Extinction Series (The Complete Collection)

by James D. Prescott

  “It’s called sadness,” Jack told her. “And it can overwhelm us no matter how smart we think we are.”

  “Dr. Viswanathan outfitted me with neural transmitters, designed to draw attention to areas of my mechanical structure at risk of failure. The data stream was very similar to when one of my joints fails to articulate.”

  Gabby’s face glowed with the warm smile of a mother. “Yes, that’s what we call pain.”

  Anna’s eyes flitted to the ceiling in contemplation. “Is it habitual for these two sensations to be connected?”

  “Feelings of loss and pain?” Jack said, rubbing the scruff on his chin. “More than you know.” His glance shifted over to the table. “So how about that display?”

  “Oh, yes.” Anna moved to the corner of the room opposite them. “I call them my flying circus.” Without warning, the room filled with the sharp whine of over a dozen motors buzzing to life. Then the table itself seemed to come alive as those hunks of plastic Anna had been working on, each no bigger than a paperback novel, began to rise and then hover five feet in the air. The aerial acrobatics began a second later as the tiny drones danced around one another, navigating the narrow space of the lab in a ballet that left both Jack and Gabby speechless. First they swept around doing figure eights, followed by a handful of other geometric shapes before she had them mimic the motion of the planets in the solar system. Jack watched Anna’s eyes as she directed their movement remotely. When they were done, the drones each settled back on the table.

  “That’s one hell of a flying circus,” Jack said, clapping. Gabby was just as impressed.

  “There is still more work to be done,” Anna admitted, beaming. “But for now they look most promising indeed.” The expression of sheer joy on Anna’s face said it all. She wasn’t a liability. In a way, she was no different from them, thrown into a dangerous and frightening situation and forced to deal with an onslaught of emotions powerful enough to floor the average person.

  The radio on Jack’s belt garbled to life. “Jack, are you there?” It was Captain Mullins.

  “I am. Go ahead.”

  “The elevator’s topside. Gather your team and your gear. We head down in ten.”

  Chapter 21

  Kolkata

  “We need to leave right now,” Jansson called out from the lab, her voice ringing with panic. A handful of researchers and lab assistants hid under desks or behind large pieces of equipment. Nobody knew what to do or where to go.

  Mia was in the projection room next door, downloading the work they’d done on HISR and Salzburg’s link to GMOs onto a USB key. Her heart was booming in her chest as she watched the progress bar taking forever. Faint shouts and screams rose up from somewhere down the hall. The transfer was at seventy-five percent complete when Mia heard a series of ragged footsteps enter the lab.

  “Are you Dr. Mia Ward?” the male voice asked. He sounded Indian.

  “No,” Jansson replied. The slap that followed echoed through the lab. Then came the sound of Jansson squealing and falling to the floor.

  The muscles in Mia’s body tensed with fear. Next door, those huddled in the lab cried out in terror. They were about to be slaughtered like chicks trapped in a coop. She glanced down at the progress bar and swore. Eighty-six percent. She removed the pistol from her side pocket and held it loosely in her hand. She stepped into the lab.

  “Someone looking for Dr. Ward?” she asked. There was a dangerous edge to her voice. Like a woman who had nothing to lose. Part of her was hoping the FBI agents assigned to protect her would come charging through that door guns blazing, but there was no telling what had happened to them.

  The two men searching through those hiding in the room stopped what they were doing. The brawny one, his hair tied back in a ponytail, stood by the door. The other headed toward her. He was thinner than his friend, but he had the eyes of a killer. As he moved in, a scuffle broke out near the door. Both of them turned to see what was going on. Two men were fighting—the brawny Indian thug and…was that Ramirez? Mia jerked the pistol into the air and followed the tall guy as he ran back to help his friend.

  If there had been a back door, Mia might have grabbed Jansson and as many others as she could and fled. But the only way out lay through the doorway where three men were currently fighting. The tall one pulled a pistol of his own and the man attacking them kicked it out of his hands. All three were exchanging a series of furious blows.

  Then she heard the white guy shout, “Get stuffed, you wankers.” And for a second, Mia stood, blinking with confusion, the gun poised in her hand. “Ollie?”

  Just then the brawny one sent a fist into Ollie’s gut, doubling him over. He then threw him to the floor. But with a half spin, Ollie managed to land on his back. It hardly seemed to matter as the two assailants were right on top of him.

  In five quick strides, Mia crossed the lab. The two on top were starting to rain blows down on Ollie. Mia pressed the muzzle to the first man’s head and fired. His body immediately went limp and collapsed. She then swiveled to the other, who looked up just in time to see a flash before he too fell back dead.

  Mia lowered the gun slightly, aiming it now at Ollie’s battered face. His left eye was swollen and a trail of blood ran from his nose and the corner of his mouth. Her index finger hovered over the trigger.

  “Go ahead, lass,” he said, staring back at her intently. “I deserve it for what I did to you. I will say before you kill me, you sure did learn your way around a gun since I’ve been gone.”

  A few feet away, Jansson sat up, rubbing the side of her head. A handful of lab assistants hurried over to help her. A bloodcurdling scream raced up the hallway, a quick reminder that the danger was far from over.

