AND THE WIND BEGAN TO HOWL

By Dale Glaser

The Hollow’s teleporter room was rapidly filling with A.R.M.O.R. operatives. A detachment of security officers, most of them human, arrived to back up Agents Nyokong and Vega, all in bronze and white uniforms and carrying large weapons. They gathered in a cluster just behind the ionic-powered head of security and his twelve foot tall second-in-command from the planet Vega Superior, standing ready and alert, with the exception of one. The non-standing agent, whose androgynous head seemed to be composed entirely of magenta light and devoid of facial features except for coruscating yellow-orange eyes, floated calmly a few inches off the ground. After the security officers came the cleanup crew, three men in sturdy coveralls that mirrored the color scheme of the armed agents but in a different form following a different function. One of the workmen wore multiple piercings in each ear, studs anchoring thin chains, at the end of which dangled small metal starfish electroplated in various colors. The crew loaded the bleached and semi-desiccated body of the Undying One onto a hover platform, which wobbled slightly under the monster’s weight. The technicians normally assigned to the teleporter room were returning to their workstations and restoring normal operations in the wake of the recent scuffle.

At the eye of this storm of activity, Ibrahim al-Bazzaz stood quietly between two versions of Charles Little Sky. One, the director of A.R.M.O.R., was in uniform much like the security officers. The other, somewhat older Little Sky was dressed entirely in covert ops black.

“How much time do you suppose we have before more Undying Ones breach this dimension?” the younger Little Sky asked.

“Not much,” his elder twin shook his head. “Not enough.”

“Not enough hours in the day,” the director said. Turning to Ibrahim, he asked, “Did you follow enough of what we’ve been over so far to be able to relay it?”

“I think so,” Ibrahim nodded.

“Good. Get down to Dr. Althea’s lab and explain the situation to her. She’s our occult expert and demonic incursions are something we need her to weigh in on. Her lab is in the R&D wing, which is off the corridor directly across the Park from the quarantine access. About halfway down that wing,” Little Sky explained.

“Got it,” Ibrahim confirmed.

“If you pass the Starbucks, you’ve gone too far,” Yaphet Nyokong added. Ibrahim glanced at the head of security and decided by the man’s large grin that he was joking about the presence of a coffee shop in the research and development wing of the Hollow. Ibrahim departed the teleporter room at a quick trot.

Once he reached the elevated catwalk that formed a perimeter loop just above the treetops of the Park, Ibrahim paused for a moment to get his bearings and mentally retrace his earlier path while touring the Hollow with Little Sky. He re-oriented himself, identified the entrance to the quarantine corridor, set his sights on the opposite corridor and moved with alacrity in that direction. As he passed other A.R.M.O.R. agents – fellow A.R.M.O.R. agents, he reminded himself, since he had accepted the position as Little Sky’s aide-de-camp – and various visitors to the Hollow, Ibrahim was struck by the pervasively matter-of-fact routines surrounding him. No klaxons blared, no red lights strobed, no hint of an imminent apocalypse was evident. Three uniformed agents walking abreast on the catwalk temporarily shifted to a single-file configuration to allow Ibrahim to pass by; one of the agents was a balding, ruddy-faced man, the second was a gleaming silver-skinned synthezoid, the third was a jade-and-black-scaled reptilian resembling the endpoint of an evolution which had forged humanity from dinosaurs rather than primates, and all three were clutching sheafs of printouts and debating fine points of diagrams on the pages. On the grassy expanse of the Park far below Ibrahim’s feet, a lone figure strolled unhurriedly along one of the meandering footpaths, a muscular, masculine being nine feet tall with chalk-white skin, pointed ears, and a long black mane. Every individual Ibrahim could see was absorbed in work assignments or personal reflection, a fact which was at odds with the sense of urgency Ibrahim felt, and yet which did nothing to dispel it. Ibrahim worked his way around the catwalk and soon entered the corridor leading to the research and development wing.

Ibrahim traversed the corridor and spotted an open doorway. From within the room the doorway accessed, he could hear a cacophony of sounds: the electric whir of power tools, a man’s voice, and the high-pitched chitterings of an animal of some kind. Ibrahim drew even with the door and peered inside.

