by James Axler
With a mental command, Grant ordered the sensor array to give him a full analysis of the hovering craft. There was no further data than that he had already seen, so he blinked rapidly, commanding a full spectral analysis, jumping from gamma to X-rays before slipping over to the other side of visibility: infrared, terahertz, microwaves. The rapidly changing views on his HUD were gaudy as an old black-light picture, but only the ultraviolet scan gave any notable information. The ultraviolet spectrum is where electromagnetic radiation is visible, and the display showed an inverted pyramid, its walls insubstantial, the points of the base corresponding with the two golden aircraft that hovered above.
The Manta was the third corner of the triangle, Grant realized, picturing it in two dimensions in his mind’s eye. He was in some kind of magnetic beam, he concluded, and it was pulling his craft up into the sky as if it were a great claw. The beam was being projected somehow from the two golden aircraft hovering above him, but how they were doing it and what interaction was necessary to create the beam itself he couldn’t know.
As he ascended above the level of the highest tree branch, Grant leaned back in his pilot’s seat and continued playing possum. Let them think he had died in the crash—it might be the only way to find out where they had taken Domi.
* * *
GRANT’S MANTA WAS automatically tagged on Kane’s display and Kane watched as it ascended above the tree line, a yellow reticle identifying it as friendly. Kane’s eyes were narrowed as he observed through the magnifying software of the Manta’s sensors. The mysterious visitors hovered in place as Grant’s Manta was lifted into the air.
“Looks like we hooked our fish,” Kane said, bringing the Manta back to life. “Or maybe they hooked Grant.”
“Kane, wait,” Brigid instructed, slapping her palm against the back of his pilot’s seat.
“What?” Kane responded irritably, still holding the joystick as he got ready to leave their hiding place amidst the trees.
“Don’t move too soon,” Brigid reminded. “You’ll scare them off.”
“Grant’s in danger,” Kane snapped.
“And aren’t you the one who told me that that was his favorite place to be?” Brigid snapped back.
Kane snarled something incomprehensible in reply, but he eased his grip on the stick. Brigid was right. “If he gets killed and haunts me, I’m telling him this was your idea,” he growled.
“Let’s just see where they’re going first,” Brigid said, ignoring Kane’s jibe. “We don’t want to blow our chance to get Domi back.”
Arranged in a loose triangular formation, the two ovoid vehicles turned northward, pulling Grant’s Manta along behind them. All three aircraft began to accelerate and then, without warning, disappeared entirely from Kane’s scopes.
“What the—?” Kane growled.
In the seat behind him, Brigid felt her stomach sink. Please don’t lose him, she thought.
* * *
WITHIN THE TIGHT cockpit of his Manta, Grant found himself jostled around as his aircraft was yanked away at high speed from the crash site. His muscles and flesh seemed to be pulled back as he was slammed against the acceleration couch, and it felt as it his bones were being yanked through his skin. He had never known such speed—certainly not in an atmospheric vehicle.
The sensor displays in his helmet were going wild, colored symbols flashing in quick succession as the Manta warned its pilot that they were out of control with the engines still powered down.
“I know,” Grant growled as his head slammed into the starboard viewport. He cursed as he tasted blood in his mouth. His eyes teared and he blinked the tears away, struggling to see through the blur. Then he realized it wasn’t the tears that were making his vision blurry—through the viewport all that could be see was a green-again, blue-again blur where the trees and sky rolled past at incredible speed. The Manta was spinning, Grant realized, rapidly rotating on its y-axis so that it went upside down and right-side up, over and over. Grant cursed again, wishing he could check on Kane, speak to him via their Commtacts.
Up ahead, Grant saw the two fixed spots where the golden aircraft towed him through the air on their magnetic beam. For now, he was at their mercy.
“I only hope Kane’s keeping up,” he muttered.
