“No faith,” Chuck murmured, his gaze unfocused. “No faith in humanity. No faith in human beings.”
Eugene felt a thoroughly uncomfortable and slimy chill trail its fingers down his spine. “They think they’re a different species already—is that what you’re saying? Like—like they’re from outer space or something?”
Chuck stood and started to pace—a good sign, Eugene thought.
“I don’t think that’s relevant,” Chuck said. “That can be overcome . . . maybe. Hopefully.”
He took a couple of strides with his eyes closed. “It’s time to move on to Lanfen’s misdirection techniques. Maybe we can force them to act unconsciously, instinctively.”
“It’s like the mom whose adrenaline allows her to lift the car off her kid. Right? It’s like the brilliant things some people do when they’re not thinking about it. It’s spontaneous, reactive. Okay. Great. How do we get that to happen in the lab with Lorstad and Alexis?”
“Lanfen and I have an idea; I need to run it by everyone else, start implementation.” Chuck, eyes wide open, turned on his heel and headed back out into the lab, calling, “All hands on deck! We have an experiment to design.”
Matt told himself he knew the three people he was going into the mountain to see. He had trained them, worked side by side with them. They were colleagues, friends even. There was no need for nerves. No need for his stomach to be tying itself in knots.
He checked the receiver in his ear for the twentieth time as he moved to the outer perimeter of the reconnaissance camp, where the LED lamps ceased to shed their light. Due north. He stared up through the trees at the mountain. In the twilight it was hard to see the burn, though the smell of it was still heavy in the air.
There was movement in the brush to his right and a gleaming ninja bot glided out of the woods to train its optics on him. A knot formed in his throat and rolled down, hard and cold, into the pit of his stomach. He felt faint.
“Well,” he said breathlessly. “Hello there.”
“It’s me, Doc. It’s Mike,” the robot said, then motioned to itself with one hand. “This is Sacha.”
The fact that it was Mike, and the personal touch of his introducing the robot by name, made Matt relax. “Hey, Mike. You and Sacha are my escort?”
“Yeah. Look, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover—several miles. I figured I’d carry you. Unless they’d let you drive a jeep. The road’s pretty torn up.”
“Carry me,” Matt repeated. “Sure. Why not. I’ve never gone anywhere by robot before.” He picked his way across the clearing to the robot and stopped. “How do we do this?”
In answer, Sacha squatted slightly and made a ledge of its arms and hands. “Have a seat, Doc,” Mike said.
He laughed uneasily, but turned and seated himself in the improvised chair. The robot straightened, lifting Matt easily from the ground, then turned and began a swift, ground-eating lope toward the mountain. It was exhilarating and made Matt experience the potential of these devices in a completely different way.
“Mike, this is incredible!” The words were whipped from his lips by the breeze of their passage. “Can you imagine what bots like this could mean for firefighters and EMTs? Can you imagine being able to go into a burning building or some other death trap and rescue people without risking the lives of the emergency workers? And the strength—a team of these things would be able to dig into debris fields and fallen buildings, rescue stranded hikers and mountain climbers.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Mike’s voice in his ear. “Funny, none of that stuff was on the short list of things you wanted to explore. Not enough money in it, Doc?”
Matt started to offer a sarcastic and angry comeback, but he stopped himself. Mike was right. He had been focused on where they could get the most financial support, but those ideas had all been in the back of his head. At least, they’d been on Chuck’s short list.
“I thought we were working with the real government, Mike. I thought they’d have more to invest than private parties. I had no idea what we were really dealing with.”
“Yeah,” Mike-Sacha said, “the devil.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Matt said, and fell silent.
It took Sacha less than ten minutes to hike him up the slope and into a narrow cave. There he set Matt down on the sandy floor and moved to what looked like a blank wall of stone. “We’re here,” he told the wall. It vanished, displaying a thick metal door that slid to one side with a grinding sound that nearly made Matt want to scream. It was like a giant raking metal nails across a chalkboard . . . in a cathedral.
