“Um,” Chuck said. “Good morning?”
“Hardly that. I know what you’re planning, Charles—you and your co-conspirators. I know that you’re actively seeking to go back to the east coast.”
Damn. He wasn’t bluffing. He knew. “I suppose I’m not surprised, but how did you—”
“How I know is unimportant. What is important is that you stop trying to escape and honor our agreement—discovering a formula that will allow your zeta training to apply to even the most adept among the Learned, and deriving from that a training regimen. I have given you and your team sanctuary, yet you are not fulfilling your promises to me, Charles, and that angers me.”
Like hell it does. Chuck studied the other man for a long moment, employing every sense he possessed. Then he set his coffee mug carefully on the deck railing and shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie.
“When we agreed to come here,” he said quietly, “you promised me that you’d help defeat men like Leighton Howard. You said, in effect, that it was as much your goal as it was ours.”
“Yes. And Howard is more than defeated. He is dead. What is left of his organization is scattered to the four winds.”
“Howard was, in all likelihood, the tip of the iceberg. He wasn’t the head of Deep Shield. He was merely in upper management. Whoever was pulling his strings is still out there. Then there are the Alphas. They are more dangerous to this country—to this world—than Howard ever was, and they are growing in power with every passing day. I need to get to them, Kristian. I need to try to reason with them before they go beyond reason. If they haven’t already,” he added, thinking of Matt.
“Dr. Brenton, what you’re doing here—”
“Is nothing compared to what I could potentially do there.” Chuck was beginning to be royally pissed at Lorstad’s patronizing calm and his feigned outrage. “I helped these people discover and use the abilities they’re wielding. They may think they’re doing God’s business now, but I know how power works. They will ultimately use their abilities against anyone who gets in their way. Anyone. That includes me and it includes you. You may have noticed that they haven’t stopped at the U.S. border. They’re reaching out far beyond their base. Reaching out to the world through every electronic avenue in existence. They’re putting the entire world at risk, Kristian. Their power could potentially grow to the point that a stray thought, a moment of rage, could result in calamities we can’t even imagine.”
Lorstad opened his mouth to retort, but Chuck didn’t let him get a word in. “Yes, I know you’re not part of the world. You and your—your Learned exist in some rarefied ether above everybody else. But I suspect you’d like the Benefactors’ community—or whatever you call it—to evolve. I know you’d be thrilled to find more Learned that can be zeta trained. But if the Alphas can’t be stopped before what Howard did to them and the power they’re wielding drives them mad, then they may very well be competing with you for prodigies. Or worse, they may destroy them before you can find them. I assure you, after their experience with Deep Shield, they will destroy anyone that looks or acts or smells like the enemy. They killed Matt Streegman. Don’t forget that. I know I can’t.”
Lorstad’s face went completely blank, and Chuck knew he’d gained some ground. He pressed on.
“You’ve seen what they can do. So have we. So, no, Kristian. We will not stop trying to escape your lovely safe house. And while I will continue to raise up more Zetas, I’m no longer committed to your stupid formula, mostly because I don’t think there is such a thing. There are some things you can’t quantify and there are some things you can’t have unless you’re willing to sacrifice something else.”
Lorstad fixed him with a chill look. “You mean you won’t tell me what you’ve learned about zeta abilities unless I let you all go. Is that it?”
“Not at all. God, Kristian—you’re not listening to me! I keep telling you that what I’ve learned can’t be put into a neat little package. Any insights I have on the elements you’re missing are in nascent form. It’s not as simple as applying a measurable amount of element Z and ta-da—you’ve got Zetas. And, no, I’m not holding out on you so you’ll let us go.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“What I’m saying, ultimately, is that you may have to give up part of what you are to become what we are. If anything, that’s the formula.”
The expression on Lorstad’s face was indecipherable, but the emotions behind it were forceful and vivid.
Chuck smiled. “Scary thought, isn’t it? But here’s the deal—and it’s something you already know—your means of gaining your abilities is limited and has to be maintained. Ours . . . well, let’s just say the potential is infinite. We literally don’t know what we can rise to . . . or sink to. Your choice, Kristian. Throw in with us or throw us out. Now—I have work to do. Let me know what you decide.”
He retrieved his coffee and went back inside, leaving Lorstad standing statue still in the desert sunrise.
Chapter 16
Emergence
Mike had gone past any sort of nerves into a sort of eerie, watchful calm by the time he and his companions finally emerged from their mountain bunker. They had the assurances of the president herself that no attempt would be made to harm them. The armed forces there would be for the purpose of protecting the president’s delegation from harm and to keep any third party from attempting to sabotage the proceedings.
Of course, that might not keep Senator Bluth from trying something using whatever tools he still had at his disposal. Because even though Bluth vehemently denied any association with Freitag, suspicion had fallen rather heavily on him. Scalded as he’d been by Sara’s grandstanding in the Senate, Mike thought Bluth aimed to humiliate the president, not kill her. He was under house arrest, according to President Ellis, and allowed to speak only with his legal team. Freitag had been taken into custody by the FBI, but God only knew how far they had gotten with their plans to resuscitate Deep Shield.