* * *
KANE WAS NOT keeping up. His heart was drumming against his chest as he fed full power to the Manta, speeding to the site of their last visual. The air was clear, and a quick run-through of the sensor feeds showed no evidence of where the three aircraft had disappeared to.
“He’s gone,” Kane spat. “No energy signature, no trail. We’ve lost him.”
Brigid eyed the empty sky from the rear seat. “There has to be some way to track him,” she insisted. “Think...think...”
“Cerberus!” Brigid and Kane exclaimed together.
Brigid started running a full-scope analysis on the data the Manta had amassed, while Kane hailed Cerberus over his Commtact. He was relieved when Lakesh’s eager tones filled his ears.
“We’ve lost Grant,” Kane explained, cutting to the chase.
Lakesh sounded astonished. “Lost how?” he asked.
“His Manta was there and then it wasn’t,” Kane summarized. “Last visual, he was being towed by two aircraft that matched the description Falk gave us. Headed on a northeast bearing and just disappeared before my eyes.”
“And you didn’t go with him?” Lakesh began, then corrected himself. “Of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t be contacting us if you had. What do you need me to do, my friend?”
“Sensors picked up some data that Baptiste is running through as fast as she can,” Kane explained. “But we need a position for Grant’s transponder. Plus anything you can add from the Keyhole sat.”
“The instruments are showing a significant cation trail, positively charged,” Brigid added.
* * *
SITTING AT A DESK in the Cerberus ops room, Lakesh listened over the earpiece as Kane read out the specific figures relating to the cation trail. Domi had been missing for thirty-two hours now and Lakesh had enlisted most of the Cerberus personnel to cover for this sting op, placing himself at the heart of the communications network so that he could field any messages that came through.
“You heard Baptiste. That all mean anything to you?” Kane finished.
Lakesh nodded, concern etched on his face. He had been a physicist of significant renown in his day. He could already visualize the data in his mind’s eye and see how it related to what had happened in the skies over Brazil. “Kane, what you’ve recorded there is an ion transfer,” Lakesh stated.
“Say again?” Kane requested. “In English.”
“An ion transfer,” Lakesh explained, “is the process wherein electrostatic acceleration of charged positive ions is generated to release incredible amounts of energy. In the twentieth century, rocket engines employed this system to achieve liftoff.”
“So, we’re looking at a rocket trail?” Kane asked.
“The application of an ion engine would suggest as much,” Lakesh confirmed. “Did you see anything take off?”
“No, we were still a couple of miles out when it happened,” Kane clarified. “Didn’t wanna spook them. Looked to me like Grant and his new friends just—pop!—winked out of existence.”
Two desks away from Lakesh, staff physician Reba DeFore tilted her computer monitor toward him and called for his attention.
“One moment, my friend,” Lakesh told Kane before examining DeFore’s screen. “Yes, Reba—what do we have?”
“Grant’s transponder data,” Reba explained, indicating one of three sets of data that showed on her screen. There, three lines were glowing in different colors alongside a numerical display for his blood pressure. The numbers looked normal enough, but as Lakesh watched, they cut abr
uptly before reappearing a second or two later. The other two displays remained rock solid.
“What is that?” Lakesh asked her. “What’s happening?”
“We’re losing the data in a fixed three-quarter-time pattern,” DeFore said. “Kane and Brigid are still in place—” she indicated the other two data feeds “—but Grant’s has been glitching like this for the past fifty seconds.”
“As though our equipment can’t fix on the transponder signal,” Lakesh mused. He was already turning to Donald Bry, where the copper-headed man sat at another terminal analyzing geographic data. “Donald? What do you have for me?”
“We can still pinpoint Grant’s position,” Bry said with his usual concerned expression. “But the transponder signal is getting weaker. He’s moving fast—by my estimate he’s traveling at six hundred miles per hour, although I’d need to run through the figures properly to...”
“Yes, yes,” Lakesh quieted the man. “Kane, we have a fix on Grant and he’s moving fast.”