When the painful sound died, Matt found himself staring down the throat of a smooth stone bore that ran directly into the mountain.
“This isn’t the main entrance.” He looked up at the bot beside him.
“No,” it said. “This is one of several secret entrances we’ve found since we . . . since we were brought here. The main way is . . . well, it’s pretty well scragged.”
Matt took a deep breath. “Yeah. I figured.”
It took another five minutes to make their way into the heart of the mountain and up an elevator that shouldn’t have been working—its controls were dark and dead. Matt was impressed.
“You doing this yourself?” he asked Mike’s bot.
There was a slight hesitation before Mike said, “Yeah. Mechanicals are my thing, remember?”
Matt nodded, his mind already beginning to work on the mathematics of the situation. The Alphas were scared. Backs to the wall. Two formulas suggested themselves—multiply the fear, hoping it would drive them to surrender (not likely), or assuage it by talking up how important their future contributions to mankind would be.
That was certainly the option Chuck would take, and Matt was astute enough to recognize that his erstwhile partner was a lot savvier about human nature than he was. But then he was unsettled by the question that popped into his head:
Are the Alphas still human?
There was still a bit of weirdness to inhabiting a bot that Mike found disorienting. If he didn’t focus tightly, the dissonance of seeing two versions of the world at the same time was dizzy-making. He was sitting at his console in ops; he was riding up an elevator with Matt Streegman—and activating the elevator and running the bot. Mike had always been pretty good at multitasking, but this was a new high. It was like that old circus trick of juggling mismatched objects—bowling balls, batons, and chain saws. He’d experimented with like objects, of course. He could handle about a dozen bots now if they were all the same type, but this was novel. He puzzled over how he’d done it and realized, again, the truth of that old adage that Necessity is a mother. If you needed to do something urgently enough, you simply acted . . . as he’d done with the focused objective of retrieving Matt Streegman.
It all seemed counterintuitive: focus more narrowly to broaden what you could do. And yet, here they were. They reached the ops level and stepped out of the elevator into the control room. Mike stationed Sacha at the rear of the room, before standing himself and turning to face Matt.
“Hey, Doc. Welcome to Olympus.” He used the term ironically and got a perverse satisfaction at having beaten Timmy-Troll to the punch.
“Hey,” said Matt, then looked past him at Sara and Tim. “Hi, guys. How’re you holding out?”
“Very well, thanks,” said Sara. She moved to meet him in the semicircular area framed by the curving banks of control consoles. She put her hand out to shake his. “Good to see you again . . . I hope. You have news from the outside world?”
Matt nodded. “I’ve spoken at length with President Ellis and the Joint Chiefs. I’m here basically to find out what you need from them to come out of the mountain and get back to your lives.”
Mike’s heart clenched in his chest at the idea of getting back to his life. “Hell,” he said, “a plane ticket to Toronto would do it for me.”
Sara gave him a look. “Down, boy. Remember, this isn’t about us.” She faced
Matt again. “It’s about the world, Matt. It’s about how crazy and screwed up this world is because of men like Howard. Because of power-hungry tribal leaders and congressmen and prime ministers and ayatollahs. It’s because those people don’t care what happens to people who are not directly supporting them. What we need in order to leave here is the certainty that the president of this country will use our powers as a threat. All military activities will cease or we will act to stop them. Trust me when I say we can.”
Matt took a deep breath. “Oh, I trust that, all right. You want the U.S. to what—weaponize you?”
Sara looked pissed. “Don’t put it like that. It’s not about us. It’s about all the people who suffer and die because world leaders are consumed with greed and full of themselves. We want to go before the United Nations. The president needs to get them to call a special meeting of the Security Council first, then of the General Assembly. We’ll put our proposition to them: if military aggression doesn’t stop within a reasonable amount of time, we will stop it. That clear enough?”
