Astronomy(59)
The Nazi officer checked the giant wall projection through his binoculars for confirmation. Satisfied, he shouted instructions to a gang of black-suited Einsatzgruppe guards.
These were the operators and drivers for the black “mobile shower” trucks. People were hustled inside even as she watched—the three hundred mental patients from Agnes Dei, she guessed.
The door was slammed shut on the last one. Einsatzgruppe technicians knelt on the roofs of each van. They might have been fixing the air-conditioning unit up there.
Susan had a more exact idea what they did. They were preparing a mixture of prussic acid and hydrogen cyanide, known to its admirers as Zyklon-B.
“We’re coming up on a convergence,” she said. She pointed to the cross hairs at the center of the wall projection. There was the black mass of the fracture zone bearing Azathoth to Earth. It was just a little to the left of dead-on.
“That cosmic fracture is going to be right over our heads in a minute. As soon as it is”—she drew a line with her finger—“the word goes down to the Einsatzgruppe technicians at the trucks to turn on the gas.”
Shrieve nodded; he could see it. “Three hundred souls are unleashed from their bodies. Those electromagnets ringing the walls”—he pointed up at a ring of bulb-ended metallic rods passing electricity around the roof of the chamber—“direct and accelerate the stream of souls into a coherent beam. The beam is aimed right down the throat of the cosmic fracture to where Azathoth waits, licking His chops.”
She wondered if souls travel out of the body at the speed of light. Can they really be accelerated like a particle in a magnetic field?
Soul accelerators: human sacrifices carried out with Zyklon-B, their souls condensed by a magnetic device into a coherent beam and fired into the sky at the speed of light. Welcome to the twentieth century.
* * *
She thought they might get to the trucks. With the summoning of Azathoth going on in the center of the amphitheater, all eyes were on the array of sorcerers. The trucks were hardly guarded, hardly even watched. A couple of people dressed as Einsatzgruppe technicians would naturally be expected to wander around down there.
They studied the layout of the trucks as they approached the leader. They were arrayed serially, like lights on Christmas trees. Thick cables ran back from the first truck to the others. Susan guessed that the first truck in the line would begin gassing the people; all the other trucks in the line would begin their gas injections on the command of this driver, like a bomb group, keying off its lead bombardier.
Like the man said, “As a weapon’s power increases, so does the precision of its components.”
As they stood figuring the best way to crack this thing, a man in a gas mask yelled down to them from the roof of the lead van. He was saying something about the cable. Susan couldn’t make it out for the mask, but he was pointing furiously toward the back of the lead van.
“He wants help with the electric cabling,” Charley said. “I’ll fix the cable. Maybe you can talk to the driver in the lead van.”
The driver was already hearing from Kriene as she walked up to the window.
“I don’t care if Azathoth is fourteen hours away!” Kriene was screaming. “We are minutes away from the crucial juncture. The sacrifices must begin on time. Azathoth has already found us. Our only hope for survival is in satisfying its lust.”
The driver was looking for a Zentralbund electrician to get him out of trouble with Kriene. When he saw the black uniform with the crossed lightning bolts coming up to his window, his face was transformed by heartbreaking relief.
Susan smiled. She had just the thing for this guy.
She glanced around once to ensure her privacy, and then slipped into the cab.
The driver started to complain—the problem was back there, with the cable.
He felt the muzzle of her Luger against his cheek.
“What is this?” the driver demanded. They were always so surprised.
“Tell Kriene the problem is worse than you first thought,” she ordered him. “They need to postpone the sacrifice.”
The soldier laughed. “Or what? You will shoot me? The world will be gone tomorrow anyway.”
“How about this,” Susan suggested. “What if the only thing missing tomorrow”—she chambered a round—“is you?”
The soldier snickered at this. Then he keyed the radio and relayed her message as he was told. They both winced at the response.
The driver glanced back just once. “You realize what happens if the sacrifice does not occur on time?”
Susan had heard Kriene say something about satisfying the hunger of Azathoth.
“We are set to survive the onslaught of Azathoth, so long as things happen as planned. Otherwise, Its fury is poured out on this island to the exclusion of all else.”