Palgrave had made that crazy dream of kaijū—which literally translated as giant beast—come true. What he had made out of his arrogance and lust for power was nothing less than a nightmare, with the potential for 9/11 times a thousand.
Palgrave was kneeling down, his hands behind his head, and he still held the device that had made this … horror … possible.
Abernathy walked up to him, nodded to Ani and Joe, and then told Palgrave, “Stop this. End it now.”
“I have thousands of hostages,” Palgrave said. “And they are all tied together into the most devastating weapon this planet has ever seen. I hardly think you’re in a position to issue orders.”
As if to underline the point, Palgrave stroked the device behind his head and the air was instantly full of the crackle of electricity, closely followed by a truly horrible sound—thousands of voices screaming in pain.
“I want safe passage,” Palgrave said. “For me. My wife. Or I will just let … that … run free. It will feast, I’m sure. It will destroy, I’m certain. And it will …”
“… not make it another step farther!” Abernathy said, and his voice was full of steel. “I gave you a chance to end this, to redeem yourself if only slightly. Ani?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I just sent you a file. Use it.”
Ani took out her tablet and there, sure enough, sat a new file on the home screen called Earthlink.
“I thought I’d let you do the honors,” Abernathy said. “Call it a reward for your excellent work so far. A present for joining YETI.”
She clicked on the file and it opened with a map of the world, places highlighted by red dots.
Text scrolled at one corner
>connecting to observatories
>>
>>>
>>>>
>connected Jodrell Bank
>connected Mullard
>connected Pabody/Reich
>connected Pushchino
>connected Arecibo
>connected Guadalajara
>connected Hat Creek
>connected Green Bank
>connected Magdalena Ridge
Ani recognized a couple of the names as observatories, and as the names scrolled down the screen, she realized that the program was linking together every radio telescope across the planet.
>connected Mauna Kea
>connected Miyun
>connected Nobeyama
>connected Murchison
>connected Hartebeesthoek
>connected Amundsen-Scott
“Professor Klein has been a massive help,” Abernathy said. “I mean, once we explained that we meant him—and the creature he was carrying—no harm at all, he explained the reason behind Pabody/Reich’s rocketing electricity bill.”
Palgrave looked entirely confused and Abernathy laughed.
“You didn’t know.” There was a mocking tone in Abernathy’s voice. “You thought that Imogen Bell was the only one who’d heard the real sound, and that was why you kidnapped her, and used her as your first test subject? She became your first guinea pig. For two years you threw so many variations of the sound at her until, finally, one stuck. Then you could include your own instructions into the mix and voilà! Instant zombie slaves. But just to make sure, you played it to your own son. You started your music movement and selected new converts for your mind control judged on their intellectual and socioeconomic merits.
“But what you didn’t know was that Klein was sitting there at Pabody/Reich, desperately trying to phone home. He didn’t have the power to reach the creature that he was a part of, but guess what?”
Palgrave looked baffled. His arrogant air was already fading away, leaving him looking out of his league.
“Do the honors, please, Ani,” Abernathy said, and she looked at the screen and saw a deep red button that read TRANSMIT.
“Oh, you beautiful man,” Ani said, and Abernathy might even have blushed as she pressed the button.
“Every observatory across the globe just called out,” Abernathy told Palgrave. “Loud. Clear. The message, if you’re interested, was HELP!
“We’ve been transmitting a message for … well, long enough, actually … because as of ten minutes ago something entered our solar system, something that was traveling at enormous speed, and I mean really really fast. Astronomers and physicists are going to be writing papers about this for years.
“Oh, did I say that the message HELP was on the precise frequency of the original message, and also a few variations on your modified version. It’s heading here because you put all of your eggs in one basket. Ani here just sent it our exact location. Hyde Park, London W2.”
The sky went dark above them.
“Mommy’s home,” Abernathy said. “She’s probably pretty angry.”
Joe knew that Abernathy had timed that speech to the second, knew that he was being fed the location of the creature from the stars, all so that he could achieve the dramatic effect of mentioning their location and the sky going dark.
Although dark didn’t quite fit. But Joe wasn’t sure there was a word that could do any better. Human language described things that human beings were capable of describing. If you passed beyond the sum of human experience, language would, inevitably, start coming up short.
No one was trying to talk anyway.
It made a nice change.
Everyone was looking up into the sky.
It was the only show in town worth looking at.
Above Hyde Park there was an area of sky that surely wasn’t quite the same as any sky that had ever appeared over it before. It just took a while to figure out why that was. Joe found that he needed to actually force his eye to translate the shape that was threaded through—or rather between—the sky. The eye kept trying to flee away, to pretend that it could not see the vast pattern that boiled and churned and twisted in the spaces between sky.
He kept thinking that: between sky, because whatever it was that hung there above them was not actually in the sky, it was not across the sky, or even on the sky; but, rather, it seemed to fit in the spaces between, as if it existed slightly out of phase with earthly things and tried to slip, unnoticed, through them.
