by David Hewson
'One down,' he said, gingerly coming out from beneath the sheets. Outside, the brightness seemed to be diminishing. 'It's moving past us. It'll soon be gone.'
The two spheres still danced outside the window. One made a little bob, then popped through the glass, no noise this time, it was as easy as stepping through a shower. The second followed and they stood at either end of the long window.
'Get under the covers, love,' he barked. 'Get some protection if one of these things goes bang. Don't move too much in case they pick it up. They're looking for something electrical, and we may be the closest they get to it.'
She scrambled beneath the sheets. He followed her, felt her scrabbling for his hand. He squeezed it once, bent over, kissed her roughly on the lips. 'Not a good idea to touch any more, Marion. Maybe we make more electricity that way.'
The closest started to vibrate, and streaks of azure appeared inside its skin. 'Under the sheet!' he yelled, and pulled what fabric there was over them. The thing was doubling in size, rippling blue and gold, swirling all the time. He took one last look, then pulled the pillow over his face. It took no more than a second. The thing imploded on itself with a deafening bellow and the room was filled with shattered flying glass. They could hear it arcing through the air above them, then impaling itself into anything it could find.
Marion screamed, and he felt sick as he realized she was cut. Then the pain came in his head too, and something warm began to drip down his scalp. She started to sob. Beneath the covers, he reached over, touched her hand, just briefly. It was warm and wet. Then he opened his eyes and pushed back the pillow from his head. The entire length of the window had been blown out in the blast. Water was pouring down from a shattered pipe in the ceiling. The street was open to them, twenty-three floors below. But you could see it. He liked that idea. There was no fire. This was something they could survive. He put a hand to his head: blood, but not so much you had to worry.
In the corner, hovering two feet off the drowning carpet, the third sphere was almost motionless, hissing with a thin, constant noise. It looked pale, less active than the first two. And a little smaller. But it was alive — if that was the right word. And it was moving, very slowly, toward the bed.
'Sam,' Marion said from beneath the sheet. 'I'm bleeding. Bad.'
'Stick with it, love. And keep your head down.' He looked at the sphere and wished he could hate the thing. But it wasn't really alive, he knew that. And there was a simple way to deal with it.
Sam Jenkinson climbed out of the bed and sat down in the chair close to the window. To his amazement, his drink was still on the tiny side table, half-full. Hand shaking, he reached over, picked it up, and took a sip. It tasted foul: warm and tainted somehow. The sphere had stopped moving toward the bed. It hovered between them indecisively.
'Now,' he said, looking at the thing, going paler by the second a few feet away in front of the shattered window, 'why don't you be a good little monster and go fuck off home?' It flickered, was almost white. For a fraction of a second he could see the side wall of the room through its glowing body.
'Sam?'
'Shut up, woman.'
The ball rolled slowly toward him, hissing softly. He watched it stop a foot away and he really could see right through it. The thing was dying. Outside the day seemed to be returning to normal. It looked like a ghost. Or a thin reflection of the moon in water, he thought. The sphere stopped hissing. Then moved so quickly, he thought for a moment it had disappeared completely. Something pale and ghostly seemed to be crawling inside his mouth, up through his nostrils, even through his eyes, his ears, and it wasn't entirely unpleasant. It was warm, it sang, and when it was in the place it sought it was impossible to think of anything at all, impossible to feel anything except this strange, fevered thrum of energy that seemed to run inside and outside of his body.
The room went silent. Marion Jenkinson poked her head above the sheet, starting to feel weak, somewhat sick too. She looked across at him and went silent. He looked like one of those old pictures of a saint, with a halo that wasn't quite a halo, more a gentle ball of light that hung around his entire head. He was screaming, but she couldn't hear the noise. It seemed to get sucked from the room before it could get to her.
