The Black Gate (21 page)

Kleist scowled, as the tone of Peter’s voice made it clear that he wasn’t really asking for Kleist’s permission. With another brief call to Hoth, Kleist hung up the phone. “Come along, then.” He reached for Mina’s arm, but Peter moved between them.

“I’ll take her,” Peter said. Gripping her gently by the upper arm, Peter led her out onto the catwalk.

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “No, no…”

Overcome with vertigo, Peter gripped the hand rail with his free hand. The expanse of the black disk below them was disorienting. There was a fundamental wrongness about it that befuddled his senses. He shook his head and forced himself to move forward, putting one unsteady foot in front of the other. Mina shuffled beside him, clinging to his arm.

“What a lovely couple,” Kleist mocked.

“Mind your tongue,
Herr Doktor
, or you may find yourself making this transit instead of her.”

Kleist shut his mouth with an audible
clack
.

With a sigh of relief, Peter reached the departure cage and pulled Mina inside. Turning her back toward the cable, he held her by the arms while Kleist attached the pulleys. “Remember what I told you,” Peter whispered as Kleist finished and stepped outside the cage.
 

“Will you be waiting for me?” She was shivering, and her eyes were wide with fear.

“Of course I will.” With a last, brief squeeze of her hands, he stepped back onto the catwalk. “I promise.”

Kleist slammed shut the door, which was made of vertical metal bars like the rest of the cage. It was designed such that the traveler, the victim, once attached to the cable, was unable to reach the bars. When it was time, the entire floor swung downward in two halves, centered on a hole through which the guide cable passed. There was nothing the traveler could grab to prevent their fall.

Peter stood there, holding Mina’s gaze, willing her to be strong, and praying for his own forgiveness at having put her in this situation instead of giving her the gift of mercy by killing her.
 

Kleist picked up the phone and reported to Hoth that all was ready. Peter’s hands clenched around the bars to the door, his knuckles white.
 

Down below, von Falkenstein barked the order to proceed. Hoth reached forward and pressed a button on his console.
 

“
Peter!
” Mina cried, reaching for him, her face contorted in terror, just before the floor dropped open like the trapdoor in a gallows.

Peter bit down on his tongue and the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. His eyes followed her as she fell, screaming, along the path of the cable.

Mina looked up, her eyes staring into his, her arms reaching for him, until she vanished into darkness, swallowed up by the Black Gate.

EVOLUTION

Peter turned and pounded down the catwalk, pushing Kleist aside so hard that the man nearly toppled over the railing into the yawning abyss below. One-hundred twenty-three point seven eight seconds, Peter kept repeating in his mind.
 

He tripped and fell as he made the stairs. Instead of trying to regain his feet, he simply curled up into a fetal position and thump-rolled to the first landing. Ignoring the bruises, he got up and continued down to the hatch that would take him through the command platform to the lower reaches of the chamber.

Finally reaching the bottom of the stairs, he hop-skipped as fast as he could to the receiving cage. While the lower half of the chamber was as well-lit as the upper half, with electric arc lamps adding thousands of lumens to the considerable glow put out by the ring, the light was somehow different, colder. Malevolent. Peter suppressed a shiver as he looked up into the infinite darkness suspended above him. In his mind’s eye, he saw the ring suddenly detach itself from the walls of the chamber to come crashing down, devouring him, consuming his soul.
 

Gasping for breath, he came to a skidding stop at the door to the cage, where a handful of Kleist’s men and a squad of heavily armed soldiers were clustered around a large metal box that Peter realized was a coffin. He heard Kleist calling his name from somewhere behind him, but he ignored the butcher.

He could see the countdown clock mounted to the command platform that faced this direction. Von Falkenstein was watching him, and Baumann had joined him. For a moment, Peter wondered why Baumann was still here. He should have already been on his way to take over his division command. The
Herr Professor’s
expression was cold. Baumann, as usual, wore his sneering grin.

Three…two…one…

The darkness above him whirled into a maelstrom that vanished with an ear-splitting boom. The cable parted with a whip-crack sound as Mina’s limp body fell, slamming hard into the concrete floor of the cage where she lay still.