“Yeah,” Tim chimed in. “And if they need proof that we can, we’ll give ’em proof. All the proof they’ll need.”
“Okay,” Matt said, but he didn’t look as if anything was okay. “How do you propose we proceed?”
“They send in some transport—drivers, unarmed,” said Sara. “We leave here with an escort of ninja bots just to secure our safety. No tricks. No attempts to tranq us or kill us or render us unconscious.”
“I’m pretty sure I can guarantee that,” Matt said. “President Ellis and her staff have seen what you guys have done. She gets the picture. She also recognizes what a boon your abilities are to humanity and I think she gets that she can’t do this by the old playbook.”
“Just pretty sure?” asked Mike.
Matt turned to look at him—met his eyes. “No—I’m sure, Mike. Ellis is a straight shooter. She doesn’t want to anger you, and she doesn’t want to lose your talents to the world. She knows what she’s got here. You three are unique.”
“Unique?” Sara repeated, her eyes fixing on Matt’s face. “What happened to the others? What happened to Mini and Lanfen? Where are they? Where’s Chuck?”
Her fists were flexing at her sides and Mike sensed that she was getting revved up.
Matt raised his hands in a placating gesture. “They’re safe somewhere. I’ve been in touch with them. I just don’t know where they are—honest. If you come out of hiding, I think that will persuade them to come out as well.”
Sara regarded him narrowly for a moment, then said, “You’re wearing a wire, right?”
Matt hesitated, then nodded.
“Then Madam President has heard our demands. Talk to them. If we don’t get out of here safely . . .”
“Admiral, you heard that?” Matt asked whoever was on the receiving end of his wire. “Okay,” he said after a moment, then to Sara: “They’ll send transport just as you asked. How many ninjas do you want to take?”
“Two for each of us.”
“They’ll send two Humvees.”
“And don’t imagine that by separating us, you can overcome us,” Sara warned. “You can’t.”
“They won’t try. And . . .” He paused to listen. “They’re talking to the UN already.”
Sara nodded and relaxed visibly. Mike felt the knot in his own chest uncoil. Maybe this would work out. Maybe he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his days hiding here or somewhere else. He hadn’t been kidding about that ticket to Toronto, though. He’d gladly go back to his old life and never use his kinetic abilities again if he could arrange that. Maybe the Alpha Team didn’t need to stick together.
The quiet of the ops theater was shredded by the sudden shrill buzz of a proximity alarm. “What the hell?” Tim jerked around to stare at the tactical displays at the head of the room. “That can’t be the transport already.”
It wasn’t. It was a flock of drones flying low to the ground and approaching the mountaintop from a dozen different directions. The monitors showed them as tiny, darting ornithopters as they overflew the peak, scudding even lower to drop small, round objects—
“The air intakes!” Tim snarled. “They’re dropping crap near the air intakes!”
“What sort of crap?” Sara demanded, as several of the objects exploded, tearing the camouflaged covers from the vents that brought fresh air in from the outside. Clouds of vapor settled into the open intakes.
Sara turned on Matt. “What is this, Matt? What are they doing?”
He shook his head, eyes wide with fear. “I don’t know. I swear! It’s not—it’s not us. It’s not the government.” He spun away from Sara, putting fingers to his ears. “Someone’s bombing us!” he shouted to his unseen listeners. “Someone’s sent drones!”
“It’s some kind of gas!” said Tim. “The assholes are gassing us!”
Sara flung herself at her console, system schematics appearing on the screen as fast as she could bring them there. “There! The ventilation system.” She concentrated for a moment, then shook her head. “Electronic controls are down. Mike, you’ll have to close them manually.” Throat constricting from the very thought of breathing unknown chemicals, Mike hurried to peer over Sara’s shoulder at the schematics. Shafts in white, a series of four doors in each shaft, shown in green. Green was open.
“Need the hatch design, Sara,” he murmured.
