Margaret had seen her before. This was a new version of the woman she’d watched destroy the insurgents in Kabul, and looked much more like the photographs she’d seen of Sara Crowell in the Forward Kinetics materials she’d pored over.
“Do you find me hard to believe, Senator Bluth?” Sara Crowell’s avatar asked as she reached the floor of the Senate on her luminous escalator. Her voice—a rich contralto—carried unnaturally over the sounds of surprise, shock, fear, and anger rising from the floor. “I know that’s my reaction to you.”
Between the dais that supported the Senate leadership and the curved rows of desks that housed the general assembly, Sara Crowell’s avatar stood, showered in light from an unseen source. It took all of Margaret’s focus to remember that this seemingly solid, three-dimensional construct was just that—a construct—and that the real, living, breathing woman was miles away under a mountain in Pennsylvania.
The sergeant at arms, whose florid face betrayed his agitation, proved the effectiveness of the Zeta’s illusion. He shouted a team of guards to his side and plunged down the central aisle past stupefied senators, pages, and guests. The Senate guards reached their uninvited guest and surrounded her, Tasers drawn. They were quickly joined by more than one Secret Service detail, only they had P90s. It was only then that she deigned to notice them. She pivoted slowly, smiling at them each in turn.
“Are you going to shoot me, gentlemen? I’d advise against it. I doubt you’d appreciate the results. I need to talk to your leadership now, okay? Why don’t you all just run along?” She crooked a thumb at the exit.
The sergeant at arms gestured at two of his men and they stepped smartly forward and grabbed Sara’s arms—or tried to. Their hands passed through her suddenly translucent body as if through empty air. One reacted by raising his Taser. Sara wheeled smartly and slapped it out of his hand. His partner shouted and fired his own weapon at Sara’s torso. She laughed as the electrified pins passed through her and connected with the sergeant at arms’s beefy shoulder. He went down like a felled tree.
Margaret was stunned herself. She’d seen this before—this bizarre ability of the Zetas to make their doppelgängers seem solid or vaporous at will. She hoped Charles Brenton had some idea how that was possible and could help them counteract it when he came out of hiding—if he came out of hiding.
There was a moment of chaos in the chamber as the senators raged and the Zeta simply stood with her hands on her hips, smiling and looking like something out of a superhero movie. It was not hard to believe that she saw herself and her companions that way—as valiant superheroes besieged by terrified mundanes. Was that what they were?
A group of men rushed the chamber doors but Sara raised a fist and the doors refused to be opened. Her frightened, angry prisoners rattled them futilely. Several more of their fellow legislators, watching this display, seated themselves and gave Sara their entire attention.
The Secret Service was another matter. Agents were feverishly working to secure an exit for the president. They opened fire on one of Sara’s sealed doors only to see the splintered remains float back up and press against the door like a shattered coffee mug clumsily glued back together. Pieces of chairs were torn from their frames and used to buttress the barriers further.
“Madam President, no one is leaving just yet.”
How many times had Margaret wished she could simply exert mind powers to stop a disaster, an injustice, a political trend she felt was destructive or ill-advised? How often had she wanted to psychically send Roman Bluth a sudden case of laryngitis? These people actually had something approaching that ability. Did that make them villains or heroes or a bit of both?
Even as she mused, the scrambles continued. The chaos only ended as Harvey Feinberg stepped back to the podium and wielded the gavel with deafening effectiveness. The chamber stilled. The Sara avatar turned to the vice president with a smile and an airy salute.
“Thank you, Mr. Vice President. As I was saying, I’d like to talk to the Senate about you, Senator Bluth. Specifically your relationship with a Mr. Ted Freitag.”
The effect of that name on Roman Bluth was electrifying, although Margaret had no idea why. This Freitag must be someone particularly damaging, though, because Bluth took a step backward, his hands coming up to his tie in the defensive gesture the president knew only too well.