“Get this door open!” Peter ordered the soldiers, who, with stricken faces, moved quickly to obey.

“No, wait!” It was Kleist, who huffed up next to Peter. “Don’t open it, you fool!”

Still moaning, Mina rolled over on her back. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she turned her head toward Peter. After a time, her gaze settled on him. He thought her eyes were glowing, but knew that surely must have been a trick of all the lights blazing in the chamber.

“Mina,” he called, “are you all right?”

She made a sound, one that it took him a long, terrifying moment to realize was laughter, but it was a laugh unlike any she could have ever made in life before being sent through the gate. It built up to a deep, guttural howl that gave him gooseflesh.

“Mina…”

In the blink of an eye she was at the bars. Before he could react, she bent the wrist-thick steel rods as if they were made of clay. Grabbing him by the hair, she yanked him forward, pulling his head through the gap before she clamped her hands on the sides of his head.
 

“
Mina, no!
” Peter felt as if his skull was held in the jaws of a steel vice. But his fear transformed to terror when he saw that her eyes were indeed flaming orbs, clearly not an optical illusion. Then her hands began to glow like hot coals, and every cell in his body seemed to explode at once.
 

“Now!” Kleist barked. Even though he was standing beside Peter, his voice sounded far away, as if he were rapidly receding.
 

The receiving cage was flooded with a fine spray of water from jets mounted around the upper edges.

Only it wasn’t just water. A noxious chemical smell, redolent of ammonia, swept across the lower chamber as the fine particles of spray inundated the receiving cage..

With an agonized shriek, Mina let Peter go and fell to the floor, writhing.

“Quickly!” Kleist ordered the soldiers. “Restrain her!”

As Peter extricated himself from the bars, still reeling from the pain, the soldiers opened the door and dashed inside the cage while Kleist’s men rolled the metal coffin in behind them. Mina had curled up into a quivering ball on the floor. Her skin was raw, bubbling and sloughing away as if it were being eaten by acid.

In a well-coordinated movement, a pair of soldiers with bolt cutters cut away her harness. Then the others covered her with a net of metallic mesh and spun her inside it, trapping her like a fly spun in spider’s silk before heaving her into the coffin.
 

Kleist took Peter’s arm and helped steady him. “Are you all right?”

Peter nodded. The pain had rapidly subsided, but he still saw afterimages in his vision of Mina’s blazing eyes. “What was that?” He croaked. “What did she do?”

“That is how the ancient ones fed,” Kleist explained. “They could still consume food, of course, but to sustain the enormous energy requirements of their bodies, they developed the ability to draw their sustenance directly from other organisms, literally sucking the life force from their victims. As you are quite aware, it is an extremely painful process.”

Kleist released Peter’s arm and moved back to the cage. “The box is made of solid titanium,” Kleist explained as Peter joined him, “and the walls and lid are lined with a thick layer of a viscous form of the chemical spray. She will not be able to break out of there.” He put a hand out to touch the bent bars and frowned. “I told the
Herr Professor
from the very beginning that we needed stronger materials for the receiving cage, but he would not listen. I cannot tell you how many times this has been repaired.”

The soldiers slammed the lid down on the coffin and fastened it with bolts as big around as Peter’s thumb.

Kleist gestured toward the elevator. “Get her to the containment chamber on Level Three. Quickly.”

The soldiers wasted no time. Trailed by Kleist, Peter, and the technicians, the soldiers pushed the cart as fast as they could for the elevator.

The trip to the cell block on the third level might not have been so nerve-wracking had it not been for the muffled screams that pierced the thick metal of the coffin. The sounds of Mina’s pain and anguish speared through Peter’s heart.

“In here!” Having reached the laboratory, Kleist guided them to the heavily reinforced cell labeled Containment Chamber 1.
 

The soldiers wheeled the coffin inside, and Peter followed behind them.

The cell, he found, was already occupied. Three men, their emaciated bodies stripped of all clothing and gags stuffed into their mouths, were chained by the wrists to the far wall. They began to thrash and writhe at the sight of the coffin, trying in vain to break their metal bonds and flee.

