by Platt, Sean
“I can download one. I just forgot.”
After a pregnant moment, Meyer nodded slowly. “Good.”
At the door, he called Trevor back.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“If Piper can’t make dinner, I’ll need you to be my second. The person I turn to as my right hand when the press asks questions.”
“Oh, sure,” Trevor said, feeling a bit blindsided.
“Because you are my right hand. My best man. And I know you’ll stand beside me no matter what.”
“Sure, Dad.”
Meyer nodded. “Then I’ll see you in a bit.”
Trevor walked back down the length of the rear hallway, the clacking of his hard-soled shoes echoing off the stone floor. He needed to prepare for dinner, and an evening as the viceroy’s right hand.
His father’s greatest ally, whether he liked it or not.
Chapter Twenty
Benjamin shuffled the windows on his largest monitor, dragging them to adjacent screens, trying to make sense of it all. Nothing quite fit — but in a maddening almost-there sort of way, something was definitely about to break the surface.
He looked from window to window. From screen to screen. Limitations in the public network had become an even bigger problem than restrictions in the underground web he used to communicate with the other rebel labs worldwide and the church in Heaven’s Veil. That network might (might!) be free and secure, though Benjamin still had his doubts. But regardless, Wikipedia was on the public net, not the private one. As were conspiracy blogs, with millions upon millions of pages packed with the puzzle pieces Benjamin needed. And who controlled the public net, at least until Cameron could get into Heaven’s Veil and plant the virus? Astrals, of course.
And the Astrals, unsurprisingly, were stingy about the alien-related information they allowed through their filter.
It shouldn’t have mattered. Benjamin knew most of this by heart and had untold terabytes of data culled from a lifetime of paranormal and extraterrestrial research. He knew history better than most historians — the real history, he often thought, rather than the official bullshit. He had his photos and videos, materials traded with others through the years. A smart and properly paranoid person didn’t rely on the Internet to answer his questions; Benjamin made copies and backed them up. But even his local records didn’t tell the whole story. Since the occupation, every amateur UFO researcher had become a serious investigator. Every conspiracy theorist, duly vindicated, had sprung into action. But with the worldwide network neutered, there was no way to share and parse new research. He had all the old information in the world, but little of the new. It was frustrating.
That’s part of what Cameron had set out to fix. The Canned Heat virus, properly unleashed, should give Benjamin and his prepared colleagues a cache from which to grab handfuls of unrestricted data as fast as they could. They wouldn’t get anywhere near all of it unless new Internet activity had been surprisingly light or the Astrals proved to be surprisingly inept at plugging the hole Cameron was about to drill, but they’d get enough. They’d get the most important sectors. The story behind the story. Then, maybe, this puzzle would begin to make sense.
Something with the Templars begged attention, for instance.
Benjamin knew the basics. He knew about the Rose Stone in Hertfordshire. He’d even been into the artificial cave below its original position. He had archive photos of the carvings inside that cave, and his own photos, samples, and rubbings. But what else might have been discovered? Were people still heading into Royston Cave, or was it too far into lawless outlands? Were there wild barrens overseas like there were here? Did shuttles guard the cave? A deep hunch swore it was important.
But Benjamin didn’t think Astral shuttles would guard Royston Cave. It was, he thought, entirely possible that the aliens didn’t even know the cave was there. It had been dug a millennium ago, well after the last evidence of a widespread alien occupation. And although the Astrals had proved they could scrape the surface of human thoughts, they didn’t seem to understand the electronic networks at all. They weren’t stupid; they knew what those networks were and had cut them on arrival. But they’d reactivated them just as suddenly, their only known attempts to access having proved no more skilled than any user who sat down in front of a terminal. In their shoes, confronting an unknown as baffling to Astrals as their technologies had always been to humans, Benjamin supposed he’d have put native experts on the case. But seeing as the Astrals wouldn’t know what they were looking for in this foreign soup of electronic information, it seemed entirely possible that nobody — alien or human — had stumbled across information about an obscure English cave. Or had any idea what it might mean.
Even Benjamin didn’t know what it meant — to either the old story or the one currently unfolding. But the Templar carvings at Royston had always been considered a kind of codex — and if Benjamin’s hunches were right, that codex might be needed to decode something after all.
Now … as to what that something might be? It was impossible to tell.
He didn’t even know what to ask. Nobody did. But the Knights Templar had been the Benjamin Bannisters of their day, and there was plenty in biblical times — even during the Crusades — that smelled extraterrestrial to Benjamin. If the Templars had known something about that last occupation, there were only so many ways they’d have chosen to pass that information along to those who’d need it in the future. In code, surely.
A loud rumbling rolled in from outside. Benjamin looked down and saw the water ripple in his glass. There had been a few rumbles minutes ago, but he’d been too focused to pay them much mind. Earthquakes, perhaps, if those happened in Utah.
There was a louder noise. Sharper, rawer. Not deep like the others, but tinged with treble notes.
Ivan burst into the office, his eyes wider than usual. It took Benjamin a moment to realize what was different, but then it hit him: even during the capital attacks, he’d never seen the hard man frightened.
“Benjamin! Get out here!”
