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Chapter 35
The Only Reason For Time is So that Everything Doesn’t Happen All at Once
Buffy’s mounted .50 caliber machine gun ran through the final cartridge from the last box magazine and the ridge fell eerily silent. Xander’s .50 had already run dry.Below them in the Valley of the Dead, the walking corpses came on, pushing past, through, and over the heaped bones and exoskeletons of those who had been chewed up by the meat grinder of the two .50s.
Buffy abandoned the gunner’s station of the Desert Patrol Vehicle and joined Xander, Angel, Spike and Elisa. All except Elisa had their rifles at the ready, waiting for the undead army to close to couldn’t-miss distance. She unslung her MP5, ready to add its firepower to theirs, when the part of her that was Lillith prodded her mind with a realization. She was part Elder Power now. She had weapons at her disposal far more lethal than an assault weapon.
An incantation came unbidden to her and she found herself reciting the words of a dialect lost in a myth-shrouded past as if they were her native tongue. Magical energy cohered around her, within her, coursing through her body and mind and taking shape under Lillith’s direction.
Above the valley, over the vast army of undead, a cobalt blue sphere began to coalesce from the ether, becoming more defined and burning brighter by the moment until it was painful to look at.
Then the sphere exploded into hundreds of slashing, blue-tongued bolts of lightning that traced serpentine paths of destruction through the mindless enemy. Those struck directly were obliterated, exploding into shards of bone or chitin. Those the lethal bolts passed near ignited instantly into roaring, blazing torches.
“Bloody hell,” said Spike.
Another spell came to Buffy’s mind, Angel, Xander and Spike opened fire, and the battle continued.
* * *
“Event sink in one minute and thirty seconds local time … twenty five … twenty …” announced GHOST to those assembled in the Pubspace vault housing the wormhole generator.
“C’mon, c’mon Jenny,” said Echo Fox under her breath as Jenny Calendar and Elisa McKenna feverishly worked on getting the wormhole coordinates set — there was no time to load them into the control-room’s computer and compute a Crossover solution, so Jenny had an access panel on the generator itself open and was inputting the coordinates directly. A computer display on one wall showed the certainty of Buffy Summers Two Six Alpha’s death nearing one hundred percent.
“GHOST, status on the White Rose Bodhisattva event,” asked Willow Six Five November calmly.
“Probability of successful occurrence of that event is assessed at four percent and falling,” said GHOST.
“That’s just great,” said Faith. “Two Six Alpha dies playing hero and takes the rest of the multiverse down with her. Couldn’t she wait until after she finished playing her part in our little cosmic tragedy?”
“You’re not being very constructive. Buffy Two Six Alpha somehow dropped the odds of the Cascade Reality Compromise by over eighty percent. Let’s give her credit for that, at least,” Willow Six Five November admonished.
“This is bullshit, Will,” snapped Faith. “Everything we’ve worked for is one minute from being destroyed. Sorry if I’m not in the nurturing and constructive mood.”
“Got it!” shouted Jenny.
The wormhole flared to life.
“We’re locked into the projected event-sink minus five minutes. Let’s go kick some ass,” said Mac.
Minus Cordelia Niner Bravo, who had been taken to the infirmary, Buffy Echo Fox, Mac, Faith, Willow Two Six Alpha and the undead Cordelia stepped into the incandescing maw of the wormhole. For an infinitesimal fraction of a nanosecond, they ceased to exist, becoming instead a hypothetical skein of unrealized potentials and possibilities, odds and probabilities twining through the quantum ether of nonexistence. Then all those infinitely complex interactions of chance collapsed once more into the hard reality of certainty and the six women emerged into a Hell at war.
* * *
Two hundred yards away, the wormhole flared to life five minutes behind schedule. But it might as well have been a thousand miles away for all Buffy and her friends had a chance of getting to it.
