The Return

by Joseph Helmreich

  “But first…,” the man said, and Shawn didn’t hear the rest because he had already blacked out.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Where is Leland?” the voice of the bald man asked again from out of the darkness.

  “I already told you,” Shawn answered, blindfolded and bound to his chair. “You killed him with your drone!”

  “So Andrew Leland is dead?”

  “Yes! For the twenty-millionth—aaaahhhhh!”

  There it went again. The deafening, piercing sound in his ears. When he’d first felt the earbuds go in, he’d remembered reading that detainees at Guantanamo had been forced to listen to “Born in the USA” and the theme song for Sesame Street for days on end, and he’d been praying for something similar. No such luck. The high-frequency noise being pumped into his eardrums had to be at least 20 kilohertz, and each burst sent him into a whirl of pain, disorientation, and acute nausea.

  “If Andrew Leland is dead, where’s the body?”

  “Buried him,” Shawn said, trying to catch his breath. “In the woods.”

  “So why no trail of blood on the highway?”

  Shawn took another few deep breaths. “Because it’s Andrew Fucking Leland.”

  He immediately regretted swearing.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaah! Shiiiiiiiiiit!”

  As pain and nausea engulfed him again, he could hear the maniacal shrill laughter of the bald man, like a baby squealing with delight.

  “Ultrasonic, you know, has become popular now in pest repellents,” the man declared. “Sends mice and rats fleeing as it scrambles their brains.”

  With that, he sent yet another burst through Shawn’s headphones.

  Shawn reeled. “I need,” he said, between breaths, “to speak to Rachel.”

  “What you need is to tell me the truth. So no blood because he was Andrew ‘Fucking’ Leland, but still dead. Dubious, dubious, dubious.”

  “He is dead,” Shawn said, fighting the urge to vomit. “I swear to you.”

  In a nearby room, Rachel, watching on a monitor, shook her head.

  “Where is all this going?” she asked the stiff Ambius intelligence analyst sitting beside her. “I don’t give a shit about Leland right now; I want this kid on our side.”

  “A little discomfort is usually the fastest way to make that happen.”

  “Yeah. Worked like a charm with Leland.”

  In the interrogation room, Shawn was wondering how much more of this he could take. In his tooth, he could feel Leland’s cyanide capsule, but this was nowhere near the level where he’d have to think about that. Still, this was pretty damn unpleasant, and he wasn’t sure if he might be on the verge of some permanent damage. He could, of course, just tell this psychopathic freak all about the cosmic shield and the dangers of disabling it, but that was probably useless, and if he was going to die tonight, he wanted to die with the knowledge that Rachel, a real scientist who understood all the implications, had heard the full story straight from his own lips.

  “So if you and I were to go for a ride,” the man asked, “you could bring me to the location of the body?”

  “I mean, it was in the middle of the woods, but yeah, I could do my best.”

  He could worry about that later.

  “Please,” he said, “let me speak to Rachel.”

  “Hmmm. Ask me again to speak to Rachel.”

  Shawn said nothing.

  But that didn’t matter.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  Shawn lurched forward and puked all over himself, which sent the man into yet higher shrieks of delight.

  Then there was a shuffle of movement, possibly a door opening and closing. The blindfold was suddenly removed from Shawn’s face, and Rachel was staring down at him, the bald man gone, the two of them alone in a darkened room. If he hadn’t known her better, he might have thought she’d looked just a little concerned.

  “You have something you want to tell me,” she said.

  Shawn took a few deep breaths. “If this is good cop–bad cop and you’re the good cop, I am truly fucked.”

  “Believe it or not, I actually want to help you.”

  “I’m gonna go with ‘not.’”

  Rachel walked around him and untied his wrists from behind his chair. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  A short while later, Shawn, now in a clean white T-shirt, sat with Rachel in a weird ovular room carved from rock with no windows and no furniture besides the retro, bright red egg chairs on which they sat. On their short walk from the interrogation room to here, they had crossed a high, grated metal bridge, from which Shawn could get a quick glimpse of the vast, subterraneous space where they were, apparently a series of large caverns housing a network of interlacing bridges and stairways and offices built into the bedrock. In all, it had reminded him of his favorite building from Columbia, the futuristic Alfred Lerner Hall, but crossed with the Batcave. Below the bridge on which they walked, he had glimpsed various people—scientists, security personnel, worker drones whose precise jobs Shawn couldn’t guess—moving in and out of offices, going about their routines, some chatting, some wheeling lab equipment or other machinery, some just staring up curiously at Rachel and Shawn.

  “This is more than some abandoned college,” he said now.

  “True.”

  “Was this always underneath the campus?”

  “Not until the school moved out.”

  “And this is the ‘Docks’?”

  She shook her head.

  Figures, Shawn thought. The awesome facility where they built spaceships and experimented with advanced alien technology was obviously not anyplace they’d bring him.

  “It was all bullshit,” he said. “Every single thing.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “But lying to me, that was the least of it, wasn’t it? That was the minor betrayal.”

