The God Peak
Page 27
Sara and Tim both smiled, then Tim said, “It was pretty cool. I handled the forces outside the parliament building—providing them with awesome targets so they weren’t shooting real people—while Sara handled the inside. She totally saved the asses of the guys holed up in that conference room.”
“What about Mike?” Chuck asked. “What did Mike do?”
Tim laughed. “Mike made us look good. He’s sort of our stunt double and explosives guy. He can move stuff with pure kinetic force without half-thinking about it. Very handy. I provide the style, he provides the substance—well, or most of it.”
That confirmed Chuck’s suspicions about the division of labor in the group, but he’d watched the video of their emergence from the mountain and had seen Sara blow blast doors weighing several tons apiece completely apart.
“Then you and Sara can’t directly affect physical objects . . . like Mike can?” he added.
Sara’s eyes kindled. “Of course we can. But Tim and I specialize in working with electronic signals and digital data. Mike doesn’t have an aptitude for that.” She turned to look back at the chair Mike had been sitting in, saw that it was empty, and shrugged. “Mike’s sort of a blue-collar Zeta.”
“Yeah,” Tim agreed. “Besides, that sort of brute manipulation takes a lot out of you. I mean, it takes a lot out of us. You wouldn’t know, I guess.”
Chuck was not about to admit to being a Zeta himself and give up the advantage of surprise. “Huh. That’s interesting. I haven’t noticed that sort of sapping effect on Lanfen or Mini or the other Zetas.”
Sara took a quick step toward the camera. “Other Zetas? You mentioned them before. Who are they? What can they do?”
Chuck considered how to play this—how to draw them out. “They’re young. They’re incredibly bright, and two of them have had some special training that none of you got exposed to. One of them is learning to manipulate the local atmosphere, another is learning to create self-sustaining constructs, and another is a software guy—sort of a combination of you and Tim. He’s amazing. Lanfen, by the way, is developing all sorts of new talents. I’d love to do a side-by-side study of her and Tim since they seem to be progressing at an equal rate.”
As Chuck had hoped, Tim took the bait. He straightened, faced the camera dead-on, and crossed his arms over his chest. “A study, huh? Name the time and place. I’ll be there. And I’m gonna bet right now that you’re wrong. I got a head start on Ninja Girl. I doubt she’s as good at pushing electrons and photons around as I am.”
Chuck nodded, smiling. “Okay. Great. I’ll go set some experiments up over in our camp. In the meantime, is there anything you’d like me to tell the president?”
“Yeah,” said Sara. “You tell her she’s done a halfway decent job of getting her trained monkeys under control and because of that, she’s gained my respect. Let her know our thoughts on the nuclear facilities and see if your physics guy has any ideas about how we can put them out of business.”
“She’s going to ask about other nations’ nuclear stockpiles.”
Sara’s smile tilted. “Tell her not to worry. Tim’s monitoring every last one of them—even ones she doesn’t know about.”
“No shit,” agreed Tim. “If they so much as let off a nuclear fart, well, we might not have a good way to destroy the nukes directly, but I’ll turn anything that makes them deployable or launchable to slag.”
“Good God, Tim.” Sara sounded exasperated. “Do you honestly think that she’d nuke Pennsylvania? Do you have any concept of how a nuclear missile works?”
Tim scowled. “I—yeah. Of course, I know how nukes work.”
Sara turned back to the screen. “No threats right now. Margaret Ellis has been a solid ally so far. If you trust her, so will I. Just tell her that other people’s nukes—the ones that are left, anyway—aren’t a problem.”
“I’ll tell her. Anything else?”
“Universal health care,” Sara said. “She needs to get experts to research other international systems and design one for the U.S. I’d like that to be taken up by the next session of Congress.”
The change of subject made Chuck’s head spin, until he recalled that Sara’s mother had died of cancer that had gone undetected because she couldn’t afford health insurance or out-of-pocket payments to doctors. What he was getting ready to do gave him a wriggle of guilt. Sara wasn’t evil. She was merely so powerful she felt her power was all it took to bring about a change in human civilization.
