Omega (54 page)

That's Stonehenge,' several people said.

'I'm going to stop now, if you don't mind,' Tricia said. 'I'm not getting anything new and that awfulness
hurts'

'Leave it, then, love,' Dan told her. 'Sally, anything hot for Tricia yet? She's shivering.'

'Coming up right now.'

'Do you realize what this means?' Greg asked. 'They're using the Henge as an amplifier. Animal sacrifice, if Tricia's right about the blood ...'

'Not animal,' Tricia interrupted. "Human. At least, I think so. If it had been animal, the blood wouldn't have
...
swamped
me like that.'

They stared at each other, appalled; for a moment no one felt like speaking.

‘I
think Greg's right,' Sam Warner said finally, in a determinedly level voice. 'I reckon Liz and I have put in more study on stone circles than anyone here, although I'm sure most of you know at least something about them. They
are
focal points of power, even most detached psychical researchers accept that by now. We're certainly convinced of it. . . . We all know the Angels of Lucifer are powerful. They're completely ruthless and they know what they're at. Well, if they're using human sacrifice to raise power
and
using Stonehenge as an amplifier - no wonder they woke us up
1'

'Any suggestions, Sam?' Dan asked.

'Yes. We all know that sooner or later we're going to have to fight the Angels of Lucifer head on. That's what we set up the Psychic Assault Group for and it's been shaping up well. So why shouldn't the PAG use an amplifier, too? The
power's
the same - it's there for the godly to use, as well as the ungodly.... So is there a stone circle anywhere near here?'

'Geraint will know/ Moira said. 'And if he doesn't, hell find out. He's got plenty of archaeological books in his school library.'

Geraint did know, because he had helped to excavate it; a small but well-preserved megalithic circle a few kilometres away in the rising mountains west of Dyfnant Forest. It had lain for centuries buried under an ancient landslide, till gradual weathering of the topsoil had, in 1998, revealed a tell-tale pattern on an Ordnance Survey aerial photograph. The local archaeologists had moved in, Geraint among them, and in two years of volunteer labour had dug out the site. Now the circle stood clear and stark, looking a thousand years younger than its counterparts elsewhere because of its long burial.

Geraint wanted to take the Psychic Assault Group - the PAG as it had come to be called - to the circle himself but Tonia would not hear of it. He was still recovering from a bullet-wound in the right leg and was firmly confined to camp.

The wound was the result of the only shooting battle that h
ad so far taken place in Camp Ce
rridwen itself. It had been quick and decisive and Geraint had been the only casualty apart from the two dead attackers. That the attack had failed
was thanks to Gare
th Underwood. Since his brief visit, Geraint or Tonia had been listening meticulously at 0745 hours every day on the designated frequency but none of the arranged code phrases had come through for several weeks. Then one morning Tonia had heard 'Jerusalem artichoke gammon' repeated twice. That had puzzled them. 'Globe artichoke' meant 'expect psychic attack' and 'Jerusalem artichoke' meant 'expect physical attack' - but there was no 'gammon' on their list. Obviously Gareth was trying to tell them something extra.

It was Greg who had hit on the answer. 'Gammon - ham - he's saying they're going to have a crack at your ham radio!'

They had posted concealed marksmen all round the radio cabin, day and night. Just before dawn on the third night they had seen two armed strangers moving silently towards the cabin. They had let them come far enough to have them surrounded, and Peter O'Malley, in charge of the night's guard, had called on them to halt. They must have been very determined raiders, for they had tried to rush the cabin, one of them firing as he ran, the other pulling the pin from a hand-grenade. In the dim light, Peter had managed to wing the grenade-thrower so that it dropped at the man's feet. The other man had tried to kick it clear, but too late, and the explosion had killed them both. Geraint, jumping from bed, had been hit by a shot through the wood of the door.

'Quite a compliment,' he had joked shakily as Eileen bandaged him up. 'Our little news network must be bothering them.'

The raiders were in civilian clothes, carrying Army issue weapons but wearing no identity discs. Father Byrne and the Rev. Phillips from the village had conducted an ecumenical funeral service at their burial. Earlier raids on New Dyfnant and the Madness had produced many unidentified but probably Christian bodies, so the priest and the minister had worked out an agreed procedure. The minister, reared in an atmosphere where Popery was anathema, had been suspicious at first but growing respect and liking for the gentle old priest had dissolved his doubts.

The attack on the radio cabin had not been repeated but the armed watch had been maintained.

The PAG had been the product of Dan's tidy mind but it was psychically sound and had been quickly agreed upon. Each coven had nominated its most psychically powerful member, which was not necessarily the same thing as the most psychically experienced. These formed the PAG, under Moira and Dan's leadership (Moira and Dan's coven being handed over to their senior couple while the PAG was in action). The idea was that when a psychic attack was to be mounted, the PAG would be its spearhead, raising the power as a group and directing it at its target. At the same time, each coven would be meeting and concentrating on feeding power to its own representative on the PAG. A simple two-tier pyramid of dynamism, with Moira and Dan at its tip.