Buffy wiped perspiration from her forehead and concentrated again. Slayer, Elder Power, and the remnants of the former Dark Hunters all combined into a magical synergy and sent a broad wave of destructive magic toward the approaching army. The strange distortion, similar to the one Lillith had used on the rock days before, moved outward in a wide arc, spilling down into the valley and cutting a hundred yard swath in the ranks of the demons.
Dozens fell, hundreds, but the gaps were swallowed up immediately by the seemingly limitless horde.
“Look!” shouted Elisa.
Buffy glanced up to see several figures emerge from the wormhole. It was hard to tell from so far away, but it looked like another Buffy, a Cordelia, a Faith, and a Willow.
“A day late and a dollar short, our friends are,” said Spike.
The lead demons started their mad, mindless scramble up the steep slope of the ridge, and the group of stranded humans raised their weapons once more and continued to kill.
* * *
Pike made his way through the Firebase Majestic complex unchallenged as the base personnel scrambled to prepare for a possible breakthrough by the demons massed against them.
He made his way downward through the levels, along old linoleum-tiled corridors lit with cold light by humming fluorescent lights, past long-empty snack and soda machines, past gray painted water fountains with their compressors whirring. Men and women rushed by him carrying files or data pads or weapons, some snapping off a salute, others too engrossed in their own responsibilities to even notice the camouflage-clad man who snaked quickly through their midst. And then he was down past sub-level three and the crowds thinned and the corridors turned eerily quiet, devoid of most human sounds but disturbed by a low background drone of equipment both mundane and exotic.
Finally, on sub-level five, he found what he was looking for.
The two sentries snapped to attention as Pike strode toward them. Behind them, the great gleaming steel vault door emblazoned with the words “Danger: High Voltage, Gravitational Anomalies” swung slowly outward to disgorge a tech in white clean-room garb and carrying a data pad.
“Sir!” barked one of the sentries, resting his hand on his holstered sidearm and blocking Pike’s path.
“Stand aside, soldier,” said Pike.
“Sorry, sir. General order number sixteen — no person regardless of rank shall be permitted to pass into a secure area without responding to challenge with the current watchword, a valid retina scan, and a U.V. sensitivity test, sir.”
Pike eyed the gap in the door, weighing his options.
Something must have come over the sentry’s radio, because he pressed the earpiece in his ear closer to hear better. Pike extended his hearing acuity until he could make out the incoming transmission clearly.
“Higgins, this is Pike. Been trying to raise Dumbrowski for a status on the cannon. I must be getting interference from the mag fields in the lab, because I can’t get him on his radio. You want to duck in there and tell him to give me an estimated time to firing on that bad boy?” said the voice on the radio.
The sentry looked puzzled.
“What the …?” he began as his hand closed around his pistol’s grip.
Before he could draw the weapon clear of the holster, Pike reached out, grabbed him with one hand by the throat, and casually broke his neck as if it were no more effort than snapping a celery stalk.
He wasn’t quick enough, however, to stop the second sentry from slamming home the big, red, security breach alarm button next to the door. Klaxons wailed and the door immediately began to cycle closed.
The second soldier managed to get his weapon free and fire, a quick double-tap. The two rounds struck Pike squarely in the chest, staggering him back a step.
Ectoplasm flowed like quicksilver around and into the .45 caliber entry wounds, restoring “Pike” to wholeness once again.
“Oh, shit,” said the sentry. He fired again and backed into the lab, through the narrowing gap of the door. As he did so, he keyed his lapel microphone and announced the bad news on all channels.
“Doppelganger in sub-level five, grav cannon lab. Higgins down, request reinforcement,” he said quickly.
His momentary distraction almost proved fatal as the changeling Pike made a lightning-quick dash for the door. It caught the sentry at a dead run, pushing him completely into the lab and sending him sprawling.
The door clicked home with the metallic sound of interlocking vanadium bolts.
The Doppelganger leapt to its feet to complete its mission.
“Well, well, well. And here I thought guarding this big old machine with nothing but these Brainiac types for company was going to be a crashing bore. Let’s party, shall we?”
