“I can’t control it much longer,” Diana whispered, sweating, leaning over the screen.
“You’re doing great,” said Temple. “Just try to take us down.”
“Gently,” Orlando offered, gripping Phoebe and Aria a little too tightly.
“Yeah,” said Phoebe. “What he said. And then, when we land, how about telling us what you know, or think you know, about the lunar sites.”
“That whole ‘not exactly’ comment about oxygen up there.”
Temple made a throaty sound. “I can answer that. What she means is that there have been reports, scientific analysis of trace oxygen levels given off on the Moon and on Mars and Phobos, around certain locations, that indicate the venting of breathable air. Somewhere down there. Most likely a contained facility, a habitat structure.”
“Damn,” Orlando said. “So…”
“So that’s what they’re planning,” Phoebe said, eyes wide. “Calderon and his Marduk cult. Destroy the earth, but save themselves by jumping to the next station. A community all ready for them.”
“And all the wisdom they’d need to keep going.”
“And build on that knowledge,” Phoebe said. “That’s what I suspect. That, as you get farther out in the solar system, you’re rewarded for your skill in reaching those places by receiving better information, more knowledge.”
Orlando closed his eyes, seeing that last dark planet and the huge book. “Until the ultimate prize.”
She nodded just as her stomach did a back flip and they dropped precipitously fast.
“Sorry!” Diana yelled over Aria’s cry of surprise, which then turned to a giggle as she realized they were on the ground, and the sphere was rolling around them, yet keeping them upright inside it.
“Stop, stop,” Diana hissed, sliding her finger backwards repeatedly. “Brake?”
Finally, they ground to a stop, lurching against one another. Diana tapped a section of the pad.
And the sphere vanished and she fell out on the soft earth in the middle of a pine forest. Behind them, trees were smoking, scattered in their wake.
Phoebe glanced back, gasping at the shadowy, stooped form of Mt. Shasta, looking grotesquely mutated, half-formed and still losing cohesion. The sound was building, near deafening. So much so that she didn’t hear Orlando crying out until several moments later.
And then, it was just to hear a recap of his vision.
“The shield! It’s gone!”
“What shield?” Temple asked, righting himself from the dirt. His voice was barely audible.
“Mars!” Orlando yelled. “The Martian shield is gone. Well, not yet, but it’s their whole facility… bodies in tanks. Robotic-looking caretakers.” His wide eyes fixed on Phoebe. “It’s being attacked!”
“What? Who’s doing it?” Temple yelled over the rumbling destruction, even as a cloud of dust rolling from the mountain obscured the stars and the bright red speck of light in the eastern sky.
Orlando shook his head, but Aria started clapping.
She fixed her bright blue eyes on Temple, then on Diana, and smiled.
9.
HAARP
As Calderon stood up and smugly left the chamber, his work done and Stargate destroyed, Alexander briefly shut his eyes and tried to picture his father.
Repelled by an undulating, unscalable wall of blue, more powerful and unyielding than anything he had encountered before, Alexander withdrew, feeling like he bounced off entirely. And landed—
Inside of a huge snow-capped mountain, Phoebe and Orlando race into what looks like a floating globe, then soar outside in an exhilarating rush before half the mountain collapses around them.
And then he returned, wiping the grin off his face just as Jacob noticed, and Isaac turned around sharply. “What do you think he saw, brother?”
Jacob shrugged. “A happy childhood memory?”
Isaac laughed. “Couldn’t have been happier than ours. What with the hunting, the remote-viewing, the killing.”
“Everything we ever wanted,” Jacob said glumly.
Alexander shook his head. “You aren’t my brothers. I don’t care anymore. You’re nothing like my father.”
“And you,” Isaac spat, “are too much like your mother.” He grinned and raised his hand for a high-five with Jacob, who let it hang there.
Alexander felt his blood boiling. Fists clenched, he was about to advance on Isaac when he saw the boy still carried the sword-cane in his other hand behind his back. And Alexander noted the body laying beside the chair. Montross, bleeding out still, his blood pooling onto the polished floor.
