The God Peak

by Patrick Hemstreet

  What do we do when we start lying to ourselves?

  Chapter 9

  Silent Running

  “You look worried.” Lanfen slid into the chair across from Chuck at the table in the canteen.

  He glanced up at her. “Funny. I was going to say the same thing about you.”

  “Aren’t we the observant pair. You first.” She set her teacup down and broke open a warmed scone.

  “Matt hasn’t messaged me for days. Almost a week. Last I heard, he’d made contact with the Alphas and was going into the mountain to meet with them.”

  “You think—what?—that Sara and the others are holding him hostage or something?”

  “Or that he didn’t want to come out for some reason. It’s just weird that he wouldn’t ping me.”

  “Maybe he can’t. I mean, they’re still sort of cut off and—” She broke off, shaking her head. “Yeah, if they’ve got a line to the outside world, I have to think they’ve taken advantage of that to get a foothold beyond the mountain. I guess it makes more sense that they’re not allowing him to communicate with the outside world, or that he’s working something out with them.” She blew out a gust of air. “It really sucks to be deaf, dumb, and blind, doesn’t it?”

  Chuck blinked at her. “Did you just say ‘sucks’?”

  She grinned. “I guess I’ve been hanging out around Dice and Joey too much.”

  He smiled at that. “So, you had something you wanted to tell me?”

  She sobered suddenly, her face going with lightning speed from a smile to an uneasy frown. “When I was meditating out on the deck this morning, I noticed that there are security guards patrolling the slopes that weren’t there when we first arrived. There are also cameras. I actually saw them putting in some of those during the night awhile back.”

  “How far back is awhile back?”

  Lanfen grimaced. “The cameras went in not long after I showed off for Lorstad. I think he saw potential for escape. The security prowlers are new. In the last several days. I guessed maybe they’re afraid I might take up desert parkour and run away or something.”

  Chuck felt his neck and cheeks grow hot. Did this increased attention to security have something to do with Matt going into Deep Shield? Did Lorstad figure he and his team might want to go back east to join him? Even if he had answers to those questions, though, the key thing was that the Learned clearly didn’t trust Chuck or his team. “We shouldn’t have to escape. We’re allegedly here for our own protection.”

  “Protection at a price, Chuck. They want something from us. A formula. A path to success. The key to the universe. They know how much we’re ‘distracted’ by what’s going on back east.”

  “If Matt can’t fix whatever went wrong with the Alphas, I don’t see what good a formula is going to do the Learned.” Chuck hesitated. “No, that’s not true. I see that they think—or thought—that the combination of their conditioning with our training would be unbeatable. They could just squash the Alphas’ rebellion.”

  Lanfen met his gaze. “What if they don’t want to, Chuck? What if they really take this whole Learned versus Unlearned thing to heart? What if they don’t care what happens to the masses of people in the world who aren’t them or us?”

  Chilling thought. “What makes you even think that?”

  She leaned toward him across the table. “Do you know what they call their lab staff? The non-Learned ones?”

  Chuck blinked. “‘Our staff’?”

  “Ha. Yes—but only in front of us. In private they call them ‘the Profane.’ I heard Alexis use the word a couple of times when she was talking with Lorstad after her failed attempt to use your tech. It bothered her that one of the ‘Profane’ could do what she couldn’t. I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Neither do I,” Chuck admitted. “But the staff have names for them, too, I’m sure.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard Joey call them ‘the Royalty.’ They sure act like that.”

  He had to admit she was right and that it didn’t seem nearly as pejorative as ‘the Profane.’ It also really bothered him. If they considered their staff so completely “other” from themselves, then that same sentiment must apply to Lanfen, and Mini, and everyone else Chuck had led to . . . wherever the hell they were.

  All of that added up to one thing: he needed to get a better sense of Lorstad’s commitment to keeping them at the Center.

  Or else he needed to figure out a way to get out of here—and soon.

  “We didn’t lie to you!” The voice was President Ellis’s, filtered through the ops intercom system—which did nothing to diminish the stark alarm in it.

  Mike trod the elliptical machine at a punishing pace. He was sweating, his muscles burning, and his mind still would not shut off. He had made the unwelcome discovery half an hour ago that repetitive physical action just left the brain alone to do whatever the hell it wanted, and his brain had fixated on Matt Streegman’s death. Still, he pushed himself. The alternative was to listen to Sara’s confrontation with President Ellis. He wanted no part of that, either, but his attention had been arrested.

  Sara argued the improbability that the president of the United States didn’t know what her own military resources were doing. It was a laughable argument under the circumstances. He had to believe Sara realized that, considering their experience with Howard, but was just playing hardball . . . or stalling to give Tim time to do what he did best—run rampant along electronic pathways. That was the plan, he knew: for Tim to establish unbreakable links with the outside world, something the president was making possible by using the communications camp as a relay station for her dialogues with the Alphas.

