“I’ll handle that.”
Cotton was floating sideways, trying to get his spin under control. “What does he mean ‘deal with’ me?”
Morrison’s armored black oval of a face remained focused on Alexa’s. His voice came across now at a more conversational volume. “This isn’t your field of expertise, Alexa. You should be back at base. Hedrick has been looking for you.”
“I don’t report to you.”
His voice grew impatient again. “Neither do you have the right to come here and interfere with my operation.”
“You’ve already captured the prisoners. I’m taking control of them now. Don’t even think of ordering me around.”
“Ah, I forgot. There’s only one person you report to . . .” He paused and then looked upward slightly. “Get Director Hedrick on a q-link to me immediately.”
Alexa apparently wasn’t waiting around. She extended her booted feet, and then she, Cotton, and Grady began to fall upward, slowly at first.
Grady felt little acceleration as he rose into the night sky, and now he could see how many marines were lying unconscious all around them in the moonlight—hundreds.
Morrison’s voice shouted after her, louder now. “Alexa, I’m not letting you take those prisoners!”
“Don’t follow me, Morrison. I mean it.”
They ascended faster, rising above the trees, and now Grady could see the vast expanse of farmland stretching beyond. And the fallen army around them.
His synesthesia made even this horrible vista beautiful, as the stars above were wondrous.
• • •
Morrison popped his visor with a hiss, revealing his weathered, scarred face. There were now six of his sons around him in full diamondoid armor, and they likewise popped their visors.
“What’s up with Granny?”
Morrison covered his microphone and hissed, “Go after her. Get the prisoners back while I get Hedrick on q-link.”
The sons exchanged worried looks and covered their mikes as well.
“Fuck that . . .”
“Iota’s right, Dad.”
“I’m not getting in the middle of a fight between Granny and Hedrick.”
“She’s supposed to be ‘priceless intellectual property’ or some shit.”
“She’s his goddamned girlfriend.”
“What if she fights back?”
“That bitch is dangerous.”
Morrison aimed a diamond-hard black finger at them. “Get your asses up there and follow her.”
“She’s on a tracker. We don’t have to follow her.”
Morrison checked in with tactical operations again. “TOC, this is Alpha Dog, do we have the director on q-link yet?”
“The director left the command center when you radioed mission completion. Is this an emergency, Alpha Dog?”
“Yes, it’s a damned emergency. Tell him I found Alexa, and that she left with both prisoners—interfering with my command.”
There was a pause. “Stand by, Alpha Dog.”
Morrison gazed up into the stars and finally pounded the side of the armored Stryker with his diamondoid fist, putting a dent in its armor. “Goddamnit!” With that he ripped out the comm module from his helmet and tossed it to one of his sons—who caught it deftly. “Hold onto that for me.”
“What are you doing?”
“Someday you boys will learn it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.” Morrison’s visor swept across his face with a hiss, and he immediately fell into the sky, followed by a trail of debris.
His sons watched him go and then turned to one another with worried looks.
“To hell with this.”
“Let’s get back to base. I don’t want to be downrange when this shit hits the fan.”
• • •
Grady watched the moon’s reflection on a lake below them and stared in wonder at the world from five thousand feet. The tragedy of recent events was flowing through him at the same time the beauty of the natural world flowed over him. It was a beautiful summer night. Turned backward, he wasn’t blinded by the wind. Judging by the stars, he figured they were “falling” to the north—back toward Chicago. It was a miraculous feeling even given his black mood.
He’d invented the gravity mirror, and now, before he died, he could see how marvelous it was.
He was still trying to process all that had happened in the last ten minutes. Davis and Falwell were dead. Killed in a horrible way. So, too, was the deputy secretary of Homeland Security—their bodies incinerated as they shrieked. Grady turned to face Alexa as she guided the three of them in the shade of her gravity mirror. He could see Cotton looking below them, probably warm enough in his protective, orange body armor.
Alexa cast a glance at Grady and shouted, “I owe you an apology.”
He just stared at her.
“I realize how feeble that sounds. Apologizing for destroying your life. I didn’t know.”
“But now you do.”
She nodded. “Your scars . . . I checked and—”
“Then you really didn’t know, did you?” He could see what looked like true emotional pain in her eyes.
“My God, what you had to go through. I had no idea.”
Grady felt relief wash over him. He strangely felt he could believe her.
But then the flow of air over them stopped. They just hung there, suspended. There was no sensation of deceleration. They just stopped.
Alexa was busy checking her systems and looking up at projected displays in her helmet.
Cotton shouted, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” She was ticking through items: “Third of a g, zero pitch, zero yaw . . . we should be moving.”
Just then a familiar voice came across the night air to them. “You’re not going anywhere with my prisoners, Alexa.”
They turned to see Morrison floating toward them in the moonlight. He aimed an armored finger at them as he did so, the tip glowing fiercely.
Alexa stopped checking her gear. There was a grim look on her face. “Integrated extogravis. That’s new.”