When Joe realized that he needed to force his eye to connect with its form, and needed to look in a slightly different, almost sidelong way, he found it became easier to pull a shape out from what had seemed at first formless. Now he could understand how it fit together—maybe only intersecting with human reality, rather than existing within it. He could begin to say what it might be, what it might look like.
Areas of the sky had become stretched tight around spherical bulges—many dozens of them, like transparent blisters—and the spheres were linked with a complex network of ragged cables and distended tubes; spheres, cables, and tubes that were only made visible because of the way their presence forced the sky to bend around them. Tubes connected the spheres in a kind of ever-shifting lattice, while the cables seemed more random in their distribution, carrying sparks from section to section as if moving power to where it was needed.
There was no sense of the head/body/limbs structure favored by Earth creatures and Joe wondered if this … space traveler … was more like a cosmic box jellyfish … or coral … or bacterium … or …
It was no good.
Analogies fell down as soon as they were made, and comparing it to terrestrial things seemed nothing more than a distraction from the true wonder of the thing.
Joe saw the shape in the sky flex, and dozens of neon-bright electrical bolts rained down from it, all angled in toward the striding sculpture of human kids that Palgrave had thought was going to buy him out of the trouble he was in.
The electrical bolts didn’t hit the colossus, not exactly, anyway. What actually seemed to happen was that they stopped just short of its surface, then changed state from bolt to liquid, a liquid that poured across the colossus, coating every inch of every surface in seconds, before exploding into incandescent light
.
Joe shielded his eyes from the light’s intensity, then watched as that brightness traveled back upward into the sky creature. The creature was draining power from the colossus, and Joe could see the bonds that held the whole thing together breaking apart, being pulled upward into the creature.
It was like skinning the creature with lasers.
They’ll fall, he thought bleakly. Take away those bonds and they’ll all die!
Already Joe could see hundreds of kids starting to spill from the wound where a huge swath of electrical force had been peeled away from the surface of the composite creature and fed back into the parent above.
Joe couldn’t watch. He turned his head away.
When the kids started leaking from wounds on the kaijū creature’s body, Ani found herself wondering what had been the point of it all. They’d stopped Palgrave, okay, but if those kids out there died, then it hadn’t been worth the price. Not even to see Palgrave’s look of abject terror as the creature from the sky set about dismantling the only thing he’d actually “achieved” with almost casual ease.
Ani wondered if all Abernathy had really done was shift the blame. If the army had thrown bombs at that thing and succeeded in stopping it, then there would have been the blood of thousands of kids staining their hands. If an alien creature stopped it with the same result, then something else was to blame.
As the first few hundred bodies started pouring from the loosening bonds, as they started plummeting toward the ground, Ani wondered if Abernathy would ever be able to truly live with the consequences.
Awake now, the kids could see the ground rushing up to meet them, and their screams were sounds of terror ripped from their throats. A cascade of human bodies …
… suddenly stopped in midair.
Ani thought that she was imagining things—that she was wanting something to happen so badly that she had invented an ending for this where nobody died—but one of the soldiers was risking Abernathy’s anger by gasping and pointing, and she knew that it was true.
The people freed from the body of the composite creature were hovering in the air, attached to the alien mass in the sky by beams of light that were either fields of energy, or tentacles, or hands, or wires.
The remaining mass of people suddenly burst, but those beams of light were there to prevent their fall. They were close enough that Ani could see the strands that tied them together, holding them in the air above the park, and she felt her fear evaporate, giving way to wonder as she saw the people descend slowly toward the park, handled gently by the alien network. It flexed again and the people were suddenly organized back into a crowd, albeit a crowd that seemed for all the world to be standing on nothing more than air. A tremendous pulse of sound tore through the park, a deep sound that Ani felt reverberate through her body, making her feel like a tiny part of some vast, cosmic orchestra, and she felt light spread through her, filling her with a sense of limitless space and dimension, and then before her eyes, the crowd began to descend slowly toward Earth, bathed in an unnatural glow, before they were deposited—with absolute care and precision—onto the ground.
The creature in the sky thickened—became completely visible for the first time, and Ani was reminded of neurons in the human brain, of jellyfish, of hoses, of bacteria, of electric cables, of neurotransmitters, of planets in orbit, of the darkness of space and the brightness of stars, of atoms and electrons and seaweed and cells and circuits and wires and octopi and nebulae—and the people that had been part of that terrible mass of Palgrave’s design were all looking upward into the heavens, staring in blissful awe at the thing as it contracted into one huge comet-shaped mass.
The air felt like it was charged with impossible forces and Ani felt tears streaming down her cheeks as the comet-creature flexed again and then the soundforms were pouring upward from every person in the park who had absorbed them, not wormlike at all, but more like infant versions of the thing that hovered above them.
The soundforms were drawn into the parent mass, fusing with it, making the shape grow and shift shape one last time until it was like one of those single-celled creatures they’d looked at in science one time—protozoa—although she knew that the comparison, once again, fell short of describing the phenomenon and was just her human mind’s attempt to draw meaning from something it was not ready to truly comprehend.