  Fed up with the elliptical’s inability to clear his mind, Mike hopped off the machine and left the gym, running. Maybe if he buried himself deeply enough in the corridors of Deep Shield (he refused to think of it as Olympus anymore) he could get lost or maybe find a way out that neither Sara nor Tim would notice. He stopped running when he reached the charging bays that housed the army of robots. There were almost a thousand of them, by his count, all shapes and sizes. Some of them were so bizarre he couldn’t even guess what they were intended for. He felt most comfortable with the Hob-bots—the same basic model as Sacha and only a bit larger and heavier than the prototypes Lanfen had named Frodo and Bilbo.

  Mike wandered into one of the bay-cum-labs and sat down on the edge of Sacha’s charging station. The bot itself was up in ops at one of the stations Deep Shield had placed there in case the installation were overrun and they had to withdraw to the core. He studied the remaining robots, familiar and friendly, and wondered how in God’s name he had come to be here. How had what looked like a golden opportunity to rise above his career as a construction manager and structural engineer morphed into this? He was hiding in a mountain, fearful and feared, labeled a traitor—labeled a murderer, and in the company of other murderers. His family—the people he had worked so hard to protect—were lying low in another country, and there was every reason to believe his two children would grow up without him.

  He didn’t realize he was crying until the first tears dripped from his chin to stain his jeans. He was broken. So broken maybe his family wouldn’t want him back if he could leave this damned place. He fell to his knees on the hard, cold floor of the lab and prayed.

  Margaret Ellis was out of her depth, and comforted herself that any president would have felt the same in this situation. The world leaders with whom she was meeting via a secure uplink and the physically present Canadian prime minister—Stephen Heaney—were similarly out of their depth.

  Several were of the opinion that she should simply drop a tactical nuke on Pine Ridge Mountain and have done with it. She tried to make them understand that—besides the fact that she wasn’t really comfortable with using nuclear weapons, let alone using them against her own people on her own soil—the people hiding in the mountain had proven their ability to knock just about anything out of the sky. She studied the face
s of these national leaders—displayed in individual windows on the huge LED screen in the Sit Room—for any sign that they comprehended the situation.

  It was perhaps human nature that some of them didn’t . . . or didn’t believe what she was telling them.

  “If you are unable to handle the situation, Madam President,” said President Valentin of Russia, “perhaps you should delegate to someone who can handle it.”

  She almost rose to that bait, but when you’re a woman in politics—hell, a woman in general—you’re used to men exerting their chauvinism and questioning your abilities. It was not a surprise it came from Valentin—he might have been just as belligerent with a male president, though she doubted it—and that made it even easier to dismiss as the posturing of a man who didn’t want to emulate the time of Stalin, but the time of the czars.

  “You’ve all seen the video of what these people can do,” she argued in return. “Trying to sneak a nuke past them would be impossible, irresponsible, and possibly criminal. Besides which, it’s not their fault they’re in this position. They didn’t set out to take over the world.”

  “No, it is the fault of rogue elements in your own military.” There was a hint of smugness in that. Asshole.

  “In times past,” added President Kavan Isfahani of Iran, “were this situation to unfold on someone else’s territory, you would simply send in drones or black ops teams or even bombers to take them out. You would not even bother to consult with the leaders of that country’s government.”

  “You’re correct. But this is not ‘times past,’ Mr. Isfahani,” Margaret reminded him. “If anything, this is a future none of us ever even bothered planning for, let alone imagining. But it is happening, and I am the president you’re dealing with now. And let me remind you all—once again—that the last attempt someone made to deal with the Zetas violently, using drone technology, was foiled completely. Unfortunately, it was attributed to me, though I had nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, it failed and resulted in the death of one of the co-creators of the Zeta program.”

  Margaret was still haunted by the image of the robot carrying Matt Streegman’s ruined body out of the forest. She shook off the revulsion that evoked and pushed on.

  “The takeaway from this, ladies and gentlemen, is that the Zetas are expecting attacks and they are more than able to stop them. The attempt to drop chemical weapons on them was unsuccessful, but not disastrous for anyone but Dr. Streegman. What you’re suggesting, Mr. President,” she said, looking at Valentin, “even with a small, tactical device, is literally the nuclear option. In other words, the last possible thing we should consider.” She could see he was going to interject, but she raised her hand to cut him off and pressed on. “One thing I don’t think you’re understanding is that these three are able to control matter. So, what if we send a nuclear missile at them, and instead of detonating or disabling it, they commandeer it? Then we have three of the most dangerous people in the world with a nuke in their back pocket.”

  Let him chew on that for a moment.

  “They cannot possibly be that powerful, can they?” asked the British prime minister, Angeline Foley. “Yes, you’ve shown the destruction of the Washington Monument and the devastation done to the Deep Shield camp, but surely they’re not—”

  Whatever Foley had been going to say was cut off by the sudden appearance on the huge wall display of a minotaur in full 3-D, wielding a mace on a chain—no, a morning star. It appeared, first, in each of the individual displays that made up the larger unit, then it took over the entire screen so that it seemed to loom over the group in the Situation Room.

  “Hello, humans.” It addressed the gathered leaders in a young, male voice, completely ignoring the verbal expressions of surprise and annoyance from the assembled heads of state, who all apparently were being treated to the same view.

