“Well, if it helps, I’d define natural inclination as a combination of talent and desire. But I see what you mean. It’s hard to pin this stuff down.”
“Exactly. Especially since we still don’t know if some people just can’t do it at all. Anyway, I thought I said I wanted a break from—” He jerked a thumb back toward his office.
Lanfen grinned sheepishly. “Sorry. Food first. The formula can wait.”
“Don’t let Lorstad hear you say that. I think to him this formula is some sort of grail. To me, it’s just an aid to facilitate ideation. We already have a repeatable process. That’s what matters.”
“Yes, but it’s a process that, right now, depends on you, Dice, and Eugene. And Lorstad wants to be first in line to be the next to experience that process.”
“Yes. The first of many. Well, of about twenty to thirty individuals, he said. I guess Benefactors will be jetting in from all over the world to get zeta training.”
Lanfen shook her head. “That seems so . . . inefficient. There are a hundred people here who could benefit from our training. You can’t change the world if you limit the next stage of evolution to a handful of elites.”
Chuck didn’t answer, but she knew he was thinking the same thing.
“Earth to Blossom.” Dice snapped his fingers to get Joey’s attention back on the task at hand. The guy seemed unable to keep his eyes from wandering after Chen Lanfen as she left the lab with Chuck.
“Oh. Sorry. I just . . . She . . .”
“Yeah. She’s all that,” Dice agreed, grinning.
“No. I mean, yeah, she’s beautiful and amazing, but that wasn’t what I was . . .” Joey leaned across the workbench, lowering his voice. “She’s bringing us lunch?” he said, putting the same inflections he had on those words earlier. “Why would she do that? She’s a Mindbender, right?”
Dice laughed. “A who? A what?”
Joey reddened. “Sorry. I shouldn’t talk about them that way. The Benefactors. You won’t tell Lorstad—”
“Hell no. I mean, hell no, I won’t tell on you and hell no, she’s not—we’re not—part of the Benefactors. Lanfen and Mini are just people who have learned to use a set of mental muscles that most people don’t know they have.”
“I heard a rumor,” said Joey, “that your people don’t tank. I wasn’t sure I believed it. But you’re saying it’s true.”
“‘Tank’? You mean the immersion therapy? No. We don’t do that. You’ll see when we start working with Lorstad.”
Joey let out a sharp bark of laughter. “Fat chance of that happening. He’s not going to allow a plain old vanilla human being in the room while he’s becoming even more godlike.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not going to have much choice. There have to be plain old vanilla human beings in the room to run the equipment. You may be one of them.”
That raised Joey Blossom’s eyebrows. “Really? Well, if you can swing that, I’d be much obliged. I’d love to see what it is you guys do with all your tech.”
“That will require us to actually complete this robot,” Dice told him. “Can you handle adjusting the optics?”
“You bet,” Joey said, his normally stoic features seemingly lit up, and he bent to his task.
Chapter 2
Under Mount Olympus
Mike Yenotov watched the blood pressure cuff inflate, grunting when it hit its max and began to deflate. The LED screen of the little machine ticked off the numbers in time with a soft, repetitive beep. Blood pressure looked good. So did his wound. It was scabbing over cleanly with no sign of infection.
He tried not to think about how he’d sustained it.
Mike pulled off the cuff and returned it to the basket below the blood pressure monitor. The machine rolled away from him to stand against the wall like a silent sentinel. He looked around the infirmary with its pristine surfaces and wondered how long it would stay clean. Even down here there was dust and he wasn’t sure his kinetic abilities ran to vacuuming.
Stupid. Thoughts like that were stupid, irrelevant. Dust was the least of his worries—their worries. He shared this domain beneath the mountain with Sara and Tim. Sorry—Troll. Regardless of what he called himself, those two were his only companions at the moment. They were—or rather had been—his . . . colleagues. He couldn’t think of either of them as friends. Not now, at any rate. Maybe even not before all this. But now, they were . . . he wasn’t sure what.