Mike comforted himself that if he knew it would be stupid to stage an attack that risked the lives of the president’s negotiating team, anybody with even a trace amount of strategic savvy would come to the same conclusion.
Although that didn’t stop them from making an attempt when Matt was here.
Mike found he didn’t much care who was plotting what. He was almost as sanguine about being blown off the face of the earth as he was about making it out of the mountain to the parley with the POTUS. Oddly, he found he trusted Margaret Ellis. He hadn’t voted for her. He hoped that wouldn’t come up . . . then laughed at himself for even having the thought. As if she’d care, at this point.
Sara, naturally, was stoked at having finally gotten through to the recalcitrant U.S. Congress. What had happened in the Senate had had the immediate effect of reducing the passive-aggressive behavior that possessed the members of both houses. Now the number of senators and representatives who considered the Zetas merely high-tech terrorists—or worse, a hoax—was in the single digits. Sara had refused to meet with the entirety of Congress but had insisted that a negotiating party be put together that included the president, the secretary of state, the head of the Joint Chiefs, and the majority and minority leadership of the lower and upper houses of the legislature.
Tim was exultant, crowing, swaggering, and hyped. He had insisted—and Sara had done little to dissuade him—that a handful of his zeta-made creatures be part of their escort, along with half a dozen of the robots, controlled by Mike.
So it was that the trio, with their bizarre troop of bodyguards, made their way out of the mountain via the main egress. Sara had insisted they use that access because it would provide the best opportunity for a spectacular emergence into the outside world, and because she did not want outsiders to know about any of their back doors. The journey took half an hour and required bulling their way through the debris and wreckage of past battles. All of this was duly recorded by Tim in a sort of rolling selfie.
It was this process that made Mike realize he wasn’t the only one who had been secretive about personal progress with zeta manipulation. At the first major obstacle they came to—a slagged howitzer that had formed a Daliesque installation in the middle of the main egress—Mike had expected Sara to defer to his prowess with gross physical objects. She didn’t. She made an almost lazy downward gesture and caused the misshapen mass of metal to grind itself back down into the turret from which it had risen. Then she levitated herself over the resulting chasm, alighting agilely on the opposite side.
Tim whooped and tried to get one of his gargoyles to carry him across. He ran into trouble almost immediately. His creations could become semisolid, but he had not yet mastered giving them mass and real density. Mike interceded to make sure he didn’t fall down the dark hole beneath the destroyed weapon, then rode across the gaping hole, himself, in the arms of the Thorin dwarf-bot.
Mike wondered at himself: why had he decided to bring that particular robot along? It had been Brian Reynolds’s remote unit and it reminded him, forcefully, of how Lieutenant Reynolds had died—how his entire team had died. It reminded him of his own part in those deaths. He supposed that made him a masochist. Or maybe it just made him more self-aware.
Sara decided that the three of them should take turns dealing with the wreckage in the mountain egress, every action calculated to impress and even terrify the people watching Tim’s streaming video. When they reached the final barrier—a twisted and malformed blast door fifteen feet high and twice as wide—Sara simply blew it apart. The huge halves flew through the clear mountain air, one to the left, one to the right. When they started to tumble, Mike made sure they landed safely away from anyone awaiting their appearance outside. It caused him to wonder about the limits of Sara’s ability to manipulate atomic structures. Had she been unable to manage objects going in opposite directions, or had she simply lost interest once her explosive maneuver had had the desired effect?
Mike felt the sun on his face for the first time in months and took a deep breath of the chill air. He smelled pine and cedar and earth. He blinked back tears, startled at how badly he wanted to never go back into that mountain again. It stank of machinery and antiseptic and death.
Arrayed in a rough arc around the entrance to the mountain was a contingent of troops, all armed, but none at combat ready. Every muzzle of every gun was pointed at the ground. Mike could feel the soldiers’ fear, see it in the wary glances they exchanged.
Sara stepped front and center and waited for a leader to emerge from among the troops. A tall, strongly built woman with red-brown skin and midnight black hair, wearing a uniform with an admiral’s stars and bars, stepped from between a pair of wary-looking officers and came to face Sara. Mike guessed she was in her sixties and that she had a fair amount of Native American blood running in her veins. She met Sara’s eyes dead on.
“Sara Crowell, I presume?”
Sara nodded. Mike read the expression on her face and realized that she was impressed with the other woman.
“I’m Admiral Joan Hand, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”
Tim giggled. “Cool. You’re Native American, aren’t you? What tribe?”
Sara rolled her eyes, but Joan Hand gave Tim her full attention. “Osage.”
“Cool,” he said again. “Take us to your chief, Chief.”
Mike winced, but thought the admiral almost smiled.
