by Stephen Moss
But the sound soon revealed itself as laughter. The laughter of a child who has been wrestling with her father, the overwhelming strength of the apparent giant combining with a feeling a complete safety to induce a mild hysteria: joy and fear summed. As the suited Madeline on the screen stood, laughing breathlessly, and clearly none the worse for wear, the screen went blank and the room returned its amazed gaze to the woman standing amongst them.
There was a sense of awe and respect, mixed with surprise and some doubts for her sanity, but none doubted the veracity of her demonstration. What they were witnessing was far outside the capabilities of known science, that much was painfully clear. She smiled and then shrugged a little apologetically for her display on the screen, wondering what they would be thinking if they had seen what else the two women had tried.
Before either of them had tried them out themselves they had tested the suits with a few watermelons, then with a crash-test dummy, sensors in it wired to a nearby bank of computers. When that had gone well, they had gone the whole hog.
Both suited, they had spent nearly an hour shooting, stabbing, mauling, clubbing, and all round beating the living crap out of each other. At one point Madeline had walloped Ayala in the stomach with a sledgehammer. Seeing Ayala tumble across the room had sent them both into fits of laughter. They soon realized their ‘tests’ had descended into something akin to two children checking their bicycle helmets by daring each other to run headfirst into a wall.
The suit was the ultimate toy, making a joke of the most dangerous things on earth. It didn’t make you invincible, far from it. In fact, they had both had a strange whole body bruising after their ‘experiments’, along with a throbbing headache and what might best be termed an unsavory dietary aftermath. But they had survived countless things that would have easily ripped their unprotected bodies apart, and it had been the most fun they’d had in years.
Neal nodded and reassumed control of the room, thanking Madeline for her persuasive demonstration.
“I asked Dr. Cavanagh to speak today for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I wanted you to see something tangible to support what we have been saying, and secondly I wanted that to be something that we have made, something that shows what we can do if we set our minds to the task I am laying out for you today.”
He paused, and then with all the gravitas he could muster, “But most of all I wanted you to see something we have made before you see something they have made.”
The room was ripped back from the revelry of Madeline’s demonstration by Neal’s words. He had expected it. And he had wanted them to have the image of Madeline’s seeming invincibility in their heads before they met the last of his team members.
John saw his cue and stood. He did so quietly and calmly, but his movement in the shadow of Neal’s last words gave his quiet entrance a truck’s worth of weight, and the room’s attention shifted completely to him as he walked slowly into its center.
“Ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Hunt. My friend Dr. Danielson has mentioned a source of information, a source of tools and materials such as Dr. Cavanagh’s intriguing black suit. He has also spoken of something they have made. I am here to tell you that I am the answer to both those riddles. For I am an Agent of the race coming to conquer you.”
What noise the room had been making, mostly only the light whisper of their breathing, stopped.
John went on, “I was part of the team sent to subdue you and mute your nuclear response to the coming attack. Not because my people believed you could win, but because they feared that in fighting for your lives you might destroy the very thing they have travelled all these light-years to claim. Your planet.”
Some of the room were remembering to breathe, but most stared wide-eyed as he went on, passionate now, “But I tell you that you can win. Because we are not united, like my friend Neal is hoping you will be. My people do not all believe in this terrible enterprise. If we have overpopulated our own planet that is no justification for taking yours. And so I was sent by the people I represent to help you. I am not a convert, I am one of the many who believe this cannot be allowed to come to pass, and I have dedicated myself to stopping it.
“But, to demonstrate Neal’s point, and to emphasize my own, I should tell you that I am not what I seem. I am but a copy, an esoteric construct overlaid with the characteristics and traits of the real me to allow me to possess this machine body that allows me to walk among you. A body capable of surviving the blistering speed with which I entered your atmosphere nearly two years ago. A body that represents some measure of what you now face.”
With that he stopped talking a moment and he bent and placed the thumb and two fingers of his right hand on the floor. He then proceeded to lift himself easily into the air, supporting his entire weight upside-down on the three fingers he had placed on the wooden paneled flooring. He ignored the gaping looks and continued talking, turning himself on his three superhuman fingers to face this way and that in a demonstration of how easy this feat was for him.
“See me. Know that I represent what is coming. I am what they can do.” He lowered himself now, supporting himself still on those three fingers, but flattening his body parallel to the floor until he lay flat, raised off the ground only a few inches, in the most impossible yoga position ever imagined. Then, with a flick of his arm, he threw himself up in a smooth arching somersault to land with alarming grace on his two feet once more.
Facing them normally, he now said, “If you think for one moment that this is something that can be ignored, I warn you that you doom everyone you love to certain death by doing so. You must resist. You must devote yourselves to defending this earth. I will help, and there are others who share my beliefs aboard the coming Armada even now, waiting to sabotage some measure of its strength. But do not think we can come close to stopping them alone. We must all stand together.”