“Pike” looked toward the speaker. It was a girl. A teenager.
“Resistance is useless,” said the Doppelganger.
The girl smiled at him.
“No, the line is, ‘Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated,’” said the girl. “And by the way, the name’s Erin. The Vampire Slayer. And welcome to my world. You won’t like it.”
* * *
“Holy shit!” said Faith as she surveyed the sea of demons in the valley in front of them.
“Oh, boy. It just keeps getting better and better,” Cordelia added.
“There they are,” said Mac, pointing to a ridgeline about two hundred yards away where Buffy Two Six Alpha and her companions appeared to be making a desperate last stand. She took in the vast swarm of demons with a discerning sweep of her gaze and nodded to herself. “Buffy, drop a Berlioz on these fuckers and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Buffy Echo Fox hastily slipped her pack off her shoulders and let it slide to the ground. She rooted around inside and came up with the telltale silver cylinder of a Berlioz Manifold Implosion Munition.
“No, you’ll kill the others and us, too!” shouted Willow.
“I wouldn’t do that Will. You know that. The Berlioz Muntion can be set to different blast radii. We’ll dump this off here, head back though the wormhole so we don’t end up part of the body count, then reopen the wormhole on the ridge and sneak them out,” Buffy Echo Fox said to her. Then she glanced at Mac. “That is the plan, Mac, isn’t it?”
“Scary how much you and I think alike sometimes, Fox,” said Mac crisply. “Yeah, that’s the idea. Now get it done.”
“Umm … okay, yeah, that sounds good,” said Willow, nodding her approval of the scheme.
“Blondie sure can think on her feet, can’t she?” asked Faith.
Mac, ever the professional, was taking a laser range finder and gyrocompass bearing on the stranded heroes on the ridge.
“Okay, Buffy,” she announced to Echo Fox after a minute. “Range is two hundred ten meters. Bearing zero three two degrees off wormhole axis. Elevation plus one hundred point six meters.”
“Roger that,” said Echo Fox as she punched a blast radius into the Berlioz Munition’s keypad.
She shouldered her pack once again and Elisa said, “Okay — everyone who doesn’t want to be dead, back through the wormhole, double time!”
* * *
“What the …?” asked Angel as something cylindrical and shiny arced from the hand of the other Buffy and sailed into the midst of the undead demon army.
Buffy Two Six Alpha’s magic and the perilously low supply of firepower available to the party had briefly slowed the advance of the demons as they stumbled over their own dead in an effort to gain the summit of the ridge. But it was a terribly temporary impediment to their advance. It reminded Buffy far too much of another desperate last stand in Hell, another losing battle, and the death of a woman who had come to mean a very great deal to her. And now the sequel to that battle would cost her everything — her own life, the life of her friends, her husband, her daughter. All dead. All because of her.
But she wouldn’t go down easily. She wouldn’t just hand darkness the victory. Whatever it took, she’d fight until the last second, until the wavefront initiators worked their magic of interdimensional physics and ended her age-old war with Hell in one monumental act of mutual destruction. If all she had to show for her death and the deaths of those she loved was to deprive Hell itself of one last victory, then so be it. It was a small thing, but it was all she had left, all she could hope for.
To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
She pushed the grim thoughts and fears aside and brought another offensive spell to mind, a nasty, rolling fireball that turned dozens upon dozens of demons into charred kindling even as her friends emptied what remained of their ammunition into the rising tide of undead.
The slide of Xander’s .45 locked back on an empty chamber, and as he ejected the magazine he glanced toward the wormhole.
“Hey, they’re going bye-bye over there,” he said as he watched the other women leave. “Does anyone here besides me not find that comforting?”
“If you like that, you’re going to bloody love this,” said Spike, looking off in the direction of Dys.
Something in his voice caught everyone’s attention, and they looked out over the plain. There, high above the ground, the sky was being rent by blue-white fire as far as the eye could see. And from that fire emerged death itself.
“Ether Phages,” said Angel. “Thousands of them.”