Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  As his head swam in the impressions of data—weapon types, targeting systems, range, lead time, recharge rates—he sent the disk into a steep dive, like a peregrine dropping on pigeons. One of them saw him and broke left. The information in Alan’s head scrambled briefly and he was left momentarily confused.

  Too much, he thought, forcing himself to focus, to bring his thoughts into line, when what he wanted to do was let go and float away.

  He sighted on the left arrowhead, realizing, as he was about to fire, that the other had locked onto Jackson’s flight. He saw the Locust feint right, then enter a steep climb, but the arrowhead wasn’t fooled. It banked and rolled and fired.

  There was a stream of colored flashes, yellow and green iridescent light slashing up and through the Locust. It bobbed like a cork on wave, and then it was all light and fire, bright as the heart of a star, as it came apart.

  Alan felt Jackson die, and his horror and sudden, vengeful grief lit up his weapon systems in a surge of energy that streamed out at both arrowheads and vaporized them in less than a second.

  63

  TIMIKA

  Indian Springs Auxiliary field number 1 (closed), Nevada

  THE SHAFT WAS UNCANNILY SIMILAR TO THE ONE SHE had emerged from in what she had decided was Siberia, though this culvert was not so deep, and it did not end in the maze of passages. In fact, the ladder led to nothing more than a recess, a concrete alcove just high enough to stand in, where she found three heavy metal doors, each only four feet high, one on each concrete wall. They looked like safes, and had apparently been sealed into the concrete rather than fastened with bolts like the manhole cover above.

  Each one had a keyhole and a steel latch handle.

  Timika worked her fingers into her pocket and wriggled out the single small key. She pushed it into the lock on the left hand wall. It slid in easily, but would not turn, and when she tried the heavy latch, it didn’t move.

  She tried the door in the facing wall with the same results, and some of the exasperated anxiety she had felt as they had hunted for the shaft cover returned. She could hear the drone of engines above her and the roar and snap of gravel under wheels, and then silence.

  She paused in the act of slotting the key into the final lock, listening. Hearing nothing, she turned the key, her heart rising into her throat.

  Come on, Jerzy. Don’t let me down now.

  It turned and she heard the latch disengage. Grasping the handle, flashlight unsteady, she twisted it much harder than she needed to. It thunked home easily and she felt the sudden heaviness of the steel door as it swung toward her.

  She looked in.

  There was a sliding metal palette, like the drawers used to hold corpses in the morgue, but this held no body. She pulled the slide toward her. On it was a box, heavy looking, perhaps ten-inches tall, three-feet long and half that wide. A rigid eagle, wings spread, was molded into the metal.

  She felt for seams or hinges and found a pair of clasps like the catches on an attaché case.

  She hesitated, conscious of both the enormity of what she was doing, and—like an animal sensing something dangerous close by—felt a change in the atmosphere above her.

  She froze, listening.

  Dully, from the bottom of the concrete tube, she heard the murmur of conversation and then, quite suddenly, a shot. It rang in the shaft, making her wince, knees buckling slightly as she instinctively tried to shrink away and make herself small.

  There was a shout, and then another shot—different this time—and then another, and another, until the world above became a blanket of noise, the booming echoing around the concrete walls with the terrible urgency of pain and death.

  64

  JENNIFER

  Indian Springs Auxiliary field number 1 (closed), Nevada

  THERE WERE TWO CARS, ONE WHITE, ONE GRAY, TWO men in each. At first, they idled, twenty yards off, but when the corporal who’d driven Jennifer and the others to the abandoned airfield moved to challenge them, rifle at the ready, the men in the first car got out. They were young. Uniformed, though Jennifer couldn’t make out what the uniform was in the erratic light of the flashlights. Blue, she thought. Not military.

  They exchanged a few words, formalities, she had supposed, so the first shot was a complete surprise. The corporal dropped where he stood. The man who’d shot him turned his pistol on her.