“I don’t know anyone—”
“Stuff it, Senator,” snarled Crowell, anger flashing quite literally in her avatar’s eyes. “You forget who you’re dealing with here. My friends and I have been monitoring Mr. Freitag’s online activities since we were reconnected to the outside world. Mr. Freitag, you should all know, works at the Pentagon as a documentation specialist. He is a former associate of one General Leighton Howard, functional head of Deep Shield.” She paused and turned to the vice president. “I assume Congress has been briefed about Deep Shield.”
Harvey offered a bemused nod. Margaret noticed that several senators returned to their seats, interest piqued by what they were hearing.
“Mr. Freitag was in contact with Senator Bluth within days of our destruction of Deep Shield. Their conversations have centered around—”
“I don’t need to stand here and listen to this!” Bluth snapped. He turned and started to descend from the podium.
The Zeta seemed to blur as she leapt to intercept him. Eyes glittering, she thrust one hand toward him, palm out. He froze in place as if the air around him had suddenly congealed. His eyes went wide and his mouth worked silently.
“Yes, Senator, you do have to stand here and listen to this,” Sara said, then scanned the large chamber with her laser-bright gaze. “You all have to listen.”
“No!” someone shouted, followed by a chorus of negatives in strident male voices.
“I know, it’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Sara asked tartly. “Some woman comes into your house and tells you what you can and cannot do. Must offend the hell out of your exalted sensibilities. Who the hell does she think she is? That’s what you’re all thinking, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
She roared those last words, her voice like the ringing of a great bell. The chamber fell silent.
Sara glanced at Margaret, shaking her head. “How the hell do you tolerate them? Guys, I’d say I’m your worst nightmare, but that would be horribly cliché. What I am, you can’t even imagine. I’m not even sure of what I am, but I’m having a hell of a time finding out. Some of you think I’m a hoax. I’m not. Sara Crowell—the real Sara Crowell—isn’t even here. She’s in a bunker underneath a mountain that, as you’ve already seen, is unbreachable. I’m not a Hollywood special effect. I’m not a hologram. You’ve all seen it and now Senator Bluth has felt it. He knows it. Don’t you, Senator?”
Still frozen, he stared at her, sweating, his face bloodless, his lips quivering. In that moment, Margaret felt genuine sympathy for him. Whatever his motives had been in stalling her, no one deserved to be toyed with like that. And seeing their power wielded so unabashedly, she even started to wonder if he wasn’t wrong about not giving in to the Zetas.
“As I was saying, all the while Senator Bluth has been stalling Congress, he and Ted Freitag have spent a considerable amount of time planning the reanimation of Deep Shield and the good senator’s accession to the executive office. The senator has expressed a great desire to have an ace in the hole that would serve him well whether or not he is elected president. Something in the nature of a personal special forces unit. Some of you think President Ellis has been lying to you about the Zeta program. She hasn’t. Any documentation that may point to the president’s knowledge of Deep Shield and the Zeta program was fabricated by the intrepid Mr. Freitag at the behest of Senator Bluth. Madam President was completely in the dark on all of this. Some of you think we’ve been lying to her. We haven’t. Some of you think the footage you’ve seen from Kabul and other locations is Hollywood-style special effects, even though you’ve checked with every independent source available to verify that it
’s not. Get your heads out of your butts, ladies and gentlemen. This is not Hollywood. This is real. I’m real.”
She cocked her head to one side and grinned. “Well, after a manner of speaking. Now get off your collective asses and meet our demands. We’re not making them because we’re narcissistic dictators. We’re making them for the good of the whole world—a world you and your greed and your political ambitions have sacrificed for far too long. You need to start thinking of that instead of calculating how to win elections or sucking up to your constituents. Put something besides your own fragile egos first, and do it now. And if you’re tempted to rattle your sabers and tout your alleged exceptionalism, just think of what we did in Kabul. What we’ve done since. That, my friends, was just a proof of concept. I can assure you that, with every day that passes, we grow in strength and ability.”
She turned to Margaret, inclining her head in a mild show of respect. “President Ellis has a complete list of our demands. She knows what we want and she’s been trying to work with you to see that we get it. All our communications will come through her unless another little meeting like this one is necessary to remind you of why you’re setting aside your partisan ass-hattery and working together. I mean, after all, you’re all on Team USA, right?”