* * *
“HOW FAST?” KANE ASKED, sweat-slick grip still locked on the Manta’s joystick.
“Six hundred miles per hour on a bearing of north-northeast,” Lakesh replied. “He’s showing as twenty-four miles from your position with the distance increasing rapidly.”
“On it,” Kane snapped back, adjusting the trajectory of his Manta and kicking in full power. Engines roared as Kane ramped up the acceleration.
“Distance now is twenty-five miles,” Lakesh confirmed.
Kane’s Manta swooped over the trees, speeding on a north-northeast bearing.
Lakesh’s voice came over the Commtact again. “Twenty-six.”
Brigid gasped. “Kane—we’ll never catch him at this rate. It’s not possible.”
Kane shook his head, the bulky bronze helmet shaking. “Gotta be a way,” he muttered, peering through the sensors at empty sky. He wasn’t going to lose his partner, no way.
“Twenty-seven,” Lakesh’s voice chimed emotionlessly.
In that instant, Kane made a decision, pulling back on the joystick and tipping the Manta up on its tail. “Hang on to something,” he told Brigid somewhat belatedly as the g-forces drove them both back into their seats.
Mantas were capable of operating inside the atmosphere and outside of it, Kane recalled, but space travel required a whole different set of principles for its execution—which meant that the Manta utilized an entirely different system to achieve it. He checked the altimeter as his craft climbed to thirty-four thousand feet in ninety seconds. A little higher and they would move out of the troposphere and the pressure would drop. The Manta’s air pulse engines roared as it hurtled straight up in a vertical climb to the very limits of the atmosphere.
Brigid felt herself being dragged back in her seat as the incredible craft hit Mach 1.
* * *
GRANT’S SENSES WERE reeling but he was beginning to get the hang of things again. He was being pulled at incredible speed toward their mystery destination.
The sensors informed Grant that he had moved thirty-two miles already, and there was no sign of slowing down. The twin golden craft continued hurtling ahead of him, visible in the viewport as they dragged him onward. They were moving so fast that Grant wondered if they would leave Brazilian air space before much longer.
Then something caught Grant’s eye, shining in the distance like a golden aberration in the cloudless blue blanket of the sky. It shimmered into place like a rising flame splitting from a fire, ebbing and sparkling as he tried to see just what it was.
Below, trees were hurtling past as all three vehicles continued to speed toward that distant speck in the sky. It hovered a mile and a half above the ground, static and serene, with a strange waver to its appearance that reminded him of heat haze. As if it was not fully there, Grant realized, like a hologram or an object seen in those confused seconds between dreaming and full wakefulness.
At the speed they were traveling, the speck became a circle in just a few moments, and Grant could begin to make out some details. His first thought was that it was a star, but as he neared he saw that the thing was unbalanced. Yes, it resembled a star, but one that had been cut in half along its horizontal midpoint, the lower section discarded. The jagged top glowed like a miniature sun while its base was entirely missing in a straight-line cut.
“What have we here?” Grant muttered as he peered at the strange star through the magnification sensors of the Manta’s heads-up display. The lenses sought to get closer, dimming and filtering the brightness of the distant object to prevent the pilot from being dazzled. Strangely, the sensors could not seem to lock on to the object—each time they got close, the view would shimmer and the image would be lost, causing them to reset and begin the process again.
“Darn thing isn’t solid,” Grant realized, shutting down the sensor scan.
Details continued to pan across his field of vision in colored numerals, but the stuttered magnification ceased, and with it Grant’s sense of disorientation.
Grant waited impatiently, wishing he could contact Kane, wishing he could find out where it was he was being taken. Up ahead, the golden half star resolved itself into something more solid, and Grant could make out its details properly for the first time. It wasn’t a star; it was a city, gold as the sun’s rays, floating above the ground, its towering buildings thrust up into the blue sky.
“Well, that gives a while new meaning to the term skyscrapers,” Grant muttered incredulously.
