The God Peak

by Patrick Hemstreet

  Dedication

  For Seth

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Hall of the Mountain King

  Chapter 2: Under Mount Olympus

  Chapter 3: Spin

  Chapter 4: Breakout

  Chapter 5: Aftermath

  Chapter 6: To See the Wizard

  Chapter 7: His Peculiar Talents

  Chapter 8: Catching the Wave

  Chapter 9: Silent Running

  Chapter 10: Inside Joey Blossom

  Chapter 11: Black Ops

  Chapter 12: Requiem

  Chapter 13: Councils of War

  Chapter 14: Beneath the Surface

  Chapter 15: The Loyal Opposition

  Chapter 16: Emergence

  Chapter 17: A Kingdom Divided

  Chapter 18: Best-Laid Plans

  Chapter 19: Of Gods and Men

  Chapter 20: Adepts

  Chapter 21: Rage

  Chapter 22: Olympus Fallen

  Chapter 23: Moving Heaven

  Chapter 24: Midnight

  Chapter 25: Going to Ground

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick Hemstreet

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Hall of the Mountain King

  Chuck Brenton woke up every morning in a room overlooking an anonymous and arid landscape of scrub and grass before going off to work in a science fiction story. The lab in which he had an office and in which he did his research had the gleaming, sanitized look and feel of something from a futuristic film. The light was pure and seemed to come from every direction at once; the air was unscented and could be heard gently sighing through filters and baffles on its way down from its desert source.

  He wished it were not so sterile. He was allowed early morning and evening visits to the deck overlooking the striking glacier-carved canyon and sagebrush-covered hills. If the light was just right, he could catch the sparkle of sun on the ripples of a nearby stream or see the snowy summit of a mountain range to the southwest. The air outside had a purity to it—a dry, winey perfume that was intensely pleasant—that was in direct contrast to the canned breaths he felt like he was taking each second inside. Chuck wished he might be allowed to go walking out there, but that was not on their hosts’ menu of choices. He did his exercise by walking the extensive warren of hallways that connected different parts of the Benefactors’ domain (the Center, they called it) or on an elliptical machine in the ground-level gym.

  Their lab—which they thought of as New Forward Kinetics (or “NeFK” in their robotics expert Daisuke Kobayashi’s acronymic vocabulary)—was a wonder of stainless steel, Plexiglas, and pale quartz. It was more or less an attempt (and a successful one) to re-create and expand upon the work areas they had left behind at their original facility. The central core of the lab was a work area in which Dice could have fielded a team of twenty robotics engineers if he’d had them at his disposal. There were tool racks and worktables—everything Dice had had in his previous workshop and more. Except, of course, red glowing exit signs above randomly located steel doors.

  At one end of the room was a testing facility with a large, square workout mat for Chen Lanfen, a series of machine bays—some already equipped with robotic arms and objects—and an art studio for Mini. At the other end of the room was a cluster of computer workstations, only two of which were in use by Chuck and his protégé, Eugene. Around the perimeter of the room were several offices that—though their walls were translucent below and transparent above—offered some privacy to the inhabitants and which were virtually soundproof when the Plexiglas doors were closed.

  The world Chuck shared with his colleagues and friends (he had stopped thinking of them as “staff” long ago) was circumscribed, guarded, and carefully monitored. As long as he was hip-deep in his work with human kinetics, he felt almost normal. Work did that—gave him a place to train his eyes and mind so that he didn’t think about what had become of his house, his furniture, his garden, let alone what was happening inside and around a mountain on the other side of the continent. At least the pragmatic issues were being taken care of—he knew, for example, that his mortgage was being paid out of the Benefactors’ apparently deep pockets. And as for the other members of his team, they were all renters; their apartments had been cleared out and their belongings either ferried here (wherever here was) or put in storage.

  Except for Mini.

  He glanced over at her now as she did a graceful series of dance moves that caused a flock of delicate rainbow-hued sprites to appear as if tossed from her open hands. That seemingly effortless harnessing of her nimble brain’s zeta waves had earned her the affectionate title “Butterfly Sorceress.” The title was attributed to Euge but seemed to appropriately sum up the group’s affections for Mini.

  Minerva Mause had been living in a college dormitory when Kristian Lorstad had rescued Chuck and his team from entrapment by the shadowy paramilitary organization that called itself Deep Shield. At twenty-one, she was very connected to her parents and still spent summers at home. Covering all of her bases had posed the most difficulty for the Benefactors, but proved beyond doubt that it was not only their pockets that were deep. As far as her family, friends, and professors knew, Mini had taken a one-semester break to do research with Forward Kinetics—the company she worked for—something that required the signing of a nondisclosure agreement. On the surface it was crazy, she was so close to finishing her degree. But this job, the “zeta-ing,” this is why she went to school in the first place. She was on the cutting edge, a novel form of human expression; she was on the crest of the wave. She got to that point without having to finish her studies; college could wait while she carried on in her dream. The position required much travel as well. Her family would get postcards from various locations. What helped sell this so easily was that her many friends had already seen how immersed she had become in a job she’d never spoken of and a boyfriend they’d never met. If her e-mails were few and far between, it was understandable. Chuck’s family and her own had been friends for decades; her parents trusted that all was as it should be.