“What is this?” Peter demanded, pointing to the three
Organisation Todt
laborers.
 

“One of the side effects of traversing the gate is extreme hunger,” Kleist told him as the soldiers positioned the coffin beside the unfortunate men. “The travelers return as if they had been gone for days or weeks without a scrap of nourishment. Feeding will help calm her, make her more manageable. In her current state, she is little more than a dreadfully powerful wild animal.” He pursed his lips. “Hopefully three will suffice. Ivan consumed nearly a dozen before he was sated.” He pushed Peter back toward the door. “Trust me, you do not want to be in here when she comes out!”

Reluctantly, Peter stepped back toward the door as Kleist bent down to manipulate a mechanism on the top of the coffin lid. “This is a remote release timer that will automatically disengage the bolts…”

He jumped back as Mina struck the lid with such force that two of the thick bolts snapped.

“Get out!” Kleist shouted.

The men stampeded for the door, carrying Kleist and the technicians with them and pushing Peter the rest of the way outside. A pair of technicians slammed the thick vault-like door closed and turned the wheel that locked it shut.

“This way, quickly,” Kleist said, grabbing Peter’s arm. “You don’t want to miss this!” The doctor led Peter into an adjoining room that was also sealed with a massive steel door. Inside was an array of medical and scientific equipment, along with a series of portholes that looked into the cell where they had put Mina. “Don’t worry,” Kleist told him, seeing that Peter was eyeing the glass with more than a bit of concern. “It is armor glass twice as thick as the door. None of our previous subjects were able to damage it.”
 

Reaching out to a console on a nearby table, Kleist flipped a switch. The muffled screams of the men chained emerged with terrifying clarity from a speaker mounted overhead.

Leaning forward, pressing his nose against the glass, Peter peered into the cell.

Mina was hammering at the lid of the coffin with a rhythmic banging, a percussion accompaniment to the screams of the doomed men. With one last titanic shove, the remaining bolts snapped and the coffin lid flew open with a deep metallic
boom
. The men fell into silence as Mina’s head rose above the rim, and Peter winced at the sight of her face. Most of the skin had dissolved away, revealing glistening muscle and sinew. She slowly looked around and sniffed at the air like a hound with a nose that had been reduced to bloody cartilage. One of the men whimpered, and her head snapped around, her gaze fixing on him.

In a flash she was out of the coffin, straddling his body with her legs. Twisting and kicking, he tried to get her off, but his efforts were hopeless. She gripped his head just as she had done to Peter. Her hands began to glow a deep red, then grew to a brighter orange, then yellow, flickering like hot coals. The man shrieked in agony, the sounds amplified by the speaker in the observation room. Mina tilted her head back, mouth open, and her body shuddered in what could have easily been mistaken for sexual ecstasy.
 

Peter felt like vomiting. He wanted to look away, but his eyes refused to obey his mind.

“Behold the perfect soldier,” Kleist whispered beside him, “She replenishes her own strength even as she destroys the enemy.”

“Yes,” Peter managed, forcing down his bile, “that’s quite…impressive.”

In what he guessed might have been forty seconds, but not longer than a minute, Mina lifted her hands from the man’s head and took a deep, ragged breath.
 

“
Mein Gott
,” Peter breathed as he saw the body. The corpse was little more than a desiccated husk that, had it been wrapped in strips of cloth, could have easily been mistaken for an Egyptian mummy.

Mina turned to the next victim. With an urgent sigh, she scuttled over to him and straddled him as she had the first man. Ignoring his muffled cries and frenzied thrashing, she gripped his head and the shrieking began again.

“Interesting,” Kleist murmured as he glanced at the clock.

“What?”

“By this time, our last subject had already fed on the first two and was working on the third. Mina appears not to be as hungry. Perhaps she requires less sustenance?” He tapped his lips with a finger, then picked up a clipboard and jotted down a few notes.

The second victim stopped struggling. His eyes drooped shut and his body went limp as Mina sucked his life away. Peter watched, chained to the sight by morbid fascination, as the man’s body shriveled away right before his eyes.