Freedom Express (Book 2 of The Humanity Unlimited Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  “I’ve been called back to Washington. Something urgent. I want you to put everyone here on ice and get every detail you can.”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “And I’m going to want the boy’s cell phone.”

  She frowned. “The alien one? Alien human? I’m not sure what to call them.”

  He chuckled. “I feel you. Yes, that one. I’m taking it with me to show some technical people I trust. Get it for me.”

  Cabot called up another agent and handed him the water. “See to Doctor Wagner.”

  He followed her to one of the lab areas where she asked for the device. One of the agents found it in an evidence bag. She looked at it curiously for a long moment and then handed it over to him.

  It was actually somewhat larger than a modern cell phone, which seemed odd. It had a distinctive logo of a tree surrounded by some strange text. Another line of which was etched across the top of the device.

  “Special Agent in Charge Pembroke wanted to talk to you as well. He’s looking at the cube, I think.”

  Pembroke was indeed in the room with the cube. He looked up as they entered. “Mister Secretary. Brenda. Isn’t this thing amazing?”

  Cabot drew her Taser without a word and shot her boss. He went down before Queen could do more than twitch. He reached for the doorknob, but she pulled her service pistol and jammed it in his side.

  “I’d rather not have to shoot you, Mister Secretary. You make the call. Perforated or not?”

  “Not,” he said, his throat dry.

  “An excellent choice,” she said as she patted him down. She pocketed the small handgun he kept for protection and the alien phone. “Flip the main power on and then pull the cube. Carefully and slowly.”

  He pushed the power lever back into the engaged position and it slammed home with a hum. Unsure of what to do, he tugged at the cube. It popped free surprisingly easily.

  She pocketed it, too. “Now we go out to the car. Come quietly and no one gets hurt. And rest assured, if you do anything to draw attention, I’ll shoot you first.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked, his throat tight. “From all accounts, you have a very promising career ahead of you. Had, I mean. I doubt Agent Pembroke will be in a very forgiving mood now that you’ve electrified him.”

  She smiled. “I’m sure that’s going to negatively impact my next performance evaluation. Once we get out of here, I’ll tell you. I promise it’ll be worth the ride.”

  “I seem to be lacking any reasonable alternatives, so I’m completely at your disposal.”

  She pushed him in front of her and slid her pistol into her jacket pocket. “I’m aiming right at your liver. Nasty way to die, too. I scored top marks at Quantico. Captain of the pistol team. I can hit a fly’s pecker at fifty meters. Now, walk.”

  He exited the electrical room and she closed the door behind them. They passed several agents and then she walked him brazenly past the heavy weapons team guarding the door. She greeted the leader by name as she casually kidnapped him.

  Once out of the building, she put him in the passenger side in one of the SUVs. Out of sight of the people watching the building, she handed him a set of handcuffs.

  “Not to seem unfriendly, but put these on. And don’t try to make them loose enough to slip out of or I’ll crank them down. Seat belt first and then put your arms around the chest strap.”

  He did as she ordered. “What the devil could you hope to gain? Selling this on the black market? I suppose that could net you some money, but we’ll come after you like, well, gangbusters.”

  She climbed behind the wheel and drove slowly away from the building. “Would you believe I’m one of those alien humans? And that we mean you no harm? You can skip the take us to your leader BS. We’ve seen what douche canoes you are.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve lost your mind. I suppose it happens to the best of us. Let me assure you that if you give up now, you’ll receive the best of care.”

  “I can understand your skepticism,” she said with a smile. “I don’t exactly come across as an alien visitor. That’s because we’ve been here since before America existed.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Completely. You maniacs have no idea how dangerous what you’re doing is. Now we have one chance to keep you from drawing disaster down on humanity’s head.”

  She patted her jacket. “This power supply will be helpful, but the gate controller is really what flushed me out.”

  “The what?”

  “The cell phone. Only it isn’t. Our ancestors used it to activate long-range transporters. Not like Star Trek. More like Stargate.”

  “Star what?”

  She tisked him. “You really should bone up on your science fiction. Especially now that you’re dealing with this stuff.”

  He started to respond, but a vehicle in the next lane drew his attention when the driver rolled down his window and raised a pistol.

  Cabot must’ve seen him, too, because she yanked her wheel over hard and smashed the SUV into his vehicle, spoiling his aim.

  The window beside him shattered and something knocked the breath out of him. The man had shot him!

  She stomped on the brakes and used the nose of the SUV to tap the back quarter panel on the car. It immediately spun out of control and went into the ditch, rolling hard. She didn’t stop to go after the gunman.

  “I’m hit,” he gasped. “Take me to the hospital.”

  “Hang on. I’ll get you some help.”

  She pulled a cell phone and called someone. “We have a problem. I need a pickup and a medic at the alternate location in two minutes. The subject has a gunshot to the torso.”

  He tried to argue with her, to order her to the hospital, but the world was fading to gray. It went dark before he could tell her that he was dying.

