“Back to the Sit Room?” Curtis asked when the door closed behind the admiral.
Margaret shook her head. “Can’t spend all my time in there, Curt. Neither can you. I need the congressional leadership in the Oval Office as soon as you can arrange it. This damned thing isn’t what we thought. And we need to find out exactly what it is before something worse happens. Have you scheduled a meeting with the news team?”
“Tomorrow morning—”
“I need to see them now.”
Curt nodded and reached for the phone on his desk.
“Curt.” Margaret looked down at him, her arms wrapped around herself. “Is this connected to the cyberattacks on military facilities? Is this . . . part of a bigger plot?”
“I don’t know. It could be someone—a homegrown terrorist group even—taking advantage of the current tension to make a move. But . . .”
“But what, Curt?”
“That this is the work of some patriot group coming down from the hills seems an outrageous conclusion at best. This is also way beyond our wildest projections on Al Sabbah’s capabilities. The tech, the funding behind this . . . it’s going to take some looking.”
Margaret folded her hands, leaned back, and sighed, speechless, yet poised, as fear pressed on her chest.
Half an hour later that fear was underscored. Margaret had two media journalists from WHUT in her office—Regina Price and Cosmo Hernandez. What she was hoping to get from them were their personal impressions of the action they had recorded on the National Mall. She got far more than that. By the end of the story they told her, Margaret’s blood was thoroughly chilled. She went into her meeting with the congressional leadership feeling as if she had just walked into the middle of a Dan Brown novel.
She did not waste time with pleasantries, but sat the congressmen and congresswomen down around the coffee table in the center of the Oval Office and said, “Al Sabbah had nothing to do with this. The video was a hoax. Right now, we have no idea who did this, how they did it, or why they did it.” She took a deep breath, gazing from one stunned face to the next.
“Now I’m going to tell you something even more disturbing.”
Leighton Howard sat at his desk at Forward Kinetics, staring at the blinking light on his phone and procrastinating. He did not want to take this particular phone call. He knew pretty much exactly what he was going to hear: It was taking too damn long to get this thing under control. It was becoming public. The president was aware of the anomalies. It was only a matter of time . . .
He took a deep breath. It wouldn’t do for him to lose his temper with the man who thought he was calling the shots for Deep Shield. He picked up the receiver. “Howard,” he said. Crisp. No-nonsense.
“What the hell is going on over there? I just got out of a meeting with the president in which she informed congressional leadership that your Al Sabbah red herring stunk to high heaven. Then she shared some eyewitness testimony that made my hair stand on end. Ghosts in the machinery. Cameras shooting whatever the hell they wanted. Missiles firing on their own. This isn’t what we signed up for, Howard. You promised advanced weapons technologies, not . . . whatever this is.”
Howard thought quickly. “I suggest you ask Madam President if she’s thought about how we’re supposed to fight an enemy like this one. Ask her if she’s considered if our current level of technology is adequate to fighting invisible terrorist operatives.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the call. Howard waited tensely.
“Are you saying this was a ploy to make kinetic tech more palatable to the lady in the White House?”
“If she’s at her wits’ end and you offer her a solution . . .”
“How’m I supposed to make a robot army a solution for—”
“You’re the senator,” said Howard. “Politics is your job. Mine is to wrangle the tech and exploit the military applications. I believe I’ve done that.”
In the end, the senator could not disagree, and Leighton Howard went away from the call knowing he had successfully dodged a bullet. But there were more in the chamber, and he also knew that it was time to go back on offense if he was going to avoid those, too. He called for his chopper to be readied and headed back to Pennsylvania.
Chapter 4
Breakout
“Al Sabbah? Is this Howard’s idea of a joke?” Sara was livid, pacing in front of the bank of screens that served as the Alphas’ windows on the outside world.
Most of them showed breaking news reports on the aftermath of the destruction of the Washington Monument. Endless reruns of the available footage and live feeds of the investigators who had swarmed the National Mall. The hashed and rehashed video of some Arab guy (at least Mike assumed he was an Arab) claiming the act against the “beast” for Al Sabbah.
