The God Peak

by Patrick Hemstreet

  All eyes were upon him, and not a single pair showed concord.

  “Fine—that’s a noble sentiment,” Lorstad said quietly. “But what if they have become more than that, Charles? What if they believe they have become avenging angels? Or gods? Then what?”

  Chuck fought the sudden image in his mind of Pine Ridge splitting asunder to reveal three godlike creatures emerging from it like deadly butterflies from a high-tech cocoon. “Then, I suppose we need a plan B. We need some way to neutralize their power and subdue them.”

  “Then what?” asked Mini. Her voice trembled as if she were afraid of the answer.

  “I don’t know,” Chuck admitted. “I don’t know how to undo or control their zeta abilities.”

  “But I might,” Lorstad admitted. “If we can tranquilize them and get them into isolation units, we can keep them in a sleep state for some time and use beat therapy and immersion to alter their brain waves. It should enable us to subdue them. Hopefully long enough for you to find some way to . . . short-circuit their zeta powers. The brain, after all, does carry out the mind’s instructions via electromagnetic impulses. If those impulses can be altered in some way . . .”

  Chuck felt himself slipping into what Lanfen called his fugue state. “Yes,” he said, barely aware of forming words. “Yes, that . . . ought to be . . . possible. If we can . . .” He snapped suddenly back to the gathering, his eyes focusing on Lorstad’s serene face. “If they won’t come out, if it becomes necessary to take them by guile, then we would have our best chance of subduing them if we can separate them—deal with them one at a time.”

  “A kingdom divided?” suggested Lorstad.

  Chuck smiled grimly. “A time-honored way of evening the odds. Plus we have a hidden card up our sleeve.” His lip curled slightly, accompanied by a half nod in Lorstad’s direction.

  “How do you wish to proceed?” Lorstad asked.

  Chuck looked him in the eye. “Like I said, we need to talk to the White House, and this time I want to talk to the president directly.

  “I expect you can make that happen.”

  Chapter 17

  A Kingdom Divided

  One moment, Chuck was standing in his office at the Center; the next he was quivering in the middle of the National Seal worked into the carpet of the Oval Office. The tiny airless gasp he heard from his left turned out to be a stunned President Ellis, who was staring at him and Lorstad as if they had just materialized out of the ether exactly as they had done.

  Chuck stared back, unsure whether he was more awed at being in the Oval Office with the president of the United States or at having been transported more than two thousand miles across the continental United States by a man who could induce quantum entanglement pretty much at will.

  It’s pretty much a wash, he thought with a smile.

  Lorstad was the first to speak. “Madam President, may I present to you Dr. Charles Brenton of Forward Kinetics. I believe you have been wanting to meet—”

  “Freeze!”

  A centipede of government-issue black suits filed into the office, guns up and at the ready.

  “On your knees!”

  Chuck inhaled deeply and complied. Hands rifled through his pockets and brushed up and down his limbs. Lorstad looked almost serene as he submitted to the same treatment.

  The lead Secret Service agent produced a zip tie and forcefully tugged Chuck’s arms behind him.

  “No.”

  “Madam President?”

  “Let them up, Pete.”

  The president glanced at Lorstad, then returned her gaze to Chuck. “I have very much wanted to meet him, but who—”

  “This is Kristian Lorstad,” Chuck managed to say. “He and his people more or less rescued my team from Deep Shield and kept us hidden until now. He’s . . . got a few talents of his own, as you can see.”

  “I . . . yes, I see. I’m . . .”

  Chuck saw her eyes snap into focus as she forced herself past the shock of this surreal situation. She stood, straightened her jacket, and came around her desk, extending her hand to him.

  “Thank you for coming in, Dr. Brenton. Please, have a seat.” She gestured at the sofas and chairs in the center of the room. “Pete, have your detail monitor from outside.” In mere moments the president, Chuck, and Lorstad had the room.