“And,” Sara added, taking another step toward the camera so that her face was all Chuck could see, “you need to vouch for us. Tell them we are not the enemy. We’re trying to save them. They need to get that through their thick little hominid skulls. Everything we’ve done—everything we’re doing and going to do—is in their best interests. Make them understand that, Doc. We’re counting on you.”
Chuck felt a bead of sweat run down his back, chased by a trickle of dread that made his skin crawl. When was the last time he’d heard someone proclaim that they knew what was best for everyone else and would therefore simply make it happen? Hadn’t that been Leighton Howard’s motto?
If he spoke, she’d surely hear the lie in his voice, so he simply nodded. The truth was, he couldn’t vouch for them—at least, not for Sara and Tim. Mike—well, there was still a chance for Mike, he thought, but Sara and Tim were too dazzled by their own press. He reached over to sign off. In the few seconds the connection was still open, though, Chuck heard Tim announce he was going to build himself a “cyber-throne” for when the world leaders came to the mountain to pay homage. The feed cut off.
He felt sick.
The admiral laid a firm hand on his shoulder. “I know this is damn hard, Dr. Brenton. But I think we both know what has to be done.”
“Yes. Yes we do. I’ll let you know as soon as we have something in place.”
A few minutes later, Chuck approached Beta Camp with a thousand thoughts racing through his head. He was brought up short just north of the clearing by a static charge of uneasiness that blew those thoughts to flinders. Heart pounding, mouth going dry, he picked up his pace and broke into the clearing at a run.
Lanfen appeared as if out of nowhere, her face eloquent with the dread Chuck was feeling. Had it been her emotions that had given him that static charge?
He grasped her shoulders. “Lanfen, what is it? What’s happened?”
“Nothing’s happened exactly. I just—I can’t find Lorstad.”
“He was in the isolation cabin.” Chuck’s gaze darted in that direction.
“He isn’t now. And he didn’t leave by the front door or we would have seen him. I went in to discuss how we were going to handle Tim and he was gone.”
“You think he . . .” What did you call what Lorstad did? “He leapt?”
“Only thing I can think of. Do you have any idea why he might do that or where he’d go if he did?”
Chuck strode toward the immersion cabin not sure what he’d do if he got there and Lorstad had returned. “I have my suspicions. I hope I’m wrong.”
The cabin was empty—the three immersion tanks and their control console were the only contents of the room. Chuck eddied for a moment, uncertain of what to do. If they were going to lure Tim down to their camp, they needed to have someone minding the isolation units. Ideally that was Lorstad, although Joey could act as a far less experienced stand-in.
Chuck went into fugue mode, his eyes out of focus, barely noticing the green and red lights on the control console.
Green and red lights?
Chuck’s eyes snapped back into focus. Three lights: one green, two red. He swiveled his head to stare at the rightmost tank. A green light blinked on its control panel, as well.
“What is it?” Lanfen asked, following his gaze. “Oh. Oh my God.”
Chuck went to the control console and slid into the seat. The press of a button brought the internal monitor of the active unit online. Kristian Lorstad floated in the tank i
n a black dry suit, eyes and ears covered by a half helm, limbs relaxed at his sides.
“What is he doing?” Lanfen murmured.
Chuck shook his head. “I don’t know. Get Joey. Maybe he’ll know if there’s any way to find out.”
Kristian entered Spiderweb at the southern checkpoint set up specifically for the denizens of Beta Camp. He began talking almost the moment he saw the armed guards there, hoping they would not notice that his feet left no imprints upon the ground and made no sound as he walked.
“I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said smoothly. “I’m Kristian Lorstad and I have a message from Dr. Brenton for Lieutenant Epstein.”
The guards at the checkpoint knew him, of course. They’d been introduced all around their first day here so that everyone at Spiderweb knew them on sight. One of them greeted him politely and offered to take him to the lieutenant’s office. He accepted the offer; he had no way of opening the door himself. The younger of the two men led him smartly into the camp and up to the front of one of the glorified trailers they used as offices. He tapped on the door, then opened it, announcing Kristian with all due formality, then he held it open.