Elsewhere
THE BUILDING LOOKED like an anvil cast in copper, with a mighty waterfall running down one of its two-hundred-foot-high walls. The waterfall fed a deep stream that surrounded the building entirely and was filled with genetically modified piranha, fast and hungry, ensuring that no one could get in or out without the express permission of the king.
One man, however, came and went as he pleased: the guards merely waved Ronald through the security, for he was above reproach. He glided past the main desk in his sleek-sided motion chair, moving into an elevator that worked via the principles of compressed air, like the internal postal system in old buildings of the 1930s. A moment later he was sitting before the incarceration complex where the building’s lone guest was held. The interior walls here were clear, so that the guest’s every action could be observed.
The single inhabitant was called Wertham the Strange, and he sat cross-legged atop a table he had pulled up to one of the transparent walls, staring down at his visitor across its transparent barricade. Wertham’s face was sunken, hungry, and the whites of his eyes had taken on a yellow cast like egg yolks, dark pupils watching from their midst. His hair—brown with flecks of gray like steel wool—was cut in an unflattering basin style from which it had begun to grow free, the tangles curling up from his scalp as if they were rising flames. He wore the simple clothes of a prisoner, a cotton shirt and pants dyed the bright green of freshly mown grass.
“I tire of waiting,” Wertham said in a voice like nails down a blackboard. “Tell me you have news.”
Ronald turned to the guards and instructed them to leave with the slightest incline of his head. He was a neat man in middle age, wearing flexible indigo armor and a skullcap. He sat in the confines of the motion chair, his legs unmoving. The chair was metallic red with twin hornlike struts towering behind it similar to upturned elephant’s tusks. “Your pleas are heard in the royal court each week,” he assured Wertham, “and each week a new reason is found to hold you longer.”
“They think me strange,” Wertham said. “Wertham the Strange. Because my ideas are too wild for them.”
Ronald nodded. “You see things differently from the norm,” he said. “It can be hard for others to accept that. Fear guides their hearts at each clemency hearing.”
Wertham nodded. It was true. Even now, he could see the shapes that hid themsel
ves from human eyes. No amount of jailing would cleanse that from his system.
“Plead my case, Doctor,” Wertham urged as the last guard shuffled out.
Ronald looked down at his legs where they were held in the motion chair, and when he looked back at Wertham his face had taken on a bitter aspect. “They won’t listen. They look at me as if I am worthless because of my injury.”
“They think the same of me because I dared to think further than merely technology, brother,” Wertham agreed.
“I’m not your brother, Wertham.”
“But we share the same goal—to see Authentiville’s stagnating regime overthrown. The same goal and the same hate.”
Ronald looked down at his legs again before shaking his head. “You can stop the pain? You can make me walk?”
“A king stands proudly above his subjects,” Wertham hissed. “Have faith, brother. Am I not the master of all things strange and all things wonderful?”
Dr. Ronald nodded solemnly. “You have so much to teach,” he said. “If only they would listen.”
“They will, brother,” Wertham assured him. “They will.”
Chapter 7
Serra do Norte, Brazil
Kane’s Manta rocketed straight up, crossing the faint blue line that marked the edge of the atmosphere and plunged onward toward the cold vacuum of space.
“Kane,” Brigid gasped through clenched teeth, “what...are...you...?”
“Al...most...there,” Kane replied, struggling to speak as the press of gravity pushed down hard against his chest. Even the g-compensator of the Manta was not capable of alleviating the change in pressure at this climb speed; it required time to catch up—time Kane didn’t have to spare.
The curvature of Earth was visible through the side viewports of the Manta. It was like looking down at a blue-white marble from very close, the great line of the horizon curving away into the distance.
Kane didn’t take much notice of the view. His mind was focused on the sensor display, where the Manta continued to track the movement of Grant’s transponder, blipping in and out of reception. The sensors didn’t tell him much; he only hoped it was enough to track Grant before he disappeared entirely, the same way Domi had.