  Chuck took a seat on the edge of one of the two sofas. Lorstad perched on one arm, affording himself a higher vantage point. President Ellis gave him a speculative glance, then lowered herself into a wingback chair directly across from Chuck.

  “Talk to me, Dr. Brenton. Tell me there’s something we can do to retrieve this situation from the edge of oblivion. Let me be clear. I’m not completely averse to what the Zetas are trying to accomplish. I just mistrust their methods . . . and them, to be honest. They have shown little reluctance to kill. Granted, the people they’ve killed have been violent themselves—and have less provocation to be that way—but I’m disturbed by that trend in combination with the growth of their capacities.”

  Chuck’s heart clenched in his chest. He had not wanted to face that reality. He nodded. “I’m afraid you may be right. There’s no way for you to negotiate your way into a position of power or even equity with them.”

  “I realize that more than you know. We—I and a number of members of my administration and congressional leaders—had a meeting with them yesterday.”

  “They came out?”

  “Briefly. Just long enough to impress us with their presence and make their intentions clear. Then they returned to their castle and pulled up the drawbridge. There is, as you say, no way to negotiate with a power that sees itself as absolute.” The president leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Tell me you have some way of dealing with them.”

  “We think we do. We propose that I go in and meet with them first. Get my own sense of where their weak points are.”

  The president was shaking her head. “Doctor, that could be lethal. Your partner went in and—”

  “My partner wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a Zeta, himself.”

  “Yes—and?”

  “Well you just saw us appear in the Oval Office out of nowhere, so . . .”

  Her eyes widened. “You . . . you can—” She made an abracadabra gesture with one hand. “May I ask what you do, exactly?”

  “I’m a neuroscientist. My . . . talents lie in the area of medical diagnoses.” He stopped there, not mentioning that he could do more than diagnose. President Ellis was concerned about the weaponization of zeta abilities; the last thing they needed was for her to know what he could potentially do.

  “And the rest of your team?” she asked. “No offense, Doctor, but I am hoping they have more, shall we say, martial powers to bring to bear.”

  “We ran from Deep Shield, President Ellis. We didn’t go through what the Alphas went through. We have had no reason to even consider weaponizing our talents.” Until now, whispered a dark little voice in the back of Chuck’s head.

  She gave him a disconcertingly direct look. “Yet, that may be what we’re asking you to do, Charles. May I call you Charles?”

  “Chuck,” he said reflexively, adding, “Please.”

  She smiled briefly. “Chuck. Suppose you and your team have the ability to challenge Ms. Crowell and her accomplices. Are you going to be able to use your own abilities against your friends?”

  “Not to harm them. I mean, I hope we won’t have to harm them. What we hope to do is talk them out. Barring that, we plan to separate them, get them to leave the mountain independently, tranquilize them—rendering their zeta abilities moot—then move them quickly into sensory deprivation chambers where their brain waves can be monitored and controlled.”

  “And modified,” added Lorstad, entering the conversation at last. “We will do everything in our power to save their lives, but they can’t be allowed to make themselves powerful dictators.”

  “What if it’s impossible to modify them sufficiently?” the president as
ked.

  Chuck closed his eyes tightly and swallowed the sudden tightness in his throat. “I can’t let myself believe it’s impossible, Madam President.”

  “It sounds like you and I are on the same team now. How soon can you put your plan into action?”

  Lorstad stood. “We have some assets we need to put into place and, obviously, some of them will need to be installed without drawing notice. I think that we can have Charles and his team in place within the next two days. The other assets will take a few days longer. Four days, and we should be ready to draw the Alphas out of their mountain.”

  Margaret Ellis nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

  Chuck spoke before Lorstad could. “Let the Alphas know that you’ve been in touch with me and that I’ll be in contact with them within the week. Tell them . . . tell them I’m looking forward to reuniting with them. I’ve missed them.” That was true.

  “We should go,” Lorstad said.