She closed her eyes and rocked gently, backward and forward, on the bed, until something hot and powerful picked her up with the sound of an exploding melon, threw her backward against the wall, left her slumped and bleeding, yelling at nothing, not opening her eyes, not wanting to see, clutching at the sheets, fists opening and closing, refusing to think about what was happening, what was flying in the room (warm and wet, making a sound like churning water) around her.
She didn't know how long she stayed like that. When she opened her eyes, she was cold. This wetness that covered her was cold too. She rolled over on the bed and looked up. The painted ceiling stared back at her, laughing, a sea of staring eyes. It was red with flesh, so much that it was contoured, seemed organic, physical. And one new feature too. Embedded in the staring, manic images was a piece of Sam Jenkinson, a single staring eyeball, around it a ragged corona of tissue and nerves.
She coughed into the sheets, retched dry bile, and tried to believe this was all a dream.
CHAPTER 41
Holy Fire
Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, 1903 UTC
An hour after the attack the smoke still hung over the city a couple of miles distant. It was an eerie sight. There was precious little consistency in any of the reports they had. In some places it had started fires. In others it had passed over buildings, even through buildings, people too, with no ill effects whatsoever. And sometimes the results had been simply devastating. The tower of the Stratosphere was now nothing but a burned-out shell. In the old downtown, the huge, block-long electronic visual display canopy that had brought visitors back to Fremont Street seemed to have attracted the full force of the attack. It had been torn apart in a rain of fire that the crowds underneath had thought was all part of the show, until the metal began to rain down in a molten flood on their heads and the street turned into a river of flame.
In some cases the floating spheres of energy had invaded people directly and then simply exploded. The casualty list was something the emergency services couldn't even begin to guess at. Every man and woman at Nellis had been brought in to help with the rescue operation. The storm had lasted more than an hour, and Helen Wagner watched every agonizing minute in horror from the airfield, which was entirely untouched. The range war with the Delta Force crew, who drove over from McCarran to make contact when it became apparent that radio comm was down, was soon forgotten.
They teamed up with the Air Force people and tacitly acknowledged that if some lead on the Children were to emerge, then HRT would be the ones to follow up on it. There was too much work on the ground for them to think of anything else. She watched with quiet admiration the grim-faced, deliberate way they went about the job.
In a small office next to the main Nellis control tower Larry Wolfit was working away at the keyboard on his notebook computer. He wore a fresh checked shirt and jeans, big mountain boots sticking out from under the desk.
'You have a line out on that yet, Larry?' she asked. Barnside and Levine were somewhere else, outdoors, talking to the HRT people, she guessed. It felt more comfortable without them hanging around. Wolfit seemed to have spent the entire time since his arrival with his head deep inside the computer, hunting for clues.
'One just came through,' Wolfit replied laconically. 'Slow and very noisy but I can get something. After a fashion.' Wolfit looked different outside the controlled, cloistered confines of S&T somehow. He was more at home out here, close to the wilderness.
'Good. So tell me what caused all this.'
He screwed up his nose at the screen. 'Ball lightning, probably.'
'Which is?' She watched him struggle with the answer.
'Lot of arguments about that. Not conventional lightning, that's for sure. This is a real
rarity in normal circumstances, though its existence is pretty well documented. The favoured theory right now is some internally powered electromagnetic phenomenon. Maybe a microwave radiation field contained inside a spherical shell of plasma. Or very high density plasma exhibiting quantum mechanical properties.'
She folded her arms and looked out the window. 'You mean we don't know?'
'What ball lightning is? No. But at least people do generally accept it exists nowadays. Some think it could explain a couple of other awkward phenomena. Spontaneous combustion. Instant conflagration with no sign of the fire that caused it. Makes a lot of sense. Real Old Testament stuff too. This is holy fire. You could use it for a million explanations out there. The burning bush, who knows? The Children promised us a message from heaven. They surely delivered that.'
'And the Shuttle?'
He shrugged. 'They're still looking.'
