Aces High Page 0,149

and rags. Something glimmered and detached itself from the machine. She marveled; a part of it had just gotten up and walked away.

No. What she thought was part of the machine was a living being. She wanted to pull her gaze away just for a moment but she couldn't. It wouldn't let her. Alien. Reminiscent of certain other aliens she'd seen on the news in the attack. Jumpin' Jack Flash. The thought was neatly shoved aside.

The alien turned to the man and stretched out an arm, or some appendage. Now it began to look more like living matter than part of a machine. The alien smoothed into something roughly bipedal though it seemed to be holding the form only by sheer will-the ergotic hypothesis (where had that come from?). The appendage touched the machine and melted into it. A moment later something protruded from the side near the man. He took hold of it and very carefully removed it. The alien sank a little, diminished. She realized it had expended a great deal of its life-force to give the man-what?

The man held the thing to his lips, his forehead, and then lifted it high overhead. Briefly, it took on the form of a human bone, a club, a gun, then something else.

Shakti, whispered the voice. Remember this. The Shakti device.

I'll never forget it, she thought. The floating feeling was starting to leave her and she grew afraid.

Now, look. Look up.

Unwillingly, she raised her head and looked up at the sky. Her vision shot up, racing through the sunlight, through the blue, through clouds, until it left the Earth entirely and she was looking at the naked stars. The stars dispersed before her until she was staring into the blackness of space, and still her vision was traveling.

Something was there ahead of her, invisible in the blackness. Something . . . it was so far away she could not begin to conceive of the distance. It was on its way to Earth. It had been this far away in 1777, when that man (Cagliostro, said her mind and she didn't wonder how she knew) had accepted the thing-Shakti-from the alien and then-and then-went on to perform many feats seen as miraculous including mind reading, levitation, transubstantiation, amazing all those in the courts of Europe while passionately recruiting for the Egyptian Freemasons . .

She struggled to absorb the information pouring into her from the dream. Not that it mattered, because when she woke up she wouldn't remember any of it. That was the way it was with dreams. Wasn't it?

...because he wanted an organization that would keep the Shakti device safe and hand it down from generation to generation, to only the most trusted people, until its mysteries could be unlocked and completed, when it would be needed for the arrival on Earth of--

Something writhed in the darkness ahead of her. Or perhaps the darkness itself was writhing in agony at having to contain this thing, this--

for the arrival on Earth of--

It burst upon her without warning or mercy, far worse than it had been when she touched it in the Astronomer's mind. It was the gathering, the congealing, of the highest, lowest, most developed, polished, and refined forms of evil in the universe, evil that made the greatest human atrocities seem petty by comparison, evil she could not understand except with her gut, evil that had been rushing toward this world for thousands of years, swallowing anything in its path, evil that would be arriving any day now, any day.

TIAMAT.

She woke up screaming. Hands were on her and she fought them, twisting, striking out. Water poured over her, thickening the air, soaking the bed and the rug.

"Sh, sh, it's all right," said a voice. Not the voice from her dream but a female voice. The oriental woman Kim Toy was there, trying to soothe her as though she were a delirious child. A light went on; Kim Toy enfolded her in a calming embrace. She let herself be held and willed the water flowing over both of them to stop.

"I'm okay," she said when she could speak. Her wet hair dripped into her eyes, mixing with her tears. The whole bed was drenched, but she saw with a little relief that she had spared the rest of the room.

"You were screaming," Kim Toy said. "I thought someone was killing you."

TIAMAT "I had a nightmare."

Kim Toy stroked her wet hair gently. "A nightmare?"

"I dreamt someone threw a bucket of worms in my