The large room was practically bursting with equipment which masked its true size by hiding every inch of every wall from floor to ceiling. Glass-fronted cabinets full of chemicals, upright compressor tanks connected to pneumatic hoses, peg boards laden with instruments as familiar as crescent wrenches and others too exotic to identify, industrial robotics, computer monitors, and more bounded the central work area, creating an impression of a cross between a cutting-edge medical facility and a futuristic garage. In the middle of the room stood a mechanical construct of blue-black iron studded with archaic-looking rivets. It stood on squat, vaguely humanoid legs which supported a perfectly spherical body. Around the equator of the body, eight jointed appendages emerged at regular intervals, each one ending in tapering ray-emitters. Atop the central globe was a cylindrical head etched with crude, rectangular eyes and mouth.

A panel on the lower hemisphere of the automaton was open, and a man knelt before it, using a small probe to read various circuit connections within the body. The man was tall but thin, and of an advanced age, his mostly bald scalp thoroughly liver-spotted and fringed with wispy white hair, while an ivory vandyke framed his thin-lipped mouth. He wore a lab coat over his otherwise unremarkable clothes. “I need the polymer forceps, Josef,” the man said.

A fierce shriek came in answer to the scientist’s request. A gray-furred Bonobo chimp clambered up the backside of the automaton’s body and perched beside the head. Ibrahim watched as the Bonobo gestured toward the wall, and the telltale energies of telekinetic manipulation flowed forth from the ape’s brain. The psychic force coalesced around a pair of yellow plastic tweezers and floated the tool through the air and into the scientist’s outstretched and waiting hand. The scientist immediately began to pull a nest of wires in the automaton’s innards apart, and the Bonobo yelped agitatedly. “Yes, yes, thank you, Josef,” the scientist said without pausing his work. “I’d be lost without you, you are a prince among primates.” The Bonobo blew a raspberry with its lips.

“Excuse me,” Ibrahim said, taking a step into the lab, “I’m Director Little Sky’s new aide-de-camp, and …”

“Tell the director that he’ll have my report on this Octo-Sapien at the end of the week,” the scientist interrupted. More to himself, he continued, “It took years for our field agents to smuggle anything worthwhile out from under the nose of Emperor Mole Man, I don’t see why he can’t wait two weeks for an initial analysis. Reports don’t write themselves …”

“No, I …” Ibrahim tried again, only to be cut off by a sudden movement of one of the automaton’s eight arms. The mechanical limb swung wildly and clipped the elderly scientist’s shoulder with enough power to send the man tumbling across the lab. The scientist smashed into a steel workbench, which rocked on its legs and dumped several metal tools to the floor in a loud crash. Josef the Bonobo screamed and threw himself from the automaton, landing atop a nearby cabinet. As the Octo-Sapien’s arm reached the end of its arc, the knob-tipped emitter shot a jagged shockburst across the lab, exploding a small monitor bolted to the wall.

Slowly but inexorably, the Octo-Sapien’s limb undulated again. Josef’s shrill vocalizations rose above the grinding of iron on iron, and the scientist shouted “I know, I know!” as he rolled painfully from his back to his hands and knees. Ibrahim crouched in the doorway, looking for more sufficient cover, when another shockburst tore into the ceiling overhead.

Ibrahim looked back over his shoulder, out into the corridor, desperately yearning on a basic, instinctual level for the sight of someone to whom he could call for help. Amazingly, someone was walking the corridor, and in fact was angling for the lab door. She was petite, much shorter than Ibrahim and probably somewhat younger, with pale skin and long blonde hair tied into two pigtails reaching past her shoulders. Her neutral, peaceful facial expression was no doubt due her immersion in whatever music was playing in the large noise-cancelling earphones crowning her head. She wore bronze coveralls like the cleanup crew he had seen earlier, although hers had been deliberately shorn of its sleeves and was accessorized with a comically massive toolbelt.

The girl strode calmly into the lab, placed one hand on the Octo-Sapien’s chassis, and used the other hand to hook the headphones down around her neck. Ibrahim was surprised to hear thrashing speed metal emanating from the headphones, but soon paid the music no attention as the girl leaned in close to the Octo-Sapien and opened her mouth. Inhuman noises rang out of the girl’s mouth, the exact sound of metal clanging against metal, ticking hammertaps, and electric vibrations. The Octo-Sapien’s moving limb paused for a heartbeat, then whipped toward the elderly scientist and fired another shockburst, which seared the floor where the man’s hands had been a moment before he had pushed himself to his feet.

“No!” the blonde girl yelled, yanking a wrench from her toolbelt with gunslinger quickness. She opened her mouth and once again blared in a way that only machinery could, and smacked the Octo-Sapien with the head of the wrench. “Is not to be shooting Dr. Livingston!” the girl added, her thick Eastern European accent coming to the fore. With that, the Octo-Sapien lowered its emitter and seemed to return to its previous dormant state.