Apart from monitoring the news, several of the displays showed feeds from the surveillance cameras Howard had installed all over his downslope base. Tim immensely enjoyed turning the general’s own resources against him. The screens that had earned Sara’s anger, though, were the endless loops of the Al Sabbah functionary claiming credit for the attack on one of America’s most beloved symbols.
Mike wondered that the concrete floor beneath Sara’s feet wasn’t smoking or—given the direction of her particular talents—that the video screens weren’t melting.
“He’s a chauvinist, Sara,” said Tim. He set the bowl of chili he’d been eating on his console, dislodging several empty soda cans that clattered to the floor. “He thinks if you’re beautiful and female, you must have a head full of air. I’ve been monitoring some back channels out of D.C., and I’ve been hearing the word hoax a lot over the last couple of hours. There’s this thing I’ve been working on, too—burrowing into Howard’s communication channels. He’s got ’em isolated pretty effectively—he’s not using so much as an inch of public circuitry for access—but because he’s got cameras halfway up the mountain, and those cameras are linked back to his camp, I can do this.”
He snapped his fingers and one of the big screens at the head of the room showed an external view of the woods. The view swiftly leapfrogged down the mountain until they were looking at the perimeter of the Deep Shield camp.
Sara stopped pacing. “You got us his video feed. Good work, Troll.”
“Better than that, Fearless Leader. I think I can use this to infiltrate their main communications system and give us access to outside phone lines and carrier waves.”
“How soon?” Sara demanded. “How soon do you think you might be able to get me direct access to Howard? Right now we’re dependent on that landline to even talk to the bastard.”
Howard’s cutting them off from communications channels after their decisive taking of the mountain was galling to Sara and Tim alike. Mike thought it was odd that two people so capable of manipulating electrons and reality hadn’t come up with an alternative way to extend their reach. Sara and Tim were still somewhat limited in their direct manipulation of mechanical things. He wasn’t. It was ironic, really—he was limited by line of sight (mostly, anyway); Tim and Sara were limited by electronic connections through which they could “see” in ways Mike could only imagine . . . but he could imagine them and had little doubt that in the future he’d be able to manipulate mechanical devices he couldn’t see through the same conduits they used. He’d already made a few strides in that direction, very quietly. Mike opened his mouth to say that they weren’t really that hamstrung, but stopped himself. He wasn’t sure why. Instinct, maybe. It seemed to him that it might pay to have some secrets of his own.
He realized that Sara had turned to face him and was watching him intently. It was creepy.
“Mike, if you can see targets in their camp—mechanical targets—can you affect them?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I want to send General Howard a message. Timmy, get me into Howard’s office.”
“Uno momentito,” Tim murmured.
A handful of seconds
later, they were looking at the inside of the general’s camp office—a single-wide, full-length trailer. The viewpoint suggested that the surveillance camera was located above his desk in one corner where the wall met the ceiling. The trailer was empty at the moment. Howard was wherever he was when he wasn’t there—probably Forward Kinetics.
“Micky,” Sara said, her voice like acid, “make something bad happen to the stuff in that trailer.”
“Sure.” Mike rose and moved to stand closer to the screen, focusing on it until the trailer’s contents—a desk with a comm unit atop it, a couple of side chairs, a conference table—were all he could see. He started with the desk, wiping it clean with a stroke of thought. Everything atop it, including the “squawk box,” went flying. Then he flipped the desk over, hurling it into the conference table, which tumbled into the trailer’s far wall.
“Wish we had audio,” said Tim. “That must sound awesome. I’m working on it,” he added hastily after another of Sara’s looks.
Mike spared a glance for the neighboring displays. “I think we’ve got their attention.” In the yard of the compound, in the mess, and in several of the hastily assembled barracks, troops were suddenly on the move. Mike waited until a handful of them approached the trailer before he began to pummel the walls with invisible fists.