  That trust weighed on Chuck. For perhaps the hundredth time, he wished that he hadn’t involved Mini in Forward Kinetics, then tried to set aside his pointless sense of guilt by reminding himself of an ageless allegory by Jalaluddin Rumi: poor, crazy Majnun, separated from his beloved Layli, was pursued through the streets of the city by night watchmen, cursing their heartlessness . . . until his wild flight led him directly to the garden in which Layli dwelt. If one could see the end of a process at the beginning, the poem instructed, one would have a completely different understanding of its meaning.

  That was the spirit that Chuck tried, with varying degrees of success, to bring to his understanding of the role Kristian Lorstad and the secret organization he represented were playing in his life and the lives of his colleagues. Still, he had been both grateful and disturbed when he’d entered his spacious room at the Center to find all of his clothing and personal effects—including his entire library, movie collection, and his home computer. All had been carefully moved here from his house in Silver Springs, Maryland. He knew from talking to them that everyone else on his team had had a similar reaction.

  “They even had my workbench laid out with the little squirrel bot I was tinkering with at home,” Dice had told him. “All the tools. All the parts. Every last screw. Laid out just as I left it—only here.”

  And that question still lingered: where “here” was—they still weren’t certain, and Lorstad would say only that they were “somewhere in the western United St
ates.”

  For Mini, that astonishing relocation had been of paintings and sketches and figurines from her corner of the art studio at school. For Lanfen, it had been her workout mats, her gi, and her collection of martial arts weapons. For Eugene, it had been his personal laptop and library of science fiction, fantasy, and scientific literature.

  Chuck had taken the Benefactors’ attention to those details as a gesture of respect and an indicator of his team’s value in their eyes, but it had also impressed upon him that this was not a short-term relocation. Their “we mean you no harm” demeanor might be a pose. He suspected that if the renegade black ops unit calling itself Deep Shield had gained control of their fate, they might have disappeared permanently. With the Benefactors, there was no telling. They were a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, or however that Churchill quote went. Chuck had wondered many times in the past week if his desperate phone call to Kristian Lorstad had pulled their chestnuts out of the frying pan only to deposit them in the fire.

  “Dr. Brenton.”

  Chuck looked up over the monitor of his workstation in their shared main lab to see Lorstad watching him. Speak of the devil. It was eerie the way the man could enter a room without drawing attention to himself. He projected an aura of mildness and calm, but his pale eyes were vivid and sharp and missed nothing.

  “Have you thought any more about my question?” he asked.

  “I’ve thought about little else since you asked it, frankly.” Chuck glanced down at Mini’s MRI that he’d been studying.

  Lorstad rounded Chuck’s workbench and looked over his shoulder at the images. “That’s Mini, isn’t it.” Not a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Mm. This was when she was manifesting her sprites.” He pointed. “Interesting the way the activity seems spread out across the receptors as if . . .”

  “As if the zeta pattern is generated in a field instead of in an isolated location?” Chuck finished. “Very.”

  Lorstad sat down in the seat next to Chuck at his workbench. “Given this increasingly general activity, does that suggest anything to you about the formula for generating zeta waves?”

  Chuck grimaced. He hated—no, too strong a word—he distrusted Lorstad’s quest for formulas. It reminded him too much of his erstwhile partner, MIT mathematician Matt Streegman.

  My deceitful, manipulative partner, who is still in the clutches of Deep Shield . . . if not their back pocket.

  But Matt and Deep Shield were—presumably—thousands of miles away, and Lorstad was right here. So he focused his attention back to the immediate . . .

  Threat? Is that the right word? Either way, he was wary around him.

  “It suggests that any formula I might arrive at is going to involve more than simply stimulating this or that portion of the brain.”

  “That goes without saying, Doctor,” Lorstad said patiently. “We have a formula for that sort of process. But it has limitations.”

  Chuck turned to look at him. “You mean the Benefactors have a process? You’ve mentioned that before. Can you be more specific?”

  Lorstad stared at him a moment longer. Long enough that Chuck thought he would not answer the question.

  He seemed to come back to himself from a mental distance, took a deep breath, and said, “I can. In fact, I think I will show you. All of you.”

  He looked back over his shoulder at the other people in the lab. Mini was dancing in a cloud of surreal butterflies and birds and sprites. Lanfen was going through a series of kung fu moves, supplementing her muscle control with her kinetic talents and seeming to float as if in lower-than-normal gravity. Euge sat at his laptop, matching EEG output to MRI results, while Dice and his borrowed assistant assembled a robot for Lanfen to work with.

  Dice looked up from his robot. “All of us what?” His face was drawn, his complexion more gray than golden. Of all of them, he had left the most behind: his fiancée, Brenda. She was still in the outside world and, while Lorstad had repeatedly told him she was safe, Dice—no less than Chuck—was distrustful of anyone with the power, the resources, and the sheer networking ability to do what Lorstad had done over the last week and a half.