“Aaahhh … thank you, Elizha,” the aged Dr. Livingston said, experimentally turning his head from side to side and wincing slightly at the newfound pains in his neck. Elizha nodded at the scientist, already retreating to her sonic cocoon of speed metal, settling the headphones in place once again. She left the lab, smiling shyly at Ibrahim as she passed him at the threshold. Ibrahim watched her, studying her, expecting to see the telltale bioelectric aura of a cyborg or an android, but seeing instead one of the first kinds of energy he had ever learned to identify.

“She’s a mutant,” Ibrahim said, to no one in particular.

“Yes, quite,” Dr. Livingston agreed. Josef the Bonobo chimp interjected with a few urgent vocalizations and Dr. Livingston added, “Miss Galdikas is a mechanoglot, to be precise. Now, since the moment of crisis has passed and we are not yet deeply embedded in our next exploration, tell me again why you’re in my …” – another screech from Josef – “OUR lab…?”

“I’m looking for Dr. Althea,” Ibrahim said succinctly.

“Then why … no, never mind, never mind,” Dr. Livingston shook his head. “You’re new here, you don’t know your way around, fine. Clearly this is not her lab. Hers is on the other side of the corridor, one door farther down.”

“Thanks,” Ibrahim nodded, already backing out through the doorway. “Sorry to have interrupted.” But Dr. Livingston and Josef were already conferring over the recently active emitter and neither responded.

Ibrahim crossed the hall and knocked on the next door, a light metal barrier designed to slide into a pocket in the corridor wall, with a four-inch gap open on the right side. The striking of his knuckles echoed in the otherwise silent room beyond, but after a few seconds a distracted female voice said “Come in?” Ibrahim slid the door open and stepped in.

The room was the same approximate size as Dr. Livingston and Josef’s lab, but there the similarities ended. The only illumination was provided by the burning wicks of candles set in sconces in the corners near the ceiling, which gave the room as many impenetrable shadows as visible surfaces. What Ibrahim could see were dark green walls, occasionally interrupted by shelves stocked with equal numbers of antique-looking books and jars which might have come directly from archeological digs. In the middle of the room was a large, tall table draped with a deep blue cloth, and Ibrahim belatedly realized it was more properly an altar. A five-legged brass brazier stood on the left end of the altar, filled with coals that glowed with banked heat. The smoke from the coals, rather than rising up to the ceiling, seemed to crawl out of the brass bowl and drop to the altar cloth, then slither to the right side of the altar before dissipating to nothingness. As the glaucous smoke made its way across the middle of the altar, it revealed a shape, as if filling in an otherwise invisible container, in the outline of a skeleton, one which was bipedal yet decidedly unearthly.

Behind the altar, staring down at the skeleton of smoke, was a woman with chestnut hair, wearing a pale yellow halterneck. She reached a hand into the vaporous ribcage and picked up a small white gemstone, which caused all the smoke along the altar to evaporate and halted the cascading effect from the brazier. The woman looked at Ibrahim, and he saw that she was middle-aged although still strikingly attractive, either due to good genes or careful maintenance. The woman smiled and said, “Yes, can I help you?”

“Dr. Althea?” Ibrahim asked, and when she nodded he went on without hesitation. “Director Little Sky sent me for your help. Another Little Sky from a different Earth teleported into the Hollow with a demon called an Undying One. The other Little Sky was fighting the Undying One and coming to warn us. Someone has apparently incited a large number of Undying Ones to try to take over the Hollow, for the dimensional travel resources and the mystical stockpiles. The Director needs your expertise on how best to defend the Hollow.”

“Of course he does,” Dr. Althea’s smile brightened, as if the opportunity to interact with interdimensional fiends were more a beguiling intellectual opportunity than a cause for panic. She stepped out from around the altar.

Ibrahim had expected her to step down, as well, since she had appeared elevated behind the altar. Her height, however, was due to the natural build of her centaur body. Ibrahim saw her lower half, the strong sleek flanks of a roan mare, as her hooves clicked on the floor. “I assume we should make haste,” Dr. Althea said. “Let’s be on our way.”

“Should I … uh … get on?” Ibrahim asked. “Ride you, I mean?”

“Darling, we’ve barely just met, and I don’t even know your name,” Dr. Althea winked. “Just try to keep up.” She cantered out of the lab, and Ibrahim ran after her.

When Dr. Althea headed down the R&D corridor away from the Park, Ibrahim called after her, “The Director and most of security are in the teleporter room!”