Military vehicles, coming and going. Ambulances carrying the dead and injured to hospitals where most of the electronic infrastructure was now burned to a frizzle. There was still power generation on the base, but the city's lines were down, and would remain so for days. There were already reports of how the heat, intense, dry, and devastating, was causing secondary problems among the survivors. It was 120 in the shade and rising, so fierce you felt exhausted just from a couple of minutes under the sun. She'd never liked Vegas, but there was something so foolhardy in the way the place was built up from the desert floor that you couldn't help but admire the spirit that had put it there. Now they had to begin all over again. And Lieberman was right: It was an island of electromagnetism in the middle of an empty wilderness. If Charley Pascal wanted somewhere to use, not just as a sign but as an experiment too, Vegas came custom-designed with the words 'guinea pig' printed in bold on its calling card.
'So what's inside this ball you're talking about, Larry?'
He grinned wryly, an expression that said he was on shaky ground. 'The best estimates say the temperature could be between fifteen and thirty thousand degrees Kelvin, with a pressure of ten to twenty atmospheres. That would explain the violence of the explosion if these things don't decay.'
'You're not telling me what causes it.'
He shook his head. 'I can't. We don't know. This is at the edge of everything we understand.'
'Sorry.' She wished he didn't look so out of sorts. They needed every smart mind they could get. 'I didn't mean to push you into a corner.'
"That's okay. What we do know is that it's usually linked to thunderstorms. But not always. The biggest sightings we've had up until now were associated with electrified underwater volcanic dust vents. You get these off Japan. When they erupt, you get balls rising from deep on the ocean bed, through the water and eventually becoming airborne. There's an event recorded back in the thirties where one six metres across came on shore and lasted for two hours. Alternatively…'
He was looking up from the computer, waiting for her attention.
'I'm sorry,' she said, wondering why she felt the need to talk to Lieberman right then. ‘I was somewhere else. Alternatively?'
'In 1957 a guy called Arabadzhi came up with a theory that what was really happening was the focusing of radioactive cosmic ray particles. Usually by the thunderstorm.'
'Cosmic rays?' Her mouth was dry just thinking about this.
'Precisely.'
'If you're right, the Children can skip the thunderstorm and the underwater volcanic vents altogether. What you get, when you focus it, is what we saw. One giant chunk of plasma that decays into the smaller spheres we saw coming out from underneath it.'
She tried to remember the details of the plane crash. 'Even when the solar storm was weaker, do you think this could have brought down Air Force One? And the other plane?'
'You bet. It was localized.'
'And all the telecommunications failures?'
'No. That's different. We were getting that anyway, without Sundog, just on a smaller scale. That's straight electromagnetic bombardment and they make it worse by feeding some data into the white noise. What we saw here… I guess this is what happens when they turn the dial that's marked "destruction" and focus it on one spot.'
It was so small. But it was something solid. 'We need to warn the people here about the radiation risk.'
'You're not going to stop them from going in there just by telling them it's hot. Those guys won't quit until they've got everyone out of that hellhole. Besides, I suspect it's marginal. This thing seems to dissipate pretty quickly.'
He was right about their determination. She knew that. Even if there were big yellow radiation signs posted all the way down the Strip they'd still be out there, combing the wrecked hotels and casinos, looking for survivors, not caring about tomorrow.
'All the same, Larry, we need to make people aware of what we think this is. And figure out some way of using that information.'
He was still quietly tapping away, with a calm, clinical detachment that she thought she could begin to find annoying. Maybe Levine wasn't playing some deep game by passing over Wolfit for the acting directorship. There was a coolness in the man that was hardly inspirational.
'There's a theory,' he said, 'that the stuff gets repelled by dead electrical circuits and attracted by live ones, which is the opposite of normal lightning, of course. If that's right, maybe we could channel it. If she attacked cities, we could try to divert it away from key areas.'
'You mean turn everything off?'