  Chuck rose and moved to stand next to the Learned. He gave Margaret Ellis a last, anguished look. “I wish I could have saved them from Deep Shield. What Howard did to them . . . changed them. I pray it was not too much.” He put his hand on Lorstad’s sleeve, closed his eyes in the Oval Office, and opened them in his own.

  “Prayer, Charles?” asked Lorstad as he separated from Chuck. “Do you really believe prayer has any effect on the situation?”

  Chuck didn’t have the bandwidth to debate the logic of faith and God. He said simply, “Even if the only thing it has an effect on is me or my psyche, then yes, I believe it always has an effect.”

  Lorstad studied him for a moment, then smiled and turned to leave the room. “I’m going to put things in motion, Charles. You need to assemble your team. Lead them in prayer if you wish. I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

  “Don’t,” said Chuck, surprising himself with the force with which the word came out of his mouth.

  Lorstad stopped unsteadily just short of the door and turned back with a puzzled frown.

  “Don’t patronize me. Don’t condescend to me. Don’t let yourself believe I’m enfeebled by my faith in God or in my fellow human beings. Consider what you place your faith in, then tell me I am wrong in where I place mine.”

  Lorstad’s smile slipped a bit as he let himself out of the office. Chuck shook away his momentary irritation and went to gather his team.

  “Chuck is coming to Olympus.”

  Sara made the announcement from the doorway of the break room they had turned into their main kitchen because of its proximity to their quarters. There were plenty of food stores in the mountain—enough for a small army, appropriately enough. Plus they’d been tinkering with hydroponics. They transferred the food out of cold storage as needed and used the microwaves in the break room to cook. Mike had been eating a prefab burrito and pondering the possibility of cooking via zeta waves (he understood the basic physics of generating heat, after all), but his thoughts scattered to the four winds as what Sara had said registered.

  He swallowed a half-chewed mouthful of carnitas and said, “That’s great.” He meant it, too. Somehow the thought of Chuck coming here gave him an absurd sense of hope. Though, given what Sara had done to Matt Streegman, he wasn’t sure it should. The burrito was suddenly completely unappetizing. That seemed to happen a lot these days. He set it down on the plate.

  “Listen, Sara . . . you’re not planning on . . . I mean, what happened with Matt . . .”

  Her facial expression warped through several twisted moments of pain and anger before she shook her head emphatically, her dark hair swinging freely around her face. “No, Mike. Chuck isn’t like Matt. Matt was a greedy, soulless bastard. He sold us to that black ops jackass for profit. Chuck tried to keep it from happening. He just didn’t have enough time. He’s going to help get us out of here for good. He’s going to find a way to . . .” She paused, licked her lips, shook her head again. “He’ll bring us into the outside world. You’ll see. It’ll be our triumph.”

  There was something plaintive about her words and tone. She sounded like a kid who was certain that her daddy could do anything. Mike had the impression she’d almost said that Chuck would find a way to save them.

  God, I wish.

  “So, how comes the robot army?” she asked next.

  “It’s coming good,” Mike said, truthfully. “I can handle about three dozen of them at once and I’ve been experimenting with controlling other systems in the base. You know, just in case they try to penetrate our defenses again.” Truthfully, he could handle more than one hundred bots at this juncture and had the entire electrical grid in his head. If there was a schematic for a system that was anywhere close to reality, he found he could control the system.

  She smiled. “Good man. Though I was hoping you’d be able to manage more than that by now.”

  He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, Sara, I’m just a blue-collar guy. I don’t have the sophisticated chops you and Timmy have. It’s just brute force with me. I think Tim might have an easier time at this than—”

  “It’s because Tim and I are able to do the more sophisticated maneuvers that we need you to keep after the ‘brute force’ items on the agenda. I know you can do this, Micky. I know you can. You may be uneducated, but you’re damned smart.”

  He shook his head in denial and looked down at the discarded burrito.

  Sara tilted her head to one side appraisingly. “Something’s eating at you. I can tell.”

  He looked up. “What?”

  She came slowly into the kitchen and sat down across from him at the table. He held his breath. Could she read him? Had she figured out how he really felt about being an Olympian?