  “Shawn, you risked your life to come here. Was it just to tell me how pissed off you are?”

  He glared at her. But he got her point and took a deep breath. “I know the truth about the shield,” he said.

  “Which is what?”

  “That you weren’t using me to help you build it. Leland had already built it—you were using me to help you destroy it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “After Leland built it for them, for that … civilization … they decided that it wasn’t good enough. Maybe we would find some way to breach it or take it down. You know, who knew what we were capable of? So they asked Leland to deactivate it, to remove it so they could go after us. Take us out for good, make sure we could never try to harm them again. But he refused. He refused, Rachel. And he knew they would kill him for not cooperating, so he escaped and came back here, came back to Earth. Came back home, where you guys captured and tried to torture him. You guys, not the government, not the fucking CIA or whatever bullshit you fed me before. Rachel, the cosmic shield protects both worlds from each other. If you take it down, mark my words, they’ll strike us so fast, you won’t have a chance to do anything about it.”

  Rachel leaned back in her chair and stared at Shawn for a few moments. She seemed to be considering something. Finally, she spoke. “Shawn, do you have any idea what it is that we want to do?”

  “To steal something. Some kind of … resource.”

  “And you don’t know what? Leland didn’t tell you?”

  He shook his head.

  “What did he tell you about their planet?”

  “Nothing, really. Said he couldn’t really remember it anymore because he experienced the whole thing as something else.”

  “What do you mean something else?”

  Shawn didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure himself what that meant, and he was also getting the feeling he may have said too much.

  “What? He somehow became one of them? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He just looked at her. She waited anothe
r few seconds, then smiled. “Either way, you’re telling me he didn’t even remember the planet, yet he was still convinced that they were so much more powerful than we are, that if we removed the shield, they would obviously be the ones to strike first.”

  “They’re an advanced alien civilization.”

  “And what are we?” She stood up. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ve always felt out of the loop, haven’t you, Shawn? I’m going to bring you in. All the way in.”

  Rachel led Shawn out of the room, then across another metal bridge, which led to a large double door in the rock. The double door slid open on their approach, and they walked through it into a dark and rather dank tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, they reached a wide and intimidating iron door. On its left was a combination thumbprint-iris scanner. Rachel put her left eye and her right thumb to the appropriate screens, and the door slid open. The two of them entered a large white room, clearly a science lab, and then Shawn saw it right away, right there in the middle of that room, and right away he understood.

  After several moments of just staring, he finally managed to speak.

  “How?” he asked.

  Rachel smiled. “Stealth operation carried out by one of our best. By the time they realized it was gone, the shield was already back up. Seems like Andrew Leland underestimated us. You, too.”

  “What is it? Some kind of … flower?”

  Indeed, the object sitting on a table in the center of the room, measuring about three feet in both length and height and encased in a glass dome, had many of the characteristics of a flower, specifically a lotus. Emerging out of a square box of soil, it consisted of large petals in a particularly brilliant shade of violet, which encircled not a normal stigma or ovary, but instead some kind of large, green, and vaguely gelatinous orb, which reflected and distorted the surrounding room like a mirror ball.

  The overall picture was undoubtedly strange, but stranger still was an intangible aura of foreignness the whole object seemed to give off, as though its uniqueness was itself a physical quality, as though the object somehow occupied a slightly different level of reality from everything else in the room. In that sense, it was truly unlike anything Shawn had ever seen before.

  “It’s not a flower,” Rachel said. “It’s a machine. It obviously has plantlike characteristics, and it contains organic material. But this was built.”

  “By them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not exactly sure. What we do know is that about a thousand years ago, their sun was said to be on the verge of burning out. Then, around that time, they built this. Well, they’re still around.”

  “So you’re saying you think this flower … machine somehow restored their sun?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it helped them replace it.”

  “Uh-huh. And, uh, how, might I ask, could it do that?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Really? That’s a shock.”

  “We have a theory. Some preliminary testing seems to possibly even support it. But it sounds crazy.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We think—and this is still just a theory—that it might utilize a kind of reverse photosynthesis. Instead of converting light energy into chemical energy, it somehow converts chemical energy into light energy.”

  “It would need to do more than just convert energy; it would need to produce nuclear fusion.”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, then. A cyborg flower that creates nuclear fusion. That might have once created a whole sun. And do you have a theory on how this thing could produce any fusion, let alone the kind of fusion ignition you’d need to create actual stars?”

  “None whatsoever. We’ve been trying our best to study it, but the problem as we see it is that this thing is in an ‘off’ position right now, and we’ve got no idea how to turn it on. It might not even function at all on Earth for all we know. We’ve been working with Roy Auslander and a few other quantum biologists, plus some botanists from the Kunming Institute, but we haven’t gotten far with any of them.” She paused. “Or, to put it another way, why do you think you’re still alive?”

  He looked at her in shock. “You have got to be kidding. What is this, round two? Are you completely nuts? The last time I helped you guys, you tried to murder me, remember that?”