Atoms were manipulatable; the only difference between solid and not was atomic density. If you knew that, you knew how to make bad things happen. Sift through the clothing racks of quantum superposition and pull down phenomena as you chose. Mike, who hated violence, who had never—up until this evolutionary leap of faith that Chuck Brenton and his machines had made possible—so much as punched a pillow, took all the hostility he’d been collecting for the last several months and pounded it into the atoms in that trailer. The walls deformed as if a herd of invisible, gravity-defying buffalo were tap-dancing on them. The floor rippled and folded. The whole damn thing rocked.
Tim let out a hoot of celebration. “Yowza! Go Micky, go! Rock ’em, sock ’em Alpha dude!”
Mike ignored him, pouring more of his anger into the assault on this metal proxy for General Howard—the man who had destroyed his world, separated him from his family, from his life. The door of the trailer flew open and an armed soldier appeared in it. He wasn’t there long; one of Mike’s kinetic punches flung him back into the yard. In the next seconds, the front wall of the trailer was torn by a barrage of machine gun fire.
Mike sucked in a startled breath and shook himself free of his fugue. He glanced at other camera feeds that Tim was getting from Howard’s camp, looking for the soldier he’d unwittingly sucker punched. Was he all right?
“Where is he?” he mumbled. “Where’d he go?”
“Who cares?” crowed Tim. “Hot damn that was a fine display of Alpha attitude. Alpha-tude!” He came to his feet in a capering jig that reminded Mike of that old Danny Kaye movie—The Court Jester—and offered Mike a high five.
Mike returned the gesture automatically, but he was still watching for signs of the soldier.
“Good job, Micky,” said Sara. “That ought to get the general’s attention. I imagine we’ll be hearing from him shortly, and when we do, Tim, I’m hoping you will have found a way to get us full access to that camp. I want every electronic connection in that place under our control.”
Tim grinned. “As you wish, my queen. I am working on it even as we speak.”
“Why?” Mike asked. “Doesn’t look like he’s going to go to the president anytime soon. I mean, if he was the one who planted that Al Sabbah video, it’s pretty clear he’s still hoping he can get back in control—”
“I’m going to give General Howard an ultimatum, Mike. Either he goes to the president now on bended knee, or we show our hand, using him as an object lesson.”
“What do you mean, an ‘object lesson’?”
“I mean—”
Whatever Sara planned on saying was drowned out in a sudden spate of invective from Tim, which was drowned out in turn by the installation’s perimeter alarms.
“What the bloody hell? What the fracking bloody hell! Are they crazy? They’ve got to be fracking crazy!”
Sara and Mike both swung to look up at the screens. It took no more than a glance to see that the camp was being mobilized. Every man they saw was scrambling into combat gear, while armored vehicles and howitzers were being stripped of their camouflage. But that wasn’t what Tim was exclaiming over. Several of their own video feeds showed incoming air strikes. There were jets coming at them from four directions—a dozen, total. They were miles away still, but no less deadly for the distance.
As they watched, the lead jet in each formation fired its missiles.
Sara let out a snarl of rage. “Damn him! Mike, bring them down.”
Mike looked at the missiles. He had no idea where they were in relation to ground zero. They were just things in the air.
“I need a tactical display, Tim!”
“Just bring them down!” repeated Sara.
“Not if I don’t know where they’re going to fall, dammit!”
“There!” shouted Tim. “There’s your tactical!”
Mike followed his pointing finger to a feed that showed a tactical display of the area. The missiles were still inbound and still outside the park. The entire wildlife refuge had been evacuated and cordoned off, allegedly because of toxicity in the lakes. He would have to time this perfectly so that the missiles would fall inside the park where they were unlikely to cause the death of innocents—but not so close to the mountain that they’d cause more damage to the Deep Shield installation. He had no doubt they were “bunker busters.” Leighton Howard knew better than anybody the extreme force it would take to bring down Olympus.