“I’m sure they are,” Dr. Althea called back, not slowing her gait. “But if I’m going to bring any useful information to bear on the situation, we’ll find it in the data center.”

The R&D corridor connected at the far end with an outer ring of the Hollow, down which Dr. Althea led Ibrahim until they reached an immense room on the periphery of the complex. Dr. Althea strode into the room, passing through a short enclosure formed by black steel racks of blade servers on either side of the doorway, followed by Ibrahim. Once clear of the server racks, Ibrahim could see that two huge structures occupied opposite ends of the room. To his right, a poly-sided collection of casings, all painted bright red with orange and green art deco trims, dominated a wall thirty feet wide and twenty-five feet tall. The configuration of boxy shapes resembled some kind of giant Mesoamerican idol, seated against the wall, with fingers made of massive cables resting on its squared knees. The illusion was enhanced by its inverted-anvil head, fronted by glowing monitors where eyes would be located and the downward curving grill of a heatsink fan suggesting an angry scowl.

On Ibrahim’s left, the direction to which Dr. Althea was bearing, was a colossal tank full of translucent liquid and occupied by a gargantuan floating head. The head appeared to have no skull or other internal structure, simply rolls of loose flesh piled in a glob-like teardrop shape, with a gaping toothless mouth, small glowing yellow eyes, and a nest of slender tentacles undulating at its crown. Ibrahim matched the vision before him to descriptions he had heard of the Supreme Intelligence, and found the only difference to be that he understood that entity to have dark green skin, whereas the one in the Hollow’s data center had the same pale blue complexion as the majority of the Kree race.

“Morrie, I need all the information we have on a race called the Undying Ones,” Dr. Althea said without preamble.

“All of it?” Supremor asked, in a voice which was profoundly deep yet warm, and capable of great amusement. “You clip-clopped in as if you were in something of a hurry.”

“If you want to pre-screen it for me, be my guest,” Dr. Althea retorted. “You might want to focus on known weaknesses, specifically.”

Across the room, a swell of whirs and hums began to rise from the red supercomputer accessing multiple drives. The Supreme Intelligence’s eyes narrowed, as if in concentration, and after a few moments a sour expression twisted the lower half of the bodiless creature’s visage. “Demons? Helene, you know how I feel about the so-called mystical dimensions, half of the information stored in Ru’s databanks is superstitious nonsense of dubious curiosity value at best. Don’t you have a djinn or a dybbuk somewhere you can summon up to converse with on such matters?”

“Not now, Morrie,” Dr. Althea waved away the Supreme Intelligence’s objections impatiently. “I’m not asking out of curiosity, I’m asking because an unknown number of Undying Ones are making their way toward the Hollow as we speak. If you want to tell those demons how much superstitious nonsense about them has been collected from across the multiverse while they smash open your tank and feast on your oversized brain, fine. If not, then give me a lead on stopping them.”

“I’ve already assembled enough of a profile to know they are not brain eaters,” Supremor tutted, “but I do take your point. Ru, if you would calculate scenario probabilities … yes, that seems about right … very well. A ninety-three-point-four percent chance of repelling any Undying Ones invasion short of a large army with suppressing fire from an Ebon Charnel Pot-de-fer …”

“Yes, of course, because we certainly have three or four of those lying around,” Dr. Althea sighed, crossing her arms.

“Would that we did,” the Supreme Intelligence lamented. “I imagine any invasion of any sort whatsoever would not last long under the Black Bombard.”

“Plan B?” Dr. Althea pressed.

“The Undying Ones are accumulators of external arcane power, which means that the usual limitations apply, vis-a-vis limits to maximal amounts internalized and the possibility of depleting their own reserves. They are also prone to retreat from combat situations when their power reserves reach lower measures. Ru posits a seventy-seven-point-one percent chance of turning them away by depriving them of power as quickly as possible. Dzonts have been used in this capacity in at least fifteen recorded instances …”

“Brilliant. Dzonts, that we can manage. Thanks, Morrie!” Dr. Althea saluted as she wheeled and trotted out of the data center. Ibrahim, pausing only briefly in noticing the vaguely pleased look on the Supreme Intelligence’s face, ran after her.

In the corridor, raising his voice over the clattering hoofbeat, Ibrahim asked, “What’s a dzont?”

“It’s an old word for a hole, like a drain,” Dr. Althea answered. “It’s also a term for a mystical phenomenon which draws in arcane energies like a vortex. Sometimes they can be bound to objects.”

