hand, he closed the blank green eyes that had once held so much life, so much warmth and humor and love. He raised her from the ground and cradled her head in his arms, then buried his face in her hair and let sorrow take him.
“Angel,” said Lillith hoarsely.
When he didn’t respond or even look up, she repeated it more forcefully. “Angel.”
Finally, he raised his head and looked at her. She was pale and drawn, exhausted physically and emotionally. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, and Angel could see her trembling slightly.
“Put her down. It’s over.”
He shook his head numbly.
“Listen to me, Angel. That is not Buffy anymore. I am,” she said, her voice terribly weak, almost fragile.
Angel looked uncomprehendingly from the body of the woman he loved to Lillith.
“It’s true. That body was just hardware,” she said. She tapped a finger against her temple. “The software’s all been uploaded.”
Angel felt a stirring of hope and he pushed it ruthlessly aside. This was, after all, Lillith Prophet, the great deceiver.
“How?” he managed to ask after a moment.
“I’m not sure. I was dying. I felt my life ebbing, felt myself being drawn down into some vast, dark emptiness. Then Lillith found me, pulled me back. Pulled me inside. Maybe it’s like when the Dark Hunter became a part of me. I don’t know. But here I am.”
Angel felt his jaw tighten.
“I don’t believe you, Lillith.”
He saw tears glisten in her eyes as she said, “Look at me, Angel. Look inside. If what we had meant anything, if what we still have means anything, look inside and see me.”
Angel moved toward her and looked into her eyes, into her heart, and he saw something he’d never known in the Elder Power, a certain spark of Buffy-ness that showed through the fatigue and long years of fighting and loss.
“I love you, Angel. Believe in me. Please?”
He put a hand out and brushed her cheek lightly, uncertainly. “Buffy?”
She smiled through her tears and nodded.
“Yes,” she said, her voice strained with emotion.
On a level he couldn’t comprehend, Angel knew it was the truth. It wasn’t just wishful thinking or fantasy. Somehow, Buffy had survived death itself.
Impulsively, he pulled her into an embrace. “Oh God, Buffy. I thought I’d really lost you this time.”
“Me, too,” she said, returning the hug with new strength. “Me, too.”
She saw past him to the three figures who had arrived moments before, who had heard everything in a stunned, devastated silence that had become instead a silence of commingled confusion and relief.
Xander, Spike, and Elisa finally moved closer and Buffy managed to stand up. She gave them all a determined smile and said, “I think I speak for everyone when I say, let’s get the Hell out of here.”
* * *
“Where the Hell are we?” asked Buffy Three Echo Foxtrot.
“Sub-level four, service tunnel twenty-six B stroke four,” said Mac absently as she studied the blueprint projected on her glasses.
“Oh, that helps,” said Faith, ducking under a low hanging stretch of ducting as she followed along at the rear of the party. The tunnel, a long, narrow corridor giving access to some of Fusion One’s cooling systems, was dimly lit and claustrophobic and did nothing to ease anyone’s nerves.
“We’re on the periphery of Fusion One,” said Mac with admirable restraint. “If we continue another fifty meters there should be a ladder leading up and down through the complex. If we go down to Sub-Level Five and get under the floor of the wormhole generator lab, we should be able to get access.”
“How do you figure?” asked Willow. “The floors in this place must be foot thick reinforced concrete.”
“True, but SL Five isn’t actually a level, Will,” said Mac. “It’s really just the airspace between the four levels above and the solid rock of the mountain. SL Four is the base level of the reactor silos and also houses the command and control facilities. It rests on huge shock absorbers so that the complex can withstand up to a tactical nuke strike at the surface and still function — these M-7 aliens of yours obviously wanted to keep their bus station open at all costs.”
“So how does that help us?” asked Willow.
“According to the schematics, on SL Five there’s an inspection hatch built into the ceiling next to every shock so that they can be visually inspected from above without crawling down where we’re going. Fortunately for us, there’s a shock absorber right beneath the lab. We can get through that and come up through the false floor.”
By then they had come upon the service ladder, exactly where the blueprints indicated. It was a narrow metal thing that ran like a steel spine through narrow semicircular openings in the floor above and below, openings so tight that in climbing down they had to hand their packs and weapons down to those who went before them.
Sub-level Five didn’t have anything to recommend it as a tourist destination. It was barely four feet high, and the only way through it was in sort of a waddling crouch. Undignified and uncomfortable, Willow thought. No wonder the M-7 aliens had installed the inspection hatches.
It seemed forever and a day, with every noise bringing the party to a halt with guns at the ready, but eventually Mac drew them to a halt and pointed upward to a steel door set into the reinforced concrete ceiling.
The door was already open. Forced, by the looks of it.
“I don’t think we’re alone down here,” said Faith.
“I don’t see anything,” said Cordelia Niner Bravo, cycling through the various settings on her glasses. “Maybe they’re time-shifted again.
They fell silent, straining their ears for any sound that might alert them to the presence of one of the Parasites, but all they could hear was each other’s breathing and the distant, echoing drip of condensation falling into puddles on the hard stone floor.
“You take us to all the nicest places, Mac,” said Buffy Echo Fox.
Mac gave her a sharp look.
That was when all hell broke loose on Sub-level Five.
* * *
Erin watched sullenly from her perch on a clear workbench as the technicians of Firebase Majestic scurried around the computers and displays that ran the gravity cannon. She was sullen because try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything she’d done wrong.