  Chapter Thirty

  Harry looked around the cargo area and hangar on Freedom Express. There were a lot of ships. A few even looked undamaged. Sooner or later, they’d have to train someone to fly them. If they ever figured out how.

  The crew was ecstatic about the unexpected rescue. He immediately got Doctors Powell, Young, and Crocket moving the most delicate artifacts back to Mars. Just in case. If things went bad, he’d evacuate the crew. Hopefully, that wouldn’t prove necessary.

  “We went outside to watch the approach with Neptune,” Jess said, “but now that I think about it, I’m not sure that’s the best idea here.”

  “Let’s go to the command and control room,” he said. “We can see if the ship itself can look at whatever it is.”

  She nodded and led him to the elevator. “If we could find a quantum code to Earth, would you save your father?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t like the man or trust his motives, but I’d prefer not to have our secrets in the hands of the US government. Hell, any government. But we can’t help him.

  “Say we found a code for one of the bases on Earth. Unless it’s the one in New Zealand, it’ll take us hours to get to his location. Perhaps days. Even then, we don’t exactly have the forces to fend off the US military. I’m afraid he’s on his own.”

  Jess sighed. “That’s harsh, but I understand. It just doesn’t seem right.”

  The elevator let them out into the core. She led them to the control console. Ray was in the chair.

  “Jess. Good to see you.”

  “And you, Ray. Good work here. What do you have?”

  The engineer gestured at the console. “We’re almost to the target. Call it ten minutes until we’re at a full stop.”

  “Can you see what it is?”

  The other man shook his head. “I’ve found the visual system. It has a good level of magnification, but we’re only starting to come into range. That little dot there on the right hand screen is what we can see.”

  It wasn’t much to look at. “Any planets around here?”

  Ray shook his head. “I think I’d have noticed one. No, we�
�re approaching something floating in space alone.”

  “I wonder how this ship knew where it was so exactly after all this time.” Jess said. “The orbits of small bodies get distorted by encounters with other bodies over time. That didn’t seem to matter. It came right to it.”

  “Perhaps it’s giving off a signal we can’t detect,” Ray ventured. “God knows there’s a lot we don’t get about these people.”

  That was certainly true. The scope of what they’d found made forming a plan to deal with it difficult. It was like staging a raid to rescue a kidnapped child and finding the Doctor’s TARDIS. Unexplainable and almost incomprehensible, at least without the Doctor around to tell you what was what.

  “We’ve been reacting since we found the guy in the pyramid,” Harry said. “My father’s original plan didn’t have anything to do with them. We have to make a real set of plans on exploring and exploiting this setup.

  “This is dangerous stuff. We can’t afford to keep stumbling around in the dark. We need to know who these people were and what they were fighting about before we run into some of them. We had no choice but to come out here after Freedom Express got into motion, but it has to stop. We’ve got to organize and bring others in to help us do this cautiously.”

  Jess frowned. “Like who? The US? Have you seen the kind of crap they’ve been up to the last twenty or thirty years? It’s a corrupt oligarchy in everything but name. And the UN is even worse. I’m not sure who you’d find that wasn’t out to line their own pockets.”

  “That’s my father’s problem, once we rescue him.”

  “We’re close enough to see the thing,” Ray said.

  Harry focused his attention to the object on the screen. It was a ship. That much was obvious. It didn’t use a planetary body as Freedom Express did, though. It was long and sleek, though obviously not suitable for atmospheric work with those wide arms coming off to the sides.

  Freedom Express came to a halt relative to the unmoving ship. On the screen, it looked like a derelict. No lights and no reaction to their arrival.

  “Do we take a look?” Jess asked.

  “We only have the one lifter, and it’s all we can pilot anyway. We’ll go over, but this is a cautious reconnaissance. We need to get an idea of what we’re dealing with. If it looks dangerous, we leave. Understood?”

  They all nodded.

  “Good. Have all non-essential personnel move back to the Mars base and take everything that isn’t bolted down. If we send word to run, they drop everything and haul ass. Come on. It’s time to go check out the spooky ship.”

  * * * * *

  Clayton, Penny, and Mick worked their way deeper into the dead base over the next few hours. There were signs of fighting everywhere. In fact, Clayton suspected the collapsed corridor was battle damage.

  On the top level, animals had scattered the bones of the dead, except for the skulls in the helmets. It was horrifying and very creepy.

  Mick’s skepticism about the whole alien aspect of this changed when they found their first heavy-worlders. That was on the second level.

  It was mostly quarters, based on the rooms they peered into. The fighting had been heavy here and they found a number of regular humans and heavy-worlders in armor. Based on the large divots blown out of the walls, the weapons had been quite powerful.

  Mick wanted to test that theory, but the ones he tried didn’t work.

  “They probably don’t have any power,” Clayton guessed. “None of the tablets or smaller equipment we’ve found has worked.”

  “Do you think they missed finding this base?” Penny asked.