“Where? What’s going on?”
Another sound outside — this one deadly similar to a distant explosion.
“Just come!”
Benjamin tumbled out the lab door behind Ivan, finding the courtyard between the lab and the ranch house in chaos.
The entire staff was outside, techs milling in their casual clothes and occasional lab coats as if unsure where to go or what to do. Ivan’s small band of military roughnecks and the minor delegation from the nearby rebel camp were climbing into an electric Jeep, one hard-jawed man with a crew cut yanking the charge cord from its rear before piling in. The lab wasn’t military, so there were few guns, but people piling into the jeep and the low transport beside it were packing and racking, cleaning their weapons and loading shells by the box.
On the horizon, there was nothing but fire, like napalm. East. Toward the resistance camp.
“What happened?” Benjamin shouted.
Ivan’s head only cocked, unhearing. Benjamin’s voice had been drowned by a helicopter thundering by to the south, moving at what had to be maximum speed. Ivan turned to watch it pass then flinched hard when an Astral shuttle appeared in front of it from nowhere. The shuttle didn’t bother to fire its weapon. Instead, as had happened above Heaven’s Veil, it allowed the copter to plow into it, detonating in a plume of rolling flames and spinning debris.
The crowd half ducked; the explosion was nearby, and the rotors had been spinning fast enough that the lab’s grounds were peppered with the outer halo of shrapnel on detonation. Ivan ducked with a hand on Benjamin’s back then straightened as the copter’s remains pounded the desert and the shuttle zipped away.
“What the hell happened?” Benjamin shouted.
“We don’t know! Carter saw it going down. Tried to run toward camp with the Jeep still tethered and about fucked our only vehicle charge port in the process. He has family over there.” Ivan’s lips formed a line. “Did have family anyw
ay.”
Benjamin looked. Black smoke eclipsed the fire. Whatever had happened was already over. The ships had left them alone until now because they were barely a threat. The just-concluded ninety-second solution ran that point home.
“What did it?” he asked, knowing the question was unnecessary.
“Shuttles.”
“Just the one?”
“Carter said there were three. But they …” He looked around. “They seem to have bugged out already.”
Benjamin scanned the sky, seeing nothing. They’d left the lab untouched. Why? They knew it was there, just twenty minutes west in an electric Jeep. The Vail mothership had spent six months suckling from the money pit on the property, and shuttles had buzzed the place repeatedly. The lab wasn’t an Astral mystery.
Yet they were all still alive, free to sabotage the capital another day. It didn’t make sense, just like the Astrals’ refusal to destroy the nearby rebel camp until now. There’d been no warning. Five minutes ago, Moab had been at peace. For a flash, it had been in the grip of a one-sided war. Now that skirmish was over, and the survivors could only bury their dead and wonder.
Two vehicles screamed across the parched soil, headed toward the pillars of black smoke. Ivan sat heavily on one of the outside chairs — in the shade during the afternoon and evening, where techs tended to take their breaks while pretending the world wasn’t ending. Benjamin doubted there would be many sitting outside this evening. Being inside didn’t make anyone safer from the shuttles’ return, but sitting outside would feel like spitting in Fate’s eye. They’d been on this spot for years, several spent in the aftermath of an alien occupation they’d been working to subvert. Being left alone so long had lulled them into feeling charmed, as if there were a bubble above that made them invincible. That illusion was gone. For days and weeks and months, residents would live in a throbbing state of quiet panic.
Benjamin watched the lanky man sit. He looked out across the pan, watching the flame and smoke of what used to be the resistance camp. Despite his fear and sense of loss (he hadn’t known many in the camp, but people were people), Benjamin couldn’t help but feel sorry for Ivan. What woke him in the morning and kept him going through the days was the dream that, eventually, brute force might be able to settle humanity’s grievances. But now it was more obvious than ever that the Astrals had merely been letting them play their ineffectual games — and that at any point they could tire of the irritation and end things with a snap.
What would drive Ivan now? What did he have to live for?
“Jesus, Ben,” he said, not turning his head. “They’re all gone. Every one of them.”
Benjamin didn’t bother to say that there might be survivors. It might make things worse rather than better.
“What now? That’s all the equipment. All the people who might know how to get more jets, tanks, anything at all. There must be other camps, but … what now?”
Benjamin sat beside Ivan, unable to summon a fitting platitude to make it all better when he knew things were only getting worse.
“I think we should go inside,” he said instead.
Benjamin rose, but Ivan didn’t seem to hear.
So he went back inside alone with the horizon still on fire, a pair of engines purring their way toward the charred atrocity. Benjamin could only leave the man to his loss, knowing that all anyone could do was to reach the next day … then the one after that.
“Cameron,” he said to his empty office once the door had closed behind him, “you’d better give us something to believe in, Kiddo.”
Cameron didn’t respond.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Sir?”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“Nathan?” Coffey repeated.
Nathan’s hands fell from his face. He looked at his second in command, trying to make his features stoic and hard. It wasn’t difficult. His default face had always been sort of impassive, and years of running a rogue paramilitary state had helped him to hone it. She didn’t ask what was on his mind, but Coffey was, of course, smart enough to intuit — and to allow no emotional inflection into her voice about that intuition when news went sour. There was a no-bullshit policy between them. Nathan always respected directness over tact.