Maybe she wasn’t supposed to be here, guarding this giant exercise in quantum mechanical folly. Maybe she was supposed to be up on Hill Tango with Hudson and Aston, and by not being there some strange chain of events would play out that would doom everything.
But if she left to help them, then maybe something would happen to the grav cannon and it wouldn’t fire and then the demons and vampires would make it into the base and …
It was hopeless. There were no answers. It was all in flux all of the time. That was what Willow Six Five November had told her a long time ago. Events were in flux. Chance was in flux. Time itself was in flux. Heck, she and the rest of Flynn’s crew couldn’t even change any particular timeline definitively. They could only change the likelihood that things would turn out a certain way. They could load the dice of the mulitverse.
And they could get killed doing it. That much was a certainty.
She rubbed her temples. Thinking too hard about the sort of work they did was enough to give a person a major migraine.
“That thing is totally cool,” said Xandra. She was looking at the grav canon in awe. Actually, she was looking at the base of the canon in awe, because all that could be seen of it past the thick, bulletproof glass that looked out into the gun bay was the massive hydraulic jack on which the apparatus itself rested. Erin had seen the whole thing a couple of days before. It didn’t really look like a gun. More like a big, flat panel with odd projections sticking out of it that the techs said were “gravitometers, waveguides, and graviton collimators”. Right. Whatever.
Erin was more at home talking with the systems programmers. Computers she understood. Quantum physics she most certainly did not.
“It’s a big weapon, Xandra. It’s like calling the H-bomb ‘totally cool’,” said the Vampire Slayer.
“The H-bomb was totally cool,” protested Xandra. “I mean, you think about it, it’s a pretty amazing thing.”
“It kills people. Lots of people.”
“Well, yeah. That doesn’t mean it isn’t kind of neat. You’re a weapon, and I think you’re pretty cool,” said Xandra.
She reached over and took Erin’s sword from the bench beside the Slayer. It was an enchanted blade straight from the Vatican that had stood the Slayer in good stead against demons for many years. It was also a work of art, with the blade acid-etched into elaborate scrollwork and the hilt wrapped meticulously in gold and silver wire.
“And this, this is a weapon and how many times have you told me you thought it was beautiful?” asked Xandra, hefting the blade and making a feigned cut at the air with it.
“I sense some sort of moral is about to be driven home, like it’s not the gun but how you use it, right?”
Xandra shook her head. “Nope. Too philosophical for me. I just like the cannon, that’s all.”
“Let’s just hope it works. I may not like the thing, but I’ll be more than pleased with it if it helps us live through the night.”
Xandra threw up her hands. “Jeez. I should have gone with Hudson. You are just too depressing sometimes, Erin. Lighten up. Find the fun.”
Erin glanced at her watch. “Well, if Aston is right, the fun should find us in about twenty minutes.”
* * *
The Parasite phased into visibility and emerged from the darkness of Sub-level Five so fast that only Faith and Buffy Echo Fox, with their Slayer-enhanced senses, were able to react in time. Their twin streams of silenced, enchanted bullets tore into the deadly, reflective mass as it bore down on them out of the shadows.
Silver droplets and globules tore away from it, but still it continued toward them on momentum alone. It caught Echo Fox with a glancing blow as it bowled passed the crouching Slayer, spinning her around and knocking her off balance. She hit the stone floor hard and felt the wind get knocked out of her. Her submachine gun came free of her grip and ended up several inches away.
As she tried to get her feet under her, she saw the Parasite reverse its course and come back toward her — fast.
No longer an undifferentiated mass, the wounded Parasite had transformed into a lethal collection of blades flashing in the light of the group’s tactical lights, and in the confinement of the crawlspace, the others were unable to get a clear line of fire past Echo Fox to shoot it.
The split second separating life from death hung suspended for a miniature eternity, the Slayer part of Buffy Echo Fox taking over instinctively and, for a brief moment, completely.
From her prone position, she grabbed for her machine gun and swung it by the telescoping stock. For a fraction of a second, she was certain the thing would evade the improvised club and impale her, but the barrel clipped one of the blades hard enough to send the Parasite spinning away from her. Unfortunately, it also wrenched the gun out of her rather awkward grasp.
She fumbled for the sidearm at her hip, drew it, and squeezed off several rounds without aiming. The reports were deafening in the enclosed space.
“Damn! What does it take to kill one of these things?” she asked as she scrambled backwards to give the others a clear field of fire.
Faith, Cordelia Niner Bravo, and Mac obliged, emptying their respective weapons into the creature within a few seconds of intense fire. The Parasite seemed to loose cohesion, collapsing into a dull, lead-colored puddle that began to congeal almost instantly.
“Looks like that’s what it takes to kill one,” said Mac. “Lots and lots of enchanted silver. Ammo check, everyone.”
The members of the squad rattled off the inventory of ammunition they still had left for their various and sundry weapons. It was less than Mac had hoped, to judge from her expression.
“Geez, you guys can sure burn through ordnance. Okay. We’d better get this finished and get out. Any more protracted fights and we might end up having to backtrack all the way to Cade’s armory to resupply. I don’t want that kind of exposure, not after we’ve come this far.”
“That leaves just one question,” said Faith.
“Yeah?” asked Mac.
“Who gets to stick her head up through the floor first?”