“Ah, too bad. And you shot him?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s gotten a little crazy, has it not, Benjamin Hood? We have here, I suspect, something more valuable than the gold of El Dorado.” He shook his staff. “And instead of rejoicing we’re fighting. Why is that?”
“Because you want to give it to a bunch of book-burning Nazi lunatics.” Hood gestured with the muzzle of the machine gun. “You’re finished, Kurt.”
“Am I? Under whose authority?”
“The Tibetan government sent me here.”
“To get this power for themselves.”
“It’s their country, isn’t it? So I repeat: Hands up!”
“And what proof do you have that you work for anyone but yourself, Hood?”
“I have the machine gun.”
“What happened to the staff you already stole?”
“It went cold.”
“Keyuri is spiriting it away, that’s what I think. We still have a destiny, she and I. And I have something entirely different from your primitive gun. Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler called it Vril, and it makes that toy in your hand as obsolete as a stone club. I have a weapon as quick as thought itself, and just as mobile. I think, therefore I destroy.” He lifted the staff slightly. “Imagine a tool that doesn’t hammer on reality but rearranges it. That’s what I feel when I hold it, Benjamin. I’ve gotten hold of the fabric of the universe itself.”
“Don’t make me pull the trigger.”
“Will you really shoot me down like one of your museum specimens?”
“Just like you fried your own man there, hurled against the wall.”
The other German looked at Raeder nervously.
Raeder ignored him. “Who really sent you? The Chinese? The Americans? What faith they have, dispatching you all by yourself!”
“We’re both scientists, Kurt. They sent me as a fellow scientist.”
“To steal discovery. Alas, I got here first.” And he raised the staff to point it.
So Hood fired.
The M-38 spat, the barrel climbing slightly as he fought to control the unfamiliar weapon. It stuttered like the guns in the gangster movies, shells flying like flung coins. Raeder should have been cut down.
Instead there was a blinding flash, a boom as loud as bells in the belfry of a cathedral, and the whine of angry hornets.
Hood’s bullets flew all around the room, anywhere but at Raeder, having been deflected by the force in his crystal staff. The American, meanwhile, was cuffed backward by power like hurricane wind, flying off his feet and skidding on his back against the pipes.
The sound of Raeder’s shot gonged off the walls before rolling away into a throaty rumble. The air crackled as if there’d been a bolt of lightning. It tasted like ozone. More rock rained down from the ceiling and bounced off the floor, the other German wincing.
“I’ve no idea how it works,” Raeder called, “or what it can really do. If it hadn’t had to deflect the energy of your bullets, I’d guess you’d be dead by now. So let’s just finish what I started and bring the curtain down.”
Hood scrambled for cover in the tunnel. Raeder aimed the weapon at the tunnel mouth. A thunderbolt flashed again and the cave quaked, the tunnel ceiling shattering and rock dropping down as Hood rolled under the pipes. It smashed onto the second entrance of the tunnel, burying it. Stray fragments bounced out across the floor of the main chamber and a cloud of dust shot out. The great machine itself seemed to shift gears and whine higher.
“Oh, I do enjoy that energy, even if it hurts. Hood? Have I killed you?”
“For God’s sake, Kurt, let’s go,” the other German urged.
“Silence, Hans. Do you realize that at this moment I’m the most powerful man in the world?”
Diels lifted his own staff. “No, you’re not. This one is charged, too. We both have Vril.”
“Then go make sure he’s finished. None of this slaughter would have happened without the interference of that damnable hack scientist and his nun. Keyuri Lin has my comrades’ blood on her hands.”
The German archaeologist walked warily into the cloud of dust. The Vril staff throbbed in his hand, casting light, but everything was obscured by the fog of the explosions. “I don’t see him,” Diels called.
“Escaped?”
“Buried, or trapped in the tunnel.”
“Then help me puzzle out this machine. It’s running higher and higher, and I’m worried it will race and break. With the tunnels sealed, we can work in peace.”
Diels turned. “We’ve buried the piping at both ends. Maybe it’s running too hot.”
“Then let’s try inserting another staff to absorb its power.”
“We don’t know what we’re doing, Kurt. We should walk away.”
“From godlike power?”
Then there was the bark of a heavy pistol and Diels’s forearm shattered. He screamed, clutched it, and dropped his staff.
A figure rose out of dust and rubble, emerging from a pocket under the pipes. Hood was gray with cave dust, rock scratches bleeding, the submachine gun ruined beneath the rocks. He hurled Beth Calloway’s now-empty revolver over Diels’s head at Raeder, who instinctively ducked instead of lifting his Vril staff.
Hood charged and dove for the other one. Diels grasped, too, screaming as the American rolled onto his injured arm.
Raeder couldn’t use his staff without incinerating them both.
Then the other German was knocked away, Hood rising to his knees, his captured staff swinging around.
Twin thunderbolts met.
The world went white. It was like a twin star exploding, two radiating coronas of energy. There was a shriek from Diels as its fury caught and dissolved the SS man, shredding him and throwing the spray of his body against the walls. What Hood and Raeder felt, encased in the energy of their own staffs, was far different. A pulse of dark energy punched through their bodies but lit them with a glow that was a transfiguration that infected every cell and corpuscle. Their air was sucked out, then punched back in. They were blind from the flash, and yet could feel the granular texture of time and space itself.
They saw a shimmer of force fields and fogs of particles, a part of the universe beyond normal human perception.
The machine was rising to a scream as it accelerated. In the cluster of pipes that led to the red glow below, something broke and steam shot upward in a geyser.
At last, Raeder ran. In fear.
Something was being unleashed he didn’t comprehend. He retreated up the ramp that led out of this underground city.
Hood wearily pursued, half staggering, since every nerve seemed on fire. The irradiation of staff energy was painful, exhilarating, numbing. His senses had been heightened, yet ached.
At the entry of the machine room where the great door had been knocked askew and the bones piled, he turned back and aimed his weapon at the machine. A jolt shot out and there was a bang, more pipes punched and broken, wire unspooling. The machine whined higher.
He didn’t want Nazis toying with this monstrosity again.
Then the American was running up the central ramp, following Raeder. There was an explosion ahead, and a rush of cool air.
When Hood got to the circular mandala door, he saw it had been blown to pieces. Raeder was somewhere beyond, on the surface of Shambhala.
Hood trotted out, his body not just tingling but almost sizzling, a boil of electrons alive with a strange new music. Was this what death felt like? Was he dead? But no, he could see his own flesh, but it had a weird, radioactive glow. He was translucent as amber.
Where was the mad Untersturmfuhrer? It was night, the roof of the valley ablaze with stars, the snow glowing silver, the waterfalls iridescent lines of pearl. The entire valley was quivering from the tremors they’d unleashed. He could hear the rising shriek of the machine, far, far below.
