The God Peak

by Patrick Hemstreet

  “Heh. Now he gets it,” said Tim, then affected a gravelly murmur. “‘Yes, young Skywalker. Only now, at the end, do you see.’”

  Almost as if he could hear the taunt, Howard moved toward the camera, stepping over bodies, drawing a handgun as he moved. He stopped before the tree the camera was affixed to and aimed at it point-blank.

  “Go to hell,” he mouthed and fired.

  “Well, dammit!” exclaimed Tim. “That was rude. Now we don’t get to see what he does next. Do you think he’ll mount a one-man attack on us?”

  “I don’t know, but I want to find out,” said Sara. “Mike!”

  He looked up at her, realizing that he’d slumped into a console chair without knowing it. He cleared his throat. “Yeah?”

  “How many bots can you manipulate at once?”

  “A couple of them, maybe.”

  “Send them down the mountain. I need to see what he’s up to.”

  “Sure.” Getting such a simple order from Sara was almost a relief. Mike started to reach for the nearest bots kinetically, then decided he wasn’t ready to show Sara he was no longer strictly limited to line of sight if he knew the mechanism well. He pulled himself to his feet and headed for the nearest robot storage area—the War Chest, Tim called it.

  He got two of the lightweight ninja bots out of their charging stations and sent them out of the facility through a narrow access tunnel that served as a back door. He had them both “pill bug” and sent them careening downhill toward the burning wreck of the Deep Shield camp. He returned to the control room then, so as to keep an eye on them through the external surveillance system.

  The moment before he lost sight of them—probably a quarter mile from the camp—he popped them both upright, fired up their onboard optics, and put them into a fast jog. Sara grabbed the video feed via more mundane means and fed it to their displays.

  Mike thought about going into VR mode but decided that as important a breakthrough as that might be for him, he had no desire to witness the devastation Tim had caused as if he were there. He sat down at his station in the rear of the ops theater and watched the displays.

  “Man, this is taking too long,” Tim complained. “Even at a run, they’re taking too long to get there. Can’t you make them fly or something?”

  “They’re not built to fly.” As soon as the words left his mouth, Mike realized that he was limiting his own thought. What, after all, was the difference between packing atoms together to create a solid “punch” and packing them to make a solid object glide along an invisible “slide” to a target location? Mike did not try this now, however. He was fairly certain that any failure that resulted in it taking longer to get where they were going would send Tim into some sort of tantrum. He settled for giving the bots a bit of an assist so that they ran like cartoon characters in bad animation, sliding along the uneven ground several feet with each step.

  Sara turned to look at him oddly, but he ignored her. He was as eager to find out what Howard was doing as she was. The two bots broke through the perimeter of the camp into a pall of billowing smoke. Mike set one unit up as sentry and took the other slowly between the still-burning wreckage, its optics sweeping the area. Camouflage-covered bodies stained crimson with their life’s blood lay everywhere. The audio feed sent back the crackle of flames, the sighing of wind, and the creaking of tree limbs. Jarringly, Mike could hear birdsong. He ignored it, making his way to the center of the devastation, to where they had last seen Leighton Howard.

  He was still there. He lay on his back at the base of the tree with its mangled camera, a neat—if bloody—hole between his brows. The gun was still attached to his left hand by its trigger guard.

  “Now that,” said Tim, “is some seriously poetic justice.”

  “Except we needed him to figuratively fall on his sword,” Sara said.

  “You guys,” Mike said, panning the robot’s gaze away from the dead officer, “we have a more immediate problem.”

  “What?” Troll asked.

  “The forest is burning.”

  Aerial reconnaissance showed that the fire was fanning out from a clearing at the southern skirt of Pine Flat. Fire Captain Bert Cross suspected campers, though as close as the source was to an old firebreak road, it could have been someone tossing out a cigarette butt, or even a vehicle backfiring. Not likely at this time of year, but possible.