  “No way of knowing,” Mick said. “Though if we’re planning on getting away from them for a long while, we might want to go deep. The more they have to search for us, the less chance they have of finding us.”

  Clayton led the way to the lowest level. His flashlight revealed a normal looking corridor as he stepped out of the stairwell. There was a T intersection a few dozen meters away.

  “That’s a long way down,” Penny said. “I counted 15 levels. What’s down here?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll go look.” She strode purposefully off to the intersection and looked in both directions. “I’m going a little bit to the right. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Mick finally arrived. “I heard something upstairs. I think we have unwelcome guests in the building.”

  “Damn it,” Clayton muttered. “I’d hoped to avoid this kind of mess.”

  Penny stepped back into sight. “The right side leads to a large room filled with machinery. I haven’t looked to the left yet.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Mick said.

  The right corridor led to something more than a machinery room, he decided. The large hatch that would have normally sealed the room was open. As there was no power, that was probably a good thing.

  Complex equipment filled the massive compartment, but he recognized what some of it was at a glance.

  “This is the power room,” he said. “See those machines over there? They are like the devices that held the blue cube on the crashed ship. Only bigger.”

  They were a lot bigger, actually. The places where the cubes would have fit were empty, so he had no trouble determining how large they should be. Rather than ten centimeters, they were almost a meter in size. That was a lot of power.

  “So,” Penny said as she gazed into the empty slots. “I’m assuming this means whoever left took their power supplies with them. Where did they go, then?”

  “Maybe they went to the other side of the corridor,” Clayton said. “Let’s take a short break. I’m an old man and need to sit for a bit. Eat a little food and drink some water. I also should look at my laptop and see what my assistant was all in a twirl about.”

  They found a handy console to sit at. It was dead, just like everything else. The food and water in the packs were of the travel ration variety, so not so tasty.

  He set up his laptop. He’d powered it on when he grabbed it earlier. That meant it had synced his email before the jamming cut them off. Hopefully.

  Yes, there was the email. He opened the attached video and watched it as he read the report out of the corner of his eye.

  What he saw set him back on his heels. Instantaneous travel. That one thing would make all his work to this point moot. Humanity could go wherever they liked without being bound to one planet like the feudal lords of old had done to keep their serfs on their estates.

  If, of course, the universe wasn’t populated by bloodthirsty aliens waiting to find humanity and serve them up for lunch. The jury was still out on that one.

  The recordings from the strange world with two suns were humbling. His boy had opened the universe up.

  “Well,” he said after the video ended, “I think I know how these people got out. Though it would seem to require power.”

  Clayton explained what they’d found on Mars. Neither of his companions believed him, so he played the video again.

  “You think the boys from here evacuated through one of those and took the power supplies with them?” Mick asked when the video ended. “Is it safe to go looking for them? Even after all this time?”

  “Damned if I know,” Clayton said, “but it beats being frog marched back to the US to stand trial on trumped up charges. Let’s go take a look.”

  The corridor going the other way led into a vast cargo storage facility. Based on the situation on Mars, that spoke well of their chances in finding one of these quantum tunnels.

  In fact, they weren’t hard to locate at all. Three arches sat against the most distant wall. A large machine was set up nearby. It was similar to the power systems found on the crashed ship and had a small blue cube.

  “Someone rigged up a temporary power supply,” Mick said. “Then they went through. I guess they couldn’t take that last bit of power and still keep the portal open.”

  There was a small tablet wired into the machine and a la
rge cable ran to the arch closest them. There was a short tunnel inside that had metal ribs all along its length. A touch showed that the device still had power. It must have been drawing energy from the cube.

  Using what he’d seen in the report as a guide, Clayton looked over the controls. Only one arch was showing, so only the one with power was online. On the off chance that it had the code for Mars in memory, he scrolled up.

  “It only has one code,” he said. “The memory is empty of everything except the last portal. Let me see about entering the code for the Mars portal myself. That would make for a handy escape.”

  Only the control wouldn’t let him enter the code. It was as though the others had hardwired it only to allow transit to this one place. He wondered where that was and why they’d restricted it.

  The sound of the stairwell door opening told him that he didn’t really have a choice but to find out. The US military had almost caught up with them and there was no other way out.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Nathan sealed the facility up and drove with his men to Paris. He honestly wasn’t certain what he hoped to do. The bastard had his mother.

  He’d already tried tracing the phone. No dice. He must have removed the battery.

  A quick stop at the house he’d been using for a holding facility confirmed that the prisoner was gone. He hadn’t escaped, though. Someone from outside had breached the building.

  The police had everything locked down, too. They wouldn’t be able to trace it back to him, most likely. He’d been very careful in how he paid for it. They might find his DNA in there, if they got lucky. He didn’t recall touching very much, but he must have handled a number of things.

  Based on the number of body bags coming out, his people had taken some of their attackers with them. Still, odds were good that none of them had survived.

  Pity. Replacing them would be an inconvenience.

  A trip to the airport found the scene there undisturbed, though for how long, he didn’t know.