Partners in crime, maybe.
Dust might not be an issue, but other things were. Take those full-spectrum light bulbs that Deep Shield had everywhere. They allowed the staff to live underground for extended periods of time without the medical problems that came from long-term lack of exposure to sunlight. He assumed that there were replacement bulbs and other supplies somewhere down here, but they hadn’t found them yet. Of course, he was the only one who’d even thought of looking for anything beyond food, water, and a way to wash bodies and clothing. Sara and Tim were focused on the outside world—specifically, on ways to control it. Mike, trying to think ahead, had constructed an observation deck on the eastern slope of their mountain home—just in case.
He slid off the exam table, wincing a little at the pain in his rib cage, and considered raiding the canteen for something to eat. Or maybe doing another inspection tour. He knew what he was doing. He was putting off going back down to “ops.” If he went back, he’d have to deal with Sara and Tim’s outrage. It wasn’t that he was bothered by anger—he’d worked with too many foremen to worry about being yelled at. But a Zeta’s outrage . . . that could be toxic. He wondered if they weren’t poisoning each other, creating a sort of feedback loop that just fed and fed on itself. They were furious at General Leighton Howard for his assault on their position. Furious at the military establishment he represented. Furious at whatever politicos knew of and sanctioned Deep Shield’s operations.
Mike was pissed off, too, but not so much at that stuff as at the hijacking of his life—of all their lives. As he saw it, the whole damn mess was a cascade of what-the-hell-did-you-expect? What the hell had Howard expected when he’d essentially made them prisoners in his secret mountain military base? What the hell had the Zetas expected when they’d exiled the general and all his crew to the outside? Of course they were going to try to get back in. Of course there were fail-safes and self-destruct plans and booby traps. Of course the general was going to try to limit their access to the outside world.
As per usual, thinking about their current situation gave Mike a headache. He wandered into the dispensary where medicines and other medical supplies were kept in a locked cage. The door to the cage lay on the floor where he’d flung it the first time he’d accessed the dispensary’s stores. He started to reach for the dial at the top of the ibuprofen dispenser—a device that reminded him of a gumball machine—but the bandages over his wound pulled. So he reached for the dial kinetically; it was second nature at this point. He just visualized a hand turning it, and two tablets dropped into the little plastic tray on the front of the machine.
He tossed back the pills and followed them with a swig of water from a water dispenser. (How soon before we run out of water?) A crackling sound came from his shirt pocket. He gave it a thought, switching the walkie-talkie on.
“Yeah?”
“You get lost, Micky?” Tim asked.
“Changing my bandages.”
“Sara wants you back down here. She’s getting ready to call Howard. Figures you oughta be in on the conversation.”
Conversation. That was one word for it. More like ransom demands. Sara had, just that morning, crashed a small regional banking system in the Midwest as a sort of demo—a moderately destructive reminder that, though he’d clipped their wings somewhat by restricting their access to cell towers, there were still things she could do beyond the halls of Deep Shield’s ex-HQ. Howard would have to be an idiot to think she wouldn’t employ every resource she could to achieve her goals. It must totally burn him that the comm
unications and computer network he’d worked so hard and so secretly to build was now being used against him.
Whatever they want to call this next phase in the discussions, he definitely needed to be there.
“Yeah. I’m on my way,” Mike said.
He shut off the walkie-talkie and took a deep breath, reminding himself that Sara’s goals were his goals. He just wasn’t sure about her means of achieving them. He shook himself mentally for that. Everything they’d done had been defensive, he told himself. Everything. They just wanted a better world. A world where men like General Leighton Howard and organizations like Deep Shield were not allowed to exist.
He remembered pictures in the Bible storybooks he’d read as a boy. Lions and lambs playing nice. Tanks rusting in junkyards. Orchards full of fruit being harvested by smiling families dressed like they were on holiday. He didn’t take those images literally, as he had when he was a kid, but he still wanted that world in which lions and lambs just got along.