  Ollie grabbed the pistols the men were carrying and wiped the blood from his lip with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “What about Ramirez and Chalk?” Mia asked, no one in particular.

  “If you’re talking about those two FBI blokes,” Ollie said, “I don’t think they made it.”

  A pang of sadness settled over Mia’s heart. Soon enough, the guilt would come. But there wasn’t time for any of that now. They needed to get far away from here.

  She slid the pistol into the pocket of her cargo pants, held out her hand and recited a line from Ollie’s favorite movie. “Come with me if you want to live.”

  Chapter 22

  Washington

  Kay came awake with a start. In her dream, she’d been salsa-dancing at a sweltering club in Miami with her fiancé Derek. Even now, awake and rubbing at her tired eyes, she could still hear that same Latin beat repeating ad nauseam. But this wasn’t a case of dreams bleeding into reality, she realized, listening to her phone belt out its Latin ringtone. No, this had been reality intruding into her dreams.

  The ring died out a second before she could answer it. As she plugged in her password and unlocked the device, two things struck Kay at once.

  The first was the time. It was nearly 10 A.M. That part made sense since she’d stayed up most of the night banging out the article on the conspiracy she’d been given by her confidential White House informant, Laydeezman. High on caffeine, she had typed the article’s final sentence right as the sun had come up, firing it off to Ron Lewis, along with copies of the close-ups and video stills they would use on the website’s front page. Surely, as the wildfire spread, papers around the world would run with news of the diabolical plot. Kay would be famous and the president would live to see another day. It was a win-win.

  Still, given what Laydeezman had leaked to the rest of the world, climbing through the cut-throat ranks of a major national newspaper was no longer Kay’s abiding ambition. Especially since it was starting to look as though in less than two weeks there might not be a paper anymore, let alone a soul left in the world to read it.

  Looking down, she saw her phone had close to forty voicemails and at least twice as many text messages. Many of them were asking where she was, whether she knew. With a growing se
nse of unease, Kay dialed Ron Lewis at the paper’s news division.

  “Dammit, I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

  “Ron, I was up the whole night writing the article.”

  “Well, we couldn’t run it.”

  Kay shot up in bed. “What?”

  “Not as is.” Ron sighed. Kay could hear people shouting around him.

  “Why not?”

  “Haven’t you listened to a single message I sent? There’s been an attack on the president. This morning, Marine One was shot down on its way to Joint Base Andrews.”

  Cold fingers danced up the back of Kay’s neck. “I-I don’t understand,” she stammered. “But the article was supposed to protect him.”

  “We posted it at 8 A.M. about thirty minutes before the attack,” Ron told her, out of breath. “Right away we had to pull it and retool the piece, but don’t worry, your name will still be on it and large swaths of what you wrote are still there.”

  “I don’t give a shit about getting any credit,” Kay barked. “We weren’t fast enough to stop it. Maybe if I’d written it faster, getting it out there a few hours earlier might have spooked the conspirators.”

  “Stop blaming yourself,” Ron said, attempting to reassure her.

  Reeling with shock and confusion, her mind kept returning to the precious moments she had spent trying to convince Ron to run the story in the first place. Add all of that up and the president might still be alive.

  “Where are they taking his body?” Kay asked, putting Ron on speaker as she hopped out of bed and shrugged into a pair of jeans.

  “Body? From what we know he survived, but he’s in a coma. That hasn’t stopped the shit from hitting the fan. They’ve declared a state of emergency. The National Guard is deploying to major city centers to stamp down unrest. Just get over here as soon as you can, damn it.”

  Kay stared down at her phone. Giving all they were facing, she had wondered how things could get any worse. It seemed they had and that it was only the beginning.

  Chapter 23

  Greenland

  Sealed into their biosuits and helmets, packs slung over their shoulders, Captain Mullins, Jack and the rest of the group made their way to the lift. They had offered to let Tamura stay behind at Northern Star, but she had refused, opting instead for a clean bandage and a handful of ibuprofen. It was clear her desire to seek vengeance for her slaughtered brothers- and sisters-in-arms was far stronger than any pain she might be suffering.

  One by one, they climbed into the metal cage and closed the door. A nod from Mullins to Anna signaled they were ready. Already patched into the facility’s computer system, she engaged the motors remotely, causing the cage to shudder. They listened with some unease to the muffled sound of grinding gears through their helmets. From the armory, each of them had been issued a pistol with four magazines. In addition, Mullins, the air crew, Jack and Dag each carried an M4 carbine and backup mags.

  Once the radio jammer devices had been found and disabled, they had reached out to CENTCOM to inform them of the situation. Needless to say, the conversation had not done much to settle anyone’s nerves. Backup, it seemed, would take anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours to arrive, which meant they would need to flush out the assassins already down below on their own.