  Margaret glanced down at the file in front of her. This was probably Timothy Desmond, twenty-six, game programmer. In the file photo, he looked like a college kid—mass of curly dark brown hair, saucy grin, watery eyes. Very different from the creature standing before them now.

  “I suspect you’re arguing over what to do about those damned weirdos in the mountain,” he continued. “I mean, you guys are always arguing, right, so why stop now when you’ve really got something to bitch about? It must be nice, having all that time and power to not actually accomplish anything. We here in Olympus don’t have time for bitching, though, so let’s cut to the chase.”

  Margaret glanced sharply at her communications technician, but the young woman only shook her head and mouthed, No control.

  No control. That was a pretty fair summing up of this entire situation.

  “Here’s what we want,” the voice continued, seeming to come from the lips of the fantastical figure on the screen. “And you really ought to believe President Ellis when she says we will make it so if you won’t. You will, quite simply, stop fighting your crappy little wars. Mother Russia will get her tentacles out of Ukraine and other territory she’s got her eye on. Iran, you’re going to stop underwriting terrorism. Britain . . . as you were, but you could send more relief to the Uyghurs. And China—you’ve got a lot of work to do. No more taking over random islands. And take better care of your people. No more jailing dissidents. We want them all released, pronto. Not to mention messing with Taiwan and Nepal. Or posturing with India. Speaking of which—India and Pakistan? Give it up in the Kashmir. Israel and Palestine, the time for dicking around is past. No more bombings in Israel. No more rockets into the West Bank or Gaza.” The minotaur seemed to look around. “There’s obviously more, but you get the idea: whatever violence there is in the world will stop now.”

  The Russian president was the first to react to this pronouncement. “We cannot simply stop—”

  “Of course you can. That’s what you don’t seem to understand. Of course you can. You just stop. There—that’s easy. Because if you don’t, well, that won’t be so easy. We’ll have to do it for you and you won’t much like our methods. I can pretty much guarantee that.”

  “What my esteemed colleague means,” said the eminently practical German chancellor, Ruthven Salzburg, “is that there are governments and groups who are, shall we say, disinclined to peace. Governments and groups over whom we have neither control nor authority.”

  On the screen, the minotaur spread his beefy hands in a gesture of magnanimity. “Hey, that’s what we’re here for, guys. Handle your own shit first. Then you do whatever you can to convince these outliers that we are serious as hell and won’t tolerate any dissension. Let them know the terrible consequences of disobedience to divine will.”

  The image on the screen changed suddenly to show a scene of such carnage and devastation that Margaret cried out—as did a number of the other statesmen and women online with her. She heard Stephen Heaney murmur “My God” and suspected it was a literal prayer.

  The location seemed to be a vast cavern with a road running through its center. In the foreground were the twisted and crushed remains of armored vehicles, around and about which were strewn dozens of bodies in military camouflage. Blood and body parts were everywhere and smoke, steam, and dust rose into the still air. The destruction—the bodies, the ruined vehicles—stretched away into the distance, stopping at what once had been a massive steel bulkhead. It, too, was a wreck.

  “This is what happens to the fools who challenge us,” the minotaur said. “I hope you guys aren’t fools. ’Cause, if you are, then you’re gonna end up just like these guys. That’s a promise.” He chuckled. “So, you show your roguey buddies this video and any others you think it might take to persuade them that they need to beat their swords into plowshares and their tanks into theme park rides. And if they don’t heed the warning, then you just stay out of our way and let us do what we do best—doing your jobs and stopping the bad guys.” There was an odd moment of silence in which the minotaur looked over its shoulder, shrugged, and said, “Uh, someone else wants to talk
at ya,” before stepping to one side.

  A woman appeared on the screen—like the minotaur, a rendered image, but to creepier perfection. She had a shock of red hair and was dressed in a formfitting black catsuit. She wore a half mask. Ellis almost laughed at the absurdity of it, indeed would have if she hadn’t been privy to all that had been unfolding the last few days.

  “What my impulsive friend has failed to communicate is that we have the means now to know whether you are complying with our demands. We have access to your worldwide networks, including many of the secret ones, and we’ll soon have access to all of those as well. You have no firewalls we cannot breach and no communications we cannot surveil. Your rogue enemies are no less vulnerable than you are. Which means that we can also determine if they’re failing to comply. To be clear, this is the opportunity you’ve all been looking for. We can solve these problems for you, and allow you to focus on actually helping your own people. But we’re not going to sit idly by while you work so hard to destroy the world, which seems to be your primary purpose right now.

  “Of course, we don’t exactly trust you to do this rather simple request, but we’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt for the time being. That said, we think it prudent to give you a deadline by which we expect any aggressions you are engaged in to cease. So, you have a month. That means if you’ve got troops anywhere that are not doing relief work, they will be withdrawn by one month from tomorrow. And don’t bother trying to redefine ‘relief work’ to mask aggression. We know the difference, I assure you.”

  “Impossible!” exclaimed Valentin. “It would take months—”

  “Hardly, Mr. President. You got them in place in less time than that. You can withdraw them at the same pace. Am I clear?”

  There was silence.

  “Am I clear?” the woman repeated, her voice a digitally enhanced roar that shook the room.