Problem was, he didn’t feel so much like a lamb anymore.
He retrieved a couple more ibuprofen and popped them into his shirt pocket. Well, not his shirt, really. The shirt pocket belonged to whoever’s uniform he’d borrowed a piece of.
He wondered if it had been one of the soldiers who’d died in the assault on the mountain. Odds were pretty good.
Mike shook off the image that conjured and headed down to the operations theater. On the way, he passed by a series of long, narrow rooms in which Deep Shield had stored row upon row of robots built expressly for remote manipulation. He had tried to count them manually at one point, only to give up when he reached five hundred. There might be many times that many in this warren. He had no idea. What he did know was that they would never rust. Steel and titanium and aluminum didn’t. He wondered how long it would be, though, before their wiring harnesses desiccated in the dry air. It almost didn’t matter. The Deep Shield guys had built them with servo mechanisms and a rudimentary AI because their Zetas hadn’t known how to manipulate the bots directly. He and Sara and Tim did. The wires could all disintegrate and they’d still be able to make use of the robot army.
Except that they wouldn’t. That would be his personal part of their endgame, he decided—destroying every last one of those war machines. Well, maybe he’d have to let Tim take down a couple hundred. The thought almost made him smile.
He entered ops quietly and slid into a chair at a console near the back of the room, angling a glance at the faraway ceiling. The place had a state-of-the-art fire suppression system. In this room alone, there were enough nozzles to flood the place. He wondered what effect all that water and fire retardant would have on General Howard’s metal army.
“Where the hell’s Mike?”
Mike jerked his head up and peered at Tim through the muted light in the room. The overhead lighting was dimmed in favor of bright, full-spectrum LEDs that lit the workstations the Zetas had appropriated. The kid was sitting in a pool of light about four feet in front of him at another console with his Converse-clad feet propped up on it, his face bathed in a rainbow of radiance from the lights on his control panel. Sara was pacing back and forth beneath the wall of tactical and real-time displays at the head of the room. Mike glided his chair forward on silent casters and tapped Tim on the shoulder.
The younger man yelped, twisting so violently he pitched himself out of the chair and onto the concrete floor.
“Son of a bitch, Mike! What the hell’d you do that for?”
Mike shrugged. “Just letting you know I was there. Thought you heard me come in.” He thought nothing of the kind, but he wasn’t about to admit it. Tim had always rubbed him the wrong way. He’d come to view him with a sort of annoyed fondness, but under their present circumstances, there was less fondness and a lot more annoyance.
“Bastard,” mumbled Tim.
Mike raised his head to see Sara regarding both of them with impatience. “I’m here, boss lady. What’s the plan?”
“The plan is, we’re going to issue some demands to General Howard. Demands that he will disregard at his peril.”
“Okay. What demands?”
“First of all, that they stop trying to pry us out of this mountain. Second, we hear from your wife and kids that they’re okay, that they’re not being harassed in any way—”
Mike felt as if someone had poured ice water over his head. “My family is in Canada.”
“Yes, and if I were Howard, I’d be looking for a way to extract them.”
“The Canadian government isn’t going to just give them up. My wife’s got dual citizenship.”
Sara crossed her arms over her breasts and gave him a look that was almost pitying. “Mike, Howard has no real authority in the American government or the military. His extraction would not go through diplomatic channels. He’ll probably just send one of his black ops teams . . . if he has any left.”
Mike stood slowly. “The hell he will! That son of a bitch touches my family and I will end him.”
“And that is something that I want to impress upon our dear general. You need to communicate with your family and your family needs to remain free.”
“Canaries in a coal mine,” Mike murmured.
“What?”
“My family. You’re saying they’re like canaries in a coal mine. If they get locked down or fall silent, you’ll know Howard’s plotting something.”