  While the planes dropped borate retardant on the fringes of the fire and forestry copters dispensed vast buckets of water from the nearby reservoir, Captain Cross drove up the firebreak with a train of three off-road engines and an EMS vehicle.

  “You know that clearing didn’t show up on the last satellite maps I saw!” The driver of his vehicle—Sergeant Robert Apatow—shouted above the engine noise. “Someone carved that out in the last four months or so.”

  Cross gave him a sidewise glance. “I hope that doesn’t mean we’re going to be dealing with a meth lab or a bunch of squatters.”

  “Well, whoever the hell they are, I hope they got out before—”

  “Yeah.” Cross finished his thought with a word, watching the GPS screen.

  “We’re almost—” Apatow broke off to peer over the steering wheel and out the driver’s side of the front window. “Is that a helicopter?”

  It was a helicopter. It sat just south of the firebreak in a clearing barely big enough to hold it. It was small, dart shaped, camouflage painted, and mostly covered with a leafy net.

  “Bob, can you get us down there?”

  “Sure thing. Looks like the road picks up again on the other side of the chopper pad. I hate to say it for a number of reasons,” Apatow added, steering the truck off the main firebreak and along a track that skirted the helicopter’s clearing, “but I have a bad feeling about this.”

  Whatever bad feeling his sergeant might have had did not prepare Bert Cross for what they found at the end of the one-lane dirt road. When the trucks pulled to a stop, the two men found themselves looking out on an abattoir. The broad clearing was ringed with charred and half-destroyed tents and a trailer that looked as if something immensely powerful had escaped from inside. Within that circle of destruction was a scene more horrific than anything Captain Cross had seen in his twenty years in the service: dead soldiers lay everywhere—shot, gored, some burned by the fire that had apparently started in some of the tents and marched away up the hill, urged on by the prevailing winds.

  “Jesus,” breathed Apatow from beside him. “What do we do, Cap?”

  “You deploy the water trucks and soak the northwest perimeter of the camp, then cut a firebreak. If the wind changes, the fire could turn and head back down toward Fayetteville. I’m going to call this in to the state police. We need help here.”

  Apatow nodded, flung open his door, and started to climb out.

  “Bob,” Cross said, “tell our guys not to touch anything in or near the camp, okay? This is either a terrorist action or a crime scene and we do not want to mess with it. This is way above our pay grade.”

  Bob Apatow nodded again, swallowing loudly enough for Cross to hear. “Yessir,” he said, and climbed down from the truck. Cross reached for the radio.

  Chapter 5

  Aftermath

  Matt couldn’t have said exactly when he realized something at Forward Kinetics was “off.” He was in his office indulging in escapist algorithms when he realized that the building around him had gone dead silent. He looked up, listened intently for a moment, then glanced at the clock on his laptop. It was two minutes past the hour, yet he hadn’t seen the regular security patrol go by his office. He got up and wandered out into the hall. All he could hear was the quiet exhalation of the HVAC system and his own breathing.

  He stood in the hall for a moment, then started down toward the robotics lab. When he was about as creeped out as he could be, feeling as if he’d wandered onto the set of a postapocalyptic film or an episode of The Twilight Zone, he finally heard the sound of voices from the direction of the
lab. He got to the door as Brenda Tansy and Phil Rath emerged, looking just as perplexed as he felt. The rest of the robotics team was right behind them, reminding him of a bevy of quail venturing out onto an empty road.

  They all stared at each other for a moment, then Bren said, “Where are all the Deeps?”

  Matt glanced up the hallway toward the conference room that had been the nerve center for Leighton Howard’s operations. “You mean the resident Men in Black, I assume. I have no idea. I just noticed that the regular detail hadn’t wandered past my office door . . . and that the place was quiet as a tomb.”

  “They were in there,” Phil said, gesturing toward the conference room with his chin. “One of them came in and called out the two guys that are usually stationed in the lab and then it just went all quiet.”

  “Well, let’s take a look around,” Matt proposed. “See what there is to see.”

