NECROM

Chapter Seven

"DOES DRESDEN KNOW about him?"

Gibson didn't recognize the voice he was hearing as he swam up through the black sea, except that it had the officious, suspicious tone of a cop.

A second voice answered the question. "Of course Dresden knows about him. He's the replacement for Zwald."

Gibson knew the second voice. It belonged to Klein. He sounded tired. The cop voice was that of a man who couldn't leave it alone. "What happened? He's the wrong color."

Gibson knew that they couldn't be talking about him. How could he be the wrong color?

Klein's voice answered again. "The trans was rough, we had to use an unorthodox access point."

"How can he be a replacement for Zwald if he's the wrong color?"

The Klein voice started to sound impatient. "It really isn't my problem. We found him, we brought him, but something went wrong in the trans. Nothing can be done about it, so quit busting my balls."

"He's going to stick out like a sore thumb."

"I know he's going to stick out like a sore thumb, but that really isn't my problem. I've done my bit and the rest is up to Dresden."

Gibson was aware that he was lying on something hard. It felt like a concrete floor. He opened one eye and wished that he hadn't. Everyone around him was blue.

Klein's voice changed, urgent and warning. "Put a cover on it, it looks like he's coming round."

Gibson opened his other eye. He seemed to be in some kind of cavernous garage or workshop. A dozen or more people, both men and women, were moving around, and the majority of them were wearing the streamheat dark-blue jumpsuits with the same silver insignia at their throats. The disturbing part was that their skins were varying shades of the same blue.

Klein was standing over him, looking down. His skin was now tinted a soft aquamarine. "Are you okay?"

Gibson decided to play it traditional. "Where am I?"

"You're in Luxor."

' "The car was on fire,"

"That was a transition illusion."

Gibson struggled into a sitting position. His muscles ached. "How long was I out for?"

"About an hour."

Gibson stared down at his hands. They were also very pale blue, but much lighter than Klein's skin or anyone else's. "Why have we all changed color?"

Klein looked mystified. "What do you mean changed color? "

Gibson gestured at the other people in the place."Everyone's blue. I'm blue, you're blue. Everyone's turned blue."

" You look a little strange but everything else seems normal."

Gibson started to get agitated. "Everyone's fucking blue."

"I think this might be a perception problem."

"You're telling me that I'm seeing things?"

Klein sighed. "Transition can produce some strange effects. Things become changed. You're in another dimension and what you're seeing is just a product of both your brain and the transition. "

"My suit, too?"

The black suit in which Gibson had left London was now spotless white, as though it had been bleached. Klein shook his head. "No, the suit really did turn white."

"This is too weird for me."

"Just relax. You'll be okay."

Gibson started to take notice of his surroundings. He found that his first impression of a cavernous parking area fell well short of actuality. The place could have been an aircraft hangar, except that aircraft hangars weren't constructed from raw unfinished concrete and their roofs weren't supported by thick steel-reinforced pillars. It was hard to tell the true size of the underground installation beyond the basic impression that it was very large indeed. Brightly lit areas where intense beams of light blazed from overhead grilles alternated with pools of impenetrable shadow. In one of the nearest pools of light, a work detail in green rubber suits, filter masks, and protective goggles that made them look like invading Martians were hosing down a large white car, removing a gray film from its bodywork similar to the one that had coated the Cadillac after the UFO attack. It was no ordinary car wash. The hose they were using was made of jointed stainless steel, and the substance that gushed from it under high pressure seemed more like a gas than a liquid. Where it hit the car it splashed and smoked, and Gibson had a suspicion that it was causing the smell of ammonia in the air. The car wasn't a Cadillac, either; in fact, it wasn't like any car that Gibson had ever seen before, big and bulky like something out of the late forties or early fifties, a Tucker or maybe an overgrown De Soto, with fins and a radiator grille that belonged on a jet fighter.

"Is that our car?"

Klein nodded. "Changed a bit, huh?"

"Why couldn't it just stay a Cadillac?"

"Because it's also been through transition. It would be fairly pointless if it still looked like an Eldorado from your dimension."

"What is this place?"

"It our main base and access point in this dimension."

"You have something like this back on Earth?"

Klein shook his head. "We maintain a much larger presence here. The politics of this dimension are very unstable."

Other big baroque cars were parked in a group farther down the area as well as a handful of sinister black paramilitary vehicles like bulky Batmobiles with armor-plate, slit windows, and exterior-mounted heavy machine guns. A pair of cumbersome, old-fashioned helicopters also stood nearby, like ugly sleeping insects, with their rotors folded back and canvas covers over the Plexiglas cockpit canopies. Klein wasn't exaggerating when he said that the streamheat maintained a presence here.

A squad of armored men carrying automatic weapons marched past where Gibson was sitting. Their dark-blue body armor was made up of irregularly shaped plates of some thick porous material that protected their torsos, thighs, and upper arms. The helmets they wore were polished and cylindrical, with a stylized sunburst insignia on the front and vestigial metal crest at the back that might have had its roots in some sort of feathered headdress. Taken as a whole, the ensemble made them look not unlike high-tech Aztecs. As they tramped by in step with the measured stamp of steel-shod boots, Klein didn't pay them the slightest attention. Instead, he looked down at Gibson.

"You feel any better?"

Gibson nodded. "A little."

"Did you hallucinate a lot coming through?"

Gibson pushed his hair back with his fingers. "A lot? Yeah, I'd say a lot. I turned into a burning meteor and then I fell into a black sea."

"It can be rough the first time. Can you stand?"

"I don't know."

"You want to try?"

"Sure, why not."

Klein reached down and took Gibson's arm. Gibson tried standing and found that it wasn't too difficult. He momentarily wanted to vomit but that quickly passed.

"Where are Smith and French?"

"They've gone on ahead to report."

Gibson was startled by a shout from one of the cleanup crew working on the white car.

"Superior in proximity!"

A group of five people were coming toward Gibson and Klein at a brisk, businesslike pace. Two of them were what Gibson was already thinking of as regular streamheat, in the plain blue jumpsuits, and two were the military form, in the slab-honeycomb armor and pre-Columbian helmets. Gibson didn't have to be told that the fifth guy was some sort of officer. The extra gold on his collar, the cape thrown over his shoulders, and the arrogance of his bearing made it immediately obvious. If that hadn't been enough, the way that the cleanup crew came to attention and even Klein formally stiffened rammed the point home.

All through his life, Gibson had always experienced a problem with authority figures. When someone started telling him what to do, his natural reaction was surly hostility. Sometimes he believed this hostility had been one of the major forces in shaping his life, and if it hadn't been built into his personality by either nature or nurture, he might have become president instead of a rock 'n' roll degenerate. He saw that it wasn't going to be any different in a new dimension. While the streamheat officer was still twenty yards away, Gibson knew that they were going to inevitably clash.