The room was with him, completely, they were transfixed, and so he said his final piece: “You should know, also, that even as we begin to prepare for the greater fight ahead, we must also address the remnants of the threat that still walks among us. For I did not come alone, and my colleagues are just as capable as I, and harbor nothing but ill-will toward you and your kind.”
They all recoiled. John raised his hands placatingly.
“Now, we believe two of my colleagues are already dead. One more has joined me, his will for genocide ebbed from him by his time living amongst you. But four other Agents still hide amongst you. And we must find them. They carry terrible purpose and awesome power, and they must be destroyed if we are to have a chance in our enterprise.”
Into the silence, a question came unexpectedly, “Where is this … friend of yours? Your ally.” came a meek voice, it was the Japanese ambassador.
John paused, and many noticed Neal and the other members of his team flinch at the mention of the other Agent.
But John did not avoid the thought of his brother-in-arms for long, “A good question.” John eventually replied, “He was last seen helping the team that was trying to limit the spread of the virus we discussed earlier. They were shot down over the Middle East, a place we were unable to fully inoculate with our antigen.”
John looked at several of the military people in the room, and noted their stoic expressions. Finally he looked at Neal, and found in his intense stare the resolve he sought.
“I am assured we are doing everything we can to find him.” he said, and Neal nodded.
Chapter 5: Running Wild
In the late 1950s the first spy satellites were launched by the United States and Russia as they sought to peek over the iron curtain that hung between them. In the days before digital media, several interposed film cameras were used to capture images on film four times the size of our household standard. Used film reels were then ejected from the satellite in large, heat-resistant canisters to fall to back into the atmosphere, and were intercepted in midair by specially designed planes as they parachuted down. Each Corona spy satellite carried tw
o film reels each, totaling more than six miles in length if unspooled.
In a stark demonstration of the evolution of our information age, a single iPod touch available in any of a thousand stores could easily store hundreds of times the information those reels held, and could transmit it wirelessly in less than an hour.
Just as our ability to record and transmit images has evolved exponentially, so has our ability to capture them. So it is an incredibly powerful camera, two hundred miles above the surface of the earth, looking through a four-meter-wide lens of astonishing acuity, that spots the unfolding chase far below.
It is one of many such eyes around the globe, and it reports back its images in near real-time to USSTRATCOM in Offutt, Nebraska. The images contain the answer to a vital question.
“Neal, this is Barrett,” came the voice over the phone. It was after 11pm, and as usual, Neal was in his new office.
“Barrett, what’s up?” came Neal’s distracted reply. He had spent the day after their conference at Camp David in teleconference meetings with a series of world leaders whose envoys had vigorously opined them to become involved personally.
Recognizing Neal’s distracted tone, Barrett changed his own in order to bring his friend around, “Neal, I have just gotten off the line with STRATCOM. They’ve found Shahim.”
Neal came to with a start, “Where?”
“He seems to be heading away from the crash sites we found yesterday, and he isn’t alone. But he has been pinned down near Mashhad by a platoon of Iranian Commandos. I have requested that they patch through the link to the SecCom in Conference Room 527, can you meet me there?”
“Immediately. What about John and the others?” Neal was already standing and grabbing his laptop.
“John’s already there, Madeline’s driving in as we speak.” said the general.
“Good. I’ll be there momentarily.”
- - -
Lord Mantil knelt in the center of a shabby, dank room, his senses on high alert, his every system primed and ready. He had made it as far through the desert as he could have hoped before being spotted. In the end, he couldn’t have known that a lone pair of army scouts in a jeep had stopped for a rest just beyond a ridge, out of his line of sight, or that one of them had stepped behind a rock to take a pee. Unbeknownst to a heavily burdened Lord Mantil as he sprinted at inhuman speed across the desert, the startled man had watched him from just behind that rock. The lowly infantryman’s brain had refused to register what he was seeing at first, squinting ever harder to make out the motorbike that his mind insisted must be there for the apparition to be moving so fast. Despairing at last, the soldier had summoned his colleague with a wild jerk of his hand, and together they had watched the figure head off down the valley before trying in vain to report the full measure of what they had seen to their superiors.
Shahim had heard the helicopters long before he saw them and bolted for cover. Hiding there, he had seen the choppers hove into view and had instantly seen that they were not transports but attack helicopters, and that they were flying in a search pattern, flaring along ridges and valleys this way and that. Their path was too close to his, their timing to coincidental. They were on his trail.
Also unbeknownst to Shahim, Jennifer, and the still unconscious Jack Toranssen, an eagle-eyed satellite above them had also spotted his hair-raising progress across the desert, and its report had gone to a wholly different command team in the US. But they were a long way away, and in no position to offer him any assistance yet anyway.
