Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (37 page)

John Smith crouched over the sigil it had spent the last five hours drafting in chalk. Intricate curves, parallels, squares, ellipses and circles contained within a single enormous oval, rendered with exacting care in the exact center of the grey city. The alien science it represented was eons beyond modern man, and yet had been perfected millions of years before man’s rise to prominence. The lines seemed to float above the dark, grey stone and push out at its borders, shrinking and growing depending on which direction they were observed from.

Smith squatted in front of it like a toad, considering the interrelationships of the thousands of intersections of lines. The proportional relationship of the circles to the squares. The way the looping ellipse of the edge made the stone it was drawn upon seem almost warped. With nothing but chalk lines on rock Smith had changed space itself—a simple enough task for a creature native to the dimension of time. Time was the element here, and it could be shifted by changing space, for the two were interwoven. Here below the city, time was so warped that it looped back upon itself. Beneath the great ward, which is what the grey city truly was, time did not proceed and the Great Enemy was entombed forever in the bowels of the Earth.

John Smith knew how to restore time here to its natural rhythm. It had spent years in this wild era perfecting the complicated art. It had suffered through countless discomforts, misunderstandings and, above all, immense loneliness for its own kind. The human “civilization,” which did not even begin to touch upon the perfection of Pnakotus, was traumatic to experience even in limited doses. It was nothing more than a million mistaken biological paths leading only to chaos, despite all its attempts to organize itself into patterns resembling the orders of the past. The human feeling of “morality,” the endless struggle for some perfection which the humans knew could never come—this order was embedded in the very fabric of creation. Humans cities imitated Pnakotus, imitated its art and science and morality, but this was nothing more than genetic memory, protein recollections of a time when man was a more base and wild creature ruled by beings native to time. Ruled by the Great Race. The dim stirrings of gods, magic, and morality all came from this place in the Congo, from the city, from the white apes which would lead to mankind.

Still, the nature of perfection is, by necessity, stagnant. And anything was better than a frozen, never-ending order. Even chaos, in its own way, was beautiful.

It stood and the noise of its shuffling feet reflected back at Smith off the endless stone faces, drawing its attention up from the sigil. When the noise died, behind those fading echoes, another sound was dancing down those same corridors of stone. More distant, but more distinct.

At first it thought perhaps the phantom noise was a trick of acoustics, but then Smith clearly heard the voice.

“Doctor!” The voice echoed down the stone streets, playing off a million different surfaces, reflecting back, growing and diminishing in power. It was the voice of the human, Thomas Arnold. Smith considered its options. Soon enough it would have to begin the noisy ritual, which would certainly draw the human to the location of the sigil. There was no way to complete the necessary ritual without attracting attention, and then... Physically, the shell Smith inhabited was no match for Arnold, and Smith had shed all advanced technology some time before in order to elude its pursuers, so it was also no match for Arnold’s primitive weaponry.

But why would the human search for Smith in such a manner? Why not stalk the streets silently until it came upon the alien? Because, most likely, Arnold had no idea that Smith was an alien. Arnold was at a supreme disadvantage.

Smith decided it could conceal its intentions by going to Arnold and dispatching
him after had it gained
his trust.

Smith followed the voice up the vast, canyon-like streets of the ancient necropolis. He came upon Arnold standing in an intersection of streets, next to a small series of ascending pillars. Arnold’s back was to a pyramid which dwarfed all human attempts to imitate it. It was obvious Arnold was injured, but Smith knew little of human anatomy. Blood had been drawn and had dried on Arnold’s shoulder, staining his ripped khaki shirt a deep crusty purple, but what did this mean? Smith had never been injured in human form before. Would Arnold perish on his own, without assistance? Or was the dried blood a sign that his body would heal from its injury?

Smith did not know.

What it did know was that it had no chance in a direct confrontation with such a creature as Arnold, a human trained extensively to kill other humans. It would have to rely on subterfuge.

Arnold held nothing except the same chemical emulsion camera he had carried on the flight across the ocean. Smith was quite familiar with these devices. In Darwin, Smith had used them to document many of the books from the library of Pnakotus, rather than taking the books with him, since that would have allowed the assassins to track its progress.

Smith could see no weapons on
Arnold, just
a small hip pouch which was too restrictive to carry anything offensive. Then, as Arnold turned, still searching for Smith, preparing to shout again, Smith saw the knife on the human’s belt.

“Doctor!?” The voice echoed down the abandoned streets.

A knife was a simple cutting implement with which Smith was familiar in the most basic sense. Humans were vulnerable to such instruments. Poor evolution had lead to an upright, bipedal stature, exposing organs to assault. Such an instrument could prove useful in close quarters.

A plan began to form in Smith’s mind.

“I am here, Lieutenant Arnold,” Smith shouted back, watching Arnold spin around suddenly to locate its voice.

Arnold’s face held little emotion. “Doctor. I was concerned. We were separated during the... assault.” The human held his hands out in an odd gesture. It was the most Arnold had ever said to Smith.

Smith flexed his mouth muscles, imitating the human custom of smiling, and showed his empty hands. Arnold trotted over to Smith and stopped, considering it from top to bottom. What a foolish custom, smiling, baring one’s teeth to show good nature. Idiocy. Random genetic lunacy.

“You are uninjured?” Arnold asked quietly, glancing over Smith’s shoulder.

“Yes.” Smith replied smugly.

The distant sounds of the jungle played in the empty streets.

“Lieutenant Arnold, perhaps we can use you chemical emulsion camera to record this moment in time.”

Some unrecognizable emotion played across Arnold’s face for a brief second. Smith could not even be sure it had even seen the slight change in Arnold’s countenance. Then Arnold fiddled with the camera for a moment, and smiled blandly at Smith.

“No one else from the...group survived, then?” Arnold asked, his voice empty of emotion.

“No. I am the last. The explosives are lost as well.”

“Let’s take the photograph,” Arnold muttered, placing the camera on a stump-like stone pillar which rose to his chest in height. As Arnold turned his back to adjust the camera, Smith’s eyes played greedily across the hilt of his knife.

Arnold returned to pose next to Smith. The two men stood with their backs against the wall of an immense stone pyramid which rose hundreds of feet into the air. A clicking sound, like a timer, could be heard chattering away from the camera box.

Smith’s right hand slowly began to shift towards Arnold’s belt.

The alien saw too late the oddity in the camera, something it never had the chance to look at closely before. The lens of the device was a strange, luminescent green. Smith’s hand froze inches from the hilt of the knife.

Like a snake striking, Arnold’s hands clamped down with frightening strength on Smith’s right wrist, then his left. The smaller, older Smith struggled vainly in Arnold’s grip, but the two men shifted slightly in front of the camera as it continued to click away seconds.

“It is not a real camera device! It is a trap!” Smith shrieked. Inside its mind a million ideas meshed into one overriding fear. It would be gone. Its mind would be gone from all time, and its mission would be left uncompleted.

“I know,” the thing in Arnold’s body replied evenly. “I constructed it.” Smith locked eyes with the assassin, seeing through the human shell for the first time. Although the alien did not know it, its human face contorted into a mask of rage.

“You,” Smith breathed.

“Yes. We have finally returned for you.”

A bright, white flash flared for the briefest moment.

Nothing remained of the two men after the flash, nothing but the tiny, camera-like device. It let out a small click, a hum, and then was silent, perched on the pillar like an artifact left on display in some bizarre outdoor museum.

As on a billion other days in the city where man was born, silence filled the avenues, and the animals which had learned to shun its streets continued their vigil in the jungles that crouched around the stones like a dense, green fog.