“Mike, what the hell are you waiting for?” Tim demanded.
“He’s waiting for them to enter the evacuated area,” said Sara. “Shut up and let him concentrate.”
Tim subsided and Mike focused his entire attention on the incoming missiles, vaguely aware of Sara moving to have a murmured conversation with Tim. Mike took the missiles two at a time, mangling their innards with a thought and crumpling them from the inside out. They tumbled out of the sky in ragged pairs. Not all of them exploded—apparently their controllers had not wanted them to arm until they were on top of their target.
The missiles “magically” malfunctioning didn’t deter them, however. The planes veered off and circled for another pass. Mike shook his head. Wasn’t that the textbook definition of insanity—repeating the same process and expecting different results?
But that was just what the jets did; they ran a second pass and fired all their missiles simultaneously. He brought them down just as before. This time they all exploded.
“Timmy-Troll,” Sara said softly, “can you charge the wires?”
“Let’s see.”
The monitors inside the Deep Shield camp showed nothing at first, and it took Mike several seconds to grasp what was happening. The first indication that something was wrong was fire. It broke out in the ruined trailer, in the mess tent, in the barracks. It sprang from floors, from walls and ceilings. Tim had somehow charged every wire, every electrical cable, with sizzling power. The shielding superheated, the plastic jackets melted, and anything in contact with the wires burned. The soldiers reacted by fleeing, naturally. As the surveillance feeds from inside the buildings failed, one after the other, they gathered in the center of the camp, weapons useless in their hands.
Tim was laughing. “Lambs to the slaughter,” he snorted, glancing up at Sara. “Watch this.”
Something rose from behind one of the large barracks tents. Something that Mike realized he’d been seeing out of the corner of his eye for days, lurking in shadows. It was—or it appeared to be—a minotaur. A ten-foot-tall, morning-star-wielding, armor-wearing minotaur, literally snorting fire and billows of red smoke. It strode toward the center of the camp, whirling its oversized weapon over its head. The spiked ball at the end of its chai
n was bigger than a man’s head. Tim bellowed and the thing opened its mouth and bellowed with him. They couldn’t hear this—only see it—but that meant what followed took place in an eerie silence that made it all the more terrifying.
The first man to hear and see the minotaur shouted and reflexively turned his gun on it, rattling off a silent barrage of machine gun fire. The minotaur opened its mouth wide in a roar and whirled the morning star threateningly above its titanic head. More men fired on it . . . from every side. Mike swallowed, sweating, trying to get his mouth to move—to make Tim stop. He couldn’t. And for reasons even he didn’t fully understand, he gave up trying.
Soldiers fell, brought down by friendly fire from only yards away—only feet away—for as solid as it looked, their bullets passed right through Tim’s creation to find live targets on the other side.
Tim generated several smaller creatures and sent them into the chaotic melee. Hideous, misshapen things out of video game nightmares. They threatened and loomed and swung their battle axes at the soldiers and seemed to land blows—albeit light ones. Mike didn’t know if Tim was pulling punches or simply lacked the zeta craft to make the blows completely solid. The soldiers shot at these creatures, too, and tried to bayonet them when they got close.
More men fell.
The last man died trying to escape the massacre. He ran, tripped attempting to dodge the imaginary morning star, and fell onto the bayonet of a dead comrade.
Only one camera was functional now, and Mike was fairly certain that was because either Tim or Sara had found a way to affect it independently of the network. That camera faithfully recorded General Howard’s expression as he entered his ruined camp moments later. Trailers and tents still burned; men lay dead or dying. The air was filled with smoke.
Tim’s creatures were gone, leaving no evidence they’d ever been there. To Leighton Howard it must have appeared that insanity had overtaken his men and they had killed each other in a violent fugue. He made a slow circuit of the camp, moving like a sleepwalker or a zombie, his face slack, his skin gray. Tim swiveled the camera to follow him. The servos must have made some sort of sound, for the general turned to look directly up into the lens.
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