  What there was to see were the handful of civilian employees wandering through a structure that every single member of the Deep Shield administration and its security details had abandoned. There were no Deeps anywhere on-site, their computer equipment was missing, and a quick scan of the parking lot revealed that all their vehicles were gone.

  At the end of their extended search, Matt gathered everyone in the lunchroom and assigned himself and their admin, Ventana Salazar, to make a series of phone calls to numbers that had previously connected them to the people charged with overseeing their work. Matt tried the number he had for General Howard several times. It didn’t even ring.

  By late afternoon, no one had attempted to contact them. Matt sent everyone but Brenda, Phil, and Tana home with instructions to stay quiet and near a phone for the next couple of days.

  “Do we come into work tomorrow?” one of the robotics crew asked.

  “Are you working on something that makes you want to come into work tomorrow?” Matt asked in return.

  Phil Rath answered for the entire team. “Weaponized shit? I think I can speak for us all when I say, ‘Not just no, but hell no.’”

  A round of “hear, hear” rippled through the small assemblage and Matt smiled. Cut from the same rebellious cloth, this bunch. When the last of the crew had trickled out of the cafeteria, Matt turned to Phil, Bren, and Tana—the people he thought of as his command staff . . . or the people he thought of as that after the original people had abandoned him—and said, “I don’t know what’s happened, but it looks as if Deep Shield has gone into hiding. I think I should contact the government.”

  “What part of the government?” asked Brenda. “After all this with Deep Shield, who can we . . .”

  She couldn’t seem to pull the trigger on the last word, but they all knew what it was.

  “Trust?” asked Tana.

  “Well, yeah . . .”

  “Chuck had a friend at the FBI he contacted,” Matt said. “I might be able to get the name.”

  “Can you contact Chuck?” Brenda asked. Her blue eyes were wide and hopeful. Wherever Chuck was, so her fiancé, Dice, might also be.

  “I was able to contact him through social media as of two weeks ago. He’s been monitoring LinkedIn. I can get a message to him—maybe. If not that, then I figure the Department of Homeland Security.”

  They parted reluctantly, as if they were all that was stable in a world that seemed to have gone pear shaped. Maybe they were. The last thing Brenda said to Matt was, “If you get hold of Chuck, please ask about Dice. Tell him . . . tell him I love him, okay?”

  Matt assured her he’d forward her message and didn’t feel the least bit inclined to tease. He thought about what he should do next, then sent Chuck a message on LinkedIn, before settling in to sip overcooked coffee from one of the pots that had been on all day. He was contemplating going over to Chuck’s house when he heard someone come in through the foyer.

  Correction—a whole lot of someones.

  Should he get up and go look? Should he stay where he was? Put his hands on the table in plain sight? Hearing the tramp of feet in the hall, he rose and turned to face the door of the lunchroom, hands at his sides, and waited. He didn’t wait long. In mere moments, a group of uniformed soldiers appeared in the corridor outside the lunchroom. They were armed and had their weapons combat ready. Matt stifled the urge to wave at them.

  “Identify yourself, please,” said a female soldier.

  “Dr. Matthew Streegman. Could you return the favor?”

  She didn’t answer but turned her head and called back down the hallway. “Here, ma’am. It’s a Dr. Streegman.”

  A moment later a woman in civilian clothes appeared in the doorway; the soldiers parted to let her through.

  “Dr. Streegman,” she said. “I’m Diana Maalouf from the Department of Homeland Security.”

  Matt let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Thank you. You’ve saved me the trouble of trying to contact you. Do you know where General Leighton Howard is?”

  “General Howard is dead, Doctor. Are you an associate?”

  He inhaled sharply. That explained the sudden evacuation of the offices. “Not a voluntary one, Ms. Maalouf—at least, not recently. I suspect that Howard’s willing associates have all gone into hiding. They vacated the building this afternoon so quietly the rest of us didn’t even realize they were gone. Ms. Maalouf, I would really like to tell someone what’s been going on here—and what’s going on in Pennsylvania.”