Bleeding. That means he’s still alive.
“Isaac. Jacob,” Calderon stepped between them. Reached over and held out his hand. “Ah, there it is. My cane, please.”
Isaac handed it over with a slight bow, never taking his eyes off Alexander.
Jacob cleared his throat sheepishly as he glanced up to the engineers. “So, is it over?”
Calderon spun his cane, keeping his eye on Alexander. “Why don’t you boys tell me? I know I brought the mountain down around those Stargate fools, but I don’t know if any are still alive under all that rubble.”
“Let’s get us a look-see then,” said Isaac. “Seems to be all we’re good for.”
Jacob managed a grin. “Found us our brother in Alexander, we did.”
“And wait a sec. Hold the phone, he never thanked us for that, did he?”
“Boys!” Calderon snapped. “Enough. Now we have to prepare. It’s time.”
Jacob and Isaac smiled and closed their eyes, their training kicking in. “Time,” they both whispered.
“Time to shed these skins. Leave our bodies and travel the path of the Great Ones to the Red Land…”
“…where we’ll be reborn,” Isaac and Jacob said in unison.
“…and from our new home, with new eyes, we’ll observe the death throes of this planet and imagine the suffering as the world is purged. First, I will follow the instructions on the Tablet, and I will let it guide me from this flesh and into the machine, where only pure matter can interact with the Emerald Tablet’s true form.”
Isaac clapped his hands slowly, picturing it.
“We’ll set the target as the earth’s very core, and send the scalar energy waves at a direct path through the pole…”
Calderon approached the device, about to retrieve the Emerald Tablet, when a call came in over the speakers from the techs upstairs. He glanced up, and two men in lab coats rushed out of the room and leaned over the railing.
“What is it now?” Calderon snapped. “You should be powering down and resetting the arrays before we—”
“But that’s it, sir. We can’t power down!”
“What?”
Alexander perked up. His attention turned to the chair-device, where for just a moment he thought he saw an outline, like an afterimage of Calderon sitting there.
Except, that wasn’t Calderon.
“We can’t power down! It’s not letting us, not responding.”
Same build and posture, but one thing different…
Calderon fumed. “Then what’s it doing?”
…red hair!
“It’s firing, Sir.”
#
Calderon fumed. Firing without my guidance? “All right, so it’s still blasting Mount Shasta. Just turn the damn thing off already, that’s taken care of.”
“It’s not aimed at Mount Shasta anymore.”
Swearing, Calderon started toward the chair. I can’t wait until we’re free of this damned world. Just a few more hours. “All right, then where is it aiming?”
The technicians looked at each other, whispering, then pointing back. One of them ran inside the control room as the other raised up a hand to wait.
“Oh for heaven’s sake.” Calderon took another step toward the machine, which was still humming, still throwing off waves of photo luminescent energy, then stopped as one of the boys wasn’t standing still any lo
nger.
Alexander had slipped by on the right, and was kneeling by Montross. Leaning over, whispering something as he tried to apply pressure to the stab wound.
Montross?
Calderon spun his head back around to the device, and for a glimmering instant, saw him: the flaming red hair, the shining blue eyes. Everything scintillating in an emerald radiance.
Montross! Sitting like an emperor on his throne. Like Loki after usurping Odin. Like Lucifer on the throne of Heaven, or just like Thoth, imagining he could usurp the rule of Marduk.
“Where is it aiming!?”
“Sir,” came the voice from above. “Nowhere right now. Just up in a straight line towards the east.” The tech’s voice cracked. “But in three hours and twelve minutes, after the scalar wave of destruction has traveled a distance of two hundred and fifty million miles…”
Calderon closed his eyes. “No.”
“…entering into the path, will be the planet Mars.”
“I assume,” Calderon said in a dull voice, “You’ve calculated the precise point on the surface that will be affected?”