'Jesus. Not everything. If you did that the only faint electromagnetic current you'd get would be the one you found in living organisms. No, you need to think of ways of focusing it away by leaving some stuff on.'
He didn't say it; he didn't have to. They both knew the reports. Of people exploding, being torn apart in thin air. A kind of spontaneous super combustion. This phenomenon fitted more exactly the longer she thought about it.
'But we can do something. I need Lieberman in with us here. He's got the kind of mind that can get around all this. Get me through to him when you can. And I want to hear about this woman he's found. We're getting somewhere, you know.'
'Yeah,' he said laconically.
Maybe Wolfit just never got excited, she thought.
'If you want my honest opinion, we're pissing in the wind,' he said. 'Either the Shuttle knocks Sundog out or we just sit back and burn. Maybe we should be thinking about that second option a little more.'
She wished she had the energy to be mad at him. 'That's defeatist crap, Larry. You don't think that. I don't think that.'
'Scientifically — '
'Let's leave the dialectic, Larry. We don't have time.'
'That is a much-misused word,' he bristled. 'I am merely pointing out the facts. She told us to prepare. Maybe we ought to listen a little.'
A quiet man, with an incisive, quick intelligence, she thought. And, in a way, he was right too. There was precious little contingency in the works. 'Larry, we've gotten nowhere with the imaging efforts, the FBI is at a dead end with their investigation, and I'll be damned if I'm going to put every last hope we have on the Shuttle. Let's make the most of what we've got. There's got to be some research projects into this subject we can tap into. Get me some experts.'
He shook his head. 'Most of the research got killed in the cuts in the eighties. I mean, it's understandable. This is pretty peripheral stuff.'
'But there is material out there. You're quoting it.'
'Sure. And it's old. Like I said, that cosmic ray theory goes back to the fifties.'
'There must be someone.'
Wolfit nodded in a way she didn't quite understand. 'Sort of. I was coming to that.'
She sat down next to him and said, 'Show me.'
He hit the keys. 'Back in the early nineties there was some postgrad work done at Berkeley. Basically one guy. Looks like good stuff too, what I can see of it. A lot of the files seem to be missing. We can check but I doubt we're going to pick up more.'
'What he says… it backs the t
heory up?'
'Absolutely. A lot of it's pretty basic, but this guy claimed to have reproduced ball lightning in the lab. On demand. He knew the preconditions. He was able to create the stuff. Brave fellow.'
She peered into the screen. It was a sea of text and flashing hot links. 'This is the man we need, Larry. Get a phone number. Or better still, an address. We'll pull him in right away.'
Wolfit peered at her. 'No need. I can tell you where he is right now.' Then he pulled up the personal Web page. It was old, last updated in April 1998 according to the date on the bottom, and there was precious little there except a few personal details — hobbies: Linux, Goth music, Nordic mythology, and beer — a brief academic resume, and a photograph. Martin Chalk, looking a lot younger than the ID shot dispatched around the internal net, stared back at them from the screen, wide-eyed, gawky.
'The Children sure picked the right guy,' Wolfit said. 'Shame he's probably lying fried on some morgue slab out there instead of unravelling this baby for us.'
'That's not the issue,' she said quickly (sometimes she thought, maybe, she could get the hang of this Operations thing). 'Not any more.'
'So what is?'
'He was here. Whether he walked or they pushed him, this guy must have been close to the Children very, very recently. Don't you see, Larry? We don't just know what they're throwing at us now. We know where from too.'
CHAPTER 42
The Farm
La Finca, 2002 UTC
'I don't get it,' Lieberman said. But when he listened to Mo's tale and watched the slow, relieved way it came out of her, he realized he did. They all did, he guessed.
They sat in a small private room in the mansion. Mo curled in a big armchair, Lieberman, Irwin, and Bevan around her in a semicircle. Not pushing her at all because they all knew there was no point. Extracting this slender strand inside her called the truth was a delicate operation. It would be so easy to snap the thing and lose it forever.