Kristian nodded, smiling, and carefully mounted the step to enter. Steps were sometimes difficult under these circumstances—regimented changes in the spatial plane required tight concentration or you could appear to be floating above the ground. If the MP noticed that the visitor’s feet made no sound on the composite surface of the step, he said nothing of it. He turned on his heel and returned to his post.
Inside the trailer, Kristian found himself facing a thirty-something woman with blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and lieutenant’s bars on her uniform jacket. “Lieutenant Epstein, thank you for seeing me.”
“Is there a problem, Mr. Lorstad?”
“Not precisely. More a concern. Dr. Brenton wished me to inquire about Mikhail Yenotov’s family. It seems he hasn’t heard from them in some time and there is concern that Deep Shield might have—well, that they might have come to harm.”
Epstein met Kristian’s eyes. “Tell Dr. Brenton that at last report Yenotov’s family was fine. Deep Shield was not inclined to cross international boundaries to get to them and we appropriated any surveillance equipment they put in place.”
“Ah, so you’re watching them, then. They’re still in Canada, I presume. Winnipeg, was it, or Toronto? Dr. Brenton wasn’t sure.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t divulge that information. It’s classified.”
“I see. Well, if you’d kindly check on them, it would greatly help us in our efforts to reach out to the people inside the mountain. Mr. Yenotov has some immediate concerns that things are not as they should be. It seems he’s developed an ability to sense the emotions of individual members of his family and has lost touch with his son, Anton.”
The woman’s expression softened. “I can certainly empathize with that. I have a son of my own. I’ll tell you what. I’ll check on the Yenotovs’ status and relay the information to Mr. Yenotov and to your camp. Will that be sufficient?”
“Oh, yes. Thank you.”
Kristian left the office, giving the door a kinetic push, and hurried out of the camp and into the woods. The moment he was out of sight of the checkpoint, he faded to nothingness. A far more discreet presence then entered the camp from the south and moved to the rear of Lieutenant Epstein’s trailer office. He passed through the wall directly behind her desk and was able to see exactly what she saw as she checked the surveillance feeds from her laptop—surveillance feeds from the security cameras posted around the current residence of Helen Yenotov and her two children.
Moments later, his objective obtained, Kristian Lorstad returned to his immersed body as swiftly as thought, then moved on to his next destination.
“I don’t know how to wake them up safely,” Joey said, staring at the image of Lorstad’s still form floating in the center of the isolation unit. “I programmed some of the software, sure, but they always decide when they’re ready to come out. Or one of their mentors does.” He chewed his lower lip and played with the end of his braid. “Maybe I can see if there’s a timing sequence in the routine he’s running.”
“Okay, yes,” said Chuck. “Try that. Try anything.”
He watched as Joey sat at the console’s controls and called up a programming module that allowed him to go behind the user interface to look at the code being run. Joey was kind enough to give a blow-by-blow of his machinations. He searched for a timing subroutine and found nothing. He tried looking for an elapsed time setting. More nothing.
“What was he thinking?” asked Lanfen. “Why would he tank when we were about to make a move? Do you think he—I don’t know—ran out of energy or something? I thought he tanked just before we left.”
“He did,” Joey replied, his eyes still on the scrolling lines of computer code. “He shouldn’t be needing to do this. I don’t get it.”
Chuck, feeling sick to the pit of his stomach, glanced back up at the immersion unit’s monitor and froze. Where the recumbent form of the Learned had been not two seconds before, there was a whole lot of nothing. Lorstad was gone, riding the quantum tangles.
Chapter 19
Of Gods and Men
It was a grim group that gathered in the habitat unit of their makeshift camp. Lorstad had yet to return, and the Beta team was faced with the possibility that they would have to put their plans in motion without him.