  The second bit of news had proven far more disturbing than the first. The head of the Joint Chiefs had come on the line to inform them an attempt had been made on the president’s life and that he was currently in hospital on life support. More unsettling still, initial reports from the Department of Justice suggested that top members of the president’s own cabinet might have been in on the conspiracy. Around the country, law and order was breaking down in a way local police forces were hard-pressed to contain. Martial law had already been declared in forty-eight states, with the notable exceptions of Hawaii and Alaska. In India, where Jack knew Mia was currently doing research, civil unrest had led to riots and hundreds of deaths. The planet was having one hell of a rough week. If things kept up, Jack suspected that by the time that alien ship did reach them, there wouldn’t be much left to destroy.

  With those dark thoughts swirling through his mind, Jack glanced up toward the narrow circle of visible sky. He watched as it receded to a pinpoint of light and then vanished. The feeling was strange indeed, as though they were being lowered into the barrel of the world’s longest cannon. In an effort to push the strange optical illusion from his mind, Jack dropped his gaze between his feet and suddenly felt his gut coil even further into a mess of twisting knots. Beneath them lay an ever-widening circle of blackness.

  Anna’s robotic fingers closed around his hand. She smiled warmly, and he wondered if she had spotted the tangle of emotion on his face and thought he needed comforting. Having your nerves calmed was one thing. Having them calmed by a robot made it clear how vastly different this new reality was from the world he’d been born into.

  “When we breach the opening,” Mullins told them on an encoded frequency only the team could hear, “keep your lights off. If the enemy’s waiting for us, I sure as hell don’t intend to give them an easy target.”

  Heeding his advice, Anna’s digital features dimmed until they were barely visible.

  On the ground, Jack thought he could make out a light source in the distance. It was at least a mile or two away, maybe half the distance between where the lift would let them off and where he had seen the giant pyramid.

  “We might not be able to catch them,” he said.

  The others followed the dim outline of his pointed finger and understood at once what he was saying.

  “They had to know someone would come after them,” Eugene said, resting his hand on the grip of his holstered pistol, cutting an uncanny resemblance to Barney Fife, Mayberry’s intrepid deputy.

  “Perhaps they were counting on it,” Tamura answered him, letting her words hang in the air.

  Although she was Asian American, Jack could tell by the crispness of her speech that Tamura wasn’t first- or even second-generation.

  “If it was me, you can bet your ass I’d have sabotaged the lift,” Mullins said.

  A moan of fear rose up from Eugene. “Sabotage?”

  The lift continued to cut through the blackness, the metal groaning and whining as it went, mimicking in some small way the sounds rising up from the back of Eugene’s throat.

  “Sabotaging this elevator would mean entombing themselves down here forever,” Jack said. “It’s clear this was no suicide mission. Whoever’s down here expects to make it back to the surface in one piece. And that’s what worries me the most.”

  •••

  At last, the elevator reached the surface with a thud and a shudder. Jack switched on the light above his helmet and spun around, studying their surroundings. The platform was flanked by azure mounds of ice which rose up to heights of fifteen feet and more. They were in a cavern, carved out of ice and snow deposited over millions of years.

  Mullins opened the gate and let them out one by one. As the cleats on Jack’s boots crunched the mixture of ice and gravel beneath his feet, he couldn’t help but marvel at the idea that he was standing beneath one of the largest glaciers on earth. Above them rested millions of metric tons of compacted snow fallen over an equal number of years.

  As the others descended from the cage, they each bore the same wondering expressions. If there was such a thing as a lost world, this was surely it. Just then, something by Jack’s left boot caught his eye. He bent down to examine it.

  “I think I’ve got something here,” he called out.

  In a flash, Mullins was by his side. “Tracks,” he said ominously. The faint hope they might be down here alone was now gone. “I count a dozen of them. Maybe more.” He pointed at a series of unusual tracks. “Looks like they may have been carrying something heavy with them too.”

  “Some sort of vehicle?” Gabby asked, kneeling next to him.

  Mullins’ eyes narrowed. “Hard to say. These im
pressions are small and rounded at the front, almost like a horse’s hoof.”

  “Or a donkey,” Eugene offered. “They can be particularly useful when trekking over mountain passes or crossing difficult terrain.”

  The small area illuminated by the lights from their helmets made one thing perfectly clear. Lugging around any significant equipment would likely be slowing them down.

  “We follow these tracks then,” Jack said. “But keep your eyes peeled and your weapons ready.” He turned to Grant. “I can take those briefcases anytime you want.”

  “These old things?” the fifty-nine-year-old biologist said, curling the heavy cases with each arm as though they were filled with feathers instead of delicate scientific instrumentation. The portable mass spectrometer was based on the miniaturized unit sent to Mars on the rover mission. As well, the DNA sequencer was the same kind being used by anthropologists in the field who were studying the movement of Homo sapiens from our species’ earliest days.

  Grant laughed at his gaudy display of newfound masculinity. Jack did too, but the images of his friend struggling up the ramps within the Atean craft, followed by the fractured hip he had suffered soon after, were hard to reconcile with the man standing before him. Especially since it had only been a matter of days rather than months.

  Jack noticed Anna pushing a spike with a glowing light on the end into the ice.

  “What’s that?”

  “A signal booster,” she replied, matter-of-factly, crushing a handful of ice and sprinkling the crystals over the top to camouflage the device. “I will need to plant others along the way if we hope to maintain contact with Northern Star.”