Navigating more slowly now, moving from cover to cover, Shahim carried his injured cargo ever farther away from the path that they had been taking. Away from the helicopters that were probing the very route of his intended escape. His plethora of sensors also searched; they searched the wavelengths, listening for information about the men that hunted him. The first reports of the ground forces came through not fifteen minutes before he heard their throttled report. Not much more than dune buggies with a machine-gun emplacement behind its driver’s seat, the buggies went where even a jeep or Humvee would hesitate. A team of them were spreading out in a grid from the point where the three fugitives had last been spotted. And they were moving fast. He couldn’t tell how many there were exactly, or their exact paths, but his every route was now being covered by keen eyes and ears, and his chances of evading them completely were getting slimmer by the moment.
But he was resourceful and quick of mind, and he managed to make it another twenty kilometers before he was spotted again. The radio signal from the buggy was like a flare in his mind. They were zeroing in. All priorities changed. He must find shelter. He must find cover. He must prepare for the battle he could no longer avoid.
The village was little more than a collection of huts, and most of those deserted. The families had headed to the city ahead of the disease that was clearly sweeping amongst them. The first had fallen ill within a day of the virus being dropped, the rest could not know that they were also fatally infected. Maybe in the city they would inadvertently catch the antigen from one of the inoculated. Maybe it would work in time to save them. But probably not. Whether they survived or not, they would never know the source of their death or that their government was hunting one of the sources of their salvation.
Amongst these huts Lord Mantil darted, laying Jack gently down in one and leaving Jennifer to tend to him, and then going in search of anything that might save them. Some kind of transportation. But there was none. The donkeys and camels had been taken to the city, bearing the ill on their forgiving backs. There were no weapons to speak of. He did not want to kill all these people hunting them, but his choices were narrowing. He heard the radio reports, he knew they were closing in. Helicopters and armed dune buggies were converging on him. It was just a matter of time.
“Listen,” he said to Jennifer, “I am going to go out and meet them. At the moment they can have no way of knowing how many of us there are. You must stay here, and you must wait. I will try and keep them away from here. I can move faster alone, and I can withstand a fight better without you than I can if I am carrying you. If you are with me I will not be able to protect you from the firepower they are bringing. I cannot know how long it will take me to get back here, and I must leave Major Toranssen in your hands until I return.”
He looked down at the sleeping man. His brief surgery had relieved the pressure and stemmed the hemorrhaging, but he was far from well. He would need tending and delicate care until he awoke, which could be in five minutes or five days. Lord Mantil looked back at Captain Jennifer Falster, the woman Jack had kidnapped in order to steal her command, whose copilot had died in the explosion that had also killed Martin Sobleski. He knew how she must feel about what had happened to her since she was rendered unconscious on the bridge of her own command, how angry and confused she must still be.
“Jennifer, I can only imagine how hard this has been for you, and confusing. I wish I had the time to tell you everything you need to know but that is not an option for us now. So I must focus on telling you what you need to know right now.” she looked at him with dubious eyes, her fury at what had happened to her and her copilot battling with her incredulity over what she had witnessed the Agent do since his shocking arrival onto the scene.
He saw her doubt and reached out to it, “Jennifer, there is more at stake here than you can know. I am sure you can tell that I am not like you. Well, the truth is you still have no idea just how unlike you I am. But we share a common bond more important than any of our differences, we are part of something greater, something tasked with protecting the innocent from harm. And I can tell you that no one represents that selfless defense of the innocent more than this man.”
He reached out and touched the arm of the sleeping Jack Toranssen, and then, to give the moment even greater gravity, he took her hand and rested it on the major’s gently heaving chest, “I know it must feel like this man has done you a great wrong, and a part of you must long for revenge. I cannot ex
plain this to you now but you must believe me, on the strength of what you have seen me do to try to save you both, when I say that to let him die here would be the greatest crime imaginable. One day, in a safer place, on a quieter night, I will tell you everything. And you will hear it not only from me, but from the most trusted sources you can imagine, you will get the answers to all your questions. And I promise you that if you let this man die tonight, then when that day comes you will regret it more than you can possibly imagine.”
A flash of fear came across her face, only slight, and he assured her, “That is not a threat. I will not judge you for what you do when I am gone from here, I promise you. But I cannot tell you firmly enough that once you know the truth about this man and what you have become embroiled in over the past week, you will judge yourself based on what you do here, tonight. So please, tend to him, just trust me and look after him. All will be explained soon enough, I promise. And if you still want some kind of revenge when you know the truth, I feel certain the major will be the first to offer it to you.”
And with that he stood, leaving her hand resting on the unconscious major. He waited a moment while he looked into her eyes. It was a horrible burden to leave a person, the care of someone they despised, a man so recently responsible for the death of her friend. But Shahim had no choice. He had to go into battle and they would not survive what he was about to face if he took them with him.
With nothing more to be said, he resigned himself to the overriding imperatives of their situation and left the small, slovenly hovel he had laid his charges in. It was not the largest house in the camp. In fact, it was the most ignominious, and also one of the farthest from the Iranian’s angle of approach. Hopefully it would be the last they would check if they searched the camp. But Shahim was going to set his mind and body to stopping the Iranian forces from ever getting to the small settlement, and they were going to be in for the fight of their lives.