Necropolis: Book 5: R'lyeh Read online

  USS Curtis Wilbur, two miles west of

  Coastal R'lyeh/Yamayuki Derelict.

  Inside GEOP-Event.

  2005

  It was strange sailing on a ship inside the GEOP-Event. The ocean, concave, it was like sailing on the inside of a massive bowl.

  The warship could still see the USS Antietam, peaking over the oceanic rim-like edge of the Event on level, sane seas. But surrounding that other warship was anything but sanity.

  The two Phalanx CIWS guns fired and hummed in stereo. They seemed to be alternating their firing patterns on the distant Shoggoth swarm a mile away. Their covering fire adding to the ballistic barrage from the USS Antietam a mile further still.

  Tamara and the Remnant-Marie watched the distant flying monsters drop in droves, caught between the two American Destroyers' crossfire, their death cries little more than a whisper from this distance.

  Then suddenly without notice, one Phalanx gun quickly changed position and opened fire directly above them. Whatever it locked onto, the automatic Gatling cannon turned it into a fireball as it screamed like a diving plane rocketing towards the USS Curtis Wilbur. It was too close – far too close – and the Phalanx gun wasn't slowing it down!

  It slammed into the warship. The deck buckled with its impact, rocking the entire Destroyer.

  * * *

  The wind screamed and roared past. It tore at her flesh and pulled at her hair as Amber plummeted thousands of feet from the sky. Her blue eyes fixated on the gray-hulled warship as the alien-facet propelled her at even greater velocities, the naked blonde appearing as a rocket as she fell from the sky.

  Streams of tears streaked across her face as the wind bit and cut at her. Amber could sense the activity on deck. Many soldiers were armed but unaware of her as she plunged from her great height. They were no threat. They didn't stand a chance. It was the girl Amber needed to contend with.

  As she approached a Phalanx gun locked onto her and opened fire. The end of its automatic Gatling barrel looked more like a garden hose than a machine gun, spraying 50 rounds a second of hot tungsten. Amber's multimind erected a shield, the ballistic death exploding into a fire-shell around her near sonic-speed descent.

  With the fractured Lorne-facet at her multimind's disposal, she was no amateur to psychic combat. Countless telekinetic tentacles whipped from her mind as she released a concussion wave to deaden her fall.

  It couldn't be said that she landed on deck. She impacted it; she hammered into it! She landed on one knee, her teeth bared like a feral animal. The metal deck buckled and bent as various pieces of equipment were shattered with a deafening boom. The entire warship bobbed from the impact.

  The sailors closest were instantly killed by the impact's shock wave. Those slightly further were less fortunate, the Amber-symbiot's telekinetic tentacles falling upon them. Struggling against an invisible force, they were picked up and broken open; rended and torn asunder as their entrails mopped sloppily across the shattered deck, their screams drowned into a gurgling silence as their throats filled with their own guts.

  In the momentary silence Amber heard the purr of the Phalanx gun's motors. A bolt of blinding white energy incinerated the pill-domed Gatling gun, leaving the lower deck exposed in its sparking ruins.

  There was no pause, no reprieve in her actions as Amber released yet another thundering bolt of energy towards the young girl standing on the ship's stern.

  * * *

  In a single instant, in one moment, Tamara witnessed more gratuitous violence and carnage then she'd seen in her entire ten year life. Tamara was shocked. She was stunned as the howling, blistering bolt of energy raced towards her. Her mind paralyzed, her instincts took over, instantly raising a shield.

  When the Amber-symbiot's energy burst collided with Tamara's psychic shield the results were disastrous. Although her protective shield held, Tamara slid back ten feet from the explosion, the back-blast knocking Amber off her feet and blowing out the USS Curtis Wilbur's portholes and windows. The ship shuttered. Heavily welded seams ripped open, its loose metal hull-sections rattled and banged loudly as the warship's bulkheads groaned.

  Although there was a great amount of commotion, with sailors running and shouting, attempting to put out sporadic fires and attending the wounded, Tamara ceased to hear it. A silence fell across the ship as a surreal atmosphere overcame her.

  She could hear the men's thoughts, their fears, their grief, their panic, their prayers. Images of children. Images of women, wives and girlfriends. Their fear was for those who weren't even here.

  Tamara realized the men needed time. Time to save the wounded. Time to escape. Time to save their lives. Time to live for their loved ones. She pushed down her fear, silenced her shock. These were innocent men. These were her men. Her empathy connected with them all. These were her people. Her sons and daughters and wives and girlfriends. Their fear was profound. Even faced with death by monsters they didn't fear for themselves. They were truly heroes. Even when they were helpless...

  “But I'm not,” Tamara whispered beneath her breath.