“And A.R.M.O.R. has some objects like that?” Ibrahim ventured.

Dr. Althea smiled. “Boxes and boxes of them.”

Retracing all of Ibrahim’s earlier steps, he and Dr. Althea made their way to the teleporter room. As soon as they entered, Director Little Sky’s attention was on the centaur. “Tell me you have something good, Helene.”

“Dzont rounds,” she informed him. “Morrie figures it gives us better than average odds.”

Little Sky nodded, and Agent Nyokong quickly relayed an order into a communication circuit embedded in his bronze and white bodysuit. Around the teleporter room, technicians tended to the various sensors and control terminals, calling out when dimensional fusor spikes were observed, noting their increases in frequency, intensity and duration. As the spikes were merging into a single, undifferentiated blur, two agents arrived carrying small wooden crates which were quickly opened, their contents distributed to the security officers. Each operative received a small box of ammunition and began unloading the conventional rounds in their rifles and replacing it with the new. Ibrahim observed the bullets as they were being handled but found them gauzy and difficult to focus on, as if they somehow blurred his perceptions in their own very small domains.

Director Little Sky spoke above the tumult: “All non-security operatives, clear out!” The technicians and other support agents made their way quickly to the doors, as did Dr. Althea. She paused at the threshold, however, looking back over her hindquarters to say, “I still remember the knockdown, drag-out you and I had over whether or not it was worth the effort and resources to enchant dzont rounds for the security armory, Director. And one of my few glaring character flaws is that I love saying ‘I told you so’.” “So noted,” Little Sky dipped his head, conceding the point. Dr. Althea smiled and departed. Little Sky, armed with two sleek hand cannons, approached Ibrahim. “You’re non-security,” he pointed out, “are you staying or going?”

“Staying,” Ibrahim said, hoping he sounded confident. The prospect of facing a demonic invasion seemed unfathomably dangerous, too preposterous to wrap his head around, but he knew that this was where he wanted to be, whatever that entailed.

Little Sky handed one of his guns to his aide-de-camp. “Don’t hit any of our people,” the director admonished. “Don’t get hit yourself. Take an outer position.” With that, he proceeded to the center of a line being formed by the security officers, standing between Agent Nyokong and Agent Vega along with the black-clad Little Sky from another dimension. The rest of the security officers alternated standing and kneeling, rifles at the ready. Ibrahim moved to the far left end of the rank, where he stood beside an inhuman security officer built like a professional bodybuilder, with utterly hairless skin the color of dried blood stretched across asymmetrically misshapen features. The monstrous officer gave Ibrahim what he optimistically assumed was the grin of a comrade in arms.

The magnesium-bright fireballs began exploding in the next heartbeat, momentarily flooding the entire teleporter room with their violent brilliance. They brought with them nearly forty Undying Ones, adding their bestial roars to the cacophony of urgently wailing dimensional barrier sensors. The Undying Ones were varied in some particulars, from the length and width of their snouts, to the presence or absence of horns or wings, to the exact number of eyes or even limbs, but all were as powerfully built as bipedal elephants, all were covered in shaggy sickly-green fur, and all radiated unmistakable hatred.

“Open fire!” Nyokong barked as the mass of Undying Ones lurched forward, talons swiping wildly, fangs bared.

The reports of rifles and sidearms boomed like thunder all around. Ibrahim was very vaguely aware of the full extent of pitched battle in the teleporter room, all the demons advancing, sometimes avoiding rounds of fire and drawing security officers into close-range melee, other times staggering back with the impact of bullet wounds. Mainly Ibrahim’s brain focused instinctually on extremely few details. He sighted an Undying One that also seemed to have focused on him, a hunchbacked goliath with a spider-like cluster of eight murder-lit orange eyes. He held Little Sky’s pistol in both hands and pulled the trigger as the Undying One opened its blunt snout and unfurled a spiked, prehensile tongue. The movement attracted Ibrahim’s aim and the dzont bullet tore through the tip of the Undying One’s tongue, trailing ichor on its way toward striking the far wall. Ibrahim grimaced and fired again, this time scoring a hit in the demon’s belly, not dead center where he thought he had been aiming, but still in a solid section of the lower left abdominals. At the same moment the Undying One’s punctured and bleeding tongue lashed at Ibrahim’s hand. He dropped the firearm, but by then the creature had turned its attention on its own wound.