  Once bitten, twice shy.

  “I need to show all of you something that I hope will help you understand why your work in kinetics is so important to us,” Lorstad said, “and to the rest of humanity. Please, come with me.”

  Dice looked skeptical, so Chuck nodded at him in assurance he didn’t necessarily feel himself. But anything we can find out now can only help us understand what the hell is going on here. He started walking with Kristian.

  Lorstad led them out of their lab and into the huge main hall of the Benefactors’ underground facility. Of course, Eugene had dubbed it the Hall of the Mountain King within hours of their arrival. It was a long, cavernous space with a brightly lit floor level populated by about two dozen pleasant but curious people working at computers. They were arranged in groups by discipline or task, according to Lorstad. There were large LED displays on the curving walls over their workstations that showed maps and tactical information on the places around the world the Benefactors were watching, for whatever reason.

  Of those, Chuck and his colleagues only knew that the splash of yellow near the east coast was a similarly hidden installation beneath another mountain that had lately belonged to Deep Shield. Now it was held by three of the most powerful people on the planet—Sara Crowell, Timothy Desmond, and Mikhail Yenotov. They were an architect, a game developer, and a construction engineer, respectively. Were being the operative word. Because now they were something . . . more.

  People who could do terrible things if they quite literally set their minds to it.

  Like Lanfen and Mini, they were Zetas—humans who had trained their brains to produce zeta waves and to use those kinetic impulses to manipulate their environment. They had so far driven Deep Shield from their own base, grounded all military aircraft worldwide, and threatened to do more in the pursuit of world peace. Whatever their agenda, what was clear was that only another group of similarly talented and skilled individuals could hope to take them on.

  Chuck rejected the scenario that they intended to destroy the world. He knew them; he had trained them. Tim was antisocial and isolated, but Sara and Mike were both intelligent, moral people. Yes, they’d expelled the forces of Deep Shield violently from their mountain base, but what choice had they been given? They would not be made slaves, and Chuck—having fled across the country himself—could certainly respect that. But it still created a problem in which two men and one woman had the ability to hold the world hostage.

  The solution to that problem was to go to Pennsylvania and contact the Zetas, he was sure of it. He just had to convince Lorstad and his associates of that.

  Lorstad led his guests to the end of the great central hall where there was a bank of three elevators. They entered the one farthest to the left and went down. Chuck tried not to show how much that startled him. He had thought the floor their lab occupied was the lowest one in the facility. He glanced sidewise and caught Lanfen and Dice looking back at him. Clearly, they had also noticed the anomaly. Eugene and Mini seemed to have eyes only for each other.

  “Get a room,” Dice muttered, and Chuck almost smiled for the first time in days.

  Lorstad, of course, didn’t even react.

  “The area you’re about to enter,” Lorstad finally said, “is off-limits to all but a handful of our staff. It must remain so.”

  “How did you cue the elevator to go down?” Dice asked. “There’s no control on the panel.”

  Lorstad gave the robotics engineer a significant look with a lift of his pale eyebrows. “You do the math,” the look said.

  “Oh, yeah. Duh,” Dice murmured and pointed at his own head. “You’re one of us.”

  The look Lorstad gave him at that statement was impenetrable. Chuck did not even attempt to decode it.

  The elevator doors opened onto a broad
corridor identical to the ones on higher floors except for the color of its walls. These were pale green and seemed to glow. There were doorways at long intervals along both sides of the corridor. Lorstad led the way briskly out of the lift. About twenty feet down the hall, he hesitated momentarily, then turned to a door on the left. The flat panel retreated into the wall, admitting the group to a chamber unlike any they’d yet seen.

  It was large, dark, and had, as its centerpiece, a pair of what looked like—

  “Sensory deprivation tanks?” asked Eugene. “You’re not planning on putting us in there, are you?”

  Lorstad smiled. “Dr. Pozniaki, I have no desire to put you into sensory deprivation units. My hope is that you will enable us to get out of them.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Euge. “Wait. You’re telling me this has something to do with how you guys learn to use your zeta-like abilities?”

  Chuck grasped immediately what Lorstad was showing them. “You program your abilities from the outside,” he murmured. “Using these.”

  “Yes. Using SDUs and binaural beat therapy—or a combination of binaural beats and timed flashes. The subject is immersed in the tank, where they are exposed to these stimuli, enabling them to achieve a state of being in which the . . . well, the spirit or soul, perhaps, actively functions in the absence of physical distraction. It learns to extend itself outside the body. To detach from the body and to act without it. To then manipulate the body and other physical objects or processes.”

  Chuck found himself nodding. “Yes. Yes, I’ve followed the research LaBerge did at Stanford. It was fascinating. In fact, I came close to moving in that direction with my own research, but it never occurred to me that prolonging lucid dreams could lead to . . . to what it is we—I mean, the Zetas, do.”

  Lorstad tilted his head to one side. “It’s not a long leap from lucid dreaming to out-of-body experiences, Doctor. And once one begins to study the implications of an OBE, well, those implications are stunning.”

  “Astral projection,” murmured Chuck.