perhaps; more detached. But just as effective.
When the last bomb dropped, the B-52s banked away and flew east with impunity. The army of Voggoth lay cut in half.
The storm raged on.
17. Maze
The air felt damp and smelled of rot. Bindings on her wrists and ankles kept Nina secure to the hard surface; a table or the like. The black ceiling above appeared featureless save for red and green lines that could have been wiring-or veins.
She heard the voices again.
“The first implant is complete, your Excellency.”
“Did you take care to conceal it?”
“While dormant it appears as nothing more than a common skin blemish. Even when activated it will remain small.”
“Very well. And the second phase?”
“The processors are encoding the appropriate memories based on our scan of the subject female’s brain chemistry. The supplemental memory unit will be available for implant in a short time. Prior to implantation, we will suppress all recollections since her capture and route chemical paths to those memories through the supplemental unit.”
“We must accelerate the process! If we do not return her to the crash site soon they will cease their search and the opportunity will pass. We already failed to neutralize the surrogate’s female carrier on the first day of hostilities and her location is no longer known to us. In the same day our assassination attempt of the surrogate’s genetic predecessor failed and he has avoided our detection since that time. She represents our last hope at disrupting human resistance before it can coalesce.”
“I understand, your Excellency.”
Then it stood over Nina and glared at her through emerald eyes on a face covered in decaying skin.
“Do not fear, my child. Soon we will purge these unpleasant hours from your mind and return you to your human compatriots. You have a duty to perform for the blessed Voggoth.”
The Bishop glared at an underling as he moved away from the blob-like Chariot transport and walked-nearly glided-across the pavement of the parking lot. The young Missionary man who met him bowed and they spoke, but Nina could not hear the conversation as she watched the Bishop’s arrival through binoculars.
She felt her heart thump faster and a wave of anger build in her bones.
Next to her along the berm lay Carl Bly with his own pair of binoculars eyeing the new arrival. The two hid at the fringe of a ring of vacant cookie-cutter duplexes to the west.
“Man, I think that’s the first time I ever saw one of those Order guys looking pissed off. Whoever he is, he’s not happy. I guess a couple of B-52s can pretty much ruin anybody’s shit.”
Nina’s team received news of yesterday’s strike via radio, the same radio call wherein she had requested- again-for transports to be sent to Clinton, Missouri. Her team directed any survivors they came across to that small town.
Command’s answer? Vague. A sort of ‘we’ll see what we can do’. At the very least Nina hoped they could air drop supplies to the survivors but even that remained uncertain.
But thoughts of survivors, air strikes, and supplies held little importance at that moment. She remained focused on the creature dressed in clergy garb with emerald eyes and a robe underneath which things squirmed.
She recognized him.
Not a memory passed from Trevor’s consciousness to hers. Not a falsehood planted by Voggoth’s henchmen. A real memory. One originally suppressed during her captivity. This memory belonged to Nina, like those other memories from The Order’s prison where they had infected her with their implants.
Bly spoke unaware of Nina’s silent rage, “Cap, this was a good idea on paper. Doesn’t look like they’ve got a lot of security around. But this place is huge. We don’t have enough C-4 to bring it all down.”
Bly referred to the massive series of warehouses formerly owned and operated by Sysco Foods of Olathe, Kansas. Years ago the world’s largest food distribution company used the place to store everything from frozen mozzarella sticks to prime rib to bags of soda syrup. The entire complex stretched hundreds of yards from south to north parallel to Interstate 35. Rows of discarded tractor trailers lined the docking bays; abandoned cars lay swept into a pile at the perimeter of the massive parking lot; a handful of monks walked patrols with support from Spider Sentries and Ogres.
The facility seemingly served two functions. First as a refueling depot for The Order’s Chariots. The blob-ish ships swooped in, hovered above the center of the complex, and received fuel via wiggling tubes protruding from roof-mounted piles of metal and bubbling black rock.
That fuel, in turn, arrived at the complex in the form of a dark gel transported in on boat-like vehicles escorted by Shell Tanks. As far as intelligence could discern, Voggoth’s minions drained this ‘fuel’ directly from the soil, sapping the Earth of nutrients that could be used to grow crops.
The second purpose of the facility appeared to be command and control. Gordon Knox’s intelligence people suspected that directives-such as where to march and what to do-were delivered to The Order’s troops via broadcasts of some kind, perhaps radio waves, maybe even telepathy. All attempts to isolate and block those broadcasts had failed.
Nonetheless, those orders came from Voggoth from his Temple in the Urals to his army via his cadre of clergymen, in which the Bishop held high rank. The theory held that the Bishop distributed these orders via various Missionaries and couriers, with various levels of redundancy.
All of this knowledge held little interest to Nina as she watched the Bishop enter the facility with a gang of monks and a Missionary providing escort. Overhead an orange sunset shared the sky with a slow-moving veil of gray; not The Order’s storm but rain clouds of Earthly origin.
“You’d think they’d guard this thing with a little more heavy duty shit,” Bly went on, still not noticing Nina’s silence. “But I guess that clicks with what we were hearing this morning.”
Bly meant reports of Wraiths, Roachbots, Mutants, Ghouls and more pouring toward Excelsior Springs like ants to a picnic. Reinforcements, no doubt, for The Order’s core army elements destroyed by the B-52s.
When she did not react, Bly asked, “So what is it, Cap? This place a good target still?”
“The place? No,” she answered and thought but the Bishop, yes.
“Get the others ready. We hit it when the sun goes down.”
One of the blob-shaped Chariot craft hovered above the center of the complex. A series of pulsing red and green lights from the craft’s underbelly lit the starless, rainy night. In response, a black hose slithered from the roof like a snake rising from a basket and met a bulging orifice underneath the flyer. A burst of steam signaled the cementing of their bond.
Glug-glug-glug.
The sound carried above the noise of a steady rain clanging off the roof and drumming on the pavement as The Order’s version of fuel pumped up from a pile that resembled charcoal-colored gelatin atop the occupied warehouse.
After a few minutes, another burst of steam squirted from the bond and the hose fell away. The Chariot’s engines hissed louder and the ship flew away, passing over the dark parking lot on its way south.
The Dark Wolves moved between wrecked cars and approached the large complex. Nina halted her group and, through night vision goggles, eyed their entry point.
She saw the remains of a human building of metal and glass and concrete succumbing to tendrils of green and black ivory although the grainy haze of the night vision did not afford much detail.
She spied a steel door that had once been an employee entrance. Two monks wearing soaked brown robes stood guard outside, each armed with The Order’s version of swords attached to rope belts as well as forearm- mounted pellet guns. Above the door a solitary orb of light provided a cone of illumination.