She wheeled then and, with one fist raised, began to ascend her beam of light chanting “USA! USA!”
She was perhaps two-thirds of the way up when two things happened in quick succession: Roman Bluth toppled out of his invisible prison and every door in the Senate chamber flew open, admitting teams of heavily armed soldiers. As one, they aimed their guns at the rising figure in the center of the room and opened fire.
Margaret screamed, her voice joining the cacophony of shouts and shrieks and the rattle and roar of gunfire. In the upper gallery, lights exploded; wall paneling and gallery rails splintered and rained down on the chamber floor. Caught in the downpour, senators and their aides dove beneath their desks or simply huddled and tried to cover their heads.
In the midst of it all, the Sara avatar dissolved in a shimmer of motes only to re-form in midair, her feet planted solidly on nothing. She was laughing. Several of the security guards below tracked her and resumed firing. Sara exploded like an Independence Day firework, sending streamers of light and fire into every corner of the huge room.
When the last streamer fell to the carpet and dissolved, the Senate chamber fell into an eerie silence. Margaret’s ears were ringing from the gunfire, her eyes half-blinded by the explosions of light followed by semidarkness, her nose full of the pungent odor of cordite. She sucked in an enormous breath, laden with gun smoke and fear, and wondered what she should do next.
She was saved from that decision by gales of dark feminine laughter that cascaded from the vault of the ceiling. She looked up to see Sara Crowell’s avatar floating there in a blaze of light. One of the marksmen raised his rifle. Sara pointed an elegant finger at him and the muzzle of his gun rippled and pinched in on itself.
“What is wrong with you people?” the apparition asked. “You’ve proved that you can’t shoot me. You’re failing to adjust to reality, gentlemen. Get with the program and remember Kabul . . . and Raqqa . . . and Ciudad Juárez. Or the day all those military bases went dark.
“Did I mention Kabul?”
She simply winked out of existence then, the air ringing with the echoes of her laughter. Margaret felt behind her, found a chair, and sank into it.
They are plotting, Kristian. I can feel it, if you can’t. Alexis stood by the long window in Kristian’s inner sanctum, looking down into the Center’s cavernous main room. She could not see into Brenton’s lab from where she stood, but she stared at the glass wall as if her thoughts could penetrate it.
“You can feel it?” he repeated, aloud. “What does it feel like, this plotting?”
She turned to regard him coolly, her arms crossed in front of her—guarded and annoyed. “You are no fool, Kristian. You know what I’m talking about. That’s why you brought their robotics expert his lady love.” She said the last word with a mocking drawl and an inner disdain. In his head he heard her saying, You think you can placate them, but you can’t. And you seem to be oblivious to the energies they broadcast when they’re being secretive. They are planning something. I wake in the night with their scheming tickling my mind. You, she added, have the ability to confirm what I sense. I wonder why you haven’t yet done it. I wonder, because I can get no sense of your reasoning.
She was right, of course, and Kristian had wondered at his own reluctance. Just as he wondered at his increasing misgivings about allowing her to access more than a fraction of what was going on in his mind.
“Is it the little artist?” she asked aloud. “I know she intrigues you. Are you afraid of losing her trust?”
He met her eyes and failed to read them. Tried to read her emotions and found them confusing. He was not the only one doing a mental dance of veils. He laughed. “Alexis, my interest in Minerva Mause is not romantic, as you ought to know by now.” Even as he said this aloud, though, the words felt false to him. Were they? He was stung with a touch of shame that he was not entirely sure.
“And I would be a fool if I believed she trusted me. She doesn’t. I haven’t done anything about their plotting because letting them scheme causes them to double their efforts in teaching our young learners the use of their zeta powers. Charles is not only a victim of guilt, he is uncomfortable with dishonesty. He told me outright of their efforts to find a means of reaching the outside world.”
“And you chose to believe him? Why, because you think he cannot lie to you? Even an inherently honest man will lie if the stakes are high enough. A man like Charles Brenton, who is inclined to altruism, will sacrifice his personal standards if he thinks it may benefit others.”