She called it up. The hatches were irises. A series of irises—four at intervals along the shaft. Good forethought. He envisioned the shafts, the irising hatches. He felt them. Solid. Well lubed. He closed them one after the other, deepest to shallowest, not even considering what that would tell the other Alphas about the extent of his abilities.
“Wow,” said Tim, shutting down the alarm’s bleating. “That was close.”
Sara looked at Mike over her shoulder. “That was impressive, Micky. You shut all the vents down at once. I had no idea you could do that.”
“Neither did I,” he fibbed. “Adrenaline is your friend, I guess.”
Sara rose from her chair and turned to face Matt again. He had backed up against an empty station and was half-sitting on the console. He looked . . . scared. Mike had never seen Matt scared before.
“A better friend than some, I guess,” she said. She advanced on Matt slowly, step by step, her expression unreadable. “Do you have an antidote on you, Matt? A gas mask? You’re not the type to sacrifice yourself for the good of your fellow creatures, so I have to assume you either came prepared or the gas wasn’t deadly.”
“I told you,” Matt said. “That wasn’t—I can’t believe President Ellis would do that.”
“Even to send a message? Well, we’ll just send one right back.”
Mike realized what she was going to do only seconds before Sara moved. It was only a graceful gesture of one hand, as if she were reaching for something. In that simple action, she electrified the console Matt was leaning against—every metallic surface sizzling with blue-white energy.
He cried out once, horribly, and spasmed, static arcing between him and the console. His body was smoking when it hit the floor, giving up the aroma of cooked meat. Mike didn’t make it to the head before he was sick.
“What the hell was that?” Joan Hand stared at the live images from the recon teams low on the mountainside. “Where did those drones come from? I want telemetry, dammit!”
“Dr. Streegman’s line is dead,” said the communications technician quietly.
Margaret was pretty sure that meant Dr. Streegman was dead as well. She knew one thing and one thing only—somewhere in the nation she was supposed to be leading, there were people who did not want the Zetas to come peacefully out of the mountain and they knew, better than she did, how the installation was laid out.
“We need to find out who the hell ordered this attack. More important, we need to find the other Zetas,” she said, her voice cutting through the chaos in the room.
“And we need to do it before some
one else does.”
Mike had Sacha carry Matt Streegman’s body out of the mountain and deliver it to the government communications outpost near the base of the slope. He had not wanted to touch the body, had not wanted to look at it. It was a caricature of the man—an empty, burnt-out husk from which the soul had been violently expelled. He’d read once that people who died that suddenly didn’t even realize they were dead; their souls lingered helplessly at the place their bodies were killed, unable to move on. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but even after Sacha left ops with the corpse, he felt Matt’s presence—his last moments of fear and agony—like an accusation that hung in the cool air.
He said nothing to either Sara or Tim about how he felt. He simply cradled the body in Sacha’s steel arms and carried it to the bottom of the mountain. He meant to do it in remote mode until Sacha reached the spot Sara had designated the body would be delivered. He had not wanted to inhabit the bot on this grim journey. But when the time came, he made himself see through Sacha’s optics, made himself speed down the mountain to the government camp, made himself own the death. He had believed Matt when he said he hadn’t known about the chemical weapons someone had dumped near their air intakes. He even half-believed it wasn’t the president who had ordered it.
As a boy, Mike had seen an old black-and-white movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still. The most vivid image he could recall from the film was the alien hero’s robot, Gort, cradling his master’s limp body after he had been injured by fearful humans. He saw that image reflected in the eyes of the soldiers he faced when he finally reached the government camp perimeter. He hesitated only a moment, then laid Matt down on the forest floor and stepped back.
“Give them the message,” said Sara, close to his ear.
“This . . . this is what happens when people lie to us,” Mike said stiffly. Then he turned Sacha on his metal heel and rolled him back up the mountain. The whole time, though, he couldn’t help but wonder:
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