“I can nullify your gravity mirror. Quite a toy you invented, Mr. Grady. One improvement we were able to make was the ability to instantiate the mirror at an arbitrary distance.”
Grady’s eyes widened, and he couldn’t help but feel amazed even as he was horrified. “But . . . how . . .”
Alexa now floated alongside them, just as helpless as they were. Like a fly in a spiderweb. “I didn’t know they’d built projectors small enough to mount in assault armor.”
“Not that big really. Just requires lots of power. Certainly doesn’t fit in a flight suit like yours. So I guess Hedrick doesn’t give you all of his toys. He’s that smart at least.”
They all four hung there silently in midair, five thousand feet above rural Illinois in a cloudless night sky.
“Let us leave, Morrison.”
He shook his head at her. “You’re free to go once you turn over my prisoners.”
“Hedrick lied to me. You all lied to me. Why?”
“You’re in your fifties, Alexa. It’s time to grow up.”
“You knew what was going on at Hibernity.”
“I’m so sick of your sustained innocence. You get to waltz around and have everyone love you. You’re the future of humanity, while my project gets canceled and I become a genetic punch line. Well, I’m a survivor. I do the dirty work that no one knows about. When things need to get done, the director counts on me and my sons to do them. The outside world is a ruthless, shitty place. At least Grady and Cotton here actually have a purpose—what’s your purpose? Other than being a genetic library for when they finally figure out how to transfer minds from one body to another?”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“
Oh, you didn’t know about that project either? Well, we don’t tell you everything.”
Alexa stared at him, her jaw clenching.
“Now push Grady and Cotton over here.” He aimed a gloved finger on his other hand, apparently a weapon integrated into the suit.
Cotton tried to swim through the air to get behind her. “Alexa, you know they forced me to do this. I haven’t harmed a soul, I swear it.”
Morrison laughed. “You’re no saint, Cotton. Did Cotton ever tell you where we found him—a master thief trying to break into BTC headquarters? Bit off more than you could chew, eh?”
“Alexa, don’t let him do this.”
“Your ten years is just about up, anyway, Cotton.”
Alexa drew a black spikelike device from her belt. Its tip glowed with an intense indigo light.
Morrison lowered his weapon arm. “A positron gun? That’s a killing weapon, Alexa. Where did you get that?”
“You know damn well.”
Morrison’s ink-black armored face was inscrutable, but he nodded slowly to himself. “He’s weak.”
“Let us go, Morrison.”
“Listen to yourself, Alexa. You’re breaking bureau regulations. Ignoring rules about tech level exposure. Chain of command.”
Cotton shouted, “He’s going to kill us—split our water like that Davis woman.”
Morrison nodded toward her raised weapon. “How much antimatter do you have in that thing?”
“A billionth of a gram. So don’t toy with me.”
“You’re not a killer, Alexa. And you know that Grady and Cotton must come with me. Civilian government knows who Cotton is now. They’ll interrogate him—torture him if necessary—to get information out of him.”
She didn’t lower the weapon, although Grady could see she was unsure of what to do. “Don’t test me, Morrison. Just leave. And tell Graham to back off while I sort this out.”
Morrison slowly reached toward his harness. “See this? I’m getting a psychotronic weapon—nonlethal—and that’s all there is to it. I’m not going to harm you or anyone. Ask yourself: Are you going to kill me, Alexa? Are you going to kill me to stop me from using a nonlethal weapon against—”
He fast-drew the weapon, but Alexa’s reflexes were faster. A blinding flash and crack of thunder, and the front of Morrison’s suit burst apart in weirdly intricate sparks and whirling vortexes of energy—hurling him backward and then downward.
But on his way down Morrison zapped Alexa with the psychotronic gun as well. She spun out of control, causing Grady and Cotton to fall out of her local gravity field—and into free fall from the night sky.
• • •
Alexa almost immediately regained her senses and found herself free of Morrison’s projected gravity field. She scanned the sky below her with thermal imaging. Cotton was falling below her, screaming, while Grady descended farther off—probably impossible to reach at terminal velocity. However, Morrison appeared to be moving to intercept Grady—sparks issuing from his combat assault armor.
“Damnit!” Alexa soared down to try to catch up with Cotton before he hit the forest thousands of feet below. She tucked her arms onto her thighs to streamline her aerodynamic profile and descended at much more than a hundred miles an hour.
• • •
Grady’s heart pounded in his chest as the rushing air buffeted him. His watering eyes saw the dark forest racing up to meet him, and he realized that these were his final seconds of life. He glanced up at the stars above him. The beauty was heartbreaking. However, his time in Hibernity had taught him how to manage fear, and he turned toward the approaching trees—determined to see his life right up to the very end.
But suddenly he felt cold, armored hands grab his arms, and his direction of descent lurched forward—only a thousand feet above the shadows of the trees.
Grady turned to see Morrison’s onyx face mask.
“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that, Mr. Grady?”
But then Grady noticed that they had not entirely stopped falling, and he felt conflicting gravity fields over about half of his body. Classical “down” was still to some extent in force.
One of Morrison’s gauntlets released Grady, and he seemed to be struggling to get something functioning. Purple sparks burst forth occasionally from the melted front plate of the suit. Morrison’s visor popped open with a hiss, and smoke issued out of it as the red reflection of a dozen flashing warning lights lit up his face.
“That traitorous bitch! A fucking positron weapon! She fried the power system—and most of my auxiliary.”
They started to buck their descent a bit as Morrison concentrated on working his suit’s systems. But a glance below them showed Grady they were still coming down at dangerous speeds.
He grabbed onto Morrison’s armor and shouted into his face over the rushing wind. “If you don’t have enough power to maintain the size of the gravity mirror, cut stabilization!”
Morrison frowned in confusion.
“If this suit is based on my technology, then there must be stabilization—or we’d be spinning like crazy. When two gravity fields interact, they’ll revolve within each other like—”
He could see the trees accelerating to meet them at much more than seventy miles an hour.
“JUST CUT THE FUCKING STABILIZATION!”
Morrison calmly nodded and manipulated unseen controls.
Suddenly they slowed dramatically—but started spinning like a merry-go-round on two different axes. Grady held on as Morrison’s armored arms embraced him.
They plunged through a thick canopy of trees at ten or fifteen miles per hour, smashing through branches on the way to the ground. In darkness, they bounced off the forest floor, Morrison on the bottom, and hit again, then splayed next to each other. The sound of crickets suddenly was all around them.
There were several seconds without movement.
“Well. That’s something for the manual, Mr. Grady.”
Morrison struggled to sit up, his suit still issuing occasional sparks. He appeared to be having trouble moving the heavy suit as smoke issued from several crevices.
Grady leapt on top of him—slugging Morrison through his open face mask. “You son of a bitch!”
“Ah, fuck!”
The sound of servomotors whined, but Morrison didn’t seem to be able to make his suit do what he wanted it to—or even close his face plate with all the smoke issuing from inside.
Grady punched him several more times until he was sure that Morrison was unconscious.
As he kneeled on top of Morrison’s armor-clad form, Grady turned at the sound of crashing branches. In a moment, Alexa descended from the sky, clutching a struggling Richard Cotton.
Cotton fell from her arms to kiss the ground. “Oh, thank God!”
Alexa looked down at Morrison with concern. “Is he . . . ?”
“No. Unconscious—although I don’t know for how long.”
She looked relieved and leaned down to pull a device that Grady recognized from Morrison’s belt—a psychotronic weapon. Alexa aimed the laser dot at the old commando’s head and keyed it for several moments. Then she took a reading. “Now he should stay asleep for twenty or thirty minutes.”
Grady looked at her and nodded. “Thank you for rescuing me. If that’s what this is.”
She grimaced. “I’m not sure what this is. I only know I can’t be partner to the type of evil you experienced. And that we have to stop what’s happening at Hibernity.”
“Do you still believe in your probability projections for disruptive innovations?”
She stared at him and shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Cotton stood next to them in his ridiculous orange body armor. “I hate to interrupt, but the wrath of God is going to come down on us any fucking second. So if we
could have this conversation elsewhere, that would be fantastic.”
“Cotton’s right.” Alexa pulled a metal stylus from her harness and activated what appeared to be a laser-cutting device—its needle-thin beam burned wickedly in the darkness. She used it to carefully carve out a tiny nodule on the shoulder of her flight suit. She repeated the process on her boots.
“What are you doing?”
“Removing the EDSP tracking devices.”
Grady nodded. “Yeah, good catch.”
Cotton was standing over Morrison. “If someone would help me get this body armor off, I’d like to take a piss on Morrison’s face.”
She glared at him. “Leave it, Cotton. You’re lucky to be alive. Don’t make it personal—it’ll be just another reason for him to come looking for you.”
Alexa then started dumping most of her equipment onto the forest floor.
“What are you doing?”
“They all have integrated trackers. We take our tech level containment seriously. Cotton’s right. They’ll come for it soon.”
Grady gazed down at Morrison. “What about him?”
“Leave him.”
Grady studied Morrison’s armor. “What about his suit? It’ll buy us more time if we strand him out here without it. No comms. At least dump it a few miles away.”
Alexa considered this.
“Can we get it off him?”
She nodded. “There’s a medical access override, if you have the clearance. Which I do.” She knelt next to Morrison and felt around the side of his helmet. She touched a control button and spoke into her own microphone. “Emergency medical access requested.”
Suddenly Morrison’s armor started to unfasten around him, opening like flower petals.
“I’ll be damned.”
She stood. “Can’t cut diamondoid armor off with scissors.”
Grady picked up a shoulder plate and hefted it. “This doesn’t even weigh all that much.”
“And yet it’s the hardest substance known.”
They took a few moments to gather the plates of armor—Alexa being careful to toss aside the four pieces that had integrated tracking particles. As they were finishing, Morrison began to wake up.
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