Astronomy(5)

It was all the warning she needed.

“I can’t help you,” she said.

Charley looked down at the floor. Maybe he was relieved.

She smelled cigar smoke. She looked up to see Walter Foley at the top of the stair. “The hell is that?” Foley spread his hand against the great, articulated expanse of green light.

“It’s called an Angle Web,” Shrieve called back to him. “I’ll tell you about it after Miss Gilbert is gone.”

“Ensign Gilbert is gone, eh? Did you tell her we need her?”

“Miss Gilbert is a civilian,” Shrieve turned back to face him. “She has a life to get back to.”

“Did you tell her that her country needs her?”

“Give it a rest, Walt.”

Charley Shrieve led her back up to the landing, right past Walter Foley. Foley glanced up at her just once. She’d seen warmer expressions on the back of bank notes. Shrieve thanked her for coming down to look at their artifact. He asked her if she had another flight to Washington, D.C. He promised to get her one if she didn’t. He asked her, please, contact them if anything relevant came to mind.

In this pantomime of kindly partings, Susan said she would.

Walter Foley couldn’t bring himself to lose so graciously. He sighed. “Well,” meaning, well, he had a million things to do, none of which involved Susan Gilbert any longer.

Dale Bogen hadn’t heard the particulars, but he knew she’d let them down. He wouldn’t look at her. But then, he had missed the war, hadn’t he? All except for the stories—the fun parts.

Bogen had been shipping out just as the Russians and the Americans were showing each other dance steps on the streets of Torgau. Missed it by weeks, he had, and boy was he disappointed.

To hell with them all anyway. She started for the outside.

A shape filled the doorway.

Susan saw nothing at first but a pair of crimson eyes gleaming just beyond the room light. She caught a whiff of something she hadn’t smelled since Berlin—rotten meat.

She froze for just an instant as a wave of nauseating fear washed over her. Then her Walther PP was in her hands and she was firing where lungs and spleen and guts would be, if only the shape were human.

Right over her head roared the big thunder of an Army Colt. Shrieve was at her back. He went through his seven rounds with the steady metronome that panic will bring to a mindless task—crack, crack, crack. He was still shaking his .45, squeezing it, after the slide pulled back and the empty clip clattered to the floor. But the thing in the doorway was clutching at its chest by then, staggering back from the light.

She followed it out to the landing, firing as she went. It emitted a weird ululation and disappeared over the rail. She looked over in time to see something very large scuttle away into the shadows.

She knew she had wounded it. The creature dragged itself as it slipped down the street, but it never slowed down. It was traveling at full speed as it melted into the darkness.

Shrieve slapped a clip into his Colt. “You all right?”

“I hit it.” She was patting her coat pocket for another clip. “I know I hit it.” She could hardly talk, her teeth were clenched so tight.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You hit it. Come on back inside.”

The two soldiers were leaning back against the glass window overlooking the warehouse. Their guns were in their hands. Their faces were perfectly white.

Dale Bogen stood rooted to the floor. “What in the holy fuck was that?” His eyes were big as twelve-gauge slugs.

Only Major Foley maintained some semblance of composure. “Seems we just had our first messenger from Das Unternehmen,” he said.

She figured Foley was wrong, because Foley was usually wrong about such things. She didn’t care. She had this aching sensation in her cheeks. She realized she was grinning, fiercely.

“Did you see the look on its face? It came up here for something and we surprised it.” She’d hurt one of them. Big, stinking, flesh-eating bastards—she’d cut his ass down to size. Five months too late to save the kids in that sewer, but never too late for payback. Payback was always good.

“Somebody screwed up,” Shrieve said. “Somebody left something of theirs behind—”

“—and sent the Fuller Brush Man there to tidy up.” She nodded over at the seated figure of Hartmann. “Anybody been through his pockets yet?”

Walter Foley looked at the two soldiers. They looked at each other. One of them cleared his throat uneasily. “We leave the gremlin work to you Watermark people. No offense, Sir.”

“That, uhm, that creature came up to retrieve something,” she said. “Maybe an address.” She nodded back over her shoulder toward the glowing insignia in the dark. “Maybe an address through there. If Hartmann knew enough about the Angle Web to drive truckloads of mercury through it, he’d have stuff like that written down.”