  “Get down!” Regis shouted, throwing himself on the ground and firing multiple rounds as she ran for the Humvee. The young soldier there, Simmons, who’d sat next to her in the back, was firing from one knee over the mudguard of the front wheel.

  Jennifer made for him, half-crouching, the air thrumming with bullets and alive with panic. She half-tripped, half-threw herself to the ground behind Simmons, who’d paused to reload. Beyond them, she saw the second car moving, flanking them. In the passenger side was a white man in his sixties. His face looked familiar though it took a moment to pull his name from her memory of the Maynard board meeting: Manning. When she saw the flash of his pistol, she ducked back behind the Humvee as the bullet careened off metal and into the night. Their cover wouldn’t last much longer.

  She looked desperately into the Humvee for something she could use as a weapon: a spare pistol, a flare, even a tire iron. There was nothing. As another shot came from the gray car, she ducked down again in terror.

  “They are coming around us,” she managed to say to Simmons.

  He nodded, white faced but calm, and squeezed off another round toward the white car. She saw the way the bullet punched through the open car door like it was paper. Surely, it was only a matter of time before one of Simmons’ bullets found a target.

  But time was something they did not have. The gray car was coming around behind them now, and she could see the driver, his thin, skull face leering out at her like one of her childhood nightmares.

  Herman Saltzburg.

  Of course it was. A part of her had known he would be here at the end.

  65

  ALAN

  Colorado airspace

  THE DISK SLID SOUTH INTO THE AIRSPACE OVER THE Colorado missile facility in under a minute, Alan’s emotions still running hot. Riordan told him Hastings had been hit and gone down, safe but out of action. Below him, Rodriguez’s Locust was in a high, fast cruise, cut off from the arrowhead parked directly over the silo by four other enemy craft and one Locust. And that meant …

  Morat.

  It had to be.

  Once more the stream of data he was trying to process was disrupted by the red spike of Alan’s outrage, and once again he felt the ship buckle and swerve as he momentarily lost control.

  Fight it, he told himself, sweat running down his face. Focus. Breathe.

  It was his confusion, the sense of being overwhelmed by distraction, that had delayed his rescue of Jackson, and that had meant the pilot’s death. He had to get it together.

  “Riordan,” he said, dimly aware of how they’d abandoned protocol as the two of them cobbled together the mission like amateurs, “I have a rogue Locust in view. I need to ID it so I don’t confuse it with Rodriguez.”

  He spoke in a clenched voice barely above a whisper, mind riveted to what was going on below.

  “A rogue Locust?” said Riordan. He sounded wary.

  “It’s Morat’s ship,” said Alan. “He is flying for … the enemy.”

  He didn’t know what else to call them.

  “Agent Morat?” said Riordan. “That can’t be right. Let me check with Special Agent Hatcher …”

  “Hatcher is dead,” said Alan, feeling the disk dip and stall again as his feelings got away from him. “Morat killed him. I don’t have time to discuss it. I need a way to tell the two Locusts apart. Can you help?”

  The mental strain was making it hard to speak. Finding each word was like fumbling in the dark, pulling them from a sack and trying to arrange them in an order that made sense while doing a dozen unrelated things. Even so, he registered the long silence be
fore Riordan spoke. He sounded anxious, but resigned.

  “Each Locust has a different energy signature. I’m sending you the data now.”

  Alan braced himself for yet more information, tensing his whole body as if anticipating a punch to the gut.

  “Got it,” he managed.

  “I can’t authorize any action against Agent Morat without higher authority,” Riordan said. “The data I’ve sent is strictly precautionary. I hope it helps keep you safe, Major.”

  Alan grinned bitterly. Riordan was covering his ass. Again the disk shimmied and shifted its trajectory, and had to be wrestled back to readiness.

  “Okay,” Alan said. “Going in.”

  And with that thought, the disk plummeted toward the swarm below, targeting systems lighting up in Alan’s head and locking on. There would be no hesitation this time.