Soon all of the soundforms were swallowed up by the creature, and it flowed through the sky, trailing behind it reverberations that seemed forged on the soundboard of infinity and made all music she’d ever experienced seem dull and cold and lifeless. It pulsed, throwing cilia in all directions, before it turned itself upward and disappeared into the sky.
She was left there feeling lost and empty and sad, like she had touched something profound, had been on the verge of understanding things beyond her mind’s capacity, and then it had been snatched away from her.
A voice behind her snapped her out of it and she turned, but not before she watched the crowd in the park suddenly awaken, looking as puzzled and lost and empty as she herself felt.
It was Abernathy who broke the silence.
“Joe,” he said, his voice strained, but still commanding. “Take him down.”
Joe realized that this was Abernathy’s idea of a reward for him, much like Ani’s had been to trigger the final call to that … that … whatever that had been.
Joe turned to where Victor Palgrave stood, a pistol in his hand. When all else failed, he’d turned to a concealed weapon. As if it were going to help him. Three AK rifles were trained on him, but Abernathy waved them aside and Joe took three giant steps forward and stood facing Palgrave.
“Put the gun down,” Joe ordered, and his voice was hard and made fear dance across Palgrave’s eyes.
He held the gun with a trembling hand, looking for a way out that simply refused to arrive, and then he let go of it and it fell to the grass in front of him.
Joe hit him hard in the gut, and when Palgrave bent over from the blow, Joe grabbed his arm, twisted it until it was behind his back, caught a cable tie that Abernathy tossed him, and bound Palgrave’s hands behind his back.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Joe said. “So please, remain silent.”
Then he handed Palgrave over to the soldiers, picked up the gun, emptied it of its magazine, and jettisoned the round from the chamber. Then he walked over to Ani, put his arm around her, and led her out of the park.
CHAPTER TWENTY: ENDS ARE ALSO BEGINNINGS
Gretchen poured tea and put cups down in front of Abernathy, Ani, and Joe.
“So you got your headquarters back, then,” she said with a faint smile on her lips. “Did it take a lot of explaining?”
Abernathy sipped his tea, made an appreciative noise, and then shook his head.
“Several law enforcement agencies got caught with their pants down. Since YETI was the one that managed to sort things out for them, losing our HQ to invaders has been overlooked. We’re back and—without meaning to boast—we’re actually bigger and better than ever.”
“And how are my favorite spies holding up?” Gretchen asked, looking over at Joe and Ani.
“Good,” Ani said. “I’m looking forward to the training program, but I know I have a long way to go. It’s good to find something to fight for, something tangible. Somewhere that I can actually make a difference.”
“We couldn’t have done it without you,” Abernathy said, and Joe nodded agreement. “Or without you, Gretchen.”
“I just looked some things up,” Gretchen said modestly. “Information is power, not the person who provides it.”
“You made the connections,” Joe insisted. “You found out that Klein was trying to contact that space thing…. What ever happened to him, anyway?”
“The thing inside him went home with mommy,” Abernathy said, “along with the things in Lennie Palgrave and Imogen Bell and the other kids we picked up from the Warhouse and the kids from the park. And the .wav file is
gone, too, pulled from every system that held it. Space reached down and plucked up every trace of the sound, and took it back out there with it.”
“So it’s over?” Ani asked. “Once and for all?”
Abernathy started to nod, then stopped himself. “I don’t know,” he said. “We just called that thing down from space. It knows where we are now. Maybe it doesn’t care. Maybe we’re nothing more than ants to it. Or maybe it will start to get curious about us. Could be we haven’t seen the last of it.”
Gretchen wrinkled her nose. “Thank you, Mr. Gloomy. If it took all trace of itself back into space with it, I think it’s gone for good.”
“I hope you’re right,” Abernathy said. “Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. You put a lot of the pieces together for us. Made me feel quite inadequate.”
“I wouldn’t have had any pieces to put together if it wasn’t for Ani and Joe. I take it this is the beginning of a new partnership for our intrepid heroes?”
Abernathy stood up, buttoned his jacket, and winked at her. “We’ll have to see about that.”
The bar was empty and quiet and also just what they needed. They found a table by the big windows at the back, sat down opposite each other, and looked out over the River Cam. The water was still and calm, with hardly a breath of wind to disturb its surface, and then the blade-like body of a rowing eight cut through it, sending indignant ducks scattering, turning the area of river into an interference pattern of tiny waves and ripples.
Ani took the drink from her dad’s hand and gave him a rueful smile.
“It’s weird, you know? When those men showed up at our place with guns, the last thing I thought would come out of it was a job offer. A new beginning … moving away …”
Ani looked at her dad. He was studying her over the top of his cider, his blue eyes twinkling in the light. This was the hardest part of the whole process. The part that made it all real. Made it final.
“It’s not weird,” he said, squeezing her arm. “I’ve always known that you were meant for better things. More than I could ever offer you.”
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