“We have.” Another pause. “Cydonia.”
Throwing down his cane in frustration, Calderon dropped to his knees. Basking before the Emerald Tablet’s glow, he prepared himself.
“He’s got you,” Alexander whispered, glaring at him from his uncle’s side.
“Shut up.”
“Tricked you good.”
“Shut him up!” Calderon pointed and the guards moved in, past Isaac and Jacob, who were still standing, open-jawed, unsure of what just happened. “And if the dead man stirs, shoot him!”
“Father?” Isaac was at his side.
“Be quiet, and be ready. I’m going to stop the traitor. Beat him at his own game.”
“But has the pulse already fired?”
“Not long enough,” shouted the tech above. “Another thirty seconds and the power level of the scalar wave will be sufficient to penetrate the depth of the Cydonia installation, smash the barriers and reinforced supports, and—”
But Calderon had tuned him out. Or, more appropriately, he no longer had ears with which to hear.
He stood on gossamer legs, his form shimmering with plasma-like sparks.
Everything was as he had foreseen.
Freed from flesh, he was power.
Freed from all restrictions, he was invincible.
He was a god.
And his enemy sat before him, startled at his sudden appearance. And unable to extract himself from the machine. Unable to defend himself.
Thirty seconds, Calderon thought.
Plenty of time.
10.
Ten minutes earlier, while three F-16 Fighting Falcons roared overhead, dispatched from Eielson Air Force Base, the Jeep Cherokee rammed through the chain wire fence at the southwest edge of the facility.
“Think it’ll work?” Caleb shouted over the tortured metal-on-metal collision that sent them rocketing off-road for a moment. The tires dug into the fresh snow, spun, then Nina got the Jeep back on the old service road and accelerated for the dimly-visible supply center, adjacent to the office buildings.
“Well, we heard the jets but I’m sure their security people picked them up on radar long before that. Their attention has got to be on the sky.”
“Temple said he ordered radio silence, too. So if they tried contact, they’d get nothing. Which would have to scare them a bit.”
“And the scalar weapon, I imagine, isn’t good for knocking out fast-moving aircraft, only motionless enemy sites.”
Caleb cringed, thinking about the Library of Alexandria, the devastation and loss of life, not to mention the original copies of all that wisdom.
As the snow and ice slapped the windshield, keeping the wipers working in hyperspeed, Nina shifted and threw caution out the window. “Wish our boys weren’t in there, otherwise we could have had them just level the damn place. Napalm it up.”
Caleb gripped the shrouded Spear in both hands, hefting it, feeling the rough rounded edge, just enough of a hilt-like handle, wishing he had a long staff to fit on it to truly make it a lance-like weapon instead of what it was now: a glorified dagger. He thought of his last vision, that of Alexander about to be attacked by Isaac.
“They’re hardly out of danger.”
“I know.” She shot him a quick look. “And I’m sorry. I wasn’t there, I didn’t know.”
“We’ll get there in time,” Caleb said, staring ahead, seeing the dark shape approaching. “We’ll get there.”
“Now that’s some confidence even I don’t have.” Nina slowed, seeing two smaller shapes peel away from the building. “Especially since we’ve got company.”
“Of course they’ve guarded the back.” Caleb unraveled the Spear point. “But they’re woefully unprepared.”
“No idea what’s going to hit them.”
The men, visible now in the brutal maelstrom, raised their guns.
Caleb responded, raising the Spear, pointing it at them through the windshield. “Confident or not, I have no idea how this works.”
Nina shrugged. “Then I’d suggest ducking.”
The windshield cracked just as Nina lowered her head and peeked around the steering wheel, aiming for the pair of defenders. But Caleb merely sat still, Spear held out before him like a narrow shield. Two more cracks in the windshield. A bullet whizzed past and then—SLAM—one of the guards went flying over the roof, while the other just managed to dodge out of the way.