Sara stared at him for a long moment, then said, “I suppose it would have that advantage, Mike. But I care that your family is an obvious point of leverage. We need to do what’s necessary to keep them safely out of harm’s way. I’m sure you agree.”
“Sure I agree.”
“Then we’re in accord. I also want Howard to get the real U.S. government involved. He’s a traitor. He has no authority to be speaking on behalf of the government or the people of America.”
“Howard is scum.” Tim had climbed back into his seat and resumed his casual pose.
Sara ignored him. “I’m sure you’ll agree we need access to the real power, Mike.”
Tim snorted. The sound echoed harshly in the cavernous room. “I’m pretty sure that’d be the heads of multinational corporations, who are just as scummy as Howard, in my book. Man, but I’d like to take those jerks down.”
Sara cut him a swift glance, a Mona Lisa smile on her face. “You’ll get your chance. I did some snooping in Howard’s private files. He’s beholden to a number of multinationals who have interests that his little robot army were intended to serve. They’ll no doubt be asking him embarrassing questions about how that’s going.”
“So,” said Mike, “what are you going to demand?”
“Access to the Oval Office and the Pentagon.”
Mike laughed. “Like that’s gonna happen. Like you said, he doesn’t have that access to give.”
Sara’s smile became a grin. “We’ll see.” She opened a channel to the Deep Shield camp at the foot of the mountain. “This is Sara Crowell,” she told the tech who answered. “I want to talk to General Howard. Immediately.”
Tim snickered, then cupped his hands over his mouth and called out in a high, singsong voice: “Paging Leighton Howard. Will Leighton Howard please report to the principal’s office?”
Howard was there so fast, Mike imagined he must have been standing right next to the communications console.
“Howard here,” he identified himself.
Sara got right to the point. “By now you will have ascertained that none of your attack forces survived the attempt to kill us and that you are unable to detonate the charges you intended to destroy this mountain. And you will have gone to Mike Yenotov’s house and found it empty.”
There was a moment of silence, then Howard said, “Yes to all three. But you should be warned that we know where Yenotov’s family is. We traced them to Ontario.”
Mike tensed.
“And you should be warned,” Sara said, “that if we do not hear from Mike’s wife in twenty-four
hours and continue to hear from her on a daily basis that she and the kids are still in Ontario and free—well, let’s just say you really wouldn’t like the consequences.”
When Howard didn’t answer, Sara continued. “Now, I think we’re clear that you’re not getting back in here by force and that you are not going to be able to trigger your explosives. Are we indeed clear on that, General?”
“Yes.” Howard ground the word out between his teeth. Mike was convinced he could literally hear the man’s molars chipping.
“Wonderful. So, here’s what I want. I want to talk to the president. In fact, I want a direct line of communication.”
“That’s—that’s impossible.”
“Why? Because she still has no idea that the little snafu in Pennsylvania had nothing to do with hackers or cyberterrorism? Because she still doesn’t know it was connected to military bases going dark all over the world? Tsk, tsk, General Howard. You’re withholding information from your own commander in chief.”
Silence again. Mike exhaled sharply. He admired the way Sara could peg this guy, but it infuriated him that this traitorous jackass would try to maintain his authority in the face of what the Alpha-Zetas had already proven they could do.
“Or maybe you don’t consider the president your commander at all?”
More silence.
“Maybe,” he said aloud, “he needs a reminder of what the stakes are, Sara.”
Sara glanced back at him over her shoulder, then turned to Tim. “Tim, pick a corporation. A corporation that’s monkeyed with people’s lives—maybe they’ve gobbled up little independent companies, stolen their tech, and then fired all their employees. Or maybe they’ve polluted the natural resources of the people living downstream from their facilities. Or maybe they’ve sold defective equipment to the military—the real military. Think about what you’d like to do to that company’s resources.” She hesitated, smiled, and said, “Then do it.”
The God Peak Page 3