  In the surrounding dreamlike silence the young Japanese girl and the naked blonde woman regained their footings. They faced each other across the damaged warship.

  The Amber-symbiot crouched into a fighting stance, her lips peeled back; her hair slowly rising with static; her skin becoming luminescent, as she siphoned power out of the very air.

  A light breeze wafted across the ship. Tamara was calm. Still. Placid. The gold and green flecks in her eyes began to light up; began to spark. Tamara's eyes burst with light as she levitated off the deck.

  Amber roared as unrestrained power burst from her hands, pouring out of her like blinding white liquid.

  Tamara teleported. Simply blinked away as the arcing fury of energy decimated the stern of the ship. She reappeared directly behind Amber, her hands cupped on either side of her head, palms glowing dimly. As she released the gravity pulse, the Amber-symbiot broke into a mist and teleported.

  * * *

  Dante watched in stunned silence near the bow of the USS Curits Wilbur. He had sensed the Amber-symbiot's approach before she landed on deck. There had been no time to warn anybody, Amber's assault was so quick and violent.

  But Dante had done something. He had reached out his mind to the Shoggoth swarm a mile away. They were simple creatures to control. They were designed, genetically engineered, built to be driven. Although he could sense someone – something – in the Shoggoth Swarm's minds, controlling them, whatever it was, it was spread thin. Dante met with no resistance as he slipped into one of the monster's minds. The first Shoggoth that broke away from the swarm to head towards the USS Curtis Wilbur was torn to pieces by the ship's defending Phalanx guns. He should have known better. The second one dropped from the sky and submerged itself. These proto-life things were as adaptable as could be. It swam beneath the waves as it approached.

  * * *

  Tamara levitated higher off the deck, opening her mind, searching for Amber's presence.

  Tendrils of mist appeared in the air behind her as they quickly spun into a vortex and coagulated into a feminine form, glowing with power!

  As the Amber-symbiot prepared to attack Tamara, the ocean beneath her exploded. The thing that ejected itself from the ocean was massive! How something the size of a transport truck could move so quick was shocking! The Shoggoth's grey gelatinous protoplasmic mass enveloped Amber, simply snapped her up, scooped her in its acid embrace as it roared into the air, water spraying wildly. Its outer body forming and absorbing multiple gibbering mouths and gawking puss-filled eyes. “Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li!” it cried.

  Amber was caught off guard. She wanted to scream in agony as the thing's digestive acids burned her flesh off, but she couldn't even breathe! She released a tremendous energy pulse and the Shoggoth was obliterated, its smoldering remains raining on the ship deck in chucks.

  The Amber-symbiot faltered for a moment, her pain excruciating, but t
he alien-facet began regenerating her flesh, stitching it back together.

  * * *

  “Dante. Dante!” screamed the Remnant-Marie, trying to gain the boy's attention. Dante's mind was linked to the Shoggoth's when Amber incinerated it. It happened so quick Dante didn't have time to withdraw before it died. He felt its pain. He felt its death. He was near debilitated by it.

  “Dante!” she called through the dimensional window. “Tamara can't defeat her! She's too powerful!” Marie was frantic, terrified for her daughter.

  “She – she's not trying to defeat her,” Dante stammered, his wits returning. “She's trying to buy the men time.”

  “Dante! You must open the Gatesphere,” Marie's shadowy form was morphing in her panic. “You must open the Gatesphere now!”

  * * *

  Egyptian Desert

  circa 1242 BCE

  “You must open the Gatesphere now!”

  The desert night breeze was cold. Moshe listened to the desert's silence as he looked at the shadowy Remnant through the inter-dimensional window. Moshe thought long before he answered the ghost. “What do you hope to accomplish by -”

  The ghost cut him off, pleadingly “- my baby... my baby's in grave danger!” she wept. “You are the only one I could find like her.”

  Only the ghost's feeble weeping could be heard in the quiet desert evening. Moshe's heart broke for the half forgotten resident of Sheol. He wanted to embrace and comfort her. “What's your baby's name?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Tamara. She is a Symbiocyst... just like you.”

  * * *

  Tamara drank in the abundant psychic energy the curved Time-Space phenomena the corpse-city R'lyeh was – her levitation blossoming into full flight.

  Arms by her sides, face forward, her silky black hair pulled back by the slipstream. The curved ocean sped beneath her as she distanced herself from the USS Curtis Wilbur, the Amber-symbiot launching blue-white energy bolts at her. In the open air they lacked accuracy in their unrefined and unfocused state. Tamara had engaged the Amber-symbiot enough to keep her away from the crippled warship, and that was the plan. But the Amber-symbiot was fast! Faster than she was. It would only be a matter of seconds before she caught up.