“I’m afraid they’ve identified your wife’s body.”
“I know,” Nathan said.
He didn’t know, but he’d assumed. It was usually best to assume the worst. The upside was that the only two possibilities, if you planned like a pessimist, were neutrality or pleasant surprise. Optimism, on the other hand, had a way of clearing the path for defeat.
“No news on Grace,” Coffey said.
“Keep searching.”
“To be blunt,” she said, “there’s not much searching to be done. The camp is in cinders. It looks like they might have got a few minutes’ warning because most of the intact bodies were in their meeting hall structure. You know, the circular roof near the stream.”
Nathan nodded. He’d looked at a few satellite images since Cameron Bannister’s visit in the way most husbands and fathers looked at beach photos from family vacations. He knew his late wife and possibly late daughter’s home from above: all rectangles and circles, the peaks of trees appearing as shrubs.
Coffey looked like she might be waiting for dismissal. She’d been better at not being subservient — being the hard-nosed number two he could respect. She’d informed him of deaths and losses, but never like this, never his own family. He couldn’t blame her hesitance, but didn’t like it. Showing him sympathy meant she felt he needed or wanted it. Either that, or Coffey just couldn’t help it.
Served him right to let her see him with his face in his hands after hearing the news.
“You can go.”
“Anything you need?”
“Just keep searching.”
Coffey looked like she might be thinking about repeating that searching was pointless, but thankfully she kept the message in her mouth. If Nathan had to repeat himself to earn compliance, he might very well snap. He was already barely forestalling a desire to throttle her. She was right, of course; he’d seen the after images of the camp. It wasn’t much more than a smoking hole in the ground — a few hundred square feet around the collapsed meeting hall being all that remained unburned. If they hadn’t found Nathan’s daughter yet, it meant she’d been in the torched areas when the shuttles had come. Maybe sleeping as death came from above.
Coffey paused for a final moment then turned to leave. The door closed. Nathan waited until his lieutenant’s footfalls were no longer audible on the steps before pulling the tall bookcase against the wall over on its face.
For a few delirious seconds, a red rage of fury subsumed him. He shouted in the mostly soundproofed room; he ripped a television screen from its mounting and smashed it on the ground. He kicked the desk, doing little more than chipping the wood and stubbing his toe.
Nathan paused, chest heaving. After a moment, he launched into another tantrum, knowing how his impotent rage would appear from the outside, not caring.
Glass vases detonated. Office items were hurled. Picture frames were shattered.
Nathan stood in his ransacked office once it was finally over, shoulders bobbing up and down with his heaving breath, unable to dominate an enemy he couldn’t see, hear, or touch.
Broken glass littered his chair. He brushed it away, suddenly delicate, and sat. Again, he planted his face in his palms then pulled himself upright.
No. He wouldn’t mourn. Not yet.
Someone had fucked him. They’d fucked him hard. It didn’t matter who you were; you didn’t fuck Nathan Andreus. Unless you were looking to get fucked right back. Step on Nathan’s land and lose a foot. Kill an Andreus warrior and get friends or family slaughtered before your eyes.
He knew who’d done this, and why. Obviously, it had been the fucking Astrals. On their own. They didn’t need permission or a tip-off. So far, their needing Nathan to control th
e outlands had kept their fucking ET hands off the camp, meaning the Astrals had somehow known where Nathan’s people had fled before he himself had. Choosing now to decimate a camp that couldn’t dent Astral armor was spittle in his eye. An intergalactic fuck you, as repayment for … for …
Well, Nathan wasn’t sure what it was for. For letting the camp survive until now rather than raiding it? That didn’t seem like a good reason, considering the Astrals had proved they could raid that camp fine without his help. Same for Benjamin Bannister’s lab.
So: Was this comeuppance for helping Cameron Bannister? That didn’t seem right either. One man headed to the capital was hardly an insurgent threat. Besides, if they knew Cameron was on his way (something Nathan didn’t imagine was likely), they could easily stop him without sending a message to Nathan.
Unless they wanted to remind Nathan that they could do whatever they wanted at any time, and that they were allowing him to keep living, too.
Unless this was a reminder … and deeply personal.
He stood and paced. He had to do something. It didn’t matter that the aliens were responsible. He was in bed with the Astrals, but Nathan Andreus of all people knew to keep one foot on the floor no matter who shared his bed. He followed their orders but kept his own. He controlled the area’s outlands in his own way, not just as their puppet.
If they’d done this to spite Nathan and teach him a lesson, then it was game on. The shuttles destroying the camp rather than Andreus HQ or his co-opted residence told Nathan that even though he’d done something the aliens didn’t like, they still needed him. His army, his Republic, maybe even his mind. They’d given him access to the unrestricted net before he’d even worked out the back doors that allowed him to peek in on Moab’s chats with …
Nathan stopped. An interesting idea flitting inside his mind.
Thanks to snooping on Bannister’s communications, he knew Cameron was on his way to the capital not just to snoop around the Apex dig site but to sabotage the network.