Putting the theory into practice had involved some trial-and-error. First, each coven had chosen its own 'delegate', and practised feeding power into him or her within the coven's own Circle, while the delegate tried to direct the total to a s
ingle objective such as the tele
kinetic moving of a compass-needle, or a specific work of healing, according to the delegate's known talents. As a result, two of the delegates had proved unable to carry such a charge and had shown signs of distress, so had had to be replaced by others perhaps less talented but more robust. Again, by the original plan the PAG should have totalled fifteen - Moira, Dan and one delegate from each of the other thirteen covens. But three of the covens had found that their most effective delegate was in fact a duo (two married couples and a pair of identical twin sisters) who were used to working powerfully together but were no more than average apart. So the final total had become eighteen.

The next stage had been to weld the eighteen into a working group. Moira and Dan had begun 'limbering them up' by practising simple and familiar rituals with them, to get them used to each other. This had resulted in the replacement of one of the delegates, from the Warners' Traditional coven, who admitted he found the strangeness of the Gardnerian-type rituals too distracting for him to be able to concentrate on the task for which he had been chosen. His replacement proved much more adaptable and fitted in well.

At last the team seemed ready and they tried some directed work - at first without calling on the support of the covens. They had begun with telepathic projection of selected images, Tarot trumps, to three volunteers outside the group: Tricia Haye
s the expert, one moderately ex
perienced witch and one helpful non-witch who claimed to be completely insensitive. Their correct guesses, which on pure chance should have been around one in twenty-two, were one in four and three-quarters by Tricia, one in twelve by the witch, and a fraction under one in eight by the non-witch (who was so gratified that she began taking an active interest in witchcraft and was accepted as a postulant in Rosemary and Greg's coven). Moira and Dan were delighted; any group which could project with that degree of success, in an experiment which was uncharged with emotion, should, they knew, be a formidable force in the urgent determination of battle.

They had then repeated the experiment with the full pyramid, the covens being unaware of the cards being projected, but concentrating on feeding power to their respective delegates. The runs had only been short, because the camp was too busy to immobilize two-thirds of its population too often for too long - but the results had been startling. Tricia's success rate became almost complete, while that of the other two approximately doubled.

This was the stage the PAG had reached when Sam made his suggestion about the stone circle.

The sun was lifting clear of the forest behind them as the PAG reached the high ring of megaliths. They had left while it was still dark but they knew that by now all the covens would be up and assembled. The experiment was to take place between 8.00 and 8.30, with its climax timed for 8.30 exactly. Moira and Dan had reconnoitred the place two days before and decided what they intended to do, but had left the briefing of the PAG till they were in position in the stone circle. The covens' minds were to be uncluttered by any concepts other than power-feeding.

All the group were fully clothed. Moira and Dan much preferred to work skyclad or for special purposes ceremonially robed; but they had decided that the PAG must be as mobile - and, if necessary, inconspicuous - as a military unit, so they had trained in ordinary clothes, of a crosscountry serviceability, from their first meeting.

They arrived just after 7.30 and rested within the ring, getting the feeling of the great stones.

Just before 8.00, Moira told them: 'You see that wooden hut over there, about a hundred metres away? It's where the excavators used to keep their tools. Geraint said it'd still be here. . . . We're going to set it alight, by psyc
hic effort from inside the henge
, at half-past eight exactly. Right - take your places, everybody and we'll cast the Circle.'

For the next half hour, they welded themselves together mentally, flexing the psychic muscles they had trained, building up the power to a higher pitch than they had ever reached before. After a while they began to feel the henge responding, the ageless currents which its builders had understood so well, stirrin
g and resonating with their own
group mind. The thought ca
me to Moira as the perspiration
beaded on her brow:
We'
ve been learning to walk, then
run - now we're riding a stallion.
She could feel, too, that
other confluence of current
s, the tide of supporting power
from Camp Cerridwen in the heart of the forest

It was going to succeed. She knew it.

At half past eight, she cried: 'Go! Go! Go!', pointing the ritual sword straight at the wooden hut.

Her whole body shook and it was as though a white-hot flame surged through the ve
ins of her arm. In the distance -
it seemed leagues away, yet impaled on her sword-point
-
the wooden hut began to smoulder; she knew the surge of extra confidence in the group behind her and gasped again as it swept through her.

The hut burst into flames. . Moira did not move till it was burning fiercely and the immense tide flowing through her spirit and body had begun to ebb. Then she turned. Several of them lay panting and exhausted, their eyes closed. Others sat gazing at the flame-wrapped hut, still hardly believing it.

Dan put his arm round her, lowering her gently to the ground as she slipped into grateful unconsciousness.

25

'Don't misunderstand me, Harley,' General Mullard said. 'I am
not
saying that Operation Skylight will be a failure. It has to succeed, because it will be the end product of Beehive's very existence. We came underground to preserve a governmental and military machine which could survive while Surface was in chaos and emerge to take charge when the time was ripe.'

'I am aware of that,' Harley said, with the complacency the general found increasingly hard to put up with these days. 'Also that the time
is
ripe and that Operation Skylight will therefore take place on 21 June. Three weeks gives us plenty of time to prepare. What is your point?'

'My point,' the general said patiently, 'is that we shall be mounting Operation Skylight with about one half of the forces we originally envisaged. The virtual destruction of the hives at Birmingham and Bristol by the earthquake and the losses at other hives depleted the Army badly. And I know Davidson's lot were only a handful but they were in key positions, so that didn't help. . . . Operation Skylight will take control of the country for you, as ordered. But we shall be thinner on the g
round than I should like. There
will be local reverses, guerilla activity from uncooperative elements and so on. Some of these Surface communities have had plenty of practice, dealing with the Madmen and with bandit groups.'