The Undying One laid a single claw against the bullet hole in its stomach, and arcane energies flowed from the talon into the wound; to Ibrahim’s eyes it was as if a kind of slow, dark-burning fire swept into the demon’s gouged flesh. Yet instead of blanketing the point of injury and knitting flesh together again, the dancing energies were channeled into the dzont embedded in the Undying One’s gut, leaving the gangrenous fur split and stained with oily viscera. The demon’s cluster of inhuman eyes widened and the intensity of spell-force expelled from its claw increased, but the end result was the same, the murky flame-like tongues dwindling to nothing as they were drawn into the mystical vortex bound to the occult bullet. Confused, possibly even frightened, the fearsome creature drew back a step.

The Undying One that Ibrahim had shot was not the first one to summon the white nimbus flare of a dimensional rending and retreat through it; that distinction belonged to a demon that had been at the leading point of the Undying Ones’ flying wedge, a fiend with a flat, noseless face, a mouth like a suckerfish and two eyes on elongated stalks, its poison-green fur almost completely obscured by the splatter of black blood from at least ten separate dzont bullet wounds. Once the first creature had spirited itself away from the battle, however, the others were quick to follow. Ibrahim received a parting fang-filled sneer from his target before he was forced to shield his vision from the blinding flash of its dimensional transit.

The air in the teleporter room was heavy with the acrid haze of rifle propellants and the sharp tang of blood, both human and demon. Eight Undying Ones, in direct refutation of their race’s grandiose name, lay lifeless on the floor of the room, some brought down by overwhelming firepower and the depleting effects of the dzont bullets, some felled by the unique powers commanded by various superhuman agents amongst the A.R.M.O.R. security forces; all the rest of the other-dimensional invaders had withdrawn from the Hollow’s reality. The A.R.M.O.R. operatives had suffered a number of injuries, few of them serious, and one casualty: a uniformed agent lay face down in a dark red pool spreading outward from his chest. The able-bodied security officers were already efficiently working to escort the walking wounded to the hospital facilities and stabilize those who were better off waiting for medics to come to them, but no one as of yet had done anything for the fallen officer. Ibrahim approached the body and looked down at it, the stinging pain in his right hand all but forgotten. The dead security officer’s head was stubbly, as if recently shaved to the scalp, but the face was fairly young. His skin was extremely pale, but whether that was a natural characteristic due to a mutation or non-human heritage or simply the result of massive blood loss, Ibrahim could not determine. In death, the security officer was bereft of any energy patterns which Ibrahim might have gleaned for clues. Ibrahim crouched down and gently closed the young man’s glassy eyes. When he stood up again, Ibrahim looked around for the pistol he had dropped, spotted it and retrieved it. Then, unsure of what he should do next, he found himself wandering toward the two Charles Little Skys, conversing with one another.

“I don’t think they’ll be back,” the older Little Sky said. His left hand was clamped against his right shoulder, staunching the flow of blood from a sizable laceration, while his right hand still held a traditional Kisani ceremonial knife. “Someone told the Undying Ones that the Hollow was ripe for the plucking, but you’ve certainly put the lie to that.”

“Someone,” the director of A.R.M.O.R. nodded contemplatively. “But you have no idea who told them that, do you?”

“I haven’t a clue,” the man clad in black shook his head. “I was lucky to stumble upon them while I was crossing the Calizuma Plain in the Outer Realms. They were arguing about how to divide the soon-to-be spoils by then, not naming names as to who pointed them in your direction.”

“We were all lucky,” the younger Little Sky added, with what Ibrahim thought was an unmistakable trace of skepticism. He pointed at his counterpart’s injury. “Will you have that looked at by my people?”

“No need,” the elder man shook his head. “I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I imagine you’re usually very busy, running an operation of this magnitude.”

“And you’re not?” the director asked.

“I’m a lone operator,” Charles Little Sky answered. “My time is my own, especially now that I’ve done my good deed for the decade.” With that he sheathed his knife, pulled his cowl from his belt and pulled it over his head, and held out his bloodied palm, bringing a shimmering white and violet disc into view. He stepped through the portal, and as the circling light enclosed the man it folded in on itself and disappeared.

“Do you believe him?” Ibrahim asked almost immediately.

Director Little Sky stared at the empty air where the dimensional gateway had been. “It doesn’t really matter,” he eventually answered. “Maybe he knew more than he was saying, maybe he was hiding nothing. What’s key is that someone set a small army of demons on us, and I intend to find out who and why.”

To Ibrahim that seemed tantamount to searching for a needle in infinite haystack dimensions, but he kept the opinion to himself. It was still his first day, and he knew he had still more to learn.