  “It’s your family, isn’t it? I know you miss them.”

  Relief washed over him, leaving him weak and shaking. “Yeah,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Yeah, it’s . . . I’ve never been away from Helen or the kids this long, ever. It’s killing me, Sara. I mean it.” It was killing him. Sometimes he wished it just would kill him and get it over with.

  Sara put her hand over his. “I’m sorry, Micky. Look, we’ve got a direct line to the president now. Maybe she can have the CIA pick them up and bring them here. Wouldn’t you just love to have your kids see this place? Have your wife see what sort of things you can do?”

  He blinked at her, horror pumping adrenaline through his veins. The thought of his family here in this sanitized hell made his skin crawl. The thought of them knowing what he could do—what he had done—filled him with screaming terror.

  Maintain. Maintain, Yenotov.

  “No thanks. At least, not until we’ve gotten good and comfortable with our new role in the world. If we have the CIA bring them here now, they could be used as leverage. And besides, with all we’ve got to do, as much as I love ’em, they’d be a distraction. You know? Complicate things.”

  Sara smiled. “You are a good man, Mike Yenotov. I wish Tim could focus half as well as you can. Little Troll still hasn’t gotten the hang of making his wraiths consistently more solid. Relies on you a little too much for help.”

  Mike didn’t say that she relied on him an awful lot, too, for “brute force” stuff. “Yeah. It’d be good if he could carry his own weight in that department. But hey, I haven’t given you the army you want yet, either. You’re better at this than either of us, Sara.” He looked into her eyes when he said it, willed her to believe it, though he knew he lacked that particular talent.

  Her smile became a grin. “Flattery will get you everywhere, good sir. But I’m sure you’ll both catch up. Especially you. You’re smarter than you think you are.” She squeezed his hand, rose, and strode out of the room, confidence unfurling in her wake like a superhero’s cape.

  Smarter than he thought he was? God, how he wished that were true.

  He got up and threw the remnants of the burrito into a compost receptacle. It was part of a network of such depositories that carried waste away to a central sorting are
a on the lowest level of the mountain—recyclables to the north, garbage to the south, compost in the solid waste tank in between. Sometimes Mike wished he could just throw himself into the compost bin and dissolve along with the rest of the organic garbage—become part of the methane exhalation that powered parts of the facility.

  Ironic, Mike thought, Olympus was powered in part by a noxious miasma of gases given off by decay. Or maybe it was just appropriate. Depressing thoughts notwithstanding, Mike was surprised to find that his heart still harbored hope. Maybe, like Sara, he had come to think of Chuck as their savior.

  Team Chuck’s assets took three days to put in place. Those assets consisted of a rather spartan base camp with two modular buildings and a wood-framed winterized tent, set up in a cleared semicircle roughly forty feet in diameter. Two nondescript SUVs were parked beneath a venerable cedar.

  The camp was populated only by the Zetas, Lorstad, and Joey Blossom, and they made no effort to disguise it. The Alphas were expecting them; it made no sense to attempt to hide the existence of the camp. What they were concealing was the equipment in one of the modules—a trio of isolation chambers and the equipment that fed them binaural audio and subliminal programming. There were no computers here save the nonnetworked ones that ran the immersion chambers and interpreted brain waves—no electronic pathways that Tim or Sara could exploit from a distance.

  The Betas were hopeful that this would tip the balance in their favor. Mike Yenotov was the key—or perhaps wild card was a more apt metaphor. Mike, Chuck knew, would be the biggest threat if he saw them as enemies—his ability to manipulate physical objects. But, with his family, he also had the most to gain by resolving this quickly.

  The Beta base camp was just under a quarter of a mile from the military communications camp (or Spiderweb, as Admiral Hand had dubbed it) through which the Alphas had connected with the outside world and through which they had been communicating with the U.S. government . . . and beyond. Any and all weaponry was there. Team Chuck was entirely unarmed except for their zeta talents and their wits.