Evil Triumphant Michael A. Stackpole(1)

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back enough to show him the Colt Krait in my shoulder holster. Ah, wearing a gun might make some of
the boys on the site kind of nervous.
I raised an eyebrow. More so than a man from AFP?
Ah, no, ah, probably not.
I appreciate your concern, Mr. Preston. You might not believe it, but some people in Build-more don t
like folks from AFP. I like to feel secure.
I can understand that, sir, the secure part, that is.
Indeed, I thought you would. Carry on, Mr. Preston.
I closed the trailer door behind myself and descended the metal steps. Tossing one hat to each of my
companions, I donned mine and headed in toward the center of the base. Away from the trailer, I
toldCrowley , Fair Lady Electronics put in several sections of the project.Looks like they have a
city-block-sized area on each floor, located approximately beneath the helipad on the surface. I d like to
think that s what we re looking for, but I can t believe Pygmalion would be so stupid as to use that again
as a name for a group he has doing business here on Earth.
You re forgetting, my friend, that Dark Lords tend to be arrogant in the extreme. When you take
someone as unimaginative as Nicholas Hunt and give him unlimited power, he becomes enamored of his
own little inside jokes. What he thinks is clever is really trite. He does what is ultimately stupid because
he wants someone to figure things out so they can appreciate how clever he really is.
Like movie directors making cameo appearances in movies... I offered.
Or authors writing themselves into books or, worse yet, using characters to mouth and espouse the
writer s views on a subject. It s a form of narcissism they defend as creativity, but it s really a cheap trick
that feeds their egos. The occultist shrugged. Pygmalion sees himself as an artiste of sorts and wants to
orchestrate everything. Symbols mean a lot to him, hence the naming of his companies.
Our conversation went on hold as we mounted the gantry to the fourth level of the construction area.
Most of the workers ignored us, making the most difficult part of our trek pulling Mickey away from
wanting to watch welding operations. We managed that without too much trouble and approached the
Fair Lady section of the project. Not unexpectedly, a couple of Build-more security guards stood in the
area. They appeared distracted, which bothered me a bit, but as they did not challenge us and had not
yet shoved clips into their FN-LAR assault rifles, I assumed our covers had not been broken.
We slipped into the Fair Lady area andCrowley coughed lightly. We re definitely not inKansas
anymore, Toto. Look at this.
What I saw impressed me as well. The whole Fair Lady section formed a shaft that ran from surface to
bottom in the facility. While the area was square, a central cylinder roughly 50 feet in diameter linked
each level. A guard rail, finished in the same flat, black matte that marked this whole portion of the
project, kept people away from a dangerously long drop and surrounded the cylinder entirely except at
the northern- and southernmost points.
At those two places, 12-foot-wide ramps led up at a 30� angle for about 25 feet, then leveled off 10
feet above the level of the floor. There they connected to a 20-foot diameter disk made of the same
synthetic, insulating black coating that covered the walls and floors in the cylinder stations. The ramps
held the disk firmly in the center of the cylinder, but the gap around the cylinder edge still made for a long
fall if anyone on the disk was not careful.
Running perpendicular to the ramps, a blue crystal lattice appeared to have grown up out of the disk s
midline. I could see no seam between the disk and the crystals, but I hardly thought they were made of
the same material. I could see no structure within the crystal, but somehow it had grown up into a hollow
rectangle with rounded corners both inside and out. Twenty-five feet long and half again as high, it
appeared to have been made all of one piece and naturally faceted, because I could see no signs of
workmanship.
I turned to askCrowley what it was, but he had already moved around toward the east to a control
bank, it looked more complicated than anything I would have imagined in a facility built inAmerica , for
the buttons had no icons to suggest their use. As I studied it more closely, I seemed to recall having seen
something similar to it before, and I suddenly recalled a dimensional gate control panel I had seen and
used in Plutonia. Is that what I think it is?
Crowleyfrowned, It s meant to look like it, but it doesn t really work. Each of the buttons on the
10-by-10 grid glowed with one of the colors that corresponded to the mnemonic Roy G. Biv: red,
orange, yellow, green,blue , indigo, violet. I knew that after violet came ultra-violet, which I couldn t see,
and then the off position. Selecting the correct pattern of lights would program the dimensional gate to
link to another gate. If that remote gate was receptive, stepping through the gate would instantly transport
a person to that other point.
The occultist punched the buttons through a new color pattern. I glanced at the gate and saw nothing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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