Alexis had not understood his decision. Kristian was surprised by that. He had somehow expected that she would see the logic of helping the Zetas deal with their more volatile comrades back east. Once that had been handled, he’d tried to convince her, their own Zetas would be able and willing to put their utmost efforts into raising up a generation of Learned who would be free of immersion. Ironically, she had found that even more unsettling an idea than Kristian had when he had first confronted it.
He had always considered Alexis the more rational of the two of them. She had always been so cool, so poised. Charles Brenton’s Zetas seemed to challenge that poise in ways he had never seen before. He had striven, during their last conversation, to get at the rationale for that—even though he understood it, having studied his own unease. Certainly, immersion had become part of his identity—the talents he’d gained formed the core of that identity—but he was able to divorce himself from it and recognize the benefits of not having to immerse in order to keep his skills. The thought of actually expanding and extending his skills intrigued and excited him.
It was during their last conversation—one in which he’d been able only to get Alexis’s grudging acquiescence to his plan—that he’d realized the depth of her distrust of the Zetas and begun to understand the real shape of her fear of them. Alexis loathed the idea that literally anyone of any bloodline or class or ethnicity might master the mind’s latent capacities and join the so-far elite ranks of the Learned. With the class-conscious Alexis, it was all about bloodlines. She and Kristian were from founding families of the Learned. She was a matrilineal descendant of the Vandias; his lineage went back further still, to the founder of the organization—Lord Julian Sorel, who had discovered his talents while orchestrating his own recovery from the Black Death.
Perhaps Kristian’s descent from Julian Sorel—who had focused his mind’s healing abilities by submerging himself in a tub of warm water—was what caused Kristian Lorstad to view things differently than his associate. What he found gratifying, ultimately, Alexis found terrifying. She attempted to conceal that, though, blocking her emotions by forming audible words. It was a dance they did more and more, day by day.
“Don’t you see?” she had all but pleaded with him when he went to her with his recommendation that they aid the Zetas in trying to control their fractious kindred.
“Don’t you see how wrongheaded this is? Yes, you might win their loyalty, but at what cost?”
“I guess I don’t, Alexis,” he had admitted in frustration. “What is it you see?”
“More than you do. Every day you work with them—treating them as equals, even mentors, granting importance to their concerns—you build a future in which the Learned are subsumed into their world rather than using them to benefit and enhance our own. Their philosophy dictates that everyone be offered a chance to build zeta capacities. Has not their experience with their Alpha cohort schooled you on how dangerous that would be? Imagine it, Kristian. Imagine a world in which anyone of any intelligence level, of any educational background, of any temperament, of any heritage, is encouraged to build the same sort of capabilities we possess. We’ve both seen the carnage that resulted from the Alphas’ taking of their mountain stronghold. Can you imagine what it would be to have that level of destruction become de rigueur? To have our evolution disrupted by powerful individuals too ignorant and benighted to use their abilities with wisdom?”
He could well imagine it, but—
Alexis, that is precisely why I feel Charles is right. We must deal with these three rogue Zetas now, before confronting them will exact a devastating toll on our own resources. I have been blinded to that threat, but no longer.
He had spoken directly to her soul, then—hit her with the full force of his conviction that he was right.
She had acquiesced. “Will you try to placate them—these Alphas? Will you attempt to bring them in?”
“That is my intention. Or, rather, it is my hope.”
“Yours or Dr. Brenton’s?”
“Does it matter?”
I suppose not. And if your hope is futile?
He had gone away from their encounter unable to answer that question. He knew, if Charles Brenton did not, that it might already be too late for the Alphas. They had come to think of themselves as Olympians, judging by their communications with the world’s governments, and when one came to think of himself as a god, there was little chance of convincing him that there was honor in being merely human. He knew this firsthand—he’d witnessed it when Alexis threw a small robot into Joey Blossom�
�s ribs.
Alexis’s fears and prejudices aside, Kristian presented himself to Charles’s team as the sun began its descent into the western hills and threw in with them. They would go to Pennsylvania and try to talk the gods out of Olympus.
“The first thing we need to do, I think,” Chuck said to the assembled team, which now included Kristian Lorstad as well as Joey Blossom, “is to make contact with the White House once again. They can facilitate contact with the Alphas.”
“To what end?” Dice asked. “They’ve killed people, Chuck. How do they walk that back?”
“They were defending themselves against an implacable foe, Dice. A foe that imprisoned them, tried to use them like a weapon, dehumanized them. We need to let them know that we get that—that we see what’s been done to them. What they did to Deep Shield they did in self-defense.”
“And Matt?” Dice asked, his voice incredulous. “What about what they did to Matt?”
“We really don’t know what happened with Matt. We don’t know if that was . . . I’m hoping that was an accident. I have to believe it was an accident.”
Lanfen put a hand on his arm. “Chuck, think about that. They might have neutralized Deep Shield’s power without killing them all, but they chose not to.”
Chuck closed his eyes, shook his head. “I have to believe they felt they had no choice. Until proven otherwise, I’m going to continue to believe that they’re just three human beings who got backed into a corner they saw no way to escape.”
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