She was right, of course.
“Yes,” Kristian said at length. “Yes, I think you may be right. I’ll take care of it. Tonight.”
Alexis relaxed her arms to her sides and smiled crookedly. I’m pleased to see that my opinion still counts for something with you.
He felt the irony in her thoughts but kept himself cloaked. “Jealousy does not become you, Alexis. Nor is it necessary.”
She came around the side of his desk and perched within arm’s length, reaching out a hand to touch his cheek. I know that. After all, you and I have shared a deep connection from childhood. If I were to be jealous of any of them, it would be Dr. Brenton—his is the mind behind all that the others can do. The mind that can switch off your natural suspicion. In ways that I cannot.
Nettled, Kristian grasped the stroking hand and held it, letting her feel his irritation. He has not done that. I assure you, Alexis. My suspicious nature is entirely intact.
Yes, but now you seem suspicious of me. I wonder why.
Later that night, when the Center neared dormancy and its inhabitants left their workstations, Kristian entered the kinetics lab to find the team wrapping up their work with Yulia and Giles. The pair of youngsters showed off their new strides, moving Roboticus through a series of complicated moves at varied speeds, then showing their baby steps in chosen disciplines. Giles, who had a keen interest in meteorology, was working with atmospheric modeling. He showed his nascent ability to run his models using his zeta powers. Yulia was, like Mini, an artist. She wanted to sculpt without the aid of her fingers. Her first steps in that direction were tentative, but Kristian could see her potential. He had no doubt that, someday, Giles would move more than ersatz clouds in a holographic display and that Yulia would move mountains and remodel landscapes as easily as she molded clay.
He praised the pair for their progress, then announced his intention to adjourn to his immersion chamber to “recharge.” “I will probably not see any of you before tomorrow morning,” he told them. “So, until then . . .”
He did not miss the looks that passed between Charles Brenton and his staff. The “cat” would be asleep—what more could a scheming pack of mice want?
Two hours later, Kristian Lorstad looked down into Dr. Brenton’s office from a vantage point above the conference table. He was not an electronic signal that they could jam, or a surveillance camera that they could point in the wrong direction. He was something they had no idea existed—a disembodied intellect that could perceive in ways physical senses could not. A heretofore unused ace up Lorstad’s sleeve.
So it was that he got a shock that ran to his very soul. Not that his guests had hatched an ambitious escape plan and disguised it with blundering feints at the Center’s integrated security and information systems—he had already suspected that was the case. No, it was that they had been using the known talents of the two women on the team to distract from Brenton’s and Kobayashi’s burgeoning abilities. More disturbing, still, was the fact that they had brought Joey Blossom into their confidence and that he, too, was growing quietly in his ability to manipulate his environment.
Perhaps the most disquieting revelation was that the exact nature of the plan was veiled by the team’s communication style. In the privacy of Brenton’s office, they occasionally spoke a patois of half-expressed ideas that Kristian knew were the tip of a much larger iceberg. He was almost certain that Team Chuck, as they thought of themselves, had learned to communicate subverbally in some way. He hadn’t seen it before, nor was it appreciable on the surveillance footage. All of the original team, with the exception of the profane neurologist, seemed to share a form of thought transference, or at least empathy.
He didn’t stop to indulge his excitement at the discovery that what they shared as a group had taken him years to develop with just one other person. Whatever this gestalt was, it was dangerous. He needed to do something about this and do it soon.
To say Chuck was startled when Lorstad popped into existence next to him on the balcony outside his room would have been an understatement. The light of dawn had just broken the horizon and Chuck had been sipping his first cup of coffee and watching the sun paint the tops of the mountains rose-gold. He was clad only in flannel pajama bottoms and a “Failure is not an option” hoodie and very nearly dropped the coffee on his cold, bare feet. The expression on Lorstad’s face was one Chuck hadn’t seen before—anger. He was surprised at his strong conviction that the anger was false and that what lay beneath it was truer. The problem was, he couldn’t read what was beneath it with any clarity.
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