  How was she summoning those energy bolts? Tamara's mind raced as she closed the distance between the crippled USS Curtis Wilbur and the USS John S. McCain. She didn't know how but she needed to fight back! She needed to do something!

  Tamara flew over the second American warship, the stationary USS John S. McCain next to the rusted Japanese derelict, the Yamayuki, her midsection bend and folded in half as it sat on R'lyeh's bizarre slime-coated coast. Ahead of her, building-sized monoliths. She could lose her in -

  The nearest alien citadel exploded, it massive stone fragments raining down on her, tumbling at the strangest angles! As Tamara released a concussion wave, pulverizing the falling debris, she glanced back.

  For the first time she saw the Amber-symbiot for the monster she truly was. The naked woman pursued, but extending from her were dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of invisible telekinetic tentacles.

  Tamara knew she stood no chance in the open air. She would have to take the battle to the ground. Into R'lyeh itself.

  * * *

  Dante's metaphysical mind conjured the black Gatesphere. The ebony sphere rapidly expanded and enveloped the boy, the Remnant-Marie and the entire bow-end of the USS Curtis Wilbur.

  * * *

  Egyptian Desert

  circa 1242 BCE

  Moshe breathed the cold desert night air. He focused and concentrated. In the dark night the lights in Moshe's eyes shone brightly.

  It began as tiny dust devils in the desert sand. Ever so gentle eddies of breeze caressing the desert. The black walls of the Gatesphere rushed past Moshe.

  * * *

  A native of Nyarlathotep's Prison-Universe, the Ghost that was an echo of Marie was unbounded by the Ordered Universe's laws of physics. A creature of the Outer Chaos, Time meant nothing to her, and in that shadowy realm in which she existed, Time simply did not exist!

  In both past and present the Remnant-Marie shouted the same words!

  “Open the portal!”

  “Open the portal!”

  Both Moshe and Dante made the same gesture: their hands mimicking an opening, parting motion.

  Both portals opened into the Outer Chaos, both worlds and times protected and buffered on either end by the two Gatespheres' event-horizons.

  Through the jet black expanse of that Shadow-Realm, across three millennia, the boy and the man gazed at one another in bewildered shock and wonder!

  “Please!” wept Marie, “You must help my baby!”

  Dante reached his hand into the darkness with a welcoming gesture.

  Moshe took a deep breath of the chill desert air and stepped through.

  Chapter 7: The Tao Xian Ching

  La Mosquée vide

  (The Hollow Mosque),

  la cinquième château,

  1930

  The cobblestone path had long since fallen into disrepair, appearing now more like a dried riverbed than a proper path, its stones treacherous to navigate.

  The tall brunette's heels were loud in the near silence of the night. Her intense blue eyes focused ahead at La Mosquée vide, la cinquième château. The crescent moon, barely a curved sliver, offered precious little light to see by, but she paid no attention to her footing, she had walked this path a thousand times.

  The young China-man that followed her struggled along the path, stumbling numerous times. He was excited and chattered incessantly.

  The fool, she thought as she half glanced over her shoulder, her cruel Arabic lips in a judgmental sneer. The freshman had an extensive background in Traditional Folklore and was majoring in linguistics: Ancient Mandarin. Chang? Chin? His name was inconsequential.

  He fell hard on the broken cobblestones. She stopped, allowing him time to pick himself up. “I thought ... I thought the Hollow Mosque was off-limits,” he stammered as he rubbed his bruised shin. His eyes nervously scanning the darkened forest and trees that surrounded them.

  “Afraid of the dark?” Her accent was a pleasant French-Arabic blend.

  “No,” he whispered into the night. “Only of what might lurk in it.”

  She began walking again, her shoes clicking loudly. “The Tao Xian Ching is a valuable tome. We keep it safely stored away from the main library.” She lied to the China-man.

  He quickly regained his footing, straightened his leather satchel and pursued the sound of her heels into the darkness ahead. When he caught up to her he stumbled on the loose stones, nearly falling on his face.

  “I don't understand,” he was winded as he spoke to her. “There are much better students that can translate Mandarin.”

  “At l'université de Etienne, we believe in giving our younger freshmen students hands-on experience and opportunities,” she lied to him again. Yes, there were more proficient students and professors to translate the Chinese manuscript, she thought, but none that were expendable. None that wouldn't be missed. Chang? Chin? He was nobody. He was isolated. Inconsequential. Expendable.

  * * *

  The scent of candle wax was overpowering as they entered the subterranean chamber beneath the half-completed Mosque. All construction had come to a standstill when La Mosquée vide was abandoned decades ago. It had never had its electrical work finished, but oddly enough, thick electrical cables snaked their way across the floor and down a cave opening at the rear of the chamber.