  The DHS agent gave him a long, searching look, then said, “I believe I can facilitate that, Doctor.”

  Under normal circumstances, meeting the president of the United States would have been nerve-racking, but something to celebrate. Under these circumstances it was nerve-racking without a damned thing to celebrate. Everyone around Matt was on edge; half the people—including the president—looked as if they hadn’t slept in a while. He empathized.

  He told them everything he knew about Leighton Howard and Deep Shield, including the horrific events when the Deeps had tried to get their mountain back. He knew nothing of what had actually transpired in the underground facility, only that of those who went in, not one had come out. There had been a cave-in deep on the main egress, but he knew that didn’t account for all of the deaths, which told him something about the state of mind the Alpha-Zetas were in. It was easy to imagine the alienated Tim perpetrating the horrors that had popped out the gun turrets on the mountainside, but not Sara or Mike. Had the abilities their training had given them been too much for them to handle? Was it always true that absolute power corrupted absolutely?

  Matt glanced up as the president’s chief of staff cued the technician to begin running the video footage they’d obtained from what was left of Howard’s base camp. When the minotaur appeared, Matt felt a deep, dark, slimy something trying to crawl out of the pit of his stomach. He forced it down. That had to be Tim. When the soldiers began firing at the mythical beast, succeeding only in slaughtering each other, he had to close his eyes. He opened them in time to see General Howard fire, point-blank into the camera lens.

  “Where . . . where did you get this video?”

  “It was on a memory stick from one of the few remaining surveillance cameras in the Deep Shield camp,” said the navy admiral seated next to the president—an imposing Native American woman with eyes so dark they were nearly black and an impressive coil of midnight hair at the nape of her neck. “It’s the only feed that shows what caused the slaughter in any detail.”

  “How did Howard die?”

  The admiral exchanged glances with President Ellis, who said, “General Howard committed suicide. We found his body just below the camera we took the memory stick from.” She leaned forward on the table and fixed Matt with a direct gaze. “Dr. Streegman, when you described what happened on that mountain earlier, I was inclined not to believe you. Then I saw this.” She waved a hand at the video display.

  Matt showed his palms. “I tried to tell Agent Maalouf . . .” He then shifted backward and folded his arms. “When they
bugged out of Forward Kinetics, the Deeps took everything with them, including the video of their attempt to take back their facility. They kept their administrative systems very separate from ours. We had no access to any of their records; they had full access to ours.”

  “Dr. Streegman, what are we dealing with here?” the president asked. “What was that . . . thing that attacked General Howard’s camp?”

  “It was a . . .” He stopped to consider how to describe them. “The Zetas call them wraiths or golems. They’re mental constructs—projections—the Zetas have learned to generate. Or, in this case, a particular Zeta. Tim Desmond. He was a game developer.”

  The president’s chief of staff sat back in his chair with a gusty exhalation. “Wait. You’re telling me that a paramilitary unit was massacred by a character from a computer game?”

  Matt turned to look at him. “No, sir. They killed each other. There was nothing there to massacre them—which is a small mercy. But that may change. One of the Zetas—a member of the Beta team that disappeared with my partner—was capable of creating golems that were . . . well, that had some substance. That you could touch.”

  “How is that possible?” asked the president.

  “Most of us—even crack scientists—can only passively observe quantum structures. As near as I can tell, some Zetas can actively observe and manipulate quantum structures. Tim Desmond can. Minerva Mause can. I’m pretty sure that’s also what Mike Yenotov is really doing when he manipulates machinery—manipulating atoms, packing them more densely, exerting some force on them. I don’t know how exactly, because I can’t do it myself.”

  The president nodded thoughtfully. “So, there are three of these Zetas inside the mountain. They’ve obviously been successful in holding out against Howard’s misuse of their . . . abilities. Howard is dead. Is it possible we could get them to come out?”