  “I remember you and I were chatting in your room, and then you decided to jump out the window.”

  Shawn was almost too stunned to respond. “I jumped out the window because your buddy was standing out in the hallway with a fucking gun! You were about to have me killed!”

  “I was trying to save you, Shawn. You fucked up that meeting with Burke at Northwestern. He wanted you disposed of.”

  “Why? Because I told him we needed to try to act responsibly and not screw over other planets? What, so that meant I wasn’t dedicated enough to the mission and I needed to die?”

  Rachel didn’t answer, and Shawn shook his head. “Jesus.”

  “You act like everything is so simple, so black and white. It isn’t. Point is, I was trying to give you a second chance.”

  Shawn nodded. “You were trying to get me to say that I would actually do anything, no matter how fucked, for the sake of our precious Earth. And if I didn’t say that, or if you didn’t believe me, you were gonna have Baldy come in and blow my brains out right there in that room. Sorry, I wasn’t going to play your game.”

  And now he turned away from her. He could feel emotions rising in him that she had no right to see. “I heard what you called out,” he said, his voice suddenly soft. “What you yelled out while I was running for the woods. ‘Shoot him.’ You said those words, Rachel; you told him to kill me. Am I wrong?”

  She started to speak, stopped herself, took a deep breath. “No, you’re not wrong,” she said. “I won’t deny it, and if you hate me now, I can understand that. You have every right. I lied to you, Shawn, and I betrayed you, and I don’t expect you to forgive me. But you have to understand that we’re not individuals here. We are part of a larger race whose survival is in some serious fucking jeopardy. On this planet, we might be on the top of the food chain, sure. In the galaxy, not even close. We need to progress, and we need to progress fast, much faster than we have been if we’re going to have any future at all. Ambius might seem dirty to you, unethical, duplicitous, but you have to appreciate that it is on the front lines in the war against our extinction and that everything it does needs to be seen in that light.”

  “Right. Like stealing valuable resources from other planets.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes to not wind up on the bottom, you do whatever you can to get to the top.”

  “Wow, eloquent. So I guess I really shouldn’t take any of this personally. I mean, guys like me and Andrew Leland, we’re just some of the eggs you’ve got to break to make your omelet. Sorry, not break. Pulverize with a drone.”

  “Let’s talk about that drone, Shawn. Don’t you find it just a little odd that you survived that strike?”

  He gave a skeptical look. “What do you mean?”

  “The drone that killed Leland. Or that you say killed Leland—I don’t believe he’s actually dead, but that doesn’t matter right now. You were supposed to be a target, too. I talked Burke out of it.”

  “Sure. That thing sent a missile at our car while we were both in it.”

  “And what do you think, that you both jumped out just in the nick of time?”

  “I don’t give a shit. You’re a confirmed liar; you admit that. But if you’re telling the truth, then I can only guess you spared me ’cause you thought I could help you figure out how your little plant here works. Well, you should have let me die. That’s never going to happen.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You’ve got an object here you think can produce real nuclear fusion. And from that spiel you just gave about the food chain and our place in the universe, I’m assumi
ng you’ve got some pretty ambitious plans for it. Something that could possibly alter our position radically, put us far ahead of everyone else, right where you and Roland Burke think we belong. Well, good luck and Godspeed. You’d have to be insane to think I’d want anything to do with you or your psychotic cohorts ever again. Not a fucking chance.”

  She didn’t respond, just stared at him for a few moments, as though weighing his words. Finally, she nodded. “Okay, I get it.” She pressed a button on the wall, and the iron door slid open. Two armed guards appeared.

  “But before you give a final answer,” she added, “how about you take some time to think it over?”

  Shawn stared at the guards. “How much time?” he asked, his expression blank.

  Rachel smiled. “All the time you need.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The dining room of Reverend Daniels’s house was rich with the fresh aromas of home cooking as the family sat around the table eating a delicious dinner of roast beef and sweet potatoes, prepared with typical love and expertise by the reverend’s wife, Anne. As the reverend and Anne dug in, Kayla, their six-year-old daughter, was building a short and compact tower of sweet potatoes on her plate.

  Reverend Daniels watched with a smile and leaned in. “Try to make it lean a little like the one in Italy,” he said softly.

  Anne shook her head. “Come on, Will. Don’t encourage her.” She turned to her daughter. “Potatoes are for eating, sweetie. Now, drink some juice.”

  The reverend laughed and helped himself to some more roast beef.

  “How was the fund-raising meeting?” Anne asked.

  “Oh, fine.”

  “They resolve that silly fuss over the library wing?”

  “Uh, yes. Yes, they did.”

  He turned his attention back to his food, while Anne watched him a moment longer.

  Kayla’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Hey, Papa. Wanna see the painting I made in Mrs. Harrison’s class today? Mama saw it before.”

  “Sure, honey!”

  Anne interrupted. “But first, baby, finish your yams.”