They all wanted to subdue the Alphas without harming them. That made distraction their best weapon. Lanfen had volunteered for that duty. She and Tim would uplink to the Brewster-Brenton monitor to do a baseline of their brain waves. That was supposed to allow Dice and Brenda to treat him to enough of an electrical shock to incapacitate him, after which someone else would administer a special sedative.
That someone else was supposed to have been Lorstad. His sudden disappearance meant they had to reassign tasks. It now fell to Brenda to tranq Tim and to Joey to install him in the isolation chamber—which he’d now be running solo instead of acting as Lorstad’s assistant.
“If we can bring him down,” said Chuck, “we can get him into the tank. If we can get him into the tank, Joey can run the program the Benefactors use to condition new trainees.”
“And if we can’t bring him down?” Euge asked the question that loomed like the invisible monster in the room. “I mean, if the shock and the tranq don’t work, what then?”
“Then maybe I have to help Lanfen keep him occupied while we try again,” offered Mini. She sat next to Eugene on his bed. “My gosh, we’ve got enough sedative to march an army to dreamland.”
“You’re assuming,” said Euge pessimistically, “that the damn stuff even works on these guys. Or that he’s going to let us try a second time.”
There was a long moment of silence in which everyone looked uncomfortably at anything but each other. Lanfen finally ended it—saying what no one wanted to even think.
“I know what Lorstad would say—what he’s suggested several times already. We have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. We have to be prepared to take Tim on—those of us who can.”
Chuck told himself he was not one of those who could take Tim on. He said it aloud, too, as if that would somehow make it true. Deep inside, he knew it wasn’t true. Deep inside, he knew that he—possibly more than anyone—was capable of getting to Tim in ways the Alpha would be incapable of defending himself against. But that’s not who he was; that was a person he was determined never to become. He would do no harm.
Do no harm. He let that Hippocratic clause run through his mind, a binding mantra. Binding until the inevitable fine print pushed its way in.
Until you have no choice.
Chuck stood. “While you’re getting set up for Tim, I think I’m going to have to take Sara up on her invitation to visit Olympus.”
There was a general outburst of disagreement at that announcement; even Mini loudly questioned his sanity.
“Because we can’t let Sara get an inkling of what’s going on down here. And because I need to try to make direct and private contact with Mike. He’s clearly not completely on board with what they’re doing, and he’s a large part of their offense—Tim admitted as much when I spoke to them earlier. A lot of the flash-bang we’ve seen on those videos is, as we suspected, Mike muscling things around while Sara and Tim call the shots. Once Tim is subdued, we can go after Sara. And maybe, just maybe, Mike will help us.”
“Best-case scenario, yes,” said Lanfen. “But there’s no guarantee that’s what we’re going to get. Even if we do get them all into tanks, what if that’s not the end of it? What if Lorstad and his Learned can’t reprogram them? What if they’re proof to the immersion tech? What if we can’t put the spirits back into Pandora’s box, Chuck?”
“Then this won’t be over until they’re dead,” murmured Chuck. “I’m beginning to wish I’d never pursued this line of research.”
“Don’t say that,” said Lanfen, reaching up to grasp his wrist. “It wasn’t your fault that Matt sold us out to Deep Shield. It wasn’t even really his fault. He didn’t know who they were—what they were. If things had developed the way you’d hoped, none of us would be here getting ready to maybe fight people who should be our friends. We’d still be back at Forward Kinetics, giving quadriplegics a new lease on life. If we manage to pull this off, maybe we can still do that.”
Chuck nodded. He wanted to believe what she was saying. He did believe it on some level, but he suspected that, after this scare, even the benign abilities of the Betas would seem frightening to—to normal human beings. He stumbled over the thought.
Evolution, he thought wryly, is not for the weak of heart.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do. Mini, Euge, and I will go over to Spiderweb. I’ll ping the mountain and let them know you’re ready for Tim and that I’m up for a visit. Once I’m inside, I’ll let Spiderweb know I’m okay. Euge, Mini—that will be your cue to come back here, which will be your cue,” he added, nodding at Dice—