“No chance to shut him up,” Nina said, sitting upright. “They know we’re here, but with any luck, they think we’ve got a whole army with us to go along with the air support. We’ve still got some element of surprise and distraction. Time to use it.”
The Jeep picked up speed as the building loomed in their view. Two double doors were no match for the head on greeting they provided at eighty miles an hour. The Jeep smashed through a metal railing and launched down into the warehouse floor. It slid and then Nina braked hard and spun it in a one-eighty, slamming Caleb’s side into two more astonished guards and pinning them against a rack of steel replacement girders.
One, still alive, managed to raise his MP5 and before Nina could recover and reach for her Beretta, he fired.
But Caleb was directly in his path. He instinctively held out the Spear tip and closed his eyes. Heard the gunshots, then what sounded like his own cut-off scream, but felt no pain.
“Holy crap,” came Nina’s voice. Caleb blinked and opened his eyes, registering the fate of the shooter: the MP5 had exploded as it fired, sending shrapnel backwards; his face was blackened and bloody, and the ruined gun fell from his limp fingers.
“I guess no instruction manual needed,” Nina commented as she unhooked her belt and withdrew her Beretta. “Now let’s move. Out my side, on three.”
Caleb looked past her, seeing several dark-clad forms running from shelter and hiding behind crates and piles of equipment.
She counted to three, kicked open the door and went out low, rolling, then shooting at two guards who came charging out of cover. By the time Caleb was out, she had fired three more times, and there were four bodies on the floor.
She ran to the edge of a stack of piping, aimed through it and fired again, taking out someone hiding on the other side. Reloading, she glanced back. “Move it, darling. Or else just stroll out there and draw their fire. We’ll see how well it protects you.”
Caleb crouched and moved to her side. “I think I’ll err on the side of caution for now.”
Nina shrugged. “You know, anything happens to you, I promise to take the Spear and do what has to be done.”
“I appreciate that. Just come back and give me a proper burial after you save the world.”
“No problem.”
Caleb winced as gunfire erupted from the back of the warehouse, and impacts ripped through the canisters and sparked off the floor. He looked to where the dead guard’s operable MP5 had fallen besi
de the broken one.
“Just the same, I’m adding to my arsenal.” He slid the spear point-down under his belt, hooking an edge, then scampered back for the weapon.
When he returned, keeping his head low in the barrage of incoming fire, Nina said: “You, a gun? Ever actually use one?”
“Yes.”
“Other than a BB gun?”
“Yes, one of these in fact.”
Nina gave him a disbelieving look after another burst of gunfire, which she answered. “And did you actually hit anything?”
Caleb peered around the edge, sighting. “Now you’re just being mean.”
“Oh just pull the trigger and aim that way.” She nodded to the left as she crouched and took off to the right.
Darting out of cover, he aimed and fired. A momentary panic as two black-clad guards stood up and leveled guns at him from twenty yards away, but then red splotches exploded on their foreheads and they went down, just as fast.
Caleb held down the trigger, struggling to maintain control against the recoil. He sent a long burst that took out lights, shattered crates and ricocheted off metal girders and frames. Two screams as the bullets punched through soft cover, and another as a guard took off and Caleb’s uncontrolled sweep happened to catch him in the shoulder.
Three more guard-soldiers ran out, charging him. Two fell to Nina’s expert marksmanship before they could take aim, the third ducked for cover. Caleb could hear him slinking around the side of a massive crate. He aimed for the far side, then saw a flash in his mind.
Behind his position: men had circled around outside. A team of six, guns drawn, running fast.
Crap! He thought. No time. He dropped to his knees, spun and let loose a screaming volley of fire out the open doors into the swirling snow that obscured the men running inside. All four, bunched together, caught the slugs square on and spun back, falling. One made it inside only a few steps before the last few rounds stopped his progress.
Now he’d hit something, Caleb thought. But he knew it was all for nothing. The last soldier, hiding behind the crate, would have sensed his opportunity. He’s out, aiming, and Nina’s not in position.
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