  He felt his thoughts move toward Jackson, and before he could pull them back, he’d fired, though what the weapon was that he’d trained on the arrowheads chasing Rodriguez, he couldn’t say. He felt the blast leave the ship but only a disturbance in the air, a bolt of something with no more substance than steam. Whatever it was tore through the group of arrowheads and burst like ripples on the surface of a pond where a stone has dropped as Rodriguez shot clear. The spreading pulse caught all three arrowheads and threw them from the heart of the blast, so that they turned in the air, out of control and coming apart. For a microsecond, the three arrowheads seemed to have gaseous tails before the ships blossomed in spectacular explosions of light and wreckage.

  Alan corrected the disk’s course and came barreling in on the arrowhead hovering over the missile silo, but it broke and ran. He dropped in behind it, matching its speed easily, and as it turned to face him, stabbing at him with laser fire, he unleashed a stream of energy that stripped the ship to burning fragments.

  As the disk streaked through the falling remnants of the ship, Alan turned, scanning the sky for Morat’s Locust.

  “Major Young?” came the voice of Rodriguez. “I don’t know what the hell you’re flying, but thanks!”

  Alan tried to say something in response, but the words would not come. Then he spotted Morat’s Locust. It was making a hard, steep climb out of the atmosphere.

  Okay, he thought. We can do that.

  And with that moment of clarity, words came back to him.

  “No sweat, Rodriguez,” he said. “Riordan will take care of you. There’s one more hostile I have to deal with.”

  And then he was in pursuit, pushing the disk harder and faster than ever as Morat made for the emptiness of space.

  66

  TIMIKA

  Indian Springs Auxiliary field number 1 (closed), Nevada

  TIMIKA DID NOT LIKE GUNS. IN FACT, SHE USED TO JOKE, she didn’t mind guns, per se—it was the bullets she didn’t like. Particularly when they were coming at her.

  Always got a big laugh.

  She didn’t feel like laughing now. Her hands were clammy on the rungs of the ladder. The world above had turned into a kind of hell, but there was no point staying down in the bunker. They would find her eventually. Maybe, just maybe, she could do something to help. She didn’t know Jennifer, and they’d only been together a couple of hours, but the Englishwoman had bailed her out, and looked after her when she needed it, and Timika always paid her debts.

  She crawled up the ladder and peered cautiously over the concrete rim of the shaft, her flashlight stuffed into her pocket. She felt it heavy against her thigh. Might prove useful as a club if the moment arose.

  It was hard to make out what was happening at first. Someone had turned on the Humvee’s floodlights, but they shone only on open desert. She caught the silhouettes of two people next to the Humvee, sheltering from the fight, and saw the muzzle flash as someone returned fire with an M16. To her right, Regis lay prone behind the toolbox. She wasn’t sure if he was still alive. Another soldier was on his back over by the white car. He didn’t look good.

  The gray car was in reverse, creeping behind the Humvee, a man in a suit leaning out of the passenger window with a pistol. She couldn’t see who was driving. A shot rang out from behind the white car, aimed at Regis but slamming into the ground. She glimpsed a young man. When he moved to get a better shot, she saw the uniform.

  Cop.

  No, she reminded herself. Fake cop.

  For a second she was back in New York, running from someone who’d called himself Cook. This was the other one, the one who had been rifling through her office. Her outrage grew as she inched up the ladder, throwing one arm over the rim, about to pull herself up and out …

  That was when she felt the cold muzzle of the pistol, jammed into the nape of her neck.

  “Get up,” said the voice behind her.

  She did so slowly

  “Hands on your head.”

  Again, she did as she was told.

  The fighting stopped. The gunman at her back shouted for everyone to hear.

  “Drop your weapons and step into the light or I blow her head off.”

  He moved around her, watching as first Jennifer, then Simmons, and then reluctantly Regis complied. The driver was dead. Timika saw the man who had his pistol trained on her and knew him immediately.

  “Get around, don’t you, Miss Mars?” said Cook.

  The man who’d hunted her on the streets of Manhattan, the man she had evaded with a quick change of clothes and a lot of nerve. Neither option was available to her now.

  67

  JENNIFER

  Indian Springs Auxiliary field number 1 (closed), Nevada

  JENNIFER KNEW THEY WERE —WHAT WAS THE PHRASE?—dead men walking. Timika knew it too. She could see it in her eyes as they were huddled together facing the muzzles of the Maynard Consortium’s hired guns as directed by Saltzburg and Manning.

  She wondered now if Letrange—or Morat, as Regis knew him—had been assigned to kill her the day of the disastrous Maynard board meeting, as he’d almost certainly killed her father. He’d underscored the aerospace item on her agenda, leaving her a clue to follow, to see what she already knew, what breadcrumbs her father might have left for her, and the extent to which he was betraying the Consortium. She had been set up, decoyed into thinking she was making progress, when in fact she was just being used to test the Consortium’s security. As soon as it appeared she had indeed unearthed some damaging truths, she had to be eliminated.

  But here she was. Not dead yet. Not quite.

  “Herman Saltzburg,” she snarled as he came in close, his death’s-head leer plastered across his loathsome face. “I always hated you.”

  “Amazingly enough,” said Saltzburg, pleasantly, “I surmised as much. You will be disappointed to know your feelings did not upset me. Quite the contrary, in fact.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said.

  She was still scared, but the imminence of her own death had given her a kind of clarity. The blind, trembling terror she had felt during the firefight was gone. The fear was there, but it had been surpassed by the rage she felt, and the revulsion, seeing Saltzburg’s sepulchral face.

  “I will spare you the villain’s self-explanations,” he said. “You have something I want. Give it to me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jennifer.

  “An item you’ve been directed to by a Polish Jew,” said Saltzburg with disgust. “It was not his to give away.”

  “I don’t have it,” said Jennifer. “And if I did, I wouldn’t give it to the man who arranged the death of my father.”

  “Arranged?” said Saltzburg, amused.

  “I assume it was you who set Letrange, or whatever his real name is, on my father.”

  “Oh no,” said Saltzburg, his skeletal grin stretching wider than ever. “Letrange was otherwise occupied at the time. I took care of that little matter myself.”

  Jennifer took a breath, fighting back the tears.

  “Now,” he said, pleased by her response. “The object the pluc
ky Miss Mars has been pursuing, please.”

  “I told you,” she managed. “I don’t have it.”

  Saltzburg’s expression did not change and his eyes never left her face as he raised his voice fractionally.

  “Mr. Cook,” he said. “Kill Miss Mars, please.”

  Cook pointed his gun squarely at Timika’s chest.

  68

  ALAN

  Low Earth Orbit

  IF THE DISK’S APPARENT TRANSPARENCY HAD BEEN STRANGE in the lower reaches of the atmosphere, it was positively surreal in low earth orbit. As Alan left the world behind him and emerged in the silent blackness of space, just a man in a chair—or so it seemed—moving without support or protection, he had to fight the impulse to hold his breath.

  He’d been apprehensive about taking the disk this high, something Morat had surely guessed, because he had no idea how—or if—it would perform in the near vacuum that was home only to satellites and potentially lethal debris.

  Crossing from the lower atmosphere momentarily obscured his sensors as he realized, with a heart-stopping shudder that rippled through the disk’s trajectory, that he’d lost Morat’s Locust. He wheeled around, using his eyes as much as the ship’s sensory array, and saw only blackness and the asymmetrical hulks of satellites. He rotated the disk in every direction, feeling the ship’s various scanning devices gradually turning back on as the craft adjusted to its new environment.

  Something lit up. A spot above Alan’s right shoulder. He pivoted the disk to see, but there was only an ungainly satellite that looked like something from a junkyard bolted together and sprouting a single bluish solar panel, rimmed with gold. He adjusted the disk, scanning a patch of space that seemed smeared by a cloud-like patch of tiny fragments. He slowly spun the disk towards it and set it in motion, making a cautious approach